Shimmer (25 page)

It was a minute before I realized that Whitley was talking to me. “What?” she was asking.

It was another moment before I could even shake my head.

“What?” she asked, smiling now. “You don't smile like that. Robbie Case doesn't smile like that.”

I shook my head.

Shining, bright then brighter, the screen blinking white, Shimmer blinking white, Shimmer gone pure and perfect and clean.

“Tell me!”
a single voice screamed out at us, once more distinguishing itself from the otherwise blurring, constant noise.
“Tell me now!”

Shimmer one color, one number on the screen.

Twelve months.

“You should smile like that more often,” Whitley said. “They say it's good for you.”

The changes had worked. But Shimmer had done more. Shimmer had used the changes to calculate the exact date of the collapse. And the collapse was twelve months away.

I turned away from Whitley, turned back, wanted to stand, to hug her, hug Cliff, wanted to tell them both what I'd just found out, what had happened, what this meant.

“Why won't you tell me?”
the voice was screaming.

I turned away again. Looking out the window. Knowing I had to stop smiling. Knowing I couldn't tell Whitley and Cliff what I'd learned. Knowing I had to get back to the conference call, to the next meeting, to my life at Core Communications. But that world I would return to, already I knew it would be so very, very different. And all I wanted was to share this with them. To come out from under my lie.

“Good news,” I said slowly, turning back to Whitley. “I just got good news.”

“Tell us,” she said, smiling, leaning sideways in her chair, hair falling across her eyes.

“Why?”
the voice was screaming.

Shimmer, on my screen, filling in lines, and colors, and numbers.

Twelve months to find a solution. Twelve months to find a way to keep the company alive.

Twelve months was forever.

Whitley was still staring at me, saying, “Tell me. Tell me, Robbie. What happened?”

“Twelve months,” I said, although I hadn't meant to say the words aloud.

“Till what?” she asked.

I shook my head. But this time I decided I wanted to hear the words. I wanted to say them. “Twelve months.”

I came inside her.

It had surprised me when I called. I'd thought I only called when things weren't good.

She was twenty-one. Twenty-two? Maybe she was twenty-two.

Maybe she could be young,
the woman had suggested when I called.

Young,
I said, not sure what to say.

Small,
she said.
And daisies, maybe.

Daisies?

Her panties, her bra. Daisies.

I see.

The girl next door.

Next door.

Maybe twenty-one.

I see.

A yellow sundress, sandals. Hair pulled off her shoulders. No makeup. Maybe lipstick. Maybe not.

I see.

For a change?

For a change.

Exactly.

For a change.

The girl next door. Damp with sweat. Smiling up at me. Whispering something, quietly, sweetly, close to my ear. Still with her daisy-speckled bra across her small, perfect breasts.

I wouldn't have thought I was a person who would call now. Now, when I'd found a date for the collapse. Now that the collapse was a year away.

But I had called. Like always. And, like always, it seemed as if this had been put in motion before I'd even picked up the phone.

“You're twenty-one,” I said quietly, speaking out loud without realizing it, speaking toward this girl a few inches from my face.

“What?” she whispered. Only whispering. I'd made that clear. Like always. No talking. Whispers, at most.

I shook my head.

“What?” she whispered again. The girl next door does not talk. She whispers.

I shook my head. I moved her hand to her chest. I had her slowly open her small bra.

Had I ever really slept with the girl next door? I tried to picture girls from high school. Women from college. But all I could see was this image beneath me, this young woman under me. What had it felt like the first time I'd had sex? What had it felt like, in high school, in college too, when I had been in love?

“I've never done this,” she whispered, and it was a good thing to say. It was a good part of the scene. And maybe it was true.

Maybe,
I told myself,
maybe it's true.

It had surprised me when I'd called. I hadn't called in two weeks. So many nights spent working on the changes.

Maybe it wasn't a release this time. Maybe I wasn't trying to sleep or escape.

Maybe this was a celebration.

“Am I pretty?” she whispered, and I moved my hand slowly across her, feeling her, this girl here so damp on her knees and thighs.

I see now that to lie, to lie about everything in your life, to do that you have to deaden yourself. And I had been deadened, separated from the things that happened around me and to me.

Sex on a schedule, sex that was prepared, then completed, that was fully contained.

“Am I beautiful?” she whispered.

Twelve months.

Before this, before this company, before Blue Boxes and Trevor's lies and my lies and money, before this, what had I wanted? Where had I wanted my life to go?

There'd been a time in my life when I'd have never touched a prostitute. Never called one to my home.

“Please, tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me you like it.”

What had I wanted? Who had I been?

Twelve months.

“Please.”

Finding myself back inside her.

“Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me you like it.”

Holding her, under me. Holding all of her, at once, completely. Whispering, “Okay.”

“I'm eighteen,” she said. “I've never done this.”

“Okay.”

“Never.”

“Okay.”

“Never, Robbie. Never.”

He wishes Eugene's journal had been real. Not because of what it would have done to the company. Leonard does not want that at all. But because of what a real journal would say. What it would explain. What it would reveal.

How this works.

How the Fadowsky Formula works. How these Blue Boxes work. How Robbie's system works.

Leonard wants to know.

He sits in a dark conference room. Pretending to sleep. Staring up at the ceiling. Sitting in a chair pressed into a corner. Staring at the dark ceiling, then at the floor, then at the dark shapes of the table and the chairs and the door and the shades pulled down across windows along the wall.

It is so quiet in here.

His life is never so quiet.

