Shimmer (35 page)

And I was ready to leave.

I am ready to leave.

So I did.

I picked up my laptop and headed through my door. I rode down a silent elevator, here in the quiet of midnight at Core. I walked past the guards in the lobby of the building.

And then I went outside.

It was cold, and there was wind, blowing lightly at my bare hands and up the sleeves of my jacket and against my lips and nose and eyes. I looked up, past the streetlights, the sky a brightened black with the reflection of the city against it.

All of it was much quieter than I'd remembered.

I was leaving the building. But I would have to manage the company through the sale to Regence, the transition to Tor and his people. I could do that from somewhere else, though. Somewhere with a phone and computer.

A car passed. A truck sat idling near the end of the street. A man walked his dog two blocks away. An old man in a tightly fitting gray suit moved past me, looking at me.

“Robbie,” someone said. I turned, and it was the old man I'd just passed in the street. I'd thought maybe he was a homeless man. He was staring at me, smiling only slightly, looking deeply into my eyes. He was not a homeless man. He was yet another father, come now to reveal the truth to me.

“I don't have time,” I said, turning away. “I'm tired of you. Of all the people like you.”

He pulled back some, surprised, and I'd already turned away.

I found a cab. Climbed into the backseat with my laptop in my hands. Told the driver to take me to 125th Street, the farthest address I could think of, then would tell him when I got there to take me somewhere else. What I wanted was to drive. The city was so still, few cars, fewer people, but so many lights. The shifting brightness of streetlights and buildings, of car lights and stores, all turning across my eyes, shadows in the car, light that struck my hands, then disappeared, and it was so nice to drive. The motion, the speed, the drift of changing lanes, the hard lifting bumps at the intersections, near the curbs. I opened my window and there was air, cold air, hard against my face and wrapping now around my whole body, reaching into my shirt and around my ankles, and so thick and full against my hands.

I hadn't been out of the building in six months.

I closed my eyes.

I would hold together the shadow network until the acquisition was in motion. Until Regence had clearly taken control of the company. Which would not take long. A few weeks, and Core would little resemble the place it had been. And once Core was theirs, then the shadow network would collapse. Collapse with some cover for Core's management, its employees.

These people had given so much time. So much of their lives had been centered on the company.

How does that happen? What did they want? Will they ever get what they wanted to find?

I would manage the demise from somewhere else. From a hotel room. An apartment. Here in New York. Then someplace back in California.

I would manage it from anywhere but that building. My home of three years.

The stock was still stable. For some reason the decline had leveled off, nearly halted. This had bought us a full month now. An extra month to let Regence get that much more involved.

Tomorrow I will sell my company.

I still hadn't managed to call Trevor. I hadn't even sent him a message. Every day, I'd started to do it. But every time, I'd stopped. I told myself I didn't want to hear his anger, didn't want to listen as Trevor launched into some attack on me, my choices, the people around me, everyone. I'd had a lifetime of that from him, I told myself. I didn't need it anymore.

But even then I knew why I didn't call. I simply couldn't face it. Couldn't hear it. Couldn't hear his disappointment.

Each time I'd started to call, I felt like I was calling my father. Calling to tell him.
Finally I have failed.

From the very beginning, I'd been hiding from that moment of facing my father. Facing him even in my mind.

Telling him I had failed.

I pressed my hands along the edges of the laptop. Slowly pulling it closer to me.

And if I closed my eyes now, here in the flashing darkness of New York at night, if I did that I would see my father. Staring at me. From his chair. Watching me from his office, behind his desk, seeing me now and the look would only be sadness. Sad that I'd done this. Sad that I'd set all of this in motion. Sad that I had brought so many people along. And sad, most of all, that I had done this to myself.

He would think that.
Why,
he would say,
why did you do this to yourself?

He would pick up each piece for me, each part of the world I had created in these three years, and he would take each moment and each decision and each person and life and company and place, and he would fold each one up and put them away. And tell me,
It's over. That's it, Robbie. It's over.

Unqualified. Unending. Without judgment. Without anger. Without disappointment. Complete.

It's over. I don't know what will happen, Robbie. But it's over.

I didn't have the ability to say this myself. I never had. I'd only ever been able to push forward. To try. To think that I was capable of finding a solution. To think my failure came from within. To think I'd never found a solution that was, for someone else, most certainly possible.

Make this work.

For three years, for thirty years, always I'd believed I had the ability to do it.
It is there,
I'd believed.
The solution is there, inside you. Right there.

But it wasn't.

And that was okay. I should have realized. That was okay.

Don't worry, Robbie. Don't. Because it will be okay.

I missed him. I missed him so much.

The cab crossed a steel plate at high speed, lifting for a moment into the air, gliding for that second above the plate and the street, my stomach going empty, and there was Cliff, in my mind, so sick these last months.

An image of the mailroom on four, one of a hundred meetings I'd held there with Julie.

The edge of my laptop so square and rigid and at right angles in my hands, and a memory of Leonard.

The vision of Whitley standing at the edge of some workgroup on seventeen, her SWAT team ready to bust a rogue section, Whitley smiling eagerly, childish and driven and watching all at once, Whitley chasing a shadow network she knew nothing about, trailing it half blind through the depths and reaches of the company, in the end coming to me, both of us together, in sex and in safety, hiding out from the world.

I rode through the streets. I saw and heard and felt each memory. All I wanted was to smile.

All I wanted was to cry.

All I wanted was to sleep.

My phone rang. I looked down at the screen. It was Perry.

I didn't answer.

He called again. Then again. The fifth time, I finally answered.

“Was that you I saw leaving the building?” he asked.

And I had to smile.

“I need to see you,” Perry said.

