Kill Process

by William Hertling

  “I guess. We had band practice until two, and I figured I’d work a few hours before bed.”

  I remember having that kind of energy. Must be nice to be young. “Go home and get some sleep.”

  “There’s no point now. The new hire arrives at ten. I’ll just grab breakfast.”

  Igloo turns back to her screen, grabs a box of Lucky Charms from her desk, and shoves a handful into her mouth.

  “Are you sure—” I cut myself off before I can comment on her food choice. It doesn’t matter because she’s not listening to me, anyway. I’m not her mother, even if I feel that way. Of our twenty-one employees, seventeen are in their twenties, and I constantly remind myself not to parent them.

  Overall, I’m proud of the employees. Fifteen are women, more than 70 percent. That’s probably a record for a tech startup. A part of me wants to hire only women, but my conversation with Emily haunts me. With each new position, I wonder if I’d accidentally miss the best person for the position by excluding men. In the end, we have a good balance. Thanks to my ongoing therapy with Charlotte, I’ve never had a day in the office when I’ve been uncomfortable or had to check where the nearest door was.

  Every employee is on board with Tapestry’s mission, not only to build a credible competitor to Tomo, but to fundamentally change the power relationship between companies and users.

  * * *

  The new employee is Keith. We hired him away from a late-stage Portland startup that’s having an IPO in six months. “We spend all our time chasing the next buck,” he told Amber and I during lunch a few weeks ago. “I want to actually build new stuff.”

  Igloo shows him around the office and gets him set up with a desk and a laptop. They finish in time for our staff meeting. We’re crowded into the second biggest conference room, because the big one is full of band equipment. With the brand new employees, we’re cramped in here, and I can barely hear myself think.

  “Igloo, you’ve got to move the band into a different office.”

  Igloo’s leaning back in a chair in the corner, eyes closed, her trademark white hoodie pulled over her head. Apparently she’s finally succumbed to sleep.

  “I’ll send her an email,” Amber says.

  I nod and grasp my stump in my hand. “Let’s start, people,” I yell.

  Everyone quiets down.

  “A key part of our strategy is to build a social network that encompasses multiple companies. We can’t build it all ourselves. If we did, we’d end up replicating Tomo, which doesn’t differentiate us in the eyes of the user, and doesn’t prevent the accumulation of power that comes with monolithic tech giants. We need partner companies to build diverse services and flesh out Tapestry.”

  “Indie partners,” Igloo yells out without opening her eyes.

  Figures she was faking.

  “Yes to indie partners. Definitely we want indies on board. The more the merrier. We also need a few big players to give us distribution, and we finally have one of those. We signed a business relationship deal on Friday with CompEx.”

  Igloo, who was part of the technical evaluation of CompEx, and knows about the deal, boos from the back of the room.

  I raise my eyebrows at Amber, and she grabs her phone. As I continue, I see Igloo pick up her phone, and she nods at me. I don’t know if Amber texted “be quiet” or “humor the old lady,” but as long as Igloo lets me finish this presentation, I’ll be happy.

  “CompEx will implement a Tapestry storage service, single-sign-on, and a PC reader app. The out-of-box-experience for new CompEx tablets and PCs will include Tapestry signup. They’re taking a small ownership stake in the company, and it’ll give us several months of cash in the bank. That will tide us over until we close our VC funding.”

  There are cheers from the room, although Igloo and Amber are quiet. I thought I was maniacal about the power relationships between companies and their customers, but Igloo and Amber can’t tolerate getting in bed with what they see as a dominant corporation.

  “Igloo doesn’t like that we’re dealing with a big company, but in this case, it’s a good deal. CompEx has stayed free of social media. They have no big partnerships. As the number three PC manufacturer and number four mobile phone manufacturer, they’re eager to make something happen, and they see us as the path to be a serious player in social media. I’m fine with taking their cash to do that, especially since they’re also on the hook to give us those services. Any questions?”

