Beautiful Code (8 page)

Adam heard someone whistling as he crawled behind one booth, then the next. Suddenly, the overhead lights snapped on and he peered out from behind the booth where he was crouched. A man in a cleaning uniform was pushing an industrial vacuum on the far side of the room. He was wearing headphones and looking away from Adam, going about his business. Adam felt his chest empty the breath he’d been holding. He quickly stood up and raced out the door.

CHAPTER 11:

Footprints

A
fter three hours of trying to find a solution, Amelia told her friends back in Palo Alto to go to bed. She sat staring out the window for a while, searching the Hawaiian stars for an answer and, finding none, took a deep breath and went to locate Adam. She knew he was upset, and she felt bad. He’d only been trying to help. But she’d also been relieved that George had had the guts to tell him he was slowing them down.

She wasn’t sure where he’d gone, but she guessed he’d wandered down to the Ugly Sweater party a group of conference participants were unofficially throwing in one of the ballrooms downstairs. The last thing she wanted was to be social with a bunch of dressed up, drunk conference goers, but she hoped it was late enough that they’d all be on the prowl for someone to hook up with and not bother her with questions about Doreye.

Amelia arrived in the lobby and followed the cheesy Christmas music down the hall, gulping anxiously before opening the door.

The room was enormous, with another crystal chandelier hanging from the center and floor-to-ceiling windows across the back, which overlooked the beach and the crashing waves illuminated by the full moon. A huge palm tree decorated with lights and Christmas ornaments towered over a garland-trimmed tiki bar, and poinsettia blossoms were mounted on tiki torches. A wooden dance floor had been constructed in the middle of the room, and it was packed with drunk twenty- to fifty-somethings, all looking equally ridiculous in red and green turtlenecks, checkered suits, and oversized crocheted holiday sweaters.

“Amelia?”

She turned around to find Sundeep, clad in a two-sizes-too-small bright green turtleneck, red chino pants, an oversized reindeer pin clipped to his shirt, and a Santa hat in hand.

“Sundeep!” She tried not to gawk at how ridiculous he looked. “I was just looking for…”

“Adam?” he interrupted. “I haven’t seen him, and I’ve been here for a while.”

Amelia’s shoulders dropped in disappointment. Why did everything about this day have to be a challenge?

“Do you want to get some fresh air?” Sundeep asked.

“Yeah,” she said, and followed him outside onto the beach. Fresh air was exactly what she wanted: lots and lots and lots of fresh air to make everything else evaporate.

They strolled along the warm sand in silence, until Sundeep finally said, “What’s wrong?”

Amelia pursed her lips and took a deep breath. “It was the expo today. Doreye didn’t work.” She tried to stop them, but tears filled her eyes. “And I just spent three hours working on it, and I’ve done everything right, Sundeep! It should be working.” She was sobbing now.

He stopped her, gently holding her shoulders to steady her. “I heard about the other company,” he confessed. “And you know what else I heard? That you’re the smartest person in Silicon Valley. The next hotshot engineer. The next big thing. You
will
figure it out, Amelia. Of that I’m absolutely certain.”

She shook her head and broke free of his grip. They continued walking.

“You know what I think?” he asked.

“What?” she sniffled.

“I think women as strong as you don’t cry over iPhone applications.”

She swallowed.

“Do you want to talk about the press conference?” he asked.

“No.” She kicked a conch shell and kept walking. “What is there to talk about? I did it. I’m guilty. I hacked in and embezzled money and knew what I was doing wasn’t right. I spent three months in prison and it was completely and utterly horrible. And now everyone knows and they’re going to bring it up and I’ll never escape it.”

“You can’t change your past,” Sundeep said. “But you can decide how you’re going to use what’s happened to you.”

She didn’t respond. He tried another angle. “What happened to you, Amelia…it’s part of you, and you may not want to do it again, but it made you a stronger person, a more honest person.”

“I wish I could be as honest as you,” she said. “I mean, you don’t have a flawed bone in your body. You’re smart and caring and totally…perfect. Your life is perfect.”

Sundeep was silent. Finally, he said quietly, “That’s not true.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you.” He turned to look at her, the corners of his mouth pinched tight. “My family disowned me, Amelia. Last spring. And now I’ve got nothing.”

They had walked back up to the hotel entrance, and she stopped before opening the door. So that’s what Lisa had been talking about. “Oh, Sundeep.” Her heart genuinely ached for him. “I am so, so sorry.”

Sundeep was looking at the stars, as if trying to fight back tears of his own, but he forced a smile. “It’s okay. It’ll work out. Sometimes other people don’t understand why we do what we do, but we can’t let that keep us from fighting for what we believe in.”

If Amelia had been a hugger, she would have given him a hug. But she was still attracted to him and was embarrassed that he might know that.

A drunk man in a crocheted reindeer vest stumbled up off the beach beside them. “Ooooooh!” He yelled at the pair, lifting the eggnog in his right hand and spilling it onto the patio. “Somebody’s under the mistletoe!”

Amelia and Sundeep glanced up and sure enough, they were standing directly under a thick tuft of mistletoe suspended from a light fixture on the wall. “That means you have to
make out
,” the drunk guy hollered as he stumbled through the door to the bathroom, leaving Amelia and Sundeep both blushing furiously. They paused, caught in the moment and the embarassment and the comfort of each other’s presence.

“Amelia!” Adam’s voice called from inside. He was running down the hall toward them. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I figured it out! I figured out how RemoteX sabotaged us. There is nothing wrong with Doreye!”

CHAPTER 12:

Yours, Virtually

A
melia pretended to go to sleep when Adam did. He was in a great mood, and she didn’t want to upset him with her nerves. She lay staring at the ceiling, heart beating and mind racing as she listened to her brother’s slow, steady breathing.

