Shimmer (17 page)

She whispered again, “Again?”

Breasts just touching my chest. Thighs so light against my sides.

Again.

What is it that makes this my release? What is it that led me to this solution? Can you stop, can you think, can you take a moment to consider? Can you find the reason?

Again.

“Again.”

Another day. We had made it.

I came inside her again.

And she doesn't love me. Doesn't know me. Doesn't care. And I like that. Want that. Need that from her.

Again.

She has a sense she is almost there. A sense that there is a point in time. Some last level achieved. Some long-held goal finally met. It's more than stock. More than bonuses.

To Whitley, for months it has felt as if Core is finally about to reach some place of permanence. And success.

She drives at nearly a hundred miles an hour, one hand on the wheel, hardly aware of where she is, the West Side Highway to the Henry Hudson, a quiet dark car passing the lights of the cars around her.

Within the company she calls it winning. Finally, she says, we will win.

But here, alone, it is something else.

Safety.

And she can't say why she feels they've almost reached it. The work isn't done, there are new markets to launch, there are offices to open in all parts of the world. And there are threats, so many threats, from outside and inside the company.

But she feels it. It's as if finally she were reaching the end of a search.
The events of this company, this place she has managed and led and organized and shaped, are finally coming together. They are about to make sense to her, to her people, to everyone around her.

She needs to sleep.

She needs to go home.

But she can't sleep, she can't go home, she can't explain any of this to her husband.

If she stops, if she pauses, if she hesitates at all, she is sure the momentum will end.

Although he doesn't understand that. And really, she's stopped trying to explain. Just as he has. They don't talk. They don't touch. They don't even go through the motions anymore. They share an address, holiday dinners—sometimes they both find themselves in the same room, awkwardly happening upon one another, finding a few empty words to say. But it died two years ago. Two years in which she's made a thousand decisions at work, in which he's probably made a thousand decisions at his firm. And yet neither of them can make this decision.

End it. Say the words. End it.

The car changes lanes. The dim lights of the dashboard just beyond her hands. One hundred. One hundred and ten.

Markets to open, products to launch, people to hire, acquisitions to make. Threats to explore. Rumors to investigate.

SWAT, Eugene, rogue sections. All are about security threats to the company. But for Whitley, they've also become something more. A slowly shifting, carefully layered view of Core itself. Moving and distorted mirrors pointed inward on the people who work here. On the actions they take. On the life they've created.

And what they show her is something she could never repeat out loud. Something she can only describe in the margins of her notes, recording these things almost absently, then crossing them out as she rereads them. Because in those moments she sees a place that is strange and flawed and unknown in so many ways and so beautiful in others. It is only an office. Only a company. But it so much more. These people all living together, not just working but living together in a community
they've created. Finding outlets for work, for ideas, for creativity and for themselves.

She needs to sleep.

It is only a company.

But it is so much more.

And it means so much to her.

And it is nearing this place she can see but not describe. An end to this time, she wants to think. An end that opens onto something more.

Cliff told her that grace has moved closer. A full month closer.

One hundred and ten is not fast enough. One hundred and twenty is not fast enough. She's not out of control. She's not careening up the highway. She's just driving, midnight, and soon she'll turn back, toward the city and the office.

An end that opens onto something more.

Onto an answer.

Why is something at Core not right?

So many times she's started to tell Robbie. So many times as they've sat together in his office, late at night at the end of another of these longest days, and she's thought about telling him. About trying to describe what is only a feeling. A blank spot in her understanding of the company.

There's only one way she can come close to describing it, describing it even to herself.

I'm not quite sure how the Blue Boxes work.

She can explain all parts of the Core system, has refined and rebuilt and remade so many parts of the process. She is, in the industry, an expert on all facets of mainframe computing.

How did Robbie make Core work?

How did Robbie understand Fadowsky?

And it's more than simply not having access to Shimmer. It's about some part, some step in the logic, that she doesn't understand.

Passing cars. Passing every car.

She needs to sleep. She needs to end her marriage. She needs to not be afraid anymore.

Whitley is afraid. Afraid at home. Afraid at work. Afraid of things she does not understand.

People are afraid of her. She knows that. Used to like it. But she thinks that maybe now the fear will end too.

She'd rather not be feared.

And when she thinks this way, she thinks about Robbie. About the thing in him that she cannot understand. Something about Robbie that does not quite make sense.

She's worked with him for these three years. Spent so many hours in meetings and on the phone and exchanging messages and reports. And still it's as if she barely knows him. And still there's this thing that she can't quite make sense of.

One more car to pass.

Afraid.

It's a thing she'd rather not think about now. Or ever.

A thing unproductive. Unhelpful. Unhealthy. Maybe sad.

A thing that, late at night, in the dark, makes her smile.

I need to sleep.

“Mr. Case,” the voice said, “there's been a problem with a Blue Box.”

I'd been woken up on the couch in my office, and already it seemed like I had not been asleep. My driver was standing in the doorway, speaking with his back turned to me.

It seemed like, all my life, I'd been waking up fully dressed.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Four
A.M
., Mr. Case.”

I stared at the dim ceiling, blinking. Trying to remember what day it had been when I'd gone to sleep. In a moment, I thought to ask, “Is she gone?”

He spoke again. “She is gone,” he said.

I was wearing jeans. I could see dim white light cast across the ceiling. The highest ceiling.

I heard him saying, “Leonard said you should forget about Eugene.”

