Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  Chris nodded.

  ‘That’s what I heard too.’ Leib smiled slightly. ‘I don’t give a fuck what some little DA in Santa Clara says.’ He gestured towards the tablet computer, where the final few lines of his conversation with Paul were still visible on the screen. ‘How can you guys guarantee me that that is legal?’

  2

  THE JOURNEY THAT led Andrei Koss to Robert Leib’s office had begun three years earlier, a couple of miles away in a student dorm at Stanford University. The autumn quarter that year brought together four juniors in a two-bed double in Robinson House, one of the accommodation blocks on Sterling Quad. Andrei was majoring in computer science. His roommate was Ben Marks, a psychology major from Baltimore. In the other room in the suite were Kevin Embley, a beefy Chicagoan majoring in economics with a more than passing interest in programming, and Charles Gok, a tall, gangly physics major with a bad case of acne.

  Andrei was the youngest of three children of a Russian emigrant couple who had left Moscow for Boston when he was four. His father was a professor of linguistics at Harvard and his mother a hospital pathologist. There was no trace of Russian in Andrei’s accent. Standing slightly below average height, and a little awkward in his movements, he had won every high-school award going in physics and maths. He had been coding since he was twelve and his decision to major in computer science was more or less pre-ordained. While still at high school, he had written a clutch of internet apps, one of which had garnered a few users and which he had sold to a software developer for $200,000.

  Andrei, Ben and Kevin knew each other from their first two years at Stanford. Charles was new to all three of them. As the four juniors settled in that fall, they spent their time in the common room between the two bedrooms, where four small desks jostled with a sofa and a couple of chairs under a changing but persistent scum of soda cans and take-out containers. The only thing that differentiated it from any other common room in any other dorm in America was a large aquarium that stood against one wall, stocked with tropical fish. Ben had always had an aquarium since his father had bought him one when he was in the third grade, and he had kept the tradition at college. People dropped by to feed the fish, often with articles that no self-respecting piscine would even have sniffed at, which for some reason became a cult activity in the house. Ben fought a constant battle against would-be fish feeders bringing pieces of pizza and chicken nuggets.

  Of the four, Ben was the most socially successful. He was five ten, dark-haired, with an air of calm self-assurance. Charles was quiet, introverted and shy, and most people agreed that an arranged marriage was probably his best shot. Kevin, who fought a constant although not particularly vigorous battle against chubbiness, made up in enthusiasm for what he lacked in attractiveness.

  Andrei had been having an on-again, off-again relationship for the past year with a sophomore called Sandy Gross who was on the public policy programme. There were times when Sandy was strongly attracted by Andrei’s uncompromising intelligence and frankness, and other times when those same qualities could be almost unbearably infuriating. He could be caring and affectionate, and yet the next time she saw him his mind might be occupied by some programming problem to the point of insensitivity. When he was on to a problem, he would work at it for days until he cracked it. Even then, there was something about Andrei’s resolve, his determination to shut everything else out and solve the problem, that Sandy found compelling. But she was by no means sure that the relationship would last, or that it would even be healthy for her if it did.

  Andrei loved epic historical movies and had a borderline obsession with them. Otherwise, his only interest was coding. He had an almost inexhaustible capacity for work and the ability to code for ten, fifteen, twenty hours at a stretch, sitting at his desk with headphones in his ears, a Coke can by his hand, gazing at his computer screen as his fingers tapped the keyboard, oblivious to whatever chaos might be happening in the common room around him. Someone once likened him to a hamster because of the way hamsters can run on a wheel all day long, and his multi-hour stretches of coding accordingly became known as wheelspins. He would come off a wheelspin exhausted but wired by the ten to twenty cans of Coke that he would have drunk, and ravenously hungry. Invariably he would see if anyone wanted to go with him to Yao’s on University Avenue, his favourite noodle bar, where he would order a double helping of chicken and prawn fried noodles.

