Bleeding Edge (33 page)

Unhappy kid. She wants to touch him but is unsure of where. “Sounds like that could be tricky.”

“All good. Do you have any idea how many large-cap bad guys there are on Ice’s client list? I can at least show other hackers and crackers how to get into some useful places. Be a outlaw guru.”

“And if some of those colleagues turn out to be already bent? and shop you to the feds?”

He shrugs. “So I’ll have to be a little more careful than I was back in my script-kiddie days.”

“Someday, Eric, they’re going to have the time machine, we’ll be able to book tickets online, we’ll all get to go back, maybe more than once, and rewrite it all the way it should have gone, not hurt the ones we hurt, not make the choices we made. Forgive the loan, keep the lunch date. Of course, at first tickets’ll be an arm and a leg, till the product-development costs get amortized . . .”

“Maybe there’ll be a frequent-time-traveler program, where you get bonus
years
? I could pile up a lot of those.”

“Please. You’re too young to have that many regrets.”

“Hey, I’m even feeling bad about us.”

“Us, what.”

“That night after we got back from Joie de Beavre.”

“A warm memory, Eric. I don’t think it’s in the criminal code yet, foot-related infidelity? Nah.”

“Did you ever tell Horst?”

“Somehow the moment has never been right. Or to put it another way, why? Have you mentioned it to Driscoll?”

“Nah, pretty sure I didn’t . . .”

“‘Pretty sure’ you . . .” Realizing she’s slipped her shoes off and has been rubbing her feet together. At least, you’d say, wistfully.

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Maybe . . .”

“You know, there really are these little tiny people who come out from under the radiator with . . . with little brooms, and dustpans, and—”

“Eric, no. I don’t want to hear about it.”

N
ext morning Reg Despard calls from over the western horizon. “Watching the Space Needle as we speak.”

“What’s it doing?”

“The Macarena. Are you OK? I would’ve called sooner, right after the towers, but I was on the road, and then when I got finally out here, I was house hunting and—”

“Just as well you got away in time.”

“Came on the car radio, I thought about hooking a U-turn and heading back. Didn’t, just kept going. Survivor’s guilt here.”

“Interstate hypnosis. Don’t overthink it, Reg. You’re out there now in Riot Grrrl country with the wholesome evergreen trees and charcoal briquettes pretending to be coffee and whatever, right? please. Release yourself.”

“All I see is what’s on the news, but it looks grim back there.”

“Lot of grieving, everybody’s still nervous, cops stopping anybody they want to, looking through backpacks—about what you’d expect. But in terms of attitude, life goes on, in the street nothing’s too different. Did you find work yet?”

Hesitation. “I’m temping at Microsoft.”

“Oof.”

“Yeah, the dress code takes some getting used to, all the breathing apparatus and stormtrooper gear . . .”

“Seen your kids yet?”

“Trying not to push anything, but . . .”

“You’re from New York, they’re expecting pushy.”

“Got invited over to dinner last night. Hubby did the cooking. Bouillabaisse, local ingredients. Some kind of Yakima Valley chenin blanc. Gracie still has that awesome-new-man-in-her-life glow, like I need to see that. But the girls . . . I can’t tell you . . . They’re quieter than I remember. Not sullen quiet, no scowls, no lower lips, once or twice they even smiled. Maybe even at me, couldn’t be sure.”

“Reg, I hope this works out.”

“Listen. Maxine.” Uh-oh. “This phone line we’re on, is it—”

“If it ain’t, we’re all doomed. What.”

“That DVD.”

“Interesting footage. One or two shots you maybe could’ve used a spirit level . . .”

“I keep waking up at three
A.M.
”

“It could’ve been anything, Reg.”

“Those guys on the roof, those A-rabs in that closed room at hashslingrz. Training sessions. Had to be.”

“If Gabriel Ice is playing a part in some large-scale secret operation, then . . . you’re suggesting . . .”

“Even though the Stinger crew look like private-sector mercs, it would still have to be with encouragement from higher levels of U.S. government.”

“Eric thinks so too. And March Kelleher, well, goes without saying. You’re OK with her posting the video?”

