Switchback

by Matthew Klein

  When Timothy returned to his office, Tricia was packing her purse, getting ready to leave for the day. Timothy looked at his watch and was surprised to see that it was already five o’clock.

  ‘Jay’s gone,’ Tricia said, peering into her purse. ‘He went to meet some friends at Zibbibos.’

  ‘When the cat’s away …’ Timothy started, but immediately thought better of it. She might take that the wrong way.

  ‘I’m leaving too. Is that okay?’ She finished rearranging her purse, then tossed it over her shoulder.

  ‘Of course.’

  She stood up, circled her desk, and walked toward the office door. She stopped near Timothy and stared at him. Timothy wondered if she was looking at the circles under his eyes, something he had been noticing with increasing interest himself. She asked, ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She considered what she was going to say next. She started speaking, just a syllable, and stopped.

  ‘What?’ Timothy asked.

  ‘I was going to invite you out. As a friend. You know, for drinks, maybe to the BBC, just the two of us. Casual. No pressure.’

  ‘Last time we did that, it didn’t really work out.’

  She shrugged. ‘That was last time. How about later this week?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Timothy said.

  She slid past him. Timothy held the glass doors open for her, and she exited to the elevator bank. He looked at her body as she went. Dumb as a wall, he thought, but what a body.

  In the hall, she pressed the elevator call button and turned to him. ‘You know, if you won’t have a drink with me, I might have to ask you for a raise.’

  ‘You can ask, but you’re not going to like the answer.’

  Behind her, the elevator chimed. The doors opened. She looked over her shoulder, then backed into the car. She flipped her purse over her shoulder. She said, ‘But I always get what I want,’ and then the elevator doors closed.

  It wasn’t clear if she was talking about a raise, or about Timothy, but either way, he thought: Yes, I believe you do.

  20

  The next morning, things began to fall apart.

  First came the phone call from Pinky’s lawyer in New York. He reached Tricia first. When she refused to put the lawyer through to Timothy, he played an old trick: Try to Make the Secretary Cry. He launched a diatribe – an electric, shocking, verbal torrent – alternately berating Tricia, muttering ominous legal threats, and scoffing at Timothy’s hiding behind a receptionist. The speech was, Timothy knew, when Tricia came to him cowering, a rehearsed piece – the attorney’s equivalent of a Hamlet soliloquy. But it accomplished exactly what it was designed to: it made Timothy pick up the phone.

  The Kid was in Timothy’s office when Tricia came to him, helpless. Timothy nodded and waved her out. She shut the door, then he picked up the speakerphone. ‘This is Timothy Van Bender.’

  ‘Timothy Van Bender,’ the voice shot back, ‘I represent Pinky Dewer. You must send my client his money as he requested. There will be consequences if you refuse.’

  ‘What kind of consequences?’

  ‘Dire, Mr. Van Bender. Are you aware that the only thing standing between me and a phone call to the CFTC is your friendship with Mr. Dewer? And I might add that your friendship is in a very precarious state, at this moment.’

  ‘So Pinky found out the fruitcake I gave him for Christmas was a hand-me-down?’

  ‘Mr. Van Bender, no doubt you think you are clever, and funny, but I am making this phone call because Pinky is gracious, and he asked me to give you one last chance. This is your final warning. Simply return Mr. Dewer’s money, as he requested, and there will be no further consequences.’

  ‘I’d like to. The problem is, Mr… .’

  ‘Allen. John Allen from Shearman and Sterling.’

  ‘The problem, Mr. Allen, is that I can’t do that. The money is not exactly in a liquid form.’

  ‘Then I suggest, Mr. Van Bender, that you make it liquid – soon. I won’t be phoning again.’

  With that, the line went dead.

  The Kid whistled through his teeth. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Sounds pretty serious.’

  ‘Just a little saber-rattling,’ Timothy said, but secretly he thought the Kid was right. He had never meant for things to get this far. He had always expected the yen to fall fast, and for Osiris to make back the original trading loss before investors realized anything had happened. But now it was heading in the opposite direction, and the loss was growing. And Pinky Dewer, who had a mean streak as wide as the Mississippi, had just sworn vengeance.

