by Sean Platt
Noah looked to his left, where a conference table with heavy wooden legs was stocked with a giant coffee urn and more food than seemed necessary for anything other than a marathon pit stop. He knew it was a courtesy table, complementary for visitors, but it seemed so wasteful. How many people came into EverCrunch on a daily basis? How many of those people needed or even wanted something to eat? But that wasn’t the point, really. The point was that this was EverFuckingCrunch, and when you had as much money as EverFuckingCrunch, you could burn wads of cash to warm the foyer if you wanted.
“What kind of something do you mean?” Noah asked the Tinkerbell receptionist.
“Something to eat,” she said, smiling. “A cup of coffee?”
Noah looked at the food table, at the receptionist, then back at the courtesy table. He’d been waiting for ten minutes and she’d pointed out the food when he’d first come in. They had even small-talked about its variety and volume.
“Other than that food and coffee?” he said, pointing.
“No,” she said. “I meant something from there.”
Noah put a perplexed look on his face. “From this table that’s right next to me?” He held up his hands. “Are you asking if you can walk around your desk, pick up something from that table, and put it into my hand?”
The receptionist giggled.
“People must really be that lazy if you’re offering,” said Noah, dropping his hands.
“You’d be surprised.”
But Noah wouldn’t be surprised at all. His father had busted his ass daily from dawn to dusk for his entire life: working land, driving tractors, repairing machinery, digging and breaking things that had to be broken. Noah had grown up under toil’s unending shadow, and all it had given him throughout high school (hell, even into college) were odd, almost pitying looks. Kids whose parents shuffled papers acted like Noah should be ashamed of his father and his chosen profession as a farmer, despite the fact that Ian West out-earned all of their parents. Most people were afraid of hard work, and didn’t understand the need to reach out and take what they wanted. They expected the world to hand it over gift-wrapped instead.
“I’m unnerving you by not partaking in this banquet,” Noah said. “Let me fix the problem.”
For a second, Noah hung on the F in “fix.” It was probably thinking of his father and the ridicule in high school that did it. But he wasn’t the farmer’s kid anymore, and he no longer stuttered. He wasn’t ashamed of his past and didn’t want to hide it, but he wouldn’t be defined by it, either. A man or a woman of substance wrote their own life story, line by line, no matter how the tale was begun.
Noah stood. Then, making a show for the receptionist, he approached the food table. The girl giggled again. Noah inspected the spread, stealing glances behind him.
The table was covered in food. Easily ninety percent of it would be stale or spoiled by sundown. Noah hoped they sent it to a homeless shelter. There were still quite a few homeless shelters in New York, no matter how uniformly wealthy and optimistic people liked to believe the world was these days. Noah saw six kinds of donuts in the spread (including some fat jelly-filled ones that smelled delightful), a few varieties of danishes, various spice breads, English muffins and wheat bread for toasting (there was a toaster and some condiments near the coffee urn), blueberry muffins, and various other carbohydrate bombs. Add a reservoir filled with congealed gray sausage gravy and it would be like the continental breakfast buffet at a Holiday Inn Express.
To one side, almost neglected, sat a bowl of fruit. Noah avoided the junk and grabbed an apple, which he polished on a napkin. Then he drew a cup of black coffee from the urn and sat, took a bite, and raised his eyebrows at the receptionist.
“Better?”
“Much,” she said.
The phone rang. The receptionist answered it, taking the call on a conventional phone with a cord. Noah found that worthy of note. EverCrunch had been built on technology — its compression algorithm that squished petabytes of data into a few megs of space without a corresponding decrease in access speed — and that technology had, through hosting fees alone, catapulted the company to the top of the Fortune list. Yet despite the astonishing things the company could do with data, the rest of EverCrunch’s world seemed abjectly unremarkable, making its facility with data appear almost random.
