The Poison Sky (11 page)

Neither of them spoke for a moment, then Maeve pointed at the name Jack Livey. “Is that just misspelled?”

“Yeah, it was me. Sure. I always keep an eight-foot acupuncture needle handy. Too bad it didn't work.”

She seemed a little hurt by his lack of reaction. “What's the Latin?”

“They can … that… can. Ah, those who think they can, can. Something like that.” He tried to imagine four hippies standing there with a big steel needle, surrounded by a crowd of cheering drugheads in bell-bottoms and 1972 granny glasses. It wasn't that hard, but he glanced at the plaque again and its permanence gave him second thoughts about the scene. It had been an art happening. His mental picture of the geoacupuncturists aged and hardened. They had beards, wore black, offered cocky declarations, and wrote up their reflections in a journal later. He saw them passing around champagne like a gallery opening.

“It's pretty good.”

But that wasn't adequate. She frowned. “I knew you'd be freaked out by earthquakes.”

“No, honey. It's weird, all right. It's just it all seems … so
studied.
There's too many layers of irony here. My idea of oddities is a bit more innocently goofy. But I'll give you a full point, two points.” He offered his crooked elbow to take her back to the car. “Are
you
touchy about geeks?”

“Computer geeks?”

“That's the ticket.”

“I'm not
bigoted.
”

He smiled. “Good. We have to drop by a little company called PropellorHeads that's chockablock with them.”

“PropellorHeads! They made Night Dogs!” It was if he'd said he knew one of the Twelve Apostles, and not one of the obscure ones.

“I thought you weren't into computer games,” he said.

They settled into the car and she tapped insistently on the clasp of his seat belt the instant she sat down. He put it on.

“Remember one time you told me you'd never read
Gone With the Wind
but you knew what Rhett said to Scarlett because it was in the culture?”

“What a memory. Sure. So Night Dogs is in the culture even if you don't play it.”

“It was the biggest thing after the Mario Brothers.”

“Who's that?”

“Daddy!”

“Doesn't anybody
go bowling
anymore?”

T
HE
elevator chugged upward. Somebody had hung padded blankets on the elevator walls, which meant movers, and he wondered if the furniture was coming or going. “What do you have against
Gone With the Wind
anyway?” she asked.

“I don't like the values it espouses. To be brutally frank, the Southern gentry can kiss my ass. Pardon my French.”

She giggled. “You're being hard on the book.”

“If you ever decide to read it, make me a promise. Read a Faulkner afterward. He's hard to read, but he doesn't glorify bunk.”

“I better not admit I read
Little Women.”

“No, that's a fine book.” He noticed he was getting opinionated again. He'd convinced himself long ago not to carry around all that baggage, and as long as he'd been feeling miserable about things, he'd found the empty shelves a surprising comfort, but now that he had a paying client and was sleeping with Marlena again and things were looking up a bit, he found a sense of zest was inviting opinions willy-nilly back onto their shelf. “Realtors are all right,” he said, feeling magnanimous. “They perform a service to humanity.”

“Don't
strain
yourself, Daddy.”

He laughed as the doors came open on the fifth floor. Something was subtly changed. Then he noticed the name PropellorHeads was gone from the double doors at the end. The doors came open and two really big guys in company T-shirts that read six
STARVING GORILLAS
carried out a black marble conference table.

“Uh-oh.”

He and Maeve stood aside for them.

“PropellorHeads moved?” he asked.

The guy in back jerked his head toward another door. “Reduced circumstances.”

The door was unlocked and inside there was a very small secretary's desk with no secretary. PropellorHeads had once had a whole opulent lobby with live video displays of their products. He led Maeve into a hallway where a banner said
YOUR FATHER SMELT OF ELDERBERRIES.
The banner had been torn in half and taped back together. A deflated shark hung overhead, like a joke that had gone sour, and extension cords ran along the wall.

“Hello! Anyone here?”

A young woman with acne and lank black hair stuck her head out a door. “Can I help you?”

“I'm looking for Admiral Wicks or Michael Chen.”

