Bleeding Edge

5

As a paid-up member of the Yentas With Attitude local, Maxine has been snooping diligently into hashslingrz, before long finding herself wondering what Reg has gotten himself into and, worse, what he’s dragging her uncomfortably toward. The first thing that jumps out of the bushes, waggling its dick so to speak, is a Benford’s Law anomaly in some of the expenses.

Though it’s been around in some form for a century and more, Benford’s Law as a fraud examiner’s tool is only beginning to surface in the literature. The idea is, somebody wants to phony up a list of numbers but gets too cute about randomizing it. They assume that the first digits, 1 through 9, are all going to be evenly distributed, so that each one will turn up 11% of the time. Eleven and change. But in fact, for most lists of numbers, the distribution of first digits is not linear but logarithmic. About 30% of the time, the first digit actually turns out to be a 1—then 17.5% it’ll be a 2, so forth, dropping off in a curve to only 4.6% when you get to 9.

So when Maxine goes through these disbursement numbers from hashslingrz, counting up how often each first digit appears, guess what. Nowhere near the Benford curve. What in the business one refers to as False Lunchmeat.

Soon enough, drilling down, she begins to pick up other tells. Consecutive invoice numbers. Hash totals that don’t add up. Credit-card numbers failing their Luhn checks. It becomes dismayingly clear that somebody’s taking money out of hashslingrz and starbursting it out again all over the place to different mysterious contractors, some of whom are almost certainly ghosts, running at a rough total to maybe as high as the high sixes, even lower sevens.

The most recent of these problematical payees is a little operation downtown calling itself hwgaahwgh.com, an acronym for Hey, We’ve Got Awesome And Hip Web Graphix, Here. Do they? Somehow, doubtful. Hashslingrz has been sending them regular payments, always within a week of each almost certainly dummy invoice, till all of a sudden the little company goes belly-up, and here are all these huge fuckin payments still going to the operating account, which somebody at hashslingrz has naturally been taking steps to conceal.

She hates it when paranoia like Reg’s gets real-world. Probably worth a look, though.

MAXINE APPROACHES the address from the other side of the street, and as soon as she catches sight of it, her heart, if it does not sink exactly, at least cringes more tightly into the one-person submarine necessary for cruising the sinister and labyrinthine sewers of greed that run beneath all real-estate dealings in this town. Thing is, is it’s such a nice building, terra-cotta facing, not as ornate as commercial real estate could get a century ago when this unit was going up, but tidy and strangely welcoming, as if the architects had actually given some thought to the people who’d be working there every day. But it’s too nice, a sitting duck, asking to get torn down someday soon and the period detailing recycled into the decor of some yup’s overpriced loft.

The directory in the lobby lists hwgaahwgh.com up on the fifth floor. Maxine knows old-school fraud investigators who’ll admit to walking away at this point, satisfied enough, only to regret it later. Others have advised her to keep going no matter what, until she can actually stand in the haunted space and try to summon the ghost vendor out of its nimbus of crafted silence.

On the way up, she watches floors flash by out the porthole in the elevator door—folks in workout gear gathered by a row of snack machines, artificial bamboo trees framing a reception desk of wood blonder than the blonde stationed behind it, kids in school jackets and ties sitting blank-faced in the waiting area of some SAT tutor or therapist or combination thereof.

She finds the door wide open and the place empty, another failed dotcom joining the officescape of the time—tarnished metallic surfaces, shaggy gray soundproofing, Steelcase screens and Herman Miller workpods—already beginning to decompose, littered, dust gathering…

Well, almost empty. From some distant cubicle comes a tinny electronic melody Maxine recognizes as “Korobushka,” the anthem of nineties workplace fecklessness, playing faster and faster and accompanied by screams of anxiety. Ghost vendor indeed. Has she entered some supernatural timewarp where the shades of office layabouts continue to waste uncountable person-hours playing Tetris? Between that and Solitaire for Windows, no wonder the tech sector tanked.

She creeps toward the plaintive folk tune, reaching it just as an ingenue voice goes “Shit,” and silence follows. Seated in a half-lotus on the scuffed and dusty floor of a cubicle is a young woman in nerd glasses holding a portable game console and glaring at it. Beside her is a laptop, lit up, plugged into a phone jack on a wire emerging from the carpeting.

“Hi,” sez Maxine.

The young woman looks up. “Hi, and what am I doing here, well, just downloading some shit, 56K’s a awesome speed, but this still takes some time so I’m working on my Tetris skills while the ol’ unit’s crankin along. If you’re lookin for a live terminal, I think there’s still a few scattered a round these other cubes. Maybe a couple pieces of hardware ain’t been looted yet, RS232 shit, connectors, chargers, cables, and whatever.”

