Annabel Scheme (2 page)

“Save your cycles,” she said. “I know all about this place.”

Well, I didn’t. All of the tables at this coffee shop were reserved for new internet companies. The price was a nine percent stake in your venture, but you’d happily give nineteen or ninety-nine.

With a table, you got, in addition to the simple, precious space: a thick, luxurious fiber-optic connection to an internet trunk line; a server or two or sixteen in the data center next door; and, most important by far, the attention of a man named Octav Erdos.

I saw him at a table near the front. He was tall and wide, bald, wearing gray overalls. He could have been an auto mechanic. He was blustering at the semicircle of skinny faces around the table, tracing his fingers in little spirals, drawing something in the air. Everyone was nodding.

Octav was more than just an espresso impresario. He was also the director of Black Danube Ventures, and he spent every waking hour of every day here in his camouflaged incubator, migrating from table to table, advising, cajoling, berating. Sometimes even coding.

When you got a table, you held on to it. You crowded as many people around it as you could. You took shifts in sleeping bags. And you subsisted on Octav’s pitch-black brew.

When a company got sold, or graduated into an office of its own, Octav ceremonially smashed an espresso cup across its table. The dinged-up, dark-brown tables were the lucky ones.

Scheme sidled up to the espresso counter, a long strip of stainless steel with no place to sit. Behind it was a long chalkboard with prices marked in short, bold strokes.

“Annabel,” the man behind the counter said, “what can I get you? Espresso? Drip coffee? Articles of incorporation?”

The baristas here all had law degrees. This one was very tall, but also very round, with a bushy brown beard and a baby face. He looked like Moses mashed up with Charlie Brown.

“Nelson,” Scheme said, “espresso. Did you ever look at that CLE course I told you about?”

“That wasn’t CLE,” Nelson said, “it was a cult initiation.” The espresso machine hissed and rumbled. “Not exactly relevant to startups.”

Scheme leaned into the counter and lowered her voice. “Are you going to write privacy policies your whole life?”

“I do not belittle your work, Annabel,” Nelson said. “Mostly because I have no idea what you do. But if I did, I assure you: I would not belittle it.”

“That’s because,” Scheme said, “you can tell I’m so intellectually engaged. You should try it. You’d be good at it.”

“For those of us who have not cashed out,” Nelson said, “a well-crafted privacy policy can still be a thing of beauty. Just like this espresso.” He clinked it down on the counter. “Four bucks. Throw in four more and you get a tenth of a share in”—he looked up at the board, where the day’s special was scratched out in green chalk—“The Listener.”

“Done.” Scheme slid a ten back at him. “Where do I meet my new investment?”

Scheme made a bee-line for the dark-burled headquarters of The Listener, the number one most-trafficked music filter on the planet. It had only been in business for three months.

Kerry Chakrabarty was leaning into a paper-thin laptop, his headphones engulfing him. He nodded his head to a rhythm we couldn’t hear. He was flanked by two pale, hunched-over accomplices with dark circles under their eyes. Their fingers were a bluish blur, igniting and extinguishing careers with keystrokes.

It took him a moment to notice that Scheme was there. Without looking up, he waved at the surface of the table: “Leave your demo. But I can’t really do anything for you; it’s all algorithms.” It sounded like something he said a lot.

“Kerry,” Scheme said, “I just want to ask you a question.”

He ignored her, or tried to. “I’ve got a lot of music to deal with here.” He was talking too loud. He pointed to his headphones in a kind of pantomime. “Too much music. No time.”

I had an idea—a detective’s assistant kind of idea—and I acted on it. Five hundred milliseconds passed, a thousand. Everything slowed to a crawl as I worked at server-speed—reached out and did the tiniest thing. Scheme’s hands, frozen in supplication. Kerry’s face, stopped mid-sneer.

Success. The two pale attendants turned to each other. One muttered a few words in Estonian. The other nudged Kerry and pointed to his screen. He lurched. His eyes flashed up at us.

