The Social Code

by Sadie Hayes

  “Sir?” This time Amit was unnerved by the silence. “Everything … everything will be okay, sir. The whole team is working on it.”

  “How could you not have told me this?” His disbelief had given way to anger. “What the fuck! Do you not realize that we’re about to close a deal? That this whole thing could fucking fall apart if…” He trailed off; it was too much to process. “I’m coming down there. Right now.” Ted hung up the phone so hard it almost fell off the desk, and then he stood up. He reached for his briefcase.

  T.J. remained seated, hands still neatly folded in his lap. “Would it help if I told you who did it?”

  Ted stopped and looked at his son. He’d almost forgotten he was sitting there. His voice was shaking. “Yes, T.J. That would be helpful.”

  “Will you get me the job at Fenway?”

  Ted swallowed hard and tried to keep his voice steady. “Yes, T.J. I’ll call in a favor with Roger and get you a place at Fenway.”

  T.J. smiled. “Thank you. Her name is Amelia Dory. She’s a freshman at Stanford.”

  “How the hell could a freshman at Stanford hack into the most sophisticated…” Ted started to speak but the smug look on his son’s face stopped him. He knew T.J. was telling the truth.

  Ted pulled out a notebook and said her name as he wrote it down. “Amelia Dory. You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  13

  Lady and the Tramp

  By the grace of God, Adam had been able to convince his RA to let him borrow her car for the evening. It was a 1999 Toyota Camry, which wasn’t exactly a match for Lisa’s Lexus SUV, but at least he didn’t have to show up for his date on a bike.

  Adam had sent Lisa a Facebook message asking if she wanted to have dinner at Salamanca Tapas Bar downtown. He’d never been on a real date or, for that matter, to a real restaurant in Palo Alto, but he’d gotten a Groupon for 60 percent off weekday dining at Salamanca, and hoped that, even if it wasn’t quite as fancy as she was used to, it might be acceptable to Lisa. To his relief, she had agreed.

  He’d pulled out his nicest pair of khakis and the button-down shirt he’d bought for his Stanford interview. The shirt was light blue, and he wasn’t sure it totally matched the pants, but he thought the color accentuated his eyes and he figured his legs would be under the table during dinner anyway. He showered and shaved, stole hair gel from one of the cubbies in the hall bathroom, and looked at himself, satisfied, in the mirror. Until he realized he didn’t have proper shoes. What shoes did you wear with khakis? He slipped on his Converse sneakers. They didn’t look too bad, and maybe she would think he was edgy?

  He arrived at the restaurant fifteen minutes early. When Lisa came through the door, looking like an angel in white jeans, heels, and a light blue silk halter top, Adam smiled and stood up to greet his date. Lisa smiled back and gave him an unexpected hug. “We match!” she said, noticing their shirt colors, and he blushed.

  The hostess sat them at a small candlelit table. Adam panicked when he opened the menu; he didn’t see a single thing that he could pronounce. Why hadn’t he looked beforehand to figure out what to order? At the bottom of the menu, there were a few “traditional Spanish rice dishes” listed. Okay, that sounded safe. Done. He closed the menu. “Look okay?” He smiled at Lisa.

  “Yes! I love this place. I did a summer program in Madrid last year and absolutely fell in love with Spanish food.”

  Adam smiled widely. Phew!

  The waiter approached and Lisa spoke with him in flawless Spanish, giggling lightly at something he said. Adam smiled, allowing the glory of being out with such a beautiful, intelligent girl to make him feel like the luckiest guy alive.

  The waiter turned to Adam. “And for you, sir?”

  “I’ll have the pay-ella,” Adam said.

  The waiter gave a knowing glance at Lisa and corrected Adam’s pronunciation. “The pi-yay-yah?”

  Adam’s face turned beet red. “Uh, yes. Yes, the pi-yay-yah.”

  The waiter smiled at his improvement. Lisa reassured him. “Don’t worry; the Spaniards love making complicated words so they can mock us for mispronouncing them.”

  Adam was grateful for her humility.

