Chapter 1

For the third time this week, the pager beats my alarm clock to the punch. I am already awake when the pager starts its little vibrating dance on the nightstand, buzzing and hopping like an alien insect.

I roll over to the nightstand, which is on the other side of my king-sized bed. I scoop up the pager and squint at the display. All the essential servers in the company are hooked up to an alert system, which can send email straight to the pager when something blows up. This time, the Internet mail server is summoning human intervention.

I toss the pager aside and plop back into the pillows. It's still dark outside, a peaceful and quiet spring morning. The fountain in the pond outside my bedroom window is splashing its soothing cacophony. I briefly consider ignoring the pager and going back to sleep, but then my sense of duty wins out over my laziness. They pay me a nice chunk of change every month for doing almost nothing, and I feel obligated to respond promptly to actual emergencies.

I stumble into the bathroom, start the hot water for my shower, and grab some work clothes out of my closet. The dress code at work is rudimentary, the only rules being a no-sneaker policy and a requirement for a collared shirt of sorts. I have a bunch of generic polo shirts for use as work uniforms, all in fashionable non-colors, like Japanese cars: beige, mauve, taupe, sand.

The morning maintenance ritual is efficiently automated. I mostly run on autopilot in the morning, showering, brushing my teeth, getting dressed and letting the critters in for their own morning rituals. I open the bedroom door after I get dressed, and the two cats stream past me, making a beeline to the litter box. They are banished from the bedroom during sleeping hours. One has a tendency to start noisy cleaning orgies next to my ear in the middle of the night, and the other is a hyperactive kitten with above-average destructive tendencies. When I first instituted a no-cat rule for the bedroom during night hours, I had to clean up the occasional mess in on the living room carpet for a few weeks, but now everything runs like clockwork.

I make my way into the kitchen. Breakfast is served in three minutes and thirty seconds. Yesterday evening I went to the store and brought home a stack of microwave meals, including some breakfast bowls featuring apple cinnamon pancakes. ("Bachelor Chow, Now With Flavor!") If you disregard the "stir after two minutes" rule, the mushy pancakes and syrupy apples congeal into a delightfully chewy mess. I have a stove, but I haven't cooked anything on it in over a year. Everything gets nuked, even the hot water for my very occasional cup of tea. The oven, on the other hand, gets a regular workout with frozen supermarket pizza, staple of the bachelor geek diet.

I distract the cats with some Meow Mix before I sit down for my five-minute breakfast.

Technically speaking, I don't even have to leave the house to do my job. The computer in the living room is wired up to the Net via DSL, and I can connect to the servers at work at any time by tunneling through the Internet. I wonder what the CEO would say if he knew I can read his morning email before he even gets into the office. His correspondence is terrifically dull, and he can't spell his way out of a wet paper bag.

The coffee table in the living room is too low for comfortable eating, so my computer desk doubles as a dining room table. I check my email while eating, pulling thirty new messages from the three accounts I check on a regular basis. Most of it is spam, as usual: offers for breast enhancement cream, get-rich-quick letters, and advice on how to increase my penis size by a guaranteed three inches.

Calling in sick is a thing of the past; we use convenient and impersonal email for that purpose. It makes things too tempting on occasion, when all you have to do for a day off is to open the laptop on the nightstand and compose a one-line email. Everybody in our group abuses the system once or twice a month, but the Network team gets things done, so we're left on a very long leash. Besides, every one of us puts in enough overtime every week to justify the occasional "well day".

I finish my breakfast and reply to a few emails from Upstairs. The replies could wait until I get into work, but I want my emails to show a 4:50am timestamp. It never hurts to let the execs know their email monkey is diligently slaving away in his office at this hour. Having satisfied my electronic social obligations, I grab my car keys off the kitchen counter and get ready to face another day in meatspace.

It's a pleasant day already, a sixty-odd degree morning without a single cloud in the sky. I amuse myself with the remote control lock of the BMW as I cross the parking lot. A few months ago, I finally saved up the funds to purchase a decent car, and I still enjoy having all buttons and controls working for once. The summers here are hot and humid enough to turn a car without air conditioning into a rolling sauna.

