Shimmer (7 page)

“But you love me?”

“I want something bad to happen to you, Trevor. I want you to feel pain.”

He was still staring at me in the glass. Still with his hands in his suit-coat pockets. And smiling, tongue at his lip, teeth just hidden, a face so sharp and hard and still.

Inside, I'd known all along that Trevor would appear in my office a few days before we closed the Omaha deal. I'd known he would never hire those salespeople. I'd known he'd been lying to me from the start. I always knew these things about Trevor. And yet always I tried to believe that this time would be different. That this time he would surprise me.

He never had.

And so I would have to fire these people. Each one. I would fly to Omaha, I would stand in a room, I would tell them they were done.

The regional sales manager I'd been meeting with was, in almost every way, completely unlike Trevor's other salespeople. That manager had worked for my father, and even for Trevor, this made him essentially untouchable as long as he produced. The salespeople Trevor hired were more like assassins—calculating, mean and focused solely on ways in which their employer, Core Communications, could further their own personal success. They were sports fiends and sex freaks,
they were women who called each other cunts, they were men who threw punches at each other during their separate Christmas party. Because of this, Trevor himself was required to report to me personally whenever he came to headquarters, a corporate restraining order on my own sales executive.

“I'll be in town for a few days,” Trevor said to me now.

“Do you ever wish we had other family?” I asked him, staring out the window, looking through his reflection. “Do you wish there was more to the family than just us?”

“I'll come by again,” he said, not answering my question. Because Trevor never answered questions about our dead parents.

“Do you think any of these fired employees will ever try to hurt you?” I asked.

“It'd be like some TV miniseries,” he said, and I didn't even have to look at him to see him, to know the tip of his tongue was centered in his smile, his dark eyes turned upward in the pleasure of his joke. “Open Season,” he said, his voice rising as it emphasized each word. “The Omaha Office Massacre.”

“It could happen,” I said. Although I didn't believe it. Knew I was only talking to talk.

“In my mind,” Trevor said, “the only person who might hurt me is you.”

“Really?” I asked, slowly turning around to face him, almost smiling as I spoke. “Are you afraid of me, Trevor?”

“No,” he said. “But you still might try to hurt me.”

“Even though, as you say, I love you so much?”

“Yes,” he said, grinning now, so happy, so satisfied, Trevor's reactions like those of a child, so complete and so pure. “Yes,” he said, “even though you love me so much.”

Trevor could sell anything. He was charming and deft, so tremendously intelligent and quick. His salespeople, all of them, they were the same. A cult ruled by fear, worshippers of money, ready at any moment to destroy everything and everyone within their reach. And yet
they were, as a group, some of the smartest, most highly skilled people I had ever met.

It was Trevor and his sales team who had made me rich.

And it was Trevor alone who knew my secret—that Core Communications was hurtling toward collapse. He'd bought in completely. In fact, he'd known from the very beginning.

Jaywalking had set all of this in motion—Core's growth, Trevor's sales, our grand journey toward collapse. It had been a jaywalking computer engineer named Frederick Fadowsky, actually, who'd retired in 1977 after a twenty-five-year career in technology research for the Defense Department. In the months after his retirement, working day and night in a poorly lit basement in a uniformly pristine subdivision in northern New Jersey, Fadowsky developed a mathematical algorithm. It was a formula, really. One that would change the world. Because, with what was called the Fadowsky Formula, the speed at which mainframe computers could transfer information suddenly increased by a factor of forty.

“The revolution has begun,” Fadowsky wrote in his journal just hours after his discovery. “The rate of transfer I've now made possible, the level of compression I have obtained, is the overture to an orchestra of speed and efficiency.”

Mainframe programmers have never been known for their humility.

And mainframe computing isn't known for its allure to the outside world.