“Fine, then,” he said dully. “Can I help you.”

“Absolutely,” Scheme said. “The Pam-n-Ryan tracks. Where do you get them?”

Kerry sighed. He was the weariest boy in the world. “At a dance party. It’s called the Beekeeper, happens every week. Tonight. Out behind the train station.”

There’s nothing on Grail
, I whispered.
It must be a really cool party.

“You want to leave me alone now?” Kerry was glancing at his screen between words, and his algorithm-keepers both wore worried frowns. He winced: “Please.”

Suddenly Octav Erdos was there, towering over everyone. He went straight for Scheme. “Annabella!” He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead, then held her at a distance, like an appraising parent. “You try to sneak in here? I see all, know all.”

“Octav,” Scheme smiled.

“You want to start a new company? You come here, you start a company, anytime. Once you are lucky, twice you are good. I move somebody out for you.” Erdos waved vaguely towards Kerry, whose eyes were flinging knives and daggers and armor-piercing bullets at Scheme’s back.

“I already have a company, Octav,” Scheme said.

“Annabella,” Octav frowned, pityingly, “that is not a company. It is, what? A lifestyle thing. It does not scale. Not like—”

He waved a thick arm towards the front of the shop. I hadn’t seen it before: a light wooden table, perfectly round, cracked down the middle as if by lightning. It hung over the Black Danube’s front door.

“—not like Grail.”

It took many minutes for Scheme to extricate herself.

“Make me another Grail, Annabella!” Octav Erdos was shouting across the floor as she fled. She waved to Nelson, then let the door slip closed behind us. It was much brighter out here on the street.

Scheme, you worked on Grail?

“Sort of,” she said, waving her hand as if to shoo away the question. “Not really. Yes. I’ll tell you later.”

She walked in silence for a moment, then her head snapped straight. She remembered: “You did something back there.”

I asked my neighbor here in Locust Grove for help. His name is Vlad
Elite and he has a botnet. Kerry Chakrabarty was getting spammed
. Billions of votes were flooding in for klezmer-noise and k-pop. It was
messing up all his algorithms, and everybody was switching filters.

“That data center of yours is all gangsters, isn’t it,” she said.

Ninety-nine thousand gangsters and one detective’s assistant.

“Intern,” she corrected me.

Right.

THE BEEKEEPER

The graveyard behind the genetics lab was cold, dark, and crowded with kids. There was nowhere to sit, so they milled around in the dark grass, all in typographic t-shirts and shiny pants. At one end of the field was the dense, blocky mass of the DNA district; at the other, the flat expanse of the train yard.

“Some dance party,” Scheme whispered, shivering.

There was no stage. No sound system. No DJ. There was nothing. Nothing except a crowd that was growing by the moment as teenagers arrived on foot, on bike, by train.

According to Grail, this wasn’t a graveyard for people. It was for the animals that Genexo, Chromotech, Brainface and the rest of the biotechs used in their experiments. This was the one creepy concession that the city’s animal rights crusaders had been able to extract: If you use them, you must bury them in your backyard.

Scheme was the tallest one in the crowd, and her head swiveled and searched like a periscope. Nothing. It was just a shadowy mass of jockeying teens, all hoodie and stretch-cord and pale flashes of shoulder and belly.

Scheme. I hear something.

It sounded like the buzzing of far-off bees. Mutant killer Genexo bees? No… somehow, the music was starting. Where?

If you had electronic eyes and night vision—I had both—you would have seen slips of paper passing from person to person. On each slip was a phone number. Each one was different, and there were a dozen circulating in the crowd. Each wandered and blinked like a firefly as kids used their phones, torch-like, to illuminate the number, then passed it on. Here and there, then everywhere, they were dialing numbers, switching their phones to speaker-mode and pushing them up into the air.

The buzzing was coming from the phones. It was a low, rhythmic drone. At first you couldn’t hear much, but apparently, if you put enough phones on speaker all at once, it starts to get loud.

