Kill Process

by William Hertling

  “What did CompEx decide?” I try to keep the question light.

  “Jesus, it’s not about what they decide, it’s that they’re a major player, and you’ve put my relationship with them at stake.”

  “It’s not all about you, Owen. The world doesn’t revolve around your relationships. You, CompEx, me, we’re all pawns in this.”

  Silence hangs heavy on the line. Finally, Owen breaks the quiet. “We had an emergency meeting with the investors, including CompEx, this morning. Everyone has agreed to jointly honor their financial commitments while maintaining your voting power to provide a show of confidence. We’re increasing the valuation of the company so we don’t dilute your share. You still have control. All this is tentative obviously.”

  “That’s great news.” The statement is vague and devoid of meaning. The outcome is what I hoped for, but the victory is hollow. Superior ideas, management skills, and technical expertise should have allowed me to win. I imagined Tapestry competing head-to-head against Tomo, beating them by the superiority of our meritocratic design principles. In the end it came to down hacking the bad guys and exposing their foul behavior. I played a game and won because I cheated better than the other team.

  * * *

  On Monday I return to the office.

  Harry, our CFO, is the first to see me, and he apologizes at least three times before he even reaches me. I edge away from him, but he keeps coming, like he’s going to hug me, and all I can hear is a hum in my circuits, like I’m about to blow a fuse.

  “I got all the money back from the police,” he says, hands up, trying to placate me.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, until I remember the cash I had begged and borrowed from friends to keep us afloat. I try to walk around him, but he blocks my path, oblivious to my discomfort, or maybe interpreting it as anger about the money.

  “We’ll receive the next series of payments from the investors, on an accelerated schedule. By tomorrow we’ll have enough cash in the bank to meet payroll for the next four months.”

  I’m still cornered in the entranceway. Amber hears him, grabs me by the arm, and pushes him aside. She escorts me to my office and follows me in, closing the door behind her.

  There’s a knock at the door before I can even sit down. Igloo opens the door a crack to sit her head in. “Can I come in?” She’s got puppy dog eyes.

  I nod.

  She gives me a hug.

  “Careful,” I say, afraid she’s going to press on one of my still-sore injuries.

  She’s gentle though, and then she takes one of my guest chairs. Amber remains standing by the whiteboard.

  “You shouldn’t go out without one of us,” Igloo says.

  I nod, feeling foolish now that I’m in my office, even though I was undeniably stuck out there.

  “Did you see today’s article?” Amber asks.

  “Yes,” I say. It’s the second in the series, and this one focused on Tomo and its effect on mental health, and privacy; it includes blurbs from experts in the field as well as regular Tomo users. Tomorrow, the article promises to unveil a dozen emails purportedly exchanged between Lewis Rasmussen and Chris Daly.

  “So far this morning we’ve had five thousand people sign up to be notified when Tapestry goes live.” Igloo passes over a tablet displaying a graph of signups. It looks like a hockey stick. “Tomo users are eager to defect.”

  “That’s great,” I say. We usually average a hundred email signups a day. “We’ll see a lot more before the week is out.”

  “We should launch right now,” Amber says.

  I shake my head. “Even our accelerated date isn’t for five more weeks.”

  “The platform is ready,” Amber stands and paces across the room. “All the beta users are happy. You know what conversion rates are like. Maybe 5 percent of the signups will come back later to create an account. If we go live now, at least half will make an account and use Tapestry right away.”

  Ugh. I run my hand through my hair. “Marketing is pushing back again. Now that we have money again, they want to do an organized launch to coincide with ITX.”

  “Screw their plans,” Amber says. “We’ll drum up more press this week than marketing could obtain for ITX, and you know it.”

  I do, but I’m glad Amber concluded it on her own. “Are we ready to scale? If all our incoming traffic turns into active users and invites their friends?”

  “We load tested yesterday to ten million clients.” Amber looks smug. “Just in case.”

  “Ten million?” I’m shocked. We’ve never tested more than half a million before.

  “We worked around some bottlenecks,” Igloo says, “and latency crept up, but we sustained that load for an hour.”

