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  Head said, “Nap Sunday’s in the shitter, but not because their smoke blows, though it does. They’re in the shitter, Jens, because they are dread-challenged. What can you kill in outer space? Robots? Cyborgs? Those annoying machine poodles? I am forced to yawn my ass off. Distant future, pah. Who gives a fuck about the distant anything?”

  Meredith said, “Clarify.”

  Head said, “We need new monsters. Hamsterman was dynamite, don’t get me wrong. Skitz the Cat, Farty Pup, Seeing Eye, the piss and toxic flatulence, all the bathroom slapstick—it worked, we’re here, and we owe it all to them. I’m duly grateful, but I sense a played-out trend. We’ve got to up the ante, folks. We’ve got to crank the dread. Our monsters are cartoons. Their life and death—cartoonish. We need human monsters. People want to shoot a face.”

  “Hmm,” said Meredith. She turned to Jens. “How’s the Postal Worker coming?”

  Jens said, “Naubek has the Postal Worker.”

  “Naubek is a burnout,” said Jaffe the attorney, doodling furiously, straining from the effort.

  “I’ll reassign it,” said Meredith.

  “Nap Sunday’s got a droid that doesn’t even kill you,” said one of the twins. “If you fight it and lose, it overrides your mouse port and drags you around for an hour and you can’t logoff or close the window.”

  “Virtual enslavement,” said Head. “You know, that’s not half bad.”

  “The problem is time,” said Meredith. “Elfin has the past, Nap Sunday has the future. We’re stuck in the middle.”

  “And Elfin’s expanding,” Digby said. “They’re launching a new time-travel feature. Click an icon and their warlocks will send you ahead in time to the day of the Kennedy assassination. They bought a lot of code at Red Motorcade’s going-out-of-business sale.”

  Head said, “Time travel is so corny.”

  “Maybe so,” said Meredith, “but soon the wizards will be able to send you ahead to a post-apocalyptic near future, and where will that leave us?”

  “Can they do that?” Digby asked. “Didn’t we license the near future?”

  Jaffe the attorney cleared his throat. He said, “We have a trademark on any game-related use of the word apocalypse and twenty-four synonyms and likely modifiers in all of the GATT languages. We own Armageddon, chaos, plague, famine, mushroom, cloud, mushroom cloud, and thermonuclear exchange. We bought toxic, ooze, and mutant from Scoregasm when they went belly up. We own belly up, bite the dust, bought the farm. We traded flog the dolphin to Sea Spawn in return for put to sleep—it seemed a better mammal-fit—and got it back when Sea Spawn choked the chicken. I’d say it would be difficult for Elfin to market a near-futuristic feature in any GATT vocabulary without running afoul.”

  “Thank you,” said Meredith.

  Head said, “Let them have the past, the future, the near future. That still leaves one time realm unexploited: the present.” He looked around the table. “Nothing crawls the flesh like the near-at-hand. Let’s draw our monsters from the nightly news. Think about it, people. What if famous serial killers made special guest appearances? I’m talking big names here, Bundy, Gacy, Gein, Manson live from Quentin. The Oklahoma City bomber, John Doe Number Two, the stocky ball-capped male they never caught. Salvadoran death squads, the Tonton Macoutes, brand-name ethnic cleansers.”

  “Bundy’s dead,” said Meredith. “Gein too, I think.”

  Head said, “I don’t mean the actual guys, living or dead, although if Manson would play ball—wow. I mean characters like them, recognizable products of our own time. What could be more dreadful?”

  “Wouldn’t it get dated fast?” Digby asked. “That’s the beauty of the distant future.”

  Head said, “We’ll be gone in eighteen months, IPO’d or RIP’d. Fast is not the problem.”

  They covered other topics, the underbrush upgrades, the new audio fx. As the meeting ended, Meredith asked Jens to stay behind. They went into her office with the head creative.

  Meredith installed herself behind her desk, a mass of spotless butcher block, a terrifying desk. “So,” she said. “What the fuck is up with Monster Todd?”

  Jens said, “Any day now. I just have a few kinks to—”

  “Six weeks overdue,” said the head creative.