“That was always the idea, I tried to spread around ten, twenty DVDs hopin somebody with the bandwidth would post one at least. Someday there’ll be a Napster for videos, it’ll be routine to post anything and share it with anybody.”

“How could anybody make money doing that?” Maxine can’t quite figure.

“There’s always a way to monetize anything. Not my department. I’m happy enough with the exposure.”

“Build up your traffic, hope that network effects kick in, yes, sounds like an all-too-familiar sad but true business plan.”

“As long as the material gets out there. Long as somebody puts in some HTML that’ll make it easy to repost.”

“You really think Bush’s people are behind this.”

“You don’t?”

“I’m just a fraud examiner. Bush, don’t get me started. The Arab angle, I have these Jewish reflexes, so I have to work to avoid paranoia on that subject also.”

“Hear ya. It’s all good in the brotherhood, don’t intend no disrespect to nobody, too busy workin on my new packaging, Reg 2.0, nonviolent, West Coast and stress free.”

“Just step careful. Send me some footage sometime. Oh, and Reg?”

“Anything, my sister.”

“Think I ought to short Microsoft?”

•   •   •

NEXT TIME MAXINE AND CORNELIA
do lunch, they agree to meet down at Streetlight People. Maxine brings Rocky a Xerox of the hashslingrz file Windust gave her.

“Here, the latest on how hashslingrz is spending your money.”

Rocky scans a page or two with a quizzical face. “Who generated this thing?”

“No-name agency down in D.C., obviously with some ax to grind, but I can’t figure out what it is. Hiding behind some jive-ass think tank.”

“Comes at a good time anyway, we’ve been looking at our exit options from hashslingrz, it’s OK I show this to Spud and the board?”

“If they can follow it, sure, what are you guys thinking these days, recapitalize?”

“Probably, there’s no IPO in the works, no M&A, they got plenty of government work, frankly it’s just time to get out. The cash, naturally, but there’s something else about them over there, like . . . can I say evil?”

“This is what, Mister Rogers’s neighborhood? I assume you mean IBM- or Microsoft-type evil.”

“You ever had eye contact with this guy? It’s like he knows you know how bad it could be and he don’ give a shit?”

“Thought it was only me.”

“None of us know how complicated this is gonna get, who they’re really workin for, but if even people in D.C. are gettin worried now,” tapping the dossier, “it’s cash-for-equity time.”

“So I take it I’m off the case.”

“But on my Rolodex forever.”

“Spare her,” Cornelia breezing in. “He’s always telling me the same thing, don’t listen.”

“Git outta here, ya ditzy broads, I got woik ta do.”

Owing to Cornelia’s impression that Maxine somehow observes kosher eating guidelines, they end up at another “Jewish” deli, Mrs. Pincus’s Chicken Soup Emporium. A chain, yet. Everybody seems to be from out of town. Fortunately, the appetites Maxine and Cornelia have brought with them are more for schmoozing than for authenticity-challenged gefilte fish.

Presently Cornelia, with the skill of an accomplished close-up card artist, has out of what seems a randomly shuffled deck of lunch conversation lightly brought them to the topic of families and the eccentrics to be found lurking therein.

“My policy,” Maxine sez, “is don’t get me started, all too soon we’re back in the shtetl with some dark magic in progress.”

“Oh, tell me. My family, well . . . ‘Talk about dysfunctional!’ pretty much sums it up. We’ve even got one in the CIA.”

“One? I thought all you people worked for the CIA.”

“Only Cousin Lloyd. Well, that I know of.”

“He’s allowed to talk about what he does?”

“Perhaps not. We’re never sure. It’s . . . it’s Lloyd, you see.”

“Y— Well, not exactly.”

“You must understand these are Long Island Thrubwells, not at all to be confused with the Manhattan branch of the family, and though we have never embraced eugenics or anything of that sort, it is often difficult not to entertain some DNA-based explanation for what, after all, does present rather a pattern.”

“High percentage of . . .”

