Idempotency

by Joshua Wright

  As he entered the sterile room, Dylan was shocked at his uncle’s graying hair and feeble posture. He stayed long enough to accompany Randy on his short afternoon walk. When they reached the outdoor patio, Dylan tried to engage Randy in quiet conversation about NRS. If foul play had been involved, maybe his uncle would be able to corroborate the story. Unfortunately, when Dylan asked his first question about NRS, Randy simply mumbled nonsensically about a music group from the 1990s.

  Dylan returned from his short break on a Thursday night, and decided to go into the office on Friday, December 30, because he had nothing else to do, he knew he’d be the only soul there, and perhaps, for once, he could actually get some work done. When he arrived at his desk that morning at eleven, he found a small notecard sitting on his chair, which read Get coffee, 1PM.

  Dylan immediately popped up from behind his desk, his heart racing. This was it. This had to be it. Unable to function, he took the liberty of a long lunch at the SolipstiCorp cafeteria. He munched on a drab turkey sandwich while anxiously perusing various news feeds. He could barely concentrate. At precisely one o’clock, Dylan entered the coffeehouse, only to immediately collide with a behemoth of a gentleman. The man-beast’s latte exploded onto both men, and the man who towered over Dylan’s stout frame let out a girlish yelp, followed by a profuse apology for not watching where he was going. The man insisted Dylan take a few credits in order to dry-clean his jacket. He refused, but the man was overly persistent, causing Dylan to get the hidden message and finally give in. The two men shook hands and Dylan felt a small encryptChip transfer into the palm of his hand.

  Now smelling distinctly of coffee, he was shaking in his office chair, his knees bouncing as if they were attached with rubber bands. Just past two, an encrypted chat pinged him. With a few flicks of the wrist, Dylan used the encryptChip private key the coffee man had given to him, and an encrypted message suddenly flickered to life:

  BEGIN 256 PETABYTE OpenPGP PUBLIC, PRIVATE, & AUTHORIZED ENCRYPTED CHAT SESSION . . . AFFIRM THREE TIMES TO ACCEPT PUBLIC KEY AND SIGNED CHAT FROM:

  NIMBUS:NIM_e874563cc101. . .<256PB>. . .333d5

  [NIMBUS 13:05:24] Dyl-Pickle. Sorry for the wait. Reach under your desk. Sim wants to meet in darkVirt. The chip is the key, the card under your desk is the location. The location/key tuple will be valid and online between the times of 20:00:00 − 20:01:00 PST next Friday. See you soon.

  [Dylan 13:05:34] Wait! I have questions! What about the interview? I don’t have eyes.

  [NIMBUS 13:05:39] Interview’s been delayed. Meet in the darkVirt. Kristi’s almost got the Solipsticorp headset working, that will be your eyes.

  [Dylan 13:05:46] She does? She didn’t tell me that. And don’t ruin my jacket next time!

 

  Dylan gasped as adrenaline coursed through him. He reached under the desk, and after a few passes his hand fell over a thin slip of paper taped to the underside of his desk. He unstuck the small paper, which was no more than one centimeter in width and ten centimeters long.

  “Hot damn,” he whispered.

  In precise pencil, the following numbers were carefully written out:

  b39F:0:85a3:0:442f:8a2e:0:0370:

  0:ff3E:0:f578:9823:9a11:0:7334

  Dylan shook his head and grinned.

  As the year 2112 flowed effortlessly into 2113, Dylan sat on the large portico of a prominent San Diego resort overlooking the bay in anticipation of a fireworks display that would begin at a moment’s notice. He was attending Frank’s infamous New Year’s Eve party for the fifth straight year. Many of SolipstiCorp’s employees were in attendance—nearly the entire sales and marketing teams, but only the more gregarious software engineers and scientists.

  The alcohol had warmed his belly enough to ward off the surprisingly chilly wind wafting off the water. But not enough to numb him from the sight he was about to behold: Kristina was at the party with another man, another developer from SolipstiCorp. They were holding hands, talking with a large group of technobrats. Dylan walked up to the group and tried to make small talk, but the group only seemed to be speaking big talk.

