[Steven Lyle Jordan]

1: In The News
I wasn’t sure when my brother had taken to listening to lite rock, but I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to handle it for long. Okay, maybe when I say “lite rock,” I’m exaggerating… no, I take it back. The radio is queuing up Abba. It was making it hard to concentrate on my web searching.

At about the time I was about to speak up and beg like a dog for him to find something else to listen to, the doorbell rung. A second later, Pete came out of his room, dressed in the baggies, tank top and sandals that were the standard dress uniform of San Diego. He started for the door… then veered towards the stereo. “Since when do you listen to Abba?” he said, as he punched the program control and an eighties rock station came on. Playing Van Halen. I was only marginally sure it was an improvement, at that.

When he reached the door and opened it, Reilly, his Starbucks connection, smiled back at him. In her hands, held close enough to her chest to squeeze her cleavage just a bit, she held two cups. She handed one to Pete, and held the other one up for me to see.

“Morning, boys! Got you something, handsome.”

“Thanks,” I said, getting up from the dining room table and crossing over to the foyer. I had to sidestep my gear, cables, power supplies, docks and all, some of which had ended up in a pile around my chair. I’d been using what I’d needed on and off, and after a while, I started to get lazy about putting things back. This little corner of my brother’s apartment was starting to look like the local node of a Borg cube.

Pete looked me over as I came up and accepted my grande double-shot skim milk espresso with room. “Any progress?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Well,” he said, but didn’t really finish, as he put a shoulder around Reilly’s shoulder and led her to the balcony. I let them go, and returned to my borgified corner of the dining room.

I had been investigating the circumstances of my impromptu firing from my last job for the past week, but I was only having limited success at getting anything useful. So far, about the only thing I had established with any certainty was that none of my ex-clients’ servers had ever actually gone down to a denial-of-service attack… supposedly the reason I was now living in exile in San Diego in the first place. Someone had lied about a DOS attack, and gotten me fired as a result. But who… and why… I could not nail down.

So far, the best lead I had was related to the strange e-mail messages of one of my ex-clients. Although it was standard operating procedure to change passwords on a system when an IT person like myself was let go, it was also standard operating procedure for IT persons like myself to conceal “backdoor” passwords in a system, allowing us to get back in if necessary. Usually, that kind of thing came in handy when some unscrupulous character got into a server and started messing with things. But it also had its personal gratification and downright sneakiness aspects, which is what I was counting on.

Anyway, it seemed there was an interesting pattern of e-mail activity around a project referred to as “Merc” within the office. The e-mails dated back to five months ago, and were generally cryptic… a lot of generalized statements without specific names, that sort of thing. When reading between the lines, they added up to a major project in the works, a lot of resources committed to it, a lot riding on it, and a lot of heads that would roll if something went wrong with it.

Suddenly, the e-mails got weird for two days: Odd, still-cryptic questions; requests for the status of this person or that in the organization; a lot of “does he know about this or that” kind of stuff. And then, nothing. All mention of the project just stopped dead, with no further inquiries, not even a “whatever happened to” message on a crackberry.

Whatever Merc was, it had fallen through a crack in the Earth and disappeared.

And the last message to be seen related to Merc, happened about an hour before Mr. Gravewort had thrown me out of his server room. Cue mystery music, hit the red-spot.

So, I had a vague suspicion. There were problems, of course. One, what exactly was Merc? Was it a secret corporate espionage tool, an private database, or an accounting spreadsheet? Knowing how important and sensitive it was would help dictate how serious the problem was. Two, whose project was Merc? I had no idea all of the projects being handled by my clients, so for all I knew, there could be any number of their clients who might conclude that my knowing their business might be bad for my career, my kneecaps, or even my pulse.

And three: What difference did it make? I don’t mean, Who cares? I mean, will knowing any of this actually help me to get my job back? Do I actually want my job back? And should I maybe be answering number three before I move on to questions one and two?

At any rate, I had decided to pursue question one first. And in that light, I was trying to ascertain who in the client’s e-mail stream I could get in touch with to ask about it, hopefully without tipping them off that it was me, or alerting anyone about sudden activity on the project. So I was back-tracking their e-mails to find an obscure connection I could spoof, a contractor, a friend or loved one whom someone had mentioned the project to, an out-of-touch employee, anything like that. But it was tedious work, and involved the examining of months of messages by dozens of people. It was only one of the reasons why I needed that grande double-shot skim milk espresso with room… to keep myself focused as I worked.

The other reason, of course, was that it was as close to my former life as I could get right now.

At about the time my attention span was beginning to waver again, about an hour further into the e-mail streams, my concentration was broken by Pete and Reilly laughing about something out on the balcony. I decided I needed to take a stretch, so I got up, navigated out of my borg alcove, and made my way to the balcony with them. They were apparently checking out some kid on the beach who was having very little luck flying a kite, and doing a lot of scrambling around trying to get it airborne, then scrambling about and apologizing to people whom the kite narrowly missed as it came back down. “Never a dull moment in San Diego,” I intoned lazily and sat down beside Pete.

“It’s called ‘peaceful’,” Pete said to me amiably. “It’s the reason people like San Diego, bro. Don’t worry, it’ll grow on you.”

“Not if I don’t grow out of it first,” I said. But to be honest, I didn’t know what I meant by that. It just sounded cool to say.

“I have no idea what that means,” Pete said, causing me to make another mental note to check my inner monologues for leaks, “but you’re not giving San Diego a chance. I mean, you got a great place to stay,” and he appropriately waved an arm to encompass the apartment behind us. Then he waved it out beyond the balcony. “Great view of the beach… and the honeys. Great weather. Great company,” he said, waving his arms at himself and Reilly. “And you’ve already gotten yourself a squeeze who’s even found you some work.” He was, of course, referring to Gail, his ex. I still hadn’t figured out what was going on between Pete and Gail, but largely I had let it slide, because she kept having sex with me, and he didn’t seem to be opposed to it. Exactly. “What more,” he concluded, “could you possibly want out of life?”

This time, I didn’t have to stop and think about something cool and meaningless to say. I had something right off.

“Answers.”

“Well,” Pete said, “maybe soon you’ll have a good reason to put off the questions for a bit.”

I looked at Pete for clarification, and saw that he was looking down… not at the beach, but closer in, like at the complex pool. I leaned forward a bit and took a peek, expecting to see some babe he planned to push me at. And sure enough, there she was: Gail, passing through the grounds from the parking lot, looking easily as hot in street clothes as any of the girls in bikinis at the pool, and heading for the building.

Something told me I wouldn’t be doing too much more research this morning.