Bleeding Edge (7 page)

“Maybe I’ll find a job first, then surprise everybody. Just don’t want you thinkin too badly of me. I know it looks like I’m running away from
something, but New York is really where I’ve been running away, and now there’s about to be a whole continent between me and my kids. Too far.”

•   •   •

IT IS MAXINE’S
practice when checking into little start-ups like hwgaahwgh.com to also have a look at any investors in the picture. If somebody stands to lose money, there’s always a chance, emergency-vehicle exhaust-fume issues or whatever, they’ll want to hire Maxine. The name that keeps popping up in connection with hwgaahwgh is a VC down in SoHo, doing business as Streetlight People. As in “Don’t Stop Believing,” Maxine imagines. Among whose listed clients—coincidence, no doubt—also happens to be hashslingrz.

Streetlight People is located in a cast-iron-front ex-factory space somewhat off the major shopping routes around SoHo. Karmic echoes of the sweatshop era long smoothed away by portable soundbreaks, screens and carpeting, passed into a neutral, unhaunted hush. Buddy Nightingale seating in a spectrum of hesitant aquas, daffodils, and fuchsias, brushed-nickel workstations custom-designed by Zooey Chu, punctuated now and then with black leather bosses’ chairs by Otto Zapf.

If asked, Rockwell “Rocky” Slagiatt would explain that losing the vowel at the end of his name was the price of smoothness and rhythm in doing business, like lyrics in an opera. Actually he thought it would sound more Anglo, though for special visitors, of whom Maxine today seems to be one, he is known to suddenly flip polarity and become disingenuously ethnic again.

“Hey! You want sum’na eat? Peppuhvr-n-egg sangwidge.”

“Thanks, but I just—”

“My
mothuh’s
peppuhvr-n-egg sangwidge.”

“Well, Mr. Slagiatt, that depends. Do you mean it’s your mother’s recipe? or, it’s, like, her personal pepper-and-egg sandwich, that for some reason she keeps in that credenza there instead of a fridge where it should be?” From her studies with Shawn, Maxine is trained in the exotic
Asian technique known as “False Eating,” so if it comes to it, she’ll only have to
make believe
eat the pepper-and-egg sandwich, which despite its authentic appearance could be poisoned with almost anything.

“’t’s ahright!” grabbing back the object, now seen actually to have an unnatural wobble to it. “It’s plastic!” throwing it in a desk drawer.

“Little hard to chew.”

“You’re a sport, Maxi, it’s OK I call you that, Maxi?”

“Sure. OK if I don’t call you Rocky?”

“Your choice, no rush,” suddenly, for a moment, Cary Grant. What? Somewhere on Maxine’s perimeter, long-disused antennas quiver and begin to track.

He picks up the phone. “Hold my calls, OK? What? Talk to me . . . Nah. Nah, the drag-along is set in cement. The full ratchet, maybe doable, but see Spud on that.” Ringing off, summoning a file onto his screen. “OK. This is about the recently belly-up hwgaahwgh dotcom.”

“For whom you are, or should I say were, their VC.”

“Yeah, we did their Series A. Since then we been tryin to evolve to more of a mezz posture here, early stages are way too easy, the real challenge,” busy tapping keys, “comes in structuring the tranches . . . valuing the company, where you get the Wayne Gretzky Principle of where the puck is gonna be instead of where it is now, see what I’m saying.”

“How about where it was?”

Squinting at the screen, “Part of the doo-doo diligence is, is we keep these daily logs, it all gets archived, impressions, hopes and fears . . . Looks like . . . even back puttin together the term sheet, these guys were being way too picky about liquidation preferences. Took days more than it should. We ended up with a 1-X multiple on only a little tiny position, so . . . without wishing to pry, why you come zoomin in on us about this?”

“Are you upset by unwelcome attention, Mr. Slagiatt?”

“Ain’t like we’re loan sharks here. Look up on that shelf.”

She looks. “You . . . have a company bowling team.”

“Industry awards, Max. Since that thing with the Wells notice in ’98?
our wake-up call,” earnest as a victim on a talk show, “we all went up to Lake George on retreat, shared our feelings totally, took a vote, cleaned up our act, those days are behind us now.”

