Shimmer (4 page)

When it did finally kill us, it would do so suddenly. Completely. The computers would stop working. The mainframes would shut down. The satellites might as well fall from the sky. And no one—not SWAT, not Whitley—would be able to decipher what exactly had happened.

Paper sorted, paper printed, paper copied, paper piled, paper flowing toward destinations unseen and unknown, paper sitting untouched in tall piles on bright tables, sitting dusty and still on high shelves along the wall. Paper bound, paper clipped, paper stapled and stacked and filed and sent and all of it reflecting white as it shot quietly from copiers and printers, or landing heavily as it was moved from desk to file, from file to binder, from binder to conference room. Paper was the breath, it seemed, the air we inhaled, then released.

“Core Communications,” I heard someone behind me say, “owns approximately two thousand six hundred and twenty-eight white-boards.”

Walking with the head of Human Resources, finding myself in the middle of an afternoon basketball game in the wide walkways on fourteen, the Lady Gunslingers of PR favored by ten over the Warlords of Admin. It was one of multiple events in an endless and informal buildingwide Olympics—Nerf basketball, laser tag, yo-yo face-offs, darts, pool, air hockey, marbles, video games of all sorts and kinds, poker, chess, D&D, cubicle badminton, Wiffle-bat baseball, chair races, Yahtzee!, Scrabble, checkers, elevator bingo, untold betting pools devoted to elections, births, sports and office romances, periodic foot races around the auditorium on two, broom-and-tape-roll shuffle-board, Frisbee, full-contact rollerball, Magic: The Gathering, tag-team wrestling, Sumo wrestling, paper-airplane competitions based on an arcane Italian formula gauging distance, speed and altitude, and six separate putt-putt courses, each with a rating of novice, pro or addict, that were spread through offices, workspaces, hallways and conference rooms to form a total of one hundred and eight holes of golf.

“Foul!” someone yelled, throwing their hands in the air.

As with every other group in Core Communications, the people playing basketball were not only some of the most productive people in the company, they were also the most productive workers in their professions. Outsiders never believed it. Even the board found it hard to understand. But despite the games and jokes and constant digressions,
Core was one of the most productive and efficient companies in the world.

I played five minutes of basketball with the Warlords of Admin. I managed to contribute two assists and a foul shot but had three jump shots blocked by a fanatical Bulgarian intern—a lightning-quick woman with a twelve-inch vertical leap and no idea I was the owner of the company, the building and the court she so freely dominated.

It was, for me, an unlikely but welcome moment of anonymity and untainted employee contact, even as other people stood around us, watching their CEO run the court.

Walking with two financial analysts, each updating me on fluctuations in various European stock markets, the meeting soon carrying us from the eighteenth to the eleventh floor, Worldwide Network Operations, where sci-fi marathons met the complete works of Nietzsche, where junior programmers in tuxedo T-shirts worked alongside engineering PhDs and tired dropouts from Cal Tech.

Picking up Julie, the two of us walking across thirteen, a floor with a particularly large number of windows, the rooms cast in shadows from the windows around us, rooms sometimes angular, sometimes round, sometimes softened into shapelessness as the light reflected off the steel and the glass and the ducts in the ceiling.

“I've got a meeting with the blind,” Julie was saying, “then a review of new day care policies on the Korean peninsula.”

Julie was our goodness. Our corporate soul. It was her staff that led tours of inner-city schoolkids through the office, her staff that cost-justified employee day care worldwide, her staff that spearheaded blood drives, canned food collections, volunteer teams for neighborhood soup kitchens. She did this while overseeing the production of all Blue Boxes and hardware in over fifty facilities around the globe. Did this quietly, without once asking for praise or recognition. Did this without seeming soft or maternal. In another age, men in gray suits would have called her a kind den mother. Cliff once jokingly referred to her as
dear
and she turned to him and hit him, hard, in the arm. He could not rotate his shoulder for more than a week.

Yet even more than her strength and temper, what probably most prevented the senior staff from calling her
dear
or
maternal
was Julie's endless appetite for discussions about sex.

“The head of production from that Korean company we just bought reminds me of an aging leopard,” she said to me now. “A sleepy, languid man who rises only to breed.”

I nodded. Waiting. Sure something more would come.

“He's taking early retirement tomorrow,” she said. “He agreed with my suggestion today.”

She nodded. She turned and was gone.

One hundred and fifty e-mails by three. Suggestions from staff members. Requests from board members. Favors to be returned. Thanks to be given.

Another group of four, all in green, this time near the elevators. Already today I'd seen an oddly large number of people in green.

People saying
Hello
to me as they moved out of the way of another of my walking meetings, some people even whispering, a few even pointing, sometimes a group slowly spreading apart, graciously and with unintended formality, making way for their CEO.

“I'm not royalty,” I'd once said to Whitley.

“It's not your choice,” she'd replied. “They've made of you what they want to believe. And they want to believe you are not like them.”

The steady sound of the ventilation system, metallic and barely audible below and between the noise of so many people in motion.

Shadows in my office I'd never noticed before.

Six hours' sleep in the past three days.

A memory of Julie with her head on her desk after lunch, the five-minute nap of the exhausted executive vice president of worldwide production.

The spreadsheet, eight hundred pages, open on my screen. For a few minutes only. Updating the model. Incorporating new purchases of secret mainframes. Adding recent leases for yet more satellite time. Tying in the hidden cash I ran daily through acquired companies. Removing now defunct shell corporations through which I bought and
sold equipment. Moving assets to newly formed shells based in Bermuda and the Caymans.

