End of Secrets (25 page)

THIRTY-THREE

Parker stood at the edge of the wide plaza at the base of ON
E’s
Midtown headquarters, sipping a box of orange juice. He had stopped without warning, suddenly unable to join the continuous ant-like march of people who came up out of the subway tunnels and streamed into the building. A curved driveway funneled taxis, black cars, and the occasional limousine to within feet of the towe
r’s
front entrance. Pedestrians veered off the adjacent avenue and lined up at doughnut and coffee carts before crossing the plaza to take up their loyal positions in offices or cubicles on one of the buildin
g’s
seventy-nine floors. Parker felt particularly resentful of the narrow, landscaped slivers of green that dotted the plaza, audacious in this island metropolis where anything that was
n’t
concrete or vertical steel was inherently a waste of space. He looked up at the ONE tower and then quickly looked down, shielding his eyes from the bright morning sun reflecting off its glass facade. It was 8:20
AM
on his first day of work at ONE, and he was hungover. He crushed the juice box in his fist and tossed it in a waste can.

The lobby of the ONE tower was a massive atrium that opened to two separate banks of elevators. The atriu
m’s
exterior walls were made of glass panels that allowed broad views to the plaza and the churning city beyond. The interior walls were lined with screens of varying size that displayed a collage of ONE programing—news programs, reality contests, music videos, feature films, and prime-time sitcoms and dramas. The lobb
y’s
main attraction, however, was the giant employee clock that hung above the security turnstiles. The clock was the first thing Parker saw when he stepped through the revolving doors and found himself inside. It ticked up from 118,094 to 118,095, almost as if acknowledging his arrival. Then it continued on: 118,09
6 . . .
118,09
7 . . .
118,098. Above and below the digits, sleek type read:
ONE
HAS 118,099 EMPLOYEES CONNECTING THE WORLD
.

He was relieved, after he was issued a temporary employee ID card, to board an elevator and leave behind the visual chaos of the lobby. But he remained unsettled. The ca
r’s
upward motion stoked his nausea. He felt terrible inside and out. There was no point on the horizon of his future on which to steady his vision, no reason to believe anything would soon become better. Why had he done it? “We can lay together in your room?” No! We cannot! He wanted to fly halfway around the world just so that he could be put in that situation again.
No, no, no,
he would say. It would be the easiest syllable h
e’d
ever utter. But there was no more flying to Dubai. The
y’d
dumped those clients in the acquisition. Now he was the associate social media consultant to the president of Digital Information and Entertainment at the ONE Corporation. He was glad he did
n’t
have to see that on a business card. He had declined business cards on the grounds that they were environmentally unfriendly and made him look like a Luddite in the digital landscape of social networks.

The first thing he did in his new role was sign a ten-page nondisclosure agreement. The people in his department got off on secrecy in a big way. They threw around phrases like “proprietary products” and “sensitive consumer data.” They were, he was assured during a large orientation with other new employees, developing technologies that would revolutionize the consume
r’s
role in the digital space.

After the orientation meeting, Parker found his way to his new office, only to be told by a temp secretary—he would get to hire a permanent replacement soon—that Mr. Lawson, his boss, wanted to see him in his office.

An LED screen built into the closed door of Lawso
n’s
office, about eye height, read
S
TEVEN
L
AWSON,
P
RESIDENT OF
D
IGITAL
I
NFORMATION AND
E
NTERTAINMENT
. When Lawso
n’s
secretary ushered Parker inside, he expected to find Lawson as h
e’d
always found him in his limited experience to date: a pale, overfed man who delivered everything he said with an arrogant scowl, as if his audience was wasting his time. Alone with the man in his office, though, there was no sign of this trademark scowl. Lawson made eye contact and spoke in a friendly tone. Parker realized that this man saw people as being either inside or outside his sphere of influence, and Parker was now an insider.

“How are you liking it here so far?” Lawson said, half sitting on the edge of his vast oak desk and leaning toward Parker as if he had something to confide.

“I
t’s
great,” Parker said. “I
t’s
only been a few hours. I
t’s
a little overwhelming, I guess.”

“Forget whatever other shit yo
u’v
e been told. Tha
t’s
not what any of us is really here for.”

Parker was
n’t
sure whether he was meant to react to this or not. He could
n’t
think of a suitable thing to say and began to sweat. Then the fear of becoming nauseated in this ma
n’s
office made him sweat even more. But Lawson did
n’t
appear to want to test him; he was merely setting up his next point.

“All of our key employees here at ONE have two jobs: the first is to carry out your duties related to your established media specialty. This is how we excel in the present and keep the shareholders off our backs. In your case, yo
u’l
l be overseeing the social campaign for the release of
Apocalypse
, our first big film release of the summer.”

Parker nodded cooperatively. H
e’d
been told about this in one of the many interviews ONE had conducted after the acquisition to determine whom they wanted to keep. Eager to impress, Parker had already come up with a few ideas for the campaign to present to the team. But Lawson did
n’t
seem to want to talk about that.

“The second job,” Lawson continued. “Now, that is the fun part. I
t’s
what sets ONE apart from every other company on earth. I
t’s
our commitment to the future. As president of Digital Information, I am responsible for maximizing ON
E’s
access to information. And you are going to be a key player in that strategy.” Lawson, apparently concerned that Parker did not appreciate the gravity of what he was being told, leaned farther forward and continued as though trying to close a sale. “Some ONE employees work years to reach this level of responsibility, Parker. But you work in a field—yo
u’r
e an
expert
in a field—that is crucial to ON
E’s
future.