  “Don’t blame me,” said Jens. “The problem is your specs, Head. What’s the concept? Who is Todd? He’s just a kid. He stands there and he walks around. How am I supposed to write his logic if I don’t get the concept?”

  Head yawned. “Want a concept? Here’s a concept, Jens. In every high school in this country, there is a quiet, troubled boy who is always thinking about murder. Maybe he is ugly, fat, or unpopular. Maybe he’s a half-assed Satanist or a pimpled white supremacist angered by the failures of his skin. He’s certainly a loser without normal friends or healthy extracurriculars. His parents don’t understand him, neither do his teachers—who can understand a bloody-minded child? So, yes, he’s misunderstood, that quaint teen complaint. He’s lonely, angry, hateful. He speaks his thoughts and they are dark and other kids make fun, so he goes to Pizza Hut and buys himself a gun. He brings the gun to school one day, planning to mow down. I say let’s put that kid, a trademark of our time, up on screen. The other kids will pay big bucks to hunt him through the corridors. That’s the concept, Jens. Stop bucking for the Nobel Prize and write some fucking code.”

  Meredith said, “Are you a burnout, Jens?”

  Jens said, “No.” He said this very quickly.

  “Because this smoke shadow thing—I don’t understand. You geniuses in software, designing your cool toys, amusing yourselves. There are good, high-grossing monsters to be written, Jens, lead-pipe money-makers. There’s a business plan to execute. You guys don’t seem to accept this. How many coders in the Bot Pod, Jens?”

  Jens said, “Nine including Mayer. He telecommutes from Honolulu.”

  “We fired him three months ago,” said Meredith. “I meant to send an officewide e-mail.”

  “Eight,” said Jens.

  “Davey Tabor’s looking for a job,” said Meredith. “I don’t buy this shit about trekking through Quebec.”

  “Tibet,” said Jens.

  “I think it’s actually Nepal,” said Head.

  “Naubek is a burnout,” Meredith continued. “Beltran’s off on another mental health day, fifth of five and it’s barely February. Lu Ping is brilliant but in love. Bjorn is clever but not solid. Prem is solid but not clever. But what do I know, Jens? I’m not down there with you. I can’t see who’s burning out, who’s burned. All I see is a smoke shadow.”

  “And no Monster Todd,” said Head.

  Jens said, “I’ve done pretty goddamn well by this company. If you’d just look at my shadow, you’d see—”

  Head said, “Let’s fire Naubek. Tabor too, soon as he treks back.”

  Meredith said, “I’ll tell Jaffe. He can put it all in one big e-mail.”

  Jens said, “Fire Naubek? That’s ridiculous. Naubek wrote a big part of the code behind the game.”

  “So?” said Meredith. “We can fire anyone, Jens. I believe that we could even fire you.”

  “You can’t fire me,” Jens said. “I invented Hamsterman. I invented Skitz the Cat. I invented Farty Pup and I did the early work on Seeing Eye.”

  Jens went through several stages of reaction after leaving Meredith and Head—vigilante anger, disbelief, the giggles, outrage giving way to a simmering self-pity. He left the plant, got in his car, and drove aimlessly around the air base, slowly facing up to the practical realities. Could they fire him? What would he tell Peta if they did? What about her plan for their family future—hang on for the IPO, get the options, reassess?

