Left Coast Karma

by Jonathan Vaught

tonight!"

  "North Carolina," I heard Kevin put in. "People out here always lump them together," he said to me. He gave her my brief bio. I realized he was competing for her attention, and she knew it. Kevin never competed for a chick's attention. She winked at me and mock-rolled her big blue eyes. "So what was my man really like in college?"

  "If he was up all night writing code, he hasn't changed much."

  "I know! I'm a night owl myself, but that's just crazy. I told him I'm cutting that off after the wedding. He's going to be home no later than six. No cheating on me with work." The thought of anyone cheating on this woman made me snort. She started to say something else, but was interrupted by a hello from another guest. I found myself resenting the intruder. Kevin clapped me on the back. "Let's get a drink, bro. I'll introduce you to some of the guys I work with."

  Kevin and I spent the better part of the next hour at the bar, slinging programmer lingo with Karma people. I lived in Raleigh, the geek capital of the South if there was one, and even there the opportunity to socialize with people in my line of work was rare. Still, I wasn't about to choose hanging at a bar with nerds over face time with someone who had two X chromosomes and a California pedigree, so when one came close to the bar, I nudged Kevin for an introduction.

  Dana also worked for Karma, as a social marketing specialist. Which basically meant she spent her days pushing the company Kool-Aid on FriendFeed or Twitter or whatever today's buzzword was. Inside of two minutes, she'd whipped out her brand-new Karma K2 phone and added me as her Facebook friend. Which kind of took the thrill out of getting her phone number. Taryn rescued me from that conversation and took me to meet her parents, up from Los Angeles. Mom was an investment banker and Dad a pharmaceutical rep. I realized I hadn't asked Taryn what she did for a living. She waved her hand breezily. "Corporate real estate, mostly. I studied journalism at UCLA. I wanted to do the acting thing for awhile, but I thought I could do worse than selling houses while I waited for my big break. I got tired of that whole LA scene, and the real estate market was even better up in the Bay Area." She shrugged. "Not so much these days." After the folks, who were nice and bland and rolling with money, she deposited me among her LA friends and left me in the land of skinny, blonde and tan. Brynn was in law school. Cara was an actress-sorry, I think they like to be called actors now-which I understood to mean she waited tables in between auditions. Rene? was an executive assistant. And so on. And most of them had boyfriends, of course. They lavished me with attention anyway, and questions about "Carolina", which was a fun ego-stroke, but in the end pointless. After awhile, I ended up back by the bar, but Kevin and his friends were gone-vanished into a crowd of painfully cool Karma drones. I was about to go track him down when someone spoke at my elbow.

  "It's all fake, you know."

  I turned to look. A woman, clearly not part of the SoCal contingency I'd just waded through. Petite-I guessed a hair over five feet-brunette, spunky-cute. Wearing a sundress, a leather jacket, and an almost Gothic amount of eyeliner. Her hair was short and artfully messy. Her accent was so out of place that I smothered a laugh. Proper British; the flavor that matched the sundress, but not the jacket or makeup. I pictured some fantasy-novel elf trying to blend in at a London club.

  "Tell me about it. I haven't seen a real tan yet."

  "I mean it's all fake. The party. The guests. The girl. All of it. It's a show put on for your friend Kevin's benefit."

  If this was some kind of hipster irony game, I'd play along. "So you and I are all that's real?"

  "You and I and him. And his co-workers from Karma. The bride's side of the aisle are actors."

  "Isn't everyone in Southern California? Who wrote the script, and can I meet the director?"

  She raised an eyebrow, took a sip of her drink. "You really want to know?"

  "I'd like to know your name so I can fact-check you later." This was the most fun I'd had all weekend.

  "Daisy. No, I'm not joking." Her eyes dared me to object. "About any of this." I tried to keep my face perfectly neutral. I never won the weekly poker game, so I don't know how successful I was.

  "Look, there are two groups of people here. Kevin and his friends from work. 'Taryn'-the quotes around the name were loud and clear-and her people, who all happen to be from out of town, or another planet as far as the Karma people are concerned. Nobody on his side knows anybody on her side. And then there's you. Don't you wonder why you're the only one here who's known Kevin for longer than two years?"

