matchmaker

Billy Young’s brother Damian is a Rocker. He makes Rock music, which is as Twenty Cent as you can get, but it creates a good background for the hacking mind, and Billy loves it. Not because it’s his brother’s work, despite it. It’s got a true sixties Backbeat, and a real Fuzz guitar line, played buy a guy Damian found in Moscow. They’re backward enough in Russia, thank god. Of course you can never be sure this guy IS from Moscow, he could be from San Jose, but that’s what he says, and it sounds good enough. The sound, that is. Who cares where the guy’s from as long as he comes up with the right stuff.

Bottom line: It sounds good.  Not that any of the neighbors share that opinion.

Matchmaker. This should be the name of this thing.  And this thing is going to take over the world. Either that or a total flop. There’s no in-between, and that’s just fine with young Billy Young. He points a browser at Matchmaker.com. Just what he thought. A Twenty cent matchmaking service. Yak. A couple of million, maybe ten. To buy the domain, that is. Chickenshit.

He looks at his creation, staring down at him from monitor 1:

It’s definitely in the COOL class. In fact, it’s in the So Cool It’s HOT class. It’s nothing to look at, really. Low tech. Twenty Cent  look and feel. But here’s a thought. Who cares what something looks like  when it’s so early in it’s life span.  Java was a piece of crap to start with, a little cartoon fella named Duke. Look where it’s now. Mosaic wasn’t much of a looker either. Windows was a dud in the beginning. Bill Gates was a spotty kid with dandruff problem. So were Bob Smith and Tim Quinn, his Agency buddies. And SS – Structured Surfing – what Smith and Quinn became famous and filthy rich for, sounded – and looked – like a Civil engineering job. It still does, but you look at it and go: “I wish I thought of that earlier”

And you kick yourself. Hard. On the butt. Which is quite difficult, technically, when you think about. Not that technically difficult stuff ever worried Billy Young. If he needs to kick himself on the butt he will, trust him.

Matchmaker is a Java application that looks a little like an old Win 3.xx. thing. Like Billy used to play with on his toy machine when he was seven, in the mid Nineties. His big brother, Damian, five years his senior, got a brand new Pentium Pro for his birthday and the old 486 dud, not even a Win 95 on it, went straight to the toddler’s room. Billy loves the old look and feel of the older ,Twenty Cent, Windows versions. Try to run it under EGUI, and it  Errorizes. With EGUI – that’s Elastic Graphical User Interface for you Twenty Cents out there – you can see as little as you like of any clickable object on the screen. You can have menus squeezed so you see only the first two or three letters, very narrowly, only to stretch when the cursor comes near. Or the whole screen becomes a giant Fisheye. Move the cursor about the screen and the area you point at grows large. Keep the pointer and it grows larger. And larger. So you can keep the whole Yahoo directory on one screen. Move the cursor fast enough and you get a headache. But you can really cram things into an EGUI screen. No need for endless clicking and drilling, it’s all there in front of your eyes, and the more you know your App – or the sites/s you’re logged to – the less you need to see of anything. You just know that little dot on the left hand corner is the tip of the letter A which is the beginning of the Advanced… item. Just click on it. It will expand when the cursor comes near but you don’t even notice. If you know your Apps. So of course eventually EGUI will be plastered upon this. But later. First things first.

Billy looks at Matchmaker, feeling like a proud father. It looks something like this:

Drop down menus along the top for File (Offer, or  Request), Edit, Results, Category and Help. Underneath it’s split between the Declaration (Offer or Request) on the left, and WCB/Data on the right.

The menu items:

-File – the usual stuff. Open, New, Print, that sort of stuff, and Broadcast.

-Edit – in which you actually create, and edit, your Offers/Request. You work on the right hand side, and navigate on the left.

-Results – click on that and you can check which Op Decs (Opposite Declarations) match yours. Navigate your Dec on the left to get the right sort of result on the right. The lower you go the less results you get, but they get more to the point.

-Category and Help are empty shells. There’s so much work to be done, these things should come later.

-Category – what will become the WCB, the World Category Bank, has to be created from the ground up, and all Billy has done so far was to build a few samples so he could run some trials and demos.

-Help, fuck it. The last thing in the world you need while creating something new, is Help. Who’re you gonna help? But it’s there anyway, You’ve got to plan for future development. A basic.  Looks like a good framework Any user can get the hang of this. Menus on top, right area for work and editing, left area for navigation. Right? Ask Jimbo.

Jimbo is AWOL, and Billy can see it clearly from the Agency main window on monitor 6. But then again Jimbo has his Palm and Lap, and a few other Commstuff he keeps while on the move, like to and from school, or to the next burger joint. The burger joint. There was a bum there, sitting on the kerb, just across from the joint, not two days ago. Or was it a couple of weeks. Strange fellow. Mumbled some pearls of what would pass as wisdom. Why isn’t there one language in the world. If I say A do you hear A? Stranger things have been said. And Gravity, the importance of. Made you think of the Universe’s first few microseconds, where all matter was evenly spread. Was it? Well, apparently not, there were tiny pockets of gravity, like a 0.0000000000001 denser little pockets of gravity. Which became superclusters of galaxies, eventually. Be nice to be a little gravity pocket on the Web, Billy remember himself thinking, as he cruised by the bum on his Board. Of course the bum was just mumbling, but it was worth a dollar, anyway.

His mother yells at him to kill the Volume, but he can’t hear her, or so she’s led to believe. She comes in and shuts the thing down. She knows what faders to slide. Comes with experience. Pretty clever, too. Real-life hardware sliders, not the software shit, which you have to D&D with a mouse. Real ones, Twenty Cent. Which you get hold of, and yank. The silence is real weird. You can hear a car’s engine and a dog’s bark. Both need tuning. Then a child screaming something. It’s potentially a peaceful little street they live in. His mother likes it. Their neighbors would be grateful if Mrs. Young had more authority, though. Like she tries on now.

“It’s Damian’s latest” Billy protests. She hasn’t seen Damian for two years now. He lives a couple of miles away, and Billy tries to win a sympathy argument.

“And don’t I know it” She says and she’s out. She doesn’t dare kiss him. Not on the forehead, not anywhere. He’s a big boy. Out.

The volume goes op again, the moment she leaves the room. A message appears on his inbox monitor:

Don’t Make Me Come Back. Really frightening. It always made him laugh. His mother trying to make him stop something this minute. There was that scene in a Twenty Cent movie Billy once saw on TV, when he was young. War Games or something. The mother of a geek tells him to stop whatever he’s doing and come down to dinner THIS MINUTE. And saving the world from a third world war in the process. Well, if this was HIS mother, the world would have been nuked by now. Bottom line: He ignores her, and she gives in. So much for the peaceful neighborhood.

He’s back on monitor 1: Let’s do a little run. We need five or six potential Offers and a few potential Requests. He quickly creates 15 virtual users.

It goes well.  It took him a few good hours to build the Simulator, which allows him to bring a few users (on remote, virtually remote, that is, locations) into his own system, so he could simulate the interaction between them. When you use Matchmaker, a few years down the road, You’ll be a user,  with an account, a connection to the World Category Bank (Which will be huge and ever growing by then), Then you’ll put a Request (if you want something, anything), or an Offer (If you have something, anything) or both (if you have and want something in exchange – Something like: A good man looking for a bad woman who’s looking for a good man) But for now all there’s is a bunch of Virtual users.

Billy stands there staring at the fifteen empty virtual users. He kicks them to monitor 3, Where a game of House is being tapped into (without it’s participants knowing, or the House site for that matter. Billy loves to hack into House. They think they’re Firewalled, Bless’em), Then he fishes a Coke from the ice box under his feet. Cool.

Now, to the WCB.

He clicks on Category. Hello, anybody in there. Of course not. The Bank is Empty. Somebody’s gonna have to start filling it up, and soon. It’s a no brainer, at least to start with. Just get a Category, say, hell, Husband, and link it to anything that comes to mind.

He Types into the scruffy looking dialog box: HUSBAND

On the right of the dialog box a few linking options appear:

MC (Mother  Category)

DC (Daughter Category)

SC (Sister Category)

Att (Attribute)

Let’s see if it works. He chooses MC. An empty list appears. What Mother Category can a husband have? This is clearly not his field. I suppose MAN could be one. He’s reasoning, quite slowly. Man is a Mother Category. Of Husband. There are many kinds of Man. One of which is Husband. Good. This could be the beginning of a beautiful bank. He types Man. Then he chooses DC. A list of Daughter Categories of Man appears. He scrolls the list. Not much to scroll when the only item on the list is Husband.

Great. It works. Now let’s go to Husband again. All you have to do is click on the Husband item in the Man DC list, at which he’s staring. He does that. Husband pops onto the type box. He feels like the father of Frankenstein. Or that rabbi that created The Golem of Prague, God working on Adam and Eve. None of the above was anything to look at  the moment of creation, or soon afterwards, were they. He clicks SC (Sister Category). What other word/s can describe Husband? Not exact interchangeables but, you know, if someone looking for a husband, what other words could they use? He scratches his head, sips at the coke and comes up with Bridegroom, Owner (in some parts of the world you own your wife, apparently – Dror told him once that it Hebrew, and Arabic too, that’s the same word. So there), Boss, Breadwinner, Doormat -  he’s enjoying it now – and, well – Man. Hell, the link Man – Husband can be a Mother – Daughter one – vertical, and it can be a Sister one, horizontal. Come to think of it, he can flip this thing around. Husband can be Mother, MC, to Man. Yeah. Man is just one kind of Husbands. Rich is another one. A rich husband. And so is Man. A rich man. And then there’s a rich husband. And rich can be either Mother or Daughter. Hmmm. At which point his head seems to be spinning, or is it the world around. It’s obvious that Up and Down are very, VERY, relative.

Now if some babe looking for a husband through Matchmaker uses any of these other SC’s on HER Dec, it will filter her Request as if she asked for a Husband. Same for any guy who declared himself a potential husband. They would meet even if he said he was Breadwinner and she said she was looking for a Doormat.  Then perhaps his mother and father were destined to meet. He reflects for a moment of goldfishing – That’s the wondering attention span – His father IS a breadwinner, AND a doormat. He ran his own business, mail-order for systems and accessories, while Billy’s mom raised Damian and him, and made his father’s life hell with guilt. With good reason, too, Because while on business trips he’d lose a fifth of his networth (but never more) on gambling and poker, and there was more then one one-night stand along the way. Women who admired his wits and courage, saw some sex appeal radiating out of him, through the receding hairline, and generally didn’t make a fuss, because they were married as well, and one or two of them had more money the he did. So good luck to mom when she stepped all over him. There was this Ready Made Divorce sticking on the fridge one day when Billy’s dad got home. His father was never the same since then. And when she overwelcomed the carpenter who overhauled the kitchen area, well, Billy remembers him fondly. Billy’s father became an official Doormat. So Breadwinner is not necessarily the opposite of Doormat.

Billy  always loved his mother. She was smart, strong and cared a whole lot for him and Damian. She would help, and answered B&B/P&P -Birds & Bees / – Plug & Play – questions before they even came up, only when she gave him some facts of life it was fascinating. She used his father as an example of how not to do things in the main, and generally expressed something not very remote from hatred, although she knew, and Billy knew, that they loved each other once, and some of it stuck. In a time when a long marriage was a collector’s item, Billy felt he was something special. He has a mother, and he has a father, they live together, he didn’t have to look elsewhere for a father figure, didn’t get a father figure substitute from his mother, so he didn’t have to go to look elsewhere for a mother figure, like so many of his classmates who found themselves toyboying for their teachers, and their buddies’ moms. In their dreams, of course. Even Lewis, Rocky Big Mouth Lewis, with his stories about Mrs. Stone – That’s Sammy’s mom – is nothing but Vapor. Sammy even asked his mom about it. She just laughed. Then Billy’s mom mentioned something about Rocky’s fine physical ATTs, but Billy didn’t bother asking if she had anything in mind. Rocky’s mother wasn’t something to dream about, so HE just laughed.

Damian’s work goes into a wall of feedback – the kind that Jimmy Hendrix used to stick his teeth into – which makes the little dog across the street howl in pain. Billy can’t hear it because of the feedback. It comes in waves of fade-in and fade-out now. Then abruptly stops.  Which snaps Billy out of his goldfishing.

It’s Time to give his users a go. He clicks 6 on the Monitor control and clicks on user no 1. User no 1 is contacting the WCB  looking for something. He (user 1) enters Matchmaker and chooses between Request and Offer. Offer. User 1 is a man and he puts himself on the market. Things are going smoothly so far. No hitches or glitches or anything, which is somewhat surprising.

Then a voice brakes into Billy’s bedroom, Like that of a herd of buffaloes: “Billy, You seen Jimbo?”

Mother Theresa. Out of the goddamn blue. Was she connecting to his goldfishing about not having to look for a mother figure? Obviously there’s a flaw in that particular train of reasoning.

He clicks on monitor 8 and sure enough, her image pops up.

“What’s up, Mrs. P?”

“You ain’t gonna believe it, Billy. Jimmy’s GONE. He’s not in his room. No answer on any of the devices…”

“Yeah” Billy is thinking aloud “I was wondering what happened. It’s not like Jimbo.”

“You’re not worried or anything, Mother Theresa?” He says, shifting his eyes between her image and user 1.

“Well…” She’s thinking it over. “I AM, as a matter of fact. I know he’s a big boy, and I know he can take care of himself, but…”

“But it’s not like him” Great minds think alike. Billy is getting a tad worried, not too much, mind “I wanted to ask him something, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll be on line in no time, Mrs. P.”

“Sure. I’ll tell him you asked” She says and stares straight into Billy’s eyes.

What is he supposed to do now. He’s thinking hard while user 1 keeps pushing himself to the forefront. If Jimbo’s input wasn’t essential – ESSENTIAL – to his project,  would he be worried about his AWOLing?

Theresa looks at him, waiting for him to say something, as does he. Surely that’s it. They are concerned about Jimbo, both of them. Yeah. He’s a Pal.

He looks back at user 1 and clicks File (Offer).

An empty Offer form appears. It must seem rude.

“Sorry, Mrs. P. Miles away. I’m working on this thing, and I need your son’s input. I know it sounds terribly inappropriate, but I guess that’s why I was going to call you.”

“But I called you.”

“Oh yes. So you did.”

He slaps his forehead. She’s doing things to his concentration.

“I’m sure he’s alright” he says.

“So am I, Billy. Shall I keep you posted? When he’s back?” She’s smiling now, perfect teeth and all, a few age lines around the eyes. Perfect. But  her smile seems a hesitant kind of smile. Like when you’re not sure.

“Yes, please. Call me anytime”

“I’m off than” She blows a kiss and disappears. She what? He rewinds the recording, Not rewind really – only played it at 00:15 seconds minus, and yes. Theresa Price, His best friend’s mom, the Queen of his fantasies, blows a kiss his way, for no apparent reason. He runs it again in slo-mo. It’s a KISS. The lips contract, they get wider on the top-bottom scale and closer together horizontally, and there’s an almost perfectly dark oval area in the middle of it all. A kiss if he ever saw one. Sends the mind of a fourteen something – genius and all – into orbit.

But not for long.

Back to the business at hand. User 1 is accessing the system. He’s a man, he’s available. He wants to marry someone like him. Or not. What about opposites attract and all that? Anyway. Let’s leave it on the supply side. He can make a Request later. Say he’s fifteen, no. Fifty. Ah, forget age. The Attribute system is not written Yet. No numbers, ages, incomes, weight , height or anything that’s meaningful in a husband. Nothing like that. Or distance. He stops and thinks about that one. Gotta link the thing to one of the IMAPS. Maybe Zoomagator. They give you YAH (You Are Here) through satellite. And links it to a IIT (It’s There).  So does World Onion. Costs a bundle now, but will collapse in a couple of years, like everything else). Back to User 1. Say he’s a Lawyer. Right. We’ll have to make a category called Profession, as a DC of Husband and as an MC of lawyer. Husband / Profession / Lawyer. So user 1 clicks (well, Billy is User 1 now)) Category and types Profession. Then he clicks MC and types Husband, then DC and Lawyer. Of course all the other users can now use these new Categories and the links between them, and when user 2, a women, puts out a Request for Doormat / Profession / Lawyer guess what? User 1 will be there waiting for her. Could be the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

He tries it, and it  works. User 1 and user 2 find each other. When user 1 clicks Results, there pops user 2′s Request waiting  for him. When user 2 clicks results, there’s user 1′s Offer  waiting for her. It’s all in lists of matching Categories. And The way the WCB will be created by the public is the big idea here. It’s not a hierarchy built up by someone for the rest of the world to work with. It will be an open ended free for all thing. Like the Web. Nuclear chain reaction. Blast the competition out like the web brushed all those propriety on-line services in the mid nineties, a thousand or so years ago.

He looks at it like a proud father. He can feel himself falling in love with it. Which is exactly the time to stop and have another look. It’s too good to be true, really. He’s got to run it past someone, if only for the sake of a reality check. He needs some serious Devil’s Advo here.  A scratch of the head, a sip of coke. Options: Obviously Jimbo’s the no’ 1 seed, but there are also Liam, Mark, Morris, Sam/Rachel, Boris, to name but a bunch. Many of the Agentheads are on line right now, as he speaks. To himself.  Sam and Rachel are good candidates. And Roy. But something tells Billy that this thing is too sensitive to be discussed outside  the family. And family is Jimbo. And nobody but. Even Jimbo’s mom isn’t family. Not yet.

He pauses for a sip. The Coke is gone and he reaches for a new one. He orders them in those disposable ice boxes, forty eight at a time. It’s a hit with Agentheads, and other Netheads. Made some Jerk a multi millionaire. Not that a multi millionaire is anything special, but hey.

Then he clicks Theresa’s Quick access, which he’s been keeping but never before used.

She’s even quicker.

” I was just going to click you” He says and blushes “Any news about the Boy wonder?”

“No” she sort of whispers “I thought you might have heard something.”

“No” a pause. “Mrs. P”

“Yes?”

“Did you by any chance check Ringleader?”