  Trees closed in on either side of the winding road, second growth, or maybe third, red maple and slash pine, the softwood instaforest of New England. He passed the former weapons storage area, high razor-wire fences, guard towers like a prison or a concentration camp. This was where they had stored the tunas, as th
e airmen called them, the long and graceful megatons. The bunkers were still out there, deep, blast-absorbing shafts driven into sandy ground. Jens had read somewhere that the bunker pumps were broken, and the shafts were slowly filling with groundwater, and it had become a cult of sorts to local stoner kids, bunker-diving, trespass on a dare. They came up from Portsmouth, gangs on racing bikes. They cut through the outer razor-wire fence, dug under the great iron doors (all of this on summer nights, smoking God knows what, angel dust or crank or crack—he had read another story about drugs coming up the interstate from the Massachusetts mill towns, Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill, hellholes if you’ve been there), and then the kids, at night, confronted blackness, the blackness of the shaft, a cool wind from beneath, and the sound of echoed dripping in the depths, and being kids, and being high, some of them dove in. What the hell was in there—frogs, piranhas, one or two forgotten tunas? The bravery of kids on drugs, amazing. Was there anybody braver than a sixteen-year-old asshole from the projects of North Portsmouth? He had read a story in the paper about a boy named Suarez, missing for three days before someone called the cops. Most of the story had been about this—missing for three days, or was it longer? The boy wasn’t Puerto Rican, as Jens had assumed, or Portuguese, as most people in North Portsmouth had once been, but rather Philippino, living with his mother, a cannery employee, and his grandmother, who expressed her fear and rage through an interpreter. The father was semi-in-the-picture, and the scandal was that no one, not the family, not the school, had noticed right away that the boy was missing or could state with certainty when he started being missing. It came out that the boy had been bunker-diving with his friends (Jens felt he had known this all along), and the cops sent a diver down to retrieve the body.

  Through the trees along the road, Jens saw split-level houses with low-pitched roofs. He took a left and drove a loop on streets named for trees, Ash, Juniper, and Hemlock, a town of housing built for airmen in the ’50s, deserted in a day after Russia fell—a brick elementary school, four softball diamonds sharing an outfield, chain-link backstops falling over, swing sets in the high grass, hydrants on the corners, streetlights overhead, a whole ghost subdivision.

  Jens walked between abandoned ranches. The lot behind the school had become a lovers’ lane and the woods behind the lot had become a dump, a gully full of Clorox jugs, old tires, and tumbled appliances. Kids snuck over from the malls and got fucked up in the empty houses, listening to rap, white kids throwing gangsta signs, leaving their graffiti, Majorca! or Skitz is Gawd, starting little fires for warmth and fun, and house by house the tract was burning down. Other kids, looking for their friends, wandered up here too—Jens saw them in the afternoons. Worried parents followed, cruising in minivans around the dinner hour, pausing at a corner, window rolled down, listening for music above the highway drone. Sometimes the parents followed the music to the party house, and found other parents’ kids inside, kindling a fire, and kept searching. Cops arrived on noise complaints and called the firefighters. Portsmouth couldn’t leave this place alone, and this was strange to Jens—so strange, he came by once a day to see who else was here.

  Jens went into the house across the street from the elementary school. The door was jimmied, splintered, and the living room was bare. He heard footsteps through the ceiling. A voice called down the stairs, “Freeze, motherfucker.”

  Jens said, “It’s me.”

  Vaughn Naubek said, “Come up.”

  Jens found Naubek sitting on a milk crate in an empty bedroom, peering out the window at the corner of the school. Naubek wore his postal worker getup. He was eating a hickory-smoked Slim Jim. He offered Jens a milk crate.

  Naubek said, “I’m fired.”

  Jens said, “I know. I’m sorry, Vaughn.”

  “We wrote that goddamn game. You and me, we wrote it.”

  Jens said, “I know. It’s wrong, Vaughn. What else can I say?”

  Naubek looked at a spot on the Slim Jim for a moment, then bit the spot he had been looking at.

  He said, “First computer interfaced?”

  Naubek was nostalgic for the old machines, the lost technology of his childhood.

  Jens said, “Hex 1000. You?”

  “3000 Turbo.”

  “Lucky dog.”

  “My dad worked for the IRS in Kansas City and I snuck into the office to play on the mainframe. The Turb was a helluva machine. First program written?”

  “JENSISNUMBER1.exe. It displayed the text string ‘Jens is Number 1.’”

  “With how many exclamation points?”

  “Forgotten. Numerous.”

  “First modem used to access first computer?”

  “Slow acoustic coupler, three hundred bips at best. Big padded cups where you fit the phone.”

  “Number of times you licked said padded cups?”

  “Once. It tasted like a vinyl chair.”

  “Number of times you licked a vinyl chair?”

  “None that I remember, yet I seem to know the taste.”