As I stroll through the breezeway, someone emerges quietly from the apartment next to mine. It is occupied by four college kids, three guys and a girl, who sit out on the porch smoking pot whenever they're not in class or out on a road trip. This apartment complex is popular with affluent parents who want to make sure their offspring is safely tucked away in a gated community close to the university campus. My college neighbors all drive SUVs with roof racks for surfboards, and bike racks holding expensive mountain bikes.

The early riser is the sole female occupant, a girl in her early Twenties sporting glasses and a black-dyed shaggy bob. She closes the door quietly behind her and steps into the breezeway on the toes of her sneakers.

"Hi," I offer, and she flinches a little as she notices me.

"Hi," she says, and moves her hand in a casual wave.

"What are you doing up so early?"

She smirks and pushes her glasses up on her nose with the index finger of her left hand. Her right hand holds a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo.

"Going out for a smoke. Can you believe they won't let me smoke inside the apartment?"

"Bit early for a smoke, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I'm an insomniac. Geek disease, it gets worse when you get to make your own schedule in college."

"Doesn't get much better after you graduate," I nod.

We walk towards the parking lot.

"Where did you go to college?" she asks, as she shakes a Marlboro out of the pack.

"University of Maine, ages ago."

"Really? You don't look that old."

I laugh. "Thanks. I still get carded. How old do you think I look?"

She peers at me through the thick, black rims of her glasses. They look like something worn by the old ladies in the Far Side cartoons, but somehow they match her face well. She has a round face--a little pudgy, but cute.

"I'd say about twenty-five, twenty-six."

I smile at her. "Thanks, I guess. I just turned thirty last year."

"Be thankful", she says around her Marlboro 100 as she flicks open her Zippo. "I'm twenty, and it sucks ass. If I could skip right through to thirty, I probably would."

She lights her cigarette, holding the Zippo with two fingers, and then flicks it shut, with a sudden wrist movement that betrays years of practice.

"That shit will kill you," I say, nodding at the pack of Marlboros.

"I know, I know, it shaves twenty years off my life. But hey, they're the sucky years, right?"

"Only from this side of the equation. My dad died of lung cancer when he was 52, and I bet you he would have mortgaged his soul for another ten years."

"Well." She takes a look at her cigarette and then proceeds to puff away. "You're a cheerful guy."

"Sorry," I say. "Didn't mean to lecture."

"Don't sweat it. I go through it every week when my parents call to check up on their prodigy. They always ask whether I quit smoking already, right after asking whether I've found Jesus already."

"Oy." I give her a sympathetic smile. "Hard to hang out with the folks when they try to save you from eternal damnation every time you talk to them."

"Shit," she groans as she flicks some ash off the end of her cigarette with a practiced motion. "Thanksgiving and Christmas is all I can take without starting to take lives. My older sister's a dentist, and she's married and going to the right church. Put an eggnog or two into mom, and it's 'Why can't you be a little more like Johnna?' It's the same story every fucking year."

"That sounds like it would get annoying after a while," I agree. "This coming Thanksgiving, I'll let you join in my annual ritual of getting drunk and staying the fuck at home. No turkey, either."

Her frown turns into a small smile.

"That sounds awesome. I'll be there with bells on."

I hold out my hand. "I'm Frank."

"Christie," she replies. Her handshake is surprisingly firm for such a little thing.

"Christie," I repeat. "I have to run off to work, but it was nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too," she replies. "But you had better not be shitting about that Thanksgiving date."

It's a forty-five minute drive to work, and I usually listen to audiobooks on my iPod while I'm driving. This week, it's the first of the Harry Potter books. I finished reading the last one two weeks ago, and now I'm re-listening to all of them in turn.

The corporate office sits on a small hill off Interstate 93. The architecture is typical Corporate Pompousness. It's a big red brick bunker, neat shrubbery arranged all around it, and an actual duck pond on the far side of the parking lot. They used to have ducks in there, but they were blocking traffic and leaving duck crap everywhere. Apparently the cleanup crews were too much of an expense, so management replaced the real ducks with plastic waterfowl. They hang suspended from wires in the cafeteria, and they don't make a lot of noise or dirt.