“I was hoping to find somebody who works here. Or who used to work here’s more like it I guess.”

“I did do some temping here off and on back in the day.”

“Rude surprise, huh?” gesturing around at the emptiness.

“Nah, it was obvious from the jump they were spending way over their head tryin to buy traffic, the classic dotcommer delusion, before you know it here’s another liquidation event and one more bunch of yups goes blubberin down the toilet.”

“Do I hear sympathy? Concern?”

“Fuck ’em, they’re all crazy.”

“Depends what tropical beach they’re lounging around on as we continue to work our ass off.”

“Aha! another victim, I bet.”

“My boss thinks they might’ve been double-billing us,” Maxine improvises, “we did stop the last check, but somebody thought we should introduce a personal note. I happened to be in screaming distance.”

The girl’s gaze keeps flicking to the screen of her little computer. “Too bad, everybody’s split, only scavengers now. You ever see that movie Zorba the Greek (1964)? the minute this old lady dies, the villagers all go rushing in to grab her stuff? Well, this here’s Zorba the Geek.”

“No easy-open wall safes here, or…”

“All emptied out, the minute the pink slips showed up. How about your company? Did they at least get your Web site up and running for you OK?”

“Without meaning to offend…”

“Oh, tell me, tag soup, right, lame-ass banners all over the place random as the stall walls in a high-school toilet? All jammed together? finding anything, after a while it hurts your eyes? Pop-ups! Don’t get me started, ‘window.open,’ most pernicious piece of Javascript ever written, pop-ups are the li’l goombas of Web design, need to be stomped back down to where they came from, boring duty but somebody’s got to.”

“Strange idea of ‘awesome and hip web graphics’ anyway.”

“Kind of puzzling. I mean I did what I could, but somehow it felt like that their heart just wasn’t in it?”

“That maybe Web design wasn’t really their main business?”

The girl nods, consciously, as if somebody might be monitoring.

“Listen, when you’re done here—I’m Maxi by the way—”

“Driscoll, hi—”

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee or something.”

“Better yet there’s a bar right down the street’s still got Zima on tap.”

Maxine gives her a look.

“Where’s your nostalgia, man, Zima’s the bitch drink of the nineties, come on, I’m buyin the first round.”

Fabian’s Bit Bucket dates from the early days of the dotcom boom. The girl behind the bar waves at Driscoll when she and Maxine come in and reaches for the Zima tap. They are soon settled into a booth behind a couple oversize schooners of the once wildly popular novelty beverage. At the moment nothing much is happening, though happy hour looms, and with it the onset of another impromptu pink-slip party, for which the Bucket has begun to get a reputation.

Driscoll Padgett is a freelance Web-page designer, “making it up as I go along, just like everybody else,” also temping as a code writer, for $30 an hour—she’s fast and conscientious, and the word has got around, so she’s more or less steadily in demand, though now and then there’s a gap in the rent cycle where she’s had to resort to the Winnie list, or index cards stuck up next to dumpsters, and so forth. Loft parties sometimes, though that’s usually for the cheap drinks.

Driscoll was over at hwgaahwgh.com today looking for Photoshop filter plug-ins, having like many of her generation acquired a Jones which has led them off on scavenger hunts after ever-more-exotic varieties. “Should be custom-designin plug-ins of my own, been tryin to teach myself Filter Factory language, not that hard, almost like C, but looting’s easier, today I actually downloaded something off of the people who Photoshopped Dr. Zizmor.”

“What, the babyface dermatologist in the subway?”

“Otherworldly, right? First-rate work, the clarity, the glow?”

“And… the legal situation here…”

“Is if you can get in, snatch and grab it. Never had that happen?”

“All the time.”

“Where do you work?”

OK, Maxine figures, let’s see what happens. “Hashslingrz.”

“Oboy.” Such a look. “Done a few quick in and outs over there too. Don’t think I could ever handle it full-time. Sooner lick the remains of a banana cream pie off of Bill Gates’s face, they make fuckin Microsoft look like Greenpeace. Guess I never saw you around.”

“Oh, I’m only temping there myself. Go in once a week and do the accounts receivable.”

“If you’re a devoted fan of Gabriel Ice, just ignore me, but— even in a business where arrogant pricks are the norm? anybody inside a mile radius of ol’ Gabe ought to be wearin a hazmat suit.”

“I think I got to see him once. Maybe. At a distance? All kinds of entourage in my sight line sort of thing?”

“Not doin too bad, for somebody just got in under the wire.”

“How’s that.”

“Street cred. Anybody who got in before ’97 is considered OK—from ’97 to 2000 it can go either way, maybe they’re not always cool, but usually they’re not quite the kind of full-service dickhead you’re seeing in the business now.”

“He’s considered cool?”