  “Number of times you put your dick in the padded cups?”

  “Zero. You?”

  “One. Pops caught me in the IRS computer room, pants around my ankles, cock enmodemed. Man, was he unhappy. Taxed my allowance down to nothing. But it was worth it, Jens. My cock felt good in there.”

  Jens shifted on the crate. “Is that a real gun, Vaughn?”

  “Which one?”

  “The big one in the corner by your night-vision headwear.”

  “True,” said Naubek.

  “What about the pistol in your belt?”

  “No, Jens, it’s a Pez dispenser.”

  “May I have a Pez?”

  Naubek reached into his pocket and tossed a roll of Pez to Jens. Jens took a Pez and tossed the roll back to Naubek. Jens bit and Naubek sucked.

  Jens said, “That’s not a Pez dispenser, Vaughn. What are the guns for?”

  “Why do they have to be for anything, Jens? Why can’t they just be?”

  The windows were sheet plastic and the room was cold. A van passed on the street below, kids getting out of school going off to party in one of the houses.

  Jens said, “Should I call the cops or something?”

  “You mean, am I a workplace rampage shooter on the verge? Shit, I wouldn’t waste a bullet on those people, Meredith and them. They think they’re so great. They think they’re running a big system. Well they don’t know a fucking thing. When I worked at NASA, I helped design the telemetry package on the shuttle Columbia. Everything redundant, triple backups, bang-paths on the motherboard—that was engineering, man. I wept the day she blew the O-ring.”

  “Aren’t all rings pretty much an O?”

  “Ring is the backup word in case you miss the O,” Naubek said. “That’s what I mean about NASA—they even had redundant words. God, I miss those days.”

  Naubek pretended to be interested in his shotgun suddenly, hiding his wet eyes.

  Jens stood. “Think I’ll take a spin and clear my head. It’s been a real shitty day so far.”

  “Excuse me, can I help you?” asked the lady at the front desk.

  Jens said, “I’ve come to get my son.”

  There was a rule at Li’l People Montessori: parents or caregivers were not allowed to go into the classroom areas when they came to get their children. Some kids were in the half-day program; some were nine-to-three; others were in full-day, which ran until six. Parents or caregivers would disrupt the classes, coming and going all day long. This had been explained in a letter from the school. Jens hated the letters from the school, the cool and therapeutic tone.

  “You can’t go in there,” said the woman. She came around the desk. She barred the classroom door with a flabby arm.

  Jens said, “I want my son. His name is Kai. He’s in the full-day.”

  It was around noon. Jens was here six hours early.

  The woman looked at Jens. “Are you all right?”

  Jens saw Kai in the corner of th
e classroom, one head in a flock of heads watching as the teacher fed the goldfish, and explained.

  Jens drove along 1A, down the rocky shore, generally home. Kai was clapping in his crash seat.

  Jens felt better, driving home from Li’l People. The curving roadway straightened out his thinking. No, it was more—the road was speaking to him, a cliché come true, the white broken line, the lane divider, stretching to forever. Speeding up, he turned the faster-passing dashes into dots, slowing turned them back to dashes, and for a moment he was a hammer kid again, reading dots and dashes, writing with the stylus of speed. Other drivers honked and waved, but he didn’t care.

  Kai was laughing. “We’re driving crazy!” he told the other cars. “Poppa, this is fun!”

  Jens’ life descended into code. Three dashes made the letter O. As he slowed, the road was saying OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Three dots were the letter S, four dots made the letter H. Speeding up, the road was saying SHSHSHSHSHSHSH.

  “We want sea views, not swamp views, and I don’t care if it’s technically a marsh and part of the overall tidal ecosystem, because as I’ve told you, Peta, told you many times, that does not make it a sea view.”

  Lauren Czoll was standing on the wraparound terrace behind the manor house at the Silence Bell estate, homesteaded on Indian land in 1646, and priced to move at a million two. Lauren had just come from her daily boxing workout. She wore a cashmere warmup suit, soft and gray as dawn, black lace-up boxing shoes, and a mustard coat, the latest from New York, abstract outerwear, a yellow parallelogram.