The Woman Who Stopped Traffic

by Daniel Pembrey

  “Hey,” he said without getting up. His hand was lifeless. His energy had faded from Friday’s. He was almost a different person. He looked unnaturally pale, with purply-dark circles round his eyes radiating nervous irritation. Late nights, Natalie reasoned. And yet he dominated the room. Michael Marantz sat next to him on the far side of the table, asking him whether he’d be back in the Midwest for the upcoming holiday weekend.

  “Why would I do that, when I have this?” he replied, waving disconsolately at his laptop.

  Natalie took her place half way down the table, in-between the senior management team and the program managers. It gave her a view of everyone in the room. She pulled out a felt pen and note pad from her bag. Still feeling very much like the new girl, she flipped to a clean page.

  Two things struck her immediately. One, there would be no discussion of the Friday investor debacle. That discussion had either already happened ‘off line’, or would not be happening at all. Two, for a company founded on the premise of connecting people, this was a decidedly unhappy family.

  She sketched the table and everything she could remember about people’s names and roles, keeping her handwriting just messy enough to confound prying eyes.

  Nancy asked the head of the table whether he wanted to say a few introductory words and Wisnold casually called the meeting to order.

  “So, this stuff is like, real important, if we’re gonna build this company to last. Really, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it in terms of a one year product roadmap,” and he thumbed his copy of Nancy’s presentation, which he’d clearly had access to before the meeting. It was so striking, the come down in his energy from two days prior. Like an addict bottoming post-high.

  “What we should be thinking about –” and he paused for an unnaturally long moment “– is how we’re gonna build Clamor.us for the next hundred years, or so. Or more.”

  “Thank you Dwayne,” Nancy said. “Well hopefully it won’t be a hundred year war!”

  The attempt at humor fell flat. Everyone looked too exhausted to laugh. Nancy proceeded to hand out hard copies of her presentation. Mike Marantz flipped to the back page and stared blankly at the final recommendation. It was one of Natalie’s pet peeves: give the poor presenter a chance to make her case!

  The first slide was headed:

  ‘m.ID.e – status update’

  – and over the next few slides, Natalie caught the gist of what the Multi-Identity Engine, or m.ID.e, was all about. The Clamor team had sought to recreate online the complex topography of our real world relationships – those subtle, subconscious ways in which people present themselves differently in differing social circumstances.

  Certainly it was a step forward from the ‘autistic’ software defining user experiences of sites such as Friendster: ‘Are you my friend? YES or NO?’ The Clamor engineers had come up with a series of algorithms that dynamically reformatted a user’s profile page, according to the level of familiarity with each viewer. No longer would a user have to refuse the request of a boss, or ‘un-friend’ a lover upon breakup. The user tagged each of their contacts – ‘work stuff’, ‘ex-file’, etc. – and the engine edited the profile elements into an always-plausible result. All the user had to do was upload their photos and self-description and then label or re-label each contact from an impressive array of choices: ‘acquaintance’, ‘top friend’, ‘top top friend…’ From there, the engine would do the rest, learning from user behavior as it went.

  The next slide unveiled the question that had really been exercising Nancy and team:

  ‘What causes people to reveal the very most about themselves?’

  The null hypothesis, or starting assumption, had been ‘familiarity’. We tell our families more than we tell work colleagues. We tell a close sibling more than we’d tell a distant cousin. Apparently, it was a founding premise of the Multi-Identity engine, that the more trusted the connection, the more profile elements should be viewable. But the experiments had in fact revealed something that the team suspected all along, which ran entirely counter. That people disclosed the most about themselves to those they barely knew at all. The statistically inferred conclusion ran along the bottom of the slide like some fortune cookie message:

  ‘Anonymity tends to amplify inner tendencies.’

  In a sense, it had been apparent since the dawn of the Internet: that people used the anonymity of the medium to do or say things they would never do or say in ‘real life’. Only, Clamor.us was now real life. The place where many of those 350 million members spent their days and nights! And in that light, how should the Clamor team re-view these ‘inner tendencies’? Slide 14 started:

  ‘Understanding the subterranean self’

  “OK, this is getting a little creepy,” Mike Marantz said.