  “What’s the timeline?” our Director of Quality asks. “Are we going to do this before South By?”

  Tons of companies launch at SXSW, the big interactive festival that draws thirty thousand attendees. Amber’s got a keynote address on IndieWeb and returning power to the user, and Igloo will be moderating a panel composed solely of AI chat systems: our Ada chat personality, IBM Watson, and Bina-48.

  “No, CompEx wants to announce at ITX in January.”

  Groans erupt from the crowd.

  “That’s two months ahead of schedule,” someone cries. “We’ll never be ready!”

  “Nobody goes to ITX except industry people,” says our social media manager. “We need a promotion plan outside of ITX.”

  “Yes, although nobody can talk about it ahead of time. We can mention the investment, without any specifics about the CompEx integration. I trust all of you to keep this confidential. A different company might keep this secret from their employees, but that’s not the way I run Tapestry. I’m telling you and trusting you not to talk about it outside of here, neither officially nor unofficially. Not with your friends and not at any meetups. The day Tomo finds out, they’ll use their leverage to stop CompEx from investing in us.”

  The room is sober for minute.

  The newest new guy, Keith, raises his hand. “What prevents CompEx from building a silo on top of our service? Why stop at the services they’ve agreed to? What if they build all the components? Their users won’t ever know they’ve got other options.”

  “Every client application has to provide access to the user settings app that only we provide,” I say. “It’s the equivalent of a mobile OS app store.”

  “Multiple app stores have shown up on AvoOS.”

  Igloo nods. Luckily she’s in the back of the room where nobody notices.

  “Then they lose their ability to interoperate with any non-CompEx components.”

  “What if they don’t care? If they have 95 percent of Tapestry users, they might decide controlling their ecosystem is more important than remaining open.”

  I take a deep breath. I’m the one who chose employees who think through implications and challenge people. Mat once said there would come a point when I’d want people who put their heads down and do as they’re told. At moments like this, I see his perspective.

  “Open solutions work out the best. The IBM PC. You can argue IBM lost control over the PC, but the PC won because it was open. Avogadro’s mobile OS has eight times the market share of their competitors, and yes, they might lose control, but the platform is open and winning. If we lose control, but Tapestry stays open and beats Tomo, I’m happy, even if our investors aren’t.

  “Allowing Tapestry to turn into a CompEx silo . . . I wouldn’t do the deal if I thought that could happen. Still, if we want to avoid letting them gain control, we must keep planning our public launch, building our user base, getting indie partners to build components, investing in Kindred, building the reference service implementations. That strengthens our core so CompEx can’t cut us off.”

  The questions go on for forty minutes, and by the time we break, I’m exhausted. It’s still not over, as I’m intercepted by multiple people on the way back to my desk, fielding questions about the deal, database fields, and the user interface. By the time I sit down at my computer, I’ve got a hundred new emails and voice messages.

  “Help. Need break from work,” I message Thomas.

  He comes by in thirty minutes. I grab a sweatshirt, and he drives to the park. He even ha
s a sandwich from Elephant’s Deli for me.

  One-handed sandwich eating can be messy.

  He catches my expression at the food. “Sorry about the sandwich, but I figured you’d be hungry and I grabbed something portable.”

  “No, it’s great.” Mostly it is.

  He takes me to Laurelhurst Park. “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not really. I’m exhausted from talking. I want to eat my sandwich and sit with you. Is that okay?”

  “Just fine.”

  We find a bench overlooking the lake. It’s a crisp, sunny spring day. Thomas bought himself a sandwich too, so we sit side-by-side and eat. When I’m done, I lean my head against his shoulder and close my eyes. I hear the ducks at the lake, which sound almost like dog barks. There’s the distant sound of a mother talking to her kids, and the kids squealing.

  It is fantastic to sit and not have anyone asking me questions or forcing me to make decisions about stuff I don’t have any expertise in.

  “Can we live in the woods?” I ask.