And now I was slowly pushing myself up from the couch.

“He said to tell you this is worse than Eugene.”

There was a sound like a hailstorm as I entered the DMZ. Twenty men and women were typing rapidly at keyboards, their bodies and features lost to the shadows in the room. Their faces were turned blue with the reflection of the screens. Their eyes flickered white and silver from the series of tall, wide displays mounted on the front wall.

The noise of it all, the unusually dense feeling of so much motion among the people and computers and screens in front of us, all of it left me just slightly short of breath.

I still didn't know what day it was.

“A Blue Box in Tulsa,” Leonard was telling me, not looking up from his seat in front of three large computer screens, his body and presence as large as it had ever been, filling the chair, the desk, enveloping the screens. I had to remind myself he was only six feet tall. “A processor failed,” he said.

I'd never seen someone type so fast, a blurry and disconnected motion made more disengaged by Leonard's tangible sense of calm.

I scanned the main status board, a twelve-foot-high by twenty-foot-wide screen that filled the center of the front wall and that was bordered by ten more large screens. The separate monitors and main status board showed a range of rapidly shifting graphs, recalculating numbers, rotating maps, and scrolling text codes, all of which painted an ever-changing, multilingual story of the company's network and computer systems. In just the few seconds I'd spent scanning the screens, I registered the current level of data flowing to and from our clients, read updates on all our international networking outposts, checked the positions of most key satellites in the system. And I could see the problem immediately, shown now as a string of rapidly growing numbers and a series of small, flashing red lights near the center of the main status board, which now displayed a very large map of North America. Most of the continent glowed a healthy blue. It was Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri that flickered red.

“Processors have failed before,” Leonard said. “But this time,” he said, “both backup processors failed. That has never happened.”

“Actually, they don't seem to have failed outright,” one tech said, her voice coming from a dark and unidentifiable area to my right. “The processors appear to have simply rejected the incoming data.”

“Although, for some reason, the Blue Box doubled the data before rejecting it,” said another tech, this one a male voice, rising from my left.

“And then this doubled data from Tulsa bounced off to the nearest Blue Box,” yet another tech said, so that now they'd become some multiheaded person, speaking with different voices, words coming to me from all corners of the room. “It found a federal payroll processing center in Oklahoma City.”

“Which not only rejected the data,” a tech said, “but suddenly rejected its own batch.”

“After doubling its data,” another said.

“Now combined, the two batches bounced off a satellite and found a Blue Box in Broken Arrow, a suburb of Tulsa. Which doubled its batch, then rejected it all.”

“Think of it as a tidal wave,” Leonard said, not looking at me as he continued to type so rapidly on his keyboard, eyes staring at the code, reports, numbers and maps all scrolling across multiple windows on the three screens in front of him. “It surges forward,” he said, “wiping out each ship, each swimmer, each sea wall in its path, getting larger, gathering mass, made stronger by the very destruction it has caused.”

I couldn't help but be impressed by his seemingly off-the-cuff, highly rhythmic analogy.

Iowa went red, a firestorm spreading across the heart of the status board. For the first time I noticed that Perry was in the room, leaning against a wall, staring up at the board, the left half of his face glowing crimson with the reflection of the failed machines. I knew he had to have been here, in the building, when the problem started. He wouldn't have had time to get here yet if the tech team had called him at home.

And Leonard, I now realized, must have been here too.

“Where is the wave going?” I asked.

“We think it's coming here,” Leonard said.

And then one of the techs spoke quietly. The words almost inaudible. “The wave just split in two,” the tech said.

Leonard leaned back, the motion at the keyboard stopping abruptly. It was like an unfinished question hanging in the center of the room. Leonard turned to the tech who'd spoken. “Say that again,” he said carefully.

“The wave of data split in two,” the tech repeated. “Into two separate waves. Near the Indiana-Ohio border.”

Leonard turned back to his screens. He typed just two commands. I saw him close his eyes, and for the first time I felt fear. Real fear, sudden and unexpected and total.

Leonard nodded, then licked his lips. “The two waves just split again.”

Pennsylvania went red.

“Before the wave split,” Leonard asked, “had anyone figured out how much time we had till it reached the DMZ?”

“Fourteen minutes,” answered a voice gone pale and anxious. “Fourteen minutes till it reaches the DMZ.”

“Although now it will arrive much sooner,” said a different voice.

“The four waves split again,” said another voice. “We have eight separate waves.”

“Sooner,” said a voice. “Even sooner.”

“And the Blue Boxes that have been hit,” I said, “what's happened to them after the wave bounced off them?”

There was the silence of typing for a moment, another.

“Each one,” Leonard said, “appears to have been erased.” He turned to me. “Essentially destroyed.”

My phone clicked. A message from Shimmer. A wave had reached the shadow network.

Whitley and Cliff entered the room behind me, both looking tired and confused, clearly with no idea how bad the situation was.

“I want to do a full reset,” I said now, loudly, and again the room was quiet.

“No, no,” a tech said quickly. “We have not tested that. We have no idea what a reset would do to the system.”

Leonard turned to me again. Silent now. Staring.

“We have sixteen waves,” a voice said.

“What is a full reset?” Whitley asked, trying hard not to show any worry. Any fear.

“It's a complete restart of the entire system,” Leonard said to her, but he was staring at me. “Which should take it back to the last moment of normal operations. Back to square one, in other words. Which, in this case, is the moment before the first Blue Box failed in Tulsa.”