Kill Process (16 page)

“It’s the same data,” she says, “but instead of two different representations, you’ve got one. It’s the user interface
and
it’s machine readable. If you later add phone numbers or addresses to your UI, you don’t implement that twice. Just once.”

“These things are already defined?”

“Sure,” she says. “People, events, reviews, tags, even social relationships.”

My mind reels. This is half the work laid out in front of me.

T
HIS IS MY
fourth appointment with Charlotte. We haven’t really talked about anything so far. Each of my last several visits I arrived in a state of anxiety, and she spent the time having me practice coping tools. She asked on the last visit if I was interested in a referral to a psychiatrist for anxiety medication, but I shook my head. Drugs seem like another way to lose control of myself.

When I arrive at her office, I sit on the couch for a change, plopping onto the cushion with gusto. I’m still excited about yesterday’s discussion with Amber.

Charlotte sits in her own chair with a pad of paper. The office is quiet, the noises of city traffic filtering through the ninth floor window, making it sound far away. The room is a little on the warm side, and I can feel the sun streaming in, heating the room up.

I smile at myself. I started my grounding practice subconsciously out of habit even though I’m not at all anxious today.

“You’re in a good mood,” Charlotte says. “Want to talk about it?”

I tell the story of the meeting with Amber and of her ideas, and I’m animated, my arm waving about as I draw pictures in the air, architecture boxes of how servers communicate. Charlotte would be lucky to understand a quarter of what I’m saying, but it feels so good to be talking to another person about creating something so exciting. It helps that she’s a good listener, asking questions at all the right places. They aren’t the technical questions I might have asked, but they’re still interesting ones.

“The decision to leave Tomo to work on this is relatively recent. What made you decide to build Tapestry?”

Where do I begin? I can’t say killing people eats away at the fragile remains of my humanity. I can’t ask which is worse, what those assholes do, or that I reach out and rip their lives from them. Maybe I could tell the story of Tomo, and how they’re abusing billions of users, manipulating everyone to extract one more piece of data, one more minute of screen time, one more layer of entanglement into their universe so they can hold everyone’s relationships and content hostage. But that is too personal, too intricately linked to my own past experiences, and I don’t want to discuss those either.

Charlotte clears her throat softly, and I glance up at her. She smiles and waits.

I swallow, try to start, and the words stick in my throat. I try again. “There are two sides to everything: creation and destruction. When I finished college, I went on a job interview.”

*     *     *

1993, twenty-two years old

“Angelina Benenati?” The secretary looks at me. I’m the only one in the waiting room.

“Angie, please.”

“Mr. Repard is ready to see you. Follow me.”

Last week I interviewed at this same office, with a dozen different people over eight hours. They say all the Big Six accounting firms have tough interviews, though I found the questions simple. I could have answered them while still cranking out code. Still, a security job here is my dream, and I’ve been waiting around the clock to hear back.

I received a call yesterday, and was told only to come back so Repard can meet me.

I hung up confused. I was neither given the job, nor rejected. Repard is known throughout the hacker world. It’s hard to imagine him taking an interest in a potential candidate. Nonetheless, I’m here, dressed in my one skirt suit, carrying a small purse, a serious case of impostor syndrome leaving me feeling like a parody of a smart, eager employee-to-be.

The secretary opens a door to an office and ushers me in. “Miss Benenati, Mr. Repard.”

She closes the door.

There’s a guy in a white T-shirt with the number 2600 across the front, and he’s typing furiously at a computer. His hair is graying, and he wears thin-framed glasses. On the back of his chair there’s a suit jacket, and on his filing cabinet, a hanger with a white dress shirt and a tie.

I wait for a minute, standing, then clear my throat quietly.

“Sit down, and don’t interrupt again.”

Jesus. This is Repard? I sit, inching into the chair to avoid any noise, and wait. I glance at my watch, and decide to time him. Time passes slowly when you’re watching someone else type. I wonder if making me wait is some sort of power trip for him, and whether taking off his suit jacket and shirt is his way of thumbing his nose at management.

