by Jim Nelson
I didn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “Clift told me—”
“Disregard anything Clift tells you,” she snapped. “I told George he should start preserving a backup copy of the Internet. That's exactly what he did.”
“You did? It was your idea?”
“I wrote the first web crawler for George. I crawled every page on the World Wide Web and stored it on George’s servers.”
“Antic’s servers, you mean.”
“No, George’s servers. They were in our house. They were in our bedroom, for God’s sake. It was a side project—a hobby, an experiment—that ran for years. I called the web crawler ARACHNID. He changed the name to CASSANDRA. I’m telling you because I don’t want you to think I was so vain as to name my program after myself. Only a narcissist would do such a thing.”
“This was when?”
“Please, eat your lunch,” she said. “The first crawl was in 1994. It took four hours to crawl the entire World Wide Web. Let me repeat that. In 1994 it took four hours to visit every web page in existence. By the time I left George, it took four weeks. That was in 1998. By 2000, it was no longer possible to measure the crawl time. With the web in constant flux—web sites changing and birthing and dying, constantly being edited—the crawler simply worked twenty-four hours a day, every day, on a cluster of forty machines.”
“I never heard any of this before.” I spoke with my mouth full. As pedestrian as my lunch order was, the sandwich was top-notch.
“It was on the Q.T.,” she said. “George didn’t want to deal with the legal repercussions of storing copies of copyrighted material, so he kept his project private. He hired three programmers out of grad school to keep the system operating twenty-four by seven. That’s all he needed, three or four coders banging away on the keyboards sixty hours a week.”
“All of this out of his own pocket?”
She emitted a palpable, authentic sigh. “George Drake is not a man to look backwards. He keeps his eyes locked forward. That’s useful when you’re an entrepreneur—a requirement, I should say. He never browsed his backup of old web sites. Unlike H. G. Wells, he was not the type of man to climb inside his own time machine. His obsession was almost theoretical in nature. It became a fetish.”
“I don’t know if I believe that,” I said, lips smacking on the salt of the potato chips. “A multibillionaire like George Drake doing all this for nothing? Not for fame? Or a tax write-off of some kind?”
She smiled. “You ever worked for a software startup, Mr. Naroy?”
“A dozen of them,” I said.
“Entrepreneurs like George Drake don’t think too far ahead. That’s their secret. They hit the ground running and they keep running. You worry about the next hurdle, not the one after it. Even when they make their first billion dollars, men like George don’t stop for air. All they know is running. They’re always a little out-of-breath.”
She fanned her arms over the bath’s foamy surface.
“George never had a purpose for his little side-project,” she said. “He never intended to turn a profit off it. He did worry that we’d lose our digital past if we didn’t back it up. That’s the great flaw of the World Wide Web. It had no memory. George Drake gave it one. But he didn’t know what to do with it. It was the first project in his life where he was actually afraid of turning a profit. Toward the end, he feared reprisals if he made it public. He wasn’t afraid of copyright law by then. He feared people would see the past as a weapon to use against each other.”
“You mean digging up dirt,” I said. “Someone writes something thoughtless in 2015 and it’s dug up by their enemies in 2025 to destroy their reputation.”
She sipped her Napoleon, not wantonly as before, but thoughtfully now.
“It turns out a number of Internet companies were quietly crawling the web and storing their own copies,” she said. “All the search engine providers were. One Internet entrepreneur in London was crawling web sites across the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. A Russian oilman was maintaining an archive of every web site written in a Slavic language. George heard whispers of these collections. He began buying old archives, cash on delivery, to bulk up his own collection. Every infusion he bought enriched his copy of the Internet that much more.”
“Like a private book collector buying up libraries at estate sales,” I said.
“Soon George held the most-complete collection of Internet archives in the world. It was his monument. A copy of almost every web site in existence from 1994 to 2026. And what happened in 2026?”
“The Nexternet first appeared,” I said. “New technology and new interfaces.” I touched the memex embedded in the back of my neck. “New ways to communicate. More intimate ways." Within twelve months, the Internet was like a ghost town. Within two years, the Internet had been abandoned. Every web server was taken offline and replaced with Nexternet servers. The Old Internet was officially switched off December 31st of 2028. That’s about the time people started calling it the Old Internet.
“And the Internet went dark on the First of January, 2029. Like the Library of Alexandria burning to ash,” she said. “The world’s collective knowledge was almost lost.”
“That’s being a little dramatic,” I said. “A lot of the old information was migrated to the Nexternet. It wasn’t all left behind.”
“If you told George that, he’d lecture you for an hour,” she said. “Most of the Old Internet would be lost if it weren’t for him. Truth is, very little of the old information was migrated to the Nexternet. He has the numbers to prove it. People are more concerned with transmitting the immediacy of the here and the now than storing information of true worth.” She made a grandiose sigh. “We produced digital encyclopedias in every language of the world covering every topic imaginable. We made video and audio archives spanning what may be the most important forty years of humanity’s existence, as it grew from paper and telephones to a completely Digital Age. And all of that was set aside so people can argue about movie star’s private lives and gripe about a new coffee flavor at Starbucks. The Nexternet is the democratization of human emotion and human communication. The sad truth is, people devote a great deal of their mental energy to the trivial and the petty. The rest has fallen into the margins, it seems.”
