The name Matthew Brand might mean very little to most people, but within the computer community he was something of a legend, even a demigod. He was there at the beginning of the personal computer revolution, and many of the things people take for granted came from work by him and the teams he assembled. He was always a visionary, always living way ahead of his time, almost as if what we were excitedly talking about for the "next generation" he already considered old hat. Always in the background, yet always welcome anywhere, he was with Xerox PARC when they effectively invented the personal computer as we know it--and whose executives then decided there wasn't any commercial future for it! At Bell Labs he worked on bringing UNIX to maturity as an operating system. Turn around and there he was--at Digital Research one moment, at HP, or Apple, or Microsoft the next. Money came easily to him so he tended to ignore it, following only what truly interested him at any given moment.
When he'd abandoned the big boys for a start-up company and think tank, everybody knew he was into some kind of ultra government research he couldn't get anybody else to pay for, and we all sat back, those of us who couldn't get on the inside, and waited for the next wonders to waft out of that building and small campus he'd set up just outside Yakima on the other side of Mount Rainier. Nothing did, and that in itself would have fueled a million conspiracy theories, but what really happened was even better for that sort of thing.
At age forty-seven, Matthew Brand, it was said, was found dead of a rare heart condition while working in his office at the campus. Nobody saw the body, it was a closed casket, and it was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Pacific as per his wishes.
But a lot of folks had been working there. Not as many as you'd expect, but maybe a hundred or so, and after being interrogated, paid off, and threatened with all sorts of dire consequences if they ever discussed their work there, they were laid off and found other prime jobs in government and industry. Key people went east to the NSA and similar installations; the rest were all over the west coast. Except for the general impression that Brand had been working on some kind of breakthrough technology in virtual reality, though, nobody ever spelled out, even anonymously, just what they were after or why the government was so interested in it that they paid a fortune to set the company up. There was no mistaking that, whatever it was, it was Brand's own concept, and that he'd sold the government on it after failing to find either private backing or adequate capital and access. Some said it wasn't even money--he wanted the government's big computers, period.
What had come out, and persisted since his "death," was that he didn't die the way they said and wasn't in that coffin. Sure, some folks thought he was still alive, maybe some kind of government prisoner or something, but the general word was that Brand indeed was dead, that he'd died in the building, but not in his office and not of any heart problem. Rather, it was firmly believed by most from the number of accounts of people who were there that Brand had died in the main lab, in the course of running an experiment, and that this experiment had literally resulted in his disintegration.
That had been five years ago, and nobody knew what became of the work that had been done there. It had certainly been shut down, not transferred, and all of the relevant records were still highly classified, but it was also clear that nobody knew who might possibly understand or take over the research without Brand, and particularly if even Brand had made such a fatal mistake.
Now, me, I'd done a fair amount of work in VR and I knew the potential, but I couldn't imagine what you might do that would disintegrate you on the spot. I mean, it was virtual reality, not reality, after all. Almost everybody knew what it was, and many have experienced it. In fact, if you ever went to one of those supersized IMAX theaters where the screen fills your whole field of vision and you felt a little dizzy or a sense of movement when you watched, you have had a virtual reality experience. Theme parks all had the same kind of thing paired with flight simulators to give you more of a feeling of reality, and there were even small versions that now toured at carnivals and traveling shows. Home games now had visors and power gloves so you could "see" what was onscreen and move there and even pick up objects. This technology has been developed to a very sophisticated level in simulators for the military. On the ultimate level, in a full VR suit and strapped to a gimbal that allows movement in all directions and one could experience an even higher level of "reality."
But it was all illusion. That was all VR was. Illusion. An incredible, fun, and even useful way of using a computer to fool your senses into let's-pretend games and exercises, but "fool the senses" was the operative part. At the end, it was just the same old you in the module or the suit or whatever.
Knowing Brand's reputation, his idea of VR was beyond what the industry was promising us for the next decade, but it's still illusion. In the end, the body is still the body, and you might fool it in every which way, but it still had to be fed and go to the bathroom.
Still, there was nobody who had egomania to begin with in the computer business who wouldn't leap at a chance to know what Brand had thought he could do, and that's why, bugged or not, I was sure as hell going to keep any appointment concerning him.
"Do you think that might be behind this?" Riki asked me, concerned. "I mean, somebody who doesn't want this program reopened or looked at? Or maybe it's the government itself, seeing how well you'd spook."