Seventeen minutes go by, and the typing stops. He leans back in his chair, puts his hands behind his neck, and smiles. He stays like that for a while, staring at the ceiling, face creased wide. His eyes slowly come back down and resolve on me.

“Miss Benenati, sorry for making you wait.”

“Angie, please.”

“Not Angel of Mercy?”

My throat catches, and I’m dumbfounded for a second. “I’m not sure what you mean,” I manage eventually.

“Come on. You want to work as a penetration tester. Every newbie cracker wants to earn money to hack. You think we wouldn’t do a little background research?”

“I guess you got me.” My stomach churns as I try to force a smile to my lips. Are they going to count my past hacks against me? What does he even know about?

Repard stares at me. “How’d you pay for school? MIT isn’t cheap, and they didn’t give you a scholarship until your second year.”

He must have access to MIT’s systems. I’m impressed. I could never break into their finance systems. “I had savings. From my parents.”

“Bullshit. You and your mother were living in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn next to the 86th street line. You had subway cars running right outside your window. If you had money, you would have lived somewhere else.”

I drum my fingers on my skirt. Shit, I guess I’ve got nothing to lose by telling him. “I won the Z100 Corvette contest in ’91.”

Repard looks off into the distance. “They gave away a ZR-1 Corvette?”

“Two of them. One in July and one in August. I won both.”

Repard sits upright, and peers at me over his glasses. “How?”

“I shunted all incoming calls, routed them through my own PBX, and forwarded them on to Z100. When they got to the hundredth caller, I disconnected the caller and took their place.”

“You have your own PBX?”

“Dumpster-diving. I picked up a used Merlin.”

Repard laughs. “Brilliant. But . . . problematic. You can’t hack if you work here.”

I nod in the direction of his computer. “That was the Federal Reserve Board you infiltrated while I was sitting here.”

“Yes. They’re our client, and we’re paid to assess their security.”

“You didn’t just hack them?”

“No, I performed penetration testing to evaluate potential weaknesses.”

“You hacked them. I can do that.”

“You’ve got the skills. The question is, can I trust you to do only your job and not freelance or abuse the power you’d have?”

“I did what I needed to do to get by. I aced all of my classes, and received a full scholarship my second year. I haven’t . . .” I was about to say I hadn’t done any other hacks, though who knows exactly what Repard might know. “I haven’t done any
major
hacks since then.”

“You’re still active on Chatsubo.”

He even knows the board where I hang out. I don’t even use the Angel of Mercy handle there, not anymore.

“I stay current.”

“Good.” He nods to himself. “You’ll want to know all the latest exploits.”

He turns back to his computer, and gets absorbed.

Do I have a job or not? What the hell?

“You could have gotten into the Fed quicker. That was a Cisco 2500. There’s an authentication flaw.”

“I know, Miss Benenati,” he says without looking away from his screen. “My goal is to find
all
the vulnerabilities, not only the obvious ones.” He’s silent except for that furious typing again.

I’m about to clear my throat again, when he speaks up.

“Still, it is impressive you recognized the Cisco from a few lines of output eight feet away at nearly right angles from the screen. Tell my secretary you’re hired. You’ll be reporting to me. Also, ask her to buy me a privacy screen for my monitor.”

I wait, but he says nothing else. I let myself out as quietly as possible, and give an air high-five to no one.

*     *     *

“Hacking has a destructive and a creative side,” I say. “And Repard saw that. He wanted me to channel my energy toward something constructive.”

“He did some breaking in of his own to obtain your college records and find out where you lived. In 1995 that information wasn’t sitting there on the Internet. How do you feel about him prying into your personal life?”

I shrug. “A little weird, I guess. But it had happened lots of times before, when I was a teenager. I’d done it plenty of times myself. It was . . . uncomfortable, but not unexpected.”

“You’ve done what yourself?”

“Doxxing. Assembling information on someone to level the playing field.” My missing right arm twinges, and I briefly recall the hard edges of my Amiga mouse under my right hand, bringing up a CLI or shell window, moving files into directories. I focus on the scratchy feeling of the couch cushion fabric under my left hand. “It was what we all did in the eighties. To survive.”

