Bleeding Edge

33

Maxine 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…

“You think?”

“It could stand for anything, couldn’t it?”

“Wait, I’m trying to think…” Each picking it up in turn, tossing it back and forth to be reamplified, till before long it’s totally paranoid panic and their security friend, grown grumpy, is showing them the back way out.

“What the boys concluded,” Vyrva summarizes, “is that Ice was trying to get Voorhees, Krueger to invoke protective covenants, take the business away, and then sell off the assets—the DeepArcher source code, basically—to Ice.”

“Fuck it,” Justin later in the night, with unexpected bitterness, “he wants it, let him have it.”

“Ain’t like you, bro, what’ll happen next time we need to get lost?”

“I won’t.” Justin sounding a little melancholy about it.

“Maybe I will,” Lucas declares.

“We can invent someplace else.”

“Justin, what is this town doing to our heads, man, we never used to be like this.”

“I don’t think it’s any better back in California anymore. Just as corrupt, we’ve been up and down the same streets together, you know where it all leads to, there or here.”

Vyrva, though technically a shiksa, let them go on, drifting in and out in a motherly way, offering snacks and keeping her annoyance to herself. Now, to Maxine, “Talk about lost. Sometimes…”

Here it comes, the fraudster’s lament. Maxine could run workshops in Conquering Eyeroll. “And…”

“And if they’re lost, then I think,” barely audible, “it could be my fault.”

In comes Daytona with a sack full of Danishes and a plastic coffee carafe. “Yo Vyrva, surf’s up, baby!”

Vyrva is enough of a sport to stand and bump butts with Daytona and contribute eight bars of backup on the seldom-heard oldie “Soul Gidget” before Daytona, giving her a look, remarks, “Should be singin ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ you lookin a little anorexic, girl, need some them po’k chops! Collard greens!”

“Fried peach pies,” Vyrva wan but game.

“What I’m talk’n about,” waving herself back out the door. “Hold that mayo!”

“Vyrva—”

“No. It’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, oh, Maxi… I’ve been going through such guilt?”

“If you’re not Jewish, you have to have a license, cause we hold the patent, see.”

Shaking her head, “What should I do, I’m like so scared now, I’m in so deep?”

“How about Lucas, how deep is he?”

“Lucas? No? Not Lucas?” Pissed off that Maxine isn’t getting it.

“Uh-oh. We’re talking about somebody else? Who?”

“Please… I really thought I could help. It was supposed to be for Fiona, for Justin, for all of us. He said the guys could write their own ticket.”

“Somebody,” as dinosaur-size scales at long last fall clattering from Maxine’s eyes, “somebody who wanted to acquire the DeepArcher source code, assumed that dating the wife of one of the partners would give him a foot in the door, am I following this so far?”

“Maxi, you’ve got to believe—”

“No, that was the ’69 Mets, it’ll be on your Big Apple citizenship exam, and meantime who now, I wonder, who of all the dozens of suits and suitors, would be enough of a total shit to try something like that, wait, wait, it’s right here at the edge of my brain…”

“I might have told you, but you hate him so much…”

“Everybody hates Gabriel Ice, so I guess that means you haven’t told anybody.”

“And he’s such a vengeful little prick, if I tried to call things off, he’d tell Justin all about it, destroy my marriage, my family… I’d lose Fiona, everything—”

“There, there, don’t dwell, that’s worst-case. Could play out any number of ways. How long’s it been going on for?”

“Since Las Vegas last summer. We even got in a quickie on September 11th, which makes it that much worse…”

Maxine unable not to squint a little, “I hope you’re not saying you caused that somehow? That would be really crazy, Vyrva.”

“Same kind of carelessness. Isn’t it?”

“Same as what? Is this the listen-up-all-you-slackers speech? American neglect of family values brings al-Qaeda in on the airplanes and takes the Trade Center down?”

“They saw how we are, what we’ve become. How soft, how neglectful. Self-indulgent. They figured us for an easy target, and they were right.”

“Somehow I don’t see the cause and effect, but maybe it’s just me.”

“I’m an adulteress!” Vyrva wails quietly.

“Ah, come on. Adolescentress, maybe.”

Yet who can help, in these situations, wanting to hear a detail or two? Ice’s cozy bachelor pad down in Tribeca, for example, a bathroom running to about the square footage of a pro basketball court, featuring a wide collection of tampons of every make, size, and absorbency, bottles of shampoo and conditioner whose labels you can’t read a word of because they’re imported from so far away, hair equipment from bobby pins to an enormous retro salon dryer you not only sit under but apparently actually have to climb inside, plus a condom selection that makes the checkout at Duane Reade look like a machine in a gas-station men’s room.

“Thing is,” after some nose blowing, “the sex is always so great.”

“A sensitive, considerate lover.”

“Fuck no, he’s a son of a bitch. Did you ever try anal?”

Does Maxine really want to hear about this?

Does Delman’s sell shoes?

“It figures,” encouragingly. “His specialty, I bet?”