Shimmer (24 page)

“It can't hurt,” Julie said, and Ronald and Leonard nodded sincerely.

“However,” Leonard added, “I must report that, twice, a number of documents have appeared in the facilities database containing the words
Regence Sucks.
”

All eyes turned to Julie. She swallowed quickly, then shrugged awkwardly. Ronald frowned deeply. Leonard turned a page.

Stopping by Cliff's office and using a quick conversation about the French stock market to confirm a rumor I'd heard from numerous sources—a small stack of airsickness bags lying on Cliff's windowsill.

As our conversation about the markets came to an end, there was a silence. I pointed vaguely in the direction of the bags. In a moment, I asked quietly, “Trouble?”

Cliff shrugged. “Age.”

“Take a break,” I said. “A few days. A week.”

His thumbs began to twitch. He crossed his arms against his chest. He held his elbows in his palms. “It would only make it worse,” he said. “Just get me to grace.”

And so I smiled. And nodded. And left.

Passing by a conference room on the twelfth floor, the meeting attended solely by women dressed in green.

Construction on Perry's expanded office had begun, his only semi-serious request for a raised floor and antechamber having been approved. Walls for the chamber had been drawn out on the carpet near his door. Chalk lines had been marked along the inside walls of his office, the dim blue marks delineating the height of the new floor.

“How does this happen?” I asked when I saw the preconstruction.

“I submit a request,” Perry said, shrugging. “I trade favors, and the work begins.”

It was Thursday, and Leonard and I had come to sit in Perry's darkness, here to discuss the status of nearly forty new products and services we'd released in the last six months.

“The ideas have proven themselves,” Perry was saying now. “Everything we've released is selling at or above projections.”

But even as he spoke, there was an awkward silence forming among the three of us. Because we knew. Knew I was dedicating as much money as possible to R&D, to products wholly unrelated to our Blue Boxes. Knew I was spending this money at the risk of worrying the board of directors, our banks and investment firms, even the brokers and Wall Street analysts, all of whom had invested in Core because it was a high-margin, one-of-a-kind service, not because of our new products.

And we knew that, so far, the sum total of the new products and great ideas had barely paid for the research itself.

“And a new Blue Box?” I asked, referring now to Leonard's team of programmers who, for two and a half years, had been working solely on replicating what our Blue Boxes did.

“They've given up sleep,” Leonard said. “I've made sure of that.”

But again there was that silence.

“They're still trying, though,” Leonard said.

“Of course,” I said.

And for that moment, we were quiet. A silence that lasted just a second too long, creating a pause no one knew how to break. An awkwardness so unnatural for our office.

The silence of failure.

Outside the door, we heard two golf balls slamming into a potted plant, a putt-putt game making its way down the hall, one player letting out a high-pitched scream. The three of us smiled some. Then adjourned. Then found our way back into the world beyond our disappointment.

In my office, on the phone, asking for changes to a new technical security plan. In a conference room rejecting three proposals to invest in software start-ups in Silicon Valley. In the hallway approving marketing plans aimed at our expansion in Asia.

In my office, watching the stock climb.

In my office, reading a report on two rumors about lost Fadowsky journals—rumors since dismissed by SWAT.

In my office, reading, at the end of an e-mail from Whitley,
And I'm still thinking about my favors.

In my office, working on the changes to the shadow network.

Late at night, reading the conclusion of a weekly confidential report from SWAT—
Analysis of Eastern European facilities continues as part of the investigation of the DMZ rogue section.

Late at night, working on the changes to the shadow network. The communication flowing through me as I sat at my computer from midnight till four, sorting through e-mails and documents, relaying the information to another group and yet one more consultant.

“You can't say
beaver
in a meeting,” Julie said.

“You can't say
erected
in a meeting,” Whitley said.

“You can't say
swab
in a meeting,” Cliff said.