“Yeah, A few days ago. I was gonna talk to you about it.”

“Well, I wanted to talk to YOU about it, too.”

“To me?”

“To Jimbo, of course, First thing, but to you too.”

What on earth would a young genius like young Mr. Young here want with a Headhunter’s human resource manager?

“You see, Mrs. P, I think I’m on to something really big, and I mean really Huge, here.”

She always thought the brainpower of Billy, combined with that of her son, was going to explode. They were like A Smith and Quinn, A Jobs and Woz, a Gates and Allen , an Andresseen and Bina act. The world at large was theirs to storm.

“But why me, Billy?”

“It’s just a hunch that I’ve got. Like I can trust you to keep a secret. To give advice, these sort of things.”

“Of course you know you can trust me, Billy” She sounds as emphatic as she probably is. Which is a lot.

Jimbo’s disappearance has disappeared for a moment.

“Spit it out, then”

“Ok” Billy is hesitant now “It’s like this: You saw how Ringleader works, right?”

“I didn’t really. I only went as far as the introduction. Didn’t put any money down or anything.” She isn’t sure where he’s going to with this.

“I didn’t think you would.”

“I was going to. Later. After I’ve consulted with you.”

“Really?” a wave of warmth runs through Billy’s young body. He can actually feel it going down his throat, his digestive system,  his untested reproduction center, down to the soles of his sneakers. It’s a bit like a stampede of ants. An Adrenaline rush, in short.

“Yeah. ’cause you know about these things. You can hack into it, explore it for free.”

“I can hack into anything I want, You know that. And so can Jimbo.”

“Yeah” It’s her turn to feel that sinking feeling. Jimbo. anyway.

So can Jimbo. But she would never ask the apple of her eye to hack for her. Commit a crime. Just isn’t right.                                                          “Yeah, anyway. You Hacked into it, didn’t you? I mean, YOU told me about it.”

“‘course I did.”

“I mean did you actually pose as a potential husband or something? Did you lay some money down?”

“Oh, I didn’t really get into that too much. You know my goldfish problem.”

“What’s a goldfish problem?”

“It’s an attention span thing. If I’m not totally hooked on something I lose interest and fizzle away, like.”

“So?”

“So, yeah, I posed as a sixty five year old widow looking for a toy boy on a weekly basis, at 350 bucks a session max, doing house calls,  in the greater LA area, not being too specific.”

“And?”

“No dice. Too little money. The minimum toy boy charge must be five hundred or something. Didn’t really stay to find out”

“So what happened? How much money do you owe them?”

“You mean Mrs. Langly? How much does SHE owe? Oh, I think it was in the neighborhood of 15 thou give or take a grand.”

“And aren’t you worried they’re gonna find you out?”

“A bit, although for all they know, they got paid.”

“Did they?”

“Not really, but they roll all their money through the same launderettes, in big bulks, so chances are they won’t go after rabbit’s dropping sort of money like that.”

She thinks it over. Another reason to be worried.

“Well, I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“So do I.”

 Then there’s an awkward pause. Either they wait for each other to run with the ball, or think about what was said or whatever it is, the pause stretches for a full 20 seconds, enough to be defined as Awkward. They just feel kinda comfy and plain vanilla good talking to each other, looking each other in the digital eye, so to speak, supporting each other. A  thirty seven year old human resources manager at a top headhunting outfit and a fourteen year old geek. He’s  going to ask her advice, later, no doubt about it, but for the time being, better wait for Jimbo. Talk about something else. Birds and the bees. Or:

“Say, Mrs. P, You know I love you and all that. Do you want me to find you a husband on somebody else’s account?” He says and regrets it as the words are leaving his lips.

“Bad idea, Billy. Dangerous. And you know it.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He’s a bit disappointed he can’t be her knight in shining armor, but what he just suggested is really tempering with fate.

“I guess Jimbo will show up any minute” She says.

“Guess so. Hope so, anyway.”

“Billy”

“What”

“You know in Ringleader, when this Stan Gilbert talks to you. He talks like he KNOWS you. But he doesn’t, does he?”

“Shit, no.”

“But he calls you by name, and talks about your situation, at work and-”

“Oldest trick in the book. Do you really think he gets a file about every client which he reads before he gives you a personal presentation?”

“No, but how the hell? Did he do that to you, I mean when you hacked into – “

“Of course he did. He called me Mrs. Langly, and he referred to the amount of money I had in my bank account and how much happiness I could buy per dollar. Everything I fed him he ate. Like a good healthy baby. Did you notice the little pause?”

“What pause?”

“You know he tells you Blah blah this and blah blah that, little pause, Theresa. Right?”

“Yeah”

“Simple Agent technology. And crap implementation too. If he used MY agents, you wouldn’t notice no pauses. I promise you.”

So that’s what those agents do. That’s what Jimbo’s doing all the hours that god gave.

“How does it work?”

“Well, Mrs. P, it’s techie stuff. But the gist of it is an agent, that’s a bit of code, goes into your system the moment you click on Ringleader and finds out a few basics, like your name, age, profession, that kind of stuff.”

“I thought browsers were secure against this kind of stuff.”

“Yeah, sure. Like Mary was a virgin. I mean after BC.”

Theresa shudders.  The implications. She knows the stories, but there’s so much reassuring propaganda that it stuck. The safety feeling, that is. Enough of it made the average American want to move near a Nuclear power plant, for god’s sake. She thinks, involuntarily, about Homer Simpson. Than she thinks it’s time for a shower. That’s how the mind works sometimes. Tell me it isn’t.

“Anyway” Billy is on a roll now “Another agent, or even the same one, picks up the findings and places them in the introduction speech. I mean the right branch of the speech, because the speech is built of segments, tailormade for the client. I bet the speech you got was way different from the one my poor old Mrs. Langly had to go through.”

Theresa’s mind is racing now. Surely Mr. Gilbert had to record thousands of hours of speech, record thousands of names, surnames…

“He didn’t have to record all those speeches himself, you know. Speech synthesis can do a lot plus there are impressionists in this world who would sit for days and record names at fifteen bucks an hour.”

“So he knows all about me?”

“He said he didn’t and I’d believe him, Mrs. P. The agents know and respond to fit to your needs, but the results probably remain within your system. They don’t go back and report. Only when you volunteer info,  it travels.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Not really. But if an investigation is held and unvolunteered info is found on Mr. Gilbert’s servers a lot of shit’s gonna hit lots of  fans, big time. So he probably stays away from that. Did he give you that rap about him being an honest man and a wealthy man?”

“Yeah.”

“Well than. Makes sense, don’t it?”

“Guess so.” A little pause, then “Hey, guess what. The lost sheep is back.”

“Jimbo!” Billy is up in arms “Where the fuck you been? Your mom was worried sick”

Jimbo’s face fills the screen his mom occupied the last half hour or so.

“Just unplugged for a few hours. That against the law?”

“It’s when Mr. Young wants to talk to you urgently. Listen – “

“Just thought I’d go to the movies”

“The movies? Out? With A CROWD?”

“You should try it sometime. Plus there was another reason why I unplugged on you” Jimbo says, his face beaming “Mom, Billy, Meet Lisa.”

LOVE

Lisa Rosen is in love. Really in love for the first time in her life. And she was about to share it with her mother if not for this e-mail.

It’s scruffy looking e-mail massage settles on Amanda’s massages monitor (no’ 11 on her Cluster). Twenty year old Lisa is with her on a visit from College, and it’s her that has the honor of clicking on it.

“Your Grandma is heading for the Great Gig up in the Sky with Diamonds.

Sorry you had to get it this way, but you’re not on the phone.

Grandpa” , it says. It has no return address. Bummer.

Amanda Rosen’s daughter, Lisa, is a Househead. Lisa’s mother, Amanda is THE HouseHead. Lisa’s grandmother, that’s Amanda’s mother, Sheila, was a Deadhead. She was there in those heady Summer of Love days, Where the Dead, Jefferson and Quicksilver invented Flower Power, free love and ballroom trips. Which could account for the fact that Amanda’s mother was not sure who her own father was. Not that it was THAT important then or at any other time. It could have been any of an unknown number of males she had brief encounters with. During the summer of love she was doing the rounds between the various tribes and communes in and around the bay area, including a short stance in a The Open Church, which was basically against having a roof over your head, which might damage your relationship with the Universe at large and god – whoever he slash she – is. That ended when the first heavy rain fell, about a week after joining. Her guru wasn’t happy, but she didn’t take it personally, as the Church lost most of its followers within a few hours. She was a child of the tribe. A flower child. She kept going to all-night Dead gigs (Ballroom dances they were called, not to be mixed with Tango and Cha Cha Cha and other kinds of Slimedance) all through the Seventies, Eighties, and half way through the Nineties, until Jerry Garcia was no more, Gone to that endless gig up in sky with Diamonds, Forever Jammin’ with Hendrix, Janis, Jim, Lennon, and rest of them. The Heavenly Supergroup. Well, one thing is sure. Jerry Garcia couldn’t escape the Dead. It’s them that changed personal. And Lisa wouldn’t be surprised if one of the Heavenly Dead, Grateful or not, was her grandpa.

“Ma! Come here, have a look at this”

Amanda Rosen, later to become Amanda Gray – Rosen was a Sixties child, And that made her into an Eighties woman. Which meant power dressing, sharp brain, total despising of her mother’s ideals, and greed. Lots of it. The more the merrier. She couldn’t give a damn who her father was. When her daughter Lisa was born, Out of a proper cross – religion marriage, to a certain Maurice Gray, It took Amanda Gray – Rosen a couple of months to go back to work at Apple, working on the Lisa. Amanda was in love with the Lisa, and was so personally attached it, that poor Lisa, the baby, was doomed to be named just that. The original Lisa was, so they say, a love child of Steve Jobs. Abandoned when it didn’t fit into plan. And so was the machine, mind. That was before she realized, same time as the rest of the Lisa team, that Lisa (the machine) was a dud, the money and glory was already on it’s way to Steve Jobs and his Mac Division, and Lisa people basically were becoming second rate citizens. Bozos. Like the Apple II people. It was a good reason for Lisa Rosen, a child of the Eighties and a Grown up of the 0 something’s, or double O’s (what do you call the first decade of a new millenium)) to show her mother that Lisa was no dud. Which is exactly what Amanda Rosen wanted to show the world: Lisa was no dud.

“Just a minute, Hon”

Hon. Well, even Powerdressers have feelings. They give their children love, they give them toys. Young Lisa, from the tender age of five played with an original Lisa her mother kept after the big slash and burn of nineteen eighty seven, the year of Black Monday and the Recession that eventually followed

Little Lisa Rosen was, is, the Apple of her mother’s eye, and only daughter. Unlike so many children of the now global Silicon Valley, she actually comes to see her mother face to face – F2F – at every opportunity , and likes to be hugged and kissed and whatnot by her mother. None of that VC business for them. F2F has intrinsic value, very underappriciated, they both feel. They were going to have a proper mother – daughter relationship, not like the one Amanda had with her mother, which made her feel like a flowerpot that was never watered and kept indoors so it doesn’t get wet, god forbid, rather then a child. Well, sometimes. After being slashed from Apple, at the tender age of twenty , Amanda Rosen never stopped for a rethink. She was way too energized and strong minded for that. Once out of Apple, and deserted by her husband, Amanda set her targets high. Be a super mother and provide for her daughter and herself. And by providing she meant anything the child didn’t even know she wanted, and for herself, well, a life style that didn’t allow second thoughts about expanses. After all, it was Silicon Valley. You didn’t have to shop around for, say, a washing machine.

“Anything interesting?”

“Come have a look at this, mom. It’s weird”

Weird. Well, weird emails are common enough. Amanda is still on the run, checking monitors and bullying employees as she goes along. Still, she likes to think herself as a good mother, one who listens to her baby daughter, so she drops all and comes over.

“Look at this, ma”

“Hmmm” It takes a few seconds for it to sink in. Grandpa? Does she have one? Could there be one definite one in the Summer of Love chaos?

“Poor Mom”

Traumatized by the sacking experience, Amanda opted to go her own way. She got herself a loan, won some good money at poker, and started a PC and Mac business, Building and repairing systems. It was a meantime thing, because everybody and his mother was doing it, including Tim Quinn at one time, when he wasn’t Zero Bleeding. And the margins were so thin, you could see the veins. It was the Web explosion of 95/6 that got her into orbit. It took a few years, and a few failed ideas to crack it, But she got it together. It’s a Web Site that makes money, tons of it. Who said you couldn’t make money on the Net. Just be creative and have arrogance, lots of it.

Meanwhile, Round about the turn of the Millenium, Maurice Gray got into financial trouble, just another in a series. Lisa, now thirteen, who was visiting with him, saw him crumble and lost a lot of respect for the male species. They didn’t amount for much in her family, apparently. She grew up powered by girl power, which very much replaced flower power, her mothers redundant childhood milieu. As far as the Rosens, Mother and daughter, were concerned, Granny was flowered alright, but in her later years began to see the advantages of power over flower, and began to resent whoever left her with a baby and a flower in her hair. She enjoyed Amanda’s success and became a fanatic supporter. And died.

Which now leaves Amanda staring at the e-mail, and thinking of the father who’s identity she doesn’t have a clue of:

Grandpa. So who wants to know.

It was addressed to Amanda’s machine, but worded for Lisa. Lord knows how the e-mail got there. Amanda’s home system wasn’t – isn’t – exactly public property, but she had – has in fact -a standing order at the mail room to intercept family oriented massages to her, especially on matters of health and death. Or maybe her mom, Lisa’s grandma, bought a computer and made use of that e-mail address she never quite understood.

“There’s no return address”

“Nope”

Amanda stares at the message blinking on the screen to her left, and without saying much turns to the next thing alive for a hug. Lisa hardly knew her gran. She spent all her formatives with her mother, not much else, and now she was just leaving home. At twenty, it took her longer than the average Silicon Child to do the She’s leaving Home Bye Bye routine, because Amanda and Lisa Rosen enjoy each other’s company and share so many interests, the biggest of which is Work. Lisa worked for her mom since she was ten. She was one of the driving forces behind turning her mother’s off-the-wall idea into the reality of HOUSE. Even in college she was still in touch, and putting in some on-line work.

“I thought Grandpa never knew he was Grandpa” Lisa whispers when the right amount of emotion was exchanged through the hug.

“So did I” Says Amanda, wiping an uninvited tear.

“I wonder if we could trace the old bastard down.” Lisa said, wiping a tear of her own. ” I could ask Tony, just the job for a Zero bleeder”

“Yeah. Give him a chance to do something useful”

“For a change”

“Earn his keep, like”

They exchange a grimace. Somebody needs to keep the customers paying. And if they pay, and they do, that someone Doesn’t have to do much. They like Tony, but they decide not to bother him with family trivia.

Mom was happy not knowing who my Dad was. She always said so. I wonder if she meant it.”

“She probably didn’t. Not late in her life.”

But Lisa Rosen is in love. Really in love for the first time in her life. And she was about to share it with her mother if not for that scruffy email.

“I was gonna bring you some good news. Personally.” She says to her mother, thinking better of it “Now this”

“What news?”

“Not important. Not now”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Ok. I’m in love”

“What do you mean, in love? The real thing? Not just a fling?” she watches her little girl, and realizes how much she missed that all-encompassing feeling her daughter must be going through right now.

“I’m pretty sure, mom. I had boy friends before. This is different. He took me to the movies. Bought me popcorn. Name’s Jimmy”

“Sounds serious enough to me. Although it could be a Drag & Drop”

“I’m not into Drag and Drop. If I drop someone I don’t drag. This is the real thing”

“Positive?”

A nod. Amanda Rosen and daughter Lisa are squashed in another hug .

“I’m Happy for you. Really I am. Even though I know, I’m positive, Love is a bag of illusions”

“I knew you’d say that” Lisa is practically radiant. “Thanks for not saying What’s love but a second hand emotion”

“It is. But who cares. I envy you.”

Another hug.

“He’s fifteen, Ma.”

” Age is not an issue. I’d give HOUSE away if I could feel the way you feel right now” Amanda Rosen is getting mushy. What with her mother gone and her daughter in love.

“You should check out Ringleader”

“Check out what?”

“Ringleader. It’s a Matchmaking site for the Rich. You’re the Rich.”

“I’m not looking for Rich Love. If this Ringleader thing is for the rich, I would probably miss a chance to find real Fifteen year old love machines.”

“Jimmy is not a love machine. He’s so sweet. He never laid a finger on me. We Just walked hand in hand, went to the movies, Bought popcorn. He’s no machine, Ma. He’s my love. “It sounds so sweet.

Amanda looks at her daughter and feels as if her heart is going to explode with sheer happiness, as if the message about her mother never penetrated.

“Jimmy is no toy boy, mom. I never touched him. Improperly, you know. And he’s got brains.”

Oh oh. Early warning. Brains no good.

“How much brains?”

“He’s a genius, mom. probably in the one eighties.”

“Listen to me, girl. I take it back”

“You what?”

“This is a fucking no no. I understand this Jimmy boy is sweet, and in love and all that. Probably genuine. But if he’s into brains, and he’s whiz as well, right? right, Then it’s not good news. Not good news at all. You’re after the money he’s gonna make. He’s gonna wipe the floor with you, flowers, popcorn and all”

That was SOME transition her mother showed there.

“Mom, I’m no peahead myself, remember? Straight A’s? Best programmer? The one fifty five? I know what I’m doing. Nobody can doormat me. Not a fifteen year old. I’m a Rosen, for cryin’ out loud. And my IQ is probably in the high one forties anyway. Not that I’m interested”

Amanda looks at her. She takes a step back and looks at her again. Then she looks at the flickering e-mail and trash-cans it. Then she changes the subject.

“Can this Ringleader thing find me Love, then?”

Lisa Rosen has to think about that one, real hard.

The day’s plan is thrown into total chaos. She – That’s Amanda – has a tough schedule to keep up with, and her mother’s death is a real spanner in her works.

