The Devil's Code

and, most of the time, three or four operating computers; a studio with a wall of windows facing northeast; and a bedroom. On the way back to the workroom, Lane paused in the door of the studio, looked up at the wall of windows, the big beat-up easel and all the crap that goes with painting, and asked, “What’s this?”
    “I’m a painter,” I said. “That’s what I really do. The computer stuff is a sideline.”
    “You really are an artist?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Jack never told me,” she said. She peered at me for a second, as if doing a reevaluation.
    “Jack didn’t know me that way,” I said. “We mostly knew each other on the Net. I only met him twice face-to-face.”
    “He came here?”
    “No, no, I saw him once when he was between planes, out at the airport, and once when I had some business out in Redmond.”
    “Redmond,” she said, and, “Huh.” She stepped over to a painting I’d propped against a wall. I’d finished it a few weeks before the fishing trip, a line of stone buildings dropping down a hill in the flat yellow light of a Minnesota September. The light is thin, then, but yellow-creamy—almost like the light you get in central Italy on hot summer evenings, although in St. Paul, it only lasts three weeks.
    After a few seconds of peering at the painting, Lane cocked her head and did a little shuffle step to get a better look. “Only two dimensions and all that light,” she said, “but it looks so like . . . it might be.” I shrugged, and she said, “Jeez. I really like it.”
    I never know what to say, so I said, “The workroom’s down this way.”
    A n old cow-box Pentium was set up on a table at the far end of the workroom. A shoulder-high stack of Dell chassis were sitting on the floor, with a couple of big cardboard boxes. She looked at the chassis and asked, “What’re you doing here?”
    “Some people in Chicago want to build an America’sCup boat,” I said. “They need a supercomputer to design the hull, but they can’t afford it, so I’m making one, with a friend.”
    “Yeah? Neat.” She wasn’t particularly impressed, as though she’d done the same thing a time or two herself. “What’s the setup?”
    “We’re gonna chain sixty-four Dell Pentium IIIs with an Ethernet array running through these stacked hubs”—I whacked a stack of cardboard boxes with the palm of my hand—“as a single distributed OS. We got the operating system off a freeware site . . .”
    “Love the freeware,” she said.
    “ . . . and my friend—she’s really doing the numbers—will come over and write whatever connections she needs, and . . . go to work.”
    “Cool.” She looked around again, taking in the books. “Where’s your Net hookup?”
    I took her down to the cow-box machine. Some previous owner, or more likely the wife or girlfriend of a previous owner, had written “Fuck you, fat boy,” on the beige front panel of the monitor, in pink indelible ink. “Top of the line, huh?” she asked.
    “What can I tell you?” You don’t need a workstation to read your e-mail. When we were up, I said, “Why don’t you, uh, go look at the Dells?”
    “Why?”
    “Because I’m gonna dial a number I don’t want you to see, and follow a procedure I also don’t want you to see.”
    “Really?” she asked. “So it’s out in the dark? Okay. I forgot.”
    “What?”
    She smiled, for the first time, a smile bordering on greatness: “That you’re a crook.”
    S he wandered down to the end of the room, and I dialed Bobby’s 800 number, a number I’m sure that AT&T doesn’t know about, since ten digits follow the 800. I then waited through ten seconds of electronic silence; in the eleventh second, the modem burped and a “?” appeared on the screen. I typed eight digits, got another “?” and typed “k” and got a further “?” I typed “MALE,” which was either a deliberate misspelling in the interests of security, or a joke. When the final “?” appeared, I typed “3RATSASS3.”
    A letter popped up.
O H , FUCK : U NLESS I’ M READING THIS MYSELF , I COULD BE IN DEEP SHIT .
    K IDD : G ET DOWN TO D ALLAS AND FIND ME —I MIGHT BE IN JAIL .
    T HIS IS THE DEAL : I CONTRACTED WITH A M M ATH TO OVERHAUL THEIR SYSTEM SOFTWARE , WHICH JOB I GOT BECAUSE I HAVE A DOD CLEARANCE FROM WHEN I WAS AT JPL. I T ’ S ALL SUPPOSED TO BE SECRET , BUT EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT THEY ’ RE WORKING ON SOFTWARE FOR THE C LIPPER II— IT ’ S BEEN IN THE