Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “It will if new statutes hit them where they live.”

  That night when Wells got home after her karate class, Jeanne Hale was watching the 10 O’Clock News, which was serving up refinement and commentary on the day’s headlines about the U.N. demands and the crippling of the dollar.

  “Did you see this?” the nurse asked.

  “Yah. I’ve been hearing it all day.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Lot of high-level wrangling.”

  “That’s all?” Hale asked.

  “No effect on you or me.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Well … how did you get here? Drive? No, and neither did I. We take the Muni bus or streetcar, sometimes a taxi, because it’s silly to own and park an automobile in this city. Do I live in a mansion? No, in an apartment carved out of the top floors of an old house that was built right after the ’06 fire. Do either of us eat that much meat? No, just a little chicken in the salad on Tuesday. We live about as sustainably as possible. What more could anyone ask?”

  “Okay, I get it. But what about your contractor?”

  “My who?” Wells asked, thoroughly mystified.

  “Your fella who’s in the building trades, John Praxis.”

  “He’s not a contractor. He runs a major engineering firm.”

  “Okay, so he builds really big things. How’s that going?”

  “And he’s not my ‘fella.’ Actually, he’s now my client.”

  “Interesting development! So what does this U.N. stuff mean for him?”

  “Even he doesn’t know. He says his firm might go under next week, but I seriously doubt that. They’ve got clients all over the world. Still, his workload’s fallen off. Not much call for new infrastructure. And all his clients have gone slow-pay, like the rest of us, so he’s in a bind. It seems dollars are scarce.” Wells thought for a moment about what she’d just said. “Dollars are supposed to be plentiful—not worth a whole lot though, but supposedly coming out of our ears—and yet they’re scarce. How’s that for trouble?”

  “But still ‘no effect on thee or me’?”

  “Well, not so much on us as the big folks.”

  “You’ll be sorry to see your man lose his business.”

  “He’s not ‘my man.’ In fact, he’s married.”

  “What does that matter?” Hale asked.

  “Not at all. I’m going to bed now.”

  “Sweet dreams to you.”

  “Shut up!”

  * * *

  Leonard Praxis was on the phone, planning his weekend getaway, when his brother came into the president’s office unannounced, closed the door behind him, and took a chair in front of the desk. Richard’s expression was, as usual, baleful.

  “Call you back,” Leonard said into the mouthpiece and hung up.

  “Do you know what Dad has done?” Richard said.

  Leonard closed his eyes. “What is it this time?”

  “He’s hired a lawyer on his personal account. And not just any lawyer, but the same woman who took us apart over that St. Brigid’s thing.”

  “That’s damned insulting. Did you ask him? Did he say why?”

  “He won’t tell,” Richard fumed. “Oh, he claims he has a reason. He says he met her in the hospital while he was recuperating. He says she was there recovering from a stroke—”

  “I heard about that. Cheered me up for the whole day.”

  “—and says she’s really a much nicer person when you get to know her.”

  “Well, that’s certainly baloney. He’s up to something.”

  “Yes, but what?” Richard said. “He’s top of the food chain in this company, both chairman and chief executive. He owns a third of the shares outright. And he has enough cronies on the board to swing any vote against us. So what does he need outside legal muscle for?”

  “Maybe he’s just crazy,” Leonard said. “Some residual brain damage from the blackout during his heart attack. So now brain-damaged Dad meets brain-damaged lady lawyer, and they’re off to smash windmills and slay giants together. It could be harmless, like he said.”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem mentally incompetent to me. He may be acting a little hyper about the money crisis, but it’s a good hyper, a creative reaction, even if I think he’s clutching at straws.”

  “And he’s getting stronger, too. With all this jogging and exercise, he even looks younger. If this health kick holds, we may have to put up with him for years to come.”

  “We can still gather votes against him. Force him to retire.”

  “How? Callie is still throwing her shares behind him.”

  “I think I may have an idea,” Richard said slowly.

  “What is it? If there’s anything we can do—”

  “Not now! You must not ask me about it.”

  “Well, why ever not?” Leonard asked.

  “Because you want deniability.”

  * * *

  While his son Richard, as chief financial officer, and Alison Crowder, PE&C’s head of Human Resources, discussed the company’s current situation and the savings to be realized by laying people off versus the expenses to be incurred in severance packages and government-mandated benefits support—with Richard shouting at this point, “What government? What mandate?”—John Praxis thought through everything he had recently been reading about corporations and their place in society.

  They were meant to serve the economy, surely, by providing a product or service. They were also meant to serve shareholders—in this case, the Praxis family and those top-level executives they had rewarded over the years—by earning profits and investing in the business. But they also had a duty to their employees, those willing heads and hands who made the business into a “company,” what the dictionary called “an association of persons engaged in an enterprise, voyage, or military expedition.” As the credit crisis evolved, as their projects in hand either folded or went into suspension and the backlog collapsed, PE&C was being forced to jettison the very people who made it capable of providing a service and earning a profit.

