by Sadie Hayes
With calm determination, Amelia raced back to her dorm room, opened her laptop, and created a secure, untraceable e-mail address. She then logged into TechCrunch, the popular technology blog, and looked up an e-mail address for the editorial staff. TechCrunch was known for its stances on freedom of information and user protection, and Amelia knew they’d faithfully handle the information she was about to give them.
SUBJECT: Privacy Invasion at Gibly
STATUS: URGENT
TO: The Editor
I’m writing to inform you of a serious issue with the Gibly platform. I’ve discovered that the company records each user’s personal data. Gibly has been monitoring our movements and purchases and has even recorded our conversations and text messages. A large database containing all of this and more, listed by unique user ID, is housed in the company’s servers. Moreover, I have reason to believe it’s this database, and not belief in the marketability of the company’s applications, that is driving the sale of Gibly to the Aleister Corporation.
I have attached the directions that got me to the database in order to prove my logic; however, I’ve put a security algorithm on the pathway, so the direction will only work for the next hour. If you need more time, reply to this e-mail and I will reconstruct a new pathway. I’m writing to you as someone deeply concerned with the ramifications such a violation of user trust could have on future Internet applications, for I fear that if the Gibly deal goes through without major changes to Gibly’s programming infrastructure, user security will be irreversibly compromised.
She attached the directions, reread the paragraphs, and stared at the “Send” button. Her finger hesitated on the mouse and she felt her heart racing. She wasn’t saying that she wanted to take Gibly on, she was just encouraging someone else to look into it, right? That was all she had to do; just send the e-mail, and her part was finished. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and clicked “Send.”
* * *
Ted let out a grunt as he pushed the bench press forward. Six. Seven. Eight. Rest.
When he’d gotten home from University Café he’d tried to work, but it had been a fruitless effort. He was too distracted. He’d come down to his home gym to relieve some stress. The large room had tiled floors and seven pieces of gym equipment, plus a stretching area with a mirror and the Pilates junk his wife was obsessed with.
Working out was helping. The more he exercised, the more he became convinced Amelia would come around to see things his way. One hundred thousand dollars for a scholarship kid from foster homes in Indiana? That was like winning the lottery; no sane person would turn it down. Everything would be fine.
He got up from the bench and moved to the treadmill, pointing the remote to turn on the flat-screen television on the wall as he dialed the treadmill up to a healthy running pace. He began trotting and smiled at a clever Volkswagen advertisement. What a great rebranding campaign that company pulled off, he thought.
When the commercial break ended, a news anchor for CNBC appeared.
“Folks, we’ve got breaking news. Internet accusations claim that Gibly, the Silicon Valley company in the process of finalizing its sale to the Aleister Corporation for three-point-eight billion dollars, has spent the past several years stealing users’ private information. Everything from your whereabouts to your purchases to your ATM PIN have been tracked. We’re going now to our tech correspondent Christian Johnson for the latest. Christian, what can you tell us about these stunning allegations?”
Ted pulled the emergency stop brake on the treadmill and stared at the television, though he could no longer hear a word they were saying. Just then, his cell phone and the house phone started to ring. He took a deep breath and composed himself. That little nerd didn’t know what was about to hit her.
16
Homeless
Adam raced up the stairs of the Gates Building, clenching a letter tightly in his hand, his head whirring with panic. He’d only been in this building twice before; once when Amelia had fainted—she’d been holed up coding something and had forgotten to eat for more than twenty-four hours and Adam’s name had been first on her speed dial—and another time to smuggle out the old monitor he kept assuring Amelia he would return any day now.
He didn’t like the building. It was too sterile and clean and the blue light and the just-barely-audible buzz of all the computers made him anxious. Plus, all the people there were such dweebs. Not that he was the emperor of cool, but at least he knew where he fell short; these people had created an environment where social weirdness was totally acceptable. Like, it was fine to stare at a machine and not shower for three days, because the guy next to you hadn’t either. It wasn’t fine; it was weird.
But he knew Amelia would be there and he had to talk to her about the letter he’d just gotten.
He found her on the third floor, at a cubicle near the window, wearing headphones and deeply engrossed in whatever she was typing.
He walked up behind her and shook her shoulder.
“Amelia, we’ve gotta talk.”
“Just a sec.” She hardly acknowledged him, still absorbed in whatever was on her computer.
He pulled off her headphones a little too forcefully. “No. Now!”
“Geez, Adam. What is it?”
“They’re taking away our scholarships.”
“What are you talking about?”
He threw the letter down in front of her. “Our scholarships: our tuition money, our room and board, our monthly stipend. They’re taking it away. All of it. The letter says the university is cutting back on aid next year and we no longer qualify. Do you think they found out?”
“They couldn’t have.… When I turned eighteen my records were sealed.”
“How else could we no longer qualify?” Adam felt his voice shaking. “We’re, like, the poorest people on this campus, Amelia, we have nothing to our names.”
Amelia was looking down at her hands and was silent.