  Thomas chuckles. “You’d hate it. Away from everything and everyone and with a shitty Internet connection to boot. The first time the power went out or the net went down, you’d flip out.”

  “Shush. I want my fantasy. They deliver sushi in the woods, right?”

  He kisses my forehead. “Yes, sushi, Thai, tapas. It’s all available. Also drones deliver packages in under thirty minutes.”

  “Oh, perfect.”

  “Let’s get a cabin this weekend,” he says. “I’ll find something for Saturday night.”

  “I can’t. I need to prep this weekend for an investor call on Monday.”

  I blink my eyes open, the sunlight startling me. A rude return to reality, investor calls.

  “How about next weekend, Saturday night?”

  We go back and forth, checking calendars and availability until we eventually settle on a Saturday four weeks in the future.

  “I’ll even bring you home by noon on Sunday, so you have the afternoon to work.”

  “Deal. Now kiss me.”

  We spend a minute making out on the park bench, and it feels good. Then Thomas pulls away. I open my eyes to see him gesture with his head toward the lake.

  There’s a little kid, maybe three or four, holding half a slice of bread and staring at us with big eyes. Two ducks slowly waddle after her, following a trail of breadcrumbs.

  “Come back here, Ella,” yells the mom. “Leave those people alone.”

  “Come on,” Thomas says, grabbing my hand. “Let’s go before we’re arrested for indecency.”

  I’m a little late, a little sweaty, and my hair is messed when I return to the office for the API meeting Amber leads. But I’m a lot less stressed. A worthwhile tradeoff.

  Amber shakes her head even as she smiles.

  CHAPTER 31

  * * *

  Chris> What’s up?

  Joe> The client who wanted the data on Angelina Benenati. Now they want her out of the picture.

  Chris> Wetwork?

  He doesn’t usually do that sort of thing. But if the price is right, he could. It’s what he had trained to do before everything went digital. She’s a woman, and a powerful one. It would actually be enjoyable.

  Joe> Jesus, no. You scare me. She’s started a company. They want the company to go away. Maybe she’s found embezzling, goes to jail, that sort of thing. Discredited, not disemboweled.

  Well, that’s vaguely disappointing. Still, she’s successful. He imagines the fall would be pretty painful.

  Chris> Give me a few days to dig, see what I have to work with.

  Daryl is out for a few hours, which means Chris Daly has time on his own to research. He goes downstairs to the basement. They’re in another short-term rental house, in Seattle this time, which makes Daly happy, because he’ll see the waitress tonight.

  Daly unlocks his computer into his secret partition and goes back to his files on Benenati. Back when the client first asked for a data dump on her, he’d pulled down everything. Modern detailed data such as web history, email, and phone records goes back about ten years, although everyone has financial and credit data, arrest records, tax filings as far back as the eighties in most cases, when computerization of records began in earnest.

  Thing is, there’s a lot of data on Benenati, although only in certain areas. Her online profile is ten times the average size. He’d glanced through her browser history one time and been bored to tears. Six hundred web searches on a single day, all related to aspects of programming.

  Outside of work, she watched a hell of a lot of movies. Mostly popular stuff, yet it wasn’t unusual for her to stream movies for hours on end. 95th percentile for hours of television watched, more than bit odd for a computer programmer. The psych profilers even mentioned it when he asked them to take a pass through the file.

  She also had a lot of VPN traffic. Fact is, that was the number one thing that stood out about her. On the other hand, it was a VPN into her work, not any of the bit torrent obfuscators. Still, a lot of network traffic. A lot of it happening at the same time as she was apparently watching television.

  And she spent a lot of money as cash. Big, regular cash withdrawals, not in the realm of blackmail, yet still a lot more hard currency than the average person.

  And yet, she has almost no social data online. Few Tomo posts of substance, no Picaloo account, few connections to anyone else.