“Idiots, basically, mm-hmm . . . Don’t mistake my meaning, Cousin Lloyd was always an agreeable child, he and I got along well, at family gatherings none of the food he threw would actually ever strike me personally . . . But beyond mealtime assault, his true gift, one might say compulsion, was for tattling. He was always creeping about, observing the less supervised activities of his peers, taking detailed notes, and when these weren’t convincing enough, I’m embarrassed to say, making things up.”

“So, perfect CIA material.”

“Ever so long on their wait list, till last year a position in the Inspector General’s office fell vacant.”

“And this is like Internal Affairs, he actually snitches on the CIA? that’s not dangerous for him?”

“It’s mostly inventory theft, they’re forever stealing bullets to use in their own private weapons? that seems to be one of Cousin Lloyd’s pet peeves.”

“So he’s working in ‘D.C. now,’ as Martha and the Vandellas might say. Does he ever do any moonlighting? Like, consultation?”

“I shouldn’t wonder. Idiots have expenses, after all, the medications, the frequent blackmail payments and police bribes, the pointed hats, which of course have to be custom-fitted . . . but I do hope, Maxi, that you aren’t in any sort of difficulty with the Agency?”

Why are disingenuousness alarms suddenly going off here? “Some
agency, maybe not that one, but coming from down in that direction at least, yes indeed, and you know, come to think of it, suppose there was something I might like to talk over with your cousin . . .”

“Shall I ask him to get in touch?”

“Thanks, Cornelia, I owe you one . . . or, without having met Lloyd yet, say at least half of one.”

“No, thank
you,
Maxi, this has all been so wonderful. So . . .” gesturing around Mrs. Pincus’s as if at a loss for words.

Maxine, lips closed and eyes narrowed, one more than the other, smiles. “Ethnic.”

•   •   •

COUSIN LLOYD,
luckily not into the NYC dating scene, where haste like this would earn him instant rejection, calls Maxine early the next day. He sounds so nervous that Maxine decides to lull him with generic accounting-fraud talk. “Right now it’s all converging on a think tank down there called TANGO? You’ve heard of them?”

“Oh. Very much the hot property in town right now. Quite popular with Double-U and his crowd.”

“One of their people, an operative named Windust, is proving a little problematic, I can’t seem to find anything about him, not even an official bio, he’s password-protected to the max, firewalls behind firewalls, I don’t have the resources to get past any of that.” Little me. “And if it turns out he was involved in, oh, let’s say . . . embezzling . . .”

“And, not wishing to presume . . . you two are . . . chums?” managing to surround the word with guttural slime.

“Hmm. Once again, whoever’s listening, I am not numbered among Mr. Windust’s fan base and know next to nothing about him, except he’s some kind of Friedmanite hit man, working 24/7 to keep the world convenient for people perhaps much like yourself, Mr. Thrubwell.”

“
Oh,
dear, no offense I hope . . . I will try to see what I can do from this end. Our databases—they’re world-famous, you know. I’m cleared pretty much all the way to Eyes Only, it shouldn’t be a bother.”

“I so look forward.”

Thanks to the thumb drive Marvin delivered, of course, Maxine has most of Windust’s résumé already, so putting Lloyd on his case is not for informational purposes, especially . . . In fact, Maxine, why
are
you harassing the man? Some honorable obsession about nailing the likely murderer of Lester Traipse, or just feeling neglected, missing the old pantyhose ripper’s curious notions about foreplay? Talk about ambivalent!

At least, if Lloyd is half the idiot his cousin Cornelia thinks he is, Windust should become aware of CIA interest in a fairly short time. No reason he shouldn’t start watching his back like everybody else. Right now petty molestation is about all that’s available to Maxine, down here in the small time, without anything you could call a moral sight line, no way to know how to compete at that elite level, that planetary pyramid scheme Windust’s employers have always bet everything on, with its smoothly delivered myths of the limitless. No idea of how to step outside her own history of safe choices and dowse her way across the desert of this precarious hour, hoping to find what? some refuge, some American DeepArcher . . .