For one thing, the company had actual physical offices. Few companies bothered to co-locate anymore, because of the expense and the way it limited the talent pool to the immediate geographic area. For another, EverCrunch used phones that ran on the unreliable fiber network. Sure, they were only using voice, but the company had internet anyway, right? So why not tie internet and phone together and cut the cord? Was it possible the building’s Internet ran on fiber? Of course not; it’d be G10 AirFi. So then why not use cellular phones instead of corded phones — or better, something like Talkie that used the G10 directly? The oddities were all small things, but they struck Noah as almost troubling. If the company couldn’t see around something so obvious (who still used corded phones?), did that explain why they couldn’t see how EverCrunch compression could tag-team with the internet and shift the nature of information forever? What other blind spots were in EverCrunch’s way? It made Noah wonder if Ben Stone was actually as brilliant as the press said or if he was just a savant — a man with a beautiful mind for numbers but who didn’t know when his shoes were untied.
The receptionist hung up, and Noah pitched his voice toward her.
“Question for you.”
It would have been more polite to approach the desk, but Noah didn’t want the receptionist to think he was hitting on her. She was cute, in her mid-twenties, and around his age. She must be hit on constantly. And just as Noah had a sore spot about laziness, he also had a sore spot around the way women were treated — even in the 2020s, while men were working the moon and the world was finally getting out of its own ass and working together. Noah’s sister was attractive. She got a lot of dates, but her ideas at her marketing firm were only really “taken seriously” by the men cocky enough to think they had a chance with her. Besides, Noah wouldn’t have the guts to hit on her anyway. He’d grown up as a farming gamer with a speech impediment who could barely read primers at age ten, and had the confidence-related scars to prove it.
“Yes?” said Tinkerbell.
“Have there been a lot of candidates coming in recently?”
She nodded. “It’s like Willy Wonka announcing he’d let a tour through the chocolate factory. The minute they listed the job, resumes poured in like the faucet had stopped working.”
Resumes. Of course EverCrunch would receive resumes. Probably on paper, stapled in the corner and detailing five years spent getting official degrees that were obsolete before the ink on them had dried. It was like the corded phone and the failure to see the applications of their own code. What did a resume tell a company, other than that the applicant was proficient at listing bullshit on a template?
“How did they sort through all of them?”
The girl giggled again. Noah thought it was distinctly possible that she liked him, but having never been a ladykiller, he had a hard time believing he wasn’t imagining things.
“What?” he said, not understanding her lack of response.
She shrugged. “I don’t know if I should say.”
“Trade secret?”
“Maybe.”
Knowing he was being manipulative but curious to proceed, Noah said, “No offense, but if it were a trade secret, do you think the receptionist would know about it?”
She could have gotten offended at that, but she didn’t. Instead, she seemed to agree and then answered the question. “I guess not. Okay, they shredded them.”
“Ouch.”
“You know how they call Mr. Stone ‘Buddha’s Brain’? Well, it’s not just because of the shaved head. He’s really into Eastern thinking.” She looked around as if keenly aware of her lips loosening. She became louder after noti
ng that every door into the offices was closed. Electronic soundproofing would be standard in a building so new, which meant that whatever she said, no one else would hear. “Anyway, he got an idea from… I don’t know, a monk test or something. They kept rejecting people, tossing their resumes. Then they would wait to see who came back in spite of being turned away.”
“And those people got interviews.”
“Well, I think they’re scheduled,” she said, looking upward as if in realization that no actual interviews had been conducted.
The phone rang again and the receptionist took the call, but Noah had already decided not to press her further. He drained his coffee and chewed his apple to a core, mentally stringing the pieces together. If the girl knew more about the hiring process, she really shouldn’t tell him, and he already knew what he needed to anyway. Even the die-hard applicants for the EverCrunch opening, who’d kept coming back after being rebuked, hadn’t landed face time with the boss. And yet here Noah was, ready to meet Stone in person. And what was more, he hadn’t called them; it was EverCrunch that had made first contact. Why?
But Noah had a guess about that, too.
