Codex (16 page)

Edward snorted.

“I need a vacation from my vacation. Jesus, do you realize it's been three days since I read the
Journal?
”

The thrill of his leap into the unknown, giving Margaret his key to the Wents' apartment, had already palled and congealed into a thin, greasy slick of dread and regret. The Wents had kicked him out, cut him off from the library, and instead of making a clean break, of salvaging at least his professionalism from the debacle, he'd left open the door for Margaret to fuck things up further. Letting her into the Wents' apartment was like giving an addict the keys to the pharmacy.

With the weight of that potential disaster hanging over him, he had allowed a few innocent pints with Zeph to turn into this decidedly dodgier and more compromising late-night excursion. The cab bogged down in traffic near Times Square. A brand-new skyscraper loomed over them, its lower third completely paneled with glowing video screens. The screens crawled, teemed, swarmed with restless multicolored information displayed in giant pixels, each one the size of a lightbulb. It was distracting, hypnotic, as if you could just fall into it.

“I should warn you about something,” Zeph said. “You have to watch yourself around these guys. They've got a very strict social code, and they don't like outsiders. And you're an outsider. You think they're losers, but what you don't understand is, they think we're the losers. They tolerate me because I speak their language, and I understand math and computers—actually, they don't think I'm a loser. Just you. You—well, you've played a little MOMUS, and that's fine, but don't start acting all superior just because you were properly socialized and you went to the prom and you get laid once in a while.”

“But I don't get laid,” Edward said. “I never get laid.”

“There could be chicks there, actually,” Zeph mused. “Geek chicks can be
very
attractive. But forget about it, they'll loathe you even more than the guys do. They're like bees, man. They can smell your fear.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It took a lot of work to build multiplayer functionality into MOMUS. These are people who really understand how shit works.”

“Uh-huh.”

The cab lurched forward, then stopped short again.

“Maybe we should just walk,” Edward said.

“Suckers walk, man. Players ride.”

Five minutes later they got out at Fiftieth Street. The air was like warm bathwater. This close to Times Square the atmosphere was like a county fair, a constant, aimless celebration of nothing, with no object and no end. The sidewalks were packed with disoriented, jet-lagged tourists. Edward followed Zeph through the crowd toward the base of an enormous pink granite skyscraper. The actual entrance was quite small, a single unassuming glass door squeezed in between two stores selling off-brand gray-market electronics. Inside Zeph nodded at the young black man in livery who sat behind a marble desk in the foyer reading Cliff's Notes for
Wuthering Heights.
He showed the guard a card from his wallet, then signed his notebook, and they walked back to the elevator banks.

They waited. The buzz from the beer they drank earlier was starting to wear off.

“What did you call this thing again?” Edward asked.

“A LAN party.”

“A LAN...?”

“L, A, N. Stands for Local Area Network.”

“Right.” Edward massaged his temples. “Dude, I feel like you're leading me right into the heart of dorkness.”

They took the elevator up to thirty-seven and stepped off. Zeph held his ID up to a dark smudged spot on the wall, and it buzzed them through the glass doors to the office. The lights were off. The receptionist's desk was empty.

“This-all constitutes a misuse of company resources,” said Zeph in a half whisper as they walked down a silent corridor. “Fortunately the IT guys are the only ones who keep track of said resources, so they can misuse them all they want. Ordinarily the sales staff would be here right now, grinding their souls away into magic gold dust, but fortunately they're all away at an offsite in New Jersey.”

They came out into a large bullpen filled with white cubicles. The overhead lights were off, but most of the cubicles were lit up from within by desk lamps. The room had no windows. The partitions were only shoulder height, and they could see the heads of people standing and conferring with each other over them.

As they walked past the first cubicle Edward felt something poke him in the chest. A tall, unsmiling man with long, wavy dark hair was holding a bright pink Nerf gun so that the tip of the Nerf projectile rested against the front of Edward's shirt. The man wore shorts and a sky blue Sea World T-shirt. He looked young, maybe twenty-five, but his hair already had streaks of gray in it.

