The Cookbook Collector (15 page)

The dressertop was strewn with bills and mail, bank statements from Fleet. Orion didn’t bother opening them. Despite his huge equity in ISIS, he had, of course, no money to speak of in his account. Molly’s damp towel lay in a heap on the floor. She had good reason to avoid inviting her parents up to the apartment.

Orion scanned his e-mail. Seventy new messages, two from Jonathan. Subject: URGENT. Message: Get your butt over here now. His cell phone rang again. He didn’t have to look. His bike had a flat, and he knew he should get moving if he was walking to Kendall Square. He stuffed his computer into his backpack.

“Okay, Molly, I’m going.” He bent down over her curly head. “Bye.”

She turned, her face tender with sleep. When she reached out and wrapped her arms around him, she was warm, her skin smoother than the silky blouse that she was wrinkling. Her eyes opened. Her lips parted, and he was about to kiss her, when suddenly she spoke. “Get milk,” she said.

“Where the hell have you been?” It was uncanny, as if Jonathan had been standing in front of the elevator the whole time. He played laser tag like that, appearing suddenly, bearing down on you.

“I was having brunch,” Orion said.

“Brunch?”
Jonathan echoed, as if he’d never heard the word before. Lou was right, Orion thought. Brunch when you’re old.

They were walking through what had recently been the second-floor wilderness of the company. At one time, Jonathan and Orion had played a form of indoor badminton here, but new cubicles had been installed to pack more programmers together. There were private offices here as well, for Aldwin the CFO, and Jonathan the CTO. Jake was the chief programmer. Only Orion wasn’t chief of anything. That had been his choice. They’d offered him some sort of vice presidency, but at the time, the whole thing had sounded too ridiculous, like aspiring to Communications Minister of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Of course, Orion had been wrong about this. ISIS was a cash-rich powerhouse, no fictional Grand Duchy. The CFO and CTO were, in fact, piloting the company, along with Dave, who was much given to navigational language, along with Mission Statements, foam-core credos posted throughout the building like slogans from Orwell’s Ministry of Love.
We are a community. We value excellence. We believe in the capacity of each individual to make a difference
….

Jonathan marched to the conference room, while Orion followed slowly, looking in on the programmers, who were writing Lockbox 2.0. Clarence was typing away, as were Umesh and Nadav, and there was the new girl, Sorel. He was always conscious of her, working among the guys. She was tall, long-limbed, lithe, and kept a guitar under her desk. She wore odd black clothes and she had fair skin and strawberry-blond hair almost as long as his. She had the palest eyes he had ever seen; he wasn’t sure of the color—they were like water.

Her first day, Mel Millstein had brought her in and introduced her in his fussy way.

“Let’s welcome Sorel Fisher. I’m sure everybody here will do their best to help her feel at home.” He’d pulled out a swivel chair. “This is your desk,” Mel told Sorel.

“Thanks very much,” she said, and Orion had been surprised by her English accent.

“What’s your name again?” he’d asked after Mel left.

“Sorel,” she said. “Like the plant.”

Her accent was wonderful, and her voice as well, which was lower than you would expect, and at the same time a little breathy. Sometimes Orion talked to her, just to get her to say words like
corollary
, which she pronounced with the stress in the middle, a little bump and then a rush of speed at the end: “corollary.” She glanced at him quizzically now as he passed by.

“I’m going to the conference room,” he told her with mock gravity.

“Oh.” Sorel suppressed laughter as she turned back to her computer. “I won’t be seen talking to you, then.”

He knew everyone would see him with Jonathan, however. The conference room cut right into the open-plan programmers’ space, and the walls were glass, another of Dave’s brilliant ideas.

Jonathan and Aldwin perched atop the oval table with the
Globe
strewn before them.

“I’ve been getting e-mails all morning from investors,” Jonathan informed Orion.

“About what?”

“About this.” Jonathan shook the newspaper at Orion.

“You cite Richard Stallman as your hero,” Aldwin said.

“I happen to admire Stallman’s ideas about sharing information.”

“Not now, you don’t,” said Jonathan. “Not one week before our IPO.”

“Are you really that nervous?” Orion asked.