Yet within the small, cloistered universe of mainframe programming, Fadowsky was hailed as a brilliant, groundbreaking thinker, a man whose work would someday be compared to the achievements of Franklin, Edison and the Wright brothers. Fadowsky gave all-day seminars to standing-room-only gatherings of spellbound engineers. He gave lectures at colleges throughout the Western world. His journals
were published, in annotated and unannotated editions, through an alliance of six university presses.

Meanwhile, Fadowsky had partnered with his brother-in-law, a retired electronics salesman, to market and sell his formula. Together the two of them sold the Fadowsky Box, a TV-sized machine featuring heavy knobs, sharp edges and thick cords that plugged directly into a company's mainframe. Fadowsky and his brother-in-law traveled the country in a dark-green sedan, pitching large corporations and government agencies on the benefits of this incredible machine.

Almost immediately, they were selling Fadowsky Boxes faster than the machines could be produced.

“My vision is a world made smaller, not larger, through the proliferation of these tools,” Frederick wrote in his journal in a roadside motel outside St. Louis. “It is a vision that we have, today, begun to fulfill.”

I was in preschool at the time, a quiet but active boy most concerned with drawing an ever-larger cityscape on a sketchpad in my bedroom.

And Trevor was off taunting some neighborhood girl, years away from introducing this story to me.

Much like standard computer modems, it took two Fadowsky Boxes—one at each end of a phone line—to transfer information. But unlike standard modems, the Fadowsky Boxes required a massive amount of mainframe processing in order to operate, so much so that companies immediately found themselves needing to double the capacity of their mainframes in order to use the Fadowsky machines. It was almost like having to buy a second PC simply to send an e-mail. Still, for the large corporations and huge government agencies that wanted to send information quickly and easily among multiple locations, the Fadowsky Boxes were worth the price.

“The value of my system,” Fadowsky wrote, “its importance to the world, will, over time, be measured not in dollars, not in gold, but in knowledge and enlightenment.”

And then, less than a year after the first Fadowsky Box was installed,
Fadowsky died. Hit by a garbage truck while jaywalking across an intersection in northern New Jersey.

And then Fadowsky's brother-in-law realized that Frederick had never told him where to find the complete mathematical algorithm. Understandably, Fadowsky had not published the formula with his journals, nor had he kept the formula in a public place. Finally the brother-in-law concluded that Frederick had kept the algorithm in his head, fearful that it would be stolen by competing inventors or large companies.

There was actually some speculation that, in fact, Frederick had had no idea how his discovery worked. That he'd stumbled onto an invention he did not understand. That he'd gone on to stage his death in order to withdraw into seclusion, hiding from the inevitable demands to document his formula. In the three years since Core had introduced its Blue Boxes, stories like this had surfaced every few months, spread on Web sites populated by mainframe programmers. Just as frequent were rumors of a lost journal, a notebook that clearly documented the Fadowsky Formula and that had, finally, been discovered. None of the rumors had ever proven true.

Despite not knowing how the central technology in the Fadowsky Boxes worked, the brother-in-law continued to sell the machines at an incredible pace. Car manufacturers, airlines, insurance companies, the Social Security administration, the Department of Defense—they were companies and organizations with thousands of mainframes in use. And by 1980, virtually all of them had purchased Fadowsky Boxes from the brother-in-law or one of his salespeople. Even by 2004, no one had found a better, faster way to pull information from a mainframe.

And no one had deciphered the Fadowsky Formula—a kind of Fermat's Last Theorem for the computer industry.

And so, when Trevor came to my small office in New York in 2004 and slowly sat down in front of my desk, leaning forward very carefully as he whispered the words
Frederick Fadowsky,
I certainly knew who he was talking about. But in my fifteen years working for networking companies in Silicon Valley, Fadowsky had never been anything but
the writer of some books I'd read, the name on a machine I had seen many times but not thought much about.

Trevor continued to stare at me. He leaned even closer. He whispered even lower. “Picture a man in thick black glasses,” Trevor said. “Picture a pair of unnaturally crisp, chemically stiff brown trousers.”