“Give him the beer, dude,” Zeph said.

Edward handed over the brown paper bag. The man took it without lowering the Nerf gun and put it behind him. With his free hand he and Zeph exchanged an arcane secret handshake.

“Let's get you set up,” the man said, when they were done.

“I'm Edward.” Edward held out his hand, but the man just brushed past him.

“I know.”

They walked down the row of cubicles together. Somehow Zeph had disappeared; Edward glimpsed him walking into one of the offices with his big arms around two short fat guys with helmet haircuts who looked like twins. It was oppressively hot, and he was already sweating. A skinny kid who could have been in high school was walking backward along the wall, paying out wire between big stacks of speakers. Here and there stood racks of strobe lights, and a big black machine like a dehumidifier that Edward didn't recognize.

The wavy-haired man stopped at a cubicle. It had a chair and a desk with an ordinary workstation on it.

“This is yours,” he said. “You may have to adjust the mouse sensitivity a little to get it to where you're comfortable. Whatever you do, don't quit out of the game. If it crashes, pick up the phone and dial 2-4444. Are you right-handed?”

Edward nodded.

“Know how to use one of these?” he asked, holding up a tangle of black wires. It was a telephone headset.

“Sure.”

“Okay then.”

Edward sat down and glumly started to untangle the headset. He didn't belong here. It wasn't Zeph's fault—Zeph hadn't exactly twisted his arm to come. In fact, Edward seemed to remember insisting in an inappropriately loud voice that Zeph bring him along. But now that he was here and sobering up it all felt like a mistake. He didn't belong here. These people didn't like him. He wished he were home in bed.

The chair had some kind of uncomfortable orthopedic pad strapped to it. The monitor showed a plain black screen with a menu of commands on it in a familiar white font. He looked around incuriously at the clutter on the desk: pink phone slips, yellow stickies, a half-used packet of tissues, a squeezable blue rubber stress ball in the shape of a globe, a minitribe of Smurfs: Papa, Brainy, Smurfette. The red voice mail light on the phone was on. Tacked to the walls of the cubicle, which were made of fabric that would have been ugly as a carpet, let alone as a wall, was a series of gelatinous Polaroids showing a small black-and-white cat with staring red eyes.

“
Wozny!
”

He started. Zeph's shaggy head appeared over the cubicle wall. He was talking into a megaphone.

“I want that sales report and I want it now!”

“I don't think I get exactly how this works,” said Edward.

Zeph put down the megaphone. “You'll be fine. Just remember: If you die, it's because you're weak and you deserve it. Come on, let's see about getting you a skin.”

Zeph's head disappeared. Edward got up and followed him, skirting the edge of the cubicles.

“So,” he said. “Do you hang out with people like this a lot? Like, when I'm not around?”

Zeph wasn't listening to him. “To think that these puny humans live like this, day in and day out. Poor beggars.”

He stopped and knocked on the door to an office.

“What's a skin?” said Edward.

“You know—skin. Skin flicks. Skin diving. Skin.”

There was no answer. Zeph pushed the door open.

It was a small square room with bare particleboard walls, containing a massive, squat workstation on it. To his surprise, Edward recognized the person who was hunched over in front of it: It was the gnome he'd seen at Zeph's apartment, the Artiste. It couldn't be anybody else; aside from his round face and thin black hair, he was so small his feet barely reached the floor. His childlike physique made it hard to guess his age, but Edward thought he might have been thirty or thirty-five. He barely glanced up when they came in.

There was a moment of silence. Even Zeph hesitated to disturb him. Then the little man looked up and calmly picked up something from beside the workstation. He held it up.

“So this is—,” Zeph started to say.

“Smile,” said the Artiste softly, and there was a blinding flash. It was a camera.

“Dammit.” Edward turned away, blinking green spots out of his eyes. “Jesus. You could've warned me.”