“Timeless,” I heard a woman's voice say from outside my office, the words drifting to me through the noise on twenty, through the noise in my office, through the noise coming in from the city now caught in the windows around me. “Placeless,” the voice said. “Godless. Sourceless.”

Not till four that afternoon did I realize it was all the members of the company's Tech Support, Network Administration and Software Development groups who were wearing green.

“I like your shirt,” I now told Leonard, the head of those groups.

“Thanks,” he said with a pleasant nod, but offering no explanation as to why his shirt matched his pants, his pants matched his sneakers, his sneakers matched his socks. “As expected,” he said, “the equipment will total two hundred twenty-nine million dollars over a three-year period.”

Somehow I hadn't noticed Leonard's green ensemble at our senior staff meeting that morning, or in any of our interactions earlier in the day. Maybe that's because Leonard was one of those big people, not fat or overweight, but big in a way that was startling every time I saw him, an unexpected amount of space suddenly occupied anytime he entered the room. Big hands, big eyes, big features, big motions. He had the largest fingers I had ever seen. His size tended to overwhelm whatever it was that he wore.

But now I saw that he was all in green. I wondered if maybe he'd changed clothes at some point, inexplicably donning a costume for the fading light of the afternoon.

Unlikely.

Cliff, sitting next to me now, nodding and taking notes, hadn't seemed to notice the green. Or maybe he didn't care. With numbers in front of him, calculator at his fingers, Cliff became a living computer, a machine purely focused on absorbing, processing and refining
the information presented to him. In those moments he had no ability to register anything else.

All day, though, I'd been seeing the tech people in green—a gangly system administrator typing frantically on a marketing executive's locked-up computer, a near teenaged girl changing toner in a brightly glowing copier, three Chinese programmers in a heated debate as they reported to Whitley about security threats from Indonesia. Some were in olive-green pants, some were in forest-green shirts or light-green shoes, one was in a dark-green hat.

There were no secret handshakes as they passed each other, no furtive hand signals, not even a shared smile. They simply all wore green.

“Leonard,” I said, “you're wearing all green.”

He glanced up, nodded, said, “NT, XP, 2000, UNIX.” It was as if he'd launched into some high-tech haiku. In fact he was listing a range of computer systems in use at a number of our newly acquired companies. “Multiple flavors on the UNIX side,” he said. “Irix, Linux, lots of Solaris. And of course that's in addition to every mainframe platform known to this planet.” He sighed heavily. “So many platforms, so many skills.”

Cliff nodded carefully. I nodded knowingly. Leonard turned a page.

Located on the ninth through twelfth floors, the tech group formed four floors of highly rambunctious but remarkably good-natured individuals. They hacked into each other's computers, they organized floorwide competitions in various Web-based role-playing games, they logged into the computers that operated the building's air-conditioning system in order to raise the temperature in rival programming groups by ten, then twenty degrees.

As I watched Leonard's thick fingers trace absently along the sharp edges of the papers in his lap, I wondered for a moment if any of the industry spies or bored college students trying to hack into our systems were themselves sitting at their computers dressed entirely in green.

“Green,” I said, to no one in particular it seemed. “All green.”

“Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange,” Leonard said, turning a page, then continuing. “Java, C, VB, Korn. So many skills . . .” he said, and let the sentence trail off.

Cliff looked up. “The real cost is personnel, yes?”

Leonard nodded quickly. “The real cost is personnel, but there's a notch up in training.”

Cliff tapped on his calculator. I nodded knowingly. Leonard turned a page.

And really, I did know. I knew exactly what Leonard meant. I understood everything he and Cliff were saying. In Technical Development, in Strategic Planning, in Sales and R&D, everywhere I knew the workflows, I knew the org charts, I knew the software tools, I knew the strategies for the best communication and support. I knew what markets we were in, what markets we wanted. I knew the product lines and the version changes and the roll-out schedules and the launches.

In the night, when I did sleep, these were the things that drifted through my dreams.

I leaned back in my chair, absently touching the thin, straight edge of Leonard's desk. Everything in Leonard's office was set at right angles to the walls. As always, this had a calming effect on me. His four computers, his five monitors, his multiple stacks of status reports, software documentation, heavy reference books, even the requisite collection of sci-fi trading cards—not only was each item squared to the desk or table on which it rested, but Leonard had clearly gone so far as to bar the public display of any rounded items in his office. Leonard's office—Leonard himself—gave me a sense of order and uniformity, not just among the physical objects within my reach but within the very structure of the universe around us.

“Corel, Claris, even Quattro, even Symphony,” Leonard said, sighing again. “In this there will be no diversity. We go to the one place. We go to the big boy.”

Cliff nodded quickly. I nodded again. I said once more, “Leonard, you're wearing all green.”

He looked up from his notes. In a moment, he nodded, flat tongue wetting his wide lower lip, his whole presence seeming to prepare itself for an extended response. “Yes,” Leonard said, “I am.”

He nodded again, Cliff asked for costs, Leonard gave him answers, I glanced toward New Jersey and smiled. Leonard's sincerity, the pure earnestness he brought to his work, to this life, it could make him impenetrable.

“Forty-four K, thirty-two K, an even hundred,” Leonard said.

“Was there a memo?” I asked. “Or an e-mail?”

“What's that?” Leonard asked.

“How did everyone know to wear green?”

He paused, letting his head fall to the side, confused. Then he nodded. “Right. Yes. I see. Green. No. It's the first of the month. On the first of the month, we've all decided to wear green.”