The job posting had come with an attachment — a form EverCrunch wanted applicants to fill out in consideration for the job. It looked like a personality assessment, which made sense given EverCrunch’s secretive and paranoid reputation. (Whispers said employees had to sign a contract — something between the world’s strictest non-disclosure agreement and a loyalty oath, and secrecy surrounding EverCrunch’s code was CIA strong.) Asking applicants to fill out a screening form wasn’t at all surprising. But Noah had been as curious about the form as he’d been about the receptionist’s corded phone, because it wasn’t fillable. Applicants would have to print the form out and fill it in by hand. At first, Noah was almost insulted; how could such a simple detail be overlooked by a tech company? But as he’d begun to pull at the question’s frayed edges, he’d discovered a few hundred K of code that comprised a background image on the document. Only on further inspection, that block of extra code proved to be not just an image, but also a puzzle.
Intrigued, Noah had examined and then cracked the puzzle like a Rubik’s cube. When he was finished, those few hundred K of code had bloomed into something larger (EverCrunch compression in action), unfolded into a virus, force-executed on his machine, then died. As best as Noah could tell, the virus did nothing other than send a single email. Noah saw that email again when [email protected] sent a reply to it, asking him when he could come in for a meeting.
Something dinged unseen on the receptionist’s computer. She lifted her head and said, “Mr. West?”
Noah looked up.
“Mr. Stone will see you now.”
Noah stood, smiled at the receptionist… and then, feeling guilty for having objectified her as “Tinkerbell,” noted her nameplate.
“Thank you, Denise,” he said.
“Do you want me to take that for you?” she said, indicating the empty coffee cup in Noah’s hand that contained his spent apple core.
“Are you asking if you can walk around your desk, take this cup from my hand, and drop it in that can that’s five feet in front of me?”
She laughed. “You’d be surprised.”
He tossed the cup into the garbage, gave her a serious look, and followed a hallway to a door that had just opened at its end. Behind him, Denise the receptionist laughed again. Yes, she seemed to like Noah West just fine.
The man in the open doorway looked like a poorly outfitted assistant — barefoot, dressed in a loose-fitting blue T-shirt and gray yoga pants — but Noah recognized him from photos on multiple covers on many of his favorite magazines. Ben Stone never seemed to dress up… or, for that matter, act remotely businesslike enough to justify his spot at the helm of one of the richest, most desired companies in the world. Stone shaved his head to a shine and had a warm, welcoming smile. Noah felt an instant kinship with him. Based on what he’d read about Stone, he knew that the icon had also grown up as a gamer, and had fought with his parents to turn a fierce love of gaming into something that looked less dope-smoking-on-the-couch unproductive. Stone was barely thirty, just five years older than Noah. He’d started EverCrunch as a school project and, as the billions rolled in, never seemed to treat it any more seriously than that. His office had a yoga mat on the floor and a few cartoon figurines lined up along the front edge of his unassuming desk. The figurines were arranged in chronological order like a 3-D timeline: a 1940s era Mickey Mouse, a Bugs Bunny, an Opus, a Phineas beside a Ferb, a Finn and Jake from Adventure Time, a Molly Destructo, and a Bill the Borg from Dumb Space Opera.
Stone closed the door behind Noah, crossed the room, and sat on his yoga mat. The move could easily have seemed pretentious, but somehow it worked. Noah knew if he sat on the mat near Stone, it would seem pretentious, so he sat on an overturned crate instead. Whether the crate was supposed to be there or whether it was a holdover from a delivery of some sort, Noah had no idea. But he had to sit on it if he wanted to sit at all, given that there appeared to be no chairs in the room.
“You solved Buddha’s Box,” said Stone without introducing himself or shaking Noah’s hand. He’d sat on the mat, then stated the truth.
“Sorry?”
“The puzzle. Did you catch the allusion?”
Noah felt like he’d walked into a funhouse. “Sorry?” he repeated.