She popped a finger straight at him, as if he'd just picked the right answer in a TV quiz. “Good choices. They're the only two Joe Codes who survived. Film at eleven.” She pointed at another door and pulled back into her office.

A Dilbert cartoon was taped by the open door and the room was obviously only half set up. A skinny young black in a wheelchair was trying to sort out a huge wad of cabling and a young Asian was on his hands and knees under a desk. A homemade parrot cage with a big green parrot hung in a corner.

“Gentlemen.”

“Mr. Liffey!” Michael Chen jumped up, banging his head on the desk, and Admiral Wicks whirled around in his wheelchair. He'd worked with them once before, helping them beat off a predatory private eye who'd been working for a predatory Japanese conglomerate. His role in the division of labor had been the private eye and their hacking skills had done serious harm to the home company.

“Mr. Liffey is my dad,” he insisted. “Call me Jack. I want you to meet my daughter, Maeve. Michael Chen. Admiral Wicks. Two of the best hackers in L.A.”

“In the known universe,” Admiral Wicks corrected.

They shook hands gravely. “Hi, there.”

“What's happened to PropellorHeads?” Jack Liffey asked.

“We're victims of the big shakeout in CD-ROM. Nobody much is making any money at it,” Admiral Wicks said. He was obsessively disentangling one strand of wire from the mass of cabling across his lap.

“I thought you guys were doing okay.”

“The boss hit a buzz saw.”

“Serve the people,” the parrot squawked. It paced gravely inside its chicken-wire enclosure like a short-legged man in a frock coat, but they ignored it.

“Moby layoff,” Michael Chen said. He lifted a cardboard carton onto one of the two desks in the room and peered inside. “Bruce's hiding in his office, boozing and trying to forget that his company just had a futurectomy.”

“That's really sad,” Maeve said. “Did you guys work on Night Dogs?”

Admiral Wicks grinned, and seemed to take her seriously for the first time. “That was elder days. We wrote the first version in
assembly language.
” He reached into a pile of trash on the desk. “You know this?”

He held up a cardboard cutout of what looked like a brown bear with a lollipop for a head.

“Huh-uh,” Maeve said.

“You never really played Dogs, did you?” He shrugged and set it aside. “Nobody's playing enough of anything these days.”

“Correct ideas!” the parrot squawked.

Michael Chen looked over at the bird as if it were something he might soon choose to discard. “This
insect
belonged to Bart Neville, the only Maoist parrot in the United States. It brings to mind a certain Monty Python routine.”

“ ‘The Dead Parrot,' ” Admiral Wicks suggested.

“Yawk!” the parrot objected. “Socialism is science!”

Michael Chen frowned and leaned close to the chicken wire. “If it was science,” he enunciated clearly, “how come they didn't try it out on
rats
first?”

The bird didn't answer and Michael Chen turned back to Jack Liffey. “What can we do for you?”

“I was hoping to ask a favor but you don't look set up yet.”

“Don't worry about all this geeked-out mess. We've got a killer machine up and running next door.”

“Remember what you did last time?” They'd hacked into a Tokyo computer room and launched an elegant little vendetta that they insisted would live forever in the annals of computer prankery.

Michael Chen came alive at the memory and did a little dance around the wheelchair as Admiral Wicks put up a hand for a high five. “Do we!”

“Bonk!”

“Oik!”

“Bonk!”

“Oik!”

Maeve watched them celebrate with her jaw dropped an inch. He was used to them and their cyber-rites by now. He thought of them as the children of the New Age, kings of their own universe, and he liked the fact that it made no difference to them whatever whether you approved or understood or not.

“I've got one little favor, and one big favor if you're up to it.”

Michael Chen stopped in his tracks. “If we're up to it?”

“It's another telephone job.”

“That'd be Michael,” Admiral Wicks said. “He's the phone phreak. I'm languages. And soul, of course.”

“Come with me,” Michael Chen said to Jack Liffey.

“Maeve Liffey,” Admiral Wicks summoned.

