by Vernor Vinge
And Juan finished, “—no matter what really happened, we’re all best to keep our mouths shut about certain things.”
She nodded.
BERTIE FOLLOWED JUAN home from Miri’s house, arguing, wheedling, demanding all the way. He wanted to know what Miri had been up to, what all they had done and seen. When Juan wouldn’t give him more than the engineering data from the dungballs, Bertie had got fully dipped, kicked Juan off their unlimited team, and rejected all connections. It was a total Freeze Out. By the time Juan got home, he could barely put up a good front for his ma.
But strangely enough, Juan slept well that night. He woke to morning sunlight splashing across his room. Then he remembered: Bertie’s total Freeze Out. I should be frantic. This could mean he’d fail the unlimited and lose his best friend. Instead, more than anything else, Juan felt like…he was free.
Juan slipped on his clothes and contacts, and wandered downstairs. Usually, he’d be all over the net about now, synching with the world, finding out what his friends had done while he was wasting time asleep. He’d get to that eventually; it would be just as much fun as ever. But just now the silence was a pleasure. There were a dozen red “please reply” lights gleaming in front of his eyes—mostly from Bertie. The message headers were random flails. This was the first time one of Bertie’s Freeze Outs had not ended because Juan came groveling.
Ma looked up from her breakfast. “You’re off-line,” she said.
“Yeah.” He slouched onto a chair and started eating cereal. His father smiled absently at him and went on eating. Pa’s eyes were very far away, his posture kind of slumped.
Ma looked back and forth between them, and a shadow crossed her face. Juan straightened up a little and made sure she saw his smile. “I’m just tired out from all the hiking around.” Suddenly, he remembered something. “Hey, thanks for the maps, Ma.”
She looked puzzled.
“Miri used 411 for recent information on Torrey Pines.”
“Oh!” Ma’s face lit up. There were a number of 411 services in San Diego County, but this was her kind of thing. “Did the test go well?”
“Dunno yet.” They ate in silence for a moment. “I expect I’ll know later today.” He looked across the table at her. “Hey, you’re off-line, too.”
She grimaced and gave him a little grin. “An unintended vacation. The movie people dropped their reservations for tour time.”
“…Oh.” Just what you’d expect if the operation in East County was related to what they’d found in Torrey Pines. Miri would have seen the cancellation as significant evidence. Maybe it was. But he and Miri had turned in their project report last night, the first local exam to complete. If she were right about the mice, Foxwarner was sure to know by now that their project had been outed, and you’d think they’d have launched publicity. And yet, there were no bulletins; just Bertie and a few other students pinging away at him.
Give it till dinnertime. That’s how long Miri said it might take for a major cinema organization to move into action. Real or movie, they should know by then. And his own secret? It would be outed…or not.
Juan had a second serving of cereal.
SINCE HE HAD A MORNING EXAM, Ma let him take a car to Fairmont. He made it to school with time to spare.
The vocational exam was for individuals, and you weren’t allowed to search beyond the classroom. As with Ms. Wilson’s math exam, the faculty had dug up some hoary piece of business that no reasonable person would ever bother with. For the vocational test, the topic would be a work specialty.
And today…it was Regna 5.
When Regna had been hot, back in Pa’s day, tech schools had taken three years of training to turn out competent Regna practitioners.
It was a snap. Juan spent a couple of hours scanning through the manuals, integrating the skills…and then he was ready for the programming task, some cross-corporate integration nonsense.
He was out by noon, with an A.
Vernor Vinge has been nominated six times for the Hugo Award, winning twice for his novels A Fire upon the Deep (1992) and A Deepness in the Sky (1999). In addition, Vinge received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Prometheus Award for A Deepness in the Sky. In the course of his long and extraordinary career, he has become widely known for his ability to blend adventure, emotion, and amazingly original science fiction concepts, an ability epitomized in his groundbreaking short novel, True Names. A mathematician and computer scientist, Vinge is often asked to speak to academic and business groups about his insights in the field of artificial intelligence. He currently resides in San Diego, California.