  The dinner passed quickly, conversation never ceasing as Adam and Lisa talked about Stanford and Palo Alto and her favorite trips around the world. They talked about their favorite TV shows and ice cream flavors and laughed at each other’s favorite jokes. The paella, it turned out, was delicious, and Lisa insisted they order the house-made flan so Adam could try it.

  But when it came time to pay the bill, Adam confronted a new dilemma: how to slip the waiter the Groupon without Lisa seeing. To his relief, she excused herself to use the restroom and Adam hurriedly beckoned the waiter over.

  “I have to get the manager to approve it,” he explained. “I’ll be right back.” He walked away just as Lisa returned to the table. Just in time, he thought.

  But then the manager came over to their table, holding the Groupon. Adam felt his hands sweat. “Sir, this coupon—” The manager stopped when he noticed Lisa. “Lisa! Lisa, my dear, how are you?”

  “Sergio! It’s so lovely to see you!” Lisa responded with a smile.

  “How was everything tonight?”

  Lisa grinned. “Oh, it was all wonderful, Sergio. This is Adam.” She gestured to Adam, who reached out his hand to shake Sergio’s and started to stand up.

  “No, no, don’t stand up. A friend of Lisa’s is a friend of mine. Marco, don’t worry about that bill; the meal is on me.”

  Adam couldn’t hide his surprise. “Oh, thank you so much,” he stammered.

  Lisa smiled. “Thanks, Sergio. I can’t wait to tell Dad how wonderful everything was.”

  “Yes, please do! I’ll leave you two to it. Have a lovely evening.”

  When he’d left the table, Lisa turned back to Adam. “Sorry about that. My dad owns the property and loaned Sergio the money to open the restaurant.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I bet you’ve been here a thousand times. I didn’t mean to bring you somewhere your father invested in!”

  “Honestly, Adam, it’s hard to find a place in this town that Dad isn’t somehow involved with. And I love this place. I would eat here every single night—if it meant hanging out with you.” She blushed. That came out a little too quickly and she worried it sounded too aggressive.

  But Adam just smiled, his heart pounding, at a loss for words.

  14

  Blank Check

  Ted’s head was spinning as he walked into University Café. He’d had hundreds—maybe thousands—of meetings here, but never one like this. He’d used T.J.’s student directory log-in to find Amelia Dory’s phone number and had called her on the way to meet Amit, asking her to meet him at University Café as soon as possible to discuss what she’d found out about Gibly. To his surprise, she’d happily obliged and agreed to meet that evening.

  In the meantime, he’d gone to Gibly headquarters and found Amit and the team in a state of panic. Everyone was typing away at computers, trying to figure out how someone had broken into the system. They could see that there had been a security breach but had no way of locating an IP address for the person who had done it. Ted didn’t tell them he knew the answer.

  When he asked him about the database, Amit confessed that the hacker had found everything. In the early days of Gibly, this database was temporary, built to make sure the software functioned properly. But when this temporary database proved to be the company’s most valuable asset, Ted Bristol had instructed Amit to integrate it into Gibly’s entire back-end infrastructure. Most temporary databases typically don’t last through one hundred million users, but most temporary databases aren’t as thorough as Gibly’s.

  As someone who started companies for a living, Ted Bristol followed one very important maxim: Know Your Exit. It’s pointless to start a company if it can’t be acquired, merged, or IPO’d. Silicon Valley is a graveyard of start-ups without homes, its land
scape littered with naïve entrepreneurs and hapless venture capitalists whose ideas lacked real value.

  That’s why the database was so important—the database was the product being sold for $3.8 billion. Before he started Gibly, a representative of the Aleister Corporation approached Ted. This young British woman with piercing eyes was no older than T.J., but she certainly knew how to play the game. She told Ted Bristol that Aleister was undergoing a renaissance, and they would pay anything to make the company a major player in the tech space.

  “Ted Bristol, you’re the man to do it,” she told him. “If you’re up for the challenge. Aleister will pay a lot of money for a database like this.” Ted already had enough money to retire early. He didn’t retire, though, because it was never about the money. It was about winning, about going beyond where those before you had gone. If he could build a company for Aleister, he would be able to end his career as one of the most successful and clever venture capitalists Silicon Valley had ever seen. Ted Bristol would be in textbooks. His Wikipedia page would have more sections than anybody else’s.

