by Hari Kunzru
At the campus gate he would smile and show his ID card to security, who waved him through to the well-signed path that led to the Michelangelo Building. The AV group occupied the top floor of Michelangelo, and he had to swipe his pass twice to access the test lab. Whenever he entered and left the secure area, his bag was checked for storage media. As numerous laminated signs in the corridor pointed out, if a disk went into the AV lab it did not come out again.
Arjun liked the security procedures. It felt good to show his pass with its code numbers and little colour headshot, and he was excited by the rumour that Virugenix was about to install an iris scanner. Biometrics were neat. The security controls seemed to underscore his elite status, to confirm that his daily routine had drama and importance. He sometimes imagined film plots in which he (played by Shah Rukh Khan) worked against the clock to outwit evil Pakistani virus writers who were holding Leela Zahir hostage. If… I… can… just… figure… this… encryption… algorithm… out… But mostly he was too busy for daydreaming. From the time he fired up his terminal to look through the first batch of new test files until the time he powered down at night, he was deep in the netherworld of malicious code, one of the good guys, the white hats, dedicated to keeping you safe in your digital bed.
The top floor of the Michelangelo Building was just one of the nodes on what Virugenix grandly called its Global Security Perimeter. After the big email attachment scares of the late nineties, the company had decided to offer its jittery corporate clients a 24-hour service. They opened satellite labs in Japan, Finland and on the East Coast, so that whenever a new threat was identified, an analyst somewhere in the world was awake and on hand to assess it. The GSP nodes were linked by two entirely separate networks: one for ordinary corporate traffic, the other for the transmission of code samples and other potentially infectious material. This second network of computers was known to the analysts as the Petri dish. It was the place where they watched things grow.
As the morning wore on, Arjun’s first latte would be followed by several more, made at the gleaming coffee-station in the employee kitchen. Virugenix also provided a refrigerated cabinet of complimentary sodas, and some time around noon he tended to make the switch from coffee to cola. He had decorated his workspace, a standard six-by-six grey cubicle, with a mixture of family and film pictures. Priti grinning at her college graduation. Hrithik Roshan in a tight t-shirt. The cubicle was part of a cluster abutting an area walled off from the rest of the office by clear Plexi-glas panels. This room contained several racks of ordinary household PCs, a whiteboard and three large plasma displays. It required high-level clearance to enter, and the analysts nicknamed it ‘the hot zone’. The racked machines were the dirtiest part of the Petri dish, an isolated sub-net on which infections were induced to spread. Once or twice a day a gaggle of senior researchers gathered round the screens, watching some new digital creature overwrite sectors of a disk or hunt for somewhere to migrate. Arjun watched surreptitiously (an activity which involved poking his head over the top of the cubicle like a meerkat) as arguments broke out, theories were outlined, and dry markers brandished in passionate defence and refutation, all in other-side-of-the-glass dumbshow. He wished he could be part of these conversations, but underneath the informal surface of the AV group there was a clear hierarchy He had neither the clearance nor the status to join in when the Ghostbusters were at work.
The movie nickname came from a 1998 Wired feature. Under the headline ‘Who Ya Gonna Call?’ the magazine ran a double-page photo, taken from a low angle, of Virugenix’s senior antivirus team, arms folded, stony-faced, wearing Oakley wraparounds and grey quasi-Trekkie jumpsuits. It was grudgingly agreed by their peers that the picture almost made them look cool. Or if not cool then at least functionally socialized. The article painted Virugenix as a new-economy success story, and its employees as heroic defenders manning the walls of the internet against the viral dark hordes. Naturally the team loved it, producing ‘Ghostbusters’ tees, sweatshirts and caps for themselves, strutting around and generally lording it over everyone else in the company.
By the time of Arjun’s arrival the Ghostbusters were still lording it, though many of the individuals featured in the picture had moved on. In Michelangelo there were fifteen, all men, assisted by a similar number of support staff. The oldest was the team leader, Darryl Gant, who Arjun reckoned to be in his fifties. ‘Uncle’ Darryl had a bushy grey-flecked beard and was the only person to have his own office, a workspace packed with waste paper, technical manuals and his extensive collection of NASA memorabilia. Inside this cocoon-like box he made whooshing noises at a 1:288 model Space Shuttle, disassembled code samples and tried as far as possible to avoid face-to-face contact with his employees. The youngest Ghostbuster was 21-year-old Clay A native of Marin County, he was an object of special wonder for Arjun, who had yet to come to terms with the Virugenix corporate culture. While Arjun tended to wear his blue blazer to work, Clay slouched about the office in shorts and Birkenstock sandals, his blond dreadlocks tied up in a strange hairy pineapple on top of his head like a Hindu mendicant. As far as Arjun could tell, Clay was not religious or even particularly ascetic, except when it came to toxins, which were apparently to be found everywhere in their workspace. On days when he judged the toxin count particularly high, he would wear a face mask and a pair of surgical gloves. He seemed to be Darryl’s special protégé, and the two of them were the analysts most regularly to be seen wearing the blue Ghostbusters splash-tops that were the latest badge of gang membership.