  ‘Where is the yen?’ Timothy said.

  ‘Eighty,’ said the Kid. ‘We’re going to get a margin call tonight, if things don’t change.’

  ‘What’s the total net loss?’

  ‘We’re down by thirty million dollars since the start of the month. What do you want to do?’

  Timothy was relieved that he didn’t need to answer the Kid, because his intercom rang. It was Tricia. He picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’ He expected Tricia to say that Mr. John Allen from Shearman and Sterling was calling to issue further threats. But instead she said, ‘Timothy, I have a Dr. Ho on line two. Do you want to take it?’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ Timothy said. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to the Kid, ‘Give me a minute, okay?’

  The Kid nodded, and quickly left the office – too eagerly, Timothy thought. It occurred to him then that the Kid had already begun sending out resumes, and perhaps was even interviewing at other hedge funds. Maybe that’s where he was yesterday afternoon. Maybe the Kid was starting the process of distancing himself from Timothy, getting off the sinking ship, explaining to prospective employers in conspiratorial tones that Timothy was responsible for ‘certain problems’ at Osiris, which the Kid was not at liberty to describe, but which the employer would no doubt hear about soon enough.

  ‘This is Timothy Van Bender,’ Timothy said, into the phone.

  ‘Mr. Van Bender, it’s Clarence Ho. Thank you for taking my call.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Dr. Ho?’

  ‘I recently had the opportunity to speak with my client. She has agreed that …’ His voice trailed off. Then he started again: ‘It’s important that you come to my office tonight. Please come alone.’

  21

  He agreed to meet Dr. Ho at eight o’clock in the evening on Sand Hill Road. Timothy drove from his house with the windows of his BMW open. The smell of Northern California summer – of rosemary and jasmine – swept down the foothills into the valley.

  Timothy parked in the Sand Hill parking lot, which was now empty, save for a few cars, perhaps those of janitors and cleaning staff. He walked beneath the sodium arc lamps, following the flagstone path along the edge of the office park, past the giant egg sculpture, and into the 3600 office building. He trotted up the three flights of stairs as fast as his legs would take him, but they were old legs, and in the last long month they had grown older. On the third floor he came to Suite 301, and the door marked ‘Amber Corp.’

  He knocked, turned the knob, and entered Dr. Ho’s office. Again, he was greeted by an empty waiting room and dark reception area. No magazines. No sign of any patient having visited, perhaps ever. This, Timothy thought, is one strange doctor.

  Timothy called out. ‘Dr. Ho?’

  The door to the reception area opened, and Dr. Ho was there. ‘Thank you for coming, Mr. Van Bender.’ He gestured for Timothy to follow. ‘Please.’

  He led Timothy down the hall. They stopped at the door marked ‘Lab #1.’ Ho removed a set of keys from his pocket and turned the lock.

  They entered the lab. It was a large windowless space, sixty feet long on each side, with exposed ceilings snaked with cables and piping and ventilation ducts. In the middle of the room were two laboratory islands, black enamel, with sinks and sawtoothed gas nozzles, out of a high-school chemistry class. On the nearest island, beside the sink, sat a computer keyboard and two g
iant screens – big twenty-one-inch plasma monitors with bright yellow and green pixels, displaying neatly indented lines of computer code.

  In the back of the room, on metal racks, Timothy saw them: rows and rows of computers – black Dell machines; sleek new Suns, the size of pizza boxes; even old clunky beige cases, fossils from an earlier computer epoch. The computers were stacked on top of each other, sometimes three high, bulging from the racks, filling every inch of space. It was high-technology squalor: haphazard piles of CPUs, some vertical, some horizontal, in no particular order. The racks themselves stretched from wall to wall, the width of a football field, as broad as the bow of a ship. The computers were linked by orange Ethernet cables, a thicket of wires, poking messily from the racks and into patchboards, where hundreds of LEDs blinked green and dark, epileptically, displaying the ones and zeros of network traffic in a ceaseless, ever-changing pattern: true becoming false, false becoming true, thousands of times per second.

