Shimmer (23 page)

“Do they know you're watching?” Cliff asked.

“No,” Leonard said.

“Can you put them on a false trail?” I asked. “Let them jump from internal operations to some kind of fake system?”

Leonard nodded. “My team has already sketched out a number of scenarios to that effect. Initial ideas include false specifications for a Blue Box or inaccurate diagrams of Shimmer.”

“A fake set of financials,” Cliff suggested.

“The secret formula for Coca-Cola,” Whitley said.

“Naked pictures of Perry and Cliff,” Julie said.

Perry shook his head. “Not without a credit card.”

“And so,” Whitley asked, quietly now, pausing, and Leonard turned to her, “and so as a result of the attack, Regence learned nothing important?”

“Correct,” Leonard said.

“We won,” Whitley said.

“So far,” he said, nodding, a motion I wanted to support with my own hands, cradling his wide brow as it dipped forward, then back, “so far, we have won.”

Maybe it was the relief of knowing that Regence's attack had failed. Maybe it was the success of having restored the network in time. But one week after the attack, I had what I can only call a vision.

It only lasted a moment. But in that moment, I had a revelation. A revelation that came from Frederick Fadowsky.

In the week since the attack, I'd taken to rereading Fadowsky's published journals late at night, poring over the pages as I waited for the sun to light my living room. Three years earlier, when Trevor had first brought me the idea for the Blue Boxes, I'd read the entire published set of annotated journals. Now, as I came back to them, Fadowsky struck me as more visionary than ever, an arrogant but brilliant man haunted by wildly prescient, deeply inspired insights into the future. Fadowsky had foreseen a networked world and had seen it in a light so separate from any of the purely technical issues.

What he'd seen was an entirely new relationship between people and time.

“The future network,” Fadowsky had written back in 1977, “a truly robust and high-speed network made up of a near infinite number of interdependent machines alters completely and forever people's relationships to one another. Fundamentally, a network such as this alters time. It renders distance meaningless. It renders physical space unimportant. It renders such artificial constructs as time zones and borders irrelevant as it recasts the very notion of human interaction.”

Wordy, self-important, filled with an inflated sense of his place in the world, Fadowsky was nothing if not arrogant. But he was also right.

And so it was that as I entered a Friday meeting with Whitley, my head was filled with Fadowsky's thoughts.

Although, thinking back, I know it was more than Fadowsky's writings that inspired my vision. It was also the game of putt-putt.

I was playing with Whitley, the two of us discussing an expansion plan for Eastern Europe. Like all the putt-putt courses spread throughout the building, this one was as much an obstacle course as it was a
golf course. Furniture, printers, potted plants and the nearly endless movement of people through the building.

Through the first few holes, I was too occupied with the plan Whit-ley and I were discussing to notice how well Whitley was playing. By the fifth hole, though, I'd realized what was happening. Playing with care, speed and purpose, Whitley had built an eight-stroke lead over me. By the seventh hole, she was ten strokes ahead of me.

“I'm a one handicap,” she said to me as we walked down the hall.

“Which means?” I asked her.

She tapped her white teeth. She pulled at her black sleeve. In a moment, she said quietly, “I'm the highest-rated player in the building.”

“I had no idea,” I said.

Whitley shrugged, smiling lightly now. “It's true,” she said, pushing that sharp black hair from her eyes as she gripped her club. “I'm a badass.”

For most of the first nine holes, I had been barely hanging in the game, totally unfamiliar with the course and obstacles. But that began to change, inspired as I was by Whitley's methodical commitment to the game. By the twelfth hole, I'd cut her lead to six. By the fifteenth hole, I'd cut Whitley's lead to four.

“So much promise,” Whitley said, watching as I sank a twenty-foot shot. “So much hope.”

To the seventeenth hole, then the eighteenth, Whitley and I tied as we neared the final hole.

“What's riding on this game?” Whitley asked, looking at me.

“Pride,” I said, “honor, the unspoken glory of individual accomplishment.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “We forgot to bet.”

“Money?”

She shook her head. “I've got none to give, and you've got no incentive to win it.”

“I guess there's no bet,” I said quickly, wanting to take my shot before anything serious was at risk. I lined up and swung my club, my ball missing the hole by a foot.

Whitley had her fingers at her lips. Inhaling. Release. “The bet is still on,” she said.

“Lunch?” I suggested.

“Not quite,” she said.

She took a practice swing. If she made the shot, she would win.

“There's a currency more valuable than any of that,” she said, leaning over the ball, but I could see that she was smiling behind the hair hanging across her face. “It's the most common currency in use in this building.”

I nodded. I smiled just slightly. I remembered what Perry had told me a few weeks earlier.

“Favors,” Whitley said.

I nodded again. “What favors?” I asked.

“Unnamed favors,” she said, lining up to take her shot. In a moment, though, she stepped back, looking at me again. “Three of them,” she said.

“Three wishes,” I said.

She took a last practice swing. She turned for a second and smiled at me brightly, kid-like in her excitement. “Three wishes,” she said, then turned back to the ball and swung.

And in what to me would seem like one long second, one motion, one thought, one vision of all the space around me, I saw Whitley swing, saw elevator doors opening behind her, saw people slowing as they turned to watch her, and I saw myself there, putt-putt golf club in my hand, thinking for that moment about this section of this floor of this building in New York, two people here for this short second as work went on around them, Core Communications passing data to its clients worldwide, its employees talking to coworkers, suppliers, partners around the globe, its shadow network bouncing data between satellites and hidden outposts, all of it in motion in that frozen second as I watched Whitley.