“Congratulations. Always a plus to find a moral dimension. Maybe it’ll help you appreciate some funny numbers I found.”

She fills him in on the Benford-curve and other discrepancies at hashslingrz. “Prominent among payees of these fishy expenditures is hwgaahwgh.com. What’s strange is that after the company is liquidated, the amounts paid to it grow dramatically even more lavish and it all seems to be disappearing someplace offshore.”

“Fuckin Gabriel Ice.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“The book on this guy is he takes a position, typically less than five percent, in each of a whole portfolio of start-ups he knows from running Altman-Z’s on them are gonna fail within a short-term horizon. Uses them as shells for funds he wants to move around inconspicuously. Hwgaahwgh seems to be one of these. Where to and what for, ya got to wonder, huh?”

“Working on that.”

“Mind if I ask, who got you onto this?”

“Somebody who’d rather not be involved. Meantime, I see from your client list you also do some business with Gabriel Ice.”

“Not me directly, not for a while.”

“No schmoozing with Ice in any social way? you and maybe even . . .” head-gesturing at a framed photo on Rocky’s desk.

“That would be Cornelia,” nods Rocky.

Maxine waves at the picture. “How do you do, I’m sure.”

“Not only a looker as you can see, but a elegant hostess from the old school. Equal to any social challenge.”

“Gabriel Ice, he’s . . . challenging?”

“OK, we been out to dinner, once. Twice maybe. Places on the East Side a guy comes by with a grater and a truffle, grates it all over your food till you say stop? Vintage dates on the Champagne, so forth—with
ol’ Gabe it’s always about the price . . . Ain’t seen either of them since maybe last summer out in the Hamptons.”

“The Hamptons. It figures.” Glittering rat hole and summertime home to America’s rich, famous, and a vast seasonal inflow of yup wannabes. Half Maxine’s business sooner or later tracks back to somebody’s need for the diseased Hamptons fantasy, which is way past its sell-by date by now, in case nobody’s noticed.

“More like Montauk. Not even on the beach, back in the woods.”

“So your paths . . .”

“Cross now and then, sure, couple times in the IGA, enchiladas at the Blue Parrot, but the Ices are running in way different circles these days.”

“Had them figured for Further Lane at least.”

Shrug. “Even out on the South Fork, my wife tells me, there’s still resistance to money like Ice’s. One thing to build a house with its foundation in the sand, right, somethin else to pay for it with money not everybody believes is real.”

“I Ching talk.”

“She noticed.” The semimischievous look again.

Uh, huh, “A boat, how about a boat, they own a boat?”

“Lease one maybe.”

“Oceangoing?”

“What am I, Moby Dick? You’re that curious, go out there and see.”

“Yeah, right, who springs for the jitney, where’s the per diem, see what I’m saying.”

“What. You doin this on spec?”

“So far it’s a buck and a half for the subway down here, that I can probably absorb. Beyond that . . .”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Picking up the phone, “Yes Lupita
mi amor,
could you cut us a check, please, for . . . uh,” raising his eyebrows at Maxine, who shrugs and holds up five fingers, “five thousand U.S., payable to—”

“Hundred,” sighs Maxine, “Five hundred, jeez all right I’m impressed, but it’s only enough so I can start a ticket. Next invoice you can be Donald Trump or whatever, OK?”

“Just tryin to help, not my fault I’m a giving generous type of guy, is it? Lemme at least buy yiz lunch?”

She risks a look at his face, and sure enough—the Cary Grant beam, the Interested Smile. Aahh! What would Ingrid Bergman do, Grace Kelly? “I don’t know . . .” Actually, she does know, because she has this built-in fast-forward feature in her brain that can locate herself, a day or two from now, glaring into the mirror going, “What, in the fuck, were you thinking?” and right at the moment it’s coming up No Signal. Hmm. Maybe it’s just that she can do with some lunch.

They go around the corner to Enrico’s Italian Kitchen, which she recalls getting raves in Zagat, and find a table. Maxine heads for the ladies’ toilet, and on the way back, in fact while she’s still in there, she can hear Rocky and the waiter arguing. “No,” Rocky with a sort of evil glee Maxine has noticed also in certain children, “not ‘pas-ta e fa-gio-li,’ I think what I said was pastafazool.”