  The whirr of the computer fans, hundreds of them together, sounded like water racing through a concrete sluice. The room was cold. There must have been dedicated air conditioning, Timothy thought, keeping the machines cool, adding to the rushing sound.

  In the back of the laboratory was another door, forbidding cold steel, with a sign that said, simply: ‘Keep Out.’

  Timothy said, ‘Maybe you’re the guy to ask. I’m having trouble setting up my wireless home network.’

  Ho smiled.

  ‘Okay,’ Timothy said, suddenly tired of trying to be charming. He let his voice deflate. ‘Tell me what this is about.’

  ‘This is about your wife.’

  Timothy stared at him. It was like a key turning a lock. Now it all made sense. He was being blackmailed. It fit: the hundred and fifty thousand dollars Katherine had paid to Dr. Ho. Her sudden suicide. And now Ho was calling him to a dark office in the middle of the night, making cryptic comments about Katherine, and about to ask for more money.

  Timothy wondered: What had Katherine gotten herself into? Did Ho have photographs of her, some sort of pornography? Were there drugs involved? Perhaps something more awful? An accidental death? Manslaughter?

  Timothy thought about how to respond. He needed a Plan. He decided quickly: he would never parlay with a blackmailer, never negotiate, but instead simply walk away. Because once you start, it will never end.

  ‘You look alarmed,’ Dr. Ho said. ‘Don’t be.’ Ho walked to the computer screen near Timothy, tapped the keyboard. The yellow cursor jumped down a line. ‘Do you use computers, Mr. Van Bender? In your line of work, I’m sure you must.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Timothy said. His mind was elsewhere. He was still trying to figure out Ho’s blackmail plan. He ran through the various angles: Katherine in trouble. Katherine killing herself. Was she in debt? Is that why she needed the two hundred thousand dollars? What kind of mess did she get herself involved in? What kind of secrets did she keep from him?

  But no: it was impossible. Katherine was too clever. Even if she did get involved in something unsavory, she would never allow herself to be put in a position of weakness. She was too strong, too smart …

  Ho said: ‘What I’m about to tell you must remain in the strictest of confidence. If anyone should find out about my work – about my company’s work …’ His voice trailed off. ‘It would be premature,’ Ho said, simply.

  ‘Are you blackmailing me, Dr. Ho?’

  Ho laughed. ‘Oh God, no.’ He removed the tiny spectacles from his eyes, virtually unpeeled them from his skin. They left a bright red line in his brow. Ho rubbed his eye sockets. His eyelids made a clicking sound as he rubbed. Now, with his eyes red and puffy, he replaced the glasses. ‘I can see, in retrospect, why you might think that. But, no, Mr. Van Bender. That’s not what I’m doing. Not at all.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’

  Ho turned his back to Timothy. He walked to the racks of computers. Only twenty feet from Timothy now, he had to raise his voice to be heard over the rushing fans. ‘Three hundred and fifty machines. Nothing fancy. Just off-the-shelf components. Some fast, some slow. Whenever we get our hands on one, we just plug it in. If a machine fails, we leave it in the racks. They’re too cheap to bother with.’

  Ho ran his fingers over an Ethernet cable absentmindedly, like a man stroking his lover’s hair. ‘That’s all Amber Corporation is: a few hundred computers. I founded it four years ago. It grew out of research I’ve been involved in, on and off since …’ He thought about it, laughed. ‘Since forever, really. I’ve been doing this as long as I can remember.’

  He removed his hand from the computer cable almost longingly, and turned again to Timothy. ‘I gathered a group of investors, men not unlike yourself, Mr. Van Bender. Wealthy men. Men who could appreciate the promise of what I’m developing. For reasons that I’m about to explain, they would prefer not to be identified. Not exactly typical Sand Hill Road VCs.’

  Timothy wondered: if this isn’t blackmail, what is it? And then he understood. Was this crazy Chinaman selling him a business plan? Could he possibly want Timothy to invest in his company? Was he using Timothy’s dead wife as a convenient entrée? Was this entire episode – the meeting this afternoon, the sinister night-time appointment – was this all a hopeless pitch meeting, a desperate Hail Mary by a cash-strapped entrepreneur?