  Andrei rented his own server space for $100 a month to host his creations, but apart from the one app he had sold he hadn’t had any great success. The idea would start off with some kind of problem that he wanted to solve, and his focus, like that of most software engineers, would be to find the leanest, most elegant way to solve it. His pitfall was that he didn’t pay much attention to the appearance of the product or the experience for potential users. None of that stuff interested him – or not enough to keep him from being distracted by the next problem.

  Kevin Embley had done some coding himself and had a good share of talent as a programmer. Occasionally he would help out with something Andrei was working on, sitting beside him with his own pair of headphones, at his own screen. When the occasion arose he could wheelspin as long and as hard as Andrei. Mostly, though, Kevin pursued his own cyber interests. He had a habit of constructing personas on social networking sites. These weren’t a matter of a few pseudonymous comments in a chatroom with the face of a cartoon character as a picture, but elaborate confections with so much personal detail that anyone would think they were authentic. He would invent a name, borrow – as he termed it – a photo of someone in Brazil or Poland or some other random country, deftly merge it into images he had borrowed from somewhere else, construct a personal story and then try to connect to someone he knew vaguely or had once met, and see where the exercise took him. He would work on it for weeks, often developing a web of intense online relationships, refining his persona and adding more fabricated photos, and then suddenly delete himself when he had had enough.

  Andrei didn’t find this kind of thing particularly interesting, but Ben found the psychology fascinating, the way one could test how other people would behave by using the character Kevin created. After they had got to know each other in their freshman year, he and Kevin had spent long sessions at Kevin’s computer debating what one of his personas should do and say next and what effect it was going to achieve.

  This was the mix that came together in the common room in Robinson House that fall. Out of this chance combination of four young men and their interests, two things soon happened that would have consequences beyond the imaginings of any of them.

  The first of these things was that Kevin decided to strike up a pseudonymous relationship with Dan Cooley, a junior who roomed on the floor below them in Robinson House. He never thought too hard about the reasons – it just seemed like a fun idea. According to his home page, Cooley claimed to be a fencer, although as far as Kevin knew he wasn’t active in any sporting society and was generally regarded as a certified loser.

  It would have been easy to pose as a woman, but Kevin didn’t do that. That would have been shooting fish in a barrel. Instead, he created ‘Jeff Milgrom’, a college senior who was supposedly at Northwestern University – with the face of someone in Trondheim, Norway – who was into fencing and Japanese haiku, and set up a home page. Dan took the bait. Through him, ‘Jeff’ – or Kevin-with-Ben-watching-over-his-shoulder – met a bunch of other wannabe fencers.

  In the online discussions that ensued about the sport, Dan said he used Nike fencing shoes. In fact, he said he wore them all the time, and was always saying how great they were. No other brand could compare. Kevin and Ben were bemused by the intensity of his Nikephilia. They still weren’t even sure that he fenced. The next time they saw him, they surreptitiously checked out his shoes – Nikes on his feet. They decided on a small experiment: to see if they could convert him to Adidas. Victory would be declared the day he ditched the swoosh and appeared with the three stripes of the German manuf
acturer’s shoes.

  Soon conversations about sneakers were taking up a considerable portion of the communication going on between Dan and ‘Jeff’. Kevin and Ben competed in creating arguments that might appeal to Dan in favour of Adidas and denigrating Nike. Kevin created links to false articles on web pages he designed to look like the New York Times and the Washington Post alleging horrific abuses at factories producing Nike goods.

  Inevitably, news leaks out in a college dorm. It wasn’t long before the whole of Robinson House – with the exception of Dan Cooley – knew what was going on. Bets were being laid as to whether and when Dan would succumb. A daily Sneaker Watch was mounted.

  Even Charles Gok, who paid about as much attention to what was happening around him as the average nuclear physicist – he must have walked past Kevin and Ben huddled around Kevin’s computer a hundred times before he twigged to what was going on – eventually became aware of it. When he did, he sat down in the common room the next time he found them huddled, a serious expression on his face. ‘Guys, this is wrong,’ he said, subconsciously rubbing his own pair of Nikes. ‘This is very wrong.’

