Kill Process (11 page)

“If you’ll come with me.” The hostess has menus in one hand, and she leads us past the bar toward a big common table.

“We’ll take that one, over there.” Emily points to a much smaller table along the wall. A card standing on the table says “reserved” in a fancy script.

“I’m sorry,
we—”

When the waitress tries to protest, Emily slips something into her hand.

“Thank you,” Emily says.

I shake my head, barely believing what I’ve seen. This is
Portland
. Did Emily pay off the waitress?

“Certainly,” the hostess says, now beaming at us. “Come with me.”

The table Emily picked has one side to the wall, and there’s ample space on either side of the table. Emily didn’t pick the table for herself. I know she’d rather sit at the bar, where she’d probably flirt with the bartender. That the bartender here is female wouldn’t slow her down at all.

“Thank you,” I say, and squeeze Emily’s hand.

“Of course. We gotta be comfortable.”

I order a Pinot blanc and Emily goes right for whisky, ordering something Scottish I can’t pronounce.

Our drinks arrive at the same time Thomas sits down. Burnt peat wafts over from Emily’s drink, and I recoil at the same time that Thomas bends over for a big sniff of Emily’s glass.

“One of those,” he says to the waitress.

We both lean in for a kiss.

“Hey,” Emily says. “She didn’t give me any tongue.”

I want to talk about my ideas for the distributed social network, but wait until after we order. We make small talk as we pick out a bunch of small plates served family style.

Once the food order is in, I clear my throat.

“Here it comes,” Emily says.

“What?”

“Your big announcement. You’re as transparent as a fish bowl. Spit it out, girl!”

“I have an idea. A really huge, change-the-world sort of idea, and I’m committed to make this happen. I’m working on it now, but once it’s ready, I’m going to leave Tomo.”

Emily’s jaw drops. “Holy shit, what did you do with my Angie?”

“I’m serious.”

“We can tell,” Thomas says, carefully telegraphing his movement so I can see and nod at him. He puts one hand on mine. “What’s the idea?”

“I’m going to build a distributed federated social network.” I can’t help the big smile that comes to my face. This is the biggest idea I’ve ever had.

“Um, a what?” Emily says.

Thomas is equally blank.

“A distributed federated social network. See, I’ve analyzed what it would require to overthrow Tomo. They’ve grown so big no single company can displace them. Even if they could, a replacement would only maintain the concentration of power in one company, which is exactly what’s gotten us into the problem with Tomo. My plan is an architecture that divides the network into many pieces. Today, a social network embodies a social graph
—
that’s your list of friends
—
a profile, publishing content, reading content, a feed algorithm to select which content you see, and a social commenting aspect. I’ve come up with a way to split these pieces so different companies can do each part. Dozens of companies compete to maintain your social graph or provide the best platform for authoring content.”

I’m talking a mile a minute and I’ve got their undivided attention.

“How do you make money with this?” Emily asks.

“Ah. I knew you would ask. I’ve come up with three ideas. First off, you can pay for an ad-free experience. Tomo makes about ten bucks per user per year, by comparison. We allow users to pay us ten bucks, and we don’t show them ads at all.”

“Okay. How many people are going to do that?” Thomas says.

“I don’t know, but Pandora and other companies use freemium models like this. The second option is the traditional advertising experience. The third option is corporate sponsorships. You buy a PC, you get two years free. The PC manufacturer picks up the cost.”

Thomas nods his head in appreciation. “You’ve given this some thought.”

“That’s how money comes in,” Emily says. “Who gets it? You’ve described lots of different companies. What’s their incentive?”

“Pay per usage. Let’s say Betty comes along, and she looks at her feed, and she interacts with a piece of content from her friend Alice. Everyone who had a role in that experience gets a percentage including the app Alice used to write the content, the social graph maintainers, the notification component, the algorithm that selects the story for Betty’s feed, even the reader app that Betty uses. If Alice interacts with 1,000 articles in a year, and pays ten bucks a year, then each interaction would be worth a penny, and each of those companies earns a corresponding fraction of a penny.”