She bells her personal assistant and orders him to cancel everything. McMahon from the bank, Taylor from engineering with all those bugs that keep cropping, Lewis from personnel and his constant nagging, Mr. Ishimoto from the Japanese branch, Price from billing and Carter from Legal. Each and every one of the lot. Then she calls him back and asks him to call Carter. There’s the legal side of the funereal arrangements. Massages of condolence start creeping in as the whole of the second floor – The House corporation – is busy circulating the news. The Witch’s mother snuffed it. Get the champagne out. Meanwhile Lisa is torn between the love glow, which is very strong – as every young lover in the first days of an affair knows – and the somewhat abstract sadness. She’s loved by her mother’s employees, and she actually enjoys being the center of a wave of compassion. That gimp Tony, which wasn’t on the payroll but was parked permanently on the HOUSE floor, well, across the road really, but kept coming in like he owned the joint, even gives her a hug, perhaps a tad too personal. And Phillip, the mail boy, says he’s feeling for her. Feeling for. Very sixties. Of course he does. She dumped him, gently, only three weeks ago. There’s no brains to speak of there. But he’s a good looking simpleton, just what the doctor ordered, if her mother was a doctor. Thank god she wasn’t. Isn’t, that is.

“Listen, Lisa” Amanda is collecting herself now “Just because mom’s dead is no excuse to stop everything, right?” She’s joking, right?

“Let me just make sure everything here is smooth, and we’ll just go out and have some fun with the funeral arrangement, OK?”

Sure. Another hug later, and a few tears to boot, a business like Amanda Rosen is out of her office bringing the House Corporation isles to a noise level reduction, making sure all is in order, and yes, confirming the rumors.

Which leaves Lisa alone with her Mom’s system.

One monitor, just in front of Lisa, is showing the live financial analysis which keeps an up to date cash flow and asset v. debt picture for the corporation and it’s various operations.

Another monitor keeps a record of HOUSE players on-line at the moment, their ranking and up to date balance, and pairing them according to the House rules.

A few monitors on her mom’s system are displaying House matches in progress. There are 102 games in all and the system – not a bad afternoon, though she have seen the number three times as big on more then one occasion – is tuned to select the more interesting ones, according to a mixture of rating and the amounts being put on the virtual table.

Lisa is eyeing them out of habit. She can tell who is playing whom just by watching the play patterns. There’s Gufus, who’s winnings verges on the 10 million, squashing a certain Maverick, who is unlucky enough to be drawn against him. Gufus is losing about 300 grand at the moment and Lisa has the ability to estimated Sting Time to the minute. In 10 minutes it’s going to be about 600 to 700 in favor of good old Gufus. She doesn’t know that Maverick very well – but he can’t be more then 50 grand to the good, in his total standing. Nowhere near the top one hundred. No way is he going to stay in the game beyond fifteen minutes. And probably never come back. Or maybe he will. And here’s the Crawler looking for some action.

“Hello” Lisa says. She likes the Crawler’s style. Intuitive, gutsy. Way up there with the best of them, and in a record time, too. The way The Crawler demolished Dracula, not three weeks ago, was breathtaking. Took him to the cleaners, Seven million. HOUSE cleared the mandatory 1 percent, of course. Cool seventy grand, count them. And Dracula, he’s a Man. He gave The Man a good hiding the other night. Was up 13 million at one point. Made the Man shiver. And sweat. And bleed a little. It was a clash to be relished. The Man called at 27 mill on the table and came up a winner by 2 million, which is not bad even by his standards. But he was never made to call before, if memory serves, which it usually does. Not for real. And Dracula, well, he kept coming. Averaging half a mill. Thank god. A class act.

Lisa thanked her mom for linking the games and stats live to her bedroom system in the dorms. She had her own room and an emergency cut system in case someone was snooping, but it was still a dangerous move. Sure shows how much Lisa’s mother loved her. Well, hugs and kisses are CHEAP, aren’t they.

This is poetry. Crawler’s style, that is. A bit early to come back, she thinks, Three weeks. Should enjoy your riches a little more. But there he is the Crawler himself, and the system sets about to find him a worthy opponent. Not an easy task. The pairing system takes the rankings of each player on line and attaches a dice value to it. Then a lottery takes place, where any player can play any other, only closely ranked players have a much bigger chance of playing each other. Which is what the good players want really, and what the riff raffs don’t. They want to take on the good players. Then beat them and BECOME the good players. The Crawler draws an opponent. Mickey. Ranked in the third hundreds, some 20 grand to the good. Fairly new, so could climb up a bit. But the chances against the Crawler are, well, none existent. Only Micky doesn’t know it. He’s heard of The Crawler, of course, Must have, but those are LEGENDS, not reality. Nobody knows for sure who’s the best, how much they won or lost. It’s all classified info, property of House Corp.

As far as Info is concerned, There’s this mag, Housewatch, but it’s only a bunch of ill educated guesses. The truth is out there, or rather in there, behind a Firewall. Mystery is part of the House Sex appeal. Nobody is sure the Man cleared those 23 mill off that King Kong character, a rich rabbit with the brain power of a light bulb. Probably inherited his money. A hare, so to speak. Get it? Try saying it aloud. Never mind. Sounds better in Yiddish, as they say in New York. Never being heard of since. This King Kong character, that is. Only Amanda Rosen and a chosen few of her stuff know. And it’s true, the rumor, and the money changing hands. To the million.

Amanda Rosen sticks her head in: “Coming?”

“Not now, mom. The Crawler’s on board.”

“Again? It’s not three weeks. Who’s he drawn against?”

“Micky. Never heard of him.”

Amanda gazes at the game in progress for a few minutes.

The two players bid their starting targets. Micky’s is 320, The Crawler’s is 3. The lower bid is the starting bid, The Crawler put 3 bucks on the table. Micky has just donated 320 dollars to House as an entry fee. One percent of the transactions will follow.

“3 bucks! This Crawler is having fun” Amanda says “twenty five minutes and 60 thou”

“Error margins?” Lisa is game.

“10 thou”

“You’re on. What are we betting?”

“If I’m wrong, outside the margins and all, You’re taking this week’s Net.”

“That’s a lot of dosh.”

“Let your mama worry”

“And if you’re right?”

“Hmmm. Nothing. A hug at the funeral.”

“That’s not fair, mom. I’m not a child anymore.”

“All right. Jimmy for one night.”

That makes Lisa shiver involuntarily.

“You sad old case. Nobody touches Jimmy. He’s mine and so is his innocence. Plus he’s keeping it until he’s a man.”

Amanda looks at her daughter obliquely, and quizzingly too. This talk about the virtue of male’s sacrament virginity goes way beyond the strange.

“You know I’m not serious about your boyfriend.” She says just in case her daughter is even remotely serious “Hell, if he’s that kind of brainy kludge, well, that’s exactly what I don’t need right this minute. Another loaded geek to boss me around. Had my fair share, thank you very much”

CHIEF

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zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and scrolling. That’s what happens when you fall asleep on the keyboard, and stay there. The head belongs to her son, and Theresa lifts Jimbo’s head up, releasing his poor left ear from the poor Z key. It’s another TOB. Poor thing, must have been coding for the last fourteen hours. At least. Judging by the size of the file that Jimbo’s left ear has created, he must have been out for the last two hours. So he’s probably going to come around any minute now. She thinks about backspacing the Z’s until something meaningful will appear, but she’s got better things to do with the next two hours, and her finger is too worked out as it’s anyway. So she thinks about putting Jimbo’s right ear on top of the backspace key, but it might step over something valuable if she times it wrong. So she just takes his head, leans it on an empty corner of the desktop, kisses him on his forehead, and off she goes.

A few minutes later he opens an eye, checks the screen, and deletes the whole pile of garbage. Straight into the trash can. This simulator he rebuilt for Billy runs like a dead dog.

He goes back to a version he was working on earlier, a simpler one that actually got some results. He tweaks it for ten minutes flat, and hates himself for even looking at such an incomplete job. It’s something that Billy would be proud of. He looks at it with utter disgust. It’s a cowboy job. Which is what Billy deserves. Of course the idea is great, but when it comes to rolling your sleeves and making a product of it – well, Billy is Billy. He hits the Return key and falls asleep again, this time missing the keyboard by a whisker, so his 133 virtual users can start Offering and Requesting. They just go about their business at random. They offer anything, and they request anything. They get the freedom of the white pages, the yellow pages and everything in the Yahoo directory: Accommodation, wheels, computers, love, anything they hit. And just like their carbon based cousins, they aren’t choosy, and they create one hell of a mass. Since the WCB is virtually an empty bank, the users have to create the Categories, their Mother and Daughter Categories, their Sister Categories and their Attributes, from those mentioned resources. That makes the system respond, especially after Jimbo decided there was a need for a permanent and temporary Declaration. Declaration is the common name for both Request and Offer. The punter DECLARES what he or she has (to Offer) or needs/wants (as a Request). When the permanent feature was coded and implemented, there was a surge of activity, the matching containers (just lists of Opposite users on the Result menu) suddenly filled up, and the Vusers suddenly found each other. There was a lot of binary joy on the simulator, and Jimbo had enough. That was more or less into the Eleventh hour of straight coding and bug busting, that the Ton Of Bricks hit Jimbo, and made him create 23 Mb of Z’s.

Theresa had a rough day. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, but things started getting up her nose. Buxter came on to her again. Again he made sure her Dicta was off, and again he said it. Even nastier then last time. Something to do with the she doesn’t get, and how he’s gonna give it to her. Again she said nothing. In case his Dicta – the Super one – was on. He can always edit his own input into something innocent to make her sound bad. And go prove you ain’t got a sister. She didn’t have to fire anyone today, though, which was nice for a change. Still, working in that environment and under this particularly nasty piece of work was something she could do without. And this son of hers. Something must be done.

Jimbo’s virtual users are going at it full speed. There’s one of them, he calls himself Mr. John smith, and he declares himself a dog catcher. Another one, his name is Robert Smith, is looking for a catcher, for his Minor League franchise. So John Smith the dog catcher gets to be on Robert Smith’s rostrum. It’s a good thing Jimbo can’t see it. Or the window cleaner who’s called to install Microsoft’s last offering. Not to mention the virus scan for the AIDS unit, or the exterminator who is called because of the bugs in Navigator. The virtual users run riot.

When Theresa comes in again to check on the apple of her eye she sees it for the first time. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t at all clear what it is, and what it does, and how it’s suppose to work, but it’s intriguing enough for her to tap on Jimbo’s shoulder and instead of saying the usual “You dozed off again”, just say “Is THAT what I think it’s?”

The boy is in Dreamland and it takes a few more taps and a few more questions before there’s real contact but she gets to him, eventually.

“Is this what I think it’s?”

” Is what? What do you think what is?”

Jimbo’s eyes are twisted and all Theresa can see of them are the whites, and she keeps on talking, but all Jimbo can see is an old man sitting in front of a pile of rubble. And he – Jimbo – comes over and hands him a Palm. What can an earthquake survivor do with a Palm? Call his estate agent? And who is this woman shaking his shoulders? Ah, yes.

“The ultimate Matchmaker. The search and declare engine to end all search..”

Jimbo, still blurry eyed, eyes his mom and mumbles “Well, yeah, when you put it like this…”

“It’s like a premonition. Jimbo. Can you make it work? It’s like a dream I used to have way back. A one stop answering machine. Find everything in the Universe and beyond in one phone number. Or one address. Is that what you two are building here?”

“Are we?” Through the fog she looks strange. She’s nothing like the cool headed human resource bitch he knows she is.

And loves.

“I think you are”

She points at monitor 6 where an overall diagram shows the Matchmaker Big Picture: “Billy said something. He wanted to talk to me about something. Is that what it was?”

“Suppose so”

“He’s in on it, isn’t he? You’re working on it together, aren’t you?”

“Well, yeah”

“Is he on line?”

“Who?”

“BILLY, you dork!” she’s talking to her son, the apple of her eye. “Wake up, for crying out!”

“Mom! What’s got into you? You’re on something?”

She ignores that. Of course she’s on something. She wouldn’t last ten minutes of hiring and firing if she had to do it on a clear head. But Jimbo never touches any of that. Coding is better then Codeine, so to speak. Say that aloud. Get it. Good.

“Jimbo, get Billy on line. Right now. Get him out of bed if you have to.”

Jimbo wipes his eyes with his sleeve and takes another look at his mother. She looks pretty much like a ghost, a scene from your friendly nightmare. Like those mythological Elm street movies she used to take him to when he was eight or so. You wake up and you’re still in a nightmare.

“Call Billy? Now? You know what time it’s?”

The time is on at least half of the monitors in the room. They all say 1:35 am. Midday for your average hacker. Hell, when Quinn started brainstorming Structured Surfing with Smith (although Smith would say it was the other way around) he didn’t look at the watch thinking oh no, it 3 am, Bobby needs his beauty sleep, now did he) Of course Billy is on line. He’s no woosie falling asleep after twelve hours of work. Not in stage one of the Death March to end all Death Marches.

“Hi, Mother Theresa!” Billy is positively radiating. “Shouldn’t you be in bed in this ungodly hour? You need your energy for all that sacking.”

He sure sounds like a mother.

“Never mind that, Billy. You wanted to talk to me, right?”

“Yeah, but”

“No yeah buts, please. You wanted to talk to me about Matchmaker, right?”

“How did you..”

“Never mind. Well, all right. Jimbo here (Hi, Billy, it’s not what you…) All right Jim. Jimbo here dropped dead on his system, again, and I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“It. Matchmaker. That’s what you’re both calling it, right?”

“Well, yeah, Mrs. P. I needed – I need to ask your advice. And you understand this conversation is, you know, Hush.”

Theresa Price looks at Billy through Cyberspace with a look that says something like ‘Yeah, I’m going to tell the New York Times night editor’

“I should’ve known better than to mention that” Billy says.

“If I could shove a word in” It’s Jimbo.

“Yeah” They both say it, like it was rehearsed.

“Well, what’s the fuss? we’re doing a preliminary testing of an idea that might become viable…”

“Oh, shut up, Jimbo. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t?” Jimbo is gobbsmcked because it isn’t Billy who said THAT, but his own flesh and blood mama, who only saw the thing for the first time five minutes ago.

“You obviously don’t” She says “You are working on something that can become so big, so huge, hell, humongous, that I am going to hand in my notice first thing tomorrow.”

“You what?” Both the teen brainboxes say at once.

“Because as of this minute I – Theresa Price – am your new Chief Operating Officer.”

It takes them a moment to recover.

“I’ve gotta wash my face” Says Jimbo “than you’ll have to repeat whatever it was you just said, very slowly, so I can get my pea brain around it.”

And he’s off to wash his face. And check what level of dream he’s in. A dream within a fucking dream within a goddamn dream within a – forget it.

“This is something I was sort of thinking about ever since the Net was cut loose. You know, Mosaic and all that. You were too young, Billy Young. It was 1995.”

“I know the mythology, Mrs. P. I surfed on the first Microsoft Internet Explorer back in 1996. Could hardly lift the mouse. Went to the adult pages. Didn’t get it. Well, I was seven.”

“That must have been formative”

“It was shit. It was a version 1.0 of a Microsoft product. What else can you expect. IE 1.0. Brrr”

“Of course. But you were a damn toddler”

“I didn’t say I didn’t get to the naughty pages. I got to them alright. I just didn’t get it. You know, the meaning of it all.”

Theresa is taken back a bit by that. So she changes the subject.

“Oh,” she says “and Microsoft. THEY are always out there. Looking for ideas and snatching them. The ideas themselves or the companies the ideas are wrapped up in. Whatever’s cheaper. We’ve got to find a way of keeping them in the dark until we’re ready.”

She’s jumping the gun, Billy thinks. He can see it might be going places, but Microsoft. They need a microscope at the end of the Hubbell space telescope to notice the spec of dust that Matchmaker is at this moment in time.

“Did you say you were thinking about it back then, in 95?”

“Yeah. Or before. This idea sort of occupied a part of my brain ever since I can remember myself think. Years and years. And I was practically pestering Anthony to get up and see if he could do anything about it. He just stuck to his securities and Firewalls and whatnot and brushed me aside, said it was not viable. The Net would explode or something.”

Jimbo is back. Fresh and energized like a kid on a death march, which is what he is.

“So what have you two decided? Am I a part of the team yet, or you’re sacking me, mom?”

“You cheeky devil you.” She kisses his forehead “I’m gonna tell Lisa”

“Nobody’s talking to Lisa until we check her out” This is Jimbo, Lisa’s boy friend, or toy friend , age being considered, talking. “That girl (his own girlfriend) could be a Microsoft Spy.”

A joke surely.

“Well, she’s lovely and she wouldn’t teach me the birds and the bees yet for fear of damage, but I’d spare her any of this for the moment. Until I get to know her, her friends, family, that sort of stuff.”

“Very sensible, young Jim” Billy says. “It’s our secret until our Chief Operating Officer says otherwise. You don’t mind me calling you Chief, Mrs. P?”

“Not at all”

“Right, Chief”

“Ok. Just limit it to once a minute”

“Right, Chief. Right.”

There’s a sudden silence. Jimbo and his mother look at the Chess game. It’s been going for three weeks now. Not a match, a game. No time limit. All they see is Kasparov running endless ideas past an endless amount of kibitzers, both human and silicon, and betting on the next move. There’s a whole betting industry that’s developed around the Chess Channel. There’s a line of betting on what the next move will be. There’s an accumulator of which the winner is the one who guesses right the largest number of moves from every point. Which takes all the bets of those who guessed less then he did. And lately a whole new branch developed, of guessing WHEN the next move will be. And when the game will end. If it ever does. They should put a time limit on this thing. There are thirteen computers waiting their turn, and there has been a rumor going, that a new Chess site is going to open up, with a time limit. Kasparov suggests he might be interested. But he doesn’t even hint he has any chance of winning against any of these things. Man is more or less a six year old average beginner compared with Blue and Red Dragon, and before long, it’s back to the womb. Kasparov is not very happy, and it shows. When Blue moves a pawn – after three and a half days of thinking – his eyebrows don’t raise up in the famous ‘what a stupid move’ which characterized him in the Eighties and Nineties. It just twitches a little. His money was on this move, but he hasn’t got a shred of a clue why.