“I’m a bit of a pop culture nerd,” said Stone, gesturing at the figurines on his desk. “My dad was one, and so I became one too. I learned to love his favorites, so I’m not just a pop culture nerd; I’m an oldies pop culture nerd. But that’s how you get cred as a nerd. You make references that no one understands because they’re too obscure. Like being into punk rock, actually.” He waved a hand. “Anyway. The box? It came from an old horror movie called Hellraiser. That’s what the background image was: the puzzle box from that movie.”
Noah shook his head.
Stone seemed disappointed. “I figured someone would see the image, recognize it, and get the idea that it might hold a puzzle.”
Noah shrugged, wishing he could participate.
“Bah,” said Stone. “Just as well. The box in Hellraiser opened doors and creatures came out. Who wants to crack that puzzle? So. Without catching the reference, how did you even know there was anything there to solve?”
Noah realized he wasn’t sure himself. He answered the best he could, wondering if he was telling the truth: “I just like to take things apart.”
“Interesting. Anyway, you were the only one,” said Stone. “Well, you and the NSA. But they keep bugging me, and I’m not hiring an NSA agent. I haven’t trusted them since the WOPR in Wargames.”
After a silent moment, Stone made an I give up gesture. If his applicant didn’t even know what a WOPR was, there seemed to be no way they could speak on common ground.
Noah felt lost. He’d been so cocksure when he’d seen what Stone was calling the Buddha’s Box puzzle. In the two weeks since, he’d rehearsed his enumeration of EverCrunch’s glaring business oversight in the mirror. He’d spent so much time deciding that EverCrunch’s CEO had simply gotten lucky and didn’t know what he was doing that he now felt totally disarmed. Sure, Stone was outdoing him on obscure trivia, but he was outdoing him nonetheless.
“Fine,” said Stone. “I’ll stop. But you’re really missing out. It’s not like I’m that much older than you. If you’re going to work here, I’m at least going to need you to see Star Wars episodes four through six and the Matrix movies. There will be a quiz. Anyway. This is your time, so let’s hear from you, not me. I need new blood. Someone very, very, very smart. The pay for the position I have in mind will make your brain explode, but you’ll have to promise me your soul. I’m only kidding. But also not really. And I will need you to convince me.”
“I solved the puzzle,” said Noah.
Stone waved his hand. “Yes, yes. But so did the NSA, and I hate those bastards.
You still have to make me believe. Who is Noah West? Why do I care? What do you have to give the world? What the hell makes you think the world will care to remember your name when you’re gone?”
“Big questions,” said Noah, feeling disarmed.
Stone shrugged. “Yeah, well, I’m a Buddhist.” He sat, cross-legged with bare feet, and waited. Noah stared at him for a minute. The CEO stared back, his expression polite but anticipatory. Stone had finished, and now it was Noah’s turn.
“I’m good with computers,” said Noah. “With code. I can see a million ways to improve internet connectivity — not just bringing it to more people, but helping it to evolve, and…”
“Yawn. Move along.”
“I have unmatched scores in the fields of…”
“Oh, Jesus. The other shit was better. Don’t start giving me your grades. Next thing, you’ll be sending me a resume.”
Noah almost laughed at that, but instead he found himself getting irritated. Stone was too cavalier sitting on his mat, letting Noah do all the work, making him jump through hoops while he sat in judgment.
“I think you’re missing vast sections of the marketplace for data archiving,” Noah said, speaking quickly, almost sniping with his words. “Your compression destroys everyone else, and the only reason everyone isn’t using EverCrunch is because they’re too lazy to switch or don’t realize that staying with another provider is…”
Stone moved as if to stand. “Okay. Thanks for coming in, but I don’t think this is going to work out.”
Jesus Fucking Christ. The asshole wasn’t even listening. How was he supposed to judge Noah’s ideas when he wouldn’t even hear him out? What did he expect? What the hell else would anyone do for his company with its dumb-ass blind spots, its CEO sitting around doing fucking yoga while missing the entire point of data compression… not to store it, but to move it faster. That was how EverCrunch would benefit if they hired him, if this asshole would just listen for a second instead of…