The lot is never completely empty, not even at six o'clock on a dreary Massachusetts winter morning. The programmers in the Development department have no lives at all. Their pre-deadline coding marathons are the stuff of legend around here.

I pull the car into one of the coveted spots close to the door, near the handicapped spaces. I didn't even forget my entry badge this morning, which is very out of character for me. The security desk is not staffed until seven, so I would have been stuck outside until then. There is a box with about thirty loaner access cards under the security desk for people who forget their keycards, and the loaners are usually all signed out by nine in the morning. Geeks can be forgetful when it comes to dealing with the details of real life.

My cubicle is on the third floor. I am the senior email administrator for the entire company, but I still don't rate an actual walled office with a door. Most of the folks on this floor are internal company tech support, only half-jokingly dubbed the "Hell Desk". Everybody needs multiple computers for their work, and all the cubes and offices on Floor Three look like starship bridges. In my office, four monitors and a flat panel display are fighting for desk real estate. I have three test servers running different versions of Lotus Domino, and my work machine is a behemoth IBM desktop. There is also a Dell laptop, which I use to test remote setups for our salesdroids in the field. Lastly, there is a lone PowerMac G4 Cube, one of the very few Macs in this building. I liberated the Mac from one of the Documentation guys who switched from Mac to Windows.

The message light on my phone is blinking a hostile red, even though I cleaned out my voice mail before I left last night. I dump my jacket on a chair and take a stroll over to the server room to check on the wounded mail server.

The email box is a Lotus Notes server running on Windows 2000. It has two gigabytes of memory and enough disk space to back up all the computers of a small industrialized nation onto it. I check the server console, and Notes seems to be running just fine. This machine is also the company mail gateway to the Internet, and the mail agent is the only thing aside from the Notes server itself that is hooked up to a pager alarm. I check the SMTP process next. Sure enough, the Internet mail handler is out to lunch. The work queue is filled up with two thousand unprocessed messages that patiently await conversion. Something is clogging up the mail queue, and after a minute of detective work, I find the bad apple near the top of the queue.

The name of the person sending the bad message looks very familiar. It is one of the Human Resources Nazis, an avid fan of pirated software. He summons Desktop Support at least twice a week to clean up his virus-infested machine. You can contract all kinds of nasty virus infections when you download pirated copies of Office 2000 from the Internet. The message is addressed to someone at AOL, and it has a file attachment which is several hundred megabytes in size. The file name of the attachment is "WindowsXP.zip", and it dawns on me that the genius tried to email the entire contents of the Windows XP installation CD to his AOL buddy. I shake my head in amazement as I cut the stalled message out of the work queue and deposit it in a blank database for evidence. The gateway has to convert a few thousand messages from our network users into Internet mail format every hour, and it does not like big and numerous file attachments. The bad message has a size of six hundred megabytes, which is about five hundred more than the gateway can handle without puking up its innards. I briefly consider writing the dope a bill for server maintenance, to include punitive damages for off-hour support. As I bring the conversion process back online, I leave a voicemail for him, explaining the malaise and asking for a return call. I also mention the corporate policy on email use, emphasizing the part about the department stance on pirated and unlicensed software. All our managers are deathly afraid of a software audit. The company policy states that people with unlicensed software on their company computers will be terminated without prior notice. Some customers respond to cordial requests, others require an occasional whack with the clue bat.

This is not glamorous work. Computer professionals are the digital equivalents of plumbers and garbage haulers, cleaning up after user communities day after day. In this business, knowledge is concentrated in the lower ranks. Many IT managers don't know squat about technology. They read PC magazines and buy software based on biased reviews by guys whose wealth depends on sucking up to advertisers like Microsoft. Last month, one of our Vice Presidents got a demo of Microsoft Outlook from his cousin, and I promptly had to convince him and the rest of the Boys' Club that switching our mail system from Notes to Outlook within a week just wasn't a feasible idea. The VP was thoroughly disappointed, because he 'likes the look of Outlook much better'. You know you're in trouble when management buys software by aesthetics instead of functionality. There is a way to make Outlook read Notes mail, but I wasn't about to clue him in on that. If I had given him the option, it would have taken three nanoseconds for all the other VPs to call me and ask for the same thing. I'd never hear the end of it, and of course I would have to do all the support on the software. The help desk will not touch unsupported configurations, and I was not about to create more work for myself just to appease an ungrateful target group.

I shuffle over to the communal kitchen to look for a caffeine boost. The cappuccino maker in the kitchen has all three flavors available, which constitutes a minor miracle. The French Vanilla powder usually goes first, but the gopher in charge of the machine does not refill it until all the less popular flavors are also gone. English Toffee is the least popular flavor, and it's usually the only thing left by the middle of the week. Today is Friday, and all three powder chutes in the machine are full. I fill up a twenty-ounce cup with the French Vanilla variety. It is loaded with sugar and caffeine, which makes it immensely popular with everybody on the floor. If you leave a cup of it sitting on your desk overnight, it turns into a brown sludge that bears a slight resemblance to toxic waste. Along with all the questionable ingredients, it does contain a lot of caffeine. Everybody on this floor is hopelessly dependent on caffeine. The Seven-Eleven down the street is the only place in town that still sells Jolt Cola, mainly because we petitioned the owner when he tried to phase it out of his inventory.

It is seven o'clock, and I have an hour of peace and quiet before the crew gets in. I retreat to my cubicle to check e-mail and screw around online.

I am deeply engrossed in the latest edition of our favorite web satirical, when Phil sticks his head into my cubicle.

"Morning, brother."

Phil is six feet tall, and he weighs about three hundred pounds. He's in his late Thirties, which makes him the oldest member of our group. An aging hippie, he makes liberal use of the loose dress policy.

"Hey." I look up and notice that Phil is wearing Dockers today, a strange thing to see on a guy who wears faded Jeans and computer vendor t-shirts to work most of the time.

"Wow. You're overdressed today," I comment. "Job interview or something?"

"Nope. The wife's out of town at a real estate seminar, and I forgot to do laundry over the weekend. What are you doing here already?"

"The Notes server croaked. Some moron tried to use the mail router as his personal software distribution service again."

Phil shakes his head.

"Screw the users, brother. I hear they're doing eggs benedict in the cafeteria now. Wanna come and grab a bite? I'm buying."

I look at the voicemail light on my phone console. The blinking doesn't look too urgent.

"Yeah, why the hell not?"

I rise from my comfortable chair, a nice executive leather model with lumbar support and gas cylinder. I liberated it from one of the new HR offices a few weeks ago. The Human Resources folks moved into a new wing, and their offices were furnished ahead of the move date. A bunch of the Technology folks mounted a late evening raid the night before the move, and rolled file cabinets and chairs by the dozen out of the lavishly furnished offices. Some of the HR people noticed the miraculous substitution of standard Office Depot junk for the ergonomic gold-plated chairs they ordered, but they decided not to press the issue. The mention of Internet usage logs can pacify combative beancounters in a hurry.

We stroll down to the cafeteria on the first floor, fill our trays, and claim a table. The eggs benedict are drenched in hollandaise sauce, fatty enough to grease a tank tread. We sip our coffees as some of the guys from the Corporate Help Desk crew trundles in, each of them carrying a plate with pastries or doughnuts. They take up a table at the far end of the cafeteria, as far away from us as possible without being completely obvious about it. Phil catches one of them looking over at us, and he puts on his cheery grin and waves over to them.

"Morning, boys!"

They smile back, and the guy who looked over raises his hand, before they hunker back down over their coffees, pretending to be occupied with something else. Phil turns around, and the grin instantly drops from his face.

"Back-stabbing bastards."

We don't socialize with the Corporate Service Desk, and they don't get chummy with us. They think we have "elitist attitudes". They're responsible for the low-level tech support stuff in the company, while our group handles all the network operations. They're the ones who have to go to user desks fixing stuff like broken Excel installs or lost printer mappings. They resent us because we get a lot more money for doing a lot less stressful work. Technical knowledge apparently constitutes "elitism" these days.