She kept thinking about the chips Adam found in the Doreye devices. T. J. had shipped their presentation to Maui days ahead of time; someone could have easily added an override switch to the terminals in each device’s radio receiver. It was an easy hack to do for an engineer with time and a wire wrap tool. But why would anyone want to sabotage their demo?

Unable to sleep she slipped out of the bed, picked up her laptop, and quietly opened the sliding door onto the balcony of their room.

The air was thick and heavy, but a cool breeze blew from the ocean, bringing with it the scent of salt and tropical flowers. She closed her eyes, listened to the gentle melody of the bugs buzzing below, inhaled deeply. She looked up at the full moon overhead and wondered for a minute how life had led her here, to this balcony in Hawaii at a TechCrunch conference where her start-up company was on display.

Then she sat down in one of the rocking chairs, opened her laptop, and logged into ZOSTRA, the virtual world she’d joined with George, T-Bag, Janet, and Jon. Wednesday nights were when everyone met at the Lair to get together in the virtual world, but individual players could log on any time to work on his or her avatar. As players completed tasks and challenges, they got points they could use to buy virtual goods.

Amelia had created an avatar that wasn’t much different from herself. Her avatar had more voluminous hair and bigger breasts, and she wore contacts, but Amelia didn’t spend any money on clothes or handbags like a lot of the other girl avatars. One Wednesday, virtual T-Bag (a stunningly buff and attractive blond) had taken virtual Amelia on his virtual private jet to virtual Rodeo Drive to model Gucci and Prada. Everyone had laughed and Amelia had blushed, but she’d quickly stuffed her virtual Jimmy Choos in her virtual closet.

Instead, she used points to buy more and more complicated weapons to fight bad guys. She’d quickly mastered nunchucks and daggers. She was saving up for a master sword, like the one Uma Thurman used in
Kill Bill
, to fight a Russian terrorist named Boris, the virtual creation of a small and timid red-headed girl from Minnesota who had been playing ZOSTRA for four years and had serious skills.

Amelia was shooting virtual clay pigeons when another avatar appeared on the right side of her screen. It was George. He didn’t say anything, just started shooting clay pigeons next to her. He was better than she was and, when they’d finished the round, she sent him an Instant Message to tell him so. The IM popped up in a speech bubble above her avatar. In the bubble above his, he said, “You’re quickly surpassing me, young grasshopper.”

“There are too many pigeons to shoot. It’s getting more difficult to see them all.”

“That’s what happens as you get better.”

“Maybe I don’t want to get better.”

“Then how will you beat Boris?”

“Maybe beating Boris isn’t the only point of the game.”

There was a pause. Amelia anxiously watched the speech bubble above George’s head. Finally, he responded.

“I think some players have talents that are so exceptional they have a responsibility to use them, even if it’s hard.”

“Then I’ll stop getting better.”

“You can’t. It’s not in your nature.”

Amelia felt tears welling up in her eyes again. “I don’t like this, George,” she typed.

“You’re the strongest woman I know, Amelia. In addition to being the smartest and the most beautiful. You can do this, I know you can.”

Her eyes hung on the word “beautiful,” and she felt a single hot tear roll down her cheek.

She waited, feeling her heartbeat slow down. She wasn’t sure why, but she suddenly, desperately, wished George were there.

She typed, “I wish you were here,” and stared at the blinking cursor at the end of the phrase, without clicking send.

Just send it, she thought, her finger resting on the Enter key. But just then another message popped up in the speech bubble above virtual George’s head. “Have to sign off. Good luck tomorrow. Let me know how it goes.”

Just as well, Amelia thought, as she backspaced the line and instead sent, “I will. Thanks, George. For everything.”

CHAPTER 13:

Tell Me Your Secrets,
I’ll Tell You Mine

T
. J.’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., but he was already awake, feeling guilty about what he’d said to his father the night before. It was unnecessarily harsh and dramatic. Ted hadn’t been trying to egg T. J. on. Probably he had only wanted to hear what had happened. Shit, he was probably even trying to have a civil conversation with T. J. and just didn’t know how to go about it in an uncompetitive way.

T.J. pulled on a pair of shorts, laced up his tennis shoes, and headed to the hotel gym.

He was surprised to hear someone already there, running hard on the treadmill, and even more surprised when he saw that it was Patty.

He stepped on the treadmill next to her and started upping the speed on the belt. “Couldn’t sleep either?”

“Nope!” she said, pulling an ear bud out of her right ear, then replacing it, politely indicating that she didn’t want to talk.

A large mirror faced the treadmills, and as T. J. started his run, he couldn’t help but notice their impeccable form. Patty’s legs were all long, lean muscle as she pounded away at a seven-minute-mile clip, and T. J.’s chest and ab muscles glimmered—not an ounce of fat anywhere—as he ran at a slightly more reasonable eight-minute-mile pace. Say all you will about rich Atherton kids, he thought, but they had phenomenal figures. Like modern-day Greek gods.

They were both panting heavily, staring into the mirror but not looking at anything in particular, as they contemplated their own concerns. When Patty’s machine hit nine miles, she slowed the belt down to a quick walk. T. J. followed suit.

“Don’t stop on my accord,” she smiled, out of breath.

“I happen to be finished too,” he said. He wasn’t about to admit that he’d just forced himself to run two miles farther than he’d intended because he had too much pride to start after and finish before a girl.

“I was going to grab a smoothie at the juice bar after this. Want to join?” T. J. asked.

“Sure,” Patty said. “Just going to stretch a little. Meet you there.”

T. J. was sitting at the tiki-themed juice bar watching CNN on the television screen when Patty joined him, a wet towel wrapped around her neck. He pushed a tall glass of white foam toward her. “I ordered you a coconut-lime smoothie. It’s the best one.”