Chapter 54: Avoid, Check, Hurt, Maim, Kill

THUD!

I realized I made a louder sound when I landed flat on my back with my legs outstretched then I did when I fell on one side or the other with my legs asunder.

Russ, who’d tossed me what seemed about thirty feet in the air before allowing me to crash back to earth, reached down to help me up. He said, “Good recovery.” I wondered what I’d done to merit the accolade. I hadn’t recovered from anything except the pain from when he tossed me in the air a few minutes earlier. I guess I was a pain junkie.

He challenged, “What’s your mantra?”

I repeated like an automaton, “Avoid, check, hurt, maim, kill.” I said the phrase with the staccato words running together as I shook off the crash to the ground that I’d just endured. I’d taken on the role of the attacker, and Russ had just shown me that an astute student of martial arts could render an attacker impotent if not dead. We both bowed to each other, and I retreated slightly praying for the end to my ninety-minute lesson. I started praying the session would end before I even got to the dojo.

Russ talked to the small class about ‘checking’ – basically just stopping all action of your attack or of the attacker. This would normally involve holding them or constraining them in some way. He went on to talk about hurting, which would leave someone wounded but functional; maiming, which would cripple them in some way; and then killing, as a last resort.

A few minutes later, we bowed again, and then I found myself flying through the air again, because I’d relaxed my guard. It seemed as though he’d flicked all one-hundred-eighty pounds of me upwards with two fingers from one hand and I’d gone flying, this time only ten feet in the air. Amazingly, he spot-checked me on the way down, and I landed on my feet ... ready to spar another day.

Russ was laughing. “You did good grasshopper.” He liked that expression from the Kung Fu movie. The quote meant that I was young, inexperienced, and somewhat impulsive.

The following Saturday, I received my orange belt. You would have thought I got a triple promotion in some job and a huge increase in salary. I felt so proud of the accomplishment. I readily congratulated the ten-year-old girl next to me that also got her orange belt. She also looked pleased with herself.

The training progressed from there. My katas became more even, but steps were added to the various forms I had to memorize and understand. These forms insisted on balance and flow, and not just form. Each form was a stance to take opposite a menacing opponent. Some prepared me to defend, and others to check, hurt, maim, or kill. At that point, the assumption was that the opportunity to avoid had passed.

Further, now that I was an orange belt, I interacted together with the other ‘oranges when we were making contact to either defend or be on the offense with our opponent as we trained and practiced. My frequent opponent was a twelve-year-old boy who was my height and probably had twenty pounds on me. I could swear he’d be a black belt before the end of the month.

I did start practicing my katas in the evening, especially working on ‘flow’, as Russ would tell me. I felt kind of odd, since no one else was doing them with me. I’d try to go off by myself. I also started to watch others doing the lesson on various YouTube videos. I was convinced that everything in the world was on YouTube. What wasn’t there, was already on some porn site.

My traveling the country trying to integrate the six businesses into one continued after the holidays. Most of the time I was alone, but I started taking Alice, Meg, or Jean with me. Jean and Meg slept in my bed, sometimes together with me. Alice slept in her own bed in another room on another floor of the motels. She let it be known that that situation was not her first choice.

Some integration points were easier than others. I was reading extensively about organizational dynamics, organizational development, and mergers and acquisitions. Many of the latter were famously unsuccessful, especially in the tech and communications areas. I didn’t want to be on that list.

I had some high points. I was alone in a Boston suburb motel when thirty inches of snow paralyzed the area. I did some work, but spent most of the day working out and perfecting my kata. I made great strides and felt I’d found some magic key. That key was practice, as it turned out.

When I finally got home and was called upon to drill my kata before my Saturday class, I repeated my work and then stepped back in line. Even Russ looked at me and smiled. “Nice work, grasshopper.” We bowed to each other.

Four weeks later, in a short ceremony before class I was awarded a yellow belt. I felt like I’d conquered the world. I also knew that I had a long distance to go.

Russ also added thirty-two new forms to the new more advanced kata that I had to practice. A complete kata was now about ninety-six steps. If I could master that, I could take on the universe!

Being on the road alone my sex life suffered. Of course, I had porn. Many men on the road were viewers of pornography. Thank God for laptops with large screens.

What made my case different was that I knew the porn stars in the video, and routinely got to fuck them when I wasn’t marooned in a hotel room. Crystal, Carol, Elynn, and Jean all had videos on the Internet. Even Carol, who was usually behind the cameras or editing, did a few so she knew what the other side of the operation was like.