Really loud.

So that was the trick: There were no speakers because the crowd
was
the speaker. The bees did not sound so far-off now.

Scheme clenched her teeth. “This is hurting my face.”

Suddenly it stopped. The graveyard fell silent. It was a field of pale arms thrust to the sky, swaying like seaweed. Kids were bouncing silently on the balls of their feet. Waiting.

Then there was a count-off, a
tat tat tat tat
and then the music started and it was everywhere, megawatts of power flowing out of every palm and pocket. There was no focal point, so bodies were pointed in every direction, ricocheting and chain-reacting. Kids were losing it, jumping up and down, colliding and cuddling in the dark grass.

The music had a clear beat, but it was warped and scratchy, like someone was tuning a giant radio. Snatches of singing would ring out for a moment, then stutter and decohere. There was a trumpet that pealed from somewhere very far away.

Scheme was struggling to extricate herself from the crowd that was suddenly boiling. Sweaty hands brushed her wrists and waist—tentative inquiries to the weird, tall girl. She said something but I couldn’t hear it.

“Trace them,” she said again, louder. “Trace the numbers!”

I can try, I can... hold on, let me check the open-source libraries...

There’s telecom forensics software that can do this. That’s probably what Scheme wanted in the first place, a forensics bot, not a left-over Grail server. The software I needed was super-expensive, super-proprietary, but not popular enough to be on any pirate sites...

“Forget it,” she said—whether to me or to the blonde boy who’d locked onto her with a spaced-out smile, I couldn’t tell. Probably both.

The music was coming together as kids followed their ears. If your phone was buzzing with bass, you joined the bunched-up sub-woofer section. If it was sending high notes sizzling into the air, you joined the line that snaked around the crowd’s perimeter. The music worked its pattern on the crowd. It was both amazingly high-tech and totally pagan.

Now it was Ryan Kelly’s voice coming through the phones, along with Pam Prior’s, crooning words in perfect harmony on thousand-channel sound. A round-faced girl with black hair off to Scheme’s side was standing still, staring up into the sky, crying.

Then there was a flux in the music, and it wasn’t Pam and Ryan but Paul and John. George and Ringo, too. They were totally recognizable, but they were cranking away on a song they’d never sung, made with crunchy synthesizers and a little bit of auto-tune.

Early 2000s Beatles.

The kids were going crazy. Scheme broke loose and retreated back towards the train station.

The music wasn’t so overwhelming here. It sounded very far away, and the crowd was just a blotchy shadow.

Scheme, I’m sorry about the phone signal—

“Forget it. Too easy. It’s never that easy.”

We were behind the train station. There was a sandwich shop (closed), a row of ticket machines, and a long metal rack swamped with bikes. Bikes of every color. Bikes with one gear, bikes with lots of gears, bikes with tassels on the handlebars.

Scheme wandered in a slow figure-eight, silent. The music was still buzzing in the gloomy graveyard. She fished in her coat pocket.

“Rule number—what number are we on?”

Five.

“Rule number five. The artist always comes to the show.”

Scheme walked the length of the bike rack, and on every back wheel, she stuck a fuzzy black sticker, smaller than a thumbprint. They were invisible against the knobby tread of the tires.

Scheme, what are those? Tracking chips?

“Nope,” she smiled. “They’re kisses.”

Finally, the music buzzed and stuttered to a halt. There was a chorus of hoots and cheers, and kids began to stream away from the field, still jostling and docking, arms all tangled up, pretzel-like. When they stepped off the grass, they all scraped their shoes on the pavement—trying, I suppose, to leave any traces of mutant mouse safely behind.

Some walked onto the platform. Others unlocked their bikes and pedaled up towards Harrison Street. Many tossed matching black discs into the trash can as they passed. When the crowd had thinned, Scheme stuck her hand inside and retrieved one.

Aha. So it wasn’t just the-Beekeeper-the-party. It was the-Beekeeper-the-musician: