With a Little Help (12 page)

He looked glum.

"Oh, cheer up," she said. "You're a young man. Getting shafted by VCs builds character. Look at me!"

He picked up the fish again. She knew what he was going to ask without having to wait. She named the price. "But for you, a ten percent discount."

He shook his head and put it back. "I can't afford that," he said.

"What are you doing tonight?"

He cocked an eyebrow at her. "Don't worry, I'm not interested in your youthful limbs. I just have a spot on my third shift. One of my girls is pregnant and she's taking some maternity. You pull six hours starting at 11PM and you can take that home."

"I'm not supposed to moonlight." He caressed the fish's scales. They rippled under his finger.

"It's due diligence," she said.

He smiled. He was very pretty. And he'd built two cars -- not bad. He'd do OK. Maybe he'd even work out and end up one of her regulars.

"Think about it. I close down at 6PM. You come by then, if you're interested, and I'll give you the details for the fabrica."

She locked her cabinets and set out her "Gone to lunch" sign, then hopped over the display case, vaulting it the way she'd learned to do in yogacrobatics class in Silver Lake.

"Lunch time?"

Mrs. Huang called to one of her daughters to come out and staff the booth, then came around on her cane.

"No nutritionist food," she said.

"Certainly not," Gretl said, sprinkling a wave at the VC as he moved off among the stalls in the dead WalMart.

--

Afterword:

I have an odd and productive relationship with
Forbes
magazine. I'm far from a typical
Forbes
reader, but they've commissioned several articles and this short story from me, and the commissions are always challenging and just weird enough to inspire. Here, the brief was to write about the future of entrepreneurship. I'd been thinking a lot about how
little
it costs to start a business, and how predatory and awful many of the investors I'd met were, and I came up with this -- a Socratic dialog between a startupist and a VC who can't find anyone to take his money.

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"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu

Greg landed at SFO at 8PM, but by the time he made it to the front of the customs line it was after midnight. He had it good -- he'd been in first class, first off the plane, brown as a nut and loose-limbed after a month on the beach at Cabo, SCUBA diving three days a week, bumming around and flirting with French college girls the rest of the time. When he'd left San Francisco a month before, he'd been a stoop-shouldered, pot-bellied wreck -- now he was a bronze god, drawing appreciative looks from the stews at the front of the plane.

In the four hours he spent in the customs line, he fell from god back to man. His warm buzz wore off, the sweat ran down the crack of his ass, and his shoulders and neck grew so tense that his upper back felt like a tennis racket. The batteries on his iPod died after the third hour, leaving him with nothing to do except eavesdrop on the middle-aged couple ahead of him.

"They've starting googling us at the border," she said. "I told you they'd do it."

"I thought that didn't start until next month?" The man had brought a huge sombrero on board, carefully stowing it in its own overhead locker, and now he was stuck alternately wearing it and holding it.

Googling at the border. Christ. Greg vested out from Google six months before, cashing in his options and "taking some me time," which turned out to be harder than he expected. Five months later, what he'd mostly done is fix his friends' PCs and websites, and watch daytime TV, and gain ten pounds, which he blamed on being at home, instead of in the Googleplex, with its excellent 24-hour gym.

The writing had been on the wall. Google had a whole pod of lawyers in charge of dealing with the world's governments, and scumbag lobbyists on the Hill to try to keep the law from turning them into the world's best snitch. It was a losing battle. The US Government had spent $15
billion
on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn't caught
a single
terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right.

The DHS officers had bags under their eyes as they squinted at their screens, prodding mistrustfully at their keyboards with sausage fingers. No wonder it was taking four hours to get out of the goddamned airport.

"Evening," he said, as he handed the man his sweaty passport. The man grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, clicking. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food in the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it as he concentrated.

"Want to tell me about June, 1998?"

Greg turned his head this way and that. "I'm sorry?"

"You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998 about your plan to attend Burning Man. You posted, 'Would taking shrooms be a really bad idea?'"

#

It was 3AM before they let him out of the "secondary screening" room. The interrogator was an older man, so skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot further than the Burning Man shrooms. They were just the start of Greg's problems.

"I'd like to know more about your hobbies. Are you interested in model rocketry?"

"What?"

"Model rocketry."

"No," Greg said. "No, I'm not." Thinking of all the explosives that model rocketry people surrounded themselves with.

The man made a note, clicked some more. "You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike of ads for model rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail."

Greg felt his guts spasm. "You're looking at my searches and email?" He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew that what you put into the searchbar was more intimate than what you told your father-confessor. He'd seen enough queries to know that.

"Calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches." The man made a bitter lemon face and went on in a squeaky voice. "That would be
unconstitutional
. You weren't listening to me. We see the
ads
that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it, I'll give it to you when we're through here."

"But the ads don't mean
anything
-- I get ads for Ann Coulter ringtones whenever I get email from my friend who lives in Coulter, Iowa!"

The man nodded. "I understand, sir. And that's just why I'm here talking to you, instead of just looking at this screen. Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently for you?"

He thought for a moment. "OK, just do this. Go to Google and search for 'coffee fanciers', all right?" He'd been very active in the group, helping them build out the site for their coffee-of-the-month subscription service. The blend they were going to launch with was called "Jet Fuel." "Jet Fuel" and "Launch" -- that'd probably make Google barf up model rocket ads. Not that he would know -- he blocked all the ads in his browser.

#

They were in the home stretch when the carved man found the Hallowe'en photos. They were buried three screens deep in the search results for "Greg Lupinski," and Greg hadn't noticed them.

