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  However, no immediate useful tactic came to Van’s throbbing mind. He couldn’t get over the fact that it was Louis that was dead. “Louis was such a good guy,” Van offered painfully. “He got me this job.”

  “Oh, sure, Louis hired me, too! Louis and I used to play Quest for Britannia online together. He was Lord Melchior and I was Dejah Thoris. Hey, Van, shouldn’t we call the cops?”

  Van ran a hand through his hair. “Why bother? I’d bet the cops will show up here no matter what we do.”

  That was an evil thought. The two of them exchanged significant glances.

  Soon they were on their knees together, rummaging through the desk.

  Cigar-burned and boot-battered, Louis’s desk was a relic from some oil-drilling company with Texas-sized notions of desktop real estate. The massive oaken desk suited the larger-than-life spread of a longhaired three-hundred-pound Texan hacker. Louis got away with this eccentricity because he was Vintelix employee number 3. Besides, it was an open secret that Louis kept all his drugs in the desk.

  In the back of the left third drawer, Van and Julie discovered a brown cardboard box, taped over with ancient, peeling underground cartoons. To judge by the rattling mess of pills, the dope habits of Louis’s vanished youth had long since faded to a galaxy of painkillers, blood-pressure nostrums, and heart medicine. Louis had been eating these pills with the debonair carelessness that was his signature: a relaxed contempt for the stuffy medical authorities, or utter, pigheaded, suicidal stupidity, you could pretty well take your pick.

  Louis’s cardboard box also contained a folded sheet of paper. The sheet bore hundreds of tiny repeated motifs, perforated like postage stamps: little colorful dancing bears. A dozen of them had been neatly clipped from the blotter paper’s lower edge, with something like toenail scissors.

  Van nodded, his heart sinking. “That must be Louis’s acid.”

  “Louis did acid?”

  “Of course Louis did acid! He was a Deadhead!” A fatal octopus of cold reality gripped Van with crushing force. Because Louis was dead, and Louis was the boss. Louis was the guy in the company who got it about code, and protected the coders from the suits. They hadn’t even removed the poor guy’s body yet, and already he was leaving a great big Louis-sized hole.

  When Julie finally spoke again, she was using her receptionist’s voice, as bright, phony, and cheery as injection-molded plastic. “Let’s get out of here now, okay? Because I’m really getting creeped out.”

  Van lifted the battered cardboard box, a coffin of hopes. He put it on the desktop. It radiated FATAL ERROR in its fat-old-hippie defiance.

  “I’m just trying to protect the company,” Van told her. “It would look pretty bad for the company if somebody else found a lot of acid.”

  “Well, we’d better tell Darren that he’s died,” Julie said. “Because Darren gets mad in a hurry whenever he’s, like, left out of the loop.”

  It made good sense to inform the CEO right away. Clearly someone had to be told, and with Louis dead, there wasn’t any higher authority in Vintelix than Darren. Van examined the perforated spreadsheet grid of LSD and swiftly calculated a value of 285 hits. Properly distributed, 285 hits of acid was enough to send every single person in the company into the Texan prison system. It really wouldn’t be healthy to screw this situation up.

  “Okay, Julie, I’d better go tell the boss. You get rid of this dope.”

  “Let me go tell Darren. You get rid of the dope.”

  Julie wasn’t handling this logically. Frustrated in a noble ambition, Van felt a crazy urge to slug her, even though violence never solved anything around the office except in marathon Quake sessions. Keep a cool head, he thought. Just reason it out, there’s a solution here. “Are we going to stand here and argue about dope?”

  Julie lifted both her hands, stepping back, face pale. “Hey, I never even touched that dope! You’re the guy holding the dope.”

  “Okay, I’ve got it.” Van produced his Swiss Army knife, opened the scissors, and neatly bisected the sheet. “Now we’ll both get rid of the dope. And we’ll both tell Darren. How about that: you and me. Are you cool with that?”

  Julie tucked her share of colored paper in the back of her clipboard. “I’m cool with it if you’re cool with it.”

  The two of them jointly briefed the CEO. Darren quickly alerted the Vintelix security guy, an ex-cop who usually hung out in a glass guard-shack, pretending to study the video monitors. Thrilled to earn his salary for once, the security guy rumbled into action, and appropriate steps took place.

  Four medics in EMS jumpsuits took Louis away forever, on a big, sturdy medical roller cart. They were quiet and tactful about it, as if they did this sort of thing every day, as Van rather imagined that they must.

  People didn’t confront sudden death every day, but there was scarcely an Austinite alive who hadn’t held drugs and stayed cool at some point. Van and Julie had broken the awful news without a hitch. Carrying huge amounts of drugs on their persons had somehow chilled them out. Seeing their stony faces and unnatural calm, Darren had compassionately insisted that Van and Julie take the rest of the day off. Maybe, Darren urged, they might contemplate even taking off a whole weekend.

  A mournful hush fell over the Vintelix offices: long before the body left the premises, every last soul in the building knew the sad news through e-mail.

  Cold waves of disorientation had Van queasy. But he really couldn’t call the trauma a surprise. It had been obvious to him from day one that Louis was a waddling time bomb. Van had been a fresh graduate in computer science when Louis had hired him. One look at his new boss in the private sector had sent Van scampering to join a gym. Guys of Louis’s generation had never gotten it about the work hazards of using computers. They still thought that computers were cyber magic, something like Day-Glo mushrooms, or maybe unicorns. Now, three years later, Louis was freshly dead of a major coronary, while Van could bench-press 180 pounds.

  Congratulating himself on his mature foresight didn’t make Van feel any better about his immediate future, though. Without Louis around to ride herd and grind code, Vintelix could easily slide straight off the edge into dot-bomb hell, and all Van’s shares would be toilet paper. Sure, there were high-tech firms hiring all over town, but what a waste!

  Chased from the glass-and-limestone premises where he commonly spent eighty hours a week, Van walked home alone, brooding and shaken.

  Van occupied an efficiency four blocks away from the Vintelix compound. The graceless little apartment suited his purposes, since it had a broadband DSL connection and was close to the gym. Van had no pets, no chairs, and no curtains. Lacking forks and knives, he commonly ate with plastic chopsticks from the Korean grocery next door. The utter bareness of his dwelling place had never bothered Van, for frills were of no relevance to him, and he commonly ate and slept at work, anyway. Van owned only three primary possessions: a large couch, a large computer, and a large cable TV. He slept on a futon under his computer—a rather less cozy futon than the one he slept on at work.

  Van turned on the lights, killed a large roach, and logged on. He was too upset to do any coding work for Vintelix, so he thought he might amuse himself with his hobby, doing unpaid coding for a Linux project. First, of course, his e-mail. Van waded through the spam and found e-mail waiting from Julie. He discovered with vague interest that her full name was Julie Woertz. Julie’s e-mail offered an IRC channel. Van found Julie ready to chat.

  “People around the office say you’re cool,” Julie typed cautiously. “They say you always bring lots of beer to the office parties.”

  “And???,” Van parried. He was a generous patron of the company’s bashes. It was easier than making small talk. Van was Vintelix employee number 26. If he cashed out some stock, he could bring a truckload of beer.

  “And, so, you don’t seem like a guy who really needs to have two hundred hits of acid.”

  “143,” Van corrected automatically.

 
“So I wanted to ask you something. If that’s all right. May I have it, please?”

  Van logged in to the Vintelix intranet, found the page for Julie Woertz, got her home phone number, and called her.

  “Hello?” she said, unsurprised.

  “First, tell me why you want that stuff.”

  “So, do you still have it?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got it.”

  “Well, why didn’t you just trash it in the Dumpster like the rest of the pills and all?”

  “I dunno,” Van admitted. “A hundred and forty-three doses of acid is kind of impressive. I haven’t seen that much drugs since I was in junior high school.”

  “But you do really think it’s LSD? This paper’s all yellow and old. Some website says that LSD loses its potency.”

  “Could be. Who knows?”

  “But if it’s really LSD and it’s really still okay, well, I got some people in my eBay trading club who sound really, really interested.”

  “Julie, why do you want to sell acid on eBay? That doesn’t make any sense to me. Louis never sold anybody acid. It seems kind of, I dunno . . . disrespectful.”

  “Hey, what’s wrong with eBay?” Julie said defensively. “People love me on eBay! I got a great eBay reputation. But, you know, if they got some acid from me and it was just no good, then that would be really humiliating.”

  “Well, what’s the use of acid? I took Ecstasy a couple of times in high school. Maybe you want to dance, but you can’t do anything worthwhile.”

  “Okay, fine, but it’s sure dorky to just trash this paper when my net friends really want some. That just seems so . . . lame.” She paused. “Hey, wait a sec. My webcam’s on. Why don’t you use my webcam?”

  Van courteously found his own webcam, blew gritty dust off the unit, untangled its cables, and set it up. Then he followed her instructions and clicked on to Julie’s cam site. Soon they were gazing at blinky screen images of each other as they talked together on the phone.

  Julie was wearing a sexy black wig. Small, polite, and efficient, Julie had always looked to Van like a grocery clerk. In her webcam getup, she looked like a grocery clerk in a sexy black wig.

  “So, you have a lot of fans for this home webcam action?” Van speculated, studying her stained wallpaper and peeling anime posters.

  “I usually forget that it’s on,” Julie admitted. “I just get used to it, since it’s so much like being a receptionist.” She smoothed her wig. “Mostly, I do a kind of role-playing game. I kind of write little fantasy skits and performances. Like a Cindy Sherman art thing. You know Cindy Sherman?”

  “She’s a big Web logger, right?”

  “Well, uh, no, not really.” Julie plucked her sheet of acid paper from her purse. “So listen, Van: I had an idea. If I ate some of these to see if they still work, would you help me out? Like a quality test. I’m thinking that I could just stay on the cam here, and you could just kind of watch me.”

  “How many of those are you planning to eat?” he hedged.

  “What do they call these little paper things, ‘tabs’? They look really small. I was thinking maybe just four or five. Is that a big deal for you? You don’t even have to get out of your chair, okay? You can just kind of click in on me and make sure that I’m, you know. Whatever.”

  Van sensed himself sliding gently into deep water. “Why are you picking on me for this?”

  “Because nobody else knows that we have a ton of acid! You don’t want me to tell anybody else, do you?”

  Van gave himself a bump on the head with the flat of his hand. “Oh, right! Sure. Sorry.”

  “So is that cool with you? Because if it’s not cool with you, you can just say so. I’ll understand.”

  “How about you eat just one.”

  “Well, okay, but that’ll probably be pretty boring. I mean, I’m not going to dress up and perform, or anything.” She sighed. “Even when I do, nobody logs on.”

  “Well, I’m game.” Van glanced at his sports watch. “I’ve gotta go do a few sets at the gym around ten P.M., but that’s like three hours from now. That should be plenty of time. I’ll just put you on speakerphone now, and get in a little coding on my X-Windows while you’re doing, you know, whatever.”

  Office doings gave them a natural topic for conversation, but Van lacked much interest in Julie’s eager gossip about who was up, down, and in and out among the company’s suits. Like the rest of the Vintelix coders, Van had always prided himself on the fact that he was technically indispensable.

  Within an hour, Julie grew bright and elated, and began to complain and unload through her flickering video in the corner of Van’s attention. She told tales of woe against her inconsiderate hippie-chick roommate. She expressed dissatisfaction with the engine of her used car. She hearkened back repeatedly to her miserable childhood in a small West Texas town among some clan of Southern Baptists.

  Julie’s well-meaning parents had committed the grave mistake of buying her a computer because Julie was making straight A’s. A single day’s exposure to the Internet had revealed to Julie that her parents knew nothing about anything that mattered. Neither did her schoolteachers. Some slow but terrific rupture had occurred. Julie had ended up in Austin, the traditional destination for pretty much any Texan who was throughly shaken up and not yet nailed down.

  Two hours later, Julie was ranting like she’d gulped two Starbucks super-grandes. She kept losing track of the webcam entirely, bolting and scampering out of camera range into the depths of her apartment, where she raided her closet for a tatty eBay finery of poodle skirts and feather boas.

  To “keep him occupied,” as she put it, Julie blasted MP3 files. Like many Austinites, Julie fancied herself quite the music aficionado. Julie and her pirate net-club of world music enthusiasts were into Congolese pygmy nose flutes and Bulgarian choral classics. Van didn’t care much for music, especially the kind requiring anthropological liner notes. As far as he could figure it, Julie’s “music collection” was a completely random jumble of files. But as long as it was different from local radio, that seemed to be fine with her.

  At 10:00 P.M., Van went down to the gym for his customary late-night workout, for Julie had vanished from the camera, and the death of Louis was weighing painfully on Van’s mind. The gym had become a major emotional refuge for Van, even though Van was not at all a fan of lifting weights, or even a fan of gyms. Van pumped iron because this was the only form of activity that made him stop thinking about code. Jogging and bicycling were better exercise, but they were far too dangerous for Van: in his usual abstracted haze, he could very easily fly off the limestone cliffs of Austin’s hike-and-bike trails. But twenty curls with a barbell were always enough to turn his arms to smoldering rubber, and to thoroughly empty his mind.

  Van did not “keep in shape.” The gym guys who were really shapely tended to be gay. Van wasn’t particularly strong, either. Genuine weight lifters, those squinty, bearded guys who were seriously strong, were about eight feet around in the belly. Van wouldn’t have minded looking sexy and picking up some women, but he simply had no time. Van was so busy coding that he didn’t have time to pick up food, much less women. He didn’t even have time to pick up his paychecks.

  So the many full-length mirrors at Big Sam’s showed him a silent geek, with thick glasses, a funny-looking nose, and cheap, infrequent haircuts. Van was pretty much content to look like what he was: a man that nobody ever took any trouble over.

  After an hour and a shower, Van returned home with his gym bag. He found Julie wandering the streetlit pavement, clutching an unopened Diet Coke. Julie had a fixed grin and her dilated eyes were as black and shiny as the buttons on a Sony boombox.

  “I lost you, I lost you,” she told him earnestly. “I got worried.”

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “I got your address from the company website and drove over.” She gestured glassily at her rusty Toyota. “But there’s something wrong with my steering wheel now. I
t feels kind of . . . melty.”

  Van took the warm Coke from her hand, placed it in his gym bag, and examined her with care. She was still in her work clothes, but she had put on flipflop sandals over her stocking feet and had yanked on a pullover, backward. Van felt that he was truly seeing Julie Woertz for the very first time. She was small, frail, vulnerable, and completely stoned.

  “My apartment’s kind of messy,” he told her. “But you better come up for a while.”

  “Is that cool with you?”

  “Oh, sure, I’m cool, we’ll just hang out,” he told her vaguely. “There’s usually something good on the Nature Channel this time of night.”

  He escorted Julie up the stairs and into his efficiency. “Wow,” she said, her dinner-plate eyes examining the bare, constricting walls. “This is so . . . snug.”

  Van turned on the lights and pursued the vermin into hiding. He seated Julie carefully on the couch, which was a nice one, since it was the second-most expensive choice at a local furniture chain. He placed the remote in her hands. He then fetched his laptop and sat down companionably.

  “You shouldn’t Web surf when you have a guest,” Julie told him, struggling to unfix her stony grin. “That’s against the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “That book, The Rules, by Sherrie Schneider?”

  Van clicked up amazon.com.

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  Van clicked twice and immediately purchased both The Rules and The Code for overnight delivery.

  “Hey Julie, what was that other one you were talking about? Cindy Sherman?”