“OK” Theresa says “You know, boys. I’m dead serious about it. I’ve got a feeling in my bones and I’m gonna follow through.”

“Mother Theresa, chief” Billy needs to know and his face fills one of Jimbo’s system monitors “Did Anthony, I mean your DAD, Jimbo, did he ever do anything with this? Talk about it? The Search and Declare thing? The one you mentioned before?”

“No, not that I know” Theresa says.

“You sure?”

“Ain’t nothing sure in this world but death, Billy Boy” she quotes a famous line from one of those cheap ‘who is who’ books to him “All I knew was he was consumed with his other ideas, which went badly sour. He was gonna track payments for people on the net. Make sure they pay or else.”

“Or else what?” Jimbo is now beginning to discover cool new stuff about an absent dad.

“Or Their bank account would bleed zeroes. That’s what he said, anyway. Bleed”

“A Zero Bleeder. Well, I’ll be. Sounds like dad was a regular tough guy, not the wishy washy gimp I grew to know and despise.” Jimbo is getting into the dad business he was out of for a good few years now.

“He was, Jimbo” Theresa says, brushing her son’s thin hair with her hand, gently.

“Take my word for it. Anyway, what’s this fascination with Mr. Price all of a sudden? That’s to you, Billy.”

“Nothing special. Only we better watch what we say and to whom. Check who knows what. If we tell anyone it better be worth it. That’s right Mrs. P? Makes sense?”

Damn sure he’s right. Even VC’ing across the net can be dangerous, as anyone who ever pressed ‘enter’ knows. Of course the very size of the Net makes sure most people are safe chatting away for the very fact that the likelihood anybody would take an interest in their petty affairs is microscopic, but there are agents out there on the lookout for telltale signs of something big. Like a Matchmaker. It makes perfect sense and somebody had better say somethin to that effect. So the new self appointed CEO takes it upon herself: “Boys, not another word. Too much at stake. We better find ourselves a nice little basement. Billy, can you take sometime off?”

“Off what?”

“I don’t know, school. Your folks, don’t they structure your life for you?”

“Not much. Haven’t been much to school lately, and nobody cares as long as I come up with the right numbers.”

“So can you make it?”

“Suppose so. “

“Don’t worry about fares and stuff, I’ll cover it. The FIRM will cover it.” Theresa Price knows how to take control of things. It’s in her job description.

She’s just about to check something that hasn’t really been mentioned, and had some bearing on the plot of things, when she notices that Jimbo’s head dropped on her lap, and he’s fast asleep, again Even Billy catches a glimpse of that.

“Are we boring you, Jimbo?” He says, and wished he never did.

“Something must be wrong here.” Theresa Price snaps off everything, and switches to becoming a mother.

“Well, he’s been like that for some time now. Falls asleep like a meteor. But then again, he’s working so hard.”

Billy nods and doesn’t quite know what to say.

“I mean He’s been working hard before, but wouldn’t drop like a dead fly mid sentence. It strikes him that although Jimbo is by far his best pal, when it comes down to the substance of that friendship, well, it’s sort of binary. They FTP (that’s File Transfer Protocol) ideas, They search each other’s Databases, and they generally interface call it what you like, but they are never near each other, they never play ball, or cover walls with graffiti, or chase the same girl. They are friends of the geeky type. It’s a shock to the system, to Billy’s system, how little else there’s between them. And now that. It must be unavoidable. Much as it’s narrow bandwidth, random use of the brain’s runtime, but he’ll have to do it. He’ll had to get on a bus, or a train, or a plane, and meet with his VBF (Virtual Best Friend) F2F (Face To Face) “Mrs. P, You’re right. You were always right when you said we got to F2F.”

“To do what?”

He explains. She actually heard it before, but there’s only so much room for Acros of the three letter kind in one’s brain, if one’s brain is not the Billy and Jimbo kind of brain. F2F. Make a note of that.

“I Don’t know what’s wrong with Jimbo. I’m sure he’s fine, just a little better time management is what he needs. But I’ve got to come over. Like you said, we need to be in the same room and start getting serious. If only to be more on the safe side”

She can’t agree more. Whether he’s referring to the side of things or to the Friendship side.

“Listen, Mrs. P, I think to be on the safe side Jimbo should run some checks, though.. I mean, they should run some checks on him, like”

She agrees again and thinks it’s a bit strange that an outsider would come to that conclusion before she, his mother, does. And she called herself a good mother. Jimbo called her a good mother, an ideal one. Out of the way and no expense spared. What else can you ask of a mother.

“Right.” She says “Tomorrow young Mr. Price is going to see the doc , and his mother quits work. That should make for an interesting day. And when can we expect to see your good self in our parts?”

She says as Jimbo suddenly jerks his head and wants to know what time it is.

About two thirty, they say in unison. Am. Billy adds, just to be on the safe side.

“Think I’ll go to bed now” Jimbo said “I’m totally drained. Haven’t slept a wink in three days.”

Theresa looks at her son with astonishment. She’s sure he has been sleeping well, even too well for a coder on a self inflicted hyper adrenalized death march, or whatever they call these things these days. But how could she really know. He says goodnight then he sleeps, right? Maybe not. Anyway.

Then Billy comes up with this. “I’ll be there soon as I can. Get on it right away. Only I don’t think I know where you are.”

“You don’t?” It dawns on Theresa Price they actually never bothered to find that particular bit of trivia out.

“Tell me your address and I’ll be on the first plain tomorrow, if

I can get a flight. My parents will understand.”

That sounds a bit too hopeful.

Surely no parents trust a fourteen something THAT much. Or maybe they do. The world is a changing place. So she tells him. They live three blocks away. Go to the same school, probably met each other hundreds of times, passing through corridors or in and out of the gym. Throw dollar coins to the same bum. Fancy the chances of that happening. Talk about a global village.

Jimbo is in bed by the time Billy rings the door bell. Theresa pecks him on the cheek, like you do, and it’s as awkward as it gets. Billy is absolutely speechless now he sees his crush object face to face, F2F. and her F is quite higher then his F. A whole H, that’s Head. Well, almost. Theresa Price can’t help bursting into one of those giggles. Then laughter. Billy doesn’t know what t make of this. This big woman can squash him like a fly. Yet he looks up at her face, not even a hint of a smile, and he knows he’s the boss. She’ll do whatever he says, and she better, or else. He smiles, she stops laughing, and Jimbo doesn’t know what to make of it.

THE MAN

Roy Chapman comes in without knocking.

“What now?”

Stan Gilbert is caught looking at the mirror. Not that he’s got anything to be ashamed of, but still.

“We don’t have a paragraph dealing with dope barons”

“Do we need one?”

“Well, there’s one of them on line right now”

“I’m not sure we want to expose the fact that we know what he does for living, whoever he’s”

Stan is eyeing his sidekick with a look of ‘and you should have come to that conclusion yourself’ “I hope he gets a very Generalized WC speech. Plain Vanilla”

“He does” Roy says, scratching his forehead around the ring that features in the middle of it, and obviously irritates him when things go slightly wrong. “I was thinking more about his friends when he recommends our service to them. You know, bring a friend, word of mouth, that sort of thing.”

“Problem with you, Roy, you think too much.” Stan is smiling, because he loves the kid really “I’m not saying you shouldn’t think. Hell no. Think. But think straight. That’s what I’m paying you for. Bucketloads, for god’s sake. We don’t want dope dealers. We want the people who are dope dealers but we want them as respectable members of society fortunate enough to be able to afford us. And stop there. Hell, I don’t want them snooping around me like WE do them”

Roy couldn’t agree more. This ‘I know who you are and I’ve got what you need pitch’ has gone too far, and is a bit too shady and asking for trouble. But he loves it and it’s the essence of his job, after all. There would be no need for him around if not for the tailor made WC speech and the adjustable Audio Help files. Of course there’s one good reason for Gilbert to keep Roy on his payroll, happy and sweet. It’s to keep his trap shut. But neither of them ever admits that possibility (of Roy blackmailing The Man) to himself. Not with a grammatically formulated sort of thought process, anyway. The headlines stuff keeps popping in and out of the occasional train of thoughts, but he – Roy – loves the Man and he’s very grateful..

“Just let it hang. Let them in with a hint that we know they’re rich. Not even filthy rich. Can you do that?”

“Rich but not Filthy?”

“That’s the ticket”

“Well, he knows we know he’s filthy rich. If there’s more then 25 mill in the visitor’s system ours goes to the Filthy rich pitch. Auto pilot.”

“Yeah, I know. We can’t monitor every visit. Thank god for that” Stan is thinking aloud “But we should catch crooks and pushers and other such scumbags early on and avoid mentioning the F word. Filth, not fucking Fuck. Filth is the F word I’m talking about here. Anyway, In fact, we should try to avoid any mentioning of us knowing anything at all about them.”

“You mean, at the first suspicion of filth we should revert to ‘tell us who you are and we’ll find you what you want? Pretend we know nothing whatsoever?”

“Yeah, the Original Ringleader ticket. We know nothing other then what you the visitor tell us. Then we help. That’s how Ringleader worked in the first year or so, before Roy introduced Stan to Agent Crawler (not to be mixed with a certain House player) and rest of the Virtual secret army. The zero one Platoon. He has many names to his Binary foot soldiers (this is another). He happily recruits them from the Agency, where they just look at him with those big sad eyes and say ‘Please, take me home with you’. Or so it seems, anyway. He sometime hear an Agent Meow, Or see them wag a tail and lick the inside of the screen, but that’s taking imagination a step too far. A piece of code is a piece of code whichever way you look at it. Of course the Agency gets to use Roy’s agents for free. He’s one of the chosen few, after all, and lots of his stuff roams the world. You can see it in SS, for example, and that Jimbo dude pulled something the other day. Not to mention the double act of Sam and Rachel. Without them, let’s face it, there would be no Ringleader. The drill was Mark’s creation, no deny, But Sam and Rachel made it do the job. Mark would never admit it, but his agents, the Drill, the Sledge, the Buster, and all the rest of them, were pathetic. But they looked so sad there on the screen, so he downloaded them anyway. And then went back and downloaded the Sam/Rachel modifications. And Billy’s, too.

Roy is scratching around the ring, hard. It looks like a major task. Can take all night, can take three. Sleeping under the machine. Pizza and coke. Jolt. Like Gates and Allen had at Microsoft in when they cranked out the first Basic for the Altair, or the Steves in the Garage. Or Smith and Quinn of SS, in that converted telephone box. A mini death march. Bit like when it all started, a couple of years ago. He loves it, the sparkle in his eye can be seen from a distance. Might even ask that egomaniac Billy for some help, correction: input.

“Yeah” Stan Gilbert is thinking as he’s talking, convincing himself in process. “Yeah. Do that. The less they know we know the better. We’re the blind monkey. See no evil. Just like we were before YOU came along.”

“Aye aye, skipper” Roy disappears into his booth and Gilbert thinks that if the kid could, he would have kissed his boss, not where employees usually kiss their bosses, he might add, just in case anybody wanted to know. Which leaves Stan Gilbert with the company he loves best. Himself.

Stan the Man Gilbert, legend, looks at the mirror. Not in his bathroom, of course. He always shaves in his office, facing monitor 1, the mirror on his setup. Putting the Mirror on no’ 1 is quite appropriate because in many ways Stan Gilbert was just that. Numero uno. His office is his home and he operates from a luxurious living room the size of half a basketball court, which was one of his strong points until an injury back in Junior High. It didn’t do him no harm, only diverted his talents into areas where he was even stronger, such as business and poker, not necessarily in that order.

At thirty something (nine if truth must be told) Stan the Man is riding the crest of two waves, each of which is made of an ever growing numbers of Uncle Sam’s virtual notes. Millions of Dollars. Many millions.

And there’s no sign of that slowing down. Money begets money, that’s what he always believed, that’s what is being confirmed every minute of the day. He likes to put his money were his big mouth is, but never too big a percentage of it. What for? The rate in which he’s getting richer, and he can easily monitor it on the monitors numbered 6 to 11, is fast enough in anybody’s book.

He appreciates the image that fills monitor 1. A high forehead, a good crop of brown hair with only touches of gray, good skin, tan and all, high cheek bones, the works. Check out a smile – yes, good dentals. No need for any major work there. He likes Flashing Teeth into his immediate surrounding. Or out into cyberspace. Radiates good fortunes, that. An hour of workout every other day, 2 miles jog every other day, feet on the table on weekends. Spend some quality time with the wife and kids. Yes, he has arrived.

The aforementioned wife, Name of Gina, looks down at him from a framed photo up on the wall, watching him. Let her watch. Next to her is a picture of all five of them: Gina, her daughter from her previous marriage to that scumbag Banks, name of Ann, the Twins Aaron and Scott. A picture of a happy family. Which it is, more or less. There’s quite a lot of the stuff to go round, the stuff being happiness. Stan loves his wife. Dearly. She loves him too, but it’s a cautious sort of love. Dearly is a word that should not be used to describe THAT love. He always thought she was holding something back, as if it was his fault that her past – the failed marriage, the horrendous affairs, the love child – were his fault. That reflected on the way he felt about her, to a point where the playground battle cry of “he/she started it” was meaningless. Which reflects in the way he feels towards his adopted daughter, Ann. He loves her. He loves her more then the Twins combined, there’s no doubt about it. He kisses her and hugs her, more or less as far as she would let him, and shows her off to friends and business associates as if she was his own product and not that SOB Banks. And she loves him back. There’s no doubt here, either.

She’s growing up now, hell, the gal is seventeen next July, A child of the Roaring Eighties. A Greed child. He looks at the picture and focuses on Ann’s face. Is she happy? Sure she is. She’s goddamn lucky too. Imagine a life with that Banks as a father. A fucking gambler, drinking problem probably out of control by now, never knowing if come tomorrow you’re wealthy or breadline material. Most probably the latter.

Yes, he thinks of himself as the knight in shining armor of his family, who owes him a whole lot of gratitude. To be paid in full. Currency: Love, Loyalty, Support. The order is less important.

Guess who’s number one in that setup.

Stan Gilbert isn’t one to step back and reflect on when he was younger. His current level of success was by no mean on the cards. He had to work for it, endure defeats, believe in himself and his set of values, which was translated into a business Strategy which eventually caught on. And when you work the Man’s way you hold on to what you’ve got, making sure a big enough chunk of it is never, repeat, NEVER risked. You might lose a few opportunities to triple and quadruple your net along the way, but you’re not gonna do a Reichmann, a Trump, a Maxwell, a Soros. Billionaires today, bankrupt tomorrow. Mind, their probably billionaires again. He’s not. Yet? Yet it is. ’cause the way thing are going, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be. And pretty soon, too.

He was belly up once, early enough not to be in that position again. Ever, if he could do anything about in. The aforementioned names (Trump, Soros etc) kept betting the shop until it was bound to happen to them. A question of catching the Economic cycle on the down turn. Any investor knows you have to get out just before the slump. If you keep borrowing it’s just a question of when. So they became huge. Because they were borrowing three times their worth hoping there’s more room in the balloon for hot air. That’s why they were huge and he was, well, a wealthy man. And the banks always bailed them out, if they didn’t jump ship, literally in one case. Or was the fat man pushed. Who cares.

He’s reflecting now. Looking at pictures on the wall, cruising memory lane. Enjoying it. Nothing better to do .

Ringleader is cruising along just fine, there’s no need for him to actually DO anything. The Small but ultra skilled team keeps the thing running, calling on him only in case of a big decision or a few adjustments to his personal welcome speech to site visitors, the one that’s gloved to them according to what he can find out about them. Or any of the other Audio Help files.

As for House, well, you can’t go there every day. He has a reputation to maintain. If he played House every day he would never be able to put as much money down, and as a consequence WIN so much money. Once a month, even less, is optimal. Keep them waiting, keep them guessing. There are thousands, he doesn’t know how many and doesn’t really care, who visit the House site every day, more then once a day even, in the sole hope of playing The Man. Poor bastards, whoever he played so far he squashed like a fly on a window pane.

And they are good, some of them. And some of them might even be richer then he is. Which is good, because by the time he’s finished with them they aren’t. Some of them, anyway. Or they would stay on the virtual table a little longer. Some of them, anyway. And some of them are no longer richer THEN. No, opposition is third rate, in the main. It can get a little boring sometimes. But sometimes not.

He looks at one of the monitors showing a sample customer being introduced to the Ringleader system. It’s a Saudi prince. The sampler is tune to catch interesting customers. He watches with obvious pleasure as his figures walks about one screen giving the prince the Heart on the Sleeve routine. The prince likes it. He goes straight to the section where you start asking questions for more then a thousand dollars. By the time he filters ten fifteen year old girls of 150 IQ plus, who love horse riding and royalty, he’s shed fifty thousand dollars. Now he’ll have to choose one. How could those girl afford being on Ringleader, Stan asks himself. The possible two answers:.

1) ambitious parents.

2) with 150 IQ money is easy these days.

Then he thinks about 2) again. Why would rich girls need a Saudi prince? So 1) is probably the answer. But then again, a Saudi prince can make you a lot richer still. Would he let Ann do that? With horror he checks the list of girls. Not to worry. Ann has 145 IQ. More then his own.

He clicks randomly on another session. A seventy something woman accesses the system with the video switched off. Looking for a toy boy. Stan checks out the results, just for the hell of it. So what if she’s seventy two? Don’t we have the right to see what she looks like? He finds an ID card with a picture from 1989. Nothing escapes Roy’s Binary Foot Soldiers. There’s a surge of seventy plus ladies on the system lately. Which is not completely unexpected, but still – it’s more then their fair share of the population. And what about that Mrs. Langly, the one that hasn’t paid yet. Stan thinks about it for a second, sees an old lady facing a debt collector at her door – it’s not a pretty sight. And decides to forget about it. He checks the payment reminder list. Thirteen. A total of seventy five thousand and change. Activate? The system asks, Stan can almost see it’s teeth flashing and tail wagging. Naaa, not worth it. The poor system goes back to sleep in the corner. Zero Bleeding is for people with no taste, Stan concludes, and looks himself in the Mirror. You’re a good man. The Mirror says.