"Could be," I agreed. "Any of that is plausible. The only way to get at what this is all about is to keep going with the flow and ignoring the rest if possible. Still, let's make sure we lock the doors and keep the alarms on, huh? If this really is two competing groups, I don't want to be any more of a sandwich than I have to be. Damn! I feel like I'm trapped in a bad spy movie! I'll sure be glad when we can find out exactly what's going on here."
"Maybe," she responded, a little dubious. "Half the time in the movies, when the innocent victim finds out everything they get knocked off. I think I'd just like all this to go away."
"You watch yourself," I warned her. "If they can't get me directly they can use you as leverage. I don't want to come home to an empty house."
She shivered. "Thanks a lot ! Well, I'm not gonna get anything else done here now , not after that . The easiest way to settle this, particularly since I'm essentially unemployed at the moment, is to come with you."
Rob was as good as his word, calling just a few minutes before noon. "Sorry to be moving like this," he apologized, "but this is all coming down fast and furious. If I didn't know better I'd swear that they were just waiting for us to get canned so they could pick us up."
"Um, Rob.... Have you had any weird phone calls? Funny stuff happening?"
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Does the phrase 'Everything you think you know is wrong' mean anything to you?"
"No, not particularly," he responded. "What's all this about?"
"I'll tell you when I see you. When and where?"
"How about an early dinner? Nothing dressy. Casual, maybe downtown. Tracers, maybe, at six?"
"Mind if I bring Riki? We've got a little problem here and I'd feel better with her near me."
"Now you are getting me curious! No, I guess there's no reason not to have her along. What on earth is going on with you two?"
"Um, shall we just say that, at least as of yesterday, I'd say there's a very good chance that whatever we're saying now is also being said to anonymous third parties?"
There was silence at the other end for a moment, then Rob said, "You sound worse than I do sometimes. Well, I'll mention this to--to the man I want you to talk to. Okay? See you later?"
"Good enough."
He hung up, but I waited for a couple of seconds to see if I could hear another hangup, but nothing sounded odd. I quietly touched the speakerphone and then hung up the receiver as I would normally. There was a late pop from the speaker but that was all. I punched it off. Bad enough to be paranoid, I thought, but when it turns out that even paranoids are the victims of real conspiracies, that makes it much, much worse.
I hadn't slept very well, and Riki probably got less than I did. Everyplace anybody lives has noises, routine noises that you filter out and ignore, and every house creaks and you barely notice, but when you're in our condition you hear all those noises and you imagine all sorts of dark figures lurking around. For the first time in my life, all the shades were down in the house, even on the second floor, and where it was impossible, in the glass-walled studio, Riki wouldn't set foot in there after dark and didn't even like it much in the daytime. It brought home just how very thin our sense of security and normalcy really was, and just how easily it could be shattered.
It was enough to drive us both back to smoking, political correctness, health, and public laws be damned. It was either that or drink, although right now the latter was making do. I didn't want to be drunk when meeting this guy, whoever he was, and particularly not if I was dealing with some unknown persons lurking about who had my number and monitored my conversations. Still, I needed more than I should to keep myself reasonable. When it took me two doubles to be steady, I was in pretty piss poor shape.
Matthew Brand.... It all came back to him, somehow. Somebody with an interest in that work knew that I and perhaps a few others were about to lose our jobs and that the government was going to come and speak to us about the legendary Brand work. That somebody didn't want the Brand project reopened. That was the most logical conclusion, anyway. I assumed that I was just part of a team being reassembled after five years, maybe with some of the original people and some newcomers who were available and who might be able to shed some light on Brand's work. My ego was stroked even in my otherwise nervous condition by the thought that I was in any way considered capable of following up on Brand's work. It felt like the computer industry equivalent of Saint Paul being told by Jesus, "Okay, I did the big stuff, you take it from here."
Okay, okay, I had no problems comparing myself to Paul. I told you this was an ego-driven business. Heck, at least I didn't promote myself even higher, but that was only because I was familiar with some of Brand's more esoteric early work and I knew that I was good but not that good.
Everything you think you know....
I guess the phrase grated so because I was at heart a mathematician--all really good programmers were. Never mind the quadratic equations and differential calculus; if two plus two equaled anything but four then I literally was ignorant as hell. The phrase just rubbed my nose in it while still not proving its own case. Any fool can assert that two plus two equals five, but could he prove it.