But the Artiste had already turned back to his keyboard. He uploaded the picture of Edward onto the screen, then manipulated it with the mouse, tweaking it, sharpening it, pulling it like a piece of taffy, extrapolating it into three dimensions and spinning it deftly through all three axes.

“That's your skin,” said Zeph. “That's what you're going to look like in the game.”

The game. Edward went closer, looking over the Artiste's shoulder.

“Can I change it?” he said. “I mean, do I have to be wearing these clothes?”

“What would you rather be wearing?” the Artiste asked politely.

“I don't know.” The figure on the screen had on his clothes, khakis and a brown T-shirt from Barneys. “I'm not exactly dressed to kill.”

The Artiste's tiny hands chattered on the keyboard, and the figure froze. Its clothes began flickering through a rapid succession of styles and colors.

“One moment please.”

Standing behind him, Edward could see the barest hint of a bald spot beginning at his crown. The Artiste tapped the back arrow a few times until the figure on the screen was wearing a black suit, a top hat, and a monocle. He was carrying a furled umbrella: the perfect English gentleman.

“Hey, wait a second,” said Edward. “Why do I have to—?”

Zeph slapped him on the back, delighted. “That's excellent! I love it! You look like Mr. Peanut.”

With a little whine a Zip disk popped out of a slot on the side of the workstation. The Artiste whipped it out and handed it to Edward.

“We're done.”

He went back to typing. Edward and Zeph backed out of the office and closed the door.

 

“
WHAT'S THE DEAL
with that guy?” Edward said as they walked back toward his cubicle. That first conversation they'd had at Zeph's had stayed with him, when the Artiste had mentioned looking through people's computers. The idea of this bizarre, autistic little elf as an omniscient being, gazing with X-ray eyes into the hard drive of his soul and spell-checking his most shameful secrets, was unnerving.

“He's always like that. Total genius. Makes me look like a fucking joker. You know what he does with his evenings? He moonlights running global climate simulations for the National Weather Service. Works on the serious supercomputers—the real Big Iron. For all practical purposes he's God.”

“But what was the deal with those clothes? Did you tell him about England?”

“Relax. You look good. You're doing the Bond thing.”

More people had arrived since they'd been in with the Artiste, and the cubicles were filling up. Devo's cover of the Rolling Stones' “Satisfaction” stuttered from the big speakers in the corners. Zeph explained that the server could handle thirty-two people at once, and they'd probably have almost that many tonight.

“Jesus. You practically have your own subculture here.”

“You have no idea,” said Zeph. “MOMUS is big. Nobody knows who started it, it just bubbled up from our collective unconscious via the Internet. Not even the Artiste knows about everything that's in it. It's bigger than books. That library you're messing around with? Obsolete information technology. We're witnessing the dawn of a whole new artistic medium, and we don't even appreciate it.”

Edward didn't answer. He thought about Margaret, and what she would think of him if she could see him now. In a way she kind of reminded him of the Artiste—she was as much a master of her own world, and as oblivious of everything else. As they walked past one of the cubicles, a skinny young man with a straggly red beard handed them each a bottle of beer, already opened, a can of Mountain Dew: Code Red, also open, and a bottle of water.

“These beverages will provide your body with all the caffeine, sugar, and alcohol it needs to stay healthy and alert,” he intoned.

Edward sat down at his desk again and braced his feet on an orthopedic foot rest he found underneath it. His phone rang, and he let the voice mail pick up, but it rang again, and then again. He was thinking about taking it off the hook when he heard Zeph's voice from across the room:

“Fucking pick it up!”

Edward punched the speakerphone button.

“What?”

“Put on your headset.” This time Zeph's voice came from the phone. “They're going to conference you in on the other line.”

“Look, how long is this going to take?”

“You have somewhere to be? Destiny is calling, you big pussy. Pick up the other line.”

Edward put on his headset and picked it up and immediately heard a babble of mostly male voices gossiping, boasting, talking trash, reciting Monty Python routines, and arguing over arcane network architecture issues.

“So,” he said. “Any chicks on this thing?”