[Steven Lyle Jordan]

12: Publication Day

A day later, we were on our way back to Pete’s place, where we’d all agreed to meet up for the big event, scheduled at 4 pm.

Why 4 pm?

One thing the best web guys always seem to know is what time it is in Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. Computers, and everything related to them, are ultimately all sync’ed up to GMT, so everybody who should knows when things were happening everywhere in the world. I knew San Diego was eight hours removed from GMT, which meant that when it was midnight GMT, it was 7 pm in Baltimore, 3am in Moscow, 9 am in Tokyo, and 4 pm in San Diego.

We’d decided that, to be as nerdy as possible, we would officially release the e-book at midnight GMT… 4 pm our time.

When we reached Pete’s place, we were surprised when someone other than Pete or Fritz opened the door. A diminutive blonde in a sun dress and sandals opened the door, took one look at me, and said, “You must be Mike.”

“And you must be?” I asked.

“The one who filled your espresso order yesterday morning,” she said sweetly.

At that moment, the door opened further, and Pete looked us over and smiled back. “Come on in, guys.” He noted our notation of the barista, and said, “This is Reilly. Reilly, Mike you guessed, and you remember Gail.” There was a strange moment, as Gail and Reilly exchanged glances, then Reilly looked over Gail and me, then back to Pete. Pete, aware of everyone staring at him, said cleverly, “Anyone want a beer?” and exited into the kitchen.

I just headed for the dining room and unlimbered my bag, which I had kept with me since yesterday, for safe keeping. (Actually, it had never left a table in the foyer where I’d placed it once I arrived at Gail’s place. But honestly, I didn’t miss it. In fact, I barely thought about it. Gail was giving me much more to think about.) I placed it on the table and booted it up, and once it was ready, started calling up the ISP control panels that would allow me to monitor the sites as things unfolded, as well as the Paypal site to monitor sales. Pete brought me my beer, and I got into the control panels to see how well my plan had worked.

Sure enough, there were a massive number of hits that corresponded to the cover art page, and quite a few fans who has simply downloaded a fresh full-res copy of the art right from there. And as I suspected, most of them had found and clicked on the links to the real site, as well as re-bookmarked it as planned, guaranteeing they would be back at the real site the next day… today.

There was also a huge buzz about the site (and especially about the art) on other e-book related sites, like TeleRead and MobileRead, in sites dedicated to other reading devices, and on one or two others whose names I’ve already forgotten. The link to the real site was everywhere, and as it looked exactly like the link to the bogus site, I was sure the sharks wouldn’t have even noticed had they thought to look.

In fact, I was able to do a quick search of IP addresses that had accessed both sites, through the stats programs available on each ISP’s site. You don’t always know exactly who an IP address belongs to, but using the stats, you could sometimes narrow things down. For instance, there were only seven IP addresses that had visited the bogus site, but not the real site. One of them was surely the sharks… maybe even more than one, depending on how their IT guy worked. Of those, three had gone on to the purchase page, which did not have its purchase links up live yet, and the stats indicated the purchase pages had been bookmarked. The sharks wouldn’t have done that, because they didn’t need to hit the purchase page specifically… a DOS attack to the root directory would take down the entire site. So that left four addresses. I was able to narrow down two of them to local ISPs. Beyond that, it was all guesswork, and not particularly useful for our purposes, but still worth recording for future reference.

“How soon are we going to get started?” Fritz asked. He had been chatting up the barista in the corner, unnoticed by Pete, who seemed to be watching me, watching Gail, and watching how close Gail was to me. This little vaca was getting more interesting by the day.

“The e-books are in place,” I told him, “and the on-sale pages are ready to be uploaded at the stroke of four.” I consulted my watch. “I’ll upload the sale pages at one minute to four, and we’ll just watch the rest. Oh, and speaking of watching: Pete, go get your binoculars, willya?” Pete gave me a funny look, then went to fetch his specs.

We had ten minutes. While we waited, I looked at Gail and Pete, and thought about this weird relationship that I’d stumbled into. There was something between them that I was missing, and I had no idea what. Obviously, they knew… and they had apparently gotten so good at hiding it under their ‘carefree swingers’ façade, that for someone on the outside there was no telling what either of them was really thinking. Of course, if they were playing some elaborate tennis game between each other—with me as the ball—I could just play along… I mean, it really doesn’t matter if the ball knows the rules, and besides, I was getting laid.

Maybe Gail had actually dumped Pete, and was now setting her sights on the other Schitzeiss brother. Even though Pete didn’t seem to mind, it seemed like a lousy thing to do to him, for whatever reason. Of course, he could have dumped her—oh, right. And Pabst might win next year’s international beer competitions. I couldn’t imagine any red-blooded American man dumping that girl, not even for Angelina Jolie with all of her money (and none of the kids).

So she dumped him… but over a boat? That was pretty far out there, even for Pete. One thing every web guy knows is that there’s more to a website than the flaming logos on the home page. Somewhere in the middle of friendly exes, boats, mansions and sex tapes was a truth just screaming to get out. I had a funny feeling that I’d never rest until I found that truth… and when I did, I was willing to bet I wouldn’t be able to stick around. But that, again, was another task for another day.