I could just see Brand now, mathematician, physicist, and engineer in one, a kind of computer-age Edison with no care for even keeping what he found, an eternal searcher for newer and more exotic toys to play with. If a man like that came up against something that literally didn't make any sense at all, that called into question all the concepts that had built our modern, comfortable civilization, and contradicted the science that always proved solid, how driven would he be to integrate it, to explain it, to make it conform? Enough to drive him to careless assumptions that eventually produced enough of a solid current to fry him to a crisp?
Hell, Brand should never have been the subject in any experiment anyway. That was a job for grad students.
The idea of potentially peeking over the shoulder at a legendary man in your field and also into the closely guarded secrets surrounding his death would have been totally irresistible no matter what.
At least for the whole day there wasn't a single taunt or weird call or fax or Internet message. It was almost as if the previous day hadn't existed, and it was beginning to fade back into those "Was it really that way or was it misinterpreted?" feelings. Or, it would have, had I not had that strange woman's voice on my answering machine tape.
That was my one ace in the hole and proof I wasn't going nuts and taking Riki with me. I had a spare tape, so I put that one in the machine and put the one with the recording in a case and put that in my pocket, at least for now.
By the time we were on the ferry going over to downtown, I'd almost forgotten it and was looking forward to this meeting and the opportunity for new and interesting work, even if it was going to be with the feds for a while. The only thing I couldn't figure out was what they might want with Rob, a sales manager with a social life that was still definitely not on the feds' "most desirable" list.
Watching the familiar skyline grow nearer, relaxed at the rail of what was proving to be a great summer's late afternoon, my arm around Riki's waist, there seemed nothing that could spoil the trip or the rest of the day no matter how this went.
And then, over the stiff wind and all the other people talking, I heard that voice.
"Oh, yes! Ah think that the l'il ol' view is about the most prettiest thing ah evah did see!"
I felt Riki stiffen and knew she'd recognized it, too. I let my arm drop and said, "Go around and through the passenger salon and over to the other side. I'm going to walk around from here and we should meet in the middle. I don't want anybody vanishing on us."
She nodded, and as soon as I saw her go in the doorway I slowly moved toward the other side of the boat and that voice that made Scarlett O'Hara sound like a Yankee.
I almost knew who I expected to see, and I wasn't disappointed. This time she was wearing all leather, and tight leather at that, with a floppy leather hat and an almost impossibly long cigarette holder. She was talking to a couple of men who looked as if they were oblivious to everything but her, and she looked over at me through those sunglasses. I felt eye contact even if I couldn't see her eyeballs. We were still maybe ten or fifteen feet apart, and she gave a smile, then turned and began to walk aft, as I expected she would, her retinue of wolves following. I sped up, and she turned and opened one of the doors and headed in, the pack following. I was now just a couple of yards behind her and closing, and I reached up to slide the door open myself when I came face to face with Riki, who looked confused.
"Where is she?" I asked her.
"Huh? Beats me! I thought you were following her!"
"I was--but she went through this door not ten seconds ago!" I pushed past her, figuring that even if Riki somehow missed her, the pack of unwanted male admirers would be pretty obvious. Back by the cafeteria I spotted a couple of them, and they were talking to one another and shrugging. I made for them, figuring she had exited to someplace else but couldn't be that much of a mystery. They were right with her.
"Excuse me, mister, but did you see where that woman you were speaking to went?" I asked the first one I came across.
"Beats me, pal," he answered. "One minute she was there, the next minute, poof! "
"Huh? She vanished in a puff of smoke?"
"Naw. Don't be an asshole, bud. She just sorta vanished. We been tryin' to figure it out ourselves. I mean, it's not like she coulda gotten off, right? And she sure don't fade into the woodwork."
That was only partially true, because she had faded into the woodwork. The men weren't exactly thrilled with being given the slip and weren't very talkative, but as near as I could gather she'd gone past a post--that post, over there, maybe one yard square and deck to ceiling--and she hadn't come out the other side. A post right in the middle of the damned boat between the rest rooms and the cafeteria!
I went back to Riki. "You really didn't see her?"
She shrugged. "I saw her through the window, there. That's some girlfriend you got, Cory! Jesus! I even sped up to cut her off, but I swear I never saw her come in. This is getting weirder and weirder by the moment."
"What about the guys I was talking to?"
She shook her head. "If they came in, they somehow escaped my notice, and the one in the Seahawks jacket is kinda cute, too."