Emily shakes her head. “How do
you
make money? You, Angie.”

“A percentage off the top? A salary? I’m not sure. I’ll figure it out.”

“You’ve worked out quite a bit,” Thomas says, fingers massaging his temple. “When did you do all this?”

“At work. I’ve been skating by with the bare minimum and working on this every chance I get.”

“At
Tomo
?” Thomas grimaces.

“Yeah, why?”

“Lalalala,” He puts his fingers in his ears. “I don’t want to know.”

“What’s the problem?” I ask.

Thomas sits up straight and puts his lawyer face on. “The problem is they own your intellectual property. These are no longer your ideas, they belong to Tomo.”

“Fine, I can work on it at home.” I’m a little indignant. He’s the lawyer. Why am I only finding out about this now?

“No, it’s no good. You’re working in the same field at Tomo. Your employment contract will give them ownership. If you’re serious about this stuff, you’ve got to quit. Even then, you might be under a non-compete agreement or an NDA that would prohibit you from working at, or starting, a direct competitor.”

“Quit my job? What would I live on?”

“Savings,” Emily says. “Until you develop the idea far enough to raise money or have an income stream.”

I stare at the tablecloth wondering what to say. Emily knows I forfeited my unvested stock options now worth millions when Jeremy convinced me to quit my first job at Tomo. Still, since they rehired me, I make good money. Excellent money, in fact, which I know because I peeked into the HR database to compare my salary to my coworkers. The problem stems from all sorts of unusual expenses. Zero-day exploits I purchased on the darknet. Cash for a VW bus. A thousand count lot of Raspberry Pi computers. Killing people is surprisingly expensive. Hell, by some estimates the government spent about ten million per Taliban soldier killed, so I’m damn efficient by comparison.

Obviously I can’t reveal what I spend my money on, so I lack a good excuse for why I have so little savings.

“Let’s assume I can survive financially. You’re saying I should quit Tomo, and then what?”

“Quit, but don’t say what you’re doing,” Thomas says. “Keep quiet about it for a while. You don’t want it to look like you’re jumping right into something else based on your current work. Eventually you’ll probably want to raise money from a venture capitalist.”

“Why live off my savings then? Why not ask for money from a venture capitalist in the first place?”

“They need to believe you can pull off what you’re describing. You can’t go to them with a vague
idea—”

“There’s nothing vague about it!” I’ve never been accused of vagueness in my life.

Thomas holds up a hand. “I don’t mean technically. I’m sure you’ve got the technology worked out. What you need though, is concrete ideas about how you’re going to do business, make deals with partners, get money from customers. How will you even build the thing? How many employees does Tomo have?”

“Fifteen thousand.”

“You’re one person. A venture capitalist won’t believe one person can create a competitive product by herself. Who will build this with you? How are you going to hire them? What will you pay them with?”

My face heats up and Thomas’s voice gets high and thin, like he’s speaking through a long pipe. I’m overwhelmed by the questions. I want to write code.

“Thomas,” Emily says, “go powder your nose in the little boys’ room for a while.”

Thomas looks back and forth between us. “Of course.”

Emily waits until he gets up, and watches him cross the restaurant toward the bathrooms.

“Nice ass,” she says, and turns back to me.

“I know,” I say, managing a weak smile.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“This is too much. I don’t know how to hire people. I’m not endowed with money. I don’t know or want to know anything about pitching venture capitalists. I don’t even like
talking
to people.”

Emily leans back and sips her drink. “You care about this idea.”

“Yes.” My voice is firm even as I’m falling to pieces inside.

“Lots of people think of ideas. Turning those ideas into something real, that’s a lot of work.”

I nod, afraid I might cry. I grab my wine, suck the rest of it down.

“You used to be the Chief Data Whozig. Didn’t you work with people then?”

“Chief Database Architect. It was different, then. The company was little, and we were all tech people. I never made slides. Occasionally I’d go into a meeting with an architecture diagram. Mostly we wrote and talked code.”

