Kill Process (18 page)

A
MBER AND
I
are going on two months working together, when I come in one morning to discover a wide swath of board wiped clean. Foot-high letters spell out “SOLVED EMPTY NETWORK” with no clue as to what the solution is. She hasn’t checked in any code.

I have a moment of panic, imagining Amber developed a great epiphany, an insight as deep as any of the core breakthroughs in science, only to have been killed or kidnapped during the night. I take off my shoes and walk down the hallway in my socks on the hardwood floors, and carefully peek into her bedroom.

I’ve only glimpsed it before. I open the door slowly, unveiling shelves covered in small Japanese toys and memorabilia from around the world. It’s surprisingly pink, given that Amber displays few girlish tendencies. In the dim light, I see the enormous bookcase she often grabs references from. Sometimes during our discussions, Amber runs in here, grabs a book by yet another social scientist or anthropologist I’ve never heard of, then comes back to read me a prophetic passage written in the early seventies or some other equally unlikely time period that exactly addresses whatever topic we’re working on.

“People who are depressed spend more money on what they buy,” she announced one day, and five minutes later delivered a book open to the page citing the research. “Advertisers want sentiment analysis because those prospective customers are valuable, not because they care how people feel. I’ll bet the data shows they charge those customers more.”

I used my backdoors into Tomo that night to verify Amber’s conjecture, and it was true: the same company advertising the same product to multiple people would increase the price by as much as twenty percent depending on how depressed people were.

This morning all I see is a half-empty bookcase, the remaining books collapsing over each other, since half of Amber’s library is now haphazardly scattered around the room we use as an office.

There, on her bed, is Amber, dressed, lying face down. I watch, waiting until I see the rise and fall of her body. She’s still breathing. A false alarm then. Nobody came and killed Amber in the night. Her insight survives.

I return to the office and dispense boiling water out of the Zojirushi kettle to heat the glassware we use to brew coffee, then fire up the burr grinder.

When we established the pattern that I’d come over in the mornings before Amber woke, I tried to grind the beans the night before, so I wouldn’t wake her in the morning with the noise. She raised an eyebrow in alarm at the notion of pre-grinding, and built the little acoustic chamber of fiberglass batting and flannel now surrounding the grinder.

I drink my pour-over when it’s done brewing, and peruse her code changes. She optimized the path notifications take to trickle through the system, but there’s no sign of anything having to do with empty networks.

Finally, around ten, she pokes her head in, grunts, and heats up the coffee apparatus again. I don’t try to speak to her. It’s not until the second cup of coffee that she approaches partial functioning.

I wait patiently, head down, reading articles Mat forwarded about raising capital.

Finally, Amber clears her throat.

“Chatbots.”

“Huh?”

“What if we solve the empty network problem by not having an empty network?”

I look down at my coffee cup. Maybe I need more. Chatbots are horrible little bits of code that parse out the nouns of what you type and echo them back to you, pretending at intelligence while being completely idiotic. They do not explain why Amber is now bouncing on the balls of her feet.

“Humor an old lady and explain the whole thing.”

“I read a bit of research . . .” Amber ruffles through piles of papers, magazines, and books hunting for something. “25 percent of adults have no one to confide in. No one to tell their triumphs or problems to. It was a study about social isolation. Isolation has a big impact on health and happiness.”

I nod my head. Now this I know about. Victims of abuse are isolated.

“One of the first chatbots from the seventies took the role of a psychologist. People would tell Eliza everything, even though she only had a handful of responses.”

“Eliza is not a solution to empty networks,” I say. “That’ll entertain people for fifteen minutes, maybe. It’s not going to keep them on the site for days or weeks, which is what we need.”

“Eliza is forty-year-old technology. Chatbots are completely different now. Avogadro Corp was working on email with natural language processing until the project was terminated.”

“You want to hire their employees?”

“We can’t touch anything from Avogadro. I’m sure it’s all locked up in IP agreements. Their stuff was breakthrough, though. I say we independently reconstruct what they did.”

The idea tempts, but I shake my head. “No, this is a distraction from building Tapestry. We need to stay focused.”