It was a moment before I answered. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said quietly, the air still pushing through the windows, across my face.

“I need to see you now,” Perry said.

“I signed the documents,” I said.

“That's why I need to see you now,” he said.

“To talk me out of it?” I asked slowly, eyes half closed, the light from the city still crossing, turning, spinning around me.

“Someone's here,” Perry said. “You need to talk to him.”

I couldn't answer. Actually, I was only barely finding a way to speak at all. I saw the words, pictured my talking, but couldn't find a way to say anything, the wind instead pushing across my mouth and across my face and across my eyes, too strong even for me to push back against it.

“He's here,” Perry said. “Here. Talk to him.”

And I saw myself hanging up. Saw myself moving the phone from my ear. But still, in the air, there was no way to move my hand or arm.

“Hello,” a new voice said. The voice of an old man.

“Robbie,” the voice said.

I was trying to lean away from the window, but couldn't.

“We need to talk,” the voice said.

I was trying to push back against the air.

“My name is Frederick,” it said.

I thought maybe, maybe I could reach the seat in front of me.

“Frederick Fadowsky,” it said.

I wanted so much to reach the seat in front of me.

“You and I,” it said, “you and I very much need to talk.”

The car hit another steel plate in the road, lifting once more, pushing me forward, and now I did float toward the seat in front of me, hand touching it easily, and the air now not pushing against me. Not pushing at all.

“We should talk,” I heard myself saying. “Yes, you're right, we should talk now.”

I hung up. I pressed my back into the seat. I wished somehow I could sleep, sleep for days, sleep ten days right now in the back of a cab.

But I only asked the driver to turn around. To head downtown. To take me back to my building.

Frederick Fadowsky had been on the phone.

And it's not as if I had anywhere to go.

I was sitting with Fadowsky in the children's chairs in Perry's office, Perry in his small chair at the end of the low conference table. Lines along the wall, twelve inches above the floor, the markings for Perry's raised floor and antechamber.

Fadowsky was the old man from the street, of course. The man I'd mistaken for another wayward father. He was old and gray-haired and slow-moving. But as he sat with us now, he began to smile. Very slightly. Very small. But he began to smile.

“Finally,” he said, “finally I have figured it out.”

It took a moment for me to respond. To realize what he was saying. “The formula,” I said. “Your system. You never understood. You never knew how the formula worked.”

He nodded. “It was a mistake,” he said. “Simple luck. There was no solution to the formula. Instead the formula worked without my understanding it.”

“And so you hid,” I said.

He nodded. “In embarrassment. In shame. Sure that, if I didn't, I would be forced to admit that I did not understand how my formula and my boxes worked.”

Perry, just barely, had begun to smile.

Fadowsky shrugged now, a full and slow motion that seemed to command all the energy in his body. “I hid. From my lie. An unintended lie. A lie of circumstance. But a lie. I didn't understand what I'd done. And I hid from it.”

“But you've figured it out,” I said slowly.

“Yes,” he said. “And I plan to give the solution to you.”

My head was tilting now, slowly, to the left. I said, in a moment, “To me.”

Perry had slowly begun to sit forward, staring at me. “To us,” Perry said. “But to others also.”

“I'm giving it to everyone,” Fadowsky said. “I'm giving it to the world.”

And I had to smile. Fadowsky, even in this moment, full of grandness and self-importance. Talking as if he were giving some gift to the world, not a mere software program meant simply to pass information at high speed.

What this meant was that Core Communications was about to become worthless. Because now anyone could draw blood from a mainframe. Regence might still want to buy us. But only for scrap. For the equipment, the clients, maybe a few of our people. But otherwise we offered Regence—anyone—nothing unique, nothing special.

And so we would collapse.

“Why did you surface now?” I asked.

He stared at me, confused, his lined, small face pulling inward slightly. “Why now?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “I'd have never done it,” he finally said, “if not for Perry. Your friend Perry here. He found me a few months ago. We talked. Shared ideas. And then he called me a few weeks ago. With a new idea. About the formula.”

“An idea,” I said.

“He mentioned a program. Some software. Shimmer. He said Shimmer gave him an idea.”

Perry was watching Fadowsky. Still smiling just slightly.

“Shimmer solved the formula,” Fadowsky said. “Perry gives me the credit. But Shimmer solved the problem.”

Perry was watching. Smiling.

“Hiding is an embarrassment in and of itself,” Fadowsky said. “For thirty years I've wished I had faced my lie.” He stood. He was small. He towered over us in our low chairs. “And now I will.”

Perry and I walked Fadowsky downstairs. Watched him wander out into the street.

And somehow that was the moment when I felt most empty. An end so unexpected was being imposed. This company was worthless, the work was done, it was over.

“It's nothing now,” I said to Perry, standing in the lobby. Staring up at the mezzanines, toward chairs he and I had sat in just a few months earlier. Where we'd sat and watched this company in motion, in happiness, having restored the network, having done the best work we could do.

Perry nodded. Nodding. But smiling. In a moment, he said, “Maybe.”

And he started walking.

And, of course, I followed him.

Into an elevator. Along a hall. Into the DMZ.

He brought up Shimmer. Painted it on the wall.

And there it was.

I saw it immediately.

Saw it in the dense, bottomless funnels and cones.

Saw the answer.

The solution.

Now that Fadowsky would give everyone his formula.

Now there was a solution.

Possible only because Fadowsky would give his formula to the world.

An answer.

So clear and so obvious that I wondered if Perry had made it up.

How could the answer be so easy?

So simple.

So real.

Perry was standing a few feet away from me. Staring at the screen. He spoke quietly. “It means giving up everything,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Satellites,” he said. “Servers, mainframes, networking.”