  The first to go had been the temporary workers brought on to fill gaps during the last expansion. Then, as each contract closed down, they had to send away the backbone of engineers, technical staff, and support services—long-time employees and familiar faces—who had fed directly off that project’s accounts. And now, in the discussion this morning, they were planning the decimation of division and department heads and the pool of senior engineers currently engaged in marketing. This was the nucleus of experts who, in the better times to come, might be expected to seed re-entry and growth in the various industries and sectors PE&C served. The national crisis had already eaten alive most of what he and his family had built over the generations. Now it was stealing their future.

  The adage says a rising tide lifts all boats. Praxis now realized that the reverse was not true. An ebbing tide leaves some boats stranded higher up the beach than others, or stuck on shoals and sandbars, while the strongest, the best-managed, or the most maneuverable boats are able to navigate to safer waters.

  Corporations which were still viable and could afford it—damn few, but not unheard of: Archer Daniels Midland, ExxonMobil, Safeway, and others necessary to prevent food riots—were actually stepping in and offering additional benefits for their key workers. They were providing premium-grade medical insurance to cover defaults in the various government insurance programs, mortgage and consumer loans where banks had refused to lend, and accelerated retirement funding to replace benefits lost from the now-insolvent Social Security system. This benevolence had the effect of increasing the tension between the haves and have-nots in society. If you had a job and long-term prospects that your employer could bank on, you might sail through the crisis with minimal discomfort. If not, you were suddenly back in the Stone Age with neither corporate paycheck nor government safety net. Of course, those who remained employed were also entering the Dark Ages of feudal ser
fdom, because who would dare quit a job that had become a lifeline?

  Corporations which had their roots, their headquarters perspective, or a largish fraction of their business overseas—construction firms like Hochtief and Taisei, auto companies like Toyota and Honda, and pharmaceutical makers like Bayer and Roche—were circling the wagons against the U.S. government’s encroachments and pulling key functions and services out of the country. U.S.-headquartered corporations with large overseas holdings and markets were also preparing to move assets and expectations offshore.

  Even states whose governments had good budget balances and relatively low tax profiles—those in the middle of the country, especially the plains and mountain states with heavy investments in the energy and extractive industries, and those in the economically rejuvenated south—offered better prospects for PE&C’s line of work. The company backlog was drying up fastest on the Coasts, in the Midwest, and the Northwest, where insolvency was growing, taxes were rising even faster, and public attitudes were closely aligned with the Twenty-Nine Points. These high-tax, high-spend states—California among them—had already begun the process of surrendering their sovereignty to the federal government and its U.N. backers, while at the same time they were demanding life-support from a partially refinanced Treasury Department.

  At one point Praxis had discussed with the boys whether they should liquidate PE&C’s business in California and reincorporate in the more viable middle of the country. He was a builder, Praxis said, but with less and less around here to build. The need for new construction still existed in California, perhaps more than ever before, but people lacked the money and the will to make it happen. He wanted to get out and work on real projects backed with real financing—not struggle through this confusing shadow play of debt and default.

  But when he put the question of relocating to Leonard, his son—rather than raise his eyes to the far horizon—had stubbornly focused on the near term. “We’ve already lost the Sheppard air base project in Texas. They cancelled two weeks ago. So the south is no garden spot, either.” Praxis had refrained from pointing out that the air base was a federal defense project and so subject to the default and collapse.

  Richard had simply exploded. “Liquidate! Why, for Christ’s sake? Our debt is way down. We’ve managed the company very conservatively. Why throw in the towel now?” Praxis had refrained from trying to argue tax structures with the financial expert.

  Instead, all he said was, “Our debt position doesn’t much matter if we don’t have customers. Without cash flow, you don’t have a business.”

  But the truth was, Praxis himself wasn’t all that keen on a move just yet. Tensions in the country were rising. Lines were being drawn for a conflict that would soon erupt. And that would be a time to hunker down and survive, rather than get creative with your assets and your loyalties.

  John Praxis was beginning to understand how his namesake, great-great—great?—grandfather Ioannis, must have felt during the Greek War of Independence. He’d had to decide whether to stay and fight the long hand of the Turk or flee to safer ground. It was an art, knowing when and where to jump. And sometimes you fell and died.

  Now, sitting in on this pointless discussion about cheese paring and staff reductions, he wondered if he was going to be in the same position as Ioannis. Then he wondered if Alison Crowder, who talked so dispassionately about shedding employees, understood how close she was—in months rather than years—to losing her own job. Or, eventually, Richard, his.

  * * *

  Antigone Wells wondered why, with everything else in the city around them collapsing into fits and starts over disputes about pay and pensions—regular police patrols, Muni bus service, streetlight repairs on major thoroughfares—the local community center had managed to remain open and her karate classes continued meeting. She supposed it had something to do with student fees being paid up for the quarter.