M
axine has a purseful of time-sensitive passwords from Vyrva, changed every fifteen minutes on average, for getting into DeepArcher. She can’t help noticing this time how different the place is. What was once a train depot is now a Jetsons-era spaceport with all wacky angles, jagged towers in the distance, lenticular enclosures up on stilts, saucer traffic coming and going up in the neon sky. Yuppified duty-free shops, some for offshore brands she doesn’t recognize even the font they’re written in. Advertising everywhere. On walls, on the clothing and skins of crowd extras, as pop-ups out of the Invisible and into your face. She wonders if— Sure enough, here they are, lurking around the entrance to a Starbucks, a pair of cyberflaneurs who turn out to be Eric’s ad-business acquaintances Promoman and Sandwichgrrl.

“Nice place to hang out,” sez Sandwichgrrl.

“Not to mention do business,” adds Promoman. “Joint’s jumpin. A lot of these folks who look like only virtual background? they are real users.”

“Really. There’s supposed to be all kinds of deep encryption.”

“There’s also the backdoor, you didn’t know about that?”

“Since when?”

“Weeks . . . months?”

So that 11 September window of vulnerability Lucas and Justin were so worried about, for good reason apparently, has allowed not only unwelcome guests to sneak in but somebody—Gabriel Ice, the feds, fed sympathizers, other forces unknown who’ve had their eye on the site—to install a backdoor also. And easy as that, there goes the neighborhood. She clicks away, reaching at length a strange creepy nimbus like a follow spot in a club where you know you’ll get sick before the evening ends, has a moment of doubt, ignores it, clicks on into the heart of the nauseous blear of light, and then everything for a while goes black, blacker than anything she’s seen on a screen before.

When the picture returns, she seems to be traveling in a deepspace vehicle . . . there’s a menu for choosing among views, and, switching briefly to an exterior shot, she discovers it’s not a single vehicle but more like a convoy, not quite simply-connected, spaceships of different ages and sizes moving along through an extended forever . . . Heidi, if asked, would say she detected some
Battlestar Galactica
influence.

Inside Maxine finds corridors of glimmering space-age composite, long as boulevards, soaring interior distances, sculptured shadows, traffic through upwardly thickening twilight, pedestrians crossing bridges, airborne vehicles for passengers and for cargo busily glittering . . . Only code, she reminds herself. But who of all these faceless and uncredited could have written it and why?

Popping up in midair, a paging window appears, requesting her presence on the bridge, with a set of directions. Somebody must have seen her log in.

On the bridge she finds empty liquor bottles and used syringes. The captain’s chair is a La-Z-Boy recliner of distant vintage, hideous beige and covered with cigarette burns. There are inexpensive posters of Denise Richards and Tia Carrere Scotch-taped to the bulkheads. Some sort of hip-hop mix is coming from hidden speakers, at the moment Nate Dogg and Warren G, doing the huge mid-nineties West Coast hit
“Regulate.” Personnel come and go on various errands, but the pace is not what you’d call brisk.

“Welcome to the bridge, Ms. Loeffler.” A loutish youth, unshaven, in cargo shorts and a stained
More Cowbell
T-shirt. There is a shift in the ambience. The music segues to the theme from Deus Ex, the lights dim, the space is tidied by invisible cyberelves.

“So where’s everybody? the captain? the exec? The science officer?”

Raising one eyebrow and fingering the tops of his ears as if testing for pointiness, “Sorry, prime directive, No Fuckin Officers.” Gesturing her over to the forward observation windows. “The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.”

“Awesome.”

“Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.”

An antenna swivels. “Lucas, is that you?”

“Bus-tiiid!” The screen filling for a moment with psychedelic iTunes Visualizer patterns.

“So you’re in here dealing with what, backdoor issues, I hear?”

“Um, not exactly.”

“They tell me it’s wide open these days.”

“Downside of being proprietary, always guarantees a backdoor sooner or later,”

“And you’re all right with this? How about Justin?”

“We’re good, fact we were never comfortable with that old model anyway.”

Old model. Which must mean . . . “Some big news, let me guess.”

“Yep. We finally decided to go open source. Just sent the tarball out.”

“Meaning . . . anybody . . . ?”