Aldwin folded his hands on his knee. With his baby face and mild manners, his well-groomed curly hair, clean clothes, and matching socks, he seemed, literally, best suited of the founding four for corporate life. Jonathan was the star, but Aldwin was Dave’s favorite. Everyone knew that. Of course the idea of Dave’s favor was strange, to say the least. The four of them had hired Dave, and at the time, Jonathan had privately conceded Orion’s contention that Dave wasn’t particularly bright. “You do see that we’re in business?” Aldwin asked Orion now.

“ISIS is not the local branch of the Free Software Foundation,” Jonathan said.

“You do see how our investors are hoping to make money here?” Aldwin continued.

“Free Software is free as in freedom,” Orion retorted. “Not free as in free lunches. I never said I don’t want to make money.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Jonathan exploded. “We are selling a proprietary security system. You are going to reporters, scaring our investors, talking about giving stuff away.”

“I never said anything about giving stuff away. I mentioned Richard Stallman’s
name.”

“He’s a nut case.”

“He happens to be a visionary,” said Orion, “and I find his questions very interesting. Like, when you think about it, the whole notion of intellectual property is an oxymoron. How can you own something intangible? It’s like, you can’t own souls, can you?”

“Are you trying to make me angry?” Jonathan asked.

“Maybe you should take your name off our patents,” Aldwin suggested.

“I said I admired him. I never said I wanted to
be
him. Jesus.” Orion turned away from the CTO and CFO, once his closest friends, and he looked through the glass wall at the programmers in their cubicles. Several guys were crowded around Sorel’s desk. Had she got the new high score in Quake III? She was keeping her head down. “I happen to have my own ideas,” Orion murmured. “I have my own opinions.”

“Your ideas are—occasionally—great,” Jonathan told him. “Your opinions suck.”

Orion sighed and turned back to listen to the rest of the tirade.

“Aldwin and I have been in Mountain View all week,” Jonathan continued. “Jake is still in London. We are taking care of customers and signing partners. We are preparing for the biggest IPO of the year. The three of us have not been home. We have not had brunch. And we do not want to come in here and find that you, with your two million shares, have been …”

“Just don’t talk to reporters right now,” said Aldwin.

“Do not talk to anyone.” Jonathan pointed his index finger directly at Orion’s chest, but Orion didn’t flinch. He had been an athlete too, although his sport was skiing and involved no contact, only swift descents.

“When you get phone calls, refer them to Vicki,” said Aldwin. “That’s her job.”

They were ganging up on Sorel. Orion could see the guys spinning her swivel chair around, forcing her to look at them.

“And another thing …,” said Aldwin.

Orion strode out of the conference room. Under his breath he murmured, “Fuck you.”

Clarence, Umesh, and Nadav were standing over Sorel.

“Lockbox went down again,” Umesh told Orion.

“She crashed the system,” Clarence said.

“What—the new version?”

“She checked in buggy code,” Umesh said.

“She gets the rubber chicken.” Menacingly, Nadav swung the rubber chicken in Sorel’s face. It was the sort of plucked rubber chicken you found in joke shops, its limp body yellow and gelatinous.

“Oh,
stop,”
said Sorel. She sounded indifferent, almost bored, but Orion could see that she was upset.

“You crash the system,” said Clarence, “you get the chicken.”

Nadav pitched the rubber bird directly into Sorel’s lap.

“Put that chicken nicely on her desk,” Orion ordered.

Clarence hesitated for a moment. Orion acted like one of the guys, and now he pulled rank on them.

“Now,” Orion said, and he waited until Clarence pitched the chicken onto Sorel’s desk. “She’s going to debug the code now,” Orion announced. “Party’s over.”

When the little crowd dispersed, Orion pulled up a chair next to Sorel. He watched her long fingers on the keyboard as she scrolled through code on the screen. “I break stuff all the time.”

“I know.” She smiled.

“So let me help you.”

“Aren’t you busy?”

Orion thought of Molly sleeping after thirty-six hours at the hospital. He considered Jake in London and Jonathan and Aldwin, who didn’t brunch. “Not really.”