  Ho continued. ‘My company has pioneered a rather interesting technology. A kind of backup technology. As you no doubt know, computers are prone to failure. And when computers fail, catastrophically, it is possible to lose critical data. That’s why companies like yours, for example, implement a backup policy. You make a copy of all your data so that, if something terrible happens, you’ll be able to start your work again. In the worst case, maybe you’ll lose a day’s worth of work. It’s upsetting, obviously, but it’s better than losing a year’s worth of work. It’s better than losing all your customer records, your correspondence, your financial transactions, your software. I’m sure you understand.’

  Timothy nodded. He did understand. Since installing the automated backup system, each night the hard disk drive of every computer at Osiris was copied and stored on an optical drive. Once a week, the Kid removed the optical disk and brought it home for safe keeping. If there were ever a fire, or an earthquake – which was not far-fetched in Northern California – and the Bank of America building was destroyed, then Osiris would be able to rise again. Unless, of course, everyone who worked at the company happened to die in the accident. Which was the small but glaring problem with the backup plan that Tran had designed.

  ‘If you understand that,’ Ho said, ‘then you will appreciate what I am about to tell you. It is very simple. You –’ he pointed at Timothy’s forehead – ‘your mind, your brain, your memories, your personality … you –’ he waved his hands around Timothy’s chest – ‘are a glorified computer program.’

  Ho stopped. He looked at Timothy to see if he understood the implications of this statement. Timothy’s face remained blank.

  ‘Well, not exactly a computer program. Not identical. Computers are binary, of course – ones and zeros – on and off. That was an arbitrary decision by the earliest computer designers, just an artifact of 1940s transistor technology. But there’s no reason computers need to be binary. In fact, we can design a perfectly good computer – a much faster one, incidentally – that uses sliding scales, not just on and off, but very on and slightly on and somewhat off. That’s how your brain works, too, Mr. Van Bender. The rate of neurons firing is a like a sliding scale. Very fast means one thing. Very slow means something else.’

  Timothy was about to interrupt, to snap the conversation closed like a bank teller’s shade, to say something snide about how fascinating this all was, but that he really needed to go home and perfect his latest hobby: solitary night-time drinking. Ho must have sensed this too, that he had lost his audience, so he tossed the meatball into the lion cage, right then and there. He was, Timothy later realized, pretty good at the pitch meeting
after all.

  ‘What I’m saying,’ Ho explained, finally, ‘is that I have made a backup copy of your wife.’

  22

  Ho’s words knocked Timothy backward. He took a step, then held on to the cool black enamel lab island to keep his balance. He wasn’t entirely sure what Ho was saying, but the doctor was doing it again, mentioning his wife off-handedly, in a way that made her sound like the subject of a medical experiment, like someone not-quite-dead.

  Now that he had Timothy’s attention, Ho told his story. The problem with science, he explained, was over-specialization. Brain experts knew a lot about how the brain functioned, but knew nothing of the work of chemists, who in turn knew nothing of the work of computer scientists. Each field read its own journals, went to its own conferences, awarded prizes and grants to its own experts. It was as if science took place in separate, hermetically sealed boxes. There was no Science, with a capital S; there were, instead, lots of little sciences, dozens of intricate and precious mechanisms, pointless contraptions, beautifully built and maintained, but absolutely useless. There was no interchange, no attempt to put the machines together to form a larger, more useful whole.

  It was a just a fluke that Ho happened to be interested in three extremely different fields – electrochemistry of the brain, computer science, and physiology – and that he had stubbornly pursued these fields concurrently, despite the protest of his professors and supervisors and fellowship advisors, who warned Ho that dabbling in many fields was the same as mastering none, and that his career would suffer as a result.

  They were right. From MIT and Stanford, Ho traveled Silicon Valley in the downhill direction, working on small, one-off NIH grants thrown to him when the competition didn’t bother to apply. Unable to find a tenure-track position, barely scraping by, Ho worked as a contract employee at a few biotechnology startups, in Berkley, in Oakland, in San Jose. It was at one of these now-defunct firms that he met a mysterious benefactor, who encouraged him to pursue his Big Idea, and who offered to throw cash his way, for a small equity stake in his company.