Kill Process (17 page)

I don’t want to work with other people. I like my space, my boundaries. I’m not even sure I know how to work with anyone else. Other people means having to compromise, spending time communicating instead of doing, having to convince them of what I want.

I want to spend my time with beautiful lines of code, not messy, complex people. Communication should be through keyboard shortcuts for my text editor. The kind of convincing I like is coaxing information out of tables with one less database hit. I want to sculpt an intellectual Japanese garden: clean, precise, ordered.

Mat’s staring, waiting for me to say something. I hear his message, I do. The books I’ve read said the same exact thing. The success of a startup is all about having the right team, a broad set of skills. Eventually I’ll need to hire people, but I hoped to postpone it as long as possible.

Damn it. I squeeze my fist under the table. The idea of working with someone else terrifies me. But I want to succeed. More than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.

“Hypothetically, if I was ready to
maybe
consider bringing someone else on board, how would I know if she’s the right person?”

Mat smiles as though he’s won some small victory. “Are you compatible? Can you communicate? Does she have expertise you need? Is she passionate about what you want to do? Can you imagine working side-by-side with her for the next couple of years?”

Jesus. Years? My mind can’t grasp the concept. I’ve never worked that closely with another person for any length of time.

Mat’s shifting his bag onto his shoulder and stuffing his napkin into his coffee cup.

“Maybe,” I say.

“Sometimes you take a leap of faith.” Mat stands, begins to walk away. “Offer her 5 percent of the company and the same salary you’re drawing. You can figure out the rest later.”

I dumbly realize I don’t even know what it means to give her 5 percent of the company. How does one do that? Thomas’s specialty is intellectual property law, but he’s still a lawyer. Maybe he knows. A few text messages later, and we’re on for dinner.

I stare at my phone, wondering what I’m getting myself into.

T
HOMAS AND
I
discuss hiring Amber at dinner.

The sum total of the funding for Tapestry is $220,000, the money I’d gotten from manipulating the bitcoin market. With very little savings outside of that, I need that money to live on. If I work alone, it could provide me with more than two years of runtime to bootstrap Tapestry. Hiring Amber means parting with some of my money.

We review the basics of company structures and control at dinner. As long as I own a majority of the stock, I can pick the directors and in effect control the company. If I give up more than 50 percent of the company to investors or other employees, I’d no longer be in absolute control.

“Why would anyone give away control of their company?” I ask him.

Thomas shrugs. “You can have absolute control over something doomed to failure because you don’t have enough money to accomplish what needs doing, or conditional control over something more likely to succeed, in which case, you’ll maintain control as long as you’re doing a good job.”

“No investors,” I say. I won’t let anyone else have control. It’s almost enough to consider another bitcoin manipulation. I risked fifteen thousand last time and multiplied my money by fourteen. If I did that again, I’d have enough for a team of employees for a couple of years. But like a magician, you never want to repeat a trick. That’s how you get caught.

“Then you’ll need to start small, and grow slowly.” Thomas spears another bite from his plate.

I nod as I take a sip of wine. Is there some other financial trick I might try? It’s not really my specialty, and at least one lesson I learned from Repard is that the heat is always hottest for financial crimes.

Thomas sleeps over that night, but I toss and turn so much I feel bad for disturbing his sleep. I grab my pillow and a blanket and move to the living room couch, where I stare at the stars through the big living room window.

Hiring Amber scares me, though I recognize that’s an emotional reaction, not an analytical one. She’s smart, she knows the space well, and she’s passionate. I didn’t quit Tomo to do this half-assed. I quit to maximize my chance of succeeding, of actually creating a worthy competitor.

Bringing Amber on board is the next logical step. If I don’t do it, I’m letting my fears rule me. I turn onto my side and pull the blanket up. I’ll call her in the morning.

*     *     *

Amber and I meet for a very early lunch at a Thai restaurant. We’re in the back corner, the only people there.