“No, he’s a dickhead, but one of the early ones. A pioneer dickhead. Ever get to any of those legendary hashslingrz parties?

“Nope. You?”

“Once or twice. That time they had all the naked chicks out in the freight elevator covered with Krispy Kreme donuts? and the one where Britney Spears showed up disguised as Jay-Z? Only it turned out to be a Britney Spears look-alike?”

“Gee, the stuff I keep missing out on. Knew I shouldn’t’ve had all those kids…”

“Those days’s all history now anyway,” Driscoll shrugs. “Echoes in the past. Even if hashslingrz is hirin like it’s 1999.”

Hmm… “Thought I noticed a lot of new payroll around. What’s going on?”

“Same old satanic pact, only more of it. They’ve always liked to trawl for amateur hackers—now they’ve set up this, well it’s more than just a firewall with a dummy computer, it’s a virtual corporation, totally bogus, sittin out there as bait for the script kiddies, who they can then keep a eye on, wait till they’re just about to crack all the way into core, then bust them and threaten legal action. Offer them a choice between pullin a single over on Rikers or an opportunity to take the next step toward becoming a ‘real hacker.’ Is how they put it.”

“You know somebody this happened to?”

“A few. Some took the deal, some split town. They enroll you in a course out in Queens where you learn Arabic and how to write Arabic Leet.”

“That’s…” taking a guess, “using a qwerty keyboard to make characters that look like Arabic? So hashslingrz is, what, expanding into a new Mideast market area?”

“One theory. Except that every day civilians walk around, no clue, even when it’s filling up screens right next to them at Starbucks, cyberspace warfare without mercy, 24/7, hacker on hacker, DOS attacks, Trojan horses, viruses, worms…”

“Didn’t I see something in the paper about Russia?”

“They’re serious enough about cyberwar, training people, spending budget, but even Russia you don’t have to worry about so much as”—pretending to smoke air hookah—”our Muslim brothers. They’re the true global force, all the money they need, all the time. Time is what the Stones call on their side, yes it is. Trouble ahead. Word around the cubes is there’s ’ese huge U.S. government contracts, everybody’s after em, big deal comin up in the Middle East, some people in the community sayin Gulf War Two. Figures Bush would want to do his daddy one better.”

Toggling Maxine immediately into Anxious Mom mode, thinking about her boys, who might be too young to draft at the moment, but ten years from now, given the way U.S. wars tend to drag out, will be fish in a barrel, more than likely the kind of barrel that holds 42 gallons and is going currently for about 20, 25 bucks…

“You OK, Maxi?”

“Thinking. Sounds like Ice wants to be the next Evil Empire.”

“Sad thing is, is ’ere’s enough code monkeys around who’ll just go jumpin in blind, fodder for the machine.”

“They’re not any smarter than that? What happened to revenge of the nerds?”

Driscoll snorts. “Is no revenge of the nerds, you know what, last year when everything collapsed, all it meant was the nerds lost out once again and the jocks won. Same as always.”

“What about all these nerd billionaires in the trades?”

“Window dressing. The tech sector tanks, a few companies happen to survive, awesome. But a lot more didn’t, and the biggest winners were men blessed with that ol’ Wall Street stupidity, which in the end is unbeatable.”

“C’mon, everybody on Wall Street can’t be stupid.”

“Some of the quants are smart, but quants come, quants go, they’re just nerds for hire with a different fashion sense. The jocks may not know a stochastic crossover if it bites them on the ass, but they have that drive to thrive, they’re synced in to them deep market rhythms, and that’ll always beat out nerditude no matter how smart it gets.”

As happy hour begins and the price of well drinks goes down to $2.50, Driscoll switches to Zimartinis, which are basically Zima and vodka. Maxine, humming the working-mom blues, stays with Zima.

“Really like your hair, Driscoll.”

“I was doing it like everybody else, you know, seriously black, with those short bangs? but all the time I secretly wanted to look like Rachel on Friends, so I started collecting these Jennifer Aniston images? off of Web sites and tabloids and shit?”

Finding herself soon enough with a purseful of photo clips and screen grabs, going from one hair salon to another, increasingly desperate, trying to get her own do exactly the way it looked on JA—something that might, it finally began to dawn on her, be easier to get wrong than right, because even with the hours of obsessive hair-by-hair color blending and strange custom-styling equipment out of geek-movie lab sets, the results never came in better than close-but-no-cigar.

“Maybe,” Maxine gently, “you aren’t really supposed to, like, what’s the word, be…?”

“No, no! that’s just it! I love Jennifer Aniston! Jennifer Aniston is my role model! on Hallowe’en? I’ve always been Rachel!”

“Yes, but this… wouldn’t have anything to do with Brad Pitt, or…”

“Oh, that, that’ll never last, Jen is way too good for him.”