Next he checks on the dope dealer. The guy is looking for a thirteen year old. Now that’s something Gilbert feels he should do something about. Sometime. He could go to jail for something like that. Only he can only claim not to know each and every search or customer that goes through his system. How could he? It’s like shutting an ISP because someone on his system does child porno. It’s being thrown out of court so many times it’s boring. Who can monitor everything? Can you send a president to jail because one of his citizens is a criminal? What’ next? Send someone to jail because he THINKS impure thoughts? He’s in a rage now. But he should talk to Roy about this thing. Put an age limit. Soon.

He met Gina for the first time when they had that wild party in the Palomino house club, celebrating a successful first round of financing for his hardware venture, the now cult status name of Cluster. Bring your wives and mistresses they said. He had a girl at the time, but it was a fairly rocky affair and he thought better of having a row on his big day. Let her stay home and cruise the shopping channels or something. She had a name, but he isn’t sure what. Instead of bringing what’s her name along and having a cert row he opted to witness the rows of other couples, and of the eleven couples that came to the party all smiling and lovey dovey, more than half started going at it soon as the booze took hold and straying eyes started to wander. Dark secrets came out in the open by the bucketload, and for Stan Gilbert, who was drinking, but not as much as the others, it turned into a very valuable learning experience to find, for example, that Ernie Grant’s success rate at VC (that’s Venture Capital, not the Video Conferencing stuff)) was a third of what he declared, and it was very interesting to know the Emanuel Fink’s wife, Eva, was out on the town every night boozing and whatnot, and that Bernie Francescoli was regularly laundering mob money off shore. And it was sure as hell enlightening to know that the big investor, the top vulture, Mr. Banks himself didn’t have a tenth of what he said he had in his account. Of course he always gets away with it, did Banks – raising or winning it – Gina said with a sneer that left no doubt as to how much she really loved her husband who was now roaring with laughter at some dirty joke Jake Green was telling, but that was not the point. Gina looked at him with a look that was actually quite sober, and said: “I made the mistake of trusting that man, and now you’ve made it. Welcome to the club” And she kissed him smack on the lips. It tasted awful . A blend of nasty tobacco with a sub-blend of different boozes distilled in hell. But he fell for her there and then, anyway.

Gina pops into the room as if by a magic wand. She takes one look at her husband, and the father of her twins, and knows it’s a bad hairday in the making.

“Not doing anything in particular?”

“What’s it to you?”

A mood storm is brewing and the blame lays smack in the middle between the two of them.

“Sorry ’bout last night” He tries to put a break on in, if only halfheartedly. He’s trying to appear as if he’s trying.

“It was my fault, as always” She sneers, clearing an empty beer can off the Mahogany table. There are drips of the liquid on the expensive hardwood. She wipes it with the sleeve of her very expensive blouse.

“You should really watch that temper of yours, honey” He says with a halfwit smirk. She looks at him in eye, and says nothing. He knows better then to say anything. Let’s admit it. Thanks to Gina’s insight he now has, and is, the Ringleader.

Never admitting it in public, and almost never to himself, Ringleader was the brainchild of his wife, and she should take at least seventy five percent royalties for what followed the conception. How aware she’s of that, it’s a matter for debate. After all he took her out of the kitchen sink and into the high life, and made her rich and happy, in whatever order. But Ringleader came out of her brains and credit was due. . He hardly ever mentioned it. He’s the Ringleader. The Man. People come to him, shedding money on the way to that elusive ring, only to chuck it out a couple of years later.

“Look at yourself” she says, looking at the Mirror.

He looks, despite of himself, and despite of himself, he likes what he sees. And despite of himself, he says it.

“I like what I see”

“You would” she says. She’s beyond bitter. Just matter of fact. Stan doesn’t like being matter of fact.

“That’s right I would”

It was definitely Gina that sparked all that Ringleader business, and it happened right after the fatal party. She got his number, apparently stole it from her beloved husband phone book or wherever, because he sure as hell never gave it to her. And she made the call exactly twelve hours after their drunken kiss. Clayton was out hunting, she said. Hunting and gathering, as men do in the daytime. He liked the phrase. He was on his cell phone, in his BMW, cruising to his office at Cluster Corp HQ, taking business calls while steering with his right knee, that she caught up with him. She wanted to meet. Was it business or pleasure, he asked, pleasure being out of the question. Business, she said. Is it about Cleyton’s credit rating? That and other stuff. Did she know anything that might enhance or derail Cluster chances of success? She had to think about that one, and while she was doing that Stan was already dialing another number and avoiding a snail paced Toyota stuck in the wrong lane obviously. It was three days before they managed to arrange a real meeting, what with his breakneck schedule and her frantic house life which became a mini war zone.

Cluster was being built by a mom and pop outfit run by a certain Mr. Fink, Emanuel Fink, who was a super tinkerer and a graduate of the Homebrew club, which amongst others gave birth to the first Apple effort.

Fink knew all there was to know about electronics, hardware, software and vaporware. When he declared he had the interface for the multi monitor system (MMI, what else) and got 12 millions of VC funds on the back of that promise, it was pure vaporware. The demo he rigged for the VC people was nothing but witchcraft. It was only that he was sure the system was going to work real soon. Than it was soon. Than it was in the near future. The pattern was clear and Stan didn’t like it one bit. And there was the business of the dual future processing socket, what they called, of course, the DFPS. The idea was building a motherboard that holds two CPUs, and each time you want to upgrade to a faster clock, or even a different processor, it should be insertable without tinkering. Like the original P&P. Plug & Play, or Plug & Pray, depends on whether it’s a success or a flop. The secret to DFPS was building an adapter with an open blank socket which was supposed to come with the upgrade on one side and a motherboard socket on the other. When a new processor came along the system side socket would be manufactured on the cheap and would be bundled with the upgrade, for the user to plug in. That allowed customers to buy a future machine, effectively betting on the speed of technology progress and the fall of prices in processing power. Everybody knows Moore’s law, that of processing power doubles every eighteen months, which held up true pretty much ever since the first electronic adding machines saw the light of day (and the outfit he, Moore, based on this law, Intel, thrived on), so it wasn’t really a huge gamble, as far as the user was concerned. But it was huge as far as the outfit was concerned, the margins being so thin. A possible deal was, say, a five year deal with four upgrades of a 50% faster CPU every time. The customer is betting that it would be cheaper, or at least less hassle to upgrade or buy a new machine two or three time in that period. That coupled with the multi monitor, and in the future, the flexible expansion board, was the Cluster claim to fame. That one, the Flexible Expansion Board (FEB, of course) was a noble one: Build a machine that looks like a CD juke box, where tens of expansion boards are placed, and a mechanical arm plugs them in and out on demand. A 3D board for heavy game creating, then a specialized sound board when you want to record your grandma’s latest hit single. That sort of stuff. And it was a bummer. For the DFPS Things didn’t work. They had to try a retro run of the future socket. They would stick an old 486 DX66, then 99 then a Pentium at 66, having to build the processor side socket, and the whole thing crumbled to a halt. The MMI stunk as well. They got as far as 4 monitors and a monitor control panel (which would be part of the keyboard or a separate unit) and the thing wouldn’t react. You press four and the cursor on monitor 2 would react. The FEB never even left the vapor stage. The whole project (or all three projects as one) was a disaster and Stan Gilbert knew it. But the fact that he knew it was no reason for his backers to know it as well, that was not how the game was played. So he gave Fink and his engineers an ultimatum: A working unit within three months or fold. Either the MMI or the DPFS. Don’t even touch the FEB. It sounded hollow and maybe was at the time, but when words are being spoken they take a life of their own, and Gilbert became engrossed in his own power play, and fell in love with it. It was the poker player in him. With three months and a day gone he called Fink into his office and asked for a demo. There wasn’t one. Out of the door. Fink asked for a little more time and Gilbert didn’t even graced him with a reply. He always dreamt of what happened next: The two security men, The clear your desk of your personals, repeat: personals, the threat not to even think about using, mentioning, developing or else. I’ll sue your ass. That’s what else. What else did you think Or Else was? That was what else.

Than there was no more substance to Cluster. Not really. There were those other engineers, but none of them was death march material and Stan Gilbert was never a techie anyway. He was no One Zero. He was Vision. Which is Double Zero without techies.

What to do next. He thought of two alternatives: Sell or admit failure, bail out and file for chapter seven or eleven or whatever his mouthpiece could come up with. Hell, he was fooled by his people, why should he be loyal to them? His people told him they were making progress, he passed it on. That’s all there was to it.

Stan Gilbert isn’t proud of what happened next. He bailed out. There was a legit chance of selling, but he bailed out. Thinking about it now with the blissful help of good old Hindsight it’s clear to him that he did right, against his sense of honor and his Basic Instinct. It was on the advice of his now girlfriend Gina Banks – Payton. She was all for it. Make a clean break. And she wanted to see Banks squirm, to which he didn’t mind. Clayton can go to hell, even though he eventually delivered on all his promises, and on time, too.

By the time Cluster folded Gina and Ann were well and truly out of Banks’ life and firmly on the way into Gilbert’s. Not the Banks knew any of this, or cared. The Bitch can go to hell. She was out on the town before, he would say, she can stay there. Gilbert offered Gina the shoulder to cry on, and they would see more and more of each other the longer it became clear that Cluster was doomed. Which gave Gina the chance to be the shoulder Gilbert could cry on. Not that Big Boys Cry, but you know how it is. They talked and talked again, careful not to spoil a friendship with what might prove to be a sexual disaster. They were convinced sex was bad for their friendship. Which proved to be true, once they let themselves go, many months later. It’s not that the sex was a disaster mind, it was mighty fine, as a matter of fact, but once it went physical, the friendship side suffered, and badly too.

But those conversation, careful and structured, healing and revealing as any who ever talked, were the basis for Stan Gilbert’s new venture: Ringleader. It was a filtering process, which filtered out the likes of Banks, and should have brought the two of them together years ago. But because they didn’t have that filtering process before, they were now saddled with a past they didn’t like. Which made them appreciate the present more. And while Gilbert was looking into Gina’s eyes and holding her hand, in the back of his mind he saw himself standing in front of the camera, talking to rich lonely people.

“Look at yourself” Gina says “No, LOOK at yourself. At the mirror”

“Already done that” He says, enjoying it clearly “Not gonna do much more if I don’t feel like”

She looks at him with total disdain.

“We should really have stuck to Platonic. Or Virtual, whatever we used to call it” She says.

“It was you who jumped me if memory serves”

“Well, memory doesn’t.” She storms out “Call yourself a Ringleader. A matchmaker for the rich and successful. Well, we’re rich. But ours is a total failure as far as marriages go” that last bit blasts in from outside the slammed door and straight into the ears of anybody who doesn’t stick a finger in them.

Gilbert isn’t phased. It’s a marriage made in heaven and they both know it. As does everybody else in Ringleader HQ, the downstairs of the Gilbert home. A bit of steam. She’ll cool down. She said so herself, many times – A little fighting is a good thing for a good marriage. It came after Opposites attract, and before Quality time. They had those little headers, which were the inspiration behind Ringleader.

OK, what now. Time, the abundance of it, is getting to be a problem. Not that he’s ever hyperactive or anything, he likes to put his feet up, watch the box, but this is now getting ridiculous. Whenever he comes up with something to do somebody else is on the case. They know what they’re doing, his people downstairs. The money is gushing in, thank you very much, and he learned the hard way that overdoing it could do some serious harm. Like playing House four days in row. It was stupid. He nearly lost, the money on the table got smaller every night, by half almost, and his ranking was probably getting lower then it has ever been.

Thank god for Gina. She put her foot down and said: “You’re not playing House more than once a week, and that’s the end of it.”

She didn’t even shout. She understood what was happening. He laid low for three weeks, came back, played The Artful Dodger, again, and wiped the floor with him. Again. Five mill. Three weeks before that he called against some low life he couldn’t even remember the name of, scooped ten mislay grand, and called it a night.

Gina understands more than she would admit, even to herself.

So Stan the Man is left with all this TIME on his hand. Of course he could go down to the old club, where some of the old timers,(along with many who were a twinkle in their parents eyes when Gilbert used to raid it) still show their best poker face and play for what Gilbert is now making on an average minute.

But then, he never felt at home at the club. Not really. They would welcome him, clear a chair, put their money down, and watch with disdain as he would just pile the stakes up until nobody had the nerve to go any higher. For him it was always pocket money, for them – the house. Word went around that Stan Gilbert was an average minus player. He just had a lot of money. They never stopped to think how he came by so much money. By putting it where his mouth was, that’s how. Like a true poker player, not a bum like they were. Fuck the club. He hasn’t been there for five months. They should send for him, and do some groveling, maybe then he’ll come. If they ask nicely, that is.

So he gets up and walks around the room. A few press ups. A few push ups.

Sit on the exercise bike. Three minutes. Getting a bit boring. Off the bike, the papers. Wall street Jo. New York Times. Boring. Forget the Business section. Sport. He used to be nuts about sport. Anything that moved. Worshipped the ground upon which those athletes walked. But he knew then, and knows now, that he was – and is – worth more than any of them, probably worth more the ninety nine point nine nine nine times of them. Maybe Jordan, Shaq, Farve and a few others could keep up with him. But not in two years time. Oh no. Because he’s doubling his networth every six to eight months, and it’s getting shorter and shorter, just as fast as he’s working shorter and shorter hours. Which is what he deserves.

Roy sticks his head in.

“Problem.”

“What?”

“System requirements too high.”

“For what?”

“You know. Taking the shady characters off the ‘we know who you are and what you’re worth’.”

“I never said it was gonna be easy, Royo”

“Neither did I, but it’s gonna take some hardware.”

“Like what?”

“Like another Cray”

Roy has always been madly in love with old supercomputers antiques. The pure brute force on bumpy terrain they represented used to make him hyperventilate.

“Well, buy one. I don’t have to authorize every piece of junk you wanna buy, now do I”

That piece of junk, the Cray 4, was a cool two mill not five years ago. Now it was sold for scrap metal and sand boxes. Well, almost.

Buy one. Roy loves it. He doesn’t really need to. Not with the wealth of experience and knowledge he could draw off the Agency. But he would buy one anyway, give himself more processing power, and armed with that, he again would check the latest offerings from Jim, Sam and Rachel, Mark, Billy and the rest of them. Especially that Billy dude .He ripped HIM off more then once. But that’s alright. The Agency is a free community, and tribe members, crowd members, help each other. They share Agents like the hippies used to share their chicks. Or so their parents would say with that smug smile. Roy is on the Agency ninety percent of his time. His creatures roam the world just like anybody else’s. He’d create them and let them loose. For all.

“Get the piece of garbage and show me results in two days, deal?” Stan says, his fingers now fiddling with the keys on his Apple Cluster.

Roy’s out like a child with fifty cents for ice cream.

Now what. Check up the Housewatch site. Maybe somebody can come up with something intelligent to say. Doubt it. They didn’t yesterday, that’s for sure. But who knows. He clicks on the site and the Housewatch mag comes crawling in out of the printer. Stan never liked reading from a monitor so the best thing now is to print it to a nice glossy mag you can sit on your rocking chair with, or maybe the bike. The bike. He’s on it, paddling away, while the printer churns out the mag and glues the pages together. Of course the mag is set to suit Gilbert’s preferences, which means only five percent of the contributions find their way in. And it’s not because he can’t afford the glossy paper and special glue, either. It’s just that he doesn’t feel like carrying the phone book with him. And on page one is the number one priority as far as he ( and many other readers) is concerned:

MAN HUNT. It’s written by The Hack, which is probably one of the fifteen names whoever is behind Housewatch uses. The Hack is a Man Watcher. His life is devoted to finding out who the Man is, how much money he’s worth at any given moment, when he’s gonna show up next, that sort of thing. And he doesn’t have a clue. Just hilarious rumors, which are as true as a manned mission to Mars last week. There hasn’t been one, in case you want to know.

He paddles away and reads more or less a row couple of words per sentence. The Man is going to be on next week. Error margins – 3 days. Where did he get that from.

The Man is a teenager wizard from Santa Monica Ca. who’s playing with his father’s money. The father hasn’t got a clue how rich his son is. The Man is worth 45 million. He’s no’ 1 in the ranking. See ranking tables on page 2. Error margins – 10% max.

The usual stuff. Stan Gilbert still enjoys reading the rumors about himself, even though it’s not quite as magical as, say, six months ago.

He flips the pages. Bring The House Down, another favorite of his. Hackers and punters shouting abuses at the House system. Let’s see.

Stealth writes with regard the rules of engagements. How come he has to play bozos every time he’s on. He’s a much better player then his current rating is (see rating on page 2, Gilbert doesn’t bother).

Only the other day he played a bozo named Vulture, says that Stealth, who thought himself a player, but had to quit with a tiny loss. Now that Vulture is nothing but a waste of Housespace. Give me the big guns. Or words to that effect. Bring The House Down is full of the “I’m better than my ranking, just give me a real player and I’ll show you’. If you were a player you’d be playing real players for real money. That’s all Stan could say to those. He remembers reading a word to word replica of the last letter written by Vulture, the one Stealth lost to. Only the roles were reversed. Vulture was a good player who had to play a bozo named Stealth. Give me the man.

Yes, the natives are getting restless. He looks, glances, at the ranking table on page 2. Yes, there he is number one – surprise surprise – with an estimated accumulated wins of 46 million dollars. It’s near enough, if a little conservative. He glances down the list with half hearted interest. The no’2 spot, occupied by Gufus, is some 25 million away. The estimates must be more or less on the ball. Gufus was always a tough nut to crack. Only no nut is too tough for the Man to crack, he reminds himself and flashes a look at number one in the Mirror monitor.

A yawn. Big one.

He throws the mag away and stretches up. It’s way too early for lunch. His daughter, Banks’s daughter really, Ann walks in.

“No school today?” He asks with as little interest as humanly possible.

“I’ve got sick leave”

“How come?”

“I’m sick”

“And I’m sick of you being sick” He just goes through the worried parent routine. She can skip school if she likes. She’s smart enough and rich enough to do what she damn well pleases. Only he mustn’t tell her.

