Killfile (7 page)

Kelsey and I go
through the usual indignities of renting a car and checking into our business-class hotel. She handles everything so I don't have to deal with the mouth-breathers behind the counters. (Customer service: where a blank stare is your umbrella.)

We drop off our suitcases and change. I'm in jeans and my old army boots. Kelsey meets me in the lobby wearing a soft-shell jacket over spandex gym gear. Hopefully that will do for serious play.

We head toward the rental car. I open the passenger side and pop another Vicodin. “You can drive,” I tell her. I've been through two airports today and I haven't shot or disabled anyone, and I'm about to go to work. I need to be unconscious for a while to reboot my brain.

“And they say chivalry is dead,” Kelsey says as she gets behind the wheel.

“It's not dead,” I say. “It's just taking a nap.”

The drive to the preserve takes a little more than an hour. Somewhere along the way, the Vicodin and the whiskey catch up to me, and I drop off to sleep. The last thing I feel is a sense of relief from Kelsey. I don't blame her. It's enough work watching what you say to other people. Watching what you think is a much bigger chore.

I wake up to the sound of Kelsey shutting her car door. We've arrived at the game preserve.

I grew up in the Midwest, so I got all my ideas about the East Coast from Marvel Comics and sitcoms. I thought it was nothing but concrete and high-rises. Then I finally got to see it in real life. Get outside the city limits and you'll find lots of forests and open ground.

The game preserve is in the middle of one of those chunks of wilderness on state land. There's a big dirt parking lot right off the highway, filled with luxury buses and a few other rental cars, with a small bridge going over a stream, leading to the main lodge.

Before we can cross over to the lodge, OmniVore has set up a check-in station. A dozen tech geeks are in line, waiting to go through.

The OmniVore employees look as if they had as much trouble deciphering the invite's dress code as we did. They're in the standard geek uniform, novelty T-shirts on top of jeans or shorts or sweatpants. On their feet, they've got sneakers and flip-flops. Which is probably what they wear to the office too.

Kelsey stands at the back of the line, waiting for me to catch up. As soon as I join her in the crowd, the surrounding buzz of thoughts strips the last bit of grogginess out of my skull.

That last thought is from the guy at the head of the line, a tall, skinny dude with
CODER
written in binary on his shirt.

“Why do you need my phone?” he says out loud. He probably didn't mean for it to come out like a whine.

The pert blond cheerleader type behind the table gives him a smile. “It's no big deal,” she says. “Everyone's doing it.”

Which is exactly the wrong message from exactly the wrong person for this guy. It causes flashbacks to another blond cheerleader telling him that everyone on the senior-class trip was going skinny-dipping, so he wouldn't need his swimsuit. I don't need to go any deeper into his memories to see how that turned out.

But the cheerleader has backup. Big guys in OmniVore polo shirts and khakis. Corporate security. One of them steps forward. “No phones,” he says, and holds out a small metal lockbox. “You won't need them.”

Which actually translates to: OmniVore doesn't want any of this being recorded or photographed. Can't blame them. Too many embarrassing pics from other tech parties have shown up in the media later. It's cost more than one company big chunks of venture capital and punitive damages in court. It only makes sense to keep someone from bringing a miniature piece of evidence-gathering hardware into the event.

The coder knows all this intellectually. Emotionally, it's still difficult for him to put the phone into the box, his fingers sticking to it like they're covered in glue. Like everyone else, he's come to rely on that thing more than his own limbs. This is because of a complex conditioning system that's wired down deep in our brains. We pick up our phones and press a button. And every time it responds with a new email or a text or a funny cat video, our brains release a little burst of dopamine. Pretty soon we're pressing the button every couple of seconds, looking for that
next hit. We've turned into those monkeys who were given a lever that delivered cocaine every time they wanted it.

It's worse for guys like the tech geek. His phone is a vital organ that just happens to exist outside his body. It carries his whole world and keeps his secrets. It feeds him data and soothes him when he looks into its screen. I can almost see the string of affection linking him and his favorite toy.

But he still gives it up, because he's got to get into the party, and the cheerleader and the football player are both telling him this is the price of admission. With a little mental whimper, he drops his phone into the box, which I'll bet any amount of money is RF-shielded against all transmissions. The coder gets a claim ticket, and the lockbox goes onto a set of IKEA shelves they assembled in the parking lot just for this.

Every single one of the geeks goes through this same little psychodrama, so it takes us a while to get to the front of the line.

Both Kelsey and I drop our phones in without complaint. I don't have any reason to worry about it. Even if anyone here knows who I am—which they don't—they'd get nothing from my phone. It's encrypted against most of the obvious password-cracking and snooping software. I'd be shocked if Sloan didn't equip Kelsey with the same stuff or better.

We walk up the gravel path to the lodge together.

“You sure this is the way you want to do this?” she asks quietly.

“Why wouldn't I be?”

“It doesn't seem very covert.”

“Nothing's going to happen here,” I reassure her. “This is just to survey the territory. Get a feel for the state of play on the board.”

“If you say so.” There's a little more skepticism there than I think is necessary, but she shoves it down and smiles brightly as we enter the lodge.

T
HE PLACE IS
huge, decorated in early Great White Hunter straight out of Tarzan movies and Hemingway novels. There are enough dead animals on the walls to qualify for a minor extinction event. The website for the preserve boasts that it offers a chance to hunt every exotic species from “Aardvark to Zebra” and they've got the heads to prove it.