  ‘It’s sneakers, Charles,’ said Ben. ‘We’re not messing with his values.’

  ‘You don’t call these values?’

  Kevin laughed.

  ‘Andrei?’ said Charles. ‘What do you think? They should stop this, right?’

  Andrei turned around from his screen, where he was in a chatroom for fans of epic movies. ‘Any of you guys ever hear about a Spanish film called Aguila Roja?’

  There were shakes of the head around the room.

  ‘I got a guy from Colombia here telling me it’s the best epic movie ever made.’

  ‘Dude,’ said Kevin. ‘Aguila Roja? Are you telling me that’s better than Troy? Better than 300?’

  ‘Do you know Aguila Roja?’ asked Andrei.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how do you know it isn’t?’

  The three other guys looked at him for a moment. Then Kevin started to laugh.

  In Andrei’s head, the second of those things had just happened.

  In the chatroom Andrei was visiting, a heated debate was taking place about the ten greatest epics of the twenty-first century so far. The discussion had reduced itself to a dance on the head of a pin about whether Gladiator, which was released in 2000, was technically a twentieth or twenty-first century film, and had got to the point where datings of the Gregorian versus the Julian calendars were being cited, when someone with the moniker ‘Guy from Colombia’ had come online and said, ‘Who cares anyway?’ By far the greatest epic movie ever, he claimed, was Aguila Roja, released in Spain in 2011. Just about everyone online ridiculed the opinion, and soon ridiculed the person, even though, as far as Andrei could tell, no one else had even heard of the film, let alone seen it.

  Andrei was a fairly regular visitor to the chatroom and knew – in a cyber sense – just about everyone who frequented it. It wasn’t a place for dilettantes, and the level of knowledge was quite high. Every so often, someone new would appear but they would face a fairly hostile reception, a kind of baptism by fire, and would rarely come back. Almost everyone in the chatroom was US-based, and the vast majority of films they discussed were from Hollywood. There was one French guy who regularly banged on about French movies the others had rarely seen, but mostly he was ignored, suspected of being from some cultural institute promoting French cinema.

  Guy from Colombia probably had a financial interest in the film he was talking up, thought Andrei – but maybe he didn’t. And even if he did, that didn’t mean he was necessarily wrong. He had tried to respond to a couple of the attacks and then exited the chatroom. There was a good deal of unpleasant humour at his expense. But he was gone, and once gone, there was no way to find him.

  Everyone had immediately assumed Guy from Colombia was talking out of his ass, just because they hadn’t heard of him or his film before. So had Kevin. He had simply laughed.

  But how did they know?

  Andrei got hold of a pirated download of Aguila Roja and watched it that night. In his opinion, it was far from the best epic movie of the twenty-first century, or of 2011, or of the month or probably even of the week it was released. If Guy from Colombia was serious that it was the best epic ever, then he was an idiot.

  But Guy from Colombia, and Kevin’s laughter, left Andrei with a deep, nagging feeling of unease. He didn’t know if the person’s name was Guy, or if he was describing himself as a guy from Colombia. But, either way, what if there was a guy from Colombia who wasn’t an idiot? Or a guy from Mexico, or Scotland, or Omaha? Or a girl? In other words, what if there was a really smart, really bright person who had interesting things to say about epic movies but didn’t happen to stumble into that chatroom? How would Andrei ever know that he or she existed? How would they ever have the chance to exchange ideas?

  There were media other than chatrooms that brought people together. Group pages on social media sites, specialist blogs, home pages of associations and societies. But each of them covered only a subset of the people you might want to connect with, and if you were using those media, the chances were that they included the group most like you. The chatroom he frequented was a case in point. It was cosy, unchallenging. There were disagreements, often intense ones, but everyone knew each other and knew the kind of things they were going to say. A kind of shared understanding of where the limits were – the same assumptions and cultural references. But surely, if you had an interest, the most stimulating people would be the ones who were most unlike you except in the interest that you shared. Surely they were the ones who would provide the most challenging and thought-expanding conversations.