And I saw it.

Fadowsky was right.

The kind of high-speed network made possible by the Fadowsky
Boxes changed completely how we had to view time. The shadow network working simultaneously in every hemisphere, above the north and south poles, in just seconds passing information from a western day to an eastern night. Time meant something else completely.

I saw the network. Saw myself. And I saw an answer. A way to take so much pressure off the shadow network. A way to extend its life by months or more.

The details of what I needed to do were immensely complex, so complex that the idea could easily fail. Already I knew that executing the change would be a huge effort, made worse by the fact that I could involve very few people, and none would know the scope of what was being done.

Still, the idea itself was simple. The shadow network would collapse when it finally choked on the ever larger amount of data that was being sent—at ever faster rates—through the satellites, cable, switches and mainframes. Ultimately, no amount of money or hardware or people could change this. But what I'd realized was that Shimmer, by default, hadn't ever allowed for transferring data not faster but slower. If I had Shimmer upload data to the satellites at a slower rate—just fractions of a second slower—and download it at the same speed I downloaded it now, I could, essentially, create more room in the network. The difference in speed between upload and download, that fraction of a fraction of a second, created a lag time. And that lag time would grow every day, increasing slowly and in turn creating more capacity in the storage units, in the land-based cable, in the mainframes and servers, everywhere except the satellites themselves.

I couldn't do this forever. The system would choke when the lag time got too big. Even ten seconds would crash the network. But for now, the lag could buy me time.

Judged against the standards of a normal business, it was a crazy idea. But the Fadowsky journals had reminded me of the tremendous scope and speed of a network like this. In so many ways, it existed in a time created by and for itself. I would simply alter that time very, very slightly.

And I know now that there was something besides the Fadowsky journals, something I'd been reminded of not by Fadowsky but by the game of putt-putt. This was not a normal company.

Core was best helped by an inherently failed idea.

“Three wishes,” Whitley said again. And I realized I was looking at her. Realized she had finished the game.

Realized that, of course, she'd already sunk her shot.

Into meetings. Crossing corridors. On the phone and answering e-mail. Walking alone or with a team of six, sitting at my desk or sitting at a table with twenty. Talking with investors, brokers, analysts, the press. Agreeing to buy three companies in south Florida. Sitting through two interviews with British TV. Seeing the light, everywhere, broken or filtered—shafts of light or angled shadows, all falling across doorways and conference tables and the faces of accountants and programmers and senior product managers.

And, all the while, communicating with the thirty groups worldwide working on the changes to the shadow network. Assessing their results. Adjusting their plans. Talking to them via a hidden trail of half-informed contractors, shifting intermediaries and redirected e-mail addresses.

For a week I'd been working on the changes. It would be another two weeks before I could roll them into the shadow network. Only then would I know if this would work, in part because none of the people working on this were aware of what I really wanted them to do.
Slow data to the satellites,
I wanted to say. But I couldn't, was instead only able to relay the responses of one group to the next, translating and recasting their comments to suit my secret purpose. It would be another two weeks of this, monitoring the groups' progress, waiting for the conclusion, doing it all in and between the mix of critical, important and sometimes trivial moments that made up my life.

Tuesday, in my office reading a letter from my mother, a onetime waitress now living in the suburbs of Toledo. She'd been forced to give
me up for adoption by my father, the domineering night manager of a densely packed Toledo trailer park. I sat back in my chair now. For a second, closed my eyes. Pictured my father, a rotund dictator roaming the asphalt streets of the Thirty Pines trailer park, his estranged wife staring wistfully toward the nearby on-ramp to Interstate 80.

The letter was heavy with emotion. Details, however, were—as always—a little sketchy.

It was just one of forty letters from would-be parents, all stacked neatly on a table in my office. My assistant tended to bundle up all these parental claims, hanging on to them in a file locked away in his desk, letting me have them only reluctantly, and only after I asked for them repeatedly. Often I would have to go to his desk and open the drawer myself.

“I want to see what's come in,” I would say.

“Actually,” my assistant always said, “you really don't.”

It was only his sense of loyalty that kept him from throwing away everyone of the letters.

So now I looked them over. A letter from my father, a karate instructor in Michigan. A letter from my mother, a customer service supervisor in North Dakota. A letter, with photo, from my father and mother, co-owners of a diner in Arizona. A very distinguished-looking Asian man and lovely Indian woman, they did not even bother to explain the racial discrepancy between us. “We have found you,” the letter began. “What's done is done.”

I looked at the letters and thought maybe they were standard packages sent to all the world's wealthy adopted children.
Playing the odds,
I thought.
At some point, maybe someone will bite.

Most all the letters did ultimately end up in the trash. But some I kept, putting them in a file locked away inside my desk. Because maybe. Maybe that woman in Toledo really was my mother. Maybe that man in Michigan really was my father. It wasn't that I didn't believe what my father had told me before he died. That my birth parents were both dead. But maybe, somehow, he'd been wrong.

And maybe someday I'd decide I wanted to know for sure.

Eating lunch in Ronald Mertz's office, and getting an update on Regence's inroad into our facilities database. In the past week, we'd let Regence's spies learn that we planned an expansion in Cologne, Germany, told them that Core used high-quality paint in all its renovations, revealed that the company's Asian soap dispensers averaged a 96-milligram output per user.