Shimmer (28 page)

“I know them,” Leonard said. “But I believe they've been rendered meaningless in comparison to the current and recent threats. Only Shimmer can definitively show us if we have been compromised by Regence. Or by anyone or anything else.”

“Actually,” Whitley said, pausing awkwardly but saying it nonetheless, “I think the severity of the attack and the new risks posed to us by Regence do justify an expanded implementation of Shimmer.”

SWAT wanted Shimmer. And SWAT was going to have it.

I was looking up, toward the ceiling. “So you're telling me to give Leonard the go-ahead?”

“I can't tell you to do it, Robbie. You know that. I can only recommend it.”

“To me. And to the board.”

“And to the board,” she said.

Perry spoke quietly. “It's time, Robbie. You knew it would come. And now it's time.”

I was thinking quickly, trying to anticipate problems, to think through the threats to the shadow network, but trying to do it without anyone seeing my defensiveness, or my plans. “Okay,” I said slowly.

“Once you've completed the self-teaching component of Shimmer, we can move forward with pointing it at the whole company. How much longer before you solve the remaining programming issues?”

“Actually,” Leonard said, “I solved the problems last night.”

Perry turned to him, slightly wide-eyed. “How?”

“I've decided to give up sleep,” Leonard said slowly, pausing, his heavy lips working against each other, preparing the words he would then say. “Once I eliminated the softness in my mind that, in hindsight, came only from being rested, I saw the answer to the remaining problems quite clearly.”

“And so this new Shimmer works?” I asked, trying to speak evenly, carefully, without fear.

“And so this new Shimmer
should
work,” Leonard said. “I haven't hooked it up to the live systems. I'd like your permission to do that right now.”

It had been Leonard's request that the group meet in a conference room near the DMZ. Now I knew why.

Leonard led the group into the DMZ, asking all but the most essential admins to leave. They filed out quickly, locking down their machines with a few commands, leaving just eight techs to administer the entire system. Leonard moved through the dim light of the room, the glow of the main screens casting green and red and a barren white across his body as he sat down in his usual place in the center of the room. He immediately began to type rapidly on the machine. “Probably,” Leonard said absently, the rest of the SWAT team gathering around him, his voice almost lost to the flurry of noise from the keyboard, “probably there will still be a few bugs.”

He hit three keys. He stared at the screen. He leaned to the side and had me enter a series of passwords that gave him very limited access to Shimmer.

I realized I was taking short breaths, blinking rapidly.

I was opening the door to my own unwitting executioner.

Leonard hit a key, then another. “And there it is,” he said slowly, looking up at the main status board. The same board that had, a month
ago, shown the Core network going red in the face of the attack. “Hello, Shimmer,” Leonard said quietly, and it was almost a whisper.

Already everyone in the room was silent, staring at the board in front of us, lost to the quiet images on the screen. On the board was the company we'd created, displayed to us now in shifting, blurring colors, rapidly moving numbers, the simple turn of squares and circles and lines.

If the standard information on the status board—the usual mix of numbers, codes, maps and graphs—was a multilingual story of Core Communications, this, this wide mix of graphs, colored bands, interconnected circles, curling numbers, this all was almost telepathic. For the people in the room, people who already knew Core so intimately, Shimmer's representations were immediately clear. It made sense.

Later, that was what everyone in the room would say.

It just made sense.

Even for me, a person who'd spent so much time using Shimmer, the images on the board—representing now the entire company, not my shadow network—were breathtaking.

Two circles near the upper left corner of the board, pale blue, barely moving, seemed simply to be the heartbeats of the people in this room.

The rogue sections were easy to see, pulsating vortexes that spun in on themselves, sending out only intermittent tentacles. I could see Ronald looking at each of them, his lips moving slightly, probably considering which sections were already under investigation, which had been rumored. It made sense that the rogue sections were so easy to identify. Even a rogue section that generated high volumes of e-mails, memos, reports and plans was not in real, two-way communication with anyone else. And so, inevitably, the rogue sections generated no results, and thus no connection to anything else within Shimmer.

“Black holes,” Leonard said absently, standing now, stepping up onto a long platform that ran the length of the status board, his body silhouetted against the screen, “each separated from the other stars in the galaxy.”

“You need some sleep, Leonard,” Whitley said.

“Actually,” Perry said as he continued to stare up at the board, “I think he needs even less.”

“So what is all that?” Julie asked, pointing at four dense circles in the upper right corner of the screen, their colors steady, the darkest blue, unchanged.

“I'm not at all sure,” Leonard said slowly.

I knew, though. I knew exactly what they were.

“There's Regence,” Perry said quietly, nodding toward a pinpoint of light on the other side of the board, people's attention all shifting from the dense circles. Regence's presence in the facilities database was a bright pinpoint of light, lines then shooting outward from the screen, some radio beacon hidden in our territory on a war map.

“And there they are again, in the cameras,” Leonard said, pointing to another pinpoint and lines, all of us following Leonard's voice, this our massive tour guide through a new but very familiar world.

And everyone stared, and nodded, and some people smiled.

“I'll need further access to Shimmer,” Leonard said quietly. “And the Blue Boxes. Need to get closer to the Blue Boxes.”

“I'm not sure that's possible, Leonard,” I said.

“I understand,” he said, fading almost, his attention, even his mind it seemed, all being absorbed into the images in front of him. “I understand. But we'll have to talk.”

Again Julie pointed to the four dense circles. Perry turned his head slowly, carefully, staring at them as well. Shaking his head. But staring.

I knew, though. It was the shadow network.

