Authors: Chris Knopf
Black Swan (18 page)
    "And he didn't have a say?" I asked.
    She responded with thinly veiled ridicule.
    "Axel doesn't take a pee-pee without Anika's permission."
    "Headstrong girl," I said.
    "Worse than that," she said, then seemed to regret it. "Don't get me wrong," she said, touching me on the arm to make sure I was listening carefully. "I love her, like a daughter. Which she's been to me."
    "I've got a daughter of my own, so no reason to explain," I said.
    "Good," she said. "So you understand."
    With that she left me and went back to her peanut-sized world, a swirl of mystified disappointment following in her wake. I watched until she disappeared into the shadows and pulled out the VHF.
    "Hello," said Amanda, returning my hail. "Nice to hear your voice. Scratchy and garbled though it may be."
    "So you made it."
    "It's a lot choppier in West Harbor than it looks from back there. But yes, we made it fine. Cute little spot. No lights anywhere around. And now that the wind's down, the water's like glass. I pulled the shades and just have one little lantern going. Eddie and I swam to shore. The water's actually quite warm. He found a tennis ball. We brought it back to the boat. He's so proud."
    I told her about meeting Professor Featherstone and my fruitless canvas of the west end of Fishers Island. She asked me what I asked Anikaâany theories on Axel?
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    "It's pretty sure he left on his own, which is contrary to his normal behavior. He's a house cat, but a very smart one. Other than that, there's too much I don't know."
    I gave her a rundown on the status of Subversive Technologies and the status of N-Spock 5.0. Amanda was a patient woman, never more evident than in the way she listened to me when I'd launch into an intricate tale of technological imbroglio. Mindful of that, I trimmed the story to its essence.
    "I have no idea what you're talking about, but it sounds problematic," she said.
    "It is," I said, then asked if everything was okay on the boat. She mentioned a few things, which I talked her through, adding some additional advice and gentle cautions. She complimented my attention to operational detail and asked me if I'd be returning to the boat, or should she be researching funeral options. And if there was a will.
    "Whatever it takes for Eddie to live out his life on Oak Point. The rest goes to my daughter."
    "You're not kidding, are you."
    "I never kid a kidder."
A
fter signing off with Amanda, I spent a while walking around the hotel grounds and the Harbor Yacht Club next door. The moon was big in the sky, turning everything colorless and cool. I had to arbitrate between competing impulses. Part of me, the more insistent part, wanted to get in the dinghy and ride out to Amanda, board the sturdy sloop, greet the gregarious mutt and sail back to the South Fork. I could see them anchored in the lagoon, motionless, the stars reflected on the surface of the black water. Nocturnal chirps and chatters on shore, the occasional flip of an insect-hunting fish.
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    I had no stake in this fight. There was nothing in it for me. I didn't know what was really roiling below the surface, but for sure it wasn't any good. I had no reason to care, no percentage in trying to care, no upside whatsoever. I was on the cusp of getting my own unruly life somewhat under control. There were blessings there I couldn't deny, but they were on loan, with permanent status contingent on responsible possession.
    I brooded over what Amanda had said about Anika. I'd never put much of a premium on being honest with myself, preferring to let avoidance and denial work their soothing charms. But standing there in the chill October night, I let the walls fall and asked the hard question.
    The answer was more felt than heard.
    "Dammit," I said out loud, and wishing I had a cigarette, walked back to the Swan to try and get some sleep.
S
omewhere around four in the morning, Anika crawled into my bed. As my dream-addled mind swam through the muck toward consciousness, my body contended with the shock of softly silken female nakedness.
omewhere around four in the morning, Anika crawled into my bed. As my dream-addled mind swam through the muck toward consciousness, my body contended with the shock of softly silken female nakedness.
    "Goddamnit, Anika, would you knock it off," I mumbled, turning away from her. She put her arm over my shoulder and squeezed into me, spoon-style.
    "You're right about marooning myself on an island. I'm so horny my eyeballs are starting to float out of my head."
    "I'm not the solution."
    "I don't understand why not," she said. "I don't care how old you are."
    "I don't care how old I am, either. You don't know this yet, but people can decide that the person they're with is the person they're with and that's that."
    "You're right," she said. "I don't understand that."
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    She pressed herself into me and worked her hand in a southerly direction. I caught her wrist.
    "So go put some clothes on and come back and I'll explain it to you, as long as you stay on top of the sheets."
    "No one will know," she whispered.
    "I will."
    "You're in great shape," she said. "I knew it." She moved her hand within the range permitted by my grip. "I know you want it."
    Part of me did, including the part Anika was trying to reach for. I squeezed her wrist.
    "I do," I said. "But I'm not gonna."
    She shoved herself even closer, got close enough to my ear to nibble on it before saying, "Not yet."
    Then she got out of the bed and left the room.