  It was possible to find experts and academics, of course, through simple internet searches, but those weren’t the people Andrei had in mind. And social media had search facilities, but then you were restricted to the population that used a particular network. And people listed so many interests, or listed them so broadly, that the chances were you’d miss the few genuine specks of gold those searches might turn up in the false glitter of everything else.

  The problem was obvious, so obvious that Andrei couldn’t believe he hadn’t been struck by it before. If such people existed – not experts, not academics, not authorities on a subject, but smart, thoughtful people submerged in the general population who just happened to share one of your interests and might have something interesting to say about it – then how would you find them?

  3

  THE QUESTION GNAWED at Andrei. He just couldn’t let it go. The itch got stronger and stronger. Eventually, Andrei did the only thing he could do. He forgot about classes, he forgot about Sandy, he forgot about meals – and coded.

  Days later, at the end of one final, stupendous wheelspin, Andrei took his headphones off, put them down beside his keyboard and looked around. The common room was empty. It was dark outside. He had no idea of the time and was only moderately certain he knew what day it was.

  On the desk beside his computer stood a good number of empty Coke cans. Andrei pulled the ring on the last unopened one and put it to his lips.

  He could hear the bubbling of the water in Ben’s aquarium. He watched the fish as he sucked on the can, and felt the sweet, warm fizz of a Coke that had been out of the fridge way too long.

  Some of the fish swam in the upper part of the tank, others in the lower part. It always struck Andrei how they layered. He watched one, an orange and white fish with a snub white nose, drift from one side of the tank to the other.

  He needed a name. The website he had created was ready to go live. Between wheelspins over the last few days he had kept telling himself that he’d have time to think of a name but now the coding was done, and he still didn’t have one.

  The website was far from perfect. The search algorithm underlying it was crude, at best. And there was a list of about a hundred other improvements he could make and features he could add. But the core of it was done, enough to sh
ow the concept, and if people didn’t like it, there would be no point in spending the time doing any of the other things he had in mind.

  But he had to have a name. He couldn’t launch without one.

  Andrei’s gaze moved around the room. It was worse than a pigsty. He wondered for a moment how come the trash didn’t pile up so high that it physically submerged them. Presumably someone cleared it out from time to time. Who? He knew that he had never done it.

  He began to scrunch up the Coke cans. He finished the one he was drinking and scrunched that as well.

  He was hungry and exhausted, as he always was after a wheelspin. He wanted to launch this thing and then go and get something to eat and maybe grab a couple of hours of sleep or go to a class and then come back to the computer and see what had happened, see if anyone had taken a look at the site and what they had to say.

  He had to have a name.

  Andrei found himself gazing at the aquarium again. He watched the orange and white fish. Or maybe it was a different one. There were at least four in there that he could see, now that he checked. They all swam somewhere between the middle and the upper part of the tank. Were they even aware of the fish that stayed at the bottom?

  Suddenly their predicament seemed to be a metaphor for the problem he was trying to solve. Maybe it was all the caffeine and the sugar in the Coke speaking, but, in Andrei’s mind, there was an uncanny parallel that had the almost unreal crystal clarity of an idea conceived by a mind that had had way too little sleep. It may have been only a four feet by three aquarium on the other side of the room, but it was a microcosm. The fish swam around in different layers, sharing the same water with the bits of pizza and chicken nuggets raining down on them from above – but did any of them know that the others in the other layers even existed? Some swam above, others below. Separate existences in a common world. What if the orange and white fish could have spoken to the little grey fish that always seemed to be drifting around amongst the various objects embedded in the sand? Wouldn’t each have had things to say, perspectives to share, which would have amazed the other? What was it like to look up all the time? What was it like to look down? But how could they communicate, even if they wanted to? How could they exchange ideas and insights and … OK, they were fish. You could draw the analogy too far. But as the fish were to the aquarium, so were people to the world.