  “We’re ready,” Amber says. “As ready as we’re ever going to be.”

  Igloo pulls down her hood, and shakes her hair free. “This is Tapestry’s moment.”

  It’s been a year getting to this point, more if you count the time I spent germinating these ideas. When Thomas encouraged me to leave Tomo and create a company, I thought he was crazy. From where I stand now, it feels like my whole life has been leading up to this point. Succeed or fail, I’ve poured everything into this business.

  “Let’s do it,” I say. “We launch tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 50

  * * *

  Five months later . . .

  Local Startup Tapestry Valued at $2B

  Fourth consecutive month of exponential growth

  Local tech darling Tapestry, founded by ex-Tomo employee Angie Benenati, is now valued at $2B after an investment round led by Pinchot Venture Partners. Growing users tenfold for the fourth consecutive month, Benenati says the valuation is justified given their growth potential.

  “We have a path forward to grow well beyond $200B,” Benenati said, referring to the declining market cap of competitor Tomo. “Our approach is fundamentally cooperative and inclusionary, not exclusionary. All of our partners are committed to cultivating the Tapestry ecosystem.”

  Tomo’s initial stumble with the CEO Lewis Rasmussen’s arrest for the alleged attempted murder of Benenati has turned into a string of setbacks as further investigation revealed evidence he coerced more than a dozen industry leaders into backroom deals that may violate anti-trust laws. Tomo stock is down nearly 25 percent since Rasmussen’s arrest. The company’s own PrivacyGuard product, decried by computer security experts since its introduction as a fatally flawed implementation, has been removed from the market. Rasmussen continues to profess his innocence while he awaits trial, even as evidence against him continues to mount.

  “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” Benenati said to wild applause during a keynote address at SXSW Interactive. “The era of control by mega-corporations is over, and open platforms are back. This is how the web was meant to be.”

  Benenati may be right. Web traffic analysis firm Alexa reports Tomo web visits are down 30 percent since their peak. Tomo’s fall from grace couldn’t be better timed for Tapestry’s own growth.

  * * *

  The killing days are over. The scrutiny I’m under as CEO of Tapestry is too immense to take such risks again. In many ways, I’m glad. The temptation would always exist to help one more person, right one more wrong. One era ends so another can begin.

  Thomas and I can move forward without any new deceptions. It’s a relief, and not only because of my ongoing guilt about lying. I can bring my whole self to our relationship. That feels good. Well, my whole self minus my past. Let that remain hidden at least.

  Tapestry’s odds of success are higher than ever, though by no means assured. Our launch, fueled by the news coverage surrounding Chris Daly and Lewis Rasmussen, exceeded our best estimates. New users continue to flood in.

  Igloo is beyond ecstatic that Kindred is hugely popular with kids under sixteen, who spend hours relating their joys and woes to our chatbots. We hired a new team of psychologists to bolster the chatbots’
capabilities so they can help people develop better coping skills and alleviate social isolation. There’s even talk of bringing in educators to develop tutoring bots.

  Amid the controversy, Tomo continues to shed users. Many sign up with us, but they’re losing users faster than we’re gaining them. That’s okay. I’d like Tapestry to succeed with our particular vision for decentralization of control, but it’s more important that people wake up and see the danger of manipulative, monolithic Internet silos.

  It’s crazy that three years ago I was writing SQL queries sequestered in a corner, hiding from everyone as best I could, and now I’m helping topple one of the world’s largest companies.

  Still, one ever-present knot of worry has taken up permanent residence in my stomach: the government. I skated by with Chris Daly, his crimes sufficiently atrocious that the government chose to keep their distance. Unless he worked in total isolation though, somewhere inside that massive intelligence organization are people who are aware of me.

  Even if my crimes remain secret, we cannot keep hidden the threat Tapestry poses to government surveillance. The dispersion of data and communication to a distributed network of providers is a nightmare for centralized spying. Where once they could have forced a wiretap on a single enormous company, now they must individually seek out hundreds of different providers who can come and go in a few months.

  I know they’re watching me. Some would say I need luck on my side. But luck is for fools. I make my own destiny.

  * * *

  “A little higher,” I say, from my perch on my desk.