    She was gone longer than it took to get dressed, though there was no danger of going back to sleep before she showed up again, wearing white panties and an oversized sweatshirt with CARNEGIE MELLON INSTITUTE OF GIZMOLOGY written on the chest.
    "Tell me why you got fired from your big-shot job," she said. "And why you never tried to get another big-shot job. Corporate politics, I bet."
    I waited for her to get settled on top of the bed before answering.
    "Politics is too weak a word. For some people, the purpose of an organization is to provide an environment within which to wage internecine combat. Whatever product or service the firm sells is secondary to the goal of personal enrichment at the expense of one's fellow human beings. It's not enough to succeed. Someone else has to fail in the process."
    "God, that's cynical," she said.
    "You asked."
    "I just can't stand it."
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    "Why'd your father leave Subversive Technologies?" I asked.
    "Nosy again."
    "You teed it up."
    I sat up in bed and used the pillows to support my back. Anika sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed, her hair, unbrushed, hanging to either side of her face. A faint glow appeared outside the window, calling an end to the night and any hope of further sleep.
    "Politics?" I asked.
    "All he ever cared about was code. The beauty, the sublime elegance of lines of alpha-numeric commands. He told me when I was a little girl that he could judge the quality of a programmer's work by the shapes his lines of code formed on the screen."
    "And he left running the business to Hammon and Sanderfreud," I said.
    "Are you suggesting that might have been an itty bit foolish?" she asked.
    I almost said, "Doesn't the guy who controls the product control the company?" But I already knew the answer to that. The powerful who don't make anything assume they can always find plenty of makers out there to replace the ones they have, and they'll be just as good. Maybe better.
    "But your father is set for life," I said. "He can afford to shake it off and move on."
    She smiled at me, with that weary, patronizing smile I got used to seeing on my daughter's face.
    "When they forced him out they may as well have murdered him. He'll never be the same."
    "Forced him out."
    "Hey, thanks for making us rich, buddy. Now get the hell out of here."
    She described how Hammon brought in a team of consultants to assess the viability of N-Spock 5.0, over Fey's
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adamant objections. They concluded that it was fully functional, and ready for release. A millisecond later, Hammon and Sanderfreud exercised a forgotten clause in the corporate agreement. Forgotten by Fey, anyway. The one that said at any time a two-thirds majority of the founding shareholders could purchase all the stock of the remaining third, at a value set at the end of the preceding fiscal year, which for Subversive Technologies had been suppressed as rumors about 5.0 circulated around the financial markets.
    They brought Fey into a conference room, and while corporate counsel explained what was going down, security packed up his office and the consultants installed new passwords on the development servers, locking him out of his own creation.
    "But they were wrong," she said. "Nobody'd bothered to fully test the data conversion from 4.0. Oopsies."
    Seemingly unfazed, they stuck to their deal with Fey. The consultants poured into the building and went to town on the application, secure in their belief that a fix was but a few keystrokes away. A month later, reality set in. The failure point was inside a small but critical region of the program that had gone missing. It was a black box, a black hole, a dense fortress that no external assault was able to breach.
    What happened was the unthinkable. The most powerful application ever written for its stated purpose was unworkable, unusable, worthless.
    "A lot of money was at stake, so you can imagine, people got upset," said Anika.
    A lot of money, for sure. Billions as it turned out. Oopsies is right.
    "So now they need your father to come back and fix things. He should be in the power seat."
    "He should be, that's right. But he's telling them what he's told me. Without the missing code, he'll have to start at the beginning and run through the entire application,
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stopping along the way for testing and QA, in order to isolate the glitch and allow him to write in a patch that will solve the problem. This will take most of next year, not the next three months, which Hammon doesn't want to hear, but that's the deal."
    "Why should he help them at all, after getting heaved out?" I asked.
    "You wonder that, too, eh?" she said, wagging a finger at me, but this time without the condescension. "Why was he so docile when they gobbled up his stock? Why was he so deferential when they all showed up unannounced on our doorstep? This should be his moment of triumph and he's acting more like a hopeful lover. What is up with that?" she asked, stringing out each word.
    The light on the bedside table came on. I reached down to the floor and dug my cell phone out of my jeans. I turned it on and saw that service had returned. For some reason, all this revival caused in me a craving to be outside in the morning air. I shared those feelings with Anika, who suggested we freshen up, get dressed and retire to the patio with sliced fruit and toasted bagels, which she'd happily prepare. Not a hard sell.
    Not long after we were out there, watching the sun warm up the island. Anika still wore the Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, though she'd added jeans and orange Crocs.
    "We keep talking about your father," I said, "but the real issue at this point is Axel."
    She sat back in her chair, mug in hand.
    "Fucking Axel," she said. "I love him with all my heart and he never stops driving me crazy."
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