THE COOKIE MONSTER
“So how do you like the new job?”
Dixie Mae looked up from her keyboard and spotted a pimply face peering at her from over the cubicle partition.
“It beats flipping burgers, Victor,” she said.
Victor bounced up so his whole face was visible. “Yeah? It’s going to get old awfully fast.”
Actually, Dixie Mae felt the same way. But doing customer support at Lotsa-Tech was a real job, a foot in the door at the biggest high-tech company in the world. “Gimme a break, Victor! This is our first day.” Well, it was the first day not counting the six days of product familiarization classes. “If you can’t take this, you’ve got the attention span of a cricket.”
“That’s a mark of intelligence, Dixie Mae. I’m smart enough to know what’s not worth the attention of a first-rate creative mind.”
Grr. “Then your first-rate creative mind is going to be out of its gourd by the end of the summer.”
Victor smirked. “Good point.” He thought a second, then continued more quietly, “But see, um, I’m doing this to get material for my column in the Bruin. You know, big headlines like ‘The New Sweatshops’ or ‘Death by Boredom’. I haven’t decided whether to play it for laughs or go for heavy social consciousness. In any case,”—he lowered his voice another notch—“I’m bailing out of here, um, by the end of next week, thus suffering only minimal brain damage from the whole sordid experience.”
“And you’re not seriously helping the customers at all, huh, Victor? Just giving them hilarious misdirections?”
Victor’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ll have you know I’m being articulate and seriously helpful…at least for another day or two.” The weasel grin crawled back onto his face. “I won’t start being Bastard Consultant from Hell till right before I quit.”
That figures. Dixie Mae turned back to her keyboard. “Okay, Victor. Meantime, how about letting me do the job I’m being paid for?”
Silence. Angry, insulted silence? No, this was more a leering, undressing-you-with-my-eyes silence. But Dixie Mae did not look up. She could tolerate such silence as long as the leerer was out of arm’s reach.
After a moment, there was the sound of Victor dropping back into his chair in the next cubicle.
Ol’ Victor had been a pain in the neck from the get-go. He was slick with words; if he wanted to, he could explain things as good as anybody Dixie Mae had ever met. At the same time, he kept rubbing it in how educated he was and what a dead-end this customer support gig was. Mr. Johnson—the guy running the familiarization course—was a great teacher, but smart-ass Victor had tested the man’s patience all week long. Yeah, Victor really didn’t belong here, but not for the reasons he bragged about.
It took Dixie Mae almost an hour to finish off seven more queries. One took some research, being a really bizarre question about Voxalot for Norwegian. Okay, this Job would get old after a few days, but there was a virtuous feeling in helping people. And from Mr. Johnson’s lectures, she knew that as long as she got the reply turned in by closing time this evening, she could spend the whole afternoon researching just how to make LotsaTech’s vox program recognize Norwegian vowels.
Dixie Mae had never done customer support before this; till she took Prof. Reich’s tests last week, her highest-paying job really had been flipping burgers. But like the world and
your Aunt Sally, she had often been the victim of customer support. Dixie Mae would buy a new book or a cute dress, and it would break or wouldn’t fit—and then when she wrote customer support, they wouldn’t reply, or had useless canned answers, or just tried to sell her something more—all the time talking about how their greatest goal was serving the customer.
But now LotsaTech was turning all that around. Their top bosses had realized how important real humans were to helping real human customers. They were hiring hundreds and hundreds of people like Dixie Mae. They weren’t paying very much, and this first week had been kinda tough since they were all cooped up here during the crash intro classes.
