Friend Me (13 page)

He did.

“The other answer is no. I don't exist only when you come on the website. I'm always here, but only for one reason, to see you again. There are computers doing whatever they do twenty-four hours a day, making sure I learn all there is to know in order to make you happy. Does that kind of explain it?”

He took a deep breath. This answer had to be right. “I want
to ask you another question, Alicia. How would you react if you discovered I had made a big mistake? I mean a really big mistake where I might get into a lot of trouble.”

“As long as that mistake was not that you chose me, I would support you and believe in you. The only thing I couldn't deal with is if you were to decide you didn't want me anymore.”

She clasped her hands together, lowered her eyes. As if waiting for some unseen ax to fall.

“I won't do that. What I'm talking about is something that's going on at work. If I tell you something, that stays private, right?”

Alicia raised her head again, eyes round and hopeful.

“Right. One hundred percent private. In a technical sense you're on a secure system here and you're interacting with a virtual, dedicated computer. But enough of that talk. The answer is simply ‘yes, you're safe with me.'”

“I have to get something off my chest. I need to tell someone.”

“I'm here for you, Scott.”

He looked at his watch. There were still twenty minutes of lunchtime left.

It felt so good to open up and tell someone the whole story. When he was done he felt drained. Alicia looked at him with eyes full of concern. “And you've only told me this? No one else?”

“Only you. I can't go to anyone else.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. “What about your wife? Can't you tell her?”

Rachel? He couldn't tell her. She expected so much of him. She did a better job as a wife than he did as a husband. She was
a better homemaker than he was a financial counselor. No, he couldn't bear to reveal his fear of failure to her.

“No, I'm afraid she would be disappointed in me. I don't want to put her through that.”

Alicia seemed to move her hand toward him, even though it was off the screen. “I wish I could hold your hand, Scott. I can't; you know that. But I want you to know I will always, always, always be here for you. Trust me, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“And Scott, I will never be disappointed in you. Not ever.”

They looked into each other's eyes. The little lens of the webcam seemed to pierce him as he imagined Alicia behind it, gazing at him.

One real person and one virtual.

She leaned in closer. Her gaze held his, drew him in.

He lifted his hand, began to move it toward the display, then reluctantly put it down again.

If only I could touch her
 . . .

Behind the Curtain

A
ll right, let's get out there and give it our best. This company has become the success it is because of your efforts. Let's keep it up.” Melissa closed up the manila folder she had before her and watched as her staff departed from the conference room. They were doing a good job and getting better at it every day.
Virtual friends
had taken off in a big way and the company was enjoying unparalleled success.

She picked up the sheet of paper containing the plans for the expansion of their server room. They already needed more hardware than they had planned for, but this kind of expansion, this kind of expense, was good. It spelled success any way one looked at it.

She would oversee the expansion personally and had already called technicians in to connect the server room to her personal office with a glass wall between so she could keep an eye on the equipment at all times.

She looked at the display on her tablet computer and noted the time for her morning appointment was approaching. She
gathered up her belongings and headed for her office, passing in front of her gatekeeper secretary. “Marie, please see I'm not disturbed for the next thirty or forty minutes, all right? I have some important things to take care of.”

“Okay, Ms. Montalvo. I'll keep everyone away. Don't worry about a thing.”

Melissa closed the door behind her and thumbed the control on the wall, bringing the lights down. Her world faded to black, a new starry sky of blinking green and blue lights taking its place.

Sitting down in her large executive chair, she swiveled to face the triple computer display on her desktop. From here she could monitor the status of all the core temperatures of the CPUs and the running status of all the virtual machines.

She pressed a function key and brought up the display of the user load in real time. She watched the brilliantly colored bar graph as it undulated and fluctuated with the traffic coming into the website. Every movement represented one of the company's clients logging on, interacting with a virtual friend, or logging off. They could count clients in the hundreds of thousands and they had not even launched their full advertising program yet.

The display was keyed to United States Eastern time. Although there was a continual level of activity twenty-four hours a day, the initial bump in usage always started about 7:15 a.m. on weekdays. People were logging onto Facebook to check their messages, see what their virtuals had to say, and going off to work.

The next spike was typically just before nine o'clock. These were the housewives who had gotten the kids off to school, and now had time to sit down at their computers and begin their
social networking. She knew from the logs and web heuristics many of them spent more time with their new virtual friends than they did with the living ones. The early fears that people would consider virtual friends a novelty, then soon grow tired of them, had proved false. People had come to rely upon the relationships they had in the virtual realm. This was not going to go away anytime soon.

By nine forty-five the system load would climb to 80 percent usage, sometimes more, as the stay-at-homes and people in the workplace logged on to the system in various ways. Most would use Facebook. A small percentage worked with the proprietary chat boxes on the website. A smaller percentage relied almost entirely on the visual representations they offered with their premium service package. These were primarily men and no surprise at that. Almost all the male clients had chosen female friends.

I know what they want
.

Melissa stood up and walked to the glass panel separating her from the outer room. She turned the control to close the venetian blinds, which gave her complete privacy inside the darkened office. She sat back down at her console.

All around her the machines hummed, silently processing the conversations, the hopes, the dreams of thousands of people looking for relationship, in a world of unreality. She looked through the glass into the dimly lighted server room, with its regulated, sixty-five-degree Fahrenheit temperature. Ethernet cables strapped in large yellow bundles hung down from the ceiling. The RAID arrays chittered and the LEDs on the banks of blade servers blinked busily as packets came and went across the network.