Wait a minute! Think! Get hold of yourself! Either Riki was part of the conspiracy, which I didn't believe for an instant, or she really didn't see the woman and all those guys come in, and either those men were all part of it or they watched a woman go past a post that wouldn't conceal her and not emerge on the other side.
If I thought that one of them were lying, I would have chalked it up to an elaborate trick, but I didn't believe any of them was lying. Since everybody, even Riki through the windows, saw the woman, she'd been real enough, and that left ... what?
Hypnosis? Some kind of ESP that made you invisible? That seemed crazy, too, but it made more sense than any other explanation and would certainly explain how she could make herself so conspicuous yet vanish at will and at very close range. Never mind me--those guys had been practically on her rear end!
"This is suddenly becoming not only weirder, as you say, but scary, too," I told her. "Somebody so noticeable who can vanish at will...."
She nodded. "I know. But she also made pretty damned sure you saw her, didn't she? Even to letting you get pretty close to her. She wanted to spook us! What's going on here, Cory? People just don't have powers like this!" She looked around. "She could be right here making faces at us and we'd never even know it!"
I sighed. I was scared, too, but one of our ordained social roles as men was to reassure and not show our fear if at all possible. That's one reason we die sooner. "I doubt it," I tried to assure her, although I really wasn't that confident myself. "She's dressed too conspicuously and she'd be an attention-getter even in a tee shirt and jeans. I doubt if she can just make herself invisible. No, she's done her job. Bet on her down on the car deck, maybe inside a camper or van, making herself look at least different and waiting to come off. She's played her game. Now let's do what she seems to want us not to do, huh?"
In spite of all that, I was deeply shaken. Until now, it was somebody playing pranks, or somebody bugging my phone or somesuch. Not now. Now it was voluptuous antebellum white women from Mars with strange mental powers. Now it was into the real Twilight Zone, a place I'd never even actually believed existed.
Either that or she missed her real calling and could have made millions in Vegas.
Where have you been, Matthew Brand, Matthew Brand? Oh, where have you been, darling Matthew?
I was certain that all this had to do with the Brand project. What the hell had he gotten himself into, anyway?
Now I started having a new worry, one that would only grow as we came into the terminal and made our way off and downstairs to a taxi.
What if Brand hadn't been the victim of a bad experiment or faulty equipment or some kind of accident, freak or not?
If she could appear and disappear like this, so easily, so effortlessly, what was secure?
What if Brand had discovered something he shouldn't have and been murdered for it? was never so happy to see Rob Garnett in my life. The man with him was nondescript, maybe mid or late forties, short hair, dark glasses that looked worn inside or out, a ruddy complexion, and a kind of military bearing. He gave off a commanding, charismatic sense of power, but he was by no means handsome. In fact, he had a nasty scar on his left cheek.
"Hi, guys!" Rob greeted us, smiling. "Good grief! You look like you just lost your life savings, both of you! What happened ?"
"Tell you about it later," I responded, looking at the other man.
Rob wasted no time in introductions. "Cory Maddox, Riki Fresca, this is Alan Stark. He's the government rep I told you about."
I had expected it. " Al and his buddies ain ' t nothin ' to sneeze at, " she'd said on the answering machine, and now here was an Al, the very government man she warned against, and one look at him said that she was if anything understating the possible dangers here. Still, she was a phantom trying to freak me out and he was at least supposedly working for the government I paid to help support, so I had no reason to take her unsupported word over his.
I put out my hand, and Stark took it and shook it in a tight, firm manner. Military for sure, I decided. Just what branch, it wasn't possible to say.
Riki also shook his hand, then smiled and said as innocently as possible, "So you're with our government, Mr. Stark? What branch?"
"DIA attached to NSA at the moment," he responded casually, surprising even me. First time I'd ever heard anybody from Defense Intelligence Agency even say the initials, let alone acknowledge the NSA. "As I think Mr. Maddox guessed."
"You're a spy?"
He chuckled. "No, ma'am. That's the CIA and various other banks of initials. We're codebreakers. Not as glamorous but often a lot more useful. Most of the victories of World War Two were due to breaking codes as much or more than fighting. We knew where they were going to attack because of that; they didn't know we knew, and they didn't know where w e were going to do things. It's a computer job, mostly, as you might also expect because we're here. But, hey--this was a dinner group, wasn't it? Is here all right or would you prefer somewhere else?"