“Sir, if you’ll look on the menu, it’s clearly spelled,” pointing helpfully at each word, “‘pasta, e, fagioli’?”

Rocky gazes at the waiter’s finger, deciding on how best to remove it from its hand. “But ain’t I a reasonable person? of course I am, so let’s go to the classical source here, tell me, kid, does Dean Martin sing ‘When the stars make-a you droli / Just-a like-a pasta e fagioli’? no. No, what he sings is—”

Maxine sits quietly, attending to her eyeblink rate, as Rocky, far from sotto voce but on pitch, makes with his Dean Martin impression. Marco the owner sticks his head out of the kitchen. “Oh, it’s you.
Che si dice?
”

“Would you explain to the new guy?”

“He bothering you? five minutes, he’s in the dumpster with the scungilli shells.”

“Maybe just change the spelling on the menu for him?”

“You sure? Got to go in the computer for that. Be easier to just whack him.”

The waiter, whose credits include a couple of
Sopranos
episodes, recognizing this for what it is, stands by, trying not to roll his eyes too much.

Maxine ends up having the homemade strozzapreti with chicken livers, and Rocky goes for the osso buco. “Hey, what kinda wine?”

“How about a ’71 Tignanello?— but then again with all the wiseguy dialogue, maybe just, uh, li’1 Nero d’Avola? small glass?”

“Readin my mind.” Not exactly doing a double take at the pricey supertuscan, but a certain gleam has entered his eye, which is what she may have been looking to provoke. And why would that be, again?

Rocky’s mobile phone goes off, Maxine recognizing the ringtone as “Una furtiva lagrima.” “Listen my darling, here’s the situation— Wait . . .
Un gazz,
I’m talkin to a robot here, right? Again. So! uh-huh! how you doing? how long you been a robot . . . You wouldn’t be Jewish, by any chance? Yeah, like when you were thirteen, did your parents give you a bot mitzvah?”

Maxine scrolls the ceiling, “Mr. Slagiatt. Mind if I ask you something? Just professional interest—the seed money for hashslingrz, do you happen to know who put it up originally?”

“Speculation at the time was lively,” Rocky remembers, “usual suspects, Greylock, Flatiron, Union Square, but nobody really knew. Big dark secret. Could’ve been anybody with the resources to keep it quiet. Even one of the banks. Why?”

“Trying to narrow it down. Angel money, some eccentric right-winger out in a Sunbelt mansion with central air? Or a more institutional type of evil?”

“Wait—what are you attempting to imply, as my wife might say?”

“What with you folks,” Maxine deadpan, “and your longtime GOP connections . . .”

“Us folks, ancient stuff, Lucky Luciano, the OSS, please. Forget it.”

“No ethnic slurs intended of course.”

“Should I bring up Longy Zwillman? Welcome to Streetlight People,” raising his glass and tapping hers lightly.

She can hear from inside her purse the as-yet-undeposited check laughing at her, as if she has been the butt of a great practical joke.

The Nero d’Avola on the other hand is not bad at all. Maxine nods amiably. “Let’s wait till my invoice.”

M
axine finally gets over to Vyrva’s one evening to have a look at the widely coveted yet ill-defined DeepArcher application, bringing along Otis, who disappears immediately with Fiona into her room, where along with the Beanie Baby overpop she keeps a Melanie’s Mall, with which Otis has become strangely intrigued. Melanie herself is a half-scale Barbie with a gold credit card she uses for clothes, makeup, hairstyling, and other necessities, though the secret identity Otis and Fiona have given her is a bit darker and requires some quick costume changes. The Mall has a water fountain, a pizza parlor, an ATM, and most important an escalator, which comes in handy for shoot-out scenarios, Otis having introduced into the suburban girl idyll a number of four-and-a-half-inch action figures, many from the cartoon show
Dragonball Z,
including Prince Vegeta, Goku and Gohan, Zarbon, and others. Scenarios tend to center on violent assault, terrorist shoplifting sprees, and yup discombobulation, each of which ends in the widespread destruction of the Mall, principally at the hands of Fiona’s alter ego the eponymous Melanie, in cape and ammo belts, herself. Among fiercely imagined smoke and wreckage, with generic plastic bodies horizontal and disassembled everywhere, Otis and Fiona kiss off each episode by
high-fiving and singing the tag from the Melanie’s Mall commercial, “It’s cool at the Mall.”