  I told her my theory about being the most portable of his college friends. She snorted, if anyone named Daisy could be said to snort. "Right. Where are his family? Even his parents couldn't drag themselves out here?"

  I opened my mouth and closed it again.

  "Ask him about them. I suspect he'll say that she convinced him not to tell them about her at all." She pushed away from the bar and waved at me to come along. "Would you like some evidence?"

  I followed before she could vanish among the taller Left Coasters. No wonder I hadn't noticed her before now. My mistake.

  She waited by the guest book, hip cocked to one side in triumph. "Read the names."

  I shrugged and glanced down at the page. I recognized my name, those of the Karma people I'd met, and one or two of the girls I'd been introduced to. I flipped backwards one page. John Rogers, Beth Jones, Michael Smith. The rest of the names were similarly devoid of personality. Even the handwriting was similar, if you looked at it closely. The same person could have signed every one. Now that I thought about it, her parents' names had been forgettable too. I couldn't remember them, but Jack and Jill weren't out of the question. It was definitely fishy.

  "They didn't even try very hard to make it look authentic," Daisy said.

  "Nobody reads those things, anyway," was all I could think of to say.

  She took me by the hand and led me to a cocktail table for two on the edge of the room. I must have looked a little cloudy.

  "So your next question is: who's responsible for this little charade, and why?"

  "OK, sure. Why is this happening?"

  "Go get us a drink. It'll look suspicious if we're just sitting here."

  Another beer sounded like a fine idea, so I trooped back to the bar. Kevin was back there again. His eyes traced my path back to Daisy at the table. He grinned and held up a hand for a high five. "Nice work, bro."

  "Kevin?" I trailed off, having no clue what to say next. "Do you?" He was still checking out my companion, who was furiously shaking her dark curls and waving me back.

  "You can give me the 411 later." He gave me a shove. "Get back in the trenches, man."

  Daisy sipped her beer, which was some Northern California microbrew that I'd never heard of, but Kevin swore by. She scrunched up her face. "Didn't they have Guinness? Anyway. Do you know what Kevin does at Karma?"

  I shrugged. "Some kind of R&D is all I know. They hired him because of some work he did on an open-source project. He didn't even apply. They came to him."

  Daisy rolled her eyes. "Aren't you in the software business? And you don't know any more about it than that?"

  "It's kind of just a job for me. Kevin lives it, you know?"

  "Right. The open-source project your friend worked on in college was a network protocol called Freenet. It's a system for storing information with complete anonymity. Anything uploaded to Freenet is encrypted and distributed across the whole network. Someone else gets a piece of your data and you get a piece of theirs. No single node on the network knows what's stored on it. There's no central server, so there's no way to take the whole system down. It's the ultimate peer-to-peer."

  That sounded vaguely familiar. "Cool. Why isn't everyone using it?"

  "For one thing, it's slow. For another, the secrecy of it attracts the dregs of the Internet like flies to meat. Three of every five documents on Freenet are about child po
rnography, drugs, or bomb-making."

  I didn't think that sounded like Kevin's cup of tea, and told her so.

  "Of course not. Your friend has his faults, but he's not a neo-Nazi or a pervert. What he does have is curiosity, and idealism. The aim of Freenet is to protect freedom of expression. And if it could be perfected, it would be a death knell for old media. Recording, television, radio, publishing-these industries only exist because it used to be expensive to package and distribute information. Imagine if they had no way of tracking or shutting down the sharing of their content. They're all obsolete now. Some of them just haven't realized it yet."

  I raised my hand. "Wait. I'm confused. This has exactly what to do with a bunch of actors at a party?"

  "I'm getting there. The Internet is a vast cloud of information storage available to everyone with a computer. Karma, as an Internet company, wants the personal computer-the piece of hardware that sits on your desk or your lap-to become irrelevant. It's in their interest to provide a means of secure, anonymous, free file storage in the cloud, available to everyone. They can say they don't own the information itself, but they will be in complete control of it. Kevin is working on Karma's own, improved version of Freenet that they hope will replace the hard disk in your computer for storage of your personal content. Think what advertisers would pay for ads served up alongside every