"Fine with us," I told him. "On the other hand, I should warn you that somebody's been going to some pains to scare us off this meeting, and they probably tailed me here."
Stark frowned. "Sexy broad with an outrageous southern accent?"
"You know her?"
"More or less. I wouldn't worry about her. She's spooky, I'll grant you that, but she's harmless. She used to work for us until five years ago."
That was a familiar-sounding gap.
"Who's she working for now?" Riki asked nervously.
"Herself, mostly, although she may have private contacts. Come on, let's go in and eat. I'm starved myself. Maybe I can explain a lot more about this and calm your worries."
That would be more than welcome, and we followed him inside. He'd already arranged for a table well away from anybody else, although there were few in the restaurant at the moment anyway.
After we'd ordered and gotten some much-needed drinks as starters, Stark began to speak.
"The woman's name is Cynthia Matalon," he told us. "She was part of a research group the CIA had years ago. From your expressions, I think you can guess what it was about, although I can't tell you more. She has one very clever trick and she can play it on almost everybody. I think you saw it."
"Would I be wrong in guessing that the project was to see if others could be taught to do it, or at least find out how she does it?" I asked him.
"Something like that. There were a lot of such people with various tricks in the program and some of them would be really scary if they weren't almost all flakes. Sort of ironic, really. If she weren't convinced that she was the world's greatest superspy, she could probably be trained to become the world's greatest superspy. Fact is, they ended the project in one of those personnel and budget shakeups, and everybody was sent home with thanks, of course. Now, we had to keep track of most of them, the ones with potentially dangerous, um, tricks, so we got them jobs where we could keep track of them. In her case, we asked her to take a job spying on Brand's Zyzzx Software Factory in Yakima. Fact was, she was a secretary and we didn't need any spies, but she would never have taken a secretarial job, you see."
I nodded. I didn't want to believe that some folks with powers like these were around, particularly if they had loose screws, but I couldn't argue with personal experience so far.
"So what happened to her after Brand's death?" I asked him.
"Not sure, really. She got absolutely convinced that creatures from another dimension, an alternate reality she called it, had emerged somehow and faked his death and spirited him off to their own realm. Hey--I told you she was loopy! Said she would find him and bring him back or at least make sure nobody else was spirited away in the meantime until she could find what she called her 'rabbit hole' to their dimension or whatever. Don't take this seriously, now, but she does."
"Rabbit hole?" Riki repeated, frowning.
He nodded. "She still thinks she's a spy and her code name is White Rabbit. White Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland, so she's looking to go down the rabbit hole I guess. In the meantime, she's been very protective of the old building and campus and all of Brand's older work, even though most of it got moved out five years back."
"Most of it? You mean that place wasn't cleaned out, sold, and isn't some other company or a dry-goods headquarters or something by now?"
He chuckled. "It would make a nice base for the International Apple Growing Consortium--the eating kind, no keyboards--which is about all the conspiracy that's likely in Yakima, anyway, but we've kept it. We aren't using most of the building except for storage right now, but there were a couple of other smaller buildings there that have proved useful to one agency or another. It was mostly our money, anyway."
"But most of that's just lain vacant all these years? I thought we had a budget deficit!"
He shrugged. "The way that place was wired was crazy and potentially dangerous, so it was felt safer not to let anybody in the labs except the security people. Of course, all the equipment is in storage, but it's still impressive and a little too specialized for anybody else. We also would prefer, even five years later, that nobody see just how it was all hooked up, since it was tied into dedicated lines and satellite backup links to just about every computer in intelligence."
I thought he was being a bit too paranoid, even considering what I'd been going through, but, of course, he wasn't really the one setting policy. It was some higher-ups back in Washington who saw enemies of humanity under every bush.
I decided to see if the question could be popped in public. "Okay, if we don't need a cone of silence, can you give me a rough idea of what his project was all about? I mean, what was he trying to do?"
"Well, I can't be too specific about it, not around here, but basically it was a radically different concept of virtual reality. Back then we were moving toward what we have today, and we had some superb body suits and simulator combinations for fighter training and the like, but it was all quite limiting and all hardware based. Brand believed that he could accomplish an even more detailed VR without all that stuff," Stark responded.
"What? You mean a sort of walk-through realistic 3-D environment?" I asked, thinking of the old Ray Bradbury story about the house of the future.
"Not--exactly. Think of it more as direct input. That's about all I can tell you here, but under more controlled circumstances, you can discover a lot more."