Clay occasionally came to talk to Arjun, leaning over the cubicle partition and telling war stories about a vacation he took in Goa, where he met a noted spiritual leader on Anjuna Beach and played host to an intestinal parasite with an unusual and picturesque life-cycle. Clay would usually slide into reminiscing about Inge, a Danish girl he met at an ashtanga yoga ashram. Sometimes, drinking smoothies through a sterilized straw, he would recount his epic fight with a person called ‘the ear-cleaning dude’, who attacked him with sharp instruments and had to be given money to go away.
Apart from Clay, most of the AV team were not particularly gregarious creatures. People did their thing and other people left them to get on with it. No one took much notice of Shiro’s habit of flapping his arms violently every few minutes or Donny’s refusal to allow purple objects into his field of vision. Everyone left their phones on voicemail and most wore headsets while they worked, creating a private sonic space that was, according to custom, violated only in an emergency. Interaction was via email, even if the participants occupied neighbouring cubicles. This made sense to Arjun. Personal space is valuable. The ability to prioritize one’s communications is valuable. Interrupting someone to talk to them is a way of pushing your query to the top of their stack. It overrides someone’s access controls and objectively lessens their functionality, which was as close to an engineering definition of rudeness as he felt he was ever likely to come.
Away from the top floor Arjun’s social life was limited. This was not a problem, since out of the office he was fully occupied with the various novelties of Redmond life (bus timetables, local government regulations, tree names) and the construction and maintenance of his home-computer network. In the cafeteria, like many of his colleagues, he tended to eat alone. A lot of people in the AV team shunned the communal areas of the campus altogether, finding them threatening and unpredictable. Though Arjun followed the workaholic Virugenix ethos (unofficial company motto: ‘Sometimes it is noble to sleep in the crawlspace of your desk’) in his rare moments away from his cubicle he sometimes craved conversation. He tentatively struck up nodding acquaintanceships with a Bengali who worked on firewalls and a Dilliwallah who did something or other for the diagnostics product team. He even took up an invitation to dinner with the Dilliwallah’s family, but, though he took the precaution of preparing a list of conversation topics, the evening was not a success.
What in-house socializing did exist was largely conducted
through the circulation of entertaining data sets. The joke, in its classic office form, was popular.
Q. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None. It’s a hardware problem.
Unfortunately jokes seemed to cause confusion for some staff members, often provoking detailed (and even angry) dissections of their semantics. A safer mode was the questionnaire. Something about multiple-choice tests chimed with the r ‘n’ d personality, and formatted quizzes were sent round at the rate of several a day, asking the respondents to assess their knowledge of Angel, their ‘nerditude quotient’, their sexual performance. Week by week, Arjun learned more about himself. His dungeons and dragons alignment turned out to be Lawful Good. His penis was of average size. He was not a secret Mac user, though his lack of familiarity with sex toys and his inability to recall an occasion when he dressed up in leather or rubber clothing to please his man rated him ‘an old-fashioned gal’. Twelve lattes and nine Cokes a day also bracketed him a ‘high-level caffeine addict’. Worried, he sent an email to a support group, who mailed back suggesting he drank fewer caffeinated beverages.
One questionnaire generated more traffic on the Virugenix intranet than all the others. Under the heading ‘How Asperger’s are You?’ it asked the respondent to consider such issues as:
Do you meet people’s eyes when you talk to them?
Do you find it difficult to develop or maintain relationships?
Does ambiguity confuse you?
Do people accuse you of failing to share their interests?
Do others get angry or upset at you for reasons which appear illogical?
Do you have any inflexible routines or habits?
Do you excel at detailed logical tasks?
Do you have to remember to modulate your voice when speaking?
Do you have difficulty decoding social behaviour?
Do you have an encompassing obsession with one or more specific and restricted activities?
Do people tell you your technical preoccupation with parts of objects is abnormal or unusual?
Are small personal rituals important to you?
Do you have any repetitive motor mannerisms (tics, gestures, rocking, etc.)?
Are you or have you ever been employed as an engineer?
Asperger’s Syndrome was a bad thing, a disease. Yet, as he filled in his answers, Arjun realized that this profile fitted the majority of people in the AV group, possibly including himself. He was obsessive. He liked repetition. He hated ambiguity. Change could be a problem. Was he ill?
Others evidently harboured similar suspicions, and for several days a stream of messages flowed around the intranet. To his surprise Arjun discovered that at Virugenix (unlike most workplaces, where being diagnosed with a neurological disorder might be a cause for concern), Asperger’s was a badge of honour. Emails pointed out that mild AS is associated with extremely high IQ scores, that AS sufferers are often brilliant programmers, and that Bill Gates (who rocked back and forth, spoke in a monotone, was obsessed with technical detail and happened to be a billionaire) was proof that high-function autists were superior to the common herd. Someone mailed to say that he had always suspected ‘people like us’ were wired differently to ‘people like them’. Gradually a competition developed, as people tried to prove that their own special cocktail of dysfunctional personality traits was casually connected to professional brilliance.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: I WIN FOOLS
FACT: If I did not have sound and visual reminders programmed into my
PDA, I would forget to change my clothes EVER.