Amongst our friends, many others had also done what Crystal called ‘commercial’ videos – those for fun and profit, as opposed to the ‘private porn’ videos. I had pretty much ceased to be a ‘model’ for the videos being taken, unless there was a really special request of some kind.

Two hunky guys replaced me: Russ and Deke. I liked the guys, but when they appeared and then fucked the stuffing out of one the ‘stars’ in our midst, my gut did that little twist and I always got a huge jolt of cuckoldish arousal. I think there was even something special there because of their martial arts abilities, and my weakness in the area.

Gradually, the new merged company started to come together and actually function like an integrated whole. Altogether, over a hundred-fifty people were relocated to create a critical mass of people in one network or software discipline in one location. On top of that, we hired an additional hundred people before the first of May.

Meg, the HR director and one of my lovers, likened the situation to throwing ten decks of cards in the air and hoping they all fell back to earth in ten neat piles, all sorted by suit.

Over the course of six months, I had met individually with every employee – old and new, relocated or not. Meg believed that my meetings and the personal touch were instrumental in things coming together as fast as they did.

And then the Satanic Virus appeared. This well-written computer virus had the mark of the devil all over it. It spread like wild fire, attacked every computer or server that it encountered and rendered them all but useless as anything other than boat anchors. The country went under in less than twenty-four hours.

My first encounter with the virus came as the result of call from Jim Manning, one of the men that Crystal and Carol had met in a cocktail lounge in town when they’d gone on the prowl. Jim worked for a firm called Retail Software that specialized in point-of-sale terminals.

Jim got me on the phone. “Help! I need you or Cyber Solutions or somebody with a lot of horsepower and understanding about this thing that is taking down one of our systems after another. We’ve lost fifty customers in the past two hours. We’re swamped. All the commerce we manage is coming to halt. We’re in deep shit. The damn virus infected Citibank, and they’ve spread the thing to every outfit that processes credit cards with them. This is a huge, worldwide problem.”

I grabbed Harley who happened to be at the office and couple of others. We were all in Sarasota that day. We raced out to the industrial park that Retail Software was in. Jim showed us what he thought was part of the virus on a core dump they’d just gotten off of one of their servers. The problem was that it made references elsewhere and he couldn’t find the elsewhere.

I reverted to my old mode as an individual contributor. Harley and the others also started to dissect the virus. I got into the backup for the server and made some modifications, and we’d run it to see whether I’d neutered the virus. It took about forty tries before we had code that wasn’t susceptible to the virus. Ten minutes later, it’d all be trash again. Finally, we had something that worked based on another of my ideas and Harley’s tweak on it.

There then came the issue of getting my software into an app that could override the virus and basically take back the servers from virus control. That took more precious time. I knew that we were pulling an all-nighter about then.

Alice got hold of me and told me that the phones of Cyber Solutions were ringing off the hook from coast to coast with what by then had been dubbed the Satanic Virus. No one had fixed the situation, but many were trying. I guess we were one of many places working on the problem.

One by one, various businesses were shutting down, like stars blinking out in the night sky. Airline travel stopped. The air traffic control system had become useless. Fortunately for the financial institutions, it was the start of a weekend with stock markets closed through Monday for some strange holiday. Retail stores and malls across the country were closing because they were unable to process any transactions. There was looting and panic in some cities, and then some radio and television stations started to go off the air, or went on limited operation. This was a real disaster.

The group in the work room at Retail Software kept plugging away. They were no longer the target. We were trying to find a solution for everybody. I used to do this routinely and my skills rapidly returned. As we worked, I kept thinking of my mantra at the dojo:

Avoid, Check, Hurt, Maim, Kill.

Companies that hadn’t been infected cut themselves off from all outside connections, waiting for some kind of relief. Those were the Avoid businesses. Others severed their Internet connections for all but a few essential transactions, and those only after verifying with sacrificial computers or servers that their links were temporarily safe. Those were the Check operations. Most of those still seemed to get the virus anyway.

I had a handle on Hurt and Maim, and as we worked, I thought I understood the Kill strategy for this virus. It took eight hours to confirm that we were right. We weren’t sleeping. We were juiced up on coffee, Red Bull, and adrenalin. We made a boot-up app of our solution.

The one saving grace was that our telephone communications across the country hadn’t been impacted yet. I got everyone in the room calling various customers of both Retail Software and Cyber Solutions, and we started distributing the app to them. It was a slow process, but necessary and it had started working.