He's been putting the network back together, each day since the attack. Rebuilding every part of it, re-creating each piece destroyed in the
reset. And he wishes more than ever that he understood. Fadowsky and Blue Boxes, Shimmer and the systems only Robbie can see. It works. All of it works. But the edges, the angles, the shapes don't make sense.

He shifts slowly to the left, his chair creaking as he moves.

Twenty years of creaking chairs.

He thinks about changes he's wanted to make to Shimmer. Improvements, upgrades, an expansion of what Shimmer can do. He wants to connect Shimmer to the entire company, wants Shimmer to reflect the company back to him and all of the senior staff, wants to use Shimmer to understand how to improve productivity, improve security, improve every aspect of the operation. And he wants to make Shimmer a self-teaching entity, a program that learns from what it sees, that operates independently of the tasks it is given.

He is sure it can be done. He is sure he can make Shimmer do all of this.

Leonard stretches out his long, heavy legs. He stares down at his thick, wide hands.

He wonders what time it is. He wonders what day it is. He tries to remember when he last went home.

He'll be happier when he gets to grace. He hates to admit it, but he will.

He's wanted to make these changes to Shimmer since he and Perry finished it two and a half years ago. But Robbie has never let them near Shimmer again. Robbie has said there are more important things to do.

His hands are so big. His legs. His body, his head, all of it.

He closes his eyes.

Leonard wants to do this because it would be so helpful to the company.

And Leonard wants to do this because he can, because he is that smart, and because he needs a success right now. Needs to do something well. Something right.

I wish I weren't so big.

The parties had become one of those New York events. They'd started as office parties, held quarterly or every other month—company-funded drinking gone unreported to our insurance provider. In the last year, though, the parties had become one of those unidentified events known to people across the city. They drew programmers from software firms city wide, founders of breakaway ad agencies holed up in Chelsea and Tribeca, brokers and investment bankers working late on Wall Street, even an unlikely sampling of junior moviemakers, directors and actors and actresses all talking up their new script, their new project, their next even better idea.

I was handed a drink. I thanked the stranger who'd already turned away, disappearing into the mix of people and music and easy warm light, all of it spread across the lobby of our building, four stories high, now filled with a few hundred people.

Friday.

“In the last six months,” I said to Perry, who was sitting next to me in a low, heavy chair on the first of two mezzanines above the lobby, “two hundred people have claimed to be my parents.”

“Sure,” he said, slowly crossing his bare feet on the table, “but at least a hundred of those claims came from me.”

His bare feet, his legs, all were motionless. His whole body was. Perry's tremendous capacity for stillness. Especially now, stillness so obvious as the room moved steadily with people and light and sound.

In front of us were the groups laughing, the pairs drinking, the people shooting cocktail straws from one mezzanine to the next, and each person, each shooting straw, each image reminded me that my changes to the shadow network had worked. Now we had time. Now I had so much more time to find a solution.

And not one thing reminded me of the girl next door. I can see now how I sat there and did not think about her at all. Not a memory or a vision of the eighteen-year-old prostitute I'd been inside twenty-four hours ago.

“A new kid from my group,” Perry said, nodding in the general direction of the mezzanine across from us, “is able to shoot toothpicks with astounding accuracy.”

I saw two toothpicks shoot forty feet into the back of the head of a programmer from R&D, the kid who'd shot them very discreetly lowering the straw to his side. I heard myself saying, “Nice.”

Ronald Mertz viewed these parties as management-sanctioned breaches of corporate security. Outsiders roamed the halls of the floors just above us. They joined baseball games played across unprotected workstations. They lined up for putt-putt golf tournaments that led in and out of conference rooms and offices—notes, plans and reports covering the tables and whiteboards that surrounded the games. And, worst of all for Ronald, the outsiders joined in on any number of multiuser, networked computer games—killing, hunting, joking, plotting, driving and swinging their way through an immense electronic universe hosted on Core's computers.

Despite the Regence attack, despite restoring the network and Eu
gene's blackmail with a fake Fadowsky journal, I'd said the party would happen. Security had been tripled, access to the network essentially eliminated, the layout of the putt-putt courses curtailed.

But Core would have its party.

As we sat in our chairs on the upper mezzanine, Perry and I had tiny earphones in our left ears, both of us listening in on the security team as they talked to one another. The sounds of urgency coming through the earphones were so disconnected from the easy, happy scene in front of us. It was an urgency that flowed directly from Ronald, who had a large force of uniformed and plainclothes security officers stalking the perimeter of the lobby, roaming from mezzanine one to the fourth floor and back to mezzanine two, issuing commands over the tiny microphones pinned to their collars, listening for instructions via the earphones hidden in their ears.

“Hansel, this is Gretel, please identify,”
Perry and I heard an officer saying over the radio.
“Repeat. Hansel, this is Gretel. Please identify.”

“This is Rapunzel,”
said another voice. “
Sector two is clear.”

As he had throughout the night, Perry spoke without turning to me, his voice instead drifting out into the space in front of us. “We have a sector two?” he asked.

I nodded. “Of course.”

I was handed a drink. I thanked the stranger who'd already turned away.

“I heard you got some good news,” Perry said.

“You've been talking to Whitley,” I said.

“And Cliff. Both said you lit up yesterday.”

I nodded. I shrugged. I hoped the topic would pass.

“Does it affect me?” Perry asked.

“Some bad conference call with an investor,” I said, smiling some, trying to answer him without giving an answer. “It would probably have gone better if I'd just gone to visit them.”

“You hardly travel anymore,” Perry said.

I took a drink. I shifted in my seat. “There never seems to be the time.”

“And you didn't answer my question,” Perry said. “Why is it you were smiling?”