Justin’s partner Lucas, who lives down in Tribeca, shows up a little late this evening, having been chasing his dealer through half of Brooklyn in search of some currently notorious weed known as Train Wreck, wearing a green glow-in-the-dark T-shirt reading
UTSL
, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of
LUST
or possibly
SLUT
but later learns is Unix for “Use The Source, Luke.”

“We don’t know what Vyrva’s told you about DeepArcher,” sez Justin, “it’s still in beta, so don’t be surprised at some awkwardness now and then.”

“Should warn you, I’m not too good at these things, drives my kids crazy, we play Super Mario and the little goombas jump up and stomp on me.”

“It’s not a game,” Lucas instructs her.

“Though it does have forerunners in the gaming area,” footnotes Justin, “like the MUD clones that started to come online back in the eighties, which were mostly text. Lucas and I came of age into VRML, realized we could have the graphics we wanted, so that’s what we did, or Lucas did.”

“Only the framing material,” Lucas demurely, “obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he’s known around my crib, God.”

“The further in you go, as you get passed along one node to the next, the visuals you think you’re seeing are being contributed by users all over the world. All for free. Hacker ethic. Each one doing their piece of it, then just vanishing uncredited. Adding to the veils of illusion. You know what an avatar is, right?”

“Sure, had a prescription once, but they always made me a little, I don’t know, nauseous?”

“In virtual reality,” Lucas begins to explain, “it’s a 3-D image you use to represent yourself—”

“Yeah, actually, gamers in the house forever, but somebody told me
also that in the Hindu religion avatar means an incarnation. So I keep wondering—when you pass from this side of the screen over into virtual reality, is that like dying and being reincarnated, see what I’m saying?”

“It’s code,” Justin a little bewildered, maybe, “just keep the thought, couple geeks up all night on cold pizza and warm Jolt wrote this, not exactly in VRML but something hypermutated out of it, ’s all it is.”

“They don’t do metaphysical,” Vyrva flashing Maxine a smile falling noticeably short of fond amusement. She must see a lot of this.

Justin and Lucas met at Stanford. Kept running into each other within a tight radius of Margaret Jacks Hall, which in that day housed the Computer Science department and was affectionately known as Marginal Hacks. They primal-screamed their way together through one finals week after another, and by the time they graduated, they’d already put in weeks of pilgrimage up and down Sand Hill Road, pitching to the venture-capital firms which lined that soon-to-be legendary thoroughfare, arguing recreationally, trembling in performance anxiety, or, resolved to be Zenlike, just sitting in the traffic jams typical of that era, admiring the vegetation. One day they took a wrong turn and wound up caught in the annual Sand Hill soapbox derby. The roadside was lined with bales of hay and spectators who numbered up in the low five figures, watching a streetful of homemade racers barreling downhill at top speed toward the Stanford tower in the distance, allegedly powered by nothing but the earth’s gravity.

“That kid over there who just spun out in the fifties spaceship rig,” Justin said.

“That’s no kid,” said Lucas.

“Yeah I know, isn’t it that Ian Longspoon dude? The VC we had lunch with last week? drinks Fernet-Brancas with ginger-ale chasers?” Another of their regrettable lunch dates. Most likely at Il Fornaio in the Garden Court Hotel in Palo Alto, though neither could remember now, everybody got kind of hammered. Toward the end of it, Longspoon had actually begun to make out a check but seemed unable to stop writing zeros, which soon ran off the edge of the document and continued onto
the tablecloth, on which presently the VC’s head came to rest with a thump.

Lucas reached stealthily for the checkbook and saw Justin making for the exit. “Wait, hey, maybe somebody’ll cash this, where you going?”

“You know what’ll happen when he wakes up. We’re not gonna get stuck paying for another lunch we can’t afford.”