  “What’s the news, dudes?” Dylan asked and was met by several uncomfortable smiles. The engineers, as usual, weren’t interested in socializing with the business team.

  Kristina rolled her eyes and seemed to latch onto her date a little tighter. Dylan tried to catch her gaze, but this wasn’t the time. He was certain she’d find him later, or she’d let him find her.

  An hour passed and the moment happened. Dylan was out on the portico behind Frank’s house, watching the clouds roll in off the ocean. He and Frank were chatting about newly tweaked two-hand tackle rules in the NFL, when Kristina walked past them both. Frank nudged Dylan’s elbow and nodded his head in Kristina’s direction. She and her date were still together, but now she held Dylan’s stare with far more passion than she held her date’s hand.

  “Dude, what happened to you guys?” asked Frank.

  “I don’t know, Frank. It’s complicated.”

  “It’s always complicated, Dylan.” Frank shook his head. “That deathTrip really screwed you up. Anyway, get your ass up and go talk to the girl.”

  “Yeah, I think I will.” Dylan hesitated, then yelled out, “Kristina, hold up! I need to talk.” He jumped out of his wooden reclining deck chair and jogged lightly up to her side, neglecting to notice the existence of the clumsy engineer lasciviously hanging onto her arm as if she was his toy, though the roles were quite obviously reversed.

  “Hey Dylan! I didn’t know you were here!” she lied, obviously drunk.

  “Hey Dyl—“ Kristina’s date, the engineer, started to say hi, but he was slovenly drunk, and as he stuck out his hand to greet Dylan he stumbled at the portico’s edge, and grabbed the handrail to save himself from a potentially perilous two-step stumble down to an expansive lawn.

  Dylan grabbed the young man’s arm to help steady him. “Whoa, hey there, buddy, you gotta watch those stairs—they have a way of jumping out at you. It’s Lester, right?” They were equally drunk, but Dylan had far more practice at inebriation than his younger counterpart.

  Lester looked up at Dylan quizzically and then toward the bay, which sat at rest below the azure, darkening horizon. “It’s so . . . what’s the appro—pro—propriate word . . . beautiful—” Lester stuttered and clamped his mouth shut before his cheeks puffed out as if he was about to play a trumpet solo. He swiveled and heartily puked over the handrail.

  The nearby crowd let out a chorus of disappointed gasps, and Dylan laughed a little too hard. Kristina shook her head, clearly frustrated by her date’s inability to provide adequate companionship.

  “Hey, I want to chat for a second.” Dylan let Lester drop to his knees and grabbed Kristina by the elbow.

  “You don’t get to chat with me just because you want to, Dylan.” She had a tendency to say his name almost every sentence when she was drunk.

  “Kristi, it’s important, it’s about . . .” he lowered his voice. “It’s about SOP.”

  “I’m important, Dylan. What about S, O, me . . . Dylan?”

  He laughed a little. “How much have you had to drink? And what’s up with bringing a date? Why the hell did you bring that guy with you?”

  “I didn’t bring him, he asked me to come with him. And, Dylan, what do you care? You dumped me, remember?”

  “Yeah, but he’s so—”

  “He’s so what? Willing to date me?”

  “Well, I just . . .” His mind went blank. “Dammit, Kristi, I want to be with you—badly! I dream about holding you again, feeling your skin against mine—but I’m a ball of mixed-up emotions right now: scared, confused, angry. I wake up sweating every night, wondering who I am. This isn’t about you—you’re being selfish. Is it too much to ask for you to wait until all this blows over?”

  “Yes, it is! I’m being selfish? Me? That’s ridiculous. Why should I have to wait? If you want to be with me, the
n be with me. You’re a coward, Dylan.” This appeared to sting him, and his smile drooped to a frown.

  “Well, at least I’m not a tool like your date.” He motioned to Lester, who was now being helped by several friends.

  “At least that tool is in my toolbox.” She bit her lower lip. “Okay, so that sounded bad. Look, Dylan, I’m not going to wait on you. Seriously, I love—loved, or maybe I still love you, whatever—but if you can’t love me when you need me most, then why would you love me when things are good? I’ll do whatever I can to help you as a friend, but anything more than that, and I’m not giving guarantees.”