I wasn't too sure I followed. How direct? Input into what? The nervous system itself? I wasn't any biologist, and for all Brand's genius neither was he. Of course, that might well be why he fried himself, too. I'd love to see the records, the notes, the files, but, failing that for now, there was a different direction for questions that was far more pragmatic.
"Okay, we'll leave that for now and go a different way. What is your intention regarding the old work? Is the government going to reopen the project? Is that what this is about? Am I being recruited as one of the people working on it?"
"Essentially, yes. There was strong feeling back east that what did Brand in, both literally and in the project sense, was that technology just hadn't gotten as far as he needed and he died less of an accident than of kludge fever--sort of the equivalent of plugging too many appliances into a single electrical circuit. Plug ten inputs into one outlet block and turn them all on, and you'll overload the circuit. In the past few years there have been quantum leaps of technology in just the things Brand was using. We think it's feasible now, and without killing anyone. The headquarters are still there, and, we've upgraded the hardware. Moved in the latest state-of-the-art stuff, and the new and superior links to bigger computing power, and we believe that it will be possible to reestablish the project and proceed in the way Brand would have done in this situation. We lack only one thing, and that one thing we cannot acquire at any price."
"Matthew Brand," Riki said, sounding a little nervous.
"Exactly. So we're doing the best we can. We are assembling a team which, collectively, everything we know about them tells us is the equal of a Brand. Not as good, perhaps, but good enough, and not nearly as vulnerable to the unexpected this time around."
"And I'm one of the folks who came out of your computer? I'm flattered, but amazed," I told him. "I haven't been exactly friendly to the government or the military, let alone the spooks, over my life. I figured I had an FBI file as a radical or something, although it never bothered me enough to write and look at it."
Stark smiled, reached down, picked up his briefcase, opened it, thumbed through things for a moment, then handed me a fairly thick manila folder. I looked at it and was startled to see that it was in fact my FBI file and that it had one hell of a lot of detail about me, my life, my beliefs, my friends. Enough to make you uncomfortable, particularly with very little blacked out, unlike the officially released material.
However, the aggregate was also something of a real ego deflater. Fact was, the whole added up to very little. I wasn't much of a dangerous radical; I wasn't dangerous at all and wasn't even much of a radical beyond some rhetoric.
In point of fact, I'd been at a few events and written enough stuff for them to have kept a file, but inside I was disgustingly middle-class. Hell, the only way I could prove I was any threat to the establishment would be to turn the offer down, and I was anything but inclined to do that. The worst part was, everybody here knew it, too.
I looked over at Rob Garnett. "What's your role in this? If I ' m on the borderline, then you must be, too."
"Pretty well, but I'm no security risk," Rob replied, sounding relaxed. "God knows there's probably more in your background for blackmail than in mine, and particularly after AIDS I've tended to be very faithful. Truth is, I think I'm about average in bravery, but I've buried too many friends not to be terrified. You're right--I'm not exactly gonna be popular with this government, but it doesn't seem to matter in this case." He gave me a familiar talk to you later look, which I accepted and didn't press.
"No, I didn't mean that . I mean, what's your role in this project?"
Rob smiled. "Because it would be like going back home."
I frowned. "You're from Yakima? I thought you were from Sioux Falls."
He laughed. "No, no. You see, I worked for Brand back then. Not directly on this, but I was one of his staff, as it were. I learned the business under him, and that's where all my sales and government contacts came from. That's how come I looked up Al, here, when we were hung out to drip-dry."
"I never knew that! You never mentioned it."
He shrugged. "I never mentioned a lot of things. But, needless to say, I worked for Matt, not for the company or the government, and my classified access was highly restricted. It's been restricted since I was in the air force. Luckily, a lot's changed now, at least in a practical sense, if not in all the ways I want."
"There will be no obvious direct government link this time," Stark told us. "The company will be private, it will have a real tax-paying corporate charter--or it would pay taxes if it ever made money, which, as a think tank and R&D sort of place, it won't--and will be formally affiliated with several very big corporate names in this business who are also, needless to say, very anxious to keep on the good side of the federal government."
I sighed. "What about Subspace?" Hell, I'd put several years of my life in that company and most of that patent was my work.
Rob shrugged. "What about it? Sangkung offered so much money, Walt's dreaming of his own personal Playboy Mansion, and the odds are good that nothing can really stop the sale no matter what he says. Besides, it would take months to ink a deal, and Walt wouldn't wait that long and you know it. It was kind of wishful thinking yesterday to think any other way. Let it go, Cory. There's no future there."