It wasn’t their most dignified moment. Waiters began hollering urgently into little lapel mikes. Beach-tanned technocuties at distant tables who’d scanned them with interest when they came in now turned away scowling. Truculent busboys splashed uneaten soup on them as they sped past. Chuchu in the parking lot, briefly having considered keying Justin’s ride, settled for spitting on it.

“Guess it could have been worse,” Lucas remarked once they were safely out on 280 again.

“Old Ian sure ain’t gonna be happy.”

Well, here he was now at the soapbox race, a perfect opportunity for them to find out how he did feel, and somehow the partners only kept slouching further down behind the dashboard instead. They thought they knew from intimidation, but at this point they hadn’t yet run into any of the finance providers in New York.

Maxine can imagine. Silicon Alley in the nineties provided more than enough work for fraud investigators. The money in play, especially after about 1995, was staggering, and you couldn’t expect elements of the fraudster community not to go after some of it, especially HR executives, for whom the invention of the computerized payroll was often confused with a license to steal. If this generation of con artists came up short now and then in IT skills, they made up for it in the area of social engineering, and many entreprenerds, being trusting souls, got taken. But sometimes distinctions between hustling and being hustled broke down. It didn’t escape Maxine’s notice that, given stock valuations on some start-ups of interest chiefly to the insane, there might not much difference. How is a business plan that depends on faith in “network effects” kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise
known as a Ponzi scheme? Venture capitalists feared industrywide for their rapacity were observed to surface from pitch sessions with open wallets and leaking eyeballs, having been subjected to nerd-produced videos with subliminal messages and sound tracks featuring oldie mixes that pushed more buttons than a speed freak with a Nintendo 64. Who was less innocent here?

Scanning Justin and Lucas for spiritual malware, Maxine, whose acquaintance with geekspace, since the tech boom, had grown extensive though nowhere near complete, discovered that even by the relaxed definitions of the time, the partners checked out as legit, maybe even innocent. It could’ve just been California, where the real nerds are supposed to come from, while all you ever see on this coast is people in suits monitoring what works and what doesn’t and trying to copy the last hot idea. But anybody adventurous enough to want to move their business from out there to New York ought to be warned—it would be unprofessional of Maxine, wouldn’t it, not to share what she knows of the spectrum of hometown larceny. So she kept finding herself, with these guys, slipping back and forth between Helpful Native and its more sinister variant, the kvetchy, spoon-waving source of free advice she lives in terror of turning into, known locally as a Jewish Mother.

Well, as it turns out, no worries—Lucas and Justin in reality are smarter cookies than the Girl Scout type Maxine was imagining. Somewhere back in the Valley, among those orange groves casually replaced with industrial campuses, they came to a joint epiphany about California vis-à-vis New York—Vyrva thinks maybe more joint than epiphany—something to do with too much sunshine, self-delusion, slack. They’d heard this rumor that back east content was king, not just something to be stolen and developed into a movie script. They thought what they needed was a grim unforgiving workplace where the summer actually ended once in a while and discipline was a given daily condition. By the time they found out the truth, that the Alley was as much of a nut ward as the Valley, it was too late to go back.

Having managed to score not only seed and angel money but also a
series-A round from the venerable Sand Hill Road firm of Voorhees, Krueger, the boys, like American greenhorns of a century ago venturing into the history-haunted Old World, lost no time back east in paying the necessary calls, setting up shop around early ’97 in a couple of rooms sublet from a Website developer who welcomed the cash, down in the then still enchanted country between the Flatiron Building and the East Village. If content was still king, they got nonetheless a crash course in patriarchal subtext, cutthroat jostling among nerd princes, dark dynastic histories. Before long they were showing up in trade journals, on gossip sites, at Courtney Pulitzer’s downtown soirees, finding themselves at four in the morning drinking kalimotxos in bars carpentered into ghost stops on abandoned subway lines, flirting with girls whose fashion thinking included undead signifiers such as custom fangs installed out in the outer boroughs by cut-rate Lithuanian orthodontists.

“So . . .” some presentable young lady spreading her upturned palms, “warm and friendly here, right?”

“And after the stories we heard,” Lucas nodding, gazing amiably at her tits.