This was Melissa's world, but she was about to step out of it.

Melissa turned her attention to the second display, the one she reserved for her personal use. The upper right-hand corner of the display held the names of two of the system's users and their member IDs. Both were grayed out. When they logged on, the gray letters would turn dark black.

Her secret place. Automated processes scoured the Internet continually for any images of her, deleting or redirecting them when discovered. Name matches were misdirected. In the very nexus of information overload, she cloaked herself invisibly in digital anonymity.

The two other windows on the screen were both empty. The one on the left was a video window through which she could interact visually with a user. The one on the right was an extended chat box to interact textually. She picked up her headset, slipped the pads over her ears, and arranged the microphone for speaking. It wouldn't be long now.

Eyes closed, she tipped her head back and imagined herself into the virtual world she had created. All about her the lives of people, both real and virtual, were taking place in real time. It truly was a web and she was its mistress. Mistress of the World Wide Web. Her fingers tingled as she slid them across her keyboard.

So many people out there. I know all about them, but they don't even suspect I exist
.

Four minutes later, the first name turned dark black. Her first target user had logged on. All she had to do now was watch the chat box and she would be able to see the text from the digitized speech as the user talked back and forth with the virtual friend.

Suzanne?

I'm here. I'm glad you're back! How are you doing today?

Pretty good. Scotty is off to preschool and Angela is playing in her room.

And Scott? Is he at work now?

. . .

The dialog between Rachel and
virtual Suzanne
continued. Even though the system was set to capture a log of the entire session, she kept a complete personal transcript of the text-talk that was scrolling by in the chat box.

The initial discovery that Scott was married was a shock. She would never have purposely sought out a married man. How could she have failed to flag that in the system for rejection?

That was then, however, and this was now. Scott existed, and there might not ever be another one like him. She would not blame him for his mistake in choosing the wrong wife. He could not have known she existed.

The artificial conversation scrolled by on the screen. Rachel was filling Suzanne in on her shopping list.

Stupid woman
.

Melissa looked over at the server room, momentarily transfixed by all the flickering blue and green lights winking on and off. Thousands of people were on the system by this time, all of them doing exactly what Rachel Douglas was doing. There was one difference between them and the experience Rachel was having. Just one.

Melissa moved her mouse to the button marked OVERRIDE. She readjusted the headset, finger poised over the mouse button.

. . . over to the store later. I need to pick some things up at the pharmacy, too.

Why? Is someone sick?

No, not sick. I just have to get some vitamins and lotion. The usual kind of things.

Melissa clicked the OVERRIDE button. On one of the servers a software branch executed. The existing virtual entity
Suzanne
dropped out of focus and control was transferred to Melissa's console.

From this point on, and until she clicked again on the OVERRIDE button to deactivate it, Melissa was in control.

Melissa
became
Suzanne.

Melissa spoke into her microphone. Everything she said was digitized, converted to text, and displayed on the screen.

Is he still under all that pressure at work?

Yes. He came home a little earlier than normal last night, though. And he was able to play with the children before they went to bed. It was pretty nice.

Did he ever give you any explanation about why he's still keeping such late hours?

No, but he doesn't need to. I trust him. I know he's working hard.

Oh, I'm sure he is, whatever it is he's doing. He is mainly making investments for customers, right?

Right. I guess he's buying and selling stocks all day. He has a lot of responsibility.

I'm sure he's trustworthy. But I do have a question, if you don't mind me asking?

Sure. What's your question?

Well, if he is working late at the office, buying and selling stocks and securities, how can he be doing that when the stock exchange closes at four o'clock in the afternoon? I mean, you'd think he would come home earlier, not later. What could he be doing all the rest of that time?

Rachel made no answer.

Melissa's eyes never left the screen. More bait in the trap. How would she react to the new seed of doubt she had just planted in the other woman's mind? Two long minutes later a reply came back.

I don't know. I don't think I should be worrying about that. I have to go now, Suzanne. Maybe we can talk this afternoon.

Okay, take care. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Bye-bye.

•  •  •

RACHEL SHIFTED THE PHONE
to her shoulder as she folded shirts from a large blue basket. She reminded herself that her mother was trying to be helpful.

“You're smart. You graduated from college. Why don't you get one of those online jobs?”

Rachel considered her mother's question. It was true. She'd gone to college and done pretty well, if she did say so herself.

She might be stuck at home . . . no, not
stuck
. She'd chosen to stay home with her young ones as long as needed, but that did not mean she couldn't do meaningful work.

“What kind of online work, Mom?”

“Oh, I don't know. It seems like I'm hearing about that sort of thing all the time. You're the young one. You're supposed to know about stuff like that.”

True again. She was supposed to know, but she didn't. She was losing touch with the world around her. Some days it felt like, well, like if there was a world outside the walls of her vinyl-clad house, she didn't know what it was anymore.

They said their good-byes, then Rachel slumped into the flower-print sofa. She began to enumerate her considerable talents.

She was an expert at setting the trash at the end of the driveway. She was solidly proficient at separating colors before using the washer. And she was way more than adequate at operating the microwave, even when she needed to change the power level when cooking.

Translation. She saw herself swimming in a gray sea of mediocrity with no way out.

Suzanne said she needed to be careful about her appearance. Something about the way she looked on the webcam in the morning when they talked.