“Social media is where the consumer becomes a partner with us in creating value from information. Most consumers already have an intuitive sense that the future is a place where
everything—everyone—will
be valued digitally. Our task is to show them that embracing that future is beneficial for everyone. The obvious place to start is in the social landscape. Tha
t’s
where you and I are going to make history here. You up for that?”

“Yeah,” Parker said, feeling for the first time that working for ONE might be a better opportunity than h
e’d
first thought. “Yeah,” he repeated, more enthusiastically.

“Good. Then le
t’s
get you credentialed with Information Security, and
I’l
l introduce you to the bunker. Why do
n’t
you take a few minutes to settle into your office. Meet me down in the B7 lobby in, say, ten minutes?”

“B7. You mean,
‘B
’ as in basement?”

“Yep. Ten minutes.”

The basement has a lobby?
Parker thought.

Parker took the elevator to B7, which was located beneath P1–P6, and found the promised lobby, where he waited on a leather couch. Lawson joined him a minute later and led Parker through two separate doors that required a tap of the ID card Lawson wore on a lanyard around his neck.

They walked down an empty concrete hallway. “W
e’l
l get you set up with your credential in here,” Lawson said, tapping his card to enter yet another locked door, this one with a narrow horizontal screen that said
I
NFORMATION
S
ECURITY
.

Two humorless men issued Parker his own ID card, which displayed a regrettable head shot under his name, department, and the words
L
EVEL 4
A
CCESS.
“I got you access at a level higher than you need, strictly speaking. It should minimize the red tape,” Lawson said, scowling at the IS men, who had clearly been on the losing end of that battle. “Your background check kicked off a little debate around here. You sailed through, of course. But the issue of your fiancée was something none of us had encountered before.”

“My fiancée? Kera? What about her?”

“Nothing to worry about at all. Just the opposite. In the end I convinced everyone that, if anything, your association with her was a strength. Yo
u’r
e already accustomed to navigating the usual insecurities that professional secrecy can sometimes create for couples.”

“
I’m
not sure I understand. What does any of this have to do with her?”

The IS men looked concerned, but Lawson found a way to turn it into another victory. “See. Exactly. It has nothing to do with her. And sh
e’l
l understand that. Just like you understand that there are things about her work that she ca
n’t
tell you.”

Baffled, but afraid to challenge Lawson further in front of the IS men, Parker followed his boss back into the hallway.

“What
I’m
about to show you is the very core of our information mission. Its existence is kind of
‘n
eed to know
,’
you know? But ONE is desperate to carve out a more dominant market share in the social space. So you need to know. You also need to know that this is the most confidential thing you will work on at ONE. You do
n’t
discuss it in the presence of anyone who is
n’t
credentialed at Level Three or higher. You already signed the NDAs about this.
I’m
just reminding you.”

Parker nodded.

The next door they went through opened into a small glass-enclosed control room that overlooked a massive chamber full of long rows of what looked like futuristic refrigerators, each with a few blinking lights on its outward-facing panel. A dozen technicians looked up from their consoles in the cramped room. “Everyone, this is Parker. H
e’s
working Information with me. Anything he needs help with is top priority.”

Parker waved lamely and was greeted by friendly nods from the men and women looking back at him. Lawson guided him to the glass where they had the best view of the chamber.

“Those are all servers?” Parker asked.

“Yes. But this is only the local relaying station. These servers encrypt requests sent out to the bunker and then accept and distribute all the data that comes back.”

“The bunker?”

“Yes. The bunker is about ten times this size, or so
I’m
told. I
t’s
where the real computing happens. Only a handful of people have seen it or even know where it is.
I’m
not one of them.” Lawson walked Parker through the control room, explaining how the technicians monitored cybersecurity, bandwidth, temperatures, electricity usage, and a host of other variables. “As I was saying upstairs,” Lawson said when they were walking back to the elevator. “Your role will be to help develop new social networking platforms that will engage more intimately with consumer
s’
moment-to-moment lives. This will allow us to collect necessary data and merge it with the bunke
r’s
existing stores.”

“What do you mean by
‘n
ecessary dat
a’?
” The onslaught of ambiguous jargon, the internal security clearances, the revelation that he actually had two jobs here—it all sent Parke
r’s
head spinning.

“Oh, tha
t’s
just the way Keith Grassley, our CEO, refers to all data. I
t’s
all necessary. Transparency wo
n’t
fully pay off for everyone until i
t’s
universal,” Lawson continued. Parker could
n’t
pinpoint what about Lawso
n’s
smooth advocacy of the company made him uneasy, but the feeling poked at the back of his mind, even as he nodded agreeably at Lawso
n’s
words.

Lawson stopped at the end of the hallway before exiting through the lobby doors. “Think of it as the Big Bang, but in reverse. The data we are interested in is like all the matter in the universe, which is expanding. We want to know what is contained in all that matter. The bunker, then, when i
t’s
complete, will be like the whole of the universe at the moment just after the Bang. It will contain a complete copy of all the information that has ever existed, even information that was not represented as data until people like you and me found a way to turn it into digital bits that can be meaningfully calculated. As Grassley likes to say, that bunker contains the end of secrets.”