“You want to solve the empty network problem,” Amber says. “We make the network useful and fun. That’s not a distraction.”

“We need to stay focused on our core mission.”

“This might be a part of that mission!” Amber clenches her jaw.

“We can’t build chatbots and also build a distributed social network. They’re two separate things.”

“We don’t need to build it ourselves.” Amber shakes her head at me incredulously. “We hire the right experts to build a chat system. The bots are merely users on the system that don’t happen to be human. No extra work for us at all.”

Oh, sure. Just hire people. My pool of money is dwindling rapidly. “We don’t have the money to hire anyone.”

“Well, maybe you should find us some capital,” Amber says. “Then it would be more than the two of us working out of
my
house.”

Where’s this sudden anger coming from? My heart thumps in my chest and my missing arm throbs. I rub the stump and take a few deep breaths. “What’s bothering you?”

“We can’t build this ourselves. It’s a job for a bigger team than the two of us. I’m stressed because I’m trying to keep it all in my head at the same time. I’m all over the code base. I want to turn some of this crap over to someone else, you know? It’s tough to bear the brunt on every single challenge. I want to go to sleep some night and know when I wake up, someone else will have fixed something.”

“Are you saying I’m slacking? Because I’m working eighty hour weeks here.”

Amber rubs her hands over her face. “Don’t take it personally. I’m stating facts. I want to work on this. It’s going to change the world, but we need help. Why don’t you want to raise money?”

I stare at the floor for a moment, then look up. “I’m afraid of losing control of the company to a bunch of white guys in suits. I’m afraid of creating something and having it taken away and twisted into the very same evil I want to stop.”

“Not every venture capitalist is a dick,” Amber says in a tired voice.

“But it’s the power dynamic. Whether they’re well-meaning or not, I still don’t want them to have control.”

“Does this have anything to do with . . .” She looks at my arm.

“Maybe. Yes.” I can’t even remember what I’ve told Amber.

“Okay, fine. I’ll back off. But eventually, if you don’t raise money, I’m not going to keep doing this. I’m trusting you to raise the money to not only pay me a salary, but make this company succeed, so the years of my life I invest in this company are not wasted. I’m not here to write code. I’m here to make a difference. If you don’t do your job, then you’re basically crapping on my life.”

I’m miserable and exposed, and want to run away. I can’t, though, not if I’m ever going to succeed at this.

Shit, this is harder than I ever thought it would be.

I
TAKE MY USUAL
chair closest to the door, and Charlotte sits opposite me.

“Can we talk about something?” I ask.

“That’s what we’re here for,” Charlotte says.

I talk about my morning with Amber, about her insistence I raise funding and hire more people.

“What do you think?” Charlotte asks.

“She’s probably right, although I still don’t want to ask a venture capitalist for money.”

“Is that your only option? What about borrowing the money? Or looking for a grant for business owners? There’s usually assistance for female entrepreneurs.”

I shake my head. “Grants and loans get you tens of thousands. That’s nowhere near what I would need to take this all the way. A team to create a strong prototype, not even MVP, would be at least a million.”

“An MVP?”

“Minimum viable product. The smallest number of features that would be enough for people to use Tapestry. We need about three million to make it to MVP.”

“You’ve given this some thought.”

“I guess so.”

“What’s stopping you from taking the next step?”

“We’ve been so busy. We haven’t had the time. Amber and I have been working around the clock.”

Charlotte is silent. I wait her out. Two can play this game.

She smiles at me.

I smile back.

She waits.

“Fine, I grok it. I’ll always be this busy because we don’t have anyone else, and we don’t have anyone else because I haven’t raised the money.”

“So, why haven’t you?”

“Because then a venture capitalist will own a part of the company, which gives them say over how the company is run. If they end up with more than half the voting shares, they can take control anytime they want.”

“And contractually, can you prevent that?”

“No VC will accept those terms. If you want money, they want control, so if you screw up, they can take over and get things back on track.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“There’s nothing to stop them from screwing me over. If they don’t like how I’m running the company, if they don’t like my mission, they can kick me out. I don’t want anyone to have that power over me.”