  Wisnold narrowed his eyes. Natalie was struck by the curious, nervous energy circulating the room. It was flinty with tension, like a tinderbox –

  “I just don’t know that the term ‘subterranean’ sounds entirely appropriate,” Marantz was saying. “Couldn’t we use another?”

  “Like what?” Nancy said.

  “You have ‘hidden’ on the previous slide,” Nguyen intervened.

  “It still sounds weird,” Marantz said. “Come on, Berkeley psych major. There must be a better word.”

  Nancy visibly bristled, controlled herself then said: “Carl Rogers talked about the true self. I guess we could use true sel–”

  “I like true self.”

  A pause hovered with a life of its own. “With all due respect Mike, you are not responsible for creating the engine.”

  “Well neither are you.”

  “How d’you draw that conclusion?’

  “I coded it,” Yuri Malovich butted in.

  “And? Nancy hunched her shoulders, turning her palms upwards. “Yuri, you may have written the code, but I wrote the rules!”

  “Well if Yuri’s name is on the patent application as an inventor, perhaps legally we should be careful not to deny his contribution,” Nguyen tried to reconcile the room. “We should be mindful of the Six Degrees situation,” he added, somehow sealing his authority on the subject. “Although, with all due respect to you Yuri, on a go-forward basis my team does have responsibility for the engineering work on the engine.”

  Natalie’s mind was whirring, keeping up: the Six Degrees patent was some seminal social networking idea later fought over by the founders of LinkedIn and Friendster, one of which won control in a bidding war or something –

  “Oh this is like, so, lame!” Nancy cried, crashing her silver bangles down.

  “OK!” Wisnold shouted. “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘t.e.a.m.’! Or ‘U’.” His eyes flashed at Marantz’s. “Let’s just take a ten minute time out. This is worse than friggin’ family meal time!”

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” Natalie asked Nguyen.

  “Sure.”

  There was a door at the far end of the room, leading straight out onto the parking lot. By the time she caught up with him, he was lightning a cigarette.

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  The cigarette end reddened. “I didn’t,” he said exhaling, the smoke vanishing into the dazzling high-sun heat. They were a strange foreign brand – Krong Tip or something, unusually acrid.

  “Well that was weird,” she said with ironic understatement.

  “Which part?”

  “All of it! Where do you want me to start?”

  “At the beginning,” he said.

  “Fine. What’s with Marantz?”

  “What’s with Marantz. He’s pissed that he’s spent the last year pimping his underage boss beers when his boss is gonna be worth a hundred times more than him. He’s pissed that his boss’s main squeeze is two-thirds his age and now worth twice what he is. He’s pissed – he’s just pissed. I doubt he’s long for this place.”

  “Another, in the departure lounge. Who’ll be left?”

  “The CEO,” Nguyen specula
ted, inhaling again and attempting humor: “along with a supercomputer, back where it all began. Back in his living space.”

  “So, any recommendations on what I’m supposed to be doing here? Other than getting back on the 101 and taking the first flight home to Nassau?”

  What better reminder of why she’d chosen to do her own thing, far away from the madness of corporate life.

  “Let’s see – I guess you should meet separately with Malovich. Hold on,” and he walked back to the doorway, leaning into the meeting room: “Hey Yuri!”

  But Yuri Malovich was already disappearing out the far entranceway. “I need to code,” he could just be heard saying, waving an arm meaninglessly.

  “Perhaps not today,” Nguyen turned back to her. “But I’ll get it set up.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “We may need to involve one of the Carmichael guys. I’ll take it.”

  “Fine,” she said, pausing. “That really was fucked up in there.”

  “Much more so than our old company?” he looked at her. “Isn’t it always?” And he ground his half-finished cigarette into the almost molten blacktop.