Charlotte’s eyebrows raise a little in surprise, and she jots something down. “To survive? Really?”

“It was the Wild West back then, and we fought each other as much or more than we fought the system. Stupid stuff like getting slighted in a conversation or booted off a system would start wars over turf and reputation. Our electricity and phone lines were shut off several times. We were almost evicted once.”

“I’m confused how this forced you into hacking.”

“Someone would have it in for you, they’d mess with your life. You’d hack them back to show them you were more powerful than they were, make them back off. There was no other option.”

“That’s scary.”

I remember the fights with my mother, the accusations that I had caused the hell we went through. The ever-present anxiety every day over what new disaster I’d find when I returned home from school, and the panic over whether I’d be able to fix it. I nod in agreement.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

I laugh. “In the eighties? The police had no clue what hacking or social engineering was. They couldn’t do anything. It’s not much better now.”

“But did you ever try? Even ask? You were being harassed. Did you ask anyone for help?”

“No.” I don’t like where this conversation is headed. It’s only one step from “Why didn’t you do anything?” to “It’s your fault.” I don’t want the responsibility for this placed on me.

Charlotte makes more notes in her pad, her pen audible as it travels over the paper. “Why’d you become involved with these people at all? What year was this?”

“About ’86, ’87.”

“Pretty unusual to be involved in computers back then, and I’d guess even more unlikely to encounter a bunch of computer hackers. Why not avoid them?”

“I didn’t ask to be attacked. It just happened. I defended myself.” Fist clenched, my blood pounds thick in my ears. I’m so angry, and I don’t even know why.

“Let’s take a few slow, deep breaths.”

“I don’t
want—”

Charlotte lifts her head a little and breathes in through her nose.

Damn her. I breathe in through my nose.

We both sit there breathing for a few moments.

“How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know why I got so angry.”

“That’s okay. Talking can be uncomfortable sometimes.” She glances at the clock. “We’re almost out of time. Think back to when you came into the office. Remember how you felt, so excited about Tapestry?”

“Yes.” There’s a little twitter in my heart thinking about it.

“Dwell on that when you leave here. It’s a happy place for you. Sometimes, when people have emotions that are hard to deal with, they bury those emotions for a long time and never deal with them. That’s not healthy. Sometimes people brood on those emotions forever, and never move past them. That’s not healthy either. There’s a middle ground, a place where we can process more challenging feelings when we’re ready, and when we have the right support. When we don’t feel as ready, or supported, we make an effort to focus on things that are easier for us. It’s a coping mechanism, like grounding or breathing. Give yourself permission to choose what feelings you want to focus on, and to move back and forth depending on how you’re feeling. I’ll see you next week.”

I leave, more confused than when I went in.

W
HEN I MET
Mat a few weeks ago, he offered to set up a weekly coffee with me. Although I didn’t take him up on it, now I want to talk to him. Neither Thomas nor Emily will understand the slightest bit about why micro formats are so exciting.

I email Mat, and we agree to meet the next morning at Coava coffee on Grand Avenue, halfway between my house and Mat’s downtown office.

I start recounting the details of meeting Amber earlier that week. I’m barely a few sentences in when Mat holds up a hand for me to stop.

“It sounds fascinating, but I’ve got a customer call in thirty minutes. Let’s cut to the chase. You’re trying to figure out how much to offer her, right?”

“Uh, what?”

“You want to hire Amber. That’s why I introduced you two. She’s a natural fit.”

“Well, not really,” I say. “I thought I’d go it alone for a while.”

“What do you mean?” Mat sucks down his pour-over, and I wonder if all Brits drink coffee the way he does. “You can’t compete with Tomo
by yourself
. You need to both build the thing and contrive to bring partner businesses onboard. Getting to scale will require special expertise on the engineering and marketing side. There’s only one way to make all that happen in a timely fashion, and that’s with a team. Stop trying to do everything alone.”