"It was a Gulf War themed party," he said. "In the Castro."

"And you're dressed as --?"

"A suicide bomber." Just saying the words in an airport made him nervous, as though uttering them would cause the handcuffs to come out.

"Come with me, Mr Lupinski."

#

The search lasted a long time. They swabbed him in places he didn't know he had. He asked about a lawyer. They told him that he could call all the lawyers he wanted once he was out of the Customs sterile area.

"Good night, Mr Lupinski." This was a new interrogator, a man who'd wanted to know about the reason that he'd sought both night diving and deep diving specialist certification from the PADI instructor in Cabo. The guy implied that Greg had been training to be an al-Qaeda frogman, and didn't seem to believe that Greg had just wanted to do all the certifications he could, pursuing diving the way he pursued everything: thoroughly.

But now the man with the frogman fantasy was bidding him a good night and releasing him from the secondary screening area. His suitcases stood alone by the baggage carousel. When he picked them up, he saw that they had been opened and then inexpertly closed. Some of his clothes stuck out from around the edges.

At home, he saw that all the fake "pre-Colombian" statues had been broken, and that his white cotton Mexican shirt -- folded and fresh from his laundry-lady -- had a boot-print in the middle of it. His clothes no longer smelled of Mexico. Now they smelled of airports and machine oil.

The mailman had dropped an entire milk-crate of mail off at his place that day, but he couldn't even begin to confront it. All he could think of, as the sun rose over the Mission, turning the Victorian houses they called "painted ladies" vivid colors, was what it meant to be googled.

He wasn't going to sleep. No
way
. He needed to talk about this. And there was only one person who he could talk to, and luckily, she was usually awake around now.

#

Maya had started at Google two years after him, but had gotten a much bigger grant of stock than he had. She knew exactly what she was going to do with it, too, once she vested: take her dogs and her girlfriend and head to Florence, for good. Learn Italian, take in the museums, sit in the cafes. It was she who'd convinced him to go to Mexico: anywhere, she said, anywhere that he could reboot his existence.

Maya had two giant chocolate Labs and a very, very patient girlfriend who'd put up with anything except being dragged around Dolores Park at 6AM by 350 pounds of drooling brown canine.

She went for her Mace as he jogged towards her, then did a double-take and threw her arms open, dropping the leashes and stamping on them with one sneaker, a practiced gesture. "Where's the rest of you? Dude, you look
hawt
!"

He took the hug, suddenly self-conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive googling. "Maya," he said. "Maya, what do you know about the DHS?"

She stiffened and the dogs whined. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. "Top of the light standard there, don't look, there. That's one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk. Lip-readers."

He parsed this out slowly. Google's free municipal WiFi program was a hit in every city where it played, and in the grand scheme of things, it hadn't cost much to put WiFi access points up on light standards and other power-ready poles around town. Especially not when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. He hadn't paid much attention when they'd made the webcams on all those access points public -- there'd been a day's worth of blogstorm while people looked out over their childhood streets or patrolled prostitution strolls, fingering johns, but it had blown over.

Now he felt --
watched
.

Feeling silly, he kept his lips together and mumbled, "You're joking."

"Come with me," she said, facing squarely away from the pole.

#

The dogs weren't happy about having their walks cut short, and they let it be known in the kitchen as Maya fixed coffee for them -- barking, banging into the table and rocking it. Maya's girlfriend Laurie called out from the bedroom and Maya went back to talk to her, then emerged, looking flustered.

"It started with China," she said. "Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction. They could google everyone going through our servers." Greg knew what that meant: if you visited a page with Google ads on it, if you used Google maps, if you used Google mail -- even if you
sent
mail to a gmail account -- Google was collecting your info, forever.

"They were using us to build profiles of people. Not arresting them, you understand. But when they had someone they wanted to arrest, they'd come to us for a profile and find a reason to bust them. There's hardly anything you can do on the net that isn't illegal in China."

Greg shook his head. "Why did they put the servers in China?"

"The government said they'd block them if they didn't. And Yahoo was there." They both made a face. Somewhere along the way, Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more worried about what the competition was doing than how they were performing. "So we did it. But a lot of us didn't like the idea."

She sipped her coffee and lowered her voice. One of the dogs whined. "I made it my 20 percent project." Googlers were supposed to devote 20 percent of their time to blue-sky projects. "Me and my pod. We call it the googlecleaner. It goes deep into the database and statistically normalizes you. Your searches, your gmail histograms, your browsing patterns. All of it."

"The search ads?"

"Ah," she grimaced. "Yes, the DHS. So we brokered a compromise with the DHS. They'd stop asking to go fishing in our search records and we'd let them see what ads got displayed for you."

Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already --"

"No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was already doing it. But that wasn't it. You know, Republicans
hate
Google. We are overwhelmingly registered Democrat. So we're doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. This isn't PII --" Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age "-- it's just
metadata
. So it's only slightly evil."

"If it's all so innocuous, why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff?"

She sighed and hugged the dog that was butting her with his huge, anvil-shaped head. "The spooks are like pubic lice. They get everywhere. Once we let them in, everything suddenly got a lot more -- secret. Some of our meetings have to have spooks present, it's like being in some Soviet ministry, with a political officer always there, watching everything. And the security clearance. Now we're divided into these two camps: the cleared and the suspect. We all know who isn't cleared, but no one knows why. I'm cleared. Lucky me -- being a homo no longer disqualifies you for access to seekrit crap. No cleared person wants to even eat lunch with an un-clearable. And every now and again, one of your teammates will get pulled off your project 'for security reasons', whatever that means."