There are more than a hundred OmniVore personnel inside the main room, and they're all on edge. The nervous chatter in the air is nothing compared to the anxiety bouncing around in their brains. It's a cage full of white mice right before feeding time in the reptile house.

They cluster around the bar to self-medicate. Which means that it's too crowded for me to do the same thing. (Dammit.)

At the front of the room is a table and a podium set up for a speech. The anticipation gets thick in the air. I snag a few impressions from some of the longtime employees. Once, when the company was starting out, Preston showed up at one of these retreats and fired half of the people in the room. Another time, he walked in and gave everyone a $20,000 bonus.

Exactly fifteen minutes after the hour, Preston appears. He jogs out from a side door like the host of a late-night show. Preston's employees give him a roar of approval normally reserved for a rock
star. I do my usual sweep of the minds around me to see what they really think of him.

This is why I didn't waste my time on Kelsey's carefully assembled profile. That's only paper. It holds only what people are willing to say out loud. But people are good at lying. They do it all the time, especially to themselves. If it sounds especially convincing, they write it down.

But when they see someone in person, they're immediately reminded of their true feelings. And I get a straight shot of what they actually believe, unfiltered by any illusions.

There are dozens of competing impressions of Preston bouncing around the room, carried forward on the waves of fear and hope generated by the crowd. I sift through all of it. It's not easy, but I've had practice at this, and I assemble my own portrait of Preston directly from the memories of his people.

I'm surprised: for the most part, they genuinely love him.

One guy recalls how Preston found him utterly stuck with an error in a compiler—whatever the hell that is—and Preston sat down and they hashed it out together, chugging caffeine until their vision blurred, stuck in front of their keyboards for ten hours straight. Another programmer remembers how he once mentioned he got into Radiohead when he was in college. Preston mocked him mercilessly—he called it “music for the funeral for the death of music”—but then the programmer found a custom playlist in his email, all obscure cuts and bootlegs. There's the customer-development guy, no programming experience, just sales and marketing, who never felt like he fit in. Then Preston praised him in front of the entire company for bringing in the cash that bought all the cool geek toys.

There are a few images of Preston as the abusive dad too. One guy can't forget how Preston screamed at him for nearly an hour over some bad coding—just utterly dismantled him, tore him down
to the foundations, and left his ego in the rubble. But the guy blames himself. He mainly feels bad for letting Preston down. Preston forgave him the next day and complimented the repair work he'd done. Now he treasures that moment like the memory of a favorite toy at Christmas.

More than anything else, they think he's cool. And he makes them feel cool. They see him drive up to work in a Bugatti Veyron, and they think

. There are a dozen memories of Preston in Vegas, taking them to Spearmint Rhino and dropping tens of thousands of dollars on strippers for everyone. Blowing off a crucial deadline so the whole company could go out and get some sun on the first decent day of spring. Sending a charter jet to pick up Five Guys burgers so they could see what all the hype was about.

Most of these guys—and they're all guys, aside from the hired cheerleaders and Kelsey—remember all too well what it was like to be left out, to be excluded and ignored. No matter what the media says about the geek inheriting the earth, these guys all have a hard diamond of pain buried deep somewhere. They stayed inside when everyone else was on the playground. They will always know, deep down, that there was something that made them strange before it made them valuable.

Preston doesn't suffer that the same way they do. His charisma, his charm, his confidence—it all seems to come from another planet. Right now, at this point in time, everyone in the world wants a piece of him. He could sit at the cool kids' table, if he wanted. And he chooses to hang out with them instead. He blows right past the velvet rope and goes into the VIP section, and he takes them along. He makes the headlines, but they bask in his reflected glory. He's their hero.

Just from swimming around in their pool of memories, I'm starting to like Preston myself.

He's smiling and greeting everyone clustered around him. He
dresses like his people, but there's a cosmetic layer of muscle under his vintage T-shirt; nerds can afford personal trainers now. In one hand, he holds a novelty-toy key chain. He presses a button, and a tinny electronic voice from a computer chip spits out an insult: “Fuckyou! Gotohell! Eatme! Eatme!” He clicks it incessantly, even while he's shaking hands.

This is one of his trademark kinks. He usually carries a gag gift like this—a bottle opener that says “It's beer-thirty!” when used, a coffee cup shaped like a toilet, or a pen that reveals a naked woman when it's flipped upside down.

The business reporters love it. It makes him colorful. One magazine profile about Preston went into detail about this little habit. His grandfather owned a novelty shop, and Preston spent a lot of time there after school while his parents were at work. The article made it sound like a cherished memory. Now he carries these toys as a way of remembering the place where he started.

Preston grips and grins his way through a half dozen more people before putting the key chain in his pocket. He takes his place at the front of the room. One of his flunkies places a black case on the table behind him. He raises his hands and gestures for quiet.

“So,” he says to the crowd. “I bet you're wondering why I've called you all here. Well, it should be pretty obvious.”

Then he turns and theatrically opens the case. He brings out a combat shotgun. It's a Mossberg 500, popular with the police and the military for busting doors and clearing rooms. I'm betting it's the first time most of these guys have seen one outside of a video game.

Discomfort spreads like a stomach flu through the crowd. “Are we going hunting?” one guy near the front asks.

“Hunting? What makes you think that?” Preston says. He looks
around the lodge, as if seeing the dead animals for the first time. “What, you think I want to kill cute little fuzzy animals? Hunt helpless, endangered species?”

He looks around. No answer this time.

“Well, where's the fun in that? Stupid things barely know when to get out of the way of a bullet. Evolution left them behind a long time ago. That's survival of the fittest—you're either fast or you're meat.”