“What are you doin’ today, Daddy?”

Daddy. It doesn’t sound right. And he hears it more and more lately. She’s a young girl, a woman, and she’s no more his daughter than that Korean kid whatever her name is Woody Allen’s. He catches himself thinking of doing a Woody. Again.

“Oh, just reading the Housewatch”

“No House today?”

“You know there’s a pause routine I’ve got to go through. You heard your mother.”

“I heard my mother. What does she know?”

“More than you think. Much more then you think.”

“But daddy, I wanna see you play. You promised.” She’s acting the sweet innocent now.

“I did what? When?”

“You did too. You know well that there’s no school in the world that can teach me in a year what you can in an hour.” She hangs her eyes on his, her lips smiling very slightly, and he says to himself, verbally and in dictation form, that she’s his daughter and flattery will get her nowhere. Nowhere.

“Young lady, did I ever tell you that flattery will get you nowhere?”

“You didn’t. It won’t?”

“No”

“Then perhaps you want to deal with this” And she transforms into a sobbing machine.

“Alright, alright. Cool it. Here, come sit by me.”

The sobbing goes on and becomes audible. She’s squeezing hard.

“Come, come”

“YOU come” A thought goes through his head and then perishes, thank god.

He puts his arm around her shoulders and she snaps it away. My my. Like mother like daughter.

Spoil the child. Get the rod. What next. He’s getting helpless and is desperately looking for an answer.

“We could check out Matches. You know, in Ringleader.”

“Fuck Ringleader. You should sell it. Concentrate on House. This is the only kind of matches worth anything”

And sobs again.

“Whatever gave you THAT idea?”

“What idea?”

“Selling Ringleader?”

“I looked at the numbers. Your income from House is bigger.”

So?

“So? House brings more money than, hell. I don’t have to explain it to you. You are my daughter, not the chairman of the board” Not that he has a board or anything.

She gets up. She goes to the door. She turns round.

“You know what you are?”

“I’m your Dad, that’s what I am”

“Well, you’re not.”

“Well, I know that Genetically I’m not, but, hey”

“All right. If you’re my dad. If you want to be considered my dad, I want you to do one thing.”

Oh-oh.

“What?”

“Just this once, Give me a kiss.”

“But I always give you a kiss”

“Not like that”

“Oh no” He is horrified now “No way, girl. You are my daughter.

D-a-u-g-h-t-e-r. Get it? No kissing. No hugs. Forget it. From now on, no funny ideas. I mean it.”

And the tantrum is on. Sky high stuff. She’s out. Back to her room. Probably at her Cluster. Doing who knows what. Which is fine with Gilbert, as long as she does not come back. Which she’s going to, any minute now. He takes a big breath, and looks at the Mag in front of him. In Housewatch, at the bottom of Bring The House Down, a letter catches Stan Gilbert’s eye. It’s signed by Vulture.

SS

“What about SS?”

Jimbo is deep into his straight tenth hour of heavy coding. He stretches up and takes a dart from a little mug on the table. He takes aim, and throws it at a picture of Bill Gates which hangs on the wall, between monitors 12 and 33. Nothing but eye. Bill’s eye.

He’s going nowhere until this is sorted out.’ This’ is the Simulator, the external system that creates virtual users for Matchmaker, to run tests on. Ever since the beginning it was the poor relation – It was going to have a short life. The moment Matchmaker would be unleashed on the world real users would replace the virtual users and the Simulator would be assigned to the history trash can .

That’s why Billy wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot stick.

Billy wouldn’t touch anything these days. He just sits around with Jimbo’s mom, otherwise known as Chief , and explores the business plan. It’s OK for them, as long as somebody else is on the coding. Obviously Jimbo alone, or even Jimbo and Billy alone don’t have a chance in hell to have anything solid within a year or even two. Which in this sort of business is nothing short of eternity.

So his mom was right. They need to push, and they need to build a team, and they need to be able to move fast or the first whiff of what they are doing would cause the whole thing to collapse. Somebody catches on to the idea, throws a bit of money at it, and zooooom! Overtakes them in a cloud of dust. The first few months are vital. Keywords: Secrecy and speed. If you had put some solid work for a few months, and there’s a code base under your belt, then of you don’t care much if the idea is out. You’re relatively – VERY relatively – safe in the lead. The world has to play catch up, or put up some serious money and try to buy you out.

Which is what happened to SS.

And just as Jimbo is about to crackdown on a particular nasty bug,

Lisa barges in with the news about SS.

Billy and the Chief – Jimbo’s mom – Raise their heads from the Lap they are co-typing on (multiple keyboards in one machine, another one of the Cluster’s promises which eventually came true), and don’t even say ‘hi’.

“What about SS?” Billy asks.

“They’re selling out.”

“Just like that?” Again Billy. He can’t believe it. The maverick outfit that rocketed out of nowhere into the leadership of a twenty something Billion dollar industry – That didn’t even exist before they invented it – were – are – his idols. They are – were? – the role model of every startup and the great white hope ever since Netscape fizzled out and got, you know, normal.

“Hit the Innovation ceiling” Says Lisa. “It’s all over the Net. Also on National news. They got an offer they couldn’t refuse. From You Know Who.”

Everybody knows Who. It’s the picture on the wall, the one with darts in.

So there it is. SS was a competitor of sorts when you thought about it, but the boys (That’s Billy and Jimbo, not the SS boys) are truly sad, and the Chief Operating Officer shell shocked.

“I knew them” Billy says, he sounds a little like the best man in a funereal “From the Agency. They used to hang there. Especially Bob. Bob Smith ” he adds, just in case anybody might accuse him of the Namedropping he obviously is doing, ” That’s where they got their core stuff.”

“Me too” Jimbo says “I once worked on some kludge Quinn pushed my way. Once. Nothing came out, and he never got back to me on that. Got too big, I guess. Don’t know if he used any of that.”

“Probably did” Lisa says. She’s an expert on everything SS and she could trace the fingerprints of many Agency creations straight into the SSS.

“Wouldn’t be surprised” Says Jimbo, but the thought that SS may have ripped him off on their way to their first Billion is kind of neat, you must admit.

Everybody on the Agency was basking in the glory of having a chat or a piece of code pushing with the SS’s.

Nobody had an idea SS were in any sort of trouble. Of course there were always rumors, takeover gossip. Microsoft is never far away. But riding the bear is something quite a few people managed, at least for a while. Problem is, everybody is macho until they come to a size where Bill Gates starts noticing them. Then he hangs your picture on the wall and starts throwing darts at it. Hat’s great, because you’ve been throwing darts at HIS face a long time before, which makes you better at darts then him.. Some people throw eggs a Bill gates picture, and other prefer laser guns or water bombs, but that’s just detail. point is, Bill gates always has a competitor’s face on his wall. It could be you, if you’re extra lucky. You get big enough with a nice product and you enter Size Hell. A nice little niche’s OK by him, him being Gates. But a billion dollar plus market is something that he has to throw Bucketloads at. And drown you. The list of sunken nutshells is endless: Xerox, Apple, IBM, Lotus, Borland, Novel, Netscape ,Oracle, Sun.

And these are just the big ones. They’re all still in business, true, but they had their shot, and they’re eating dust now. Off the floor. The hundred billion dollar man keeps gobbling everything. Like a black hole, if you ever saw one. Hundreds of startups keep a picture of Bill Gates on their wall and on their computer’s screen savers, and mark him as their competitor. They pray for the moment when he does the same. If and when their dream comes true, then there’s a bust up of a year or two, then the smoke clears. You end up a very rich man, But a total failure. And you have the sympathy of the world at large. And can’t bear to look in the mirror.

Jimbo looks at the wall, at the picture of Bill gates. He’s got egg all over it, and a few darts stuck on his chin, left eye and right ear.

“Hi, big Brother” Jimbo says.

“You’re talking to Gates again?”

“Just a bit of moral support, mom” Jimbo looks at his mom, then at Big Brother. He never had one. He never had a little brother either. If he had a little brother, would he give away all the advantages that size brings with it?

“Like the browsers” Lisa, standing in the far corner, says.

“And Java” Billy, in the other corner, adds.

“And Linux”

“And Apple”

“And Next”

“And Lotus”

They see the writing on the wall. Just look at what happened the last couple of years. Net browsing vanished as a viable commercial market when it became a part of the Operating System. The OS market – as a competitive option - disappeared when one solution, top to bottom-supercomputers to dishwashers – in the form of Windows – finally caught on. Java disintegrated into flavors. Java optimized for Windows, Java for Next, Java for Mac, Java for Linux, you name it. Try to run an application written for one on the other. Half of the features won’t even make an attempt on pretending to be running. You get error messages to fill a Cluster full of monitors. Each monitor with EGUI, too. That’s Elastic GUI, all right, Elastic Graphical User Interface, which give the display area up to ten times info by magnifying and squeezing objects on the screen. Just to show you how bad Java Flavoring can errorize you. So much for the Java promise. And Java’s main feature, the portability between operating systems, disappeared with the other OS’s. It was like, who needs translation to Latin? To add salt to injury, instead of using the Java Virtual Machine, people started using the Windows Virtual machine in the rear case someone used the Mac Os or some Linux antique. The company that built the Windows Virtual Machine, Panes Inc, disappeared inside Microsoft. That was the end of Sun as a major. Sure, they keep building wonderful workstations. But IBM make loads on counseling, and workstation, and Agentware, and what not, Borland are tool makers, a tenth of their heyday size, Novell is back in networks, Netscape tailormake fringe net solutions and they are all big respectable companies, and they’re all in the history trash can. Not that any of those guys needs a soup kitchen coupon, but, you get the picture.

Jimbo knows all that. And so does Billy. It was long time coming. Ever since SS rose out of nothing people held their stop watches and measured the time to the Fizzle. Or the Crunch. If there was hope for an SS victory, whoever had that hope would cling to it in the privacy of his/her own home/homes and small/big office, or whatever. The common wisdom was that the innovation ceiling was somewhere around the 4 billion dollar three year survival span. Which was what happened in the case of Netscape. But there was hope that SS can get there, and maybe, just maybe, keep on growing and really dominating their new created market. Which is like hoping to grow old, like forty, say, and look fifteen. Doesn’t happen, but hope is free.

Still, when Lisa comes in with the news there’s a sense of shock in the air.

Then Theresa says “I heard the talk, but the vital signs were strong. Up until the day I left we had to bring heads in for them”

“I didn’t know you were headhunting for SS” Jimbo says with an air of admiration, looking at his mother and chief as if she was being touched by god as we speak.

“You don’t know many things about me, dear boy.” She forces a smile.

“Don’t underestimate your mother, Junior” she adds.

Lisa is on the case, surfing for more info which is practically gushing through the Net like a river that burst it’s banks.

“They had a drop in earning the last quarter, 7%. And Microsoft hinted they were looking at the technology.”

“That’s a deadly combination” Billy is up from the Lap on his knees, looking in the four monitors that gather the info. Live. They are using SS doing that, for Pete’s sake.

“They’re dead. 677 mill a quarter. Dead. And buried. What phrase did MS use with regard SS technology? Adapt and enhance?”

“Yep” Said Lisa. “Acquire and disintegrate in Gatesspeak. An exact replica of the Java killing”

They hate Gates. And admire him. And want to BE him. Not Andreseen, Not Jobs, Not Quinn, Not Paul Allen. Him. Top Dog. Big Brother. Darth Vader. Well, dreams are free.

.

Which is what Jimbo is doing. All this talk cut him off his work and made him realize just how tired he was. He goes down like the Challenger space shuttle. Which brings everybody back to earth, pardon the expression. Nobody wants to know if they are BORING him now. Nobody can be bored when a company the likes of SS gets to it’s Supernova stage.

“He should see a doc” Says Jimbo’s mother “Maybe I’m not in the position to be Chief.” She has her doubts.

“What do you mean?” Says Lisa, changing the position of her toyboy’s body who leans awkwardly against the side of his swivel chair.

“I might drive my son to total exhaustion, or worse. That’s bad mothering, and bad CEOing all at the same time”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. P” says Billy “You’re not doing it. It’s him. It’s called crash and burn. You know the score”

She shakes her head “I want him to see a doctor. Sooner rather than later. But not now.”

She’s looking around the room. They are looking for her guidance, which is good. All except Jimbo who suddenly looks very much at peace with the world. His eyelids move, which obviously suggest dreaming. Good. We need vision.

“There’s no point worrying about it now. We’ll call a doc tomorrow. Everything’s gonna be fine”

“Maybe we should check the on line docs. “Lisa comes up with “Just to be on the safe side, like you say, Mrs. P. I can SS it right now. Won’t be a nano. Piece of cake”

“Would you trust a web doc?”

The Chief is right, of course. Too many of the people who tried to bypass their family docs and surf for cures and treatments could testify to perils of the practice. Some of them couldn’t, being dead.

“Well, you’re right there, Chief. Although there’s this authentication program, you can find sites that are being approved by the Ministry of health in various countries. I could SS that as well.”

“Well, it’s MY son” Theresa Price stabs in quite a hostile manner, which is a bit unfair, because all Lisa really wants is to get to the bottom of it and stop there. Just the background info. That’s not killing by surfing.

“Let’s leave it, Lisa. The best we can do now is let it be, until Jimbo’s up and running, so we can discuss it with him.” She seeks agreement and finds enough. ” Let’s all go to work. In the other room, please.”

Lisa volunteers to keep an eye on Jimbo and another eye on the SS situation. Just to be on the safe side, both things considered.

“Come on, Billy.” Theresa pushes on. “A business plan. I want to see one before Jimbo is up.”

Billy tends to agree, but he’s digging up a few reservations, and they could be, and are, summarized in the word “But”.

Just ‘But’.

She’s rambling about financing, recruiting and exposure when Billy says it again.

But.

“Did you say ‘But’?”

She says looking at him with a new perspective she’s trying to create by pushing her head backward about a foot.

“What do you mean ‘but’?

“I mean” Billy says “Slow down”

“Slow down?” Theresa Price can’t believe her ears. “You slow down, you’re dead. Look at those SS boys.”

“Well” Billy is speaking slowly, unconsciously mimicking Theresa Price’s son’s way of deliberating.

“I think you should slow down here. SS went fast. They are dead. They had a quick plan. They’re dead. OK, they’re Billionaires, both of them, and some. But dead, right?”

“Right” Now she’s slowing down “What’s you’re point?”

“Well, I don’t want to bring this up, ’cause I admire you and all that, but”

“Here we go again. Cut to the fucking chase”

She’s a grown up and she isn’t supposed to say Fucking but there’s a time for good manners, and this obviously isn’t it.

“OK. How do we cut the cake?”

“The Cake?”

“Yeah, how do we cut it? What part of Matchmaker did you have in mind for yourself?”

She’s taken aback now. Head backward the same foot as before. Then she smiles.

“OK, wise guy. You’re asking me?”

“Yeah, I’m asking you.”

“Well, if you ask, a hundred percent. That’s what I want.”

“A hundred?”

“Yep. One 0 – 0.”

“I had in mind something different” He says. He looks at his feet, where one of them scratches the other “Like maybe we split three ways or something.”

She looks at him with amazement. “You’re fucking nuts! You’re gonna be eaten alive. Maybe I WILL take a third because you’re so dumb. Hell, I’m not gonna let YOU handle any negotiations. Last offer. Ten percent for me and the rest equally between you and Jim.”

Billy is thinking. No more foot scratching.

“Don’t think, shoot” She says ” Boy, you’ve got so much to learn. Maybe you should go back to coding and I’ll do the rest.”

Billy can’t help but release a nervous laughter.

“You’re Joking, aren’t you?”

Now she joins in, the laughter, that is. She sounds like a desert storm.

“I’m just trying to teach you, make you a little tougher in a harsh world. Be the tough nut. You know Johnny Cash?”

“Johnny who?” Must be some TV shopping mogul.

“Johnny Cash, The Man in Black”

“Stupid movie. Fell asleep halfway through”

“No, The ORIGINAL Man In Black. The Country singer”

“Country?”

“What’s wrong with Country?”

“What’s RIGHT with it? ” Why should a geek know anything about country. Country is a different country if ever there was one.

“Not very much into that Hillbilly stuff”

“Well, maybe you should look into it. You just might learn something”

“Like what?”

“Well, there’s a song by Johnny Cash, A Boy Named Sue – “

“A BOY?”

“Exactly. There’s this typical bastard who splits his wife and son – “

“Sue?”

“Yeah.. And before he split he gave his son a girl’s name. To make him tough”

“And?”

“Maybe you need to be tougher”

“Why don’t you try the SUE TECH on your son” Billy sneers.

“That’s better. But you’re still as soft a pussycat. I bet you give the bum a dollar every time you pass by him”

“He’s worth it. Comes up with 1.0′s” That’s geekspeak for fresh, original ideas. One point O’s.

They both burst into laughter. NO sign of Jimbo or Lisa in the other room.

“We’ll leave that one open, shall we?” She says “The decision is yours. Yours and Jimbo’s. You give me what you think you should give me. I’m CEO but you’re the boss. Dig?”

Dig. Fucking language is that? Peace and love, like his granny? Dig.

“Let’s talk finance. What did you have in mind?”

“Well. I’m working on it.” She says, not quite knowing where to begin.

“Let’s see. You know the finance SS had?”

Billy knows bits and pieces, everybody does, but he never looked at the thing too closely. Why should he? He’s a core geek. An Agenthead, not some robber baron. Which is what he wants to be.

“I know some. What everybody knows , the Ad on the Net and all that. But that’s not enough for us, I take it.”

“Let’s ask Lisa if she could dig it for us. Lisa!” Theresa Price has some voice on her when the occasion requires it. She was good at the hire and fire game, after all.

Lisa comes in, almost running.

“Lisa, darling, can you fish for us everything about the finance package SS had when they started? What?”

A pause. She shouldn’t call her Darling. No, not that.

“What? Oh, yeah. How’s Jim Boy?”

“Serious but stable” Lisa says. Could there be trouble brewing between the two fair maidens?

“I’ll get on it”

“Is he OK?”