  Ted glanced around University Café. That someone besides Ted and Amit and Gibly’s acquirers now knew about the tracking made Ted more than a little nervous. The legal battles the database would stir up notwithstanding, if anyone found out that an eighteen-year-old had hacked into Gibly, the deal would be off and his reputation would be finished.

  He had to shut her up somehow. Ted’s career grand finale was on the line.

  Sitting at the corner table where Amelia had said she’d be was a slender teenager with a long blond ponytail and glasses. She tapped her foot anxiously, watching the television over the bar. Upon seeing her, Ted let out a sigh of relief. There was no way this fidgety little girl—she couldn’t weigh more than 110 pounds—would be the threat that brought him down. He felt his confidence coming back for the first time since his conversation with T.J.

  “Amelia?” he asked as he walked up to the table, sticking out his hand. “Ted Bristol. Thank you for meeting me on such short notice.”

  Amelia jumped, startled, when he said her name. “Oh, hi, Mr. Bristol. Yes, of course. No problem. I really want to—”

  Ted put his hand up to cut her off. “We have all night,” he said as he sat down across from her and motioned for the waiter. “Have you eaten dinner? Would you like to order anything? I’m going to have a little something.”

  “Oh, sure.” Amelia hadn’t expected such an offer; she had thought she was in trouble.

  Ted ordered eggplant Parmesan. Flustered, Amelia said she’d have the same.

  “Do you want wine?” he asked her.

  Amelia was stunned. Didn’t he know she was eighteen? “No, thanks,” she answered quickly. “I’ll just have a Coke.”

  “Suit yourself.” Ted smiled. “I’ll take a glass of the cab. Thanks, Martin.” He always made a point to pay attention to waiters’ nametags and address them personally.

  “So, Amelia,” he said, crossing his hands on the table. “Do you mind telling me a little about what you found on Gibly?”

  “Well, first I want to say I’m sorry for breaking in. I really didn’t mean to.”

  “No need to apologize. On the contrary, you’ve helped us realize a flaw in our security, which our team is addressing as we speak.” He was buttering her up, making her feel comfortable.

  Amelia let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, that’s great. How did you find out, though?”

  “Not important, Amelia. What is important is that I understand what you saw once you were in.” Ted smiled again.

  Amelia didn’t exactly think how he found out was “not important”—she was certain she’d covered all her tracks—but for now she knew that making sure Ted knew what was going on with the Web site was more important.

  “Well, I found the database where Gibly is storing all of its users’ information. Billions and billions of cells recording the Web movements and physical locations of every person using Gibly. It’s insane. I mean, that’s, like, totally unethical, if not illegal, right? It’s a complete infraction of users’ privacy.”

  Ted kept the same neutral smile as the waiter delivered his wine. “Well, yes, I suppose it would be, if it existed. Did you see anything else?”

  “Well, then I started thinking that maybe that was why the company had sold for so much. I mean, it’s illegal, but that kind of information would also be insanely valuable to everyone from advertisers to terrorists. So, I tracked Aleister’s accounts.” She stopped, not sure she should have admitted that.

  “It’s okay, Amelia. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  Reassured, she went on. “So, I tracked Aleister, and they’ve been receiving ten-million-dollar payments every month from someone named VIPER.”

  Ted took a moment to consider this, but quickly chose to ignore it. What Aleister did was not his problem. His problem was the possibility of this being discovered and his reputation being destroyed.

  He took a sip of his wine. “Amelia, I want to reassure you that the database was temporary, just something the engineering team did to make sure that the applications we were putting out were working on different browsers and in different network areas. Last week, when you got into the system, the team was actually disabling everything. In fact, that might be why you were able to get in; the security wall was probably compromised when they were reprogramming. Because of you, though, we’re repatching that, too.”

  Amelia stared at Ted. That didn’t make sense, and he knew it as well as she did.

  The food arrived and Ted picked up his fork and knife to cut a piece of eggplant. “I want you to know that it’s all being taken care of. Okay? But I need a favor from you.”

