by Reiss, CD
“What is wrong with you?” he asked.
“How much gas do you have?” I leaned over, figuring if he had to get gas soon, I could get out.
“Always full. Have you lost your mind? Is this what happens when you succeed? You turn into a raving lunatic?”
I threw my body against the back of the seat, sliding down until my knees hit the front seat.
“You went code black back there.” Keaton jerked his thumb in the direction of the house we’d left behind.
“She’s trying to protect me. She thinks she’ll drag me down.”
He turned for a split second to look at me, then he put his eyes back on the road. “She said this? Or you’re making it up?”
“I know her.”
We blew by the gas station and got onto the interstate. A yellow stick-of-butter truck went by, and the distro center slid in and out of view. As I got more distant from her, I got more distant from myself, moving at seventy-five miles an hour and as stagnant as wet summer air.
“Okay, let me explain something to you,” Keaton finally said. “Women are not subtle. If they’re not one-hundred-percent crystal clear, it’s because they don’t know, not because they’re being elusive or enigmatic or call it what you will.”
The bar where I’d lost my watch came into view and left my sight in an instant.
Gone.
I checked the Langematik. It was wrong. I went for my pocket to check it against the phone. I came up with a piece of paper. I opened it. The last code.
4e 2d 2e 20 6d 20 2e 2d 2e 20 4d 2e 20
4e 20 6e 2d 20 2e 40 4d 20 2e 0d 0a
Hexadecimal. But random—no message because the text decoding left so many dots and dashes.
N-. m .-. M. N n- .@M .
“You were stupid to trust her,” Keaton said. “Have a tantrum over that.”
Stupid? How could he say that? He didn’t know her.
I was drained of the ability to be offended.
He’d never had much to say about women until that day. I was the one with the deep distrust I’d never admitted to until I trusted the wrong woman.
“Never trust a woman who hacks you.” Keaton pointed upward as if the truth came from God.
I nodded. She had been wearing tape when she held out four paper cups of Dom Perignon. “Yeah.”
“But you didn’t help her get into the system.”
“She wanted to do it fairly. On her own.”
He shook his head. “Fucking myth. No one does anything on their own.” He made eye contact in the rearview. “That saved her life. I swear to you. If she’d gone in, after what she already did, I would have made sure this entire town burned.”
The will to resist him couldn’t overcome my exhaustion. I didn’t have energy for arguments, even in my own head. I only saw my mother’s old car against the backdrop of Jaguars and Mercedes in the Poly parking lot. The feds letting me go if I just showed them how I’d used Luhn’s formula against the banks. Having a best friend with the money to invest in my ideas.
I ran my finger over the paper with the last code.
Dots and dashes started with two. I was an idiot. And a bunch of even numbers should have been enough to clue me in to the fact that the message was all dots and dashes if I just broke apart the larger numbers.
2e 2e 2d 2e 20 2d 2d 2d 20 2e 2d 2e 20 2d 2d 2e
20 2e 2e 20 2e 2e 2e 2d 20 2e 20 20 2d 2d 20 2e
It was so simple I broke it down in my head.
..-. --- .-. --. .. ...- . -- .
A simple request in Morse code.
Forgive me
I pressed my knuckle to the window where the land met the darkening sky and whispered to myself, “I don’t know what to do.”
Fields sped by, the perpendicular rows visible one at a time then disappearing into a bicycle-spoke blur. I was the hub of it. The tiny center of a circle larger than the circumference of the horizon.
LXI
Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos.
What does it take to change the world?
Mostly luck and a support system and timing. Secondarily, a person’s talent has to fit into the surrounding puzzle of the era, their opportunities, and the willingness of the people around them to smooth the path. Most pieces don’t fit on all sides, but when they do, the entire world hears it all click into place.
I didn’t feel guilty for being a guy who could make things work with quantum theory at a time when quantum theory was ready to become things. I hadn’t turned down favors or hands up. I’d had plenty of both.
Rockefeller. Carnegie. Ford.
Even Fitz seemed to know already, instinctively, who he worked for and why.
Luck + opportunity + talent + other people. There were no shortcuts. We ascended the throne because we fit the puzzle on all four sides.
Decades from now, they’d crown a new ruler. I’d be no one or a myth or forgotten. I might be a footnote or an afterthought. It didn’t really matter.
What mattered was my life now.
What mattered was the wrong question anyway.
Who mattered?
That was the question. Who mattered?
A woman who wouldn’t speak to me. I was a footnote to her.
Her name was Harper.
LXII
I emailed her once in a language I could write and she’d understand.
<script>
var person = {firstName: "Taylor", love: };
var person = {firstName: "Goose", love: math.random};
IF (Goose: love> 0) {
execute phone call = 669-555-2280 ;
ELSE IF (Goose: love < 0) OR (Goose: love = 0) {
execute memory = thorn bushes ;
execute memory = lessons ;
execute memory = spoons in bed ;
execute memory = taste ;
execute memory = voice ;
execute memory = laughter ;
THEN
execute phone call = 669-555-2280 ;
</script>
When I didn’t hear back, I texted. I messaged. I found a stagnant Twitter account and DM’d it. I wrote the entire thing in Sharpie and sent it in an envelope.