  Problem is, none of these pieces of data individually mean anything. Put all together, it points to something more, but neither he nor the data geeks at Central had come up with anything conclusive.

  * * *

  Chris Daly doesn’t go into the office often; then again, he doesn’t need to. He has his burner phones, and encrypted connections for when he needs to talk to Enso. Normally, he and Daryl spend all their time operating in the field, taking care of Enso’s most sensitive, most politically deniable stuff.

  The only time he sees anyone from BRI is when he calls in a crew for a temporary base of operations, cleanup, or if they need a bit of wetwork.

  But now he needs to see the data boys, the analytic geeks that crunch the data, profiling people and digging up dirt. He needs to put the fear of God or Enso or something into them, which is why he took the redeye last night from coast to coast, and this morning he’s heading for the Hopper Information Services Center (HISC), part of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

  BRI is a modern ghost organization, which means BRI doesn’t exist. Not only are there no public records, there’s also no actual organization or budget. Their data arm is twenty-odd staff paid for and housed by the Navy, and armed with data by the big fat Naval data center.

  The psych arm of BRI is run out of Military Information Services Organization (MISO), part of the U.S. Army. Chris himself is technically part of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau in the Investigations Division. He visits FCC headquarters once a year to renew his badge. Everyone is in a position where their BRI work is plausibly consistent with their day jobs.

  Only Enso reports to the NSA’s Signal Intelligence organization, where he is a Division Chief, with a regular NSA team, working on mundane intelligence. BRI is his second job.

  Daly enters the Suitland Federal Center, which houses a dozen different government agencies, including the Naval Intelligence Center. He’s on the permanent access list, in theory having something to do with investigating pirate radio stations operating in international waters, and they allow him into the parking lot.

  Lieutenant Jessica Plaint, U.S. Navy, is in charge of the team of mixed naval staff and contractors. She’s not happy to see him when he plants himself in her office at 8:45.

  “Daly.” She drinks what appears to be the last sip of coffee in her cup, and does a double-take at the empty mug. “I’ve got a meeting in five minutes.”

  “Really?” He glances at the wall clock. “You schedule meetings at ten before the hour?”

  “Don’t be a dick. What do you want?”r />
  For some reason, he and Plaint never get along. He suspects Plaint only likes mining data, and doesn’t want to think about what’s done with it, which is what he represents.

  “I need to work with your team.”

  “Obviously.” She leans back in her chair, arms crossed. “You didn’t come for the company. What for?”

  He doesn’t know why she has to be so goddamn antagonistic. “I have a person of interest, maybe connected to a suspicious death.”

  “Yeah, we already got your request through Enso. The team investigated, found a few anomalies. Cell phones in the vicinity that weren’t usually there. License plates caught by traffic and security cameras. They dug into each, ran them by PsychOps, and none match your person of interest.”

  “Maybe the team overlooked something or PsychOps profiled wrong.”

  Plaint’s face tightens and her voice gets frosty. “Or maybe your person of interest had nothing to do with it.”

  “There’s got to be something. I want to spend the day with them.”

  “Come on, Daly. You’re going to annoy them. It does no good for someone to watch over their shoulders.”

  “I want to spend the day with them.” Chris enunciates each word forcefully.

  Plaint glances at the clock. “Jesus, Daly. You’re a pain. Fine, spend the day with them.”

  “Thanks, Jessica. You’re a sweetheart.”

  She raises her eyebrows at that. “Get out.”

  He puts up one hand in submission and lets himself out.

  * * *

  The investigation team works down the hall from Plaint’s office, in a room whose door won’t open to Daly’s badge. He settles for knocking.

  The door opens a crack and a young kid (they all look like kids to him these days) blocks the path. Chris pushes his way in, and the kid protests.

  “You can’t come in here.”

  Chris is on the verge of telling him off, when a familiar face from across the room hurries over.

  “It’s okay,” Pete says, “Daly is one of us.”

  A handful of analysts around the room look up and nod in Daly’s direction.