I had just taken over my father's company, having immediately moved the headquarters of what was then still called the Mainframe Supply Center Inc. from Redding, California, to New York City with vague but ambitious plans for expansion—doubling, maybe tripling, the number of employees from the thirty we then had as we moved away from merely selling third-party mainframe supplies. My father had died that summer, leaving me eighty percent ownership. Trevor, my only cousin and only living family, had been given the remaining twenty percent.

Trevor had come to my office to tell me that he'd bought a piece of software that was not only capable of deciphering the Fadowsky Formula but could increase the boxes' transfer rate by another factor of forty.

“It's a cash cow,” Trevor told me. “A no-brainer add-on for companies with billions of dollars to spend.”

“Why would someone sell this system to you?” I asked. “Why not market it themselves?”

“Because the woman who wrote the code is dead,” he said. “She was from China. Her family just wants a royalty.”

He told me her story. And I nodded. And I said,
Okay.

And, as always, I believed him.

We sketched out a business plan. Trevor—a gifted programmer who'd long ago dropped out of college and who, until now, had shown no interest in my father's company—became salesman and product manager.

I managed the traditional mainframe supply company while laying the groundwork for expanded production, marketing and tech support. Trevor, who was still living in California, coordinated between the Chinese programmer's family and a series of outside software
firms that were helping Trevor create the first pair of Blue Boxes. The two of us spoke daily, Trevor giving me updates on the progress of the programmers, until finally, nine months and more than $4 million later, two crates arrived in the New York office. Inside were the first Blue Boxes. Heavy, two feet tall, perfectly square except for the corners and edges just curved by the designers, the boxes looked like the newest minimalist creation of a long-cloistered German design team. They were covered in dark-blue plastic, had just a few connection points near the base and a few indicator lights on the front.

The boxes stood in the center of my office, and people came by, sometimes more than once, all looking at the machines, a few even asking to touch them.

Trevor arrived from California a few hours later, pulling two small silver crates that held a set of mobile satellite dishes. “The best news,” he said, taking a bottle of vodka from his luggage, pouring himself a drink as he stared at the machines sitting between us, “the best news is the delay.”

I stared silently at Trevor.

“The programmers,” he said brightly. “They implemented the system with only a two-hour delay in the delivery of information from one Blue Box to the next.”

I shook my head slowly. “You're saying,” I managed to get out, “that people who use these boxes will have to wait two hours to receive their information?”

He sipped from his glass. He nodded toward me. “Yes.”

“Trevor,” I said carefully, “that's a huge problem.”

“No, no, Robbie,” he said, smiling and sipping again. “We call that a bonus feature.”

The greatest value of the Core Blue Boxes was not really speed, Trevor explained to me, already falling into a well-honed—but as yet undelivered—sales pitch. The value of our Blue Boxes was that they freed up a client's mainframes from the time spent feeding information to the Fadowsky Boxes.

“Our clients free up their mainframes for the valuable work they
need done,” Trevor said to me. “And what some might call a delay,” he added, shrugging, smiling wide, addressing—then deflating—a potential buyer's concerns, “well, be assured that our clients will never notice the delay. Because now, given all the mainframes they'll be freeing up, now they'll be able to send their information at least two hours
earlier
than before.”

It was an extremely appealing yet highly circular concept that, even for me, seemed to slip away just as I'd digested it. But when Trevor purred
clients,
when he smiled that easy smile and shrugged so confidently, any concern I had drifted away.

And I had already learned that as powerful as Fadowsky's Formula was, Fadowsky's boxes did suffer from one severe weakness—companies had long ago realized that they had to double their mainframe's capacity with every eight pairs of Fadowsky Boxes they installed. As one company executive said, “Fadowsky marked the beginning of our addiction to speed.”

With the Core Blue Boxes, however, the addiction could finally be broken. The extra mainframe capacity would be unnecessary. The cost savings would be huge.