“Hello? Amelia? Are you listening?” Why did she not get the gravity of this? Then it dawned on Adam what she was thinking. “You don’t think it was Roger Fenway, do you?” he said. “Do you think he’s blackmailing you to take the job? Oh my God! Do you think that’s it?”
“No, Adam. It’s not Roger Fenway.” Amelia paused. “It’s Ted Bristol.”
“Ted Bristol? Lisa’s—I mean, T.J.’s dad?” He hadn’t told Amelia about Lisa yet, and this didn’t seem like the time.
Amelia took a deep breath, still looking down at her hands. “Yes. We … we had a meeting the other day and I didn’t exactly give him the answer he wanted.”
“Wait, what? What are you talking about? What meeting?”
“He somehow found out that I hacked into Gibly.”
“How? Didn’t you conceal your identity?”
“I don’t know how, but he found out. And he called me and it sounded like he wanted to fix it, and so I went to University Café to meet him and explain everything. I thought he was going to ask me how to fix the problem. He was so nice on the phone, I was certain he wanted to do the right thing.”
Adam felt his face go white. Oh, God. What had she done?
“But then he tried to pay me off, Adam. He didn’t want to do what needs to be done to change the monitoring, and he said that the deal just needed to go through.”
“How much did he offer you?”
“At first it was ten, then it was twenty-five, then it was a hundred. And a job, nothing specific, kind of like choose your own—”
“Wait,” Adam interrupted, feeling his ears turn red. “One hundred … thousand?”
“Adam, that is dirty money and you know it.”
He couldn’t speak. It felt as if there were something lodged in his throat, preventing the expulsion of air.
Amelia glanced away. She knew she had to tell him the last part, but he looked so devastated. “And then I…” she said meekly.
“And then you WHAT?”
“When I got home, I e-
mailed the editors at TechCrunch with the details of what I’d found. I put a security tag on it so they could only access it during a one-hour window, which they did. They posted about it pretty much immediately. A bigger article came out this morning.”
“And you think Ted … to get back at you…?”
“He knew about you, Adam. I mean, he knew I had a twin brother and that we were on financial aid. He must have—”
Amelia suddenly realized what she had done. No financial aid meant Stanford was finished. It had been too good to be true, after all, this world where she could spend all her days coding and being around people who were driven by the same pure aim of creation. No, she shouldn’t have ever let herself believe four years of this was possible. One year was more than she deserved. Now it would be back to figuring things out, just her and Adam. Just the Dorii.
But when she looked up at Adam’s face, painted with anger and betrayal, she felt an even greater panic. Would it be her and Adam—or her alone?
“Adam, say something,” she pleaded.
“You,” he started, then shook his head as if trying to put it all together. “First you turn down an unbelievable job opportunity. Then you turn down one hundred thousand dollars. Then you knowingly backstab one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and have our financial aid revoked?” He felt a pit in his stomach, like someone had punched him under the ribs.
“I did what was right. I did what I had to do to keep the Internet free,” she said, but, in doing so, felt how weak and naïve that argument sounded against the charges Adam had just lodged.
“Don’t you get it, Amelia? We’re poor. We’re dependents. Taking this high moral ground? Taking risks for an ideal? That’s a freedom and a luxury, and it’s not one you have.”
His use of “you” struck her hard. Everything was always “we” with them. She understood then just how betrayed he felt.
“Fix this, Amelia. I’m not giving this up. I’m not.” He turned and walked out.
Amelia sank back into her chair. This room, this safe place where she felt so at home, suddenly felt foreign.
17
A White Comforter on a Four-poster Bed
Everything was a blur as Adam hopped onto his bike. This can’t be real. How could she?
The sun was setting and he’d left his bike light at home, but he didn’t care. He had to see Lisa. He pedaled hard to Atherton and called Lisa’s phone from outside the front gate.
“Hello?”
“I need to see you. I’m outside your front gate.”
“What? No, Adam, you can’t be here. Dad is—”
“I have to see you, Lisa.”
“We’re in the middle of dinner. We have guests.”
“I’ll wait.”
“You can’t wait out there. They’ll see you.” He could sense her thinking on the other end, scrambling for a solution.
“Come around to the back gate. The code is eight-nine-two-four. There’s a key under the flowerpot next to the side door and a back staircase. Take it to the second floor and go to the third door on the right. That’s my room. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but it’s probably going to be thirty minutes at least.”
“I’m on my way.”
She hung up. Adam followed her instructions and carefully crept into her room. He wasn’t sure at first if he was in the right place. Could this really be an eighteen-year-old girl’s bedroom? he thought. It was cavernous, with hardwood floors covered by an intricately patterned Turkish rug. A four-poster bed with a draped white canopy was neatly made, a plush white comforter and a dozen or so mint-green and white pillows covering its surface. But the vanity in the corner—a deep cherry wood to match the other furniture in the room, topped with a massive mirror—gave Lisa away. Pictures of high school friends, cheerleading camp (She was a cheerleader? Of course she was a cheerleader.), and Lisa and T.J. in front of the Eiffel Tower were neatly stuck around the edges of the mirror. The vanity drawer was open, and Adam saw it was cluttered with lip glosses and nail polish and metallic eye shadows.