Monday, a senior staff meeting, just days from rolling out the changes to the shadow network. Once more we were coming to the end of our management meeting, the gold light of the sunrise shining cold and bright on the New Jersey shore. Once more we were joking with each other. Once more we looked ahead and were sure we could not be stopped. We'd restored the network. We'd bought off Eugene. We'd let Regence know that our use of cellophane tape was experiencing a massive and unprecedented upswing.

As we talked, I thought back over the weekend—forty-eight hours preparing the most difficult of the upcoming changes to the shadow network. I'd slept a few hours Saturday, an hour on Sunday. But otherwise I'd been on the phone or at my computer, still managing the rework and testing. So far I'd found no problems with the idea of a lag time.

And I'd realized I was excited. Excited by the thrill of building something big, of doing something I hadn't thought possible, of engineering an insane and creative solution to an impossible problem.

Inside, I felt good. And, inside, for a moment, as I sat there in the sunrise with my senior staff, I had a thought. A glimpse, really. Coming to me, then gone, like the hundreds of dreams I'd had in my few hours' sleep that weekend. What I'd seen in that glimpse was something much more than us not being stopped. More than the obvious happiness felt by everyone in the company. More than the invented daydream in which the staff around me were now immersed. What I saw was a glimpse of this, all this, continuing forever.

And I sat back. And in that moment, it was better than floating. Better than sleep.

Better than the thing I called sex.

“You can't say
foam
in a meeting,” Cliff said.

Leonard hesitated, ready to speak, all of us waiting. “You can't say
sordid
in a meeting,” he said.

Julie blinked, turned away, then turned back to Leonard. She started to speak, paused as Leonard squinted, then said kindly, “Why would anyone need to say
sordid?
”

After a few moments' hesitation, Leonard responded to Julie. “But we were listing inappropriate words,” he said, his voice part response, part question.

“Actually,” Julie said in a deeply helpful, even encouraging tone, “we were listing words that you
can
say but
shouldn't
say, because, for juvenile professionals like us, such words have sexual, uncomfortable or otherwise inappropriate
connotations.
”

Despite the glimpses of irony he had exhibited during the restoration of the network, Leonard was, as he'd always been, a bit out of sync with the joking around him, his highly organized mind somehow unable to identify the shape and texture, the underlying rhythm and tone, of the bantering conversation he witnessed.

He stared at Julie now, squinting, puzzled. He bit his wide lip. He
rubbed a massive ear. He reminded me—probably everyone in the room—of a kind and overgrown child.

Julie stood, rapidly moving to the whiteboard at the end of the conference table, beginning to write out two separate lists of acceptable and unacceptable words.

Leonard scanned the board, eyes jumping from one column to another. He nodded, slowly at first, then faster. “You can't say
tasteless
in a meeting,” he announced.

I sat back in my chair. I turned toward New Jersey and smiled.

Forever.

“By the way,” Whitley whispered to me, leaning toward my ear, “you look like shit.”

Word would come any minute now. Weeks of work complete. Thursday, and within the hour I would get an answer. Whether the changes to the shadow network would work.

Cliff, Whitley and I were ninety minutes into a conference call that should have taken just five. And yet the three people on the other end of the call—all managers of a venture capital firm in Newark that had invested heavily in Core during our IPO—were screaming so loudly, so forcefully, that there was some question whether the call would ever stop. They were screaming at Whitley and Cliff, at each other, at me. Screaming in unison, then seeming to take turns. Screams filled with anger, then happiness, with gloom, and even hope. In the muzzled, amplified projection of their voices from the speakerphone on my desk, the managers alternately sounded like gleeful revelers at a New Year's party, then dying passengers on a crashing plane.

There was no point to their anger. No reason behind it. They simply called us once a quarter, wanting, it seemed, to hear themselves yell.

“Is it not possible,” Whitley was now saying into the speakerphone, the first of us to speak to them in more than five minutes. “Is it not possible,” she repeated, neck straining as she leaned down toward the
microphone, trying to be heard over the din coming back in her face, “that you are overreacting?”

The speaker went white with noise, a crackling blur of renewed accusations and an unbridled, albeit digitized, passion.