I pushed aside the plate of crumbs and the dirty napkin. With my memex, I launched a search for autobiographical information on George Drake. It was easy to do. The memex made searching for old data as easy as searching one's old memories. Today, even a ten-year-old can "remember" the OJ Simpson trial. Today a ten-year-old can "remember" the 9/11 attacks.
“Don’t bother looking any of this up,” she told me, puncturing the silence. “Don’t you realize Dr. Elgin Clift has carefully excised that history from the record?”
“Look, I don’t exactly trust Clift, but I can tell he’s highly protective of the Old Internet. He guards it like a shepherd.”
“Wouldn’t you be tempted to erase an embarrassing episode of your own history?”
I thought of Detachment. The movie drove me out of San Francisco.
“You’re saying Clift has changed the past? He edited the Old Internet?”
“It’s not a claim. It’s a fact.”
“Let’s rewind,” I said. “How did Clift come into possession of George Drake’s copy of the Old Internet?”
“He stole it.” She almost spat it out. “Elgin Clift stole the Internet we’d preserved with the threat of force.”
“Whose force?”
“Clift is no computer programmer. He’s a wheeler and a dealer. When George met him, Clift was a gray-market agent for that Russian oligarch I mentioned. He brokered the deal between George and the Russian for the Slavic archives. Clift’s a dabbler, a paper-pusher, nothing more. But that’s how he found out about George’s collection. When the Nexternet rose to prominence, Clift proposed a business venture to George. They would make the Old Internet available to the public as a subscription service. Offer it t
o universities and research centers and city libraries and turn a profit. George flat-out refused. So Clift paid a visit to the right people in our government. He got them to see that this was a national treasure and too important to be held in private hands.”
“Maybe he was right,” I said.
She shifted uncomfortably in the water. “I don’t deny that George was short-sighted. That’s what got him into this mess. But Antic was done by that time. George had failed to lead the company into the Nexternet Age. The corporation was a husk by 2028.”
“I thought it was still in operation.” I recalled seeing it on the list of owners of Leigh’s apartment building on Jones Street.
“It’s a shell company now,” she said. “George uses it as a front when he wants to dabble in some new venture. Yesterday, it was race horses. Horses, can you imagine? Today, it’s sailing. Damn fool’s going to drown if he doesn’t electrocute himself first.”
I didn’t quite follow that last comment, but I let it go.
“When Clift confronted George with the threat of nationalization, George waved the white flag," she said. "He gave in and let Clift have it.” She shook her head with palpable disdain. “Clift even had a gag order drawn up preventing George from discussing the transfer in public. It’s shameful.”
I went to the goose platter and poured myself another Napoleon. I asked her if she cared for a top-off. Lost in the tangle of her bleak memories, she whispered Please, thank you while staring blankly ahead. I pushed the refilled flute into her hands.
“Who are the other two gray beards?” I said. “Marker and Warwick?”
“Clift’s flunkies,” she said. “Fraternity buddies. Drinking mates. I have no idea what mausoleum he pulled them out of.”
“They look twenty years older than him. They’re bags of dry bones.”
“Clift keeps fit for a reason,” she said. “He will go to the grave chasing young women.”
“You can’t tell me that gag order was enough to keep Clift’s secret, though.”
“No. Clift’s gag order wasn’t sufficient for his petty little ego. He erased from the Old Internet any mention of George’s contribution to preserving it.”
“I thought George had kept it a secret.”
“Oh, there was the occasional news article about it. Whispers. You know, stories like ‘After the success of Antic Corporation, what’s next for George Drake?’ Those kinds of news articles. A few sharp tech reporters deduced George was preserving a copy of the Internet on the side.” She frowned, her glassy eyes wandering the space over my head. “Clift trimmed those news articles. Oh, the interviews still exist in the Old Internet, you can look them up all right. But none of them mention George’s side project. Elgin Clift made sure to wipe all mention of George’s contribution from the historical record.” Her grimace was so sour, she looked like she’d just eaten a wax lemon.
“As well as your contribution,” I said.
“I ran the first leg of the race,” she said. “George ran the marathon.”
“You talk about the Old Internet like it was your flesh and blood,” I said.
“I believe in the sanctity of the Old Internet. Yes, I use that word. Sanctity. If we don’t have a digital memory we can trust, we can trust nothing.”
I clapped my hands and laughed. Having refilled her glass, I was standing over her.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded from the water.
I plunked down to the edge of the pool. We sat side by side.
“That’s why you installed Leigh out on the island.”
Improbably, she flushed. After all that had transpired that afternoon, that was what it took to make Cassandra Chancellor blush.
“You needed a confederate,” I said. “Someone to spy on Clift and tell you exactly what he was up to. You couldn’t do it. Your son couldn’t do it. And so you convinced your son’s girlfriend to go out there and do your dirty work. Am I not right?”