I cut to the chase, and tell her I want to her to work with me. We go back and forth a bit, and eventually settle on her getting 10 percent of the company and a long-term salary comparable to her existing one. Until we take on investment or earn a regular source of income, she agrees to take only as much as my own draw. Now I’ll burn through my pool of money twice as fast.

Amber offers up her spare bedroom as a place we can work together. I hadn’t even thought of the issue of office space. After lunch, we check it out together.

That afternoon I contact a law firm Thomas recommended, and one of the partners agrees to meet me the next day as a professional courtesy to Thomas. The paperwork is drawn up, and by the next Monday Amber and I go in to sign the documents together.

On Tuesday morning we go together to Ikea and pick out furniture, then drive back to her place. I’m screwing a desk leg onto the top using a cordless drill when I notice Amber watching my one arm technique.

“That’s impressive.”

“Not so hard. I’m doing it singlehandedly.”

She laughs and we flip the desk over together.

“We have an office!” I say, a bit proud of this moment.

We simultaneously glance around at the mess of cardboard boxes and packing material from the furniture.

“Let’s take care of that in a bit,” Amber says. “Beer?”

“Sure.”

Amber comes back in with two glasses. “It’s called Whit Faced,” she says, gesturing with the glass. “Local brewer friend makes it once a year.”

We chink our glasses together, and I take a sip. It’s crisp with a hint of clove and orange.

Amber sits on one of the desks. “I was thinking about Tapestry over the weekend. There’s two big pieces of existing work we can leverage. Diaspora was a distributed social network launched in 2010. It’s got the idea of multiple nodes in the network, and they’ve defined protocols to enable those nodes to communicate. And IndieWeb, along with everything it brings: POSSE syndication, notification, micro formats.”

“IndieWeb doesn’t handle selective visibility of content,” I say. “Everything is either public or private.”

Amber taps a finger on the desk. “Before social networking, we had the web for public stuff, and forums for discussions.”

“Which were themselves rooted in the BBSs of the eighties,” I say. “We still have forums. More than ever before.”

“More in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of all Internet users, fewer than ever. The reason I bring it up is because forums foster a different kind of community, especially in the old days. Most people in a forum knew each other, had social norms specific to that community.”

I nod. “So forums develop deeper human connection than social media?”

Amber stands, one finger on her nose, and stares at the wall.

I glance at the wall, don’t see anything there.

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m picturing my bookcase, trying to remember if I read anything on this.”

“In my experience,” she goes on, “forums are better at establishing new friendships. How many new friends have you made on Tomo?”

Damn. Right to questions I don’t like to answer. “None, but I’m weird. Don’t go by me. How about you?”

She shakes her head. “Not as many as I made in the days of forums. Social media maintains existing friendships, but doesn’t create new ones.”

“Why?”

She shrugs. “Forums are more cohesive somehow. Usually they’re closed. They have a common purpose. A moderator keeps the community on track.” She grabs a marker, makes notes on a cardboard box.

“We need whiteboards.”

She nods. “Tomo has a groups feature, although, of course, it’s another silo. Since we’re going to be open, we must define interfaces so Tapestry can interact with forums. There are lots of forums out there. Better integration will breathe more life into them.”

We go back and forth like that, slowly working our way through Amber’s hyper-local beer supply, into the wee hours of the night. Sometime during the late night I realize I’ve not only gained a business partner, but maybe also a friend.

A
MBER AND
I
work together every day, our energy feeding each other. The weekend comes and goes without a break, and I don’t mind a bit. I’ve never been one to vegetate on a couch watching television, and I’m certainly not going to do it now when we’re making so much progress. I wake each morning tired but excited to return to work at Amber’s house.

The days turn into weeks. Toward the end of our work days, coding slows down, and we spend our time discussing and arguing until late in the night. Amber works around the clock, with the stamina of a grad student weeks from her thesis. I usually peel off around ten or eleven, after the texts from Thomas peak, then slow down.

Angie> Not tonight. Working late.

Thomas> You worked late the last four nights. Take a break.