FACT: I can recite pi to ninety-seven decimal places and know the exact times of sunrise and sunset at seven named locations in the continental United States FOR EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR…
Arjun suspected that Darryl’s email disqualified him, since boasting was excluded by a clause in the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of Asperger’s, which mentioned a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests or achievements with other people’. He tried to assess his own situation. He was clearly less symptomatic than some of his workmates: Shiro, for example, never spoke and his only discernible enthusiasm was for a certain series of telephone switches used by Pacific Bell in the early 1970s. He, on the other hand, knew not to stand too close to people and responded to body language with his own appropriate body language. But did he do so naturally, or was it a learned response? At what point should one consider oneself abnormal? The question started to preoccupy him (was that itself a symptom?), so finally he emailed the person who had first sent out the mail, and asked for advice.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
hello chris girl or boy i am wondering about your quiz…
A response came back that afternoon.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
2 x chromosomes. How do you feel about team sports?…
She had been roped into a Softball game over at the Microsoft campus. If he wanted to talk to her, she would be there on the sports field after work. He would recognize her easily enough.
I’ll be the one with most visible tattooing.
As befitted the demesne of the reigning power in Redmond, the Microsoft campus sat on top of a hill. Arjun could walk there from Berry Acres in ten minutes, and he had hovered outside the entrance once or twice, but his meeting with chriss was the first time he had gone any further. The MS perimeter enclosed almost 300 acres of terrain, landscaped around discreet buildings that for some inexplicable Gatesian reason were all named after famous golf courses. The structures were functional glass-clad boxes, with few architectural quirks or tics. Security cameras perched proudly on their roofs, and they were linked by marked fitness trails, colour-keyed according to length and difficulty. New cars sat in the parking lots. Young people in conservative casual clothing walked along the paths or waited for company shuttle buses. At the centre of the complex was a large playing field, used by staff, their guests and local freeloaders for every kind of activity from five-a-side soccer to interdepartmental croquet tournaments.
The softball game was not hard to find. Arjun just followed the sound of whooping and cheering. When he reached the diamond he found to his surprise that there were very few spectators. The noise was generated by the players, who were positively reinforcing each other with a vigour peculiar to corporate employees engaged in an organized bonding exercise. One team even had yellow polo shirts with Go Sales! printed on the back. At the side of the field, an impressive buffet table had been set up, laden with soft drinks and finger food to stimulate post-game networking. Despite the yelling, no one appeared to be taking the game very seriously.
As Arjun walked up, he spotted her: a slight young woman in grass-stained denim cut-offs and a sleeveless black t-shirt with iloveyou.vbs written in white across the front. Her brown hair was tied up in a scarf, and from biceps to wrist her left arm was covered in a blue-black coil of intricate tattooing. Against the backdrop of khakis and polo shirts she stood out. Hesitantly he held up a hand. She beckoned him over.
‘Arjun, huh? Chris. Good thing you made it. We’re one short.’ She handed him an aluminium bat. ‘You’re up next.’
Off the bench. On the team. Chris’s first gift to him.
That afternoon Arjun surprised himself, making contact with the ball more often than not and sending sedentary yellow-shirted salesfolk huffing and puffing into the outfield. His success modified his natural contempt for softball, which he considered basically an attention-deficit version of cricket, a sort of child’s bat-and-ball game with no real tactical complexity. Naturally he kept this opinion to himself; it was fun to be congratulated on his play, especially by someone as unusual as Christine Schnorr.
She was not beautiful exactly, or even inexactly. Her face was lopsided, as if it had drifted down to the left
, and her right eye wandered intermittently when she was talking, lending her expression an uncannily divided quality, as if she were concentrating simultaneously on him and on some object in the middle distance. At twenty-nine, she was older than Arjun, and he got a sense that she had seen more of the world than him. Since Arjun had seen relatively little of the world, he reasoned that many people (particularly in an affluent country with a developed tourist industry) would statistically come into this category, were the idiom to be understood in a strictly geographical sense. But there was something less definable, something extra-geographical about her confidence, a restrained energy that seemed to come from knowing things he did not. He liked it.
Christine worked for the firewall group, and her preferred mode of social interaction was the interrogation. As the game dissolved into chat and buffet-grazing, she started to question him. Had Arjun any brothers and sisters? Where exactly in India? What social class would he say his parents belonged to? His answers appeared to form a satisfactory constellation of data points, and she nodded encouragingly, as if he had confirmed a hypothesis or made progress in some unstated experimental task. She appeared to have forgotten that the purpose of the meeting was for him to ask her something, rather than the other way around. He took a deep breath.
‘I’m worried, Christine.’
‘Chris. Why do you say that?’
‘Oh, sorry I’m worried, Chris. This Asperger’s condition. I –’