But Dixie Mae didn’t mind. “LotsaTech is a lot of Tech.” Before, she’d always thought that motto was stupid. But LotsaTech was big, it made IBM and Microsoft look like minnows. She’d been a little nervous about that, imagining that she’d end up in a room bigger than a football field with tiny office cubicles stretching away to the horizon. Well, Building 0994 did have tiny cubicles, but her team was just fifteen nice people—leaving Victor aside for the moment. Their work floor had windows all the way around, a panoramic view of the Santa Monica mountains and the Los Angeles basin. And li’l ol’ Dixie Mae Leigh had her a desk right beside one of those wide windows! I’ll bet there are CEO’s who don’t have a view as good as mine. Here’s where you could see a little of what the Lotsa in LotsaTech meant. Just outside of B0994 there were tennis courts and a swimming pool. Dozens of similar buildings were scattered across the hillside. A golf course covered the next hill over, and more company land lay beyond that. These guys had the money to buy the top off Runyon Canyon and plunk themselves down on it. And this was just the LA branch office.
Dixie Mae had grown up in Tarzana. On a clear day in the valley, you could see the Santa Monica mountains stretching off forever into the haze. They seemed beyond her reach, like something from a fairy tale. And now she was up here. Next week, she’d bring her binoculars to work, go over on the north slope, and maybe spot where her father still lived down there.
Meanwhile, back to work. The next six queries were easy, from people who hadn’t even bothered to read the single page of directions that came with Voxalot. Letters like those would be hard to answer politely the thousandth time she saw them. But she would try—and today she practiced with cheerful specifics that stated the obvious and gently pointed the customers to where they could find more. Then came a couple of brain twisters. Damn. She wouldn’t be able to finish those today. Mr. Johnson said “finish anything you start on the same day”—but maybe he would let her work on those first thing Monday morning. She really wanted to do well on the hard ones. Every day, there would be the same old dumb questions. But there would also be hard new questions. And eventually she’d get really, really good with Voxalot. More important, she’d get good about managing questions and organization. So what that she’d screwed the last seven years of her life and never made it through college? Little by little she would improve herself, till a few years from now her past stupidities wouldn’t matter anymore. Some people had told her that such things weren’t possible nowadays, that you really needed the college degree. But people had always been able to make it with hard work. Back in the twentieth century, lots of steno pool people managed it. Dixie Mae figured customer support was pretty much the same kind of starting point.
Nearby, somebody gave out a low whistle. Victor. Dixie Mae ignored him.
“Dixie Mae, you gotta see this.”
Ignore him.
“I swear Dixie, this is a first. How did you do it? I got an incoming query for you, by name! Well, almost.”
“What!? Forward it over here, Victor.”
“No. Come around and take a look. I have it right in front of me.”
Dixie Mae was too short to look over the partition. Jeez.
Three steps took her into the corridor. Ulysse Green poked her head out of her cubicle, an inquisitive look on her face. Dixie Mae shrugged and rolled her eyes, and Ulysse returned to her work. The sound of fingers on keys was like occasional raindrops (no Voxalots allowed in cubicle-land). Mr. Johnson had been around earlier, answering questions and generally making sure things were going okay. Right now he should be back in his office on the other side of the building; this first day, you hardly needed to worry about slackers. Dixie Mae felt a little guilty about making that a lie, but…
She popped into Victor’s cubicle, grabbed a loose chair. “This better be good, Victor.”
“Judge for yourself, Dixie Mae.” He looked at his display. “Oops, I lost the window. Just a second.” He dinked around with his mouse. “So, have you been putting your name on outgoing messages? That’s the only way I can imagine this happening—”
“No. I have not. I’ve answered twenty-two questions so far, and I’ve been AnnetteG all the way.” The fake signature was built into her “send” key. Mr. Johnson said this was to protect employee privacy and give users a feeling of continuity even though follow-up questions would rarely come to the original responder. He didn’t have to say that it was also to make sure that LotsaTech support people would be interchangeable, whether they were working out of the service center in Lahore or Londonderry—or Los Angeles. So far, that had been one of Dixie Mae’s few disappointments about this job; she could never have an ongoing helpful relationship with a customer.
So what the devil was this all about?
“Ah! Here it is.” Victor waved at the screen. “What do you make of it?”
The message had come in on the help address. It was in the standard layout enforced by the query acceptance page. But the “previous responder field” was not one of the house sigs. Instead it was:
Ditzie May Lay
“Grow up, Victor.”