“He’s OK and I’m off fishing. If this is what you like me to do”

And she goes back to the other room.

Everybody knows the basic facts about the SS financing. It was the biggest story since the legendary Netscape IPO, where Marc Andreesen and his major backer Jim Clark woke up one day floating on a paper balloon worth four billions and change. But what Theresa and Billy need to know are the numbers. They need to learn how they made it happen, and what went wrong. If anything. And there’s no one better at fishing for facts and figures then Lisa. She knows her way through the SSS (Structured Surfing Suite) backwards. With a blindfold. She has a library of SS tools at home she can call upon, at any moment, if needed. Home is where your Palm is, after all. Which is everywhere. Like the center of the Universe. Everywhere, right ? So when she comes back in, it’s after ten minutes only. And Jimbo is still sound asleep, with a certain smile on his face, she says.

The main numbers are public folklore. A one and a half year old startup, with 29 employees none of which have been paid for two months gets 110 (In words: one hundred and ten) Million dollars of venture capital, in cash, a week after advertising on the web that it needs some.

Well, they had a supreme product, with betas flying through the net so fast they had to rent thirteen workstations just to keep up with the demand. And they were a least a year ahead of anybody who had anything similar in the pipeline. And a year, in this business, is ten in the car industry, for example. An eternity. You’d expect a hot start up to pull some money, but a hundred and ten million, that’s a little dizzying, even in this day and age.

There were more details that became folklore. It was the scheme that made people rush and offer SS so much money in the first place. It’s called FEF (or Flexible Equity Financing), which by now is something of a standard. The jury’s still out on the question of whether it was Tim Quinn who thought it out or Super lawyer Talbot Kravitz. The fact is it worked like a dream. The FEF was posted on the Net one morning in February 2002. It announced simply and bluntly that SS, creators of SSS, need some VC money, and will take the highest bid. The highest bidder gets 80 percent of SS, under the following terms: The amount of the bid becomes one unit. When SS Floats on the Stock Exchange (after no more then six months) the Flexible principle takes over: Every time the stock’s worth rises by one unit (the first unit rise would be double the VC investment) SS gets 20 more percent of equity for that unit. First unit 20%, the second unit 40%, the third 60% forth and onwards – 80%. Confused? Don’t be. Here’s a scenario of a possible case: Say the bid is 10 million. After the IPO SS is worth 20 million. Of the first unit SS owns 2 million and the bidder 8 million. Of the second unit SS owns 4 mill (for a total of 6 million). The bidders have a total of 14 million . So the higher the market cap, the bigger SS equity gets. If the equity rises to 100 million (9 units added to the initial investment), SS would get to 68%, or 68 million. The bidder has made a profit of 22 million, which is not bad, but he probably kicks himself, slightly, for not putting, say, 40 million on the table. But then again very few investments swell to ten times the original.

If you take out a Palm or even a stone age calculator, you’ll find that there’s a strong incentive to put a lot of money on the table, if you think the venture has a lot of potential. The beauty of it is, that you don’t have to argue and haggle about how much potential the company has. Just put your money where you think your mouth is. If you think it’s worth a little, just build your FEF so that you gain the most where that potential is. If the company thinks they’re worth more, well, let them prove it. Right? End of all night haggling. So, presenting their case like this, what SS had in mind was something like 10 million, and they secretly hoped for something like 20, but what happened was, a barrage of no less then 719 bids came gushing in. And they had to take the highest, that was in the deal, no way out of that. They secured themselves against managerial interference, and against a stock plunge (the equity parity stays at the highest point at all times), and no, there are no negotiations and no second round of bidding ( Well, either of the sides – SS or the bidder – can take another round if they feel they need it, but it would be from their money, as it stands at any particular point of the FEF. A case of TOL. Take it Or Leave it. Given the sum of 110 million, the SS boys knew they had to be a Billion dollar business if they wanted to have any sort of financial control of their own business. Which did them a power of good, eventually. A bit like a leverage buyout Eighties style. You buy a company out of that company’s future’s earnings. As a result you’re so deep in debt you’ve got no choice but to be good. Great.

That was it. They thought they’d get 10, hoped they’d get 20, and ended up with 110 million dollars. That’s what went wrong, to answer Theresa’s question. What do you do with 110 million when you need, say, 40 tops? Buy another company or three? Headhunt for a whole layer of managers just so that the money is being managed? Take the money and run? SS went off the rails. When the product was on their site for downloading, the pricing policy killed it. Competition was closing in, with the backing of every major player in the industry and beyond, and SS were panicking. They gave the SSS away for free. Then they bought four competitors out plus seven other startups with vaguely matching or complementing technology. Some to enhance, some to bury. As you do. The money suddenly dried up to the 20 million. That’s cash, not the assets value. Assets value was anybody’s guess, and then what. Start selling now? After you buried assets and stripped them off value? Tim Quinn and Bob Smith kept face and made all the right noises, and so did their backers, Chapman, Anderson & Squire. Who looked pretty stupid at that moment in time, certainly more stupid then the other 718 bidders, who were obviously closer to the mark when putting a price tag on the start up. But when IPO time came (and it was in the contract, so it had to come, if only to save face) there were many questions being asked. FEF came into scrutiny. Flexibility was too complex to maintain. The pricing policy was a disaster. So was the hiring. Quinn had a good mind to sell all the new acquisitions and go back to some 30 hardcores. That’s employees. But just before the IPO was a particularly stupid time to do it. So they went ahead, the prospectus describing an outfit in disarray, too many conflicting factions, no earnings, a huge organization, in short – Well on the way to being an IBM. It was going to be a disaster. That was the word on the Street. Despite the cheery words that the prospectus was written in. You didn’t even have to read between the lines to know the truth. Just read the lines. Which was what everybody on Wall St and beyond read. And reread. No investment bank wanted to touch it with a six foot stick. Goldman, Merril, Morgan. Nobody. Eventually First agreed to take it on with record book value, like they were VC’s or something. That’s Venture Capitalists, Which they weren’t then and aren’t now by any stretch of imagination. Chapman Anderson Squire didn’t have a choice. They were obliged to take SS public and SS didn’t want to hear about a delay, a matter of saving face if anything. And saving face in this line of business has a lot of substance, too. Say you go public and you back off, you’re half your value overnight. It’s no joke. Smith admitted himself that the last thing he wanted to do was to go public under those horrendous circumstances. But they did. And guess what, they did a Netscape. The SS corporation was suddenly one morning a Billion point seven dollar hot air balloon, the hottest stock around by a long shot. Chapman Anderson Squire found themselves with some 27 percent of the company they started off as owning 80 percent of, and found themselves kicking themselves under the table. Hard. For not putting on the table something closer to 300 hundred million. Hindsight, the loser’s last hiding place. Still, on IPO day, Chapman Anderson Squire’s 27 percent registered a profit of almost 200 million. But they still kicked themselves under the table. Especially as SS went ballistic from then on, With Anderson and co kicking themselves harder and harder as they get richer and richer. A new version Of SSS hit the net just two days after the IPO, and it was going like hot cakes at 19.99$ per. The gloom was swept aside, as equity – and profits – increased 15% every month since. Sixteen of them. Months. In a row. Until this month. With the stock rising twice as fast. Until this morning.

Lisa clicks OK for end-of-presentation (the new SSS can create presentations, the flexible kind you just talk into, and “Here’s something I prepared just now”) and says “And that’s the SS story in a nutshell, boys and girls. Now what?”

“Nothing really new here” Billy says “I knew all of that. I would probably would have done the same as them. Trade places with them this minute if I had the choice”

Theresa is inclined to agree but there are glaring holes in the SS strategy, and she’s going to make sure they are going to sidestep them.

“Hey, you’re talking as if we are on the same LEAGUE” It’s Lisa’s voice “But we’re not.”

“Maybe you’re not” Says Theresa “You’re not even in yet.”

To which Lisa said “I AM now. And I am on at least five percent.”

Theresa is about to laugh but Lisa seems serious enough.

“I heard you and Billy squabbling. I am in, and on 5 percent. I’m not a woosy like Billy here.”

Billy is watching as the company is being divided under his nose, and Jimbo is still asleep. What would he say.

“Hey, chicks, girls, cool it. It’s a bit early to divide anything yet. Next thing you’ll want an FEF from me, and”

“Wouldn’t be such a bad idea, kiddo” Says Lisa, her voice at zero centigrade, her eyes icicles. No Mona on her face now.

“What?”

“Since I’ll be bringing the initial financing” Lisa has it all planned, apparently. A quick word to her mom, and a couple of millions could jump-start the Matchmaker train.

“Hold on, hold on” Theresa is up on her feet “Nobody’s bringing any money in. Or talking about what we’re doing here, to anyone. There’s too much to sort out before we do anything like that”

“Rubbish, I can bring in two millions, tomorrow morning. And Mom’s the word. Safe as the Bank of England”

“You?”

“Yeah. Two, at least. My mother…”

“Don’t bring any mothers into it” Theresa says, before Billy can raise any objections.

“Not for two millions, not for ten. We need at least 30 million and a six months lead before we even whisper the word Matchmaker to anyone. Including dear mom. If you bring thirty million dollars I just might compromise security. Not a dime less. The stakes. Think about how high they are”

Lisa is about to ask some practical questions but thinks better of it.

Then Jimbo comes in, yawning and in one hell of a good mood.

“Mom, I’m starving. Anything in the fridge?”

The Chief Operating Officer goes to the kitchen to make a few sandwiches and some strong black coffee. Then she stops at the door and asks Lisa, still laughing.

“That’s right” Says Lisa. There’s no need for the people in this room to

“Who’s your mom anyway? Do you trust her?”

Now it’s time for Lisa to burst out laughing.

“Listen to yourself”

They are both laughing now, and Billy and Jimbo don’t see any other way but to join in.

“Oh, never mind” Theresa says eventually and heads for the kitchen, know who her mother is. And Jimbo is not THAT much in love that he has to meet the mother in law. All in good time. Or not, as the case may be.

HUSBAND HUNT

“Hello, you lonely hearts out there, this is your Ringleader speaking”

Well I’ll be damned. Amanda Rosen takes a few seconds before she realizes she knows the son of a gun on the screen in front of her, and knows him well.

“My name is Stan Gilbert and My mission in life is to marry you.”

Good old Stan. You’re the Ringleader. Well I’ll be.

“Marry you to the best match which is out there, looking for you as we speak.”

“I bet you say that to all the women”

“By the way, if you heard this speech before, or you just wanna cut to the chase, click here.”

Stan Gilbert does the clicking on the heart on the sleeve routine. Tacky. Or what.

Amanda clicks the heart and the menu jump forward.

She clicks the Wanna hear some more? option, like any other new visitor with a bit of sense.

“Yeah, find me a husband, big boy.” A thought crosses her mind. Can she get to the Man himself. He looks quite a catch, behind all that make up. Naa. ‘Course there was that time, back in the old poker club, when they were just about to get into some serious fluid exchange, but it never came to anything. Stan wasn’t up to strip poker, like some she could mention. He just took her – and everybody else’s – shirt, metaphorically speaking. You would, when you can spare ten times then your rivals – all of them combined – can.

And what was that other thing that crossed her mind?

She wants to hear more.

“I knew you’d choose to listen”.. He pauses. She thinks the program crushed, just for a nano second, but then he rambles on: “Amanda.”

“I know what you’re doing pal. And how. You don’t fool ME.”

“A little trick of the trade”, a short pause, “Amanda.” A big smile at close up. No hair coming out of the nostrils. Not like she remembered. “Of course I don’t have time to talk to each of my guests. You wouldn’t wanna pay for that, I assure you”.

Amanda feels like talking back, but that would be stupid, now wouldn’t it. And if she’s anything, stupid it’s not.

“But you, and your future husband will have to pay. Until you meet. Because here at Ringleader only those who are willing to put their money where their heart is, are welcome.”

Hand on his heart. Spontaneous. Must have worked hard on that right left combination, good old Stan.

“Only if you’re filthy rich, baby. You won’t be sorry.”

So you know I’m filthy rich. And that I want a husband because I’m sick and tired of ordering men around. Like every other power bitch in Corporate America, there’s a little girl yearning for a sugar daddy. Common knowledge, right? Well, dream on. Maybe I want to marry a beggar. Saw a candidate just the other day, sitting on the sidewalk. If he was younger, and cleaner. What do you know about what a woman needs. She’s a tough cracker and they better be ready for her. Keep talking.

She clicks on a menu item marked “What you get for your money”

” Yes, the rumors are correct: It could be the hundred dollar click. Or even more. But, It’s worth it. What you get for your money is a husband. When you get a husband, you get your money back.”

“What?” Amanda, like any normal woman would be, is a bit perplexed. No other word for it. Surely he means No Husband No Money.

“Yes, darling. You heard right. I want to give you a husband for free. And I’m not a do-gooder.”

She knew that.

There’s a pause. Obviously smart man Stan expected her to ask him something like “So what are you”.

Just humor him, she does just that. Stan looks pleased.

“I’m an honest man. I lay my cards on the table. And my heart on my sleeve, as you can see. I’ll give you a better chance of finding a husband, or a sugar daddy, or toy boy, or a business partner, or male stripper, whatever tickles your fancy. That chance is still fairly low. To be honest, which I am, maybe one in ten will get a good match. When that happens, and we’re satisfied it happened, they’ll get their money back. The rest – tough. We humans (join the club) are so different and complex, that perfect matches are near impossible. That’s why – a little pause – everybody you know is scared stiff of you, and – another little pause (those agents could do with a bit fine tuning, I could recommend someone who does a decent job at half price) – your Ex didn’t really work out, Now did it”.

He should know.

Amanda Rosen hits the pause button on the Transport Bar. The thought of Stan Gilbert, the Man, out there Matchmaking for the rich and loaded is indeed a curious one. It doesn’t exactly go with the techie sort of halo he was trying to put on when he was starting up high tech ventures in the PC revolution days.

But you gotta give the man credit for innovation. That thought again. Give the man Credit? was that it?

“At each point on Your Ringleader session you will be faced with a choice of Going deeper, or Calling.” Yes, Stan Gilbert couldn’t resist poker wherever he went.

“Calling means that you’ve got a set of criteria you’re happy with and you’d like to check who’s out there matching. You don’t know how many there are. You want as many as possible, so you can shop around, But each candidate will cost you. Access to the list will cost you, and clicking items on the list – potential husband in your case (quick pause) Amanda, will cost you further more. So you want to limit the field more. But every limitation, every extra criteria costs, so you have to consider carefully on that front as well. Are you with me?”

She’s getting irritated. Of course she’s with him. Where else can she be. If he’s so clever he should know that she, Amanda Rosen isn’t falling for the cheap trickery.

“Good. The prices increase as you go deeper. If you get to level 5 or 6 we are talking hundreds of bucks a click. And every Candidate will cost you more the deeper you go.”

Go ahead scare me with money. See if I’ve got what it takes to take you on. Am I a man or am I a mouse. Another thought, a De Ja Vu like, crosses her mind. But she doesn’t connect to that thought. She’s just following Lisa’s advice. Looking for a man in her life. A man. Again the thought. But she misses it again. And it’s screaming in her face.

“You might ask yourself how I, Stan the Honest Man Gilbert, can justify this enormous extortion. Well, I don’t have to. It’s a free world. You want to shop around the beggars and bums, welcome to them. Some like a poor spouse they can step all over. I know YOU don’t.”

That sounds personal enough.

“I know a lot about you, Aman-”

And the system crushes. Gilbert’s lips are frozen in an open position that comes with the “A” sound while his tongue still pushes onto his back teeth to produce a “D” that the “A” followed, but obviously some smart agent realized that it’s not too smart to tell Amanda Rosen, Which Gilbert knows, that he knows about her. But that agent is obviously nothing more then a third rate kludge. Should be sent back to the cold, so to speak.

She stands up, then kicks the gray box, as if it was a vending machine or an antique public telephone. Or a juke box. The movement is what you’d expect from The Fonze. The system came back on. Now That’s spooky.

“You don’t have to kick the box, Amanda” Says Gilbert, which makes it even more spooky “a restart will do. I’ll take it from where we left”

Well, maybe he’s a mind reader after all. Would I trust the husband search in his hands? Maybe, maybe not.

“Don’t worry about me knowing about you. I don’t really. There are a lot of you, too many for me to take interest. I’m a happily married man (click if you want to a picture of The Wife - point at breast pocket), I’m wealthy enough (click here if you want to see my latest bank statements - point at briefcase), Your secrets are safe with me. As safe as you want them to be.”

Than it clicks: And so are YOUR secrets, pal. I know just how much you made last night. It was a record 53 million. Off a poor sonavabitch first timer named Queen who is not very likely to come back for more soon. It’s nice to know that she has some juicy inside info on that hot air balloon who pretends to have inside info about HER.

“You might want to ask yourself a few questions before you decide whether you go on or not. Wouldn’t blame you if you just Quit this minute. Go back to Earth (what with you being in Cyberspace) and think it over.”

Amanda Rosen is having the time of her life now. Better call Lisa, let her into it. She’s gonna enjoy this. She could have found who The Man was if she wanted to. But it was not her policy to snoop after on-tine paying customers, cocky though they might be. But he was asking for it, the son of a gun, Now wasn’t he.

“Any questions?”

Like he’s really there. Very funny.. A Transport Bar appears with the Caption: Press Record and ask away. We’ll come back to you.”

She presses Record and says: “Will you marry me? “and regrets it the moment she finishes. Probably there’s no woman who could resist that silly question. He probably runs a statistic analysis of how many women asks him if he will marry them. Subdivide by profession, age, networth, that sort of thing. And she fell for it. Wouldn’t reflect too good on her persona. But it’s done.

Now she gets tired, and clicks the session off. Be interesting to investigate a little further. She could use her inside info to get some advantage here and there, if and when she feels she needs it. But why should she. Suppose she gets to the thousand buck click. And she clicks a hundred times. So she paid a hundred thousand dollar for a husband. And the husband is not what the result of the clicking said he would be. So she’s out of a hundred grand. Big deal.

The phone rings.

Tony from Billing.

“Yes, Tony?”

“Money’s arrived.”

