Kill Switch Page 19

  “She’s falling in love?” Igloo’s heart felt like it was breaking for the hundredth time. “Not helpful.”

  “She’s on a biochemical high. Some would say this is the primary reason to choose polyamory, because otherwise, we experience this only once per relationship, sometimes once in a lifetime. By allowing each other to engage in more relationships, we get to experience this high, or new relationship energy, many times over.”

  Igloo thought of the old saying, don’t harsh my high. If Essie really was having this amazing experience, then it kind of sucked for Igloo to keep bringing her down. “You’re saying I should let her enjoy herself.”

  “I’m not saying you should do anything. I’m letting you know that her behavior right now has nothing whatsoever to do with you. It’s very likely that her feelings toward you are exactly as they were a month or two ago. Every time she sees her new partner, she gets a biochemical drug high. That’s all that’s happening. There’s no way you can give her that experience. It’s evolution’s gift for meeting someone new and falling in love.”

  Igloo found something hopeful in that thought. “It has nothing to do with him being better than me? Nothing to do my shortcomings? Nothing to do with how much she loves me?”

  “Nothing at all. He’s new. That’s it. A drug high because of his newness. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Igloo suddenly felt a load rise off her shoulders. There was nothing wrong with her. Essie wasn’t intentionally hurting her. She probably wasn’t even capable of understanding how Igloo was hurting. Essie was just having a good time. That’s all. And Igloo had been freaking out, for weeks.

  Guilt flooded through her. For years, she and Angie had been working to free people from control, to give them the freedom and agency to do what they wanted. They hacked to free people from abusive partners. They built Tapestry to free people from oppressive corporations. But in the throes of her own insecurity, she’d resorted to seeking to control Essie. To control her behavior by pressing her to stop the overnights, to control Essie’s feelings by limiting what she did with Michael.

  Could this new perspective alleviate her insecurities and give her the confidence to allow Essie to do what she wanted, without fighting her every step of the way?

  “Thanks, Alan. That’s a lot to think about.”

  “No problem, Igloo. I’m here anytime you’d like to talk.”

  Alan Rickman’s rich baritones fell silent, and Igloo was left with a feeling of quiet calm. For once, she no longer felt on the verge of panic. Everything was going to be all right.

  Chapter 21

  Igloo walked down the corridor, wondering which of her coworkers were working on Angie’s special projects. Angie had only disclosed a handful of people so far.

  Angie’s words came back to haunt her. An entire revolution planned, all in Angie’s head. Tapestry employees working on key features to foil the government, without even realizing the bigger picture of what they were doing.

  She passed the Mac client team, a half dozen engineers coming out of a meeting room, laughing over some joke or event. Someone on each of the client teams would have to be involved. Those clients were an even better platform for Tapestry 2.0 than the cloud-in-a-browser solution.

  She swung into the auditorium where Ben and Diana had their hidden office. She knocked on the seat, but there was no response. She tried to lift the seat, but it didn’t budge. A second later her phone buzzed.

  “Moved. Come to roof.”

  How the hell did they get on the roof? It took two tries before she found a staircase that led to the roof. The door had a typical push bar latch, but a flap of duct tape extended from the bolt hole, presumably to keep it from locking behind them. When she glanced up, she discovered the door sensor was disengaged. There was a security camera behind her, and hanging two feet in front of it, a photograph of the closed roof exit. Decidedly low-tech.

  Out on the roof, she didn’t see much except another staircase exit across the way and the elevator shaft bulkhead near the front of the building. She made her way toward the elevator structure. She opened the door, not knowing what to expect, but half-afraid of falling into an open elevator shaft. There was just a clean white room, with the white vinyl roofing material continuing inside. Ben sprawled across a bean bag. Diana bounced on a yoga ball staring into a large curved monitor on a long desk.

  “What are you guys doing up here?”

  “HR got wind of our space under the bleacher stand,” Ben said. “Maria came with a building maintenance guy. We locked the seat down just in time. Then they tried the door at the end of the bleachers.”

  “What happened?” Igloo asked. “What’d she say?”

  “Oh, they didn’t get in,” Diana said. “We put toothpicks and crazy glue in the lock. Maria and the maintenance guy came back later with a bunch of tools to remove the door. By then we’d gotten out, but of course they found the couch and table. We couldn’t get those out through the bleacher seat.”

  “Do you trust Maria?” Ben asked. “She’s kind of a hard-ass.”

  Igloo thought back to their day having coffee. “She seems fine. I mean, she’s got to oversee day-to-day stuff. It’s her job to be a hard-ass. She has to deal with the two of you.”

  A loud thunk startled Igloo, who stared at the second set of double doors on the far wall.

  “You don’t want to open those,” Diana said. “They open directly into the elevator shaft.”

  “Unless you fancy a bit of rock climbing,” Ben said. “It’s only five stories down. Did you know we have a sub-basement you can access from the shaft, and in the sub-basement there’s a locked room with power and fiber optic running into it? Any idea what that’s about?”

  A locked room in the basement. Holy shit. That could be one of two things. Angie had a secret hidey hole for hacking, or the government had set up a hidden monitoring station. Either way, not a topic that she could discuss with Ben and Diana, or anyone else outside of Angie. Time for a quick change of subject.

  “Is there any chance we’ll run into situations our traffic simulator didn’t simulate?” Igloo asked.

  “It’s always possible,” Diana said. “But I doubt it.”

  They dove into a technical discussion of edge traffic cases and how their peer-to-peer communication would work in those situations.

  Igloo was distracted, her mind only half on the conversation. If the room Ben discovered was a hacking space, then it needed to stay secret, and she and Angie needed to figure out how to handle Ben’s knowledge of it. If it was a government monitoring station, then they needed to figure out how to mitigate the intrusion. Either way, she needed to talk to Angie ASAP and in total privacy.

  Igloo walked down the staircase, sending a coded message to Angie that they needed an emergency meeting.

  The reply came only a few seconds later.

  “Meet me in the south staircase.”

  Igloo turned around, trying to figure out which staircase she was in. Of course, it was at the opposite corner of the building. She crossed the building, keeping her hood up to avoid any awkward conversations, and entered the other staircase.

  Angie stood on the landing, her coffee cup balanced on the banister.

  Igloo rushed up. “I have to tell you something important.”

  Angie’s eyes flickered off to the side, and Igloo looked over to find Maria standing there.

  “What’s up?” Angie asked.

  Igloo’s mind locked up, unable to figure out whether Angie meant for her to speak in front of Maria. Why was Maria here? A chance encounter? Some previous private conversation? Was Maria now in on everything?

  There was simply no way she could discuss hacking business in front of Maria. She needed an excuse, something plausible that would warrant asking for an emergency meeting. Ugh, the first thing that came to mind was, of course, the thing that was always on her mind these days. Poly.

  “I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

&nb
sp; “That’s okay,” Angie said. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, this is awkward,” Igloo said, and she didn’t need to pretend to cringe. She glanced over at Maria. “My girlfriend, Essie, and I, decided to open up our relationship, and see other people. It’s been harder than I thought.” Igloo ran her fingers through her hair. “I thought we’d have fun. But mostly we just fight all the time and I’m afraid we’re growing apart. I’m on a non-stop jealousy rollercoaster.”

  “That’s rough,” Angie said, and her concern even sounded genuine for a moment. She squeezed Igloo’s hand. “I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re dealing with. Jealousy is hard enough in one relationship. I can’t understand why you would want to make it more complicated by seeing other people.”

  A memory yanked her back to twelve years old, when the boy next door kept touching her. She told her mom, and her mom made it sound like it was somehow Igloo’s fault. But then her mother hadn’t stood up to her birth father either. She was not going to regress to twelve. There was no bedroom closet to hide in. She forced herself back to the present.

  “I’m not here to debate poly,” Igloo said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve been feeling guilty about how distracted I am. But I’m going to get things back on track. I’ve started talking to someone about it, and I think that’s helping. I just thought I should let you know.”

  “Thanks,” Angie said. “Actually, I thought maybe you had wanted to discuss the work with Ben and Diana on traffic simulation. Your experiments starved the local network. The topic came up in my staff meeting this morning.”

  What the fuck did Angie want her to talk about and not talk about? Igloo couldn’t deny that anything was happening, but it was hard to know exactly what parts Maria was in on. She needed something with elements of the truth, just not the whole truth.

  “Sorry about that,” Igloo said. “We got enthusiastic.” She babbled on about technical details, stuff which was clearly sailing over Maria's head. Eventually, she fell silent and turned to Angie for a lifeline.

  Angie inspected her phone. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have something to take care of. I’m sorry about the relationship woes, Igloo. Few things are harder to cope with, and it’s hardest of all when you lose your support network.” She turned and left.

  Igloo felt very confused by Angie’s words. She was surrounded by people, and yet somehow totally alone.

  “Let’s get some coffee,” Maria said. “Last time I made Turkish coffee. This time it’s your choice.”

  Igloo wanted to be by herself. But Maria seemed to mean well. Ugh. She was going to have to suck it up.

  “Okay,” Igloo said. The espresso machine in her office didn’t seem like it would cut it. “Let’s go to this place across the street. They have cold brew on a nitro tap.”

  “Lead the way,” Maria said and followed Igloo.

  Igloo was so flustered, she couldn’t imagine how she was going to carry on a conversation.

  “Do you think Ben and Diana are happy working here?” Maria asked, as they waited to cross the street. “I’ve tried talking to them but they’re never around.”

  “Yeah, pretty happy,” Igloo said. She was distracted by the process of trying to cross the middle of the street. The cars just kept coming, even though she was already a few feet into the street.

  Maria held up one hand and stepped directly in front of the traffic. Cars in both directions stopped.

  “Why are they never around then?”

  “It’s just their thing,” Igloo said, looking back. How did Maria do that? “They like to be mysterious. Everyone has some way to express themselves.”

  “What’s your way of expressing yourself?”

  Igloo shrugged. “My hoodies. My code. My band.”