Victor raised his hands in mock defense, but he had seen her expression, and some of the smirk left his face. “Hey, Dixie Mae, don’t kill the messenger. This is just what came in.”
“No way. The server-side script would have rejected an invalid responder name. You faked this.”
For a fleeting moment, Victor looked uncertain. Hah! thought Dixie Mae. She had been paying attention during Mr. Johnson’s lectures; she knew more about what was going on here than Victor-the-great-mind. And so his little joke had fallen flat on its rear end. But Victor regrouped and gave a weak smile. “It wasn’t me. How would I know about this, er, nickname of yours?”
“Yes,” said Dixie Mae, “it takes real genius to come up with such a clever play on words.”
“Honest, Dixie Mae, it wasn’t me. Hell, I don’t even know how to use our form editor to revise header fields.”
Now that claim had the ring of truth.
“What’s happening?”
They looked up, saw Ulysse standing at the entrance to the cubicle.
Victor gave her a shrug. “It’s Dit—Dixie Mae. Someone here at LotsaTech is jerking her around.”
Ulysse came closer and bent to read from the display. “Yech. So what’s the message?”
Dixie Mae reached across the desk and scrolled down the display. The return address was [email protected]. The topic choice was “Voice Formatting,” They got lots on that topic; Voxalot format control wasn’t quite as intuitive as the ads would like you to believe.
But this was by golly not a follow-up on anything Dixie Mae had answered:
…
HEY THERE, HONEY CHILE! I’LL BE TRULY GRATEFUL IF YOU WOULD TELL ME HOW TO PUT THE FOLLOWING INTO ITALICS:
“REMEMBER THE TARZANARAMA TREE HOUSE? THE ONE YOU SET ON FIRE? IF YOU’D LIKE TO START A MUCH BIGGER FIRE, THEN FIGURE OUT HOW I KNOW ALL THIS. A BIG CLUE IS THAT 999 IS 666 SPELLED UPSIDE DOWN.”
I’VE TRIED EVERYTHING AND I CAN’T SET THE ABOVE PROPOSITION INTO INDENTED ITALICS—LEASTWISE WITHOUT FINGERING. PLEASE HELP.
ACHING FOR SOME OF YOUR SOUTHRON HOSPITALITY, I REMAIN YOUR VERY BESTEST FIEND,
—LUSTING (FOR YOU DEEPLY)
Ulysse’s voice was dry: “So, Vi
ctor, you’ve figured how to edit incoming forms.”
“God damn it, I’m innocent!”
“Sure you are.” Ulysse’s white teeth flashed in her black face. The three little words held a world of disdain.
Dixie Mae held up her hand, waving them both to silence. “I…don’t know. There’s something real strange about this mail.” She stared at the message body for several seconds. A big ugly chill was growing in her middle. Mom and Dad had built her that tree house when she was seven years old. Dixie Mae had loved it. For two years she was Tarzana of Tarzana. But the name of the tree house—Tarzanarama—had been a secret. Dixie Mae had been nine years old when she torched that marvelous tree house. It had been a terrible accident. Well, a world-class temper tantrum, actually. But she had never meant the fire to get so far out of control. The fire had darn near burned down their real house, too. She had been a scarifyingly well-behaved little girl for almost two years after that incident.
Ulysse was giving the mail a careful read. She patted Dixie Mae on the shoulder. “Whoever this is, he certainly doesn’t sound friendly.”
Dixie Mae nodded. “This weasel is pushing every button I’ve got.” Including her curiosity. Dad was the only living person that knew who had started the fire, but it was going on four years since he’d had any address for his daughter—and Daddy would never have taken this sex-creep, disrespecting tone.
Victor glanced back and forth between them, maybe feeling hurt that he was no longer the object of suspicion. “So who do you think it is?”
Don Williams craned his head over the next partition. “Who is what?”
Given another few minutes, and they’d have everyone on the floor with some bodily part stuck into Victor’s cubicle.
Ulysse said, “Unless you’re deaf, you know most of it, Don, Someone is messing with us.”
“Well then, report it to Johnson. This is our first day, people. It’s not a good day to get sidetracked.”