Phil is the company web master. He can make an hour of actual work look like eight, and he spends the majority of the work week designing web pages for other companies. Management has not caught on to the fact that Phil makes more money with freelance work than he does with his regular job. He's been with the company for almost two years, and everybody around here loves him because of his amicable nature. His job is absolutely secure, since he handles all the stuff that would have to be outsourced to a professional graphics house without him. The resulting monthly bill would cause coronaries in the Accounting department; Phil's paycheck is a real bargain in comparison. As a result, he can get away with loud music in his cubicle and blatant defiance of the rudimentary dress code. Our little group of senior administrators holds the key positions in the Technology division. I have all the e-mail under my command, and it is frightening just how much blackmail material goes through the mail server every day. Messaging engineers are like plumbers, plugging away at nasty stuff nobody else wants to handle. E-mail is the second most important thing in the company after Payroll, and like plumbing, the value of the system is only fully appreciated after it breaks down.

Then there's Jessica. She handles the Unix servers which run all the HR and Payroll databases. She also controls the NNTP server that lets the corporate employees access Internet newsgroups, and the daily newsfeed from our service provider constitutes several gigabytes worth of network traffic. On any given day, three quarters of the newsfeed consist of binaries, most of which are porn images in the alt.binaries.erotica newsgroups. Jessica doesn't curb the binary groups and their associated porn attachments, because nobody has asked her to limit the newsfeed. ("They wanted a full feed, and that's what they'll get.")

Jessica is twenty-six and hyper-cynical. The idealism that carried her through Master's degrees in Computer Science and Business Administration has disappeared since the corporate culture started absorbing her. In typical geek fashion, she has no social life. Jessica is attractive enough to be the target for socialization attempts by every nerdy programmer in the department. The male-to-female ratio in the IT sector is grossly disparate, with one female for every ten thousand males. This would be a great incentive for females to join the industry if it wasn't for the fact that a lot of the males are hopeless nerds. Jessica has nerdy tendencies herself; she likes Star Trek, but she took the starship model of the Enterprise-D off her monitor after every nerdy programmer passing by her cube tried to engage her in a lengthy conversation on the Star Trek universe.

Next, there's Little Joe. He is responsible for all the tape backup systems. He is twenty-four, young for a LAN administration senior. Most techies his age still sit in phone support purgatory, the entry-level position of choice for all networking jobs. Little Joe is like a three-quarter scale facsimile of a GQ model, a very handsome guy with a square jaw and carefully maintained build, all on a frame that stands a hair over five feet and four inches tall. He actually spent three years as a police officer before going into computers, and he carefully maintains the rock-hard physique he acquired beating up drunks and arresting rednecks.

Lastly, there's Adam. He's the wide-area network guy, master of all wiring closets in the building, and lord over all LAN and fiber-optic cable. He's a complete loon, easily the least stable member of our group, and he is funny as hell. His taste in clothing runs a bit eccentric, which means that on occasion he will come into the office in leather pants and frill shirts, or bell-bottomed orange slacks straight from the 1970s. Adam sports a scruffy goatee and an amazing variety of tattoos and body piercings. He looks more like the proprietor of a biker bar than a network engineer. The more conservative office drones usually give him a wide berth and only look at him out of the corner of their eyes.

Phil has seniority in our group, followed by Adam, Jessica, Little Joe and me. We all suffer from techie burnout in more or less advanced stages. Programmers have a half-life of seven years; technology folks fizzle out after merely three. After thirty-six months in the same position, or with the same set of responsibilities, the average tech support guy or systems administrator needs to quit or expand his horizon in order to keep any kind of enthusiasm about their career field.

Phil and I shuffle back upstairs after a slow twenty minutes of chat over caffeine and cholesterol. Not surprising, the Corporate Service Desk folks are still chatting away and munching on their donuts when we leave. They keep complaining about their insane workload, yet they always seem to manage extended breaks.