“Uh-huh?”

“How would you like to be an alpha tester? We have a nice educational game we're debugging. We hope to find a niche in education for our vast talents, and help dehose this poor company.”

Jack Liffey left his daughter behind and followed Michael Chen down the hall to a room labeled
EAST HYPERSPACE
. The room was only relatively tidier, but it had what appeared a working computer with stacks of addon electronic boxes and two very large monitors. The desk around it was littered with Lego space capsules and an open jar of Jif with a spoon in it.

There was a screech in the hall so shrill it made his hair stand on end, and then a young woman leaped into the open doorway with her arms spread and wailed, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” She noticed Jack Liffey and clutched her blouse around her.
“Ooh!
Crash and burn! So sorry!”

Then she was gone, erased out of the air, and Michael Chen shook his head. “That's just Pam.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jack Liffey shut the door and explained that he wanted Michael Chen to log into the computer that he'd left running in Milo Mardesich's study and nose around to find out what he could. Just as he got that out, the door came open again. “Seen Pam running about? Well, stone the crows, look who's here.”

It was Bruce Parfitt, the Australian who ran the company for the absentee Perth beer baron who owned it. He'd cut off his ponytail and put on a business suit since Jack Liffey had last seen him, but at the moment his nose was fluorescing and he was having a bit of trouble standing upright.

“Jack Liffey, as I live and breathe.”

“Hello, Bruce, how's tricks?”

“Business is rubbished, to tell the truth, as you can plainly see. A gi-fucking-normous pain in the arse.”

His attention was drawn by a wave of giggles down the hall. He raised his eyebrows and pointed in that direction and then pushed off the door frame. “Gotta shoot on through, mate. Come say hello.”

When he was gone, Michael Chen got up and closed the door softly. “We were making five CD-ROMs for a big fascist suit-heavy company in Milwaukee, state-of-the-art games with movie tie-ins and lots of expensive graphics and video. They called Bruce back there two weeks ago and he thought he was going to get another big project, and they sat him down and said, ‘Sorry, dude, things are bad, no more work. And by the way, we aren't going to pay you for the last three months, either.' One-point-five mill outstanding. Brucie looked like the ghost of Hanukkah past when he got back and he was on the phone to his paymaster for hours. To save what he could of the company, he had to lay off almost everybody. The last group left this morning. We're the skeleton crew, working for half pay. He's a decent guy and he'll make it up to everybody later if he can, but he feels like shit. That's the short version. The long version includes a lot of alcohol and heads banging on walls.”

Jack Liffey nodded. “So I noticed.”

“Kinda takes the steam out of your enjoyment of life, but you know what computer people say? Ninety percent of
everything
is crap.”

The yen to say something smart in reply rose in him and then passed. He felt a kind of easing of all the sour-puss urges inside himself, a harshness passing away. “Sounds a little too high maybe.”

“Oh, fnord. Anyway, we're only making games. We're not saving the world.” He sat at the keyboard and then seemed to reconsider. “This first hack you want is Mickey Mouse. Didn't you say something about a tough one?”

“Why don't we complete the first task before you stub your toe on the second one.”

Michael Chen's expression grew slowly into a grin. “Real soon now I'm going to be offended.”

“I know this guy, thought he was a pretty good hacker, thought he was invulnerable, and they reached back through cyberspace and wrung his neck. Virtually.”

They heard a burst of giggling down the hall. It sounded like Maeve.

“Did he take any precautions?”

“He routed his call through the switchboard of a department store and some other stuff he didn't tell me about, and they got back to him and fried his computer. It didn't even look like they'd worked up a sweat.”

“Well, let's not underestimate them, then. Let's see if they can find their way back through the CIA and the NSA and the Central Bank of Switzerland. Your friend
thought
he was good.
I'm
good.”

Jack Liffey told him about the Theodelphian Elect. All he really wanted now was confirmation that Jimmy Mardesich was with them and where he was.

“I'll have what you want by morning,” he promised. “It's when you get impatient that you get burned.”