Jennifer Government: A Novel (13 page)

Hack took deep breaths, gulping air. It felt so good to be out! What that Jennifer Government had said was true: you didn’t appreciate freedom until it was too late. It really put things in perspective, an experience like this. It made you realize what was important.

He couldn’t feel depressed, even though he knew there was a good chance he’d lose his job, and that debt to the Police wasn’t going anywhere. Hack was happy to be alive.

He caught a cab to take him to Violet’s sister’s house, then changed his mind halfway and got out at Sears in Fitzroy. He wanted to buy Violet a present: something to show her how he felt. This experience had brought them closer together, he thought.

He stopped. Sears had a jewelry section. Rows of glass-encased stones and rings gleamed at him. He hesitated, then entered.

“Help you?” a salesgirl said. She had curly red hair. “Um…”Hack said. “Do you have any…”

“Lemme guess,” she said. “Engagement rings?”

“How did you know?”

“You look nervous,” the girl said, and smiled.

H
e clutched the package, lining up at the register behind a large woman who was buying a tricycle. “
Surely
you can wrap it,”
the woman said to the checkout boy. “You have a
wrapping service;
I want this
wrapped.”

“I can only wrap smaller items here,” the boy said patiently. “Something this size you have to take to the wrappers on level three.”

“It didn’t say that on the advertisement.”

“I’m really sorry,” the boy said.

The woman pushed past Hack, poking him in the arm with one of the tricycle’s handlebars. Hack protected his package. He had been to the wrapping desk first, even though his item was small.

The boy scanned Hack’s box. The price materialized on the orange readout:
$649.95. “
You got a US Alliance card?”

“Yes.” He handed it over.

“Do you have a Team Advantage card, too?”

“What?”

The boy pointed to a bright blue badge on his chest. It said: THROW AWAY YOUR T.A. CARD AND SAVE! ASK ME HOW. “If you quit the Team Advantage program, you get fifteen percent off from all US Alliance—affiliated stores for the next two months. Got a T.A. card?”

“No. I work for Nike.”

“That’s okay. If you stick with US Alliance and don’t get a T.A. card, you can accrue points too.”

Hack blinked. That sounded all right. “How do I register?”

“Like this,” the boy said, and pushed a button. The register chatted out a couple of extra lines onto Hack’s receipt. “Thanks for shopping at Sears. Have a nice day.”

“Thanks,” Hack said. He took his package and walked out of the store. On impulse, he turned to look back at the registers. There were thirty or forty stations, lined up like battlements. Each was staffed by a clean-cut girl or boy in Sears uniform. Their blue badges winked at him.

V
iolet’s sister, Claire, was watching TV when he arrived home. Hack had actually known Claire first: he had met Violet through her. Claire was tall and had long hair and brown eyes and a nice smile. She was shier than Violet; more like him. For a while Hack had thought he was in love with her. But then Violet came along. Violet was pretty determined.

“Hi.”

“Oh! Hi, Hack. Where have you been?”

“I had to see the Government.”

Claire’s eyes widened. “Are you in trouble?”

“No. Not really. Is Violet home?”

She shook her head. “I thought she was with you.”

“She had a business meeting today. If she’s not back… maybe it went well.” He looked at his watch. It was pretty late.

“Have you eaten? I can cook something, if you want.”

“Oh—no, thanks.” He felt embarrassed. Claire was always offering to do stuff for him. “Can I call my apartment? Maybe she’s there.”

“Of course.”

“Thanks.” He went into the kitchen and dialed. The phone rang and rang.

Violet had never flown before, and Rendell, the fat ExxonMobil manager, thought that was hilarious. “Not even interstate?” he asked, and shook his head, amazed. Rendell had two million frequent flier miles.

She wished she could fly without Rendell, who took up the full girth of his extra-wide business-class seat and leaned into her when he wanted to talk, which was all the time. She had a paperback novel, selected from a range the flight attendant had brought
around, but Rendell wouldn’t leave her alone with it. After fourteen hours, all she wanted was for Rendell to choke to death on an airline-issue peanut.

He leaned across. “You can plug into the web from here, you know. There’s a jack in the armrest.”

Violet looked. There was, too.

“Although, with your virus—I mean, you’ve got that thing under lock and key, right? Maybe you shouldn’t plug in.”

“I really doubt the customer network is connected to the flight controls,” Violet said.

“Even so.” Rendell smiled nervously.