  CHAPTER 5

  Yuri Malovich’s attempts at personalizing his office were – interesting.

  A Dilbert cartoon hung on a wall. There was the plastic Homer Simpson model that Ben Silverman was scrutinizing, resident to a bookshelf otherwise piled high with Java and C++ programming manuals. No photos. None of the usual chotskys or other random ephemera found in start-up land. It was as though he’d started to Americanize it and then given up, before ever really getting going. Yuri’s desk sat in the middle of the room, protectively facing outwards. He peered at Natalie and Silverman from behind his screen like a treed animal. He was still wearing that Atari T-shirt.

  “Where’re you from?” Ben tried to make small talk. It was easier for Ben to stand than fit his frame back into the borrowed roller chair, an arm of which had just fallen off.

  Natalie, seated alongside, had noticed Ben at the investor presentation and registered his good looks. Up close, he was distractingly handsome, the musculature of his torso and shoulders stretching the wool turtleneck he’d apparently dressed down into for the occasion. His legs were thick, in shape: football, rowing?

  “Armenia.”

  “Armenia,” Ben repeated. “What brought you over here?”

  “There were many changes in my country in the early ‘90s. Some good, some not so. Several of us decided to leave and come here.”

  Natalie was due on a plane in three hours and was rather irked by the vagueness of these preliminaries: “Under the Lautenberg Amendment?” she asked. One of her father’s newspaper articles had reported how the Lautenberg Amendment allowed 50,000 Soviets into the US annually after the easing of tensions in the late ‘80s. Yuri studied her closely.

  “For several of my countrymen, yes. For me, no. I received an academic scholarship to Stanford. I had been working at a government laboratory. One of the lucky ones.”

  No kidding, Silverman’s expression seemed to be saying.

  “Harvesting and Phishing: Statistical Fraud Inferences from Dark Pools of Information Clustering in Eastern European and Russian Email Harvesting Centers,” Natalie said. “A well thumbed reference of mine, when I was a head of security. And a well-cited PhD thesis. Congratulations, Yuri.”

  A smile flickered across his face. “Here,” and he picked up a ring-bound tome from a pile of papers behind his desk. Beneath was a sheet of paper facing forwards, with what looked like a corporate holding structure drawn on it. Malovich quickly put the ring-bound monster back down – “No! There is another copy, right next to you.”

  “This one?” and Silverman picked up a copy from the bookshelf beside him. “Erm, thanks. I’ll bring it back.”

  Keep it, Malovich waved.

  “I don’t know how much Tom has told you,” Natalie started in, “but I’ve been asked to look at some of the Clamor group activity, in the run up to the Initial Public Offering. As a sort of third party certification approach, if you will.”

  He was a real computer guy, Natalie decided: pure input-in, output-out. If no answer was required, none would be forthcoming.

  “I know this meeting has been hastily scheduled, and I can only imagine how busy you are. So what I wanted to do today was outline my study and agree a process for us to go through the group data together.

  “Ben Silverman you already know,” and she opened her palm towards him. “He has some additional questions, relating to the IPO documents he is preparing for the Securities and Exchange Commission. He would like to be part of the overall process.”

  “Hopefully Tom mentioned that bit too,” Silverman added, unnecessarily.

  Malovich crossed his arms, behind his computer screen, behind his desk.

  Input-in, output-out.

  “I work for the CEO, not Nguyen. And not anybody else.”

  “D’you wanna grab coffee?” Silverman asked Natalie in the now familiar parking lot. “There’s a place just up the street.”

  The Silicon Bean was an oasis of normal interaction after the Clamor office. It wasn’t busy on a Monday morning, but the hiss of the milk foamer, the loud rock music and the uniformed girls’ chat about their weekends gave it a welcomely lively feel. Natalie ordered a latte to have there while Ben grabbed a sports-juice-water and insisted on paying. They sat at a high table in the front window.

  “That dress is a great look for you, by the way. Really brings out the color of your eyes.”