I sighed. "I know, I know. It's just that you two may get most of me, but my heart's still dying a little at this. You realize that."
"It is the way of the world and one of the curses of living," Stark commented. "So many times I've spent all my energies and efforts on projects only to see them collapse at the last moment and my work come to nothing. I suspect Rob feels that about the original Brand project, and probably, in her own way, Matalon feels that way, too. Being grown-up is not avoiding these things--which are worthwhile or we wouldn't attempt them--but picking yourself up after you hit one of these walls and going out and finding a new challenge and doing it over again until you get it right. I assure you, Mr. Maddox, that once you see exactly what we are dealing with here, you will go through several phases. First you'll refuse to believe that such a thing is possible; then you'll realize that it's not only possible but that, at least to an extent, it has already been done. Finally, you'll want to be the one to perfect it."
"So, when will I see this? I assume it'll take quite a while to start up again down in Yakima."
"Actually, we were well under way before you two became available. However, while it will be a headquarters and you will of necessity make many trips down there, much of the work can be done from here. You won't have to move, at least not until you yourself feel you must. In fact, we can have some folks from the naval base near you drop by with your permission and secure your home--electronically, I mean--and key in some equipment to you and no one else. You can do it from your home, without even commuting."
I was impressed, but wondered about how effective this would be. "I'm all in favor of telecommuting, but what happens when I need expertise and have to talk to others? You don't build and maintain a coordinated programming team electronically."
"Oh, but you can , although I see what you're getting at. Frankly, we agree it will probably be less effective, and certainly less efficient, and you will certainly meet from time to time as necessary, but, well, from a security point of view it is best that you do remain apart, and not know each other too well. That means that if we must change someone in a key spot it will not cause a complete breakdown. We had that sort of thing on the last project--that is, being forced to change someone in a close-knit workgroup. We may find that this doesn't work, but, for at least a year, until we have to go back for funding again, there's no real hurry and we'll try this my way."
"Hard to say," I told him, "considering I haven't even seen the basics of this thing yet. But there has to be a way for constant Q and A access on things I know nothing about, and a quick way to test and exchange code and files without reinventing the wheel."
"That you will have. I guarantee you that you've never seen a wide area network like this one."
By the time we'd finished dinner and drinks and all that, a deal was pretty well made, at least on my end. I didn't really like this guy Stark, more on general principles than anything else, but he was typical of the government types that stood between creative people and real breakthrough type work in this day and age. I felt that if I didn't have to see him on a day-to-day basis I might be able to forget he existed after a while.
Once he had gone off into the night, however, we stood on the street corner with Rob and felt pretty much secure once more. "So, what was it you were dying to tell me once he was away?" I asked my old sales manager.
"Well, it's just--oh, okay. You know Stark and his type. G.ĘGordon Liddy before he got caught but without Liddy's sense of humor. Al likes to have people working for him that have rather clearcut vulnerabilities. He can't always do that, since with certain specific people like Matt Brand, you took them when you could get them, sort of like Einstein in the old days I guess, but when he puts together a group, well, he generally has a way to keep you very much on his side, like him or not. Me, I'm obvious. You--well, it wouldn't be much of a big deal to add a little fiction to that folder and its associated computer files in Washington, and before long you'd wind up indicted for selling supercomputers to the IRA or something. You know what I mean."
I nodded. "I got that impression. But, on a day-to-day, is he all that intrusive?"
"Not to me. He'll have somebody on you from now on, and probably on Riki as well, but the way you were talking about this weird woman, that might not be a bad thing."
A cab was coming along and I flagged it.
"I'm not so sure," Riki told him, as the taxi came over and stopped for us to get in.
"Huh? How's that?" I responded, surprised.
"Suppose this Stark's lying about her. Suppose she's right, and he's the dangerous one? Suppose she's not who or what he said at all. I just wish she'd talk to us the way Stark did. I'd like to compare the two."
We bid good-bye to Rob, who lived in the city, and headed off in the taxi for the ferry terminal.
I turned and frowned at Riki. "What's the problem?" she asked, confused.
"Well, I'd just had enough of an explanation that maybe at least I could get some sleep, and you go and rebuild my paranoia again. Thanks a lot."
She looked at me innocently and shrugged. "Any time. All you have to do is ask."