it might have found a back door. This idiot put it on the network, so maybe it’s—’ I didn’t finish the thought. I interrupted myself. My fingers were on the end of her cable. At the point where it went into her system. Her system was immaculately clean, where mine and Park’s were filthy with dust. My dirty fingerprints, dusty from the cables I’d already pulled. I could see the marks that I’d left, and I could imagine her dusting them off; using that blast of cold, clean air on them, and then they would be gone. Like they were never even there.
‘Charlie,’ she said to me, ‘do you think I’m an idiot?’
I didn’t answer her. Easier to not answer, because that felt like a trapdoor I simply did not want to open. The night before, we both said some things, I told myself. People say things when they’re in the heat of the moment. They say nasty things, cruel things, hateful things. I tried to tell myself that we both said some things, but in reality: I said some things. She was quiet, and I thought, when I said those things, that she looked beaten. Not like it was a competition, or even a war. Beaten. I had never hit her. I never would. She looked like I had.
Years later, I’d think: Does it just feel kind of the same?
Is it the same?
I pulled the cable. She tilted her head back in that way she did, like she wanted to test that the muscles – the spine – was working properly. Like it was fused. Those wrestlers you see on television every now and again, when they do movies. I hadn’t watched wrestling in years, but then I would see them every now and again, and it would be like they’d had their necks turned into something else. The place they attached to the body fused with something else. I remembered them when they were limber, and then suddenly they were like cheap toys. Fewer points of articulation.
‘Thanks,’ she said. There was less spite in there than I thought there would be. Still, whatever. Her hand went to her arm. I knew her tells. Every single one of them.
‘I had to make sure,’ I told her. Everything I said, I thought that she would retort. That is what I would have done. I would have snapped back some witty whatever, some pithy fuck-you about the things we had said and the thing that had happened. For my part, it was like I was setting up the jokes, and she couldn’t be bothered to deliver the punchline.
I heard Park ask Laura what was up with me. She waved him off. She waved her hand, and I caught it through the blinkers. ‘Has something happened?’ Park asked her, and I shut my eyes, because I didn’t want to see even a fraction of her reaction.
SCION was our baby. Adopted, sure, but that doesn’t change how much you care for it. And the best part: it was an orphan, the original programming team lost to the sands of time. Myself and Park, both recruited from MIT, but we didn’t know each other when we arrived. Different tracks, which helped when it came to the interview, to getting the job. Different skill sets. I knew him to stare at him across a room, and to think about how different we were. That was the extent of our relationship before. He told me once that I bought him a drink on his birthday. He remembered that, but I was sure it couldn’t have been me that did it. It didn’t seem like something I would have done, not for somebody I didn’t know.
Mark Ocean came to us. He would do the recruitment fairs, throw his head around velvet curtains drawn up around a booth, like it was an entrance into the secret service. What was behind the curtain was important, that was clear: but, then, a few companies used that tactic. Selling something as if it’s worth more than it is. It’s all magic, all smoke and mirrors. Ocean would only show his software to a few people, if he thought they were right. Otherwise it was a standard Bow OS setup. SCION wasn’t running for most people. You could peek behind the curtain, and it looked like absolutely nothing at all.
Ocean’s pitch to me was – I remember thinking how strange his accent was, how it was a halfway house, the accent of a country that couldn’t exist – that he understood that I wanted to change the world. He told me that. Said, You want to, and I couldn’t argue with him. Who doesn’t want that? You want to leave something indelible, he told me. This, he said, will change the world. It will change everything. It’s called SCION, and it’s the future.
He was a snake-oil Steve Jobs, even in those days, and I didn’t know how to deal with him apart from be slightly impressed. One of those people who, when you’re in the room with them, you can’t look away.
I remember when I walked in. I asked him: How do you pronounce the name of the company? Because everybody has different ways. It’s like, there’s no single right way on the Internet. Like, GIF; where even the dude who came up with GIFs gets it wrong.
We pronounce it bow, he said, like the gesture of servitude. Or the front of a ship. I told him that I had always said it was bow, like the thing you tied in the rope to hold the ship to the anchor. He said he liked that. That it was clever, quick. But he was lying, because that word was so mispronounced. You would hear people saying it both ways: like Bowie. Everybody had their own way. Wasn’t until I met Laura Bow that I realized Ocean was wrong, and I had it right all along.
He said to me, We’re making this thing, and I’d like you to take control of it. Hold its hand. I said, I’ve never held the hand of software before, and he said, Well, that’s because there’s never been software like this before.
* * *
The girl from the bar’s name was Lola; or, it wasn’t, not really, but she said it was, because she did that thing from the song. Like her own chat-up line; like the song. My name is Lola; Ell oh ell eh, Lola. She was taller than Laura, a good few inches taller. Slightly thinner. Not as well proportioned. Everything was held against the scale of Laura, those first few days. Weeks, months. Lola was different, and maybe that’s okay. I asked her if she wanted Cherry Cola, because that’s the meet cute of it all: the story we one day would tell our grandkids. I wouldn’t be telling that story, but she would want the story; she’d want to run through the whole thing while we flirted. I knew that Lola was a one and done, I knew it, and likely she knew it as well. Her fingers stroked my arm when I told her what I did for a living, and she said – honest to God – that I didn’t look like a programmer. She said, ‘I meet a lot of people who work out in Silicon Valley, and they’re never like you.’ I was wearing my contacts, even if they were going to dry out in the air conditioning. I could feel them against my eyelids when I blinked, like somebody gently pressing on my eyes. Willing them to stay closed. ‘You don’t look like them. Or act like them. They can’t talk, you know? They can’t make a decent conversation.’ Lola was a student, or had been a student and was going to be a student again; but in between her studying she was travelling the country, seeing the places she’d never seen. She was from North Carolina, and her accent had that twang that said she couldn’t shake the place. All she had to talk about was the places that she had seen, the people that she’d met. She’d been in the Bay area for four weeks, and she’d not spent a night where she wasn’t cruising the bars. ‘Because soon I’ll have to go home, and when I’m back there, Jesus, there’s nothing compared to this. This is where I want to live, when I’m done with everything.’
She asked me what I did exactly at Bow. We were under the tightest of the tight non-disclosure agreements, but I was drunk, and I was tired, and I wanted to feel good about myself. I said, ‘I’m on the artificial intelligence team.’
‘Like from that movie?’ I didn’t ask which one. There were lots of movies.
‘Yeah, kind of,’ I said, ‘but we’re making something that’s actually practical. Something that will help us in our lives, you know? That’s the aim.’
‘So it won’t blow up the world,’ and she had this sarcastic tone, this sarcastic tilt of her head when she said it, like this was all stuff she’d heard before.
‘I’m pretty sure blowing us up would count as a project failure,’ I said. ‘No bonus for me if that happens.’ I could be charming, when I wanted to be. I remembered being charming before I met Laura. Hard for your body, your mind, to forget that stuff. Like muscle memory.
Another drink, and another. Her fingers stroked the hairs on my arm,