Slowly, line by line, they combed Lockbox 2.0. He took the workstation next to hers, and they worked in parallel on separate computers. As they searched, they turned up little items and oddities: missing comments, obscure bugs, strange bits of circuitous reasoning, the dust bunnies in the code. Hours passed. They didn’t speak, but mumbled to themselves. “What happens when this line executes?”

“And what happens here?”

“What’s the value of the variable now?”

They worked until numbers seemed to imprint themselves on Orion’s eyes. The chambers of the program drew Orion and Sorel deeper and deeper into the software’s formal logic. They counted their steps as they descended into dark passageways. The voices all around grew muffled, the ambient light on the floor began to dim. Orion’s phone rang, but he didn’t even glance at it.

Night came. Programmers departed, and others took their place. Jonathan and Aldwin were long gone. Still, Orion and Sorel kept hunting underground, watching for errors, listening for rushing water, tapping walls.

“Why are you smiling?” Sorel asked at one point.

“I’m just concentrating,” he murmured, half to himself. Then he confessed, “Actually I love doing small repetitive things.”

“I don’t,” she confessed. “I need fresh air.”

“You can go home if you’re tired,” he told her. “I’ll finish.”

“No. I can’t go home. I’m responsible. I’m just going out for a minute.”

Suddenly he realized that she was going down alone into the dark. “Wait!” He ran after her. “I’ll come down with you.”

“No, don’t,” she said. She stepped into the elevator and as the doors closed she confessed, “I just want to smoke.”

How could she smoke? She was so beautiful. He hated that she smoked. While she was gone, he raided the company kitchen for salt-and-vinegar potato chips and jelly beans. He took four cans of black-cherry soda from the fridge, and lined them up on her desk. He wasn’t sure why he did that. They looked silly. He brought them to his own desk and kept working. When he heard the elevator bell he kept his head down, pretending he hadn’t been waiting for her.

“You like working all night,” she said.

“I’m good at it.” Orion was showing off a little, but he was also telling the truth. He had an eye for detail, a grasp of the small picture, the obsessive game-playing mind of a superb hacker.

They shared her computer now, and the monitor glowed before them as they found their way back inside the code. They made their way without a map; the program was their map, spreading in rivulets before them. Their hands hovered over the keyboard and overlapped. Her wrists were delicate, her skin fine as rice paper, but he pretended that he didn’t notice when their hands brushed. She pretended as well, even when she felt his fingers close reflexively on hers. The task before them made pretense easier, because they had to concentrate. They were like diviners, searching for the source of her mistake.

Suddenly Sorel found the bug. “Stupid, stupid,” she groaned. “Over there. I forgot the bounds check.”

“Aha!” cried Orion. She had neglected to specify enough memory for the number of items in her piece of the Lockbox system.

“It’s not even an interesting mistake,” she griped as she typed in proper array bounds. “Wait, why isn’t it working now?”

“Be patient.” He took over the keyboard.

“No.” Gently she pushed his hands away. “Let me.”

By the time they got Lockbox up and running, the sun was rising, shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows, drenching East Cambridge in liquid gold.

“Got it.” Orion basked for a moment in accomplishment. “We got it back up,” he announced to the nearly empty room.

“Cool,” somebody said faintly from across the way.

Orion extended his hand to Sorel, and she shook it. He felt joyous, masterful after the all-nighter. “I knew I’d get to the bottom of this.”

“You!”
she said. “Give credit where credit is due.”

“You found the bug,” he admitted.

“And don’t forget that I created the bug too. I created a monster!” She picked up the rubber chicken and told it sweetly, “I’m going to murder you.”

“Let’s go down to the river and drown it.”

“Yes!” She hunted for the black heap that was her coat. As she turned it here and there, trying to figure out which end was up, her pack of cigarettes fell from one of the pockets. She didn’t notice.

“I can carry that….” Orion took her guitar. “What kind of …” He was about to ask her what kind of music she played, when everything faded. The lights dimmed, the computer monitors darkened. The constant whirring of machines ceased, and only the
EXIT
signs remained illuminated.

“The control room,” Orion said, and they sprinted downstairs to the new ISIS nerve center with its monitors covering the entire wall, illuminating the world in all its time zones. There on that map, green dots indicated servers for the ISIS global security network. At desks in the control room, as at NASA, at least two ISIS programmers monitored the ISIS network at all times.