“Anybody with the patience to get through it, they want it, they got it. There’s already a Linux translation on the way, which should bring the amateurs in in droves.”

“So the big bucks . . .”

“No longer an option. Maybe never was. Justin and me’ll have to keep on being working stiffs for a while.”

She watches the unfolding flow of starscape, Kabbalistic vessels smashed at the Creation into all these bright drops of light, rushing out from the singular point that gave them birth, known elsewhere as the expanding universe . . . “What would happen if I started to click on some of these pixels here?”

“You could get lucky. It’s nothin
we
wrote. There could be links to somewhere else. You could also spend your life dowsing the Void and never getting much of anywhere.”

“And this ship—it isn’t on the way to DeepArcher, is it?”

“More like out on an expedition. Exploring. When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there’s one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that’d take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days you look at the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy. Meantime, down here, sooner or later someplace deep, there has to be a horizon between coded and codeless. An abyss.”

“That’s what you’re looking for?”

“Some of us are.” Avatars do not do wistful, but Maxine catches something. “Others are trying to avoid it. Depends what you’re into.”

•   •   •

MAXINE CONTINUES TO WANDER
corridors for a while, striking up conversations at random, whatever “random” means in here. She begins to pick up a chill sense that some of the newer passengers could be refugees from the event at the Trade Center. No direct evidence, maybe only because she has 11 September on her mind, but everywhere now she looks, she thinks she sees bereaved survivors, perps foreign and domestic, bagmen, middlemen, paramilitary, who may have participated in the day or are only claiming to’ve done so as part of some con game.

For those who may be genuine casualties, likenesses have been brought here by loved ones so they’ll have an afterlife, their faces scanned
in from family photos, . . . some no more expressive than emoticons, others exhibiting an inventory of feeling ranging from party-euphoric through camera-shy to abjectly gloomy, some static, some animated in GIF loops, cyclical as karma, pirouetting, waving, eating or drinking whatever it was they were holding at the wedding or bar mitzvah or night out when the shutter blinked.

Yet it’s as if they want to engage—they get eye contact, smile, angle their heads inquisitively. “Yes, what was it?” or “Problem?” or “Not right now, OK?” If these are not the actual voices of the dead, if, as some believe, the dead can’t speak, then the words are being put there for them by whoever posted their avatars, and what they appear to say is what the living want them to say. Some have started Weblogs. Others are busy writing code and adding it to the program files.

She stops at a corner café and has soon fallen into conversation with a woman—maybe a woman—on a mission to the edge of the known universe. “All these know-nothings coming in, putting in, it’s as bad as the surface Web. They drive you deeper, into the deep unlighted. Beyond anyplace
they’d
be comfortable. And that’s where the origin is. The way a powerful telescope will bring you further out in physical space, closer to the moment of the big bang, so here, going deeper, you approach the border country, the edge of the unnavigable, the region of no information.”

“You’re part of this project?”

“Only here to have a look. Find out how long I can stay just at the edge of the beginning before the Word, see how long I can gaze in till I get vertigo—lovesick, nauseous, whatever—and fall in.”

“You have an e-mail address?” Maxine wants to know.

“Kind of you, but maybe I won’t come back. Maybe one day you’d look in your in-box and I won’t be there. Come on. Walk with me.”

They reach a sort of observation platform, dangerously cantilevered out from the ship into high hard radiation, vacuum, lifelessness. “Look.”

Whoever she is, she’s not carrying a bow and arrows, her hair isn’t
long enough, but Maxine can see she’s gazing downward at the same steep angle, the same space-rapt focus at infinity, as the figure on the DeepArcher splash page, gazing into a void incalculably fertile with invisible links. “There’s a faint glow, after a while you notice it—some say it’s the trace, like radiation from the big bang, of the memory, in nothingness, of having once been something . . .”

“You’re—”

“The Archer? No. That one is silent.”