  “What’s the point?” Igloo says. “2600 Hz phone phreaking didn’t work when you were a kid, and you still want me to learn it? And even if it did, I’d make my phone generate it.” She grabs a mobile device out of her pocket, and opens a music app. “There’s no point in doing it Grandpa’s way.”

  With a few taps she generates the required frequency from her phone, and the light goes off on my software meter.

  “I see your point, although the whistle kind of saved my life.”

  “Still.” Igloo crosses her arms. “It’s an old white guy custom. I don’t want my rite of passage to be defined by the patriarchy.”

  I nod. “Fine. We need some rite of passage. Lock-picking?”

  “With physical keys?” Igloo graces me with an intentionally silly bug-eyed gaze. “They’ll be obsolete in a few years, replaced with digital locks.”

  These last few months caused me to reflect on my relationships with Repard and Nathan9. Repard is gone, and I’m still persona non grata to Nathan, but it’s time for me to be the mentor anyway. Igloo will be my first disciple.

  I might be able to leave the world of killing, but I’ll never be able to leave the world of hacking. There are young hackers, old hackers and hackers in jail. But there are very few ex-hackers.

  Igloo and I will forge new ways. What worked for Nathan and Repard won’t work for us.

  “How about compromising cloud provisioning?” Igloo says. “By the time someone gets the server they requested, it’s already undermined.”

  “Whoa.” I hold up my hand. “The point of tests of ability is not to go to jail, it’s to demonstrate inside knowledge, skill, and courage.”

  “And whistling 2600 Hertz does that?” Igloo shakes her head.

  Working with Igloo isn’t going to be easy. She pushes too much. Well, maybe I did, too.

  “We’ll figure something out,” I say.

  A Note to the Reader

  DEAR READER,

  Thank you for purchasing Kill Process. I hope you enjoyed reading it.

  As an indie published author, I don’t have the support of a large marketing department at a major publisher. Instead, I’m dependent on readers like you to spread the word. If you enjoyed Kill Process, please:

  Post a review online.

  Tell a friend or two about Kill Process, or post about it on social media.

  Subscribe to my mailing list at www.williamhertling.com to find out when my next book comes out.

  If you are new to my books, please check out my four-book Singularity series, starting with Avogadro Corp, about the emergence of AI and subsequent transformation of the world.

  Thank you,

  William Hertling

  www.williamhertling.com

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  * * *

  THE LONGER WRITERS stay in the business, the more people they end up interacting with and relying on in the course of working on a novel. Also, as the length of the novel increases, so too does the number of people involved. All of this is to say that I’m indebted to many people for their help on Kill Process. As always, any errors that remain are my own fault.

  I worked with two editors this time around, Anastasia Poirier and Dario Ciriello, and deeply appreciate their assistance. Editing is a business where the work doesn’t stop with just one reading of the manuscript. There are follow-up phone calls, questions by email, spot-checking of revised material, and emotional handholding. Thanks to their hard work, characters spring to life in more vivid detail, emotions are felt more keenly, and everything has more clarity.

  Thanks also to everyone involved in the production of the novel. Proofreading is thanks to Kate Heartfield. The red-and-black cover on the trade paperback is thanks to Mike Corley. The hooded hacker limited-edition paperback cover is thanks to Adam Hall. Formatting for the print edition was done by Dario Ciriello, and formatting for the ebook was done by Rick Fisher.

  Beta readers are invaluable for their feedback on the manuscript. These folks are the first to read the manuscript as a whole, with fresh eyes. Their job isn’t easy. Often stuck reading the manuscript at their computer in Word, they need to wade through and attempt to ignore thousands of grammar errors and lazy word choices, in order to provide feedback on the more substantive content issues. I’d like to thank Gene Kim, Brad Feld, Bernie A. Hernández, John-Isaac Clark, Stacey Wransky, Barb Vostmyer, Stacey Stein, Mat Ellis, Mike Whitmarsh, Monica Villaseñor, Catherine Shyu, Reid Tatoris, David Mandell, Katie Carey Levisay, Danger Marshall, Lucas Carlson, Eliot Peper, Catherine Woneis, Grace Ribaudo, and Amber Case.