“Too… ‘good’… for Brad Pitt.”

“Wait and see.”

“OK, Driscoll, this is against my better judgment, but you might want to go try Murray ’N’ Morris, over in the Flower District?” Rooting through her purse to find one of their cards, or, well, more like a 10%-off introductory coupon. These two demented yet somehow board-certified trichologists have recently spotted an opportunity in the Jennifer Aniston wannabe boom, and are investing heavily in Sahag curlers and forever going off to Caribbean resorts for intensive tutorial workshops in color weaving. Their remorseless urges toward innovation extend to other salon services as well.

“Our Meat Facial today, Ms. Loeffler?”

“Uhm, how’s that.”

“You didn’t get our offer in the mail? on special all this week, works miracles for the complexion—freshly killed, of course, before those enzymes’ve had a chance to break down, how about it?”

“Well, I don’t…”

“Wonderful! Morris, kill… the chicken!”

From the back room comes horrible panicked squawking, then silence. Maxine meantime is tilted back, eyelids aflutter, when— “Now we’ll just apply some of this,” wham! “… meat here, directly onto this lovely yet depleted face…”

“Mmff…”

“Pardon? (Easy, Morris!)”

“Why is it… uh, moving around like that? Wait! is that a— are you guys putting a real dead chicken in my— aaahhh!”

“Not quite dead yet!” Morris jovially informs the thrashing Maxine as blood and feathers fly everywhere.

Each time she comes in here, it is something like this. Each time she exits the salon swearing it’s for the last time. Still, she can’t help noticing the crowds of Jennifer Aniston more-or-less look-alikes competing for dryer time lately, as if downtown is Las Vegas and Jennifer Aniston the next Elvis.

“This is expensive?” Driscoll wonders, “what they do?”

“It’s still what you guys would call in beta, so I think they should offer you a price.”

The crowd has begun to sort into a mix of hackers and hacker grrrlz and corporate suits repackaged in somebody’s idea of barhopping gear, out looking for romance or cheap labor, whichever way the night develops.

“The one element there ain’t so much of anymore,” Driscoll points out, “is the gold diggers of both sexes who thought there was all these nerd billionaires just about to come step out of the toilet and fiercely into their lives. Never was better than delusional back then, but these days even a hardcore techno-adventuress has to admit, it’s mighty slim pickings.”

Maxine has noticed a pair of men at the bar who seem to be eyeballing her, or Driscoll, or both of them, with uncommon intensity. Though it’s hard to say what normal is around here, they don’t look too normal to Maxine, and it ain’t just the Zima talking.

Driscoll follows her gaze. “You know those guys over there?”

“No, uh-uh. Thought it was somebody you knew.”

“It’s their first time in here,” Driscoll is pretty sure, “and they look like cops. Should this be freaking me out?”

“Just remembered it’s my curfew,” snickers Maxine, “so I’m outta here. You stay. See which one of us they’re tailing.”

“Let’s make a big deal about writing down our e-mail and phone numbers and shit, that way we don’t look so much like longtime associates.”

Turns out it’s Maxine who’s their Person of Interest. Good news, bad news, Driscoll seems like a nice kid and doesn’t need these idiots, on the other hand it’s Maxine, now inside a lemon-lime alcopop haze, who has to try and shake them. She gets in a taxi headed down- instead of uptown, pretends to change her mind much to the driver’s annoyance, and ends up in Times Square, which for a few years now she has made a conscious effort not to go near if she can help it. The sleazy old Deuce she remembers from her less responsible youth is so no more, Giuliani and his developer friends and the forces of suburban righteousness have swept the place Disneyfied and sterile—the melancholy bars, the cholesterol and fat dispensaries and porno theaters have been torn down or renovated, the unkempt and unhoused and unspoken-for have been pushed out, no more dope dealers, no more pimps or three-card monte artists, not even kids playing hooky at the old pinball arcades—all gone. Maxine can’t avoid feeling nauseous at the possibility of some stupefied consensus about what life is to be, taking over this whole city without mercy, a tightening Noose of Horror, multiplexes and malls and big-box stores it only makes sense to shop at if you have a car and a driveway and a garage next to a house out in the burbs. Aaahh! They have landed, they are among us, and it helps them no end that the mayor, with roots in the outer boroughs and beyond, is one of them.

And here they all are tonight, converged into this born-again imitation of their own American heartland, here in the bad Big Apple. Blending with this for as long as she can, Maxine finally seeks refuge in the subway, takes the Number 1 to 59th, changes to the C train, gets off at The Dakota, threads in and out of a busload of Japanese visitors snapping photos of the John Lennon assassination site, and next time she looks back, she can’t see anybody following her, though if they’ve had her on their radar since before she walked into the Bucket, then they probably also know where she lives.