  Dylan nodded. “I get it, I’m sorry. I just—”

  She suddenly sobered up. “Stop apologizing. Jeez, I’m so sick of you apologizing all the time. Just tell me the news you have already.”

  Dylan slowly led her down to the lawn, toward the water, and away from the dispersing crowd; they both forgot about their sick friend in an instant.

  “They contacted me,” Dylan said. “They gave me a darkVirt location and a key, whatever that means. They want to meet. They said you’ve been working on getting SolipstiCorp headgear working for darkVirts. Is that true?”

  “Wow! How do they know that? Yeah, I’ve been working on it.” Her face lit up.

  “So SOP hasn’t been in contact with you then?”

  “Nope; I was tinkering with it on my own time.”

  “Well, I need it by Friday night. Can you make that happen?”

  She exhaled loudly, then said, “Dylan, I don’t even know that it will work. We’ve never tested our gear for a darkVirt use case.” She paused, he smiled widely, and she continued, now talking more to herself than to him. “Friday? It’ll definitely take a little hacking on the code. I need to finish the unit tests . . . I’d need to get another pair of eyes on it, a code review. And I need someone who knows hardware.”

  Both of them looked back at the engineer bent over on his knees, face firmly pointed at the ground. Lester groaned.

  “How about that guy?” Dylan asked. “He’d obviously do anything to help you out. He’s been wagging his tail at you like a puppy all night.”

  “I don’t want to use him like that.”

  “C’mon, Kristi—I’m sure he’d enjoy it anyway.”

  “Look, I don’t know, let me think about it.“

  “Don’t tell him about SOP, though. I don’t trust anyone at this point. Just say we’re mucking around with alternative uses.” She nodded and he continued, “So Friday? You can do it?”

  She looked back at him and smirked. “Yeah, it’s possible. But this is a potential security breach if they catch us—it’s been almost impossible to find time to write code when folks aren’t around, and the lab is on grade-one lockdown.”

  “Can’t you just take the gear home?”

  She rolled her eyes and Dylan realized she had eschewed her glasses. “Yes, I could do that. We’d have to use my home kit, and I’d have to clear my tracks; but yeah, if we’re careful, sure.”

  Dylan slapped his hands together anxiously, “Ha-ha! All right! Now we’re talking.”

  “Okay, Friday. It’s a date,” she said, then amended her statement: “Save the date.”

  With a start, the sky exploded into a multifarious display of colors. Dylan and Kristina watched in awe as if they had never experienced anything more amazing.

  Dylan leaned over, hesitated, then kissed Kristina gently on the mouth. They began to hold each other tighter. He released. “I do love you, Kristi, I do, truly. If you can’t wait for me now, I’ll try to catch up with you later.”

  She returned his smile but not his words.

  On Wednesday of the following week, with only two days left until the week’s end, Kristina had secured use of the SolipstiCorp headgear for the entire weekend. Additionally, she had been coding fervently, making modifications to the headgear kit to ensure it would be able to connect to an open-source darkVirt. She had also enlisted the services of Lester, the eruptive engineer from the party. His embarrassment from the other night was richly deserved, but he was quick to help Kristina as soon as she batted her goggling eyes and mentioned the idea of using SolipstiCorp’s headgear to access darkVirts.

  Both engineers had become fixated on the challenge of using the tech for this new purpose. The pair had been deeply involved in the tedium of bug-fixing the past several months during their day jobs, whereas Dylan’s ad hoc project had afforded them the opportunity to innovate again. Innovation begot a Pavlovian response from developers. They viscerally craved it; it could motivate an engineer to push moral or personal boundaries, or tempt them to leave one opportunity for another. The chance to create something unique, something new, something unprecedented: this was an engineer’s raison d'être.

  Kristina and Lester couldn’t help themselves if they wanted to.

  Chapter Eighteen

  An energetic Wheaton terrier bounded with pure ecstasy across a damp lawn. A dozen riders clung onto the silky white hair of the dog with childlike wonder showing upon their faces, Sindhu included. Owning a dog had never been possible; as a child she had been horribly allergic. Once she had started working and was able to afford allergen antidotes she had simply become too busy to own a dog. So, upon learning of the dogVirt several weeks ago, Sindhu had made a point to visit it once daily at a minimum. She found it cathartic.