She sniffled and started to drink. She hesitated and sniffled again.
“You make it sound illicit,” she said.
“Your very own foundation paid for Leigh’s internship out on Alcatraz. You served Clift a beautiful young woman on a goose platter.”
“His weakness was my foothold.”
“Your son’s girlfriend. She could be the mother of your grandchild someday.”
“I had good reasons,” she spoke over me. “And Leigh is a strong enough woman to hold her own against Clift.”
“I can’t believe Clift was so dumb he couldn’t put two and two together and see the connection. From Leigh to Gannon to you to George. How did you keep it a secret from him?”
She pruned her lips. “We didn’t,” she said. “He knew Leigh was working for me from day one.”
I coughed a laugh. “Then how—?”
“Elgin Clift is a man who craves the company of beautiful young women. The younger and slimmer the better. He knew Leigh worked for us. He didn’t care. He had Leigh all to himself out on that island. That’s all that mattered to him.”
“That’s one step removed from pimping.”
“Only a man would see it that way,” she said coldly.
I rose. “She’s a bright one, I’ll give you that. But Leigh also loves the Blue Pharjé. She’s trying to forget something painful, even if she can only forget it for a few hours at a time.” I yanked a starched white towel from a pile next to the door. I began drying my feet and legs. “I think she’s trying to bury some painful memories you forced her to re-experience out on that island.”
“I forced no one.”
“You talked her into it,” I said. “She’s twenty-five. You’re the matriarch of the family. You lived a life in software she dreams of. Old men order boys into war. You ordered her into the lion’s den.”
“We had a full discussion before she agreed—”
“You’re successful, you’re strong, and you speak your mind. You made a mark in the computer field, a real difference, and back in a time when software was a men’s club. She probably worships you, for crissakes.”
She turned her head away from me. “You can leave.”
“Did your beloved Gannon go along with this too?” I asked.
“He did,” Chancellor said.
“Gannon must have discovered Clift was pawing his girlfriend. He went out to the island and made a scene. Something set him off.”
“It was that ungodly Blue Pharjé she drinks,” she said. “One night after she emerged from a blue-out, she confessed to Gannon of the harassment she endured. He joined her for their New Year’s Eve party on the island. That’s when he let Clift have it.” She added, “I can’t say I disapprove.”
“Gannon got physical?”
“He did. But Clift has this little mouse of an employee named Brill—”
“I know Brill.”
“Well, Brill may look like a runt but apparently, he’s quite the acrobat, because he was able to pin my Gannon to the floor.”
To my eye, Brill was five feet of nothing. Gannon was built like Vince Lombardi’s blueprint for a Super Bowl quarterback. For Brill to best Gannon was quite the revelation.
“What did you possibly gain from sending Leigh out to the island?”
She was fuming from the admissions I’d forced from her. She collected herself.
“He’s already proven he’s willing to edit history for his own ends,” she said. “There’s no oversight out there. There’s no one monitoring the Old Internet other than Clift and his flunkies. This video you’re seeking that was deleted—did anyone outside of Alcatraz notice it was gone?”
“No,” I had to admit. “Maybe one person,” I added, thinking of Cline’s visit to my office.
“The Old Internet is wired into the brain of everyone on this planet,” she said. “The Old Internet is our memory. When the world wants to recall something from forty years ago, it remembers what the Old Internet says. Clift makes one edit and the world remembers what he wants instead. And if he
deletes something, it’s like forgetting an old memory. How can anyone remember a memory once it’s gone?”
I finished drying myself. I began to dress.
“Remove yourself from Clift’s employ,” Chancellor said from the pool. “Don’t offer him another minute of your services. He’s a foul man.”
“No doubt about it,” I said. “For the moment, I need to see this through.”
“To what end?” Her voice drew low. “To destroy my son?”
“You don’t stop, do you?” I said. “Gannon, Gannon, Gannon. He’s all you can ask me about. I’m beginning to think you haven’t the slightest concern for Leigh.”
“Gannon is my only child,” she said. “He is my alpha and my omega.”
It was a sticky process, pulling on a suit jacket and tie in that musky, steamy room.
“I need to talk to George Drake,” I said to her. “Can you make an introduction?”
“You may,” she said. “I hope you’ll reconsider leaving Clift.”
I tied my damp shoelaces. The wet knots were going to be hell to undo later. I tossed the damp towel into a wicker hamper of them.
“By the way,” I said. “Who is this Max person?”
“Max? He's George's pilot.”
“When we talked, it sounded like he worked for you.”
“Max is a kind of liaison between me and George. He does me favors from time to time. I asked Max to arrange this dress rehearsal, which you passed.”
At the ostentatious black door leading to her bedroom, my hand on the grapefruit-sized doorknob, I stopped and turned. “Tell Drake it’s imperative we meet as soon as possible.”
Although she remained stout and proud in the bath, I could tell from her head held high I had wounded her. I’d forced her to admit what she’d done. There was only her dignity left.