•   •   •

BACK IN MEATSPACE
,
needing somehow to talk to somebody about the new, and soon she guesses unrecognizable, DeepArcher, Maxine calls Vyrva’s mobile number. “I’m just headed down into the subway, I’ll get back to you when I have reception again.” Maxine is not an old hand at cell-phone shenanigans but knows nervous when she hears it. A half hour later Vyrva, allegedly just back from the East Side, shows up at the office in person dragging a heavy-gauge trash bag stuffed full of Beanie Babies. “Seasonal!” she cries, pulling out one by one little Hallowe’en bats, grinning jack-o’-lanterns in witch hats, ghost bears, bears in capes done up as Dracula, “Ghoulianne the Girl Ghost, see, with the little pumpkin, isn’t she cute!”

Hmmm yes something slightly manic about Vyrva this morning, the East Side to be sure can have this Munchkinetic effect on people, but—retro-CFE circuits now fully kicked in—it occurs to Maxine that the Beanie Babies could have been a cover all the time, couldn’t they, for activities less in the public interest . . .

Phatic how’s Justin, how’s Fiona, all fine thanks—a shifty flicker of the eyeballs here?— “The guys . . . I mean, we’re all stressed lately, but . . .” Vyrva putting on a pair of lavender-lens wire-rims, five dollars on the street, any number of reasons why right now, “We came to New York, we all did, so innocent . . . Back in California it was fun, just write the code, go for the cool solution, the elegance, party when you can, but here, more and more it’s like—”

“Growing up?” maybe a little too reflexive.

“OK, men are children, we all know that, but this is like watching them give in to some secret vice they don’t know how to stop. They want to hang on to those old innocent kids, you can see it, it’s this terrible disconnect, the childlike hope and the depravity of New York meatspace, it’s becoming unbearable.”

Dear Abby, I have this friend with a big problem . . .

“You mean, unbearable for you . . . somehow . . . emotionally.”

“No,” Vyrva with a rapid flash of eye contact, “for everybody, as in a-little-goes-a-long-way, pain-in-the-ass unbearable.” Chirpy yet snarling delivery, all too familiar in Maxine’s line of work. Maybe also an appeal for understanding, hopefully on the cheap. This is how they get when the audit hooks start pulling up evidence they thought they’d deep-sixed forever, when the tax man sits there across the desk with his office thermostats cranked all the way up, stone-faced, puffing on an IRS-issue stogie, waiting.

Careful to keep it subtext-free for the moment, “Maybe it’s business that’s getting to them?”

“No. Can’t be pressure about the source code, not anymore, they’re out from under all that now. You can’t tell anybody, but they’re going open source.”

Pretending not to have heard the news already, “Giving it away? Have they looked at the tax situation?”

According to Vyrva, Justin and Lucas were out one evening at the brightly lit bar of some tourist motel way over in the West Fifties. Huge-screen TVs tuned to sports channels, fake trees, some of them twenty feet tall, long-haired blond waitresses, an old-school mahogany bar. A lot of convention traffic. The partners are drinking King Kongs, which are Crown Royal plus banana liqueur, and reviewing the room for familiar faces when they hear a voice to which time has been at best disrespectful going, “A Fernet-Branca, please, better make that a double, with a ginger-ale chaser?” and Lucas does a spit take with his drink. “It’s him! That
crazy motherfucker from Voorhees, Krueger! He’s after us, he wants his money back!”

“You’re being paranoid?” Justin hopes. They hide behind a plastic bromeliad and observe squintingly. The packaging is a little different these days, but it seems to be Ian Longspoon all right, last seen years ago just having spun out in the Sand Hill soapbox derby. Being approached now by a compact individual in Oakley M Frames and a neon avocado lounge suit. Justin and Lucas instantly recognize Gabriel Ice in some notion of deep disguise.

“What would Ice be meeting our old VC, on the sly, to talk about?” Lucas wonders.

“What would they have in common?”

“Us!” Both at once.

“We need to look at those cocktail napkins, and quick!” They happen to know the motel security guy here and are presently back in his office scrutinizing a bank of CCTV displays. Zooming down on the Ice/Longspoon table, they can make out strange soggy diagrams full of arrows, boxes, exclamation points plus what sort of look like giant letter J’s, not to mention L’s . . .