He sat on the stool of the vanity and looked in the mirror. So, this was what it felt like to be a rich girl.
He heard the door crack open and turned, startled.
“Adam, this better be really important.”
The temporary calm he’d felt seeing Lisa’s things melted, and he felt his purpose and his anger return.
“The university took away Amelia’s and my scholarships today. Do you know what that means? I’m out. We’re out. No more Stanford. No more California. No more chances. We’re back on the street.”
Lisa’s shoulders sank and her eyes closed in disappointment. “Oh, God,” she said.
“Was it your dad?”
She looked down at her hands and then said weakly, “He’s a trustee of the university.”
“So, he did it?”
“He gives a lot of money to the school. They’d do it if he asked them to.”
“Your father’s a dirty—”
Her eyes sprung open. “Hey!”
“What kind of a person goes around picking on eighteen-year-old foster kids?”
“Oh, please! Don’t you dare play that sympathy card with me. Do you have any idea what that little e-mail of Amelia’s did to him? To our family? The deal’s probably off, Adam. And, more importantly, he’s on the hook for it. He didn’t catch it, Adam, and that means his reputation is on the line. Do you have any idea how many people—how many friends—invested in Gibly? Do you have any idea how much money could be lost?”
He’d never seen her so animated. “He’s breaking the law, Lisa. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“He’s breaking the law? And what was Amelia doing when she hacked into the system? She broke the law, and then brought down this company with speculation based on the confidential information she found.”
Now Adam was getting protective. “She did the right thing, Lisa. The site was totally corrupt. The deal was totally corrupt.”
“That is an assumption that you cannot prove.”
“She did! She did prove it; she found the database. She found the rotten money trail.”
“She thinks that’s what she found. Does she have any way of proving it? That that’s what it was? That whoever was paying the Aleister Corporation was a bad guy?” Lisa was repeating the lines she’d heard over and over in the house since the news broke.
“If it wasn’t true, why would your father have offered her a hundred grand to keep her mouth shut?”
“I don’t know, Adam. Maybe he was trying to help you poor, pathetic foster kids?”
Adam felt his teeth clench. He glared at her.
“You little disrespectful, stuck-up … How dare you?”
“How dare I?” She laughed. “You, the brother of the girl who is bringing down my family’s reputation as we speak, who sneaks into my house with my father downstairs? How dare you yell at me!” Lisa stood up and charged at Adam with every ounce of her anger and frustration. She swung her hand, meaning to slap him hard enough to make him feel what she was feeling. He blocked her arm with his and forced it to her side.
And then Adam pulled her face into his hands and kissed her.
For a moment their lips were pressed hard against each other, then he felt her mouth open against his and her hands slide behind his shoulders. They stood pressed against each other, kissing with passion and force for long enough to forget about Gibly and Ted Bristol. They kissed until all they knew in the world was each other. She finally pulled away and rested her head against his shoulder while he enveloped her slender body in his arms.
“Oh, Adam. I am so, so sorry,” she whimpered into his sleeve.
“It’ll work out,” he said, trying to convince himself as well as her. “And it’s better knowing we’ve got each other.”
18
For the Greater Good
Amelia took a deep breath, gathering her strength, and pushed open the glass door. The area was all new, the sp
ace to the right still draped in plastic from construction. The receptionist’s desk was empty, but there were two workers drilling in a room to the side. Amelia stuck her head in. “Excuse me?” she said. “Excuse me, do you know where Roger Fenway is?”
The men stopped drilling. “Sure thing, kid. Try the office at the end of the hall on the left.”
Amelia had tried to focus after Adam left the Gates Building last night, but she hadn’t been successful. She’d walked back to her dorm via Stanford’s main quad. The quad was empty and silent, save the faint sound of a piano coming from Memorial Church, the majestic centerpiece of the campus, whose tiled mosaic entry glistened in the low moonlight. Without thinking, she followed the music and took a seat in a back pew.
She’d only been in a church once before, when she was very young and their social worker had dragged her and Adam to a Baptist revival. She remembered being terrified and had decided God wasn’t for her. It was nothing like this, though; Memorial Church was a cathedral with a high-crested ceiling of dark wood, the walls covered in sweeping multicolored mosaics. Candles were lit on the altar, creating a glow that bounced off the stained-glass windows and painted the church a beautifully eerie yellow.
A pianist was at the front, seated at a long concert grand piano to the left of the pulpit, practicing a dark and dramatic piece. Beethoven, maybe?
Amelia sat back in the pew and closed her eyes. There was something magical about this scene, and she tried to absorb it as she searched for … She didn’t know what she was searching for. She also didn’t know how long she sat there before the pianist stopped playing and blew out the candles. As he did, she blinked open her eyes and said out loud, “Okay, I’ll do it.”