  “You haven’t had a band since I started. Angie told me you used to practice in the office.”

  “Yeah, I guess my interests changed.” That was an understatement. She didn’t do anything outside of kink these days.

  “Where are your interests now?”

  Angie always said that when you didn’t want to answer a question, just answer a different question. Don’t even justify it, just do it. It’s why so many interviews with politicians seemed to miss the point.

  “I don’t have any concerns about Ben or Diana leaving or anything like that. But I don’t think they’re super excited about the work Amber has them doing. They don’t want to be saddled with onboarding content providers.”

  Maria gave her a funny look at the change of topic. “But it’s important. Amber showed me the dollar impact of every new company we bring on as a native Tapestry content provider.”

  They entered the coffee shop. “Two cold brews on nitro, to go,” Igloo said.

  She turned back to Maria. “It might be important, but it’s not sexy. Engineers want to work on worthwhile problems, satisfying problems.”

  “And Amber’s work is not sexy?”

  “No.”

  “What’s sexy then?”

  Sexy was Essie, or maybe Charlotte, kneeling before her on the floor, handcuffed. Igloo shook off the distraction. “The new protocols we’re working on, those are sexy.”

  “But isn’t that about better peer-to-peer connections to support the content providers? Isn’t it, in a way, the same sort of thing that Amber wants them to work on?”

  Igloo laughed. “Not at all. Bringing new content providers is a solved problem. It requires work, but it’s known work. It’s the difference between inventing a recipe and cooking something from a recipe someone else invented.”

  The barista handed over their cups.

  Maria chuckled. “Fine, so Amber’s work is boring. But these peer-to-peer protocols are exciting because they represent brand new inventions?”

  “Yes…and no. It’s not totally new. The basic protocols for peer-to-peer were invented in the past, but we’re putting them together in new ways.”

  “What’s new about it?” Maria sipped at her coffee and then raised the cup in a mock toast. “This is good stuff. I never had anything like it.”

  “We’re continually optimizing the connection. Not just available bandwidth, which has been done in the past, but also focusing on minimizing latency. Latency is a proxy of how far apart two nodes are. It’s way better, for example, for two nodes on the same local network—” Igloo gestured toward the Tapestry offices, “—to speak directly to each other than to have those same two nodes present, but one is speaking to a peer in New York and another is speaking to a peer in China. Those distant connections waste backbone capacity and lead to ISPs banning peer-to-peer traffic. We need to optimize the flow of data, while keeping the communication channels encrypted, and without exposing data an attacker can use. We have to do all that without server-side involvement, and, on top of all that, we have to make it work not just for bulk data transfers but also small packets and realtime data. It’s going to take a borderline miracle to pull it off.”

  The last bit came out in a rush. Igloo noticed her cup was empty and Maria was staring. “Sorry,” Igloo said. “That caffeine can get right on top of you.”

  “You’re telling me. I’ve got the jitters.”

  “Maybe some food will help,” Igloo said. “Mexican?”

  Maria stared back with one eye raised.

  “Err, sorry. I just really like burritos.”

  Maria leaned in close and whispered. “So do I. But if you tell my grandmother I ate from a Mexican restaurant in America, she will kick my ass.” Maria glanced at her phone. “I have a meeting at one. It’s gotta be somewhere close.”

  “El Nutri Taco? It’s a holdover from my vegan days.”

  “A vegan burrito? Are you trying to force the Portland into me?”

  “You’ll live,” Igloo said, grabbing Maria by the shoulder of her jacket and guiding her the right way. “Get the soy curls.”

  Over huge plates of chimichangas (Maria shook her head as she let Igloo order for her) and a trio of housemade sauce
s, they chatted about work, about being a female in tech, and what it was like to work at Tapestry after all the other male-dominated companies they’d worked at.

  “Coming back around to the special projects. Are you involved in the blockchain work at all?”

  Igloo glanced around. The restaurant was full. They really shouldn’t be discussing this work out here. Maybe she shouldn’t even be discussing it with Maria at all. But Angie seemed to be confiding a heck of a lot in Maria. Fuck, this was a hell of a way to try to keep security when you didn’t know who was working on what, or who could be trusted.

  Igloo was almost done with her plate. “Let’s discuss it outside, okay?”

  Maria’s face suggested she saw the logic in that, and she nodded.

  They finished the last of their food and left.

  Outside, Igloo still had second thoughts about talking. In the same situation, Angie would normally drive her around for half an hour looking for surveillance, scan her twice, and then only talk in a dead zone. Yet the work they were doing at Tapestry wasn’t, and couldn’t be, conducted at that level of secrecy. Too many people already knew, and even more would have to be involved before they finished.

  She surreptitiously gazed at Maria. Midway between Angie and Igloo’s ages, she seemed to have the calm collectedness of someone who knew their way around the world, but she didn’t have that worn look like Angie. Not worn out or worn down, but just worn in, like Igloo’s leather jacket that she’d stolen from a college boyfriend. No, Maria looked somehow both freshly minted, but experienced too.

  “Yeah, I’m familiar with the blockchain work.”