  My critique group was essential in refining the beginning of the novel, especially getting deeper into Angie’s character. Thank you to Catherine Craglow, Cathy Heslin, Shana Kusin, David Melville, and Amy Seaholt.

  Dr. Kusin also provided very helpful medical expertise. Grace Ribaudo and Katie Carey Levisay provided valuable psychological expertise.

  As always, the members of Codex, an online community, rendered assistance with countless issues. Actually determining who provided help is a forensic exercise that can consume days, so in lieu of appreciating individually all of those talented and wise people, I would like to thank Luc Reid, who created and hosts the community, providing a valuable forum for hundreds of professional writers.

  I’d like to thank Sean Cordero for getting me involved in DDial, and Vito Masotti, Mike Jee, Bill Shamam, Grace Scaglione, and others for many fun times at an influential point in my life. Bill Shamam and I had a blast on rmac DDial recently when I wanted to check a few details of DDial usage. If you’d like to experience an authentic eighties Diversi-Dial for yourself, telnet to rmac.d-dial.com, which is running on a collection of original Apple //e computers.

  Chris DiBona invited me to a dinner celebrating open source luminaries last year. When we all grabbed seats, I found myself in the midst of several women who worked in tech. This turned out to be one of those serendipitous occurrences. I was already interested in the experiences of women working in technology, and all I had to do was be quiet and listen to hear inside stories from women at different stages in their careers. I’m incredibly grateful for that dinner conversation. Thanks to Deborah Bryant, Cat Allman, and Karen Sandler.

  I’d like to thank several people who shared their experiences with domestic violence and abuse with me. You know who you are. I especially apologize for any mistakes in the handling of this topic, w
hich is a sensitive issue, and one I care deeply about. I had to take a few liberties for the sake of the story, including: Most abusers avoid social media and other communication tools to isolate their victims. Abusers and victims come in all gender combinations. Because I couldn’t stomach writing about it, and didn’t want to subject my readers to it, I avoided going too deeply into the particulars of abusive situations. On the other hand, statistics I shared about abuse are accurate, based on the best data I could find. A few beta readers questioned whether forty percent of police officers really have violence in the home. Studies vary in their numbers and methodology, but most agree the prevalence of domestic violence for police officers is much higher than the population at large, and at least two studies agree on the forty percent figure. This includes both violence directed at spouses/partners as well as children, and both long term and isolated incidents of violence.

  I also want to acknowledge Eliot Peper’s Uncommon Stock, a great startup thriller series about the founding of a financial fraud detection software company, which stimulated my interest in writing about a tech startup.

  As usual, many characters are inspired by or tributes to real-life people whom I greatly appreciate. However, in the spirit of fun mysteries, I’m not going to tie them to any specific names. Ask me over a whisky.

  I also want to extend a very big thank you to my backers on Patreon. In exchange for a small monthly donation, these folks get early access to my published novels, signed copies, and occasionally cut scenes. Their regular contributions help smooth out my writing income between books and defray costs associated with production of each novel. Thank you very much to Mike Doyle, Bernie Hernandez, John-Isaac Clark, Joe Ludwig, Brad Feld, James Anderson, Carolyn Stark, Addison Smith, Greg Roberts, Keith Nolen, Richard Sorden, David Mussington, Jon Guidry, Robert Miller, Peter, Jason Gardner, Jackie Tortorella, Ben Bieker, Caleb Johnson, Steven E. Burchett, Robert Solovay, Gerald Auer, Peter Soldan, Stephen O., Adam Colon, Adith Radityo, Robert Dobkin, B. Wolf, Jan Svanda, Felix Knecht, Tom Haswell, Vivek Bharadwaj, Ted Young, Larry Pearson, Jim White, Stephen Syputa, Karl Bernard, Jonathan Yantis, Nicole J. LeBoeuf, Jacob Perkins, Alek, Nima Bigdely Shamlo, Erin Gately, Eugene Epshteyn, Nils, and Craig T. Wood. If this is at all interesting to you, please visit patreon.com/hertling.