Whitley frowned. Cliff shook his head. I shrugged and turned to my computer. Waiting for an e-mail about the shadow network. Trying not to stare too frequently at my screen. Trying not to let Whitley and Cliff see how distracted I really was.

Cliff looked at Whitley, then me. “I've forgotten what we're arguing about,” he said, his voice unheard by the screaming men at the other end of the line.

“They'll lose their steam soon,” I said.

Cliff threw a binder clip at me. I shrugged again.

“Haven't they made millions off us?” Whitley asked.

“Tens of millions,” Cliff said. “Maybe more.”

“I picture them standing in a concrete room,” Whitley said, staring into the phone as if she could peer down inside it. “Or locked up in a pen. Cyclone fencing. Chains on the gates.”

The sound from the speakerphone increased, then tapered off, then spiked to a near impossible high. A kind of ebbing then rising tide from a four-inch-by-four-inch box.

I clicked on my mouse. I checked for new messages. I was waiting for just a few numbers. Transfer speeds, network capacity, repositioning of eight satellites. I would drop the numbers into the model. Work the changes into Shimmer.

No messages.

I squinted my eyes. I stared at Whitley. Thinking back on something Whitley had said. “You say
cyclone
fence,” I said, part comment, part question. “Not
chain-link.
”

She thought about it for a second. “Yes,” she said.

“Interesting,” I said.

“Really?” she asked.

“Given the context,” Cliff said slowly, and as I glanced at him I saw that he'd attached a black binder clip to his lower lip.

He seemed unaware of this fact.

“Tell me again where you grew up?” I asked Whitley.

“Houston,” she said.

“Do they say
soda
or
pop?
” I asked.

“Neither. We just say
Coke.
”

Cliff shot binder clips toward the window. Whitley stared up at the ceiling. I clicked absently on my mouse.

“What's wrong with you?”
one of the managers was yelling, apparently having pushed aside the other partners in order to dominate the phone. He was like a nine-month-old who'd found his voice, a baby forming words, finding joy in the wavering tones he could emit by screaming at full volume.
“Tell me!”

Whitley leaned forward toward the phone. “Nothing at all,” she said flatly.

The noise from the speaker seemed to erupt in front of her, a sound almost visible, bright and solid and so loud that I half expected her black hair to blow back from her face.

I clicked on my mouse. I quit my e-mail program, then opened it again.

I said to Cliff, “Barf bags.”

He nodded. He detached the binder clip from his lip, for a moment staring at it, clearly having no idea where it had come from. In another moment, he'd attached it to his thumb. He turned to me. “Barf bags,” he repeated, nodding. “Unused for three days,” he said.

I nodded.

He nodded.

“I'm glad,” I said.

Whitley had leaned to her left, as if the sound from the speakerphone was a fountain she had to look around. “Do you want to know whether I say
crayon
or
crayon?
” she asked, pronouncing the word as
kray-on,
then as
cran.

Cliff shot a binder clip at her, missing her head by a few inches.

I nodded, now also leaning to the side, looking at Whitley around the invisible tower of noise.

Whitley thought for a second. “Cran,” she said.

I mouthed the word. I clicked on my mouse.

“Do you want to know whether I say
sneakers
or
tennis shoes?
” she asked.

I nodded again.

Cliff had begun using the plastic body of a pen to shoot spitballs toward the open door.

“Tennis shoes,” she said.

“Is it tennis shoes,” I asked, “or, really,
tenny
shoes?”

She moved her head side to side, squinting, thinking, clearly repeating the words in her mind. “Somewhere in between,” she finally said.

I nodded. She nodded. Cliff shot giant paper clips toward the door.

And then I saw it. An e-mail from Scotland. Sent to me via three blind e-mail relays. I tried to click on the message without showing Whitley and Cliff how anxious I was. I saw two rows of numbers. Flipped open the model. Saw Shimmer launch itself behind the spreadsheet. I entered the numbers into the model. Let Shimmer absorb them. And then I simply stared.