Emily leans back and stares at me. “I know you like to look down on managers, but they possess a whole mess of useful skills. How to create a good presentation. How to interpret a profit and loss spreadsheet. The ability to stand up in from a room of investors, employees, or customers, and make them believe. They aren’t born knowing how, they learn it. If this is what you want to do, then you’ve got to embrace learning all that.”

“I don’t know, Em. I’m a coder, not a . . . manager.”

“Yeah, today you are. You didn’t start out a coder. You learned that. What’s harder, learning to code or making slides?”

I smile. She knows what I think of most managers.

“You’re smarter than those guys. You can do what they do.” She leans in close. “Only if you care about this federated . . . thingy. If you don’t care, then don’t bother.”

“Okay, I understand. I care. I do. I will learn how to do all that crap.”

“Not crap,” she says. “All the necessary hard work to get you what you need.”

“Fine, all the necessary hard work.”

Emily grabs my hand, and pulls it close to her. “And something else. You need to talk to someone. A professional.”

“What are you saying?” I try to pull my hand away. Emily holds tight.

“How many men’s hands will you need to shake to do this? How many times will you walk into a room of venture capitalists, and find a table full of hairy people? Are you going to suffer a panic attack each time? Going to look for an escape route?”

I want to shrink into the furniture. “Fuck you!” The words stumble out of my mouth, surprising even me.

The diners at the next table stare. Please, God, let me disappear.

“What happens when you want to hire someone, and the best candidate is a man? Are you going to pass him over because he might be a threat?”

“Screw you.”

“You never got help. You’ve never seen a therapist.”

“I did. In San Jose.”

“I’m not talking about physical therapy to live without an arm,” Emily says in a harsh whisper. “I’m talking about your phobia of men. I’m not saying this to be cruel, Angie. I’m telling you because I care. You can’t live your life in fear. You’ll kill your odds of succeeding if you don’t deal with it before you create this company.”

She lets go of my hand, and I pull it back into my lap. I shake with anger and embarrassment.

Emily extracts a tissue from her purse with shaking hands.

“Why are
you
crying?” I ask.

“I love you, girl. I want you to be happy.” Emily blows her nose with a loud honk. “I believe in you. You can do this.”

“It’s hard. So hard.”

“Yes. Everything worthwhile is hard.”

M
ONDAY MORNING
,
I go into the office at my usual time.

I need access to Human Resources’ employee records database. Unlike all the ones we use for customer-facing operations, or even some of the less sensitive finance systems, I don’t have access to the employee records. Tomo has a reasonably good security department, and we run twice-annual audits with the same firm that hired me out of school.

Administrative assistants have access, delegated from the managers they work for, but changes made through the official path leave a digital trail, by design, that can be traced back to the time, location, alteration, and user. I need something more permanent with less evidence.

The company is big enough that the overwhelming majority of people don’t know each other. Every few months, I make a local copy of the corporate directory so I can do employee searches without being tracked. I check my cached copy now. There’s an engineer, Andy Trask, three floors down who works for IT in records management. He’ll have the access I need and he’s in the office now, according to his chat availability status.

Ten minutes later I’ve doxxed the guy. I know where Andy lives, who he’s married to, where she works, and their kids’ names and ages. I know they moved here from San Diego, and they contracted out a kitchen remodel when they bought their home. The kids go to “A Bowl of Cherries” preschool. The school has a private Tomo group, where they post pictures of the kids. Andy hasn’t visited the group in six months.

I download pictures from a recent garden planting, and copy them to a USB hard drive. I stick that drive and a spare into my pants pocket.

I glance around. The workspaces near me are empty. One guy across the floor is making coffee.

I retrieve my prosthetic arm from my bag. I slip it on, press down hard with my stump, and twist the air valve closed with my hand. It’s suctioned onto my upper arm now. I slip on a wind breaker, and slip the prosthetic gripper into the pocket, which takes a half dozen tries. I normally use it to balance my weight when biking so I don’t wipe out when I hit the brakes. I can’t actually control the arm, only position it, and lock into place.