“I was in California once, I gotta say, you go out there expecting all those howdy-there vibes, it comes as a shock—talk about entitled? suspicious? Nobody here in the Alley’s about to snoot you the way you get snooted by those folks in Marin. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re not Well people, are you?”

“Hell no,” cackles Lucas, “we’re as sick as they come.”

By the time the tech market began its toiletward descent, Justin and Vyrva had enough squirreled away for a down payment on a house and some acreage back in Santa Cruz County, plus a little more in the mattress. Lucas, who’d been putting his money in places a bit less domestic, flipping IPOs, buying into strange instruments understood only by sociopathic quants, got hit way harder when tech-stock enthusiasm collapsed. Soon people were coming around inquiring, often impolitely, after his whereabouts, and Vyrva and Justin found themselves overditzing to deflect the unwelcome attention.

“Come on.” Leading Maxine up a set of spiral stairs to Justin’s workroom, an obsessive clutter of monitors, keyboards, loose discs, printers, cables, Zip drives, modems, routers, the only books visible being a CRC manual and a Camel Book and some comics. There’s custom wallpaper designed to look like a hex dump, in which Maxine out of habit searches for repeating cells but can’t find any, and some Carmen Electra posters, mostly from her
Baywatch
period, and a gigantic Isomac steampunk espresso machine in the corner, which Vyrva keeps calling the Insomniac.

“DeepArcher Central,” Lucas with one of those may-I-introduce armwaves.

Originally the guys, you have to wonder how presciently, had it in mind to create a virtual sanctuary to escape to from the many varieties of real-world discomfort. A grand-scale motel for the afflicted, a destination reachable by virtual midnight express from anyplace with a keyboard. Creative Differences arose, to be sure, but went strangely unacknowledged. Justin wanted to go back in time, to a California that had never existed, safe, sunny all the time, where in fact the sun never set unless somebody wanted to see a romantic sunset. Lucas was searching for someplace, you could say, a little darker, where it rains a lot and great silences sweep like wind, holding inside them forces of destruction. What came out as synthesis was DeepArcher.

“Whoa, Cinerama here.”

“Cute, huh?” Vyrva switching on a gigantic 17-inch LCD monitor, “Brand new, retails for about a thousand, but we got a price.”

“You’re assimilating.” Maxine meantime reminding herself that she has never had a clear idea of how these guys make their money.

Justin goes to a worktable, sits at a keyboard and begins tapping at it while Lucas rolls a couple of joints. Presently remotely linked window blinds close their slats against the secular city, and the lights go down and the screens light up. “You can get on that other keyboard over there too if you want,” Vyrva sez.

A splash screen comes on, in shadow-modulated 256-color
daylight, no titles, no music. A tall figure, dressed in black, could be either sex, long hair pulled back with a silver clip, The Archer, has journeyed to the edge of a great abyss. Down the road behind, in forced perspective, recede the sunlit distances of the surface world, wild country, farmland, suburbs, expressways, misted city towers. The rest of the screen is claimed by the abyss—far from an absence, it is a darkness pulsing with whatever light was before light was invented. The Archer is poised at its edge, bow fully drawn, aiming steeply down into the immeasurable uncreated, waiting. What can be seen of the face from behind, partly turned away, is attentive and unattached. A light wind is blowing in the grass and brush. “Looks like we cheaped out and didn’t bother to animate much,” Justin comments, “but look close and you can see the hair rippling too, I think the eyes blink once, but you have to be watching for it. We wanted stillness but not paralysis.” When the program is loaded, there is no main page, no music score, only a sound ambience, growing slowly louder, that Maxine recognizes from a thousand train and bus stations and airports, and the smoothly cross-dawning image of an interior whose detail, for a moment breathtakingly, is far in advance of anything she’s seen on the gaming platforms Ziggy and his friends tend to use, flaring beyond the basic videogame brown of the time into the full color spectrum of very early morning, polygons finely smoothed to all but continuous curves, the rendering, modeling, and shadows, blending and blur, handled elegantly, even with . . . could you call it genius? Making Final Fantasy X, anyway, look like an Etch A Sketch. A framed lucid dream, it approaches, and wraps Maxine, and strangely without panic she submits.