Even with this limited access, what this new version of Shimmer had done was pick up on the massive overcapacity in various parts of Core's system. It was represented in the dense circles Julie had seen. Circles so dense with information that Shimmer couldn't yet make sense of them. So for now, even Leonard couldn't recognize what they were. And really, Shimmer was only showing a tiny fragment of the
company, and a tiny fragment of the shadow network beneath it. But that could be enough. That could be all it took.

And of course Shimmer itself was getting smarter, learning, adjusting itself as it studied each part of Core.

“There will have to be more testing,” Leonard was saying, staring, talking absently, probably to himself. “Quite a bit more refinement before we can give access to the senior staff and other managers. But this is promising. Very promising.”

I stared at the glimpse of the shadow network.

“That's your company,” Perry said quietly, standing next to me but maybe not even speaking to me.

“That's it,” I said.

My God, I thought. There it is. The spinning, drifting image of shapes and lines and colors.

And the image was beautiful.

Regence. Shimmer. SWAT.

Shimmer spreading out through the company. Seeing more. Learning more. Getting smarter every second.

With Shimmer, SWAT could find me.

With Shimmer, the shadow network itself could even be empowered to speak back to every person it secretly supported.

I could see myself in the window. Could see my hair that needed cutting, my jaw working slowly on my lip. I turned in my chair, away from the image. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, staring down at the floor. At my feet. And the base of my chair. Wanting simply to lie down. Wanting simply to sleep. Finally, sleep.

Shimmer was my real enemy.

Shimmer.

Inside her.

A beautiful woman. Always a beautiful woman.

Shifting pressure there. Then there.

Regence. Our spies watching them. Where could their spies be? In Marketing, maybe. In Programming. In Sales. Production. Security.

“Come now,” she whispered, between the slowest movements, talking, then not, all of it one motion, one thought.

This, my release. This, my answer to Shimmer. To SWAT.

“Come in my mouth,” she whispered, between, then talking, then not.

And why was this what I wanted? Why was I here in my home, naked on my bed, a woman paid to fuck me now moving so carefully, so perfectly, across me?

This, the answer to my life.

I'd spent part of that night panning through the live security-camera views of various parts of the building. Wanting to see the views Regence itself was looking through. And I'd stopped on the camera pointed at the sidewalk outside our lobby, the one on which I'd watched the man from Regence get into that silver car. And through that camera I watched the people plodding through a cold New York night, racing toward a train, searching frantically for a cab. Or just wandering down the street. Wandering through their evening. Some of them alone, more of them in pairs. Wandering. And at some point I caught a clock in a store window, a store across the street from our building. And I realized I'd been watching that camera for nearly an hour.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd been outside. I remembered that I used to go outside. Remembered whole days in the New York streets. But I couldn't remember the last time I'd been out there. The time I must have walked back into the building, thinking—knowing— that I would go out again. Never imagining that I wouldn't go outside again for months.

“Come now,” she said.

I had to have known why this was my answer. This, my release. If I stopped for a moment, thought about it for a second. Thought about the day two years ago when I'd made the first call. Called to have a woman come here. Have her here, see her, see what it would feel like. Be like. Look like.

But if I did know then, I'd forgotten it by now.

Motion so slow.

A woman paid to fuck me.

Our fantasies, everyone's, somehow attached to a fixed place or moment. Something gone wrong. Something very good. Something scarring. Something wonderful.

Something.

Why can't I remember?

And of course it was about sleep. Wanting some way to sleep.

What happened to sleep?

And of course it was about work. About Shimmer, the shadow network, the collapse.

What happened to work?

I'd seen an ad in the paper. Called that place. Then another. Then found this one.

Why had I been looking in the paper?

And so now I think that maybe, even then, I didn't tell myself why I'd chosen this. Maybe, even then, I wouldn't tell myself.

The warm, damp surface of her mouth.

Why this?

The wet, narrow corners of her lips.

Tell yourself.

The very end of her tongue.

There was a reason. There is always a reason.

The very edge, lightly dragging, her teeth, then tongue.

But I honestly didn't see it.

Maybe it was time. Like so many things. I just didn't have the time. Time to answer the question. Time to figure out why.

Didn't have the time. Didn't have the focus. Didn't have the will.

And that was it, there, her there. Her.

Regence. Shimmer.

Shimmer.

And that was it, there, her there. Her.

And for a second I could see that the answer was lost in that same
place that didn't really know why or how I'd started this fraud. The same place that let me sustain the lie now called Core Communications.

Mouth, then tongue. Then coming.

What is this woman's name?

There was something wrong with me.

Coming.

There is something wrong with you.

Coming.

You know that. There is.

Trevor walked into my office at three
A.M.
the same night. I was sitting in the gray and white light from the buildings nearby, watching the faded glow of three tugboats move slowly up the Hudson.

Trevor leaned against a table near the window. Half standing, half sitting. Leaning his thin back against the glass, his whole presence so much thinner, narrower than I remembered.

“You have bad news,” I said, barely hearing my voice.

He smiled some, looking away. “Do I only ever come to see you with bad news?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, still smiling. “Sometimes I bring good news,” he said. “And always I bring sales.”

I could hear the empty sounds of the city drifting up toward the two of us in this building, the sounds of a downshifting truck, a speeding subway, two barking dogs, each barely penetrating the windows of my office.

“Even the best news you ever brought me,” I said, feeling small and light and like some kid in a chair, smiling and blinking slowly, and wondering if I would sleep that night, “even that has been the worst thing in my life.”

He nodded, turning to look out the window. Hair hanging across
his face for a second, over his eyes, and he didn't bother to move it. “I have no news, Robbie. Good or bad. I'm just here.”