  The dogVirt was simple: Choose your breed, choose a location, and hang on for the ride. Virt users were shrunk to about ten centimeters and placed in a simple harness atop the back of an excitable dog. Sindhu had lived next to a Wheaton terrier in her third year of grad school. While she had barely said hello to the dog’s owner, she had cooed over the dog aplenty. No matter what the weather, the time, the season, or its owner’s disposition, Wilhelmina the Wheaton was always happy to see Sindhu. Her owner had called it the Wheaton greetin’; Sindhu would arrive at her rented house, and Wilhelmina would jump up on the neighboring fence with reckless abandon, pure elation washing over her shaggy face; from somewhere behind that silky hair, two eyeballs somehow managed to find their way to Sindhu.

  The dogVirt Wheaton was finally crashing now. It had been playing for a good ten minutes, herding invisible sheep around a rain-dampened yard somewhere in middle America. Sindhu’s laugh was melodic, and it melted into the laughter of the other twelve riders. The Wheaton decided to curl up under a picnic table on the back patio, its tail still wagging frantically, its body now at rest aside from the regular cadence of panting.

  The riders began to blink away from the dogVirt, most of them offering heartfelt good-byes to the strangers they had shared the dog-riding experience with: A moment of youthful innocence tearing down anonymous walls that typically would have kept everyone quiet.

  Sindhu was petting a few strands of hair, also about to log out herself. As she raised a hand to do so, a voice rose up from behind her and said, “The end of the ride always saddens me.”

  Sindhu turned around and saw a gentle face staring back at her. The man’s avatar had a narrow smile and neatly trimmed brown hair. His skin was rough, and he hadn’t shaved in a day or so, Sindhu guessed. Then she wondered what he looked like in the realWorld. She posited he must look similar to his virt representation—otherwise, why choose mediocrity?

  “Okay, I’ll bite: Why does the end sadden you?” Sindhu asked.

  “Well, I guess I mean everyone should have the chance to be so close to something so purely happy.” The man spoke softly, then displayed a warm, simple smile. He exuded a peacefulness that put Sindhu at ease—not an easy task.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Sindhu replied, then made a gesture to leave. Before she could, however, the man raised his hand, signaling her to stop.

  “I want you to have something.” The man reached into his front shirt pocket and pulled out a small strip of paper. Sindhu reached up to take it with a confused look on her face.

  Her eyes got wide as she asked, “SOP?”

  “We’ve been w
atching you. We’ll contact you with next steps. Stay quiet. Be smart, not rash. Use caution.” He let go of the paper, smiled warmly, waved a hand in front of him, and then blinked away.

  Sindhu opened the paper, and read the handwritten note. It read:

  Look under your pillow.

  Her big eyes widened further still, and she instinctively looked around for a pillow, finding only stalks of fur. She scoffed at herself, realizing that the man must have meant her pillow in the realWorld. SOP wouldn’t risk providing sensitive information digitally; she had to log out of the dogVirt immediately. A simple turn of her hand later and she was groggily opening her earth-blue ocImps. She awoke to the realWorld where she had fallen asleep: recumbent upon a narrow bed meant specifically for virtTripping. The bed was crafted of foam, which wrapped the majority of the virtTripper’s body into itself. The foam then acted as a stimulant against the body, providing further sensation to the experience. Sindhu had shelled out serious corpNet monetary credits for the bed and had been mostly underwhelmed. Further, she had found it required the use of a small pillow, or else she would drool all over the foam itself.

  Upon logging out of her virtTrip, the foam hardened, unwrapping her and pushing her to the surface. She quickly rolled over and lifted her pillow, immediately spotting the folded-up piece of paper. She opened it and read the following scribbled note:

  Loc — AE27::4FA2:0:0:11E4

  Key — “I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”

  —Abraham Lincoln

  A jackrabbit erupted within her chest where her heart had been moments before. She glanced at the front door to her small apartment; there were no signs of entry. She was strangely okay with the fact that someone had been inside her house; under any other circumstance, she would have had a vehement reaction to such a violation.