  He casually took a bite of his eggplant. “I need you to promise me that you won’t say anything about this. To anyone.”

  Amelia looked down at her food. She poked at the eggplant with her fork.

  “And to thank you for your discretion,” he went on, “I want to offer you a payment of ten thousand dollars.”

  Amelia put her fork down. She was no longer hungry. “You want to pay me?”

  “Consider it a consulting fee for helping us increase our security. Your getting in has saved us a lot of potential trouble down the road; we’ll be much stronger now with the new security patches.”

  “I don’t think … I don’t want your money.” She felt her voice growing more assertive. “Your programmers can’t just disable the database. Recording private information is in Gibly’s core code. It looks like that’s what it was built for in the first place! Everything else—the speech-to-text, the near-field communication, the payment systems—are just add-ons. It would take an entire team six months, maybe more, to undo all of that.”

  Ted felt his anxiety rising. The deal was closing in three weeks; six months was five months and one week too long to save his reputation.

  “Amelia, I can assure you we’ll do what needs to be done and all your concerns will be addressed down the line. But right now the deal has to go through. I can’t have anything delay it.” He reached into his briefcase. “I brought a contract. Just sign it, and I’ll write you a check right now for twenty-five thousand dollars. Twenty-five thousand just for doing nothing.”

  To her surprise, Amelia felt calm and confident. “I’m not signing anything,” she said.

  Ted decided to try a new tactic. “What if I brought you onto the team? I can guarantee you a job. Do you have a summer job yet? I’ve got an entire portfolio of companies. You can have your pick of any of them. I’ll help make you the next Mark Zuckerberg.”

  Amelia couldn’t help but laugh. “No offense, but I don’t want to start a company, Mr. Bristol.”

  “What do you want, then, Amelia?”

  “I don’t want to be exploited, and I don’t think Gibly’s users do, either. The Internet should be a free and open place. Your company steals users’ private information without their permission. It’s irresponsible. It’s immoral.” The passio
n in her voice surprised even Amelia.

  Ted looked at her carefully. This girl, this tiny little thing, was actually serious. “One hundred thousand,” he told her.

  But Amelia didn’t flinch. “I don’t want your money.”

  “Do you know how much money one hundred thousand dollars is, Amelia? It would take you and your brother a very long way.”

  “How do you know about my brother?” Amelia asked.

  “I know more than you think, Amelia. A lot more.” His expression hardened. “I’m telling you right now, you want to take this offer. After this, things only get worse.”

  Amelia couldn’t believe she was being threatened. “I’m not afraid of you, Mr. Bristol.”

  Ted took a deep breath. “Listen, go home and talk it over with your brother. I’ll call you in the morning and you can tell me your decision then. Once we’re in agreement, I’ll wire the money to you immediately—and we can discuss any job you might want. I can make your life incredibly easy, Amelia. All you have to do is sign the contract.”

  Amelia stood up from her chair and put on her jacket. “Thank you so much for dinner, Mr. Bristol, but I can assure you, you’re wasting your time.”

  She walked out with her head high. As the café door closed, Ted slammed his fist onto the table. “Dammit!” The whole restaurant turned to stare, but he didn’t care. He threw a fifty-dollar bill onto the table and stormed out.

  15

  Part of Something Real

  Amelia’s head was spinning as she got onto her bike and headed back to campus. University Avenue, where the café was, turned into Palm Drive, the majestic entrance to Stanford University. One hundred sixty-six palm trees lined the road that led to the main quad, the magnificent Spanish fortress that composed the original university and sat at the base of the foothills, providing a gorgeous view up into the mountainous skyline. No matter how many times she biked this road, its beauty never failed to make Amelia pause. Tonight was no different, and she felt her heart slow as she looked down the stretch, noticed the breeze in her hair, and watched as the sun set behind the mountains and turned the tiled roof of the main quad a majestic red. Over the past year this place had become a part of her, and she a part of it, and it demanded that she live according to what she knew was right. She owed it to all the minds that had worked on the campus to pioneer a new world of technology. She knew what she had to do.