I can’t take a break. Amber just keeps going. I’m the owner, the founder. I force myself to work as many hours as her. It was my idea, after all. But I’m nearly twice her age, and after a few weeks I give up my attempts to equal her hours, and settle for merely working harder than I’ve ever worked since Tomo’s first year.

I come back in the mornings, let myself in quietly while Amber sleeps, and see what’s changed during the night. One long wall we covered with cheap whiteboard panels hot-glued to the sheetrock, and in the mornings the boards are usually covered with new diagrams, arrows pointing every which way, which I then puzzle out. I check those out first, then review the git history to see what changes Amber committed after I left.

One night I come home a little after midnight, exhausted, my brain fried, and make the mistake of sitting down on my couch. The next thing I know, I crack my eyes open, crusty and tired, to find it’s midmorning. I stumble to my feet and head to the bathroom for a shower.

Standing there, letting the hot water run over me, watching it spin down into the drain, I find myself wondering about my VW van. Where is it now? Is someone living in it? Add up all the hours I spent holed up there, researching people, penetrating their phones, computers, and lives, maintaining my tools and infrastructure. I spent way more time on that than I ever did on my day job at Tomo.

Now I barely have the minutes in my day to brush my teeth and shower. The time and energy I spent killing abusive assholes held me back. There’s no way I could do both.

I turn off the water and grab my towel. As I dry off, I remember the pile of carefully sanitized laptops sitting in my closet. Encrypted hard drives packed with utilities ranging from remote administration tools to port scanners to assorted infectious malware. A bag of burner phones. Pirated SIM cards. A toolkit I use for disabling GPS and bluetooth on devices. Directional antennae. An expensive software-defined radio. Thumb drives to hold USB viruses. That’s a lot of evidence surrounding me that is, if not incriminating, at least highly suggestive of wrongdoing. I’m not killing anyone now, though I might as well be driving around with a trunkful of guns.

It’s not worth the risk. I’m not ever going back to that life.

When I’m done in the bathroom, I message Amber and tell her I’m taking care of personal stuff this morning and won’t be over until the afternoon.

I go through my condo and make a heap of electronics on my bed. Although hacking doesn’t require much specialized hardware, I took the time to prep all this equipment, removing unnecessary transmitters, anything that could leak my location or data. The software on the drives is mostly superfluous. Encrypted backups of everything are stored in the cloud. If I needed to, I could recreate this. I have a few long-term assets that aren’t in my apartment, and I’m not going to dispose of those, but neither are they likely to lead back to me.

I’ve never dumped so much equipment so fast, but I make a general plan. Everything’s triple-encrypted, so in theory there’s no risk of anyone accessing my data, but there’s no harm in zeroing everything out, so the drives appear empty rather than full of encrypted information. I set up all the laptops on my dining room table and then boot them with a keystroke that invokes custom firmware to erase the hard drives and restore the original OS images from a backup file.

The NSA can recover data even when it’s been overwritten by multiple passes of zeros, so I ultimately trust more in my encryption than the wipe. But a wipe is what the average, modestly secure individual would do, so it’s less likely to raise suspicions.

Layers upon layers of security and misdirection. I honestly can’t say if I love it or hate it. A little bit of both, I guess, though it’ll be a relief to put all this to rest.

When everything’s done, I vacuum the laptops, blow them down with compressed air, and then wipe them down with screen wipes. Wearing gloves, I separate the gear into bags, then load them all into my car.

One goes into a residential garbage can left out by the curb. Another bag gets dropped off by a park near a high school. I drop one bag off at Free Geek, another at Goodwill. One goes into a dumpster behind a grocery store. Individually, they are nothing. Only together do they make a pattern.

I experience a sharp pang of regret as I drop off the final bag. I let it slip slowly from my fingers. It’s okay. They are only tools. I have backups. Still, I’m throwing away bits of my life.

I return to my car and breathe deeply, trying to shake off some weird mix of grief and fear. I hit the stereo, fire up Suicide Commando, and crank the volume to drown out my feelings.