  She found comfort and stability in the new movements that the green and brown belts were teaching her with every class. The straight punch pistoned forward in time with that swinging step into seisan stance, her fist making a half turn from palm up to palm down, planting those tightly folded knuckles in an imaginary opponent’s solar plexus. The blocks whipped across from the hip, again in time with a half-circle step, pivoted on the hinge of her elbow in an arc either upward or downward to sweep the vulnerable areas of groin, solar plexus, or face. The straight kick brought the knee of the rear leg up and the foot forward in an arc, with toes pulled stiffly upward to tighten the foot and ankle bones, struck at an imaginary groin, then snapped back twice as fast, planting the foot again in the square seisan.

  The movements were as mechanical as clockwork, yet strangely fluid. She was constantly reminded to hold her trunk still, her head level, and her center of gravity evenly balanced between her two feet—even when one of them was off the floor and flying. She was told that her energy must be controlled and contained, with blocks stopping precisely at the edge of the body, deflecting an incoming blow to just past her side but no further than necessary. The punches and kicks were held to mere touches and taps, which supposedly would transmit their kinetic energy into the opponent’s vulnerable nerve centers. It was all precise, concise, specific.

  When Wells asked about this kinetic energy, this chi, the instructors told her it would come in time, as she learned to control her muscles. “First you learn the movements,” Judy the green belt said. “Then you learn to make your muscles soft and smooth in motion, but rigid and hard on impact. It’s called ‘focus.’ ”

  “How long did that take you to learn?” Wells asked.

  “Well, I understand it, but I can’t do it yet.”

  “How long have you been studying?”

  “About a year and a half now.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “Not really.”

  Wells thought about all this as she walked home. As a method of self-defense, the classes were going to be a bust. It seemed karate had no trick, no special technique, that would give her superhuman powers. In fact, one of the black belts, Daniel, had told them: “If you want to protect yourself against a mugger or a rapist, buy a gun.” But she was learning the purpose of the class, which was mental and physical discipline through mastering a complicated and difficult set of movements.

  She had never been much for physical exercise. The treadmill and the stationary bicycle bored her. Yoga poses made her feel silly and vulnerable. But the clockwork movements of karate—the tiny perfections of motion linking shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers into a solid punch, or linking hip, knee, ankle, and toes into a perfect kick—that fascinated her. It was like ballet, except that instead of representing fanciful literary objects like waving willows and fluttering swans, the movements had a precise, technical, even lethal purpose. And it appealed to the fighter in her. What she had long ago learned to do with words in the courtroom, she was learning to do with elbows, fists, fingers, and toes on the dojo’s polished wood floor.

  Not to mention that she had lost five pounds and could touch her toes again. Her balance was better. Her breathing was easier. And after a workout she felt like Wonder Woman.

  * * *

  Richard Praxis stayed late at the office one night, waiting until he was sure that most of PE&C’s employees—and everyone on the thirty-sixth floor, where the Accounting Department was located—had gone home. For what he was about to do, it probably wouldn’t matter if anyone was around, physically, but he just simply better knowing he was alone.

  He logged out of his computer, cancelling his personal identity, then started it up again, this time as a “guest.” It was as if someone else had taken control of his machine. Normally, a computer running in this state would not have full administrative access to all of its software and settings, but Richard didn’t need that, just an internet connection and a little piece of code stored in an innocuous folder on his hard drive. The code was named pretzel.exe.

  Richard was not su
pposed to have that program. No one was supposed to have it. But one of the system integrators working for Intelligeneering Systems Inc., the firm that had installed and customized the accounting package on PE&C’s computers, a man named Louis Petzel but whom everyone called “Pretzel Man,” had given it to him on a thumb drive, “in case you have to make any interim reconciliations.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?” Richard had asked, accepting the memory chip.

  “Well, technically.” The man grinned. “But sometimes you have to run system checks with test data that you don’t want to leave hanging around. Besides, occasionally you might need to push a penny into this column or that. This will keep you from later having to fill out the long form with the Financial Accounting Standards Board or whoever.”

  As Richard understood these things—and he admitted his understanding of modern security systems was that of a complete idiot—the piece of code went onto the internet and poked at a specific port from among the 65,000 attached to the computer that ran the accounting software. This had the effect of setting up a virtual server which bypassed all of the company’s internal security—the firewall, the logon process, and intrusion detection. For that little trick to work, the accounting package itself had to have secret instructions, known as a “back door,” written into its source code so that it listened to that one port and responded appropriately. Pretzel Man had made it sound like this was a service they provided for all their clients.

  Sometimes Richard lay awake at night, wondering how many of the grinning computer geeks of this world had the key to the back door of his company’s accounting systems—to his company’s money—but then he always got to sleep by assigning that worry to the category of “things I cannot change.” This night, he was glad to have that key himself.

  Well, one advantage that Richard had—and any random hacker wouldn’t, unless it was Pretzel Man himself—was he knew his way around the PE&C accounting structure. All of the active data and running totals were organized by account number, rather than the account name. Names as pieces of text were kept in a separate file and only linked to the numbers as needed—say, for a billing statement or a financial report. Unless you knew and entered the account numbers, you were lost in the system.