“Fine.” She didn’t want to e-mail with him looking over her shoulder anyway. She raised her novel.

His arm pressed against hers. “There are phones, though. If you want.”

She looked at him.

“If there’s anyone you need to tell you’re en route to Texas. Don’t worry about the cost, it’s taken care of.”

“There’s no one I need to call,” Violet said. She didn’t want to call home with him there, either.

S
he was surprised by Dallas’s ugliness. Even with the sun rising behind it, the city looked as if it had been built to withstand bombardment. She’d never seen so much concrete in one place.

“What do you think?” Rendell said in the cab. “Nice, huh?”

“Where are the trees?”

“There are some parks.” He craned his neck. “I think you can see one…” A heavy truck roared alongside them. The cab darkened like it was descending into the earth. Violet put her fingers in her ears. “Past that traffic accident.”

She looked. There was a snarl of turnpike ahead, and tow trucks were extracting cars and pickups from one another. The
cab driver slowed to avoid a shredded tire that had rolled onto the road. Violet didn’t see any park.

“See it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Which is the ExxonMobil building?”

“ExMo’s out of town, in Irving. It’s about a thirty-minute drive.”

“Oh.”

“You’re going to be sick of me by the end of all this,” he said, smiling. She tried to smile back. “I thought you’d want to see Dallas. This is where the President was assassinated, you know.”

She looked at him in surprise. “The President of ExxonMobil?”

“No. The Government President. Kennedy.”

“Oh,” she said, turning back to the window.

“You’re probably too young to have heard of him,” Rendell said, and Violet bit her lip until it hurt.

T
he ExxonMobil man was tall, with bright blue eyes. He stood, smiling, and extended his hand. His mouth showed teeth, but his eyes never changed. “Violet. Please, sit.”

She took an ornate chair across the table from him. Rendell took a seat beside her. She couldn’t escape him anywhere.

“I’m Nathaniel ExxonMobil, CEO.” Behind him was a door with a snarling tiger, the ExMo logo, engraved in frosted glass. “I appreciate you coming on such short notice.”

“No problem.” She felt thirsty.

“We’re going to have a conversation now. But first, I want you to understand some ground rules.”

“I’m happy to sign a nondisclosure agreement.”

“I don’t want you to sign an NDA.” He smiled. “I prefer to do this by word of agreement.”

“Oh.” Violet felt her heart sink. This was already deviating from the little she knew about how business worked.

“Contracts force people to do things, Violet, and nothing good comes from force. People achieve great things by voluntarily working together for mutual gain. Does that sound all right to you?”

“Sure,” she said, but she could feel the bridge creaking beneath her feet, the boards splintering. An NDA was standard; everybody used them. She didn’t think Nathaniel would talk to her without one unless he had a better way of ensuring her silence.

He folded his hands on the table. “I understand you have some software that can take down a company-wide computer network. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Any company’s network?”

“Pretty much.”

“If you wanted to attack my network at a particular time, on a particular day, could you do that?”

“Um, no. The software can only spread when the clients request an update from the server. That could be immediately; it could be next week.”

Rendell leaned forward. “But in Melbourne, it happened so fast—”

“You guys were ultra-paranoid, you had your virus checkers all geared up. The more active the checker is, the faster my software spreads.”

“Ah,” Nathaniel said.

“I didn’t realize that,” Rendell said. “Sorry, Nathaniel, I just assumed—”

Nathaniel ignored him. “Violet, for this software to be useful to me, I need to be able to control the time at which it activates.”

“But if you want to simulate an attack, you can—”

“Let’s just agree I need to control the timing,” Nathaniel said. “Shall we?”

And Violet realized Nathaniel ExxonMobil wasn’t interested in simulating anything. He didn’t want her software for defensive purposes. He didn’t want to shore up his I.T. security. She felt a tinge of fear.

“What if we could gain access to a key server?” Nathaniel said. “Could you control the timing then?”

“Then—yes, you could load it and tell the server to push an update. But if you can access a server, why would you go to the trouble of—”

“We could gain temporary access. If we have to.”

She took a breath. “Well, if you can do that, you can control the timing.”

Silence.

Rendell said, “How would you like to become an employee of ExxonMobil, Violet?”

She jumped. “I’m not here to become anyone’s employee. I just want to license my software.”

“We’ll license it,” Nathaniel said. “And pay you well for it. But I want your services to implement it, too.”

Her gut tightened. “Implement how?”