Read Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
At one point Praxis had discussed with the boys whether they should liquidate PE&C’s business in California and reincorporate in the more viable middle of the country. He was a builder, Praxis said, but with less and less around here to build. The need for new construction still existed in California, perhaps more than ever before, but people lacked the money and the will to make it happen. He wanted to get out and work on real projects backed with real financing—not struggle through this confusing shadow play of debt and default.
But when he put the question of relocating to Leonard, his son—rather than raise his eyes to the far horizon—had stubbornly focused on the near term. “We’ve already lost the Sheppard air base project in Texas. They cancelled two weeks ago. So the south is no garden spot, either.” Praxis had refrained from pointing out that the air base was a federal defense project and so subject to the default and collapse.
Richard had simply exploded. “Liquidate!
Why,
for Christ’s sake? Our debt is way down. We’ve managed the company very conservatively. Why throw in the towel now?” Praxis had refrained from trying to argue tax structures with the financial expert.
Instead, all he said was, “Our debt position doesn’t much matter if we don’t have customers. Without cash flow, you don’t have a business.”
But the truth was, Praxis himself wasn’t all that keen on a move just yet. Tensions in the country were rising. Lines were being drawn for a conflict that would soon erupt. And that would be a time to hunker down and survive, rather than get creative with your assets and your loyalties.
John Praxis was beginning to understand how his namesake, great-great—great?—grandfather Ioannis, must have felt during the Greek War of Independence. He’d had to decide whether to stay and fight the long hand of the Turk or flee to safer ground. It was an art, knowing when and where to jump. And sometimes you fell and died.
Now, sitting in on this pointless discussion about cheese paring and staff reductions, he wondered if he was going to be in the same position as Ioannis. Then he wondered if Alison Crowder, who talked so dispassionately about shedding employees, understood how close she was—in months rather than years—to losing her own job. Or, eventually, Richard, his.
* * *
Antigone Wells wondered why, with everything else in the city around them collapsing into fits and starts over disputes about pay and pensions—regular police patrols, Muni bus service, streetlight repairs on major thoroughfares—the local community center had managed to remain open and her karate classes continued meeting. She supposed it had something to do with student fees being paid up for the quarter.
She found comfort and stability in the new movements that the green and brown belts were teaching her with every class. The straight punch pistoned forward in time with that swinging step into
seisan
stance, her fist making a half turn from palm up to palm down, planting those tightly folded knuckles in an imaginary opponent’s solar plexus. The blocks whipped across from the hip, again in time with a half-circle step, pivoted on the hinge of her elbow in an arc either upward or downward to sweep the vulnerable areas of groin, solar plexus, or face. The straight kick brought the knee of the rear leg up and the foot forward in an arc, with toes pulled stiffly upward to tighten the foot and ankle bones, struck at an imaginary groin, then snapped back twice as fast, planting the foot again in the square
seisan.
The movements were as mechanical as clockwork, yet strangely fluid. She was constantly reminded to hold her trunk still, her head level, and her center of gravity evenly balanced between her two feet—even when one of them was off the floor and flying. She was told that her energy must be controlled and contained, with blocks stopping precisely at the edge of the body, deflecting an incoming blow to just past her side but no further than necessary. The punches and kicks were held to mere touches and taps, which supposedly would transmit their kinetic energy into the opponent’s vulnerable nerve centers. It was all precise, concise, specific.
When Wells asked about this kinetic energy, this
chi,
the instructors told her it would come in time, as she learned to control her muscles. “First you learn the movements,” Judy the green belt said. “Then you learn to make your muscles soft and smooth in motion, but rigid and hard on impact. It’s called ‘focus.’ ”
“How long did that take you to learn?” Wells asked.
“Well, I
understand
it, but I can’t
do
it yet.”
“How long have you been studying?”
“About a year and a half now.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Not really.”
Wells thought about all this as she walked home. As a method of self-defense, the classes were going to be a bust. It seemed karate had no trick, no special technique, that would give her superhuman powers. In fact, one of the black belts, Daniel, had told them: “If you want to protect yourself against a mugger or a rapist, buy a gun.” But she was learning the purpose of the class, which was mental and physical discipline through mastering a complicated and difficult set of movements.
She had never been much for physical exercise. The treadmill and the stationary bicycle bored her. Yoga poses made her feel silly and vulnerable. But the clockwork movements of karate—the tiny perfections of motion linking shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers into a solid punch, or linking hip, knee, ankle, and toes into a perfect kick—that fascinated her. It was like ballet, except that instead of representing fanciful literary objects like waving willows and fluttering swans, the movements had a precise, technical, even lethal purpose. And it appealed to the fighter in her. What she had long ago learned to do with words in the courtroom, she was learning to do with elbows, fists, fingers, and toes on the
dojo
’s polished wood floor.
Not to mention that she had lost five pounds and could touch her toes again. Her balance was better. Her breathing was easier. And after a workout she felt like Wonder Woman.
* * *
Richard Praxis stayed late at the office one night, waiting until he was sure that most of PE&C’s employees—and everyone on the thirty-sixth floor, where the Accounting Department was located—had gone home. For what he was about to do, it probably wouldn’t matter if anyone was around, physically, but he just simply better knowing he was alone.
He logged out of his computer, cancelling his personal identity, then started it up again, this time as a “guest.” It was as if someone else had taken control of his machine. Normally, a computer running in this state would not have full administrative access to all of its software and settings, but Richard didn’t need that, just an internet connection and a little piece of code stored in an innocuous folder on his hard drive. The code was named pretzel.exe.
Richard was not supposed to have that program. No one was supposed to have it. But one of the system integrators working for Intelligeneering Systems Inc., the firm that had installed and customized the accounting package on PE&C’s computers, a man named Louis Petzel but whom everyone called “Pretzel Man,” had given it to him on a thumb drive, “in case you have to make any interim reconciliations.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” Richard had asked, accepting the memory chip.
“Well, technically.” The man grinned. “But sometimes you have to run system checks with test data that you don’t want to leave hanging around. Besides, occasionally you might need to push a penny into this column or that. This will keep you from later having to fill out the
long form
with the Financial Accounting Standards Board or whoever.”
As Richard understood these things—and he admitted his understanding of modern security systems was that of a complete idiot—the piece of code went onto the internet and poked at a specific port from among the 65,000 attached to the computer that ran the accounting software. This had the effect of setting up a virtual server which bypassed all of the company’s internal security—the firewall, the logon process, and intrusion detection. For that little trick to work, the accounting package itself had to have secret instructions, known as a “back door,” written into its source code so that it listened to that one port and responded appropriately. Pretzel Man had made it sound like this was a service they provided for all their clients.
Sometimes Richard lay awake at night, wondering how many of the grinning computer geeks of this world had the key to the back door of his company’s accounting systems—to his company’s
money
—but then he always got to sleep by assigning that worry to the category of “things I cannot change.” This night, he was glad to have that key himself.
Well, one advantage that Richard had—and any random hacker wouldn’t, unless it was Pretzel Man himself—was he knew his way around the PE&C accounting structure. All of the active data and running totals were organized by account number, rather than the account name. Names as pieces of text were kept in a separate file and only linked to the numbers as needed—say, for a billing statement or a financial report. Unless you knew and entered the account numbers, you were lost in the system.
What Richard was about to do was a simple matter. He even thought of it as “reconciliation.” He made complementary changes in two accounts that no one would ever think were related. Then he deleted one record entirely to hide the change. That done, he exited by the back door, no logoff required, and shut down his computer.
Tomorrow morning, when he came into the office and started it up, it would show no trace of what he had done.
4. Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Cable news was reporting on a convention held in Kansas City over the weekend by the “middle states,” which included roughly the same areas John Praxis has been watching: the Plains, the Mountains, the Old South, plus Texas and Arizona. Polls during the past week had shown that, while the national attitudes in general ranged from unenthusiastic to complaisant about accepting the Twenty-Nine Points of the U.N. guidelines, for the middle states their imposition was a cultural and economic death sentence.
That’s not hard to understand,
Praxis thought.
In places where the majority of the population lived in urban areas, as on the East and West Coasts, and people rode bicycles for health and pleasure, only taking the family car out for trips to the beach or the mountains, then they could remain calm about pending legislation to boost the price of gasoline to European levels and eventually outlaw internal combustion. Where the most property people owned was 1,500 square feet of condo in Berkeley or Menlo Park, they didn’t mind EPA restrictions on wet lands, dry lands, runoff, and dust pollution. Where they had already bought into Green Planet thinking on nutrition and diet, they didn’t mind outlawing beef and pork.
But in places like “flyover country,” where most of the population lived forty-odd miles outside of any large town and ten or fifteen miles from the nearest high school, they depended on their cars—more likely a pickup. Where the local economy was farming or ranching a couple of hundred or a thousand acres, and everyone hoped for a windfall from drilling for gas or oil on their property, they wanted the federal government to stay farther out of their lives rather than moving closer in. And where people worked hard and played hard outdoors seven days a week, they didn’t want to try subsisting on 1,500 calories of brown rice and kale—that was stuff they fed to the cows and pigs.
As legislation and regulations enacting the Twenty-Nine Points poured out of Washington, D.C., the middle states had at first discovered they had an identity, then that they had common ground, and finally, over the past weekend, that they had a cause. Twenty-six states, from North Carolina to Idaho, had come together to form a Committee of Secession. As with everything else in politics, the voting was neither unanimous nor uncontested. Florida and Nevada were tepid about the move, as were Minnesota and Wisconsin. New Mexico never even showed up. But so long as secession was still in the talking stages and, to quote the governor of Idaho, which was halfway to the Left Coast itself, “Nobody’s going to
do
anything,” the committee was formed and began drawing up plans.
This is getting serious,
Praxis realized. So that morning he decided to call his daughter Callie in Denver and find out what effect any of those plans might have on her project, the Mile High Performing Arts Center.
“Hard to say, Dad,” was her response. “Denver might be San Francisco, as far as the political climate goes. Everyone this morning is pooh-poohing the goings-on in Kansas City.”
“What happens if your project ends up on the other side of a national border?”
“I don’t know. What happens when we work in Shanghai or Dubai?”
“Same thing, I guess. Except we’re not at war in those places.”
“Do you really think it will come to that? To civil war?”
“It did the last time,” he said. “But shooting aside, we could see all kinds of interruption. Tariff restrictions. Rules against employing foreigners. Currency exchange—as if that would make much difference, now that the dollar has cratered. I think this imbroglio puts your whole project in jeopardy.”
“So what do you want me to do, Dad?”
“I don’t know—well, keep your ears open. Keep a bag packed. And memorize the flight schedules out to either coast.”
“Do you think things are going to happen that fast?”
“Do you have any reason to suppose they won’t?”
“Fair point,” she conceded. “I’ll keep in touch.”
“You do that, Daughter,” he said and hung up.
* * *
When Antigone Wells got home at the end of a long day, she went up the terrazzo steps lightly, quickly, hardly bothering to breathe. As she got out her keys at the front door, she stopped to think how different that was from a few months earlier, when she was released from the hospital. Then she had gone slowly and clung to the railing. It was proof that with diet and exercise you really could recover from a near-death experience.
In the hallway at the top of the inside stairs, she found a pair of suitcases. Almost immediately Jeanne Hale came out of the kitchen. She was dressed in her winter coat—although the day did not require it—and a hat.
“I left a note in the kitchen,” Hale said. “In case I didn’t see you.”
“What’s this?” Wells asked. “Are you going somewhere?”
“You obviously don’t need me anymore. I should go.”
“Oh? Do you have another assignment lined up?”
“Well, no, but MaxStaff will find something.”
“Funny,” Wells said. “When I got their bill last month, they announced they’d be closing their doors. Gone bankrupt. Surely you heard about that?”
“I’m a trained nurse. I can always find work.”
“Not if the agencies themselves are going toes up. Look, we can eliminate the middleman. What say I write you a check for the full amount each month?”
“But you don’t
need
me. I think you’re stronger than I am now.”
“Ah, you never know. I’m due for a relapse. One day I might slip and fall in the shower.”
“Then you can get yourself a beeper. Or call nine-one-one.”
“Can’t wear a beeper in the shower. And I could drown before I got to a phone.”
“I don’t like to take charity,” Hale said.
“This is not charity. It’s life insurance.”
“Well … so long as you understand, I still don’t do cooking or cleaning.”
“I know. I have a woman who comes in for that,” Wells said. “But you can carry those cases back up to your room, can’t you?”
Hale picked up the suitcases. “So … dinner in half an hour? Chinese takeout?”
“Sure. Let’s have that water chestnut thing again.”
* * *
Adele never joined him for breakfast anymore, or not on workdays when he had to leave the house early. Occasionally on weekends, as this Saturday, she would come down and have coffee with him. And then he could smell the bourbon in it from across the table. Praxis had discreetly asked their cook, Miranda, whether Adele ever ate anything before lunch. The woman grimaced. “Better to ask if she eats anything before dinner. A few crackers, maybe. I make her a sandwich and she eats maybe half the bread.”
This morning Adele sat across from him, staring out the window at the lawn of the house next door, where nothing was happening, while he read the paper. Praxis had long ago given up trying to start a conversation at times like this, because she would only answer in grunts and negatives, shutting him down. So it was unusual that she would try to start one herself.
“John …?” she said clearly, distinctly, as if calling his attention to something.
“What, dear?” he said, not bothering to look up from his newspaper.
“John!” she said louder, as if alarmed at whatever she’d seen.
He glanced out the window—nothing—then back at her.
Adele was sitting bolt upright, eyes wide. The hand holding the cup halfway to her lips was shaking. She tried to put it down, missed the saucer, and dropped it on the tile floor, where it smashed. Her whole body was rigid and shaking now, with some kind of fit.
“Adele!” he called but knew at once that she wouldn’t hear him. He moved around the table, grabbing her silver teaspoon and wrapping the handle with his napkin. He got two fingers into her mouth, pried her jaw open, and inserted the padded restraint. By this time she had lost all control and flopped sideways, off the chair and into his arms. He lowered her gently to the floor and cupped his hand under the back of her head to keep it from banging on the tile.
“Miranda!” he shouted. “Call 9-1-1. Get an ambulance. Adele’s having a stroke.”
The seizure lasted only a minute or two but seemed longer. By the time Miranda came into the breakfast room to tell him the emergency team was on its way, Adele had already stopped convulsing and was lying quietly with her eyes closed. He took the spoon out of her mouth and let her head rest on the floor. After another minute, she opened her eyes.
“How did I get down here?”
“You had some kind of fit.”
“Really? I don’t remember.”
When she tried to get up, he urged her to stay down, and that was how the EMTs found her when they came into the house with their satchels of medicines and bandages and cases of equipment. They hooked her up to one machine to take her heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen, temperature, and other vitals. They gave her Tylenol when she complained of a headache, and put an oxygen mask on her. Then they lifted her onto a gurney and took her out to the ambulance.
Praxis asked if he could ride along, but they discouraged that, saying he could meet them at the California Pacific Medical Center in Pacific Heights. When he arrived there, Adele had already been admitted to intensive care and was scheduled for a brain scan. Two hours later, he met with one of the staff physicians, Dr. Meyer.
“The good news is we didn’t find any lesions, no clots, no ruptures, no tumors. Does your wife have a history of epilepsy?”
“No, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“No prior seizures, convulsions?”
“No, nothing of the kind.”
“Does she have any medical conditions of which you’re aware. Diabetes? Heart disease? Liver or kidney troubles?”
“Well, she does drink pretty heavily.”
“So describe ‘heavily,’ ” Meyer said.
Praxis pursed his lips. “Pint of bourbon a day. Maybe more.”
“For how long has she had this drinking problem?”
“Ten years. Maybe fifteen. All her life.”
“Okay, we’ll run a panel for liver toxins. We’ll also schedule a biopsy.”
“But she’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”
“I’d like to be reassuring,” Meyer said. “But your wife may be a very sick woman. We’ll keep her here for a few days of observation, see how she responds to enforced abstinence. We’ll know more then.”
* * *
Antigone Wells was going over the practice’s accounts with Ted Bridger, in his office with the door closed. It had become a first-Monday ritual that neither of them relished.
“This is worse than last month,” he said as they compared the reports for accounts receivable against revenues.
“Too many clients going bankrupt,” she replied. “Or going slow-pay, no-pay.”
“Are we still making our nut?” By which he meant BB&W’s monthly cost for maintaining the office and utilities, paying staff salaries, and subscribing to information feeds like LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law, and ProQuest. After flipping through pages of the accounting software printouts and fumbling with them twice, he found the answer. “No, I guess not. But the shortfall is—”
“—fifty thousand eensy-beensy American dollars,” Wells supplied from her own reading of the bottom line. “That’s not so much, in the scheme of things.”
“Yeah, but suck it out of your veins every thirty days, and sooner or later you’re losing real money.”
“What do you want to do, Ted?”
“Can’t cut back on the lease or the utility bills. Without the databases and news feeds we might as well be reading palms. I’d sell the furniture, except we’re sitting on it. That just leaves—”
“—people,” she said bleakly. “Layoffs.”
“Not much of dent letting the admins go.”
“No, it’ll have to be one of the associates.”
“At least one for now. Maybe more later.”
“You don’t have any staff, do you, Ted?”
“Who, me? Halfway out the door myself.”
“So really it’s down to Carolyn or Sully.”
“Do you want me to pick for you?” he said.
“No, I can do it,” she said. “I’m a big girl.”
“And before the end of the month, please.”
She nodded. It was going to be hard, firing one, maybe both, of the people who had carried on so valiantly while she was in the hospital. And it wasn’t as if associate positions at prestigious, boutique law firms were going begging during the currency crash.
Well, on the bright side, with a start like this, the week couldn’t get much worse.
* * *
Callista Praxis was sitting in the construction trailer at the Mile High project site on a Monday morning when the call came from Harold Cromwell, her liaison with the Denver Arts Commission.
“We got a problem here, Callie.”
“Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. What’s up?”
“Our accounting firm just called. They say you issued a duplicate invoice on the last progress payment.”
“Well, if it’s a duplicate, you can probably ignore it,” she said.
“Yes, except it came with a notice saying the original invoice was never paid, the sum is now overdue, and we have to pay a penalty. I’m sweating blood here, because we’re talking a bit more than forty million.”
“Let me check something.” She cradled the handset against her shoulder, turned to the computer on the trailer’s desk, logged in with her headquarters identity, and brought up the project accounts. She ran down the columns of numbers and did a quick mental calculation based on amounts of previous payments. “Yeah, Hal. I could be mistaken, but it seems we really
are
short on that last invoice.”
“No way! I remember signing the check myself. That was over a month ago. I know how snail mail’s been all bollixed up—which is why we send everything certified, registered, insured, and the rest.”
“Okay, fax me what you’ve got and I’ll look into it.”
An hour later she was looking at three sets of documents. From the Denver Art Commission’s third-party accountants, she had the original invoice with initials authorizing payment, as well as the duplicate PE&C invoice with formal notice that the original amount—$43.6 million and change—was now overdue and carried a ten-percent penalty. From Harold Cromwell himself, she had his photocopy of the original check with his signature and a postal return receipt signed by “B. Glaser” at PE&C’s San Francisco headquarters. And finally, from the Denver Art Commission’s bank, she now had a fuzzy electronic image of the cleared check, front and back, with a stamp that sure as hell
looked
like PE&C’s endorsement. All the dates matched Cromwell’s story, and Callie had no reason to doubt his good faith. The art commission had been an excellent client to work with all down the line.