“Any time you enter a relationship, there’s a chance the other person will take advantage of you. Nothing provides an absolute guarantee that won’t happen. There has to be trust for two people to enter a relationship.”

“I don’t want trust. I want power. I want control.”

“What does power and control mean to you?”

I fiddle with a thread on the arm of the chair. “When I was fifteen, I went to Death’s party.”

*     *     *

1986, fifteen years old.

We’re in the Upper East Side, a few blocks from Central Park. There’s four of us, and we’re huddled in the cold trying to figure out how to pass the doorman, who wears a blue uniform with matching top hat, and a yellow sash across his chest. He opens the door for an old woman and her poodle. They climb into a chauffeured Rolls at the curb, and the car pulls away. I wonder if the door is real gold.

“We’re invited guests,” BTS says. “We go up and tell him.”

“What are we going to say to him?” I ask.

“We’re here to see . . .” Ruger fiddles with his Zippo.

“We’re here to see
Death
. Yeah, that’s going to go over well.”

“We can’t stand around all day,” dragon says. “Let’s go.” He insists on the lowercase d for reasons nobody knows, and I’ve come to think of him this way, even in my own head.

BTS shoves me forward. I shrug and saunter over, the rest of them falling in behind me.

“Hi, we’re here to see our friend.”

The doorman looks down at me, takes in my razor blade earrings, my carefully cut up Dead Kennedys t-shirt. His dismissive frown does not indicate approval.

“Whom are you here to see?”

“Death.” There’s a chorus of giggles behind me. The guys are children.

He consults a piece of paper on a podium and sighs. “Fourteenth floor, apartment 1401.” He opens the door very slowly, staring off into the distance.

“No problem,” BTS says, once we’re inside. “See?”

The elevator opens, and we step in. I hit the button for fourteen, noticing there is no thirteenth floor. The guys crowd needlessly close to me. I wiggle free and go over to the other side of the elevator with an annoyed sigh. They’re mostly harmless, but I’m not in the mood to be groped right now. I’m intensely focused on Death’s party.

A Zippo snaps open with a metallic pop, and BTS lights a cigarette.

“Don’t smoke in here,” dragon says, running his hand up and down all the buttons for the floors above fourteen. “Not cool.”

“Screw that,” BTS says. “I’ll smoke where I want.”

“Put it out,” dragon says.

“Fuck you. It’s a Craven A. I’m not wasting a cigarette.”

“Hey, idiots,” Ruger says, his own pack of Marlboros out, a smoke in his mouth. “We’re here. Let’s motor.”

Ruger holds the pack out to me. I take one and hold it out for a light. He hands me his cigarette, and I light mine off his.

We stroll down the hallway. I trail one finger over opulent wallpaper, and compare it to the shitty little apartment I live in on 86thth street in Brooklyn. Someday I’ll live in a place like this.

At 1401 Metallica’s Master of Puppets bleeds into the hallway from the door. Ruger bangs on the door so hard it shudders in its frame.

A short kid, well, my height, opens the door. “Bill the Skinhead! Rooooga! dragon! Angel of Mercy!” He belts out our handles like he’s announcing us to the guests.

“Death.” BTS is all cool calm. “Rad party.” With a nod, he walks in.

People we know gather at the door to see us, and for a few minutes, we’re celebrities.

The couches and chairs in the living room are filled, people arguing the finer points of the new Metallica album, the Amiga versus Atari ST, and whether baud rate is the same thing as bits per second. Conversation hiccups when I enter, and everyone stares at me. I scan the room without meeting anyone’s eyes. Three girls present.

I run a Diversi-Dial. Install seven lines from the phone company, plug them into seven modems slotted into an Apple IIe, load the DDial software by cassette tape over the audio port because there’s no slots left to plug in a floppy disk drive, and presto: online chat system.

There are four of these chat systems in New York City and about a hundred around the world. In 1986, if you’re the sysop of one, you’re hot shit. If you’re a girl online, you’re also hot shit. Combine the two, and I’m molten lava.