She never responded.
LXIII
SIX WEEKS AFTER GREYHATC0N
She was brilliant. She knew it too. She wore I-don’t-give-a-fuck pumps and told me exactly what I was doing wrong.
“You rolled out the software before you had the capacity for hardware. You disappeared at a critical time for the company. You let a bunch of media take pictures of that monochromatic coding team you got in there.” She leaned forward when she spoke, elbows on the table, fingers laced together.
Her last employer had said she was “bossy,” “demanding,” “shrill,” and lastly, after a few drinks, “a bitch.”
“I have an HR director,” I said, mimicking her posture. “I have a media person and a business manager. You’re not here for any of those jobs, so your observations may be correct, but they’re not useful.”
“This is my fifth interview—and my first one with just you.” She indicated the empty room, the shut blinds, the closed door. “What do you want? I was COO of RKD for four years. It started smaller than QI4 and wound up ten times the size.”
Interviewing men was easier. I had a better sense of them from a handshake and a nod. We spoke and read the same language. I felt crippled talking to this candidate, but I had to go through whatever this language barrier was. I couldn’t go around it anymore.
She was the best for the job. End script.
“Can I be frank? About your reputation?”
“Oh, here it comes.” She leaned back in her chair.
“I’m traveling a lot. So is Keaton. Deepak’s around, working on the monitor design and his own projects.”
She shifted her jaw to the side a little in defiance, as if girding herself against what I was going to say. I’d run it all through my head. She thought I was going to question when she intended to start a family, whether or not
she was going to be “a bitch” when I traveled, or if she could handle all the testosterone-flinging.
“You have a reputation as a maverick,” I continued. “A DIY hands-on outlier.”
Her face changed. She hadn’t expected me to go there.
“They needed a shark at RKD before they got rigor mortis.”
She smiled.
“We’re growing fast. You know, we talked about it last time, we just secured a huge infrastructure investment.”
“And rumor is another’s coming?” She raised an eyebrow.
She kept her ear to the ground. I liked that.
“The rumor is right.” I wouldn’t have told her that unless she was hired, and she knew it. “We’re different, but I want you to bring here what you brought to RKD. We don’t have time for timid or CYA. I want you to make mistakes fast and fix them faster.”
She held her palms up in a half shrug. “I don’t know how to be any other way.”
We shook on it.
As if reading the vibrations in the air, Raven came in with paperwork. “So glad to have you on board, Ms. Friar.”
“Gwen, please.”
Raven turned to me, every word loaded with things she knew that no one else did. “Mr. Harden, Mr. Fitzgerald is on the way to the airport.”
LXIV
FOUR DAYS AFTER GRAYHATC0N
I was obsessed with her, and four days after I got back, Raven caught me at it.
To the world, I was completely in control. I took interviews, accepted adulation and awards. I met with real bankers about real money, not Bitcoin. When I went out, I brought my mother or my sister because I was obsessed with Harper Barrington and no other woman would come close.
I attacked the obsession in my off hours as if it was a second job. Harper’s daily movements. Harper’s internet presence. Harper’s past. Harper’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Raven caught me hacking into Barrington Christian High School my second day back.
“Who’s that?” Raven asked as she sneaked up behind me. I had Harper’s third-grade picture on my screen.
“Niece.” I closed the window, lying as if I wasn’t the boss. Maybe because I was tired and it was after work hours. Maybe because no one else was in the office.
She’d brought things to sign. New hires. Resumes to look over. Checks. Invoices. A flood of the mundane.
“Taylor,” she said.
“Raven.”
“Are you all right?”
“Not really.”
“Can I be honest?” She sat across from me as if I’d asked her to.
“No. Please. God, no.”
“You’re a mess.” I almost objected, but she got her first words in edgewise. “You’re in this office more than you’ve ever been. You shut windows like a kid caught looking at porn. Your traffic is almost constantly—”
“You’re monitoring my traffic?”
“I monitor everyone’s. It’s my job. And the activity on yours shows certain patterns.”
“Patterns?”
“You’re hacking.”
“That’s my job.”
“Who is she?”
I hadn’t been in the mood, and I would have loved to shut her down, but I couldn’t. I’d changed, and I couldn’t just tell her to mind her business. “Rave, what we had—”
“Was convenient. We were friends, as much as Taylor Harden could be friends with anyone. And as a friend, I’m telling you, you’re a mess. You have dark circles under your eyes. You haven’t brushed your hair in two days. Do you want me to go on? Or do you want to tell me?”
“Neither.”
It was late. I’d just seen a young, fresh third-grade genius I eventually loved. I wanted to go home and stew. I was still raw from being dragged away in a rented Mercedes. I slid my jacket off the back of my chair. “I owe you. For putting up with me. For staying professional when I wasn’t. For everything.”