Back on the third floor, Phil disappears in his cubicle and barricades himself behind his gigantic 23-inch Sony Trinitron monitor. The monitor is fitted with rear view mirrors, wide angle stick-ons taped to the upper corners. The walls of his cubbyhole are adorned with Phil paraphernalia. A sign taped to his filing closet proclaims Rule #1, "If it ain't fun—Phil don't play." His cube is filled with trade show souvenirs, software boxes, computer manuals, and a platoon of action figures ranging from Spider-Man to Thrall, the Orcish war chief. It is by far the most cluttered cubicle in the building.

Phil reaches into his desk drawer and throws a CD in my direction.

"Here's the copy of Call of Duty 2. I managed to burn it last night, shame you were already gone. We could have slugged one out. Copy protection on it was a bitch, though."

We play games over the network all the time. It sucks up network bandwidth and productivity, and everybody loves it. I stick the CD into my back pocket.

"Key code?" I ask.

"It's on the inside of the jewel case."

"Most excellent. Thank you muchly."

"You're welcome. Stick around tonight, and we'll give it a go."

"See if you can recruit Little Joe or Adam, too," I suggest, before I leave him to his own private universe for now and make my way over to my office.

Passing by Jessica's cubicle, I hear the clicka-clicka sounds of her mechanical IBM keyboard, so I peek around the divider to find her working with the keyboard on her lap. Her Keds are comfortably propped on the desk.

"Hey, stranger. Keepin' busy?"

Jessica looks up from the screen and gives me her little lopsided smile. She is wearing jeans and a burgundy wool sweater. Her long hair is tied up in a pony tail, and the color of the week is black. Jessica's original hair color is a nice, rich auburn red, but her head is like her personal Mood Ring. She wears black-rimmed glasses that look like the ones worn by the old ladies in the Far Side cartoons.

"Who, me?" she asks. "I'm just trying to find out how much web surfing a person can do before their brain melts."

"Oh, they put you on that project, too? I thought that was just the Marketing department."

"You're supposed to use the server logs only for good, not for evil," she says. We share a good conspiratory chuckle. Few of our users know that the software logs every site visited and tags it with the name of the user. The software running on the firewall can spit out amazingly detailed reports on every workstation on the network. It tracks average Internet use per day, week or month, as well as surfing habits and the peak times for access. Everybody starts to fire up Netscape after lunch, and the most connections are logged on Friday afternoons, when everybody is trying to slide into the weekend without wearing themselves out.

If you want to know everything about your users, check the logs on the proxy server. The proxy tracks every visit to every web site, every hour of the day, and most users are unaware that they are leaving footprints in the digital sand with every mouse click in their browser. Every time I pull the logs, it's like seeing people through and through, like I am wearing X-ray glasses. I know the company CFO is into incest fantasies (incesttaboos.com). Van Horn in HR apparently has a depression problem (prozac.com), and he is also contemplating an illegal medication stockpiling run to Mexico (mexicopharmacy.com). Betsy Kerrigan in Accounts Payable likes Vin Diesel (vindieselfanclub.com), and David at the Corporate Service Desk spends six of his eight work hours every day trading stocks (ameritrade.com). With all this blackmail material in the log files, I could be practically untouchable if I was a ruthless bastard. I am entrusted with material that can end careers, terminate marriages and ruin lives. If the bigwigs had the faintest idea how sophisticated modern monitoring software has become, they'd have me erase the logs at the end of every business day under their supervision. The irony is that we wouldn't even monitor Internet access if it wasn't pushed onto us from upstairs. This is done almost everywhere these days, and it's always for the same reason: a corporate insurance against sexual harassment lawsuits. The users on the upper floors are frequently featured in the Top Ten of biggest Internet abusers. The written company policy on the subject is clear: surf for porn on company computers, and you'll get fired. The unwritten policy is equally firm: if you are one of the boys, you can do whatever you want. The tight inner circle around the CEO and CFO is called the "Untouchables". They would be hard pressed to find somebody stupid enough to deliver a reprimand upstairs.

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