  “Thank you.” She’d become better at taking compliments. Hell, her mother had been a couture model: wasn’t like she had much choice in the matter.

  His own eyes darkened thoughtfully. “What color are they?”

  “Caramel, flecked with green,” she said, and looked down. The dress was the same one she’d worn on Friday. She’d packed for four non-work days. A trip to the Stanford Mall was already overdue. It wouldn’t happen today: her flight to Seattle was at noon. She looked back up at him. His eyes had that cheeky, confident glint often found in film stars. Not that she’d ever tell him as much. The last thing she needed was another work-related romance after the way her last one went. And yet the brahma charya celibacy regime her guru had recommended was proving particularly hard going now. “It’s just a different way of using our life energy, to spiritual ends,” she’d explained to concerned girlfriends. “But Natalie, you’re not supposed to be celibate!”

  She pulled her wrap dress to and cleared her throat, her hand drifting up briefly, shielding her face and tidying a hair behind one ear.

  She said: “I don’t know why Nguyen didn’t anticipate this and secure Malovich’s buy-in.”

  Silverman was silent.

  “I guess I’ll just call him,” she continued. “What was it you needed to know again?”

  He had a faraway look in his eyes. He seemed dazed.

  “Ben?”

  “Huh? Oh – There’s an investor in the company called Multiworld that no one seems to know anything about. Neither Nguyen nor Marantz – though Nguyen thought Malovich may know something.”

  “And what do you need to know?”

  “That the investor’s in good standing. That it’s not laundering money or something crazy. We just need to be able to prove that to the SEC, if called on to do so.”

  “OK.” She looked at her watch: 10:04. “I need to hustle.”

  They parted ways. She called Nguyen and let him know that Malovich wasn’t playing ball. Neither with her about the group data, nor with Silverman about his mystery investor.

  Then she sped off to the airport, content to be returning to Seattle.

  CHAPTER 6

  Alaska flight 16 was delayed, not touching down in Seattle till 14:35. It had been a bumpy ride up. “Stick around and you may see a lightning show,” the pilot had warned. Natalie added another rental car to her collection and was soon back on the road.

  Surface water hissed beneath the ti
res as she pulled onto the main highway. The grey-green conifers, low cloud and cooler, moist air were a balm after the heat of the Valley. Her plan had been to take Interstate 405 and avoid the bridges over Lake Washington altogether. One glance told her that 405 would be equally slow. She drove instead towards downtown, taking her chances with the 520 floating bridge. It connected Seattle with Redmond and the familiar corporate campus.

  Dreams of clothes shopping on familiar terrain were pushed aside for a meeting with her old technical mentor. Ray Ott had been with the company since it went public in 1986. An early, brilliant programmer, he was now something of a curiosity around campus: a futurologist contributor to national newspapers and magazines, with an avid interest in dinosaurs. The two-foot bone in his office suite was supposedly the smallest one from a brontosaurus skeleton. He was a great raconteur, he knew the company inside out and he was a close friend of the founder. He was also a gifted architect: a man for whom there was an answer to any conceivable data puzzle.

  Natalie’s plan was to establish a dialog with him – within the bounds of acceptable confidentiality norms – about analyzing the relationships between the Clamor group data. The questions she needed to answer were if and how the site was being used systemically to nefarious ends. She needed to act fast. If Ray could help her come up with some kind of blueprint schema, and a Clamor data base administrator were made available, it was fully achievable. In truth, Nguyen could have done all of it with her. But she knew better than to hang around his office bugging him. Perhaps it would end up being just the two of them working on it anyway, but it was important to show initiative. And Tom should get a kick out of Ray Ott’s involvement. Tom had been one of Ray’s biggest fans.

  Heavy rain spattered her windshield as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled by. She reached for the wiper switch. The columns of taillights ahead wound their way towards the distant clump of downtown office towers. Still it was humid. She turned the air conditioning on. Between 4th of July and September’s Labor Day, Seattle was reliably warm and sunny. Either side of these holidays, all bets were off.