“I was horny,” she said. “And I was coming off a bad breakup. Yes, I can sue your ass from here to Disneyworld. But you got lucky this time.”
“Turns out I’m a pretty lucky guy.”
“Don’t push it.”
“Thanks, Rave.”
I’d been on my way out, but she had to get a few more words in as she collected the checks and papers off my desk. “Did you know there are cameras all over the distribution center outside Barrington?”
“Excuse me?”
“Live feed. Deepak and I were looking for you, and we came across it.”
“Thanks.”
Again. I’d gotten one foot out the door when she spoke up.
“And the Barrington post office is using Windows 3.1.”
“What?”
“Just saying.” Her smile hadn’t been joy. It had been pure mischief.
“Motives. Spill,” I said.
“You guys with your underhanded crazy ‘exploits’ and the way you see things other people can’t. It’s always been intriguing. When I was working with Deepak to figure out what was going on with you, I… well, it was fun.”
“Fun?”
“Yeah. Fun. More fun than video games.”
“You’re a gamer?”
“Yes. And I want you to teach me how to hack.”
Her breathing was sharp, and her face was flushed as if she was turned on—but not by me. I knew when a woman wanted me, and she’d moved on from my body to my knowledge.
“Have you heard of Chaxxer?” I asked, pulling a chair out for her.
This was going to take a while.
LXV
We couldn’t get into Harper’s wireless. She was too good for that. She’d never open a phishing link or download anything unknown. The only way in was around.
In the weeks between secretly partnering with Raven and before my flight with Fitz, Harper had been doing the following things:
Turning away the most appealing Chaxxer profiles Raven could come up with.
Lurking, but not participating, in dark web hacking forums.
Quitting the distro center.
Buying groceries with her credit card.
Applying to college.
We’d tapped into every security system in town, from the distro center to city hall to the police dash cams. I tracked her credit card to see when she pumped gas, then I watched her do it on station’s security video. Raven suggested we tap into the wireless at Barrington City Hall to see if anyone had taken phone video of the council meeting. I showed her how to breach it, and she learned so fast I could barely keep up. She would have been a formidable criminal.
Harper was at the city council meeting to discuss the sale of the factory. Someone had indeed taken video, and it was automatically uploaded to the cloud, where I watched it so closely and so many times I dreamt about it. She was tiny, but it was her. When she pinched her bottom lip, I inspected the video for signs of tape on her fingers. There was none. When she raised her hand and stood to speak, I could hear her clearly but failed to read her mind.
She and Catherine were going to meet Fitz at Barrington Glass Works.
She didn’t know I knew that.
LXVI
It was easy to sleep on Fitz’s private jet. The whole thing was designed for rest and work. Raven was already dozing, and Deepak was pounding away at his laptop as if he was playing Whac-A-Mole with the keys. Fitz’s team buzzed around a set of blueprints.
I wasn’t tired, so I listened to Fitz practice his speech. I never mentioned the identity of the girl he was dirty-talking from his sailboat. The Watsonette was mine, and as far as I was concerned, she was talking to Flow_ro to get to me. End.
“Overpopulation is the single greatest problem we face.” Fitz was putting on his “TED Talks voice,” which was infuriating in close quarters. Good thing he was my friend, or I would have punched him. “Why? Not because we’re running out of space or oil or ways to dispose of our waste. But because there’s one resource people need to live that depends on an environmental balance that’s b
eing disrupted right now. Water.”
Fitz was about to continue, but I interrupted. “That’s the longest sentence ever.”
“It’s two sentences,” Fitz said, pointing at the screen. “Look. There’s a period right there.”
I should have been sleeping, but I was too nervous. “You can’t just make one sentence into two by putting a period before a conjunction. That’s a bullshit fake period.”
“It tells me when I need to pause.” Fitz had a manly face despite the red hair, but when he was full of shit, he sounded like a teenager trying to get away with something.
“You paused after ‘but,’ not before.”
“You think your speeches are so perfect?”
“My speeches are awesome.” They were. I’d pitched QI4 hardware and software all over the world, selling triple our projections, building the choke on supply I was counting on.
“Then why don’t you do it?”
“Because you need the practice.”
Fitz knew I was lying and closed his laptop.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot called over the intercom, “we’re starting our descent. It’s a short strip, so if we don’t make it the first time, don’t panic. We should be landing outside Barrington safe and sound in eleven minutes.”
LXVII
If I rubbed my palms on my pants one more time, I would leave sweat marks. I clutched a handkerchief instead, switching it between my right and left hands like a fucking neurotic. When I’d met the prime minister of the UK, my palms were as dry as her sense of humor. When I’d asked Fitz if he was interested in a partnership an hour after he got off a sailboat, I was half-drunk and easygoing. I’d taken calculated risk after calculated risk in the past month and never lost sleep over it.