“All fifty three mill of it?”

“Yep”

“Be nice if we could just, you know”

“No, I don’t know. We’re Mr. one percent. Fifty two point forty seven have left the station.”

Amanda Rosen waves goodbye to 52.47 million dollars that automatically switch to the winner of the match between The Man and The Queen. Only now she knows, for the first time since House was launched, where the money is going. To whom, to be exact. She doesn’t know where The Man LIVES, but that’s not the point. And she doesn’t like it. The money vanishing like that. Plus she doesn’t like that any Ringleader click she’s going to perform, from here on end, is going to be added to that same amount. Still, as the Brits say, Mustn’t grumble. 520 thousand dollars and loose change is always nice to get your hands on.

Hell, I can click Ringleader till my fingers bleed and it won’t cost me THAT, she thinks It’s a comforting sort of a thought.

“Tony, any monies not coming?”

“Just a couple of accounts.”

“Is it worth making them sorry yet?”

“You’re not ASKING me that, now are you Mrs. Rosen?”

“Wait three days max then do the biz. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY stalls House. That clear?”

“Yes Mrs. Rosen”

And he’s not even an employee. Gosh, the MEN in this place. Or across the road.

She turns to Ringleader.

It’s a screen divided to four basic sectors, each in a window:

One is a question. The first one is: Are you looking for

1) A husband price: 2$

2) Other price: 3$

The second window is a prompt to ask your own question and to put your price on it. In other words, you tell Ringleader how much you’re willing to pay to find the answer to this question at this particular junction. Once this question is on the system other people can use it at this junction. Prices will be regulated by demand.

The third window is a prompt for the list of names answering the question.

The average price per name is – 16 dollars. There’s no mention of how many names – how many people who want to be husbands – are in the list. press “yes” and you might a list of 10,000 names and you’re forced to pay 160 grand. And you get ugly ones and poor ones and foreigners and whatnot.

Then, in the forth window, she’s prompted for her price for this particular question. How much is she willing to pay to protect HER name at this junction. The price she’s prepared to pay will melt into the other prices and push the average up or down, depending. That sets her thinking and sends her asking for help.

“Hello, Amanda” It’s Stan again, explaining the fine points of putting a price on a question in a junction.

“I want you to think how much money you want people to pay to expose your name on this particular junction. Of course, you don’t know how big the list is.

You could be one out of two, in which case you could influence the price a lot, or one in a thousand. Anyway, the price you quote is a payment to us. Once you name your price, consider that amount gone. Is that clear?”

In the event she wants more explanation, good old Stan is ready with quite an array of answers. But the picture begins to be clear. No point in paying too much. She types 100$, just to be on the safe side. She has no way of knowing how she influenced the price.

Then there’s a general toolbox window with some navigation buttons, help etc.

Nothing to it then.

She answers the first question. Looking for a husband.

A list 511 questions now appears with price range between 3 and 30,000 bucks. The list has a table of topics which is accessible for a price, in case she doesn’t want to actually browse 511 questions one by one. But she doesn’t mind. Save 5 dollars 11 cents.

Each of these questions is leading to more questions, and at each junction Amanda can put her price on the existing question as well as compose a new question. In this way each Searcher has a personal sequence of questions which should be parallel to the sequence of the opposite side.

Hmmm.

The next question she chooses is meant to narrow the field drastically.

She considers “Are you worth more then 20 million dollar” which is very tempting, but The price on that one is 7000 dollars and besides, someone with five million might do very nicely.

Another question is: Where do you live. It’s fairly cheap, 10 bucks. But too general. She can bring a few questions from previous junctions to this one. So she finds somebody else who is smart enough to ask: Do you live within the New York area for 85 dollars, and there are a few other geographic such like variants on the theme, which she likes. So she composes a question: Do you live around Silicon valley and puts a price of 150. At which point Stan comes in.

“Hi, Amanda, Thanks for your question. We’ll put it on our system. May I suggest you give the possible husbands in the Silicon Valley area some time to find the question and respond to it if they like?”

Assuming she’s saying ‘yes’ he continues:” Thank you, Amanda. But you don’t have to go away right now, you can keep working with the questions on the junction you’re in, or compose new question. If you’re not clear click here, and he pointed toward the help button on the far right of the screen.

Right. More questions, at the same junction.

She spots one she likes: Do you like poker? the price is a modest 12 and she puts a price of 800 on it. Which of course goes to Stan the Man’s pocket, to be added to the 53 millions he won at off her at House. Well, it wasn’t off her as such, but the money was parked at House, and then it went. So she feels as if it belonged to her. Many bankers feel the same way. And stock brokers. Some act on that feeling. She wonders how much she influenced the price of the question with those 800 bucks. Depends on the number of others, the more there are, the less she changes it. Remember, she says. The fact that the husband she’s after likes poker doesn’t mean she has to like it. How many wives are happy to let their husband go play with his chums and have the house to themselves. A big smile comes to her face. And stays there.

She glances sideways to the House system, checking the on-going matches. There he’s again. Vulture.

Amanda likes Vulture’s style of play. No time for time wasters. All out when a big challenge shows up. There are a few others like that, but Vulture is definitely unique. He just loses patience and loses every match he plays against poor players. Had some fifteen of those losses. If she could change the rules it would be for players like him. Wait a minute here. Of course she can change the rules, she OWNS the joint.

She looks at the Ringleader screen, waiting to see if anybody out there wants to answer her question, the one about Silicon Valley. There’s one. Good. There’ll be more. But does she want her husband to come for the Valley? Or maybe someone who lives far but who’s happy to come live with her? Hmm. Some food for thought here.

Vulture has drawn an opponent. Hello, it’s that Queen again. Just lost 53 million and back for more. That draws her attention.

She turns the Ringleader off. Her future husband can wait. Stan Gilbert pops up saying “Thank you for cruising Ringleader, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again soon, Right?” with a wink, and a wide knowing smile. She’s got to see this. This being the Vulture v. The Queen.

And there’s that letter in Bring The House Down. All about playing for real. Real House. Or something. She sets about finding that letter, buried in the Housewatch.com site. As the Vulture is poking about the opposition credit limit. Could take a while, Buddy, she says aloud.

HEADHUNT

Where IS everybody?

After two hours of rolling in the sofabed he jumps out, quickly brushes his teeth and logs on to the Agency. What he sees is strange. He gets the sinking feeling of a man landing on Mars. The site is organized differently, and non of his old pals is on line. He checks three screens of names and that’s it. Usually there are about ten of them. A hollow sort of chill goes down his spine. A negative rush of Adrenaline. Where IS everybody. That’s what happens when you go away. You come back and it’s nothing like what you knew. Try going back to school after a few years, where the ceiling seems nearer, or watching an old film. Billy remembers, distinctly, a conversation with the Bum, the other day. Don’t look back, the Bum said. When you look back you influence your memory. Is that a bad thing? Billy said. It’s if you want to remember. The Bum said. There was a hint of smugness there, Billy seems to remember, but then again, thinking about it, dilutes the memory. Is that a bad thing? It’s if you want to remember. And Chief, Theresa Price, made him go back. He was tied, overworked, and she simply stuck two fingers into his eye sockets, and kept them open. Metaphorically speaking.

“Mr. Young, where are you going?”

“To bed, chief”

“Well, you’re not. I need to run an idea through your head.”

“It’s overloaded, Mrs. P., Chief”

“Not for this. Listen. I think I’ve got an answer to the talent pulling problem.”

Two months into the Death March now, and the numbers of feet is too small.. They need to pull talent, and they need to keep it a secret. Which presents obvious problems.

“Oh yeah?”

“I think. It’s the Agency.”

“What about it?”

“This is the pool of people we have to draw on.”

Billy thinks he must be sleep walking. Of course the Agency is the pool. Where else can they go? Set a booth at universities for those not smart enough to go to Microsoft? Who aren’t smart enough to go to SS?

“You can’t be serious, chief. You don’t want to ADVERTISE, do you? A small outfit with huge potential looking for talent. No money. Generous stock ops. You cannot be serious.” He says it in the immortal manner that John Mcenroe once did at the general direction of a Wimbledon Umpire, only he – Billy – surely is too young to actually having heard it. Must be one of those cultural overtones that carry themselves down bloodlines. Or so it seems to Theresa. She prefers to let it go. She was never a tennis ice cube, anyway.

“Well, You know me better then that. We got to pull them using agents.”

“What do you know about agents?”

“Enough to tickle you curiosity. Something for you to sleep on.”

“Go on”

“You’ve got to go back to the Agency, both of you. Show your faces. Then push some well disguised agents which do matchmaking related tasks to the people we want to target.”

“You’re crazy. I’m not listening”

“Yes you are” she says.

“It’s nothing short of advertising”

“It’s if you do it openly. But you can disguise things. Tickle curiosities. open doors only to those who know something, part of a puzzle. Things like ‘look at page 27 of a book only you and the other one read.”

“Yeah, and that other one can guess the rest.”

“Not the whole picture if you don’t give it away.”

Billy scratches his head, a sure sign that something is about to give.

“Well, maybe there’s something in it. Maybe”

“Think of it as a vaccine. A slight infection, harmless but effective. The people will work their way towards understanding what we do. If their interested enough they’ll go on. They’ll have to tackle tests”

“What sort of tests?”

“You know better then me.”

“I suppose we can put a few hinting Agents. You know, a treasure under a stone, that kind of stuff. Could be dangerous though.”

“Like I said. A slight exposure. A bit of risk. But you’ve got to calculate the risk so carefully like it’s an egg on the tip of your nose, a golden one. And your hands are tied and you’re standing right above a manhole. And you’re broke. Get the picture? Careful. Very carefully”

“Like hedgehogs.”

“What?”

“When they make love. Very carefully. They are. When they make love.”

“I see where you’re coming from. Anyway. You get them hooked. When they’re hooked we offer them a chance to know more. If only they join. And they can only join in bits and pieces. It’ll take them time to be full members.”

“Like a goddamn cult, right?’

“Something like that.”

“Hmmm. You, the Agency itself works like that”

“I know”

“You know? Did Jimbo show you around?”

“He didn’t need to. The Agency is a cult, it’s obvious from his face”

“You seem to know about cults. Anyway, what happens if whoever we pull hits on the Matchmaker idea and decides to COMPETE?”

“That’s a problem, all right. But you should build it so they get involved gradually. And once they’re in they can’t, well, won’t, want out.”

“It’s like a cult”

“Yeah. That’s what I feel in a way. Like I’m a member of some godforsaken holly church ready to convert mankind and any other kind that comes my way.”

Her parents are the obvious picture she sees. They always told her about how they were enticed to that Open Church back in the sixties. How they – each one separately – met that strange man on a street corner, who through such obscure pearls of wisdom at their direction, that they couldn’t resist. How they were joined in holly matrimony under the falling rain and the blazing rainbow. And how everybody ran to get shelter except for the priest. He would never go indoors. That was the day the church lost most of its members.

“Well, that’s stupid” Billy says.

She leans forward and kisses him on his forehead. He’s like a son to her now. If he’s supposed to be a GURU of a cult, well, it isn’t very likely. If she’s supposed to be the GURU, the one who knows all, and takes away everybody’s girlfriend because it’s for the benefit of mankind that his genes would spread, well, that didn’t feel very likely either. It doesn’t work that way when you’re female, except maybe in the insect world. Interesting. Still, she feels like a cult member in a way. She knows something the rest of the world doesn’t, and it’s going to take the world by storm. If that’s not a cult what is.

“Go to sleep now” she says to the obviously tired Billy, and gives as motherly a hug as she can muster under the circs “Wake up tomorrow and find a way to get around it. We need ten people yesterday, and we’ve got lots of stock ops to pay them, right?”

And Billy can’t sleep a wink that morning.

The Agency. That hotbed of no good wasted energy and brain power. Man, some of those guys are so brilliant it’s heartbreaking not to give them a chance at the big time. They wouldn’t sell us out, would they? He scrolls the endless list in his mind, and he can see the faces. Almost. Of course the only one he ever bothered making VC contact with was Jimbo, but he can still see faces. He sees Roy as a Ginger Spike, and Sam/Rachel as a couple of geeks with specs the size of a tea saucer. It’s the easiest thing in the world to establish eye contact, but it’s a waste of time and bandwidth – both of which you can never get enough of, whatever the hardware you’re sitting on. But in bed , trying to sleep, all those faces keep popping. Mark is a fat boy. He looks like secret service agent, ready to take a bullet away from the president. Yuck. Boris is an agile Ballet dancer. That’s because he’s Russian. And Dror has an Uzi and a long Jewish nose. Or he sits in the snow putting the kettle on a hot spring. He’s never been sure whether it was Israel or Iceland.

Could be the time of day, he tries to make sense of it, Every self respecting hacker is asleep at ten AM, but many of the Agency crowd are in Malaysia and Chile for god’s sake. And yes, some of those guys work American time, which means they have to work nine to five adjust to Hacker Office Hours Pacific time zone. That’s nine AM five AM, mind. But still. There’s very little activity and those that are on the system are, well, he doesn’t recognize them. Not a single one. The chance of that happening, say, three months ago was, well, closer to zero then one percent. He doesn’t even want to click on any of them. They are just, you know, names. Nobodies. Of course there was always a high turnover of players on the Agency system, it has always been part of the scenery. People would drift in and out, between projects and jobs, before and after their startup went bust. But there was always a good bunch of connections you knew well and could work with, if you can call Agencing work. And there’s nobody out there now.

A second chill runs down Billy’s spine as he starts contemplating the headlines of the possible implications. He thinks he might share the thought but Theresa is out, Jimbo is asleep and Lisa is studying for some exam or other.

So he churns out a small agent, out of components he has on his own system, that sends feelers to Agency members who were in contact with him for more than an hour in the last six months. The agent comes back with a list, and reports that most of them have gone AWOL in the last month. Shall I track them down?

Billy thinks it over and asks the agent do a Touch and Go: If the person does not seem to want to be tracked down, leave him/her alone. It’s quite a delicate task to program for such nuances, but Billy is a master, if ever there was one. The Agent pretends to be an agent of some fake address which is well hidden inside a corporate Firewall that Billy and Jimbo once cracked for fun and games. Another requirement which Billy insists on his Agent is a geographical one. No more then a hundred miles from some bogus address he gave it, not very far away from the Price home. This is a bit tricky because interfacing with the Agency crowd nobody ever gave a dime about the geographical whereabouts of anyone. Abu Dhabi was always just as near as San Jose. So that relatively easy part of the work takes Billy nearly half the time.

Touch and Go is eventually established with three Agency veterans. There’s Mike, then there are Sam and Rachel, which are like one really, and then there’s Roy.

When Billy tweaks with the code very gently and ups the last contact to twelve months, exposing himself to a much bigger danger of exposure, there’s T&G with five more. Roger, Peter, Tim, Simon (here’s a cool dude: In high school he founded a company which allows computers to share disk space. The more disk space you give, the more equity you own. People bought tens and hundreds of disks just to accumulate equity in Simon’s venture, but then there was not enough stuff to put in those disks, and the thing crumbled. Jimbo own until today 0.006% of SimonSpace, which is worth 0.00003 cent) and Marcello. He thought Marcello was from Chile, what’s he doing less then a hundred miles away? But then again they invented the airplane, which is a good tool for moving around the globe, if a bit clumsy and, well, Twenty Cent.

Armed with eight names none of which hopefully knows nothing about him poking them around, Billy sets to work.

First he sends feelers to Mike, known in some quarters as Drill. The guy who always build drills and worms which never work properly. Jimbo always jokes about Mike. If you want your stuff to be a secret, let Mike try to break in. If the rest of the world knows Mike is on the case, you know they’ll let Mike get on with it, and you’re safe. Still, Mike is a fairly smart guy, truth be told. He even had this great idea of asking people with illegal Microsoft products to pay, or he’ll tell. Made a lot of money, which the rest of the Agency Zero Bled to death. Poor Mike.

“I’m not home if you want me”

Is the message Billy gets when he breaks into Mike’s system.

That’s a bit rude, so Billy leaves a note about a job needs doing, something along the lines of Mike’s special talents. He leaves the note for ten minutes, and directs it to an address that doesn’t exist. If Mike’s interested, he can trace the source of the message. Not Billy’s real address, but two layers away. No too demanding. If Mike’s interested but can’t do the tracing, well, BILLY isn’t interested. So he goes to the coffee machine and pours himself one. He drinks it slowly. After nine minutes he sees Mike trying to trace the message’s source. He keeps on sipping, slowly. Mike keeps trying, and getting nowhere. Billy feels for him and drops one layer, just to give the poor soul a chance. Another sip, and the coffee’s gone. And so is Mike.

He then establishes a runaround contact with Sam and Rachel, leaving an E-mail where they are likely to find it if they’re still in business.

More than one would be a bit risky at this stage.

The e-mail says he’s going to crash and please show a sign if you’re still in biz.

And he goes back and sleeps like a babe in the wood until his Chief comes in with a steaming cup of Colombian Roast coffee and says:

“Rise and shine, sleepy head. Message from a certain double header.”

He turns his Palm on and imports the massage:

“Hi, Bill. What’s up”

And that’s it.

He looks at the timer. Twelve AM. Washes his face, gulps the coffee, and zooms to the Matchmaker Headquarters, next door.

He establishes VC just as he realizes that he never went beyond AC (that’s Audio Conferencing) with either Sam or Rachel. He never had a clue what they LOOKED like.

And he’s somewhat surprised to find out that Sam is a Forty Something with an Egghead and a red nose. and not much hair to speak of, what there’s is bundled in a sorry excuse of a ponytail. And his nose is, must be, naturally bright red. A clown is an immediate association that could come to mind.

“Hi! Billy boy ma man, Long time no seen. Rachel sends her best. What’s up, dude?”

Billy has some second thoughts. There’s no way this Sam is the right material for what he’s looking for, despite the dudespeak.

“What? Oh, yeah. You were expecting to find a teenage geek like you. Wouldn’t blame you. Neither would Rachel. Rachel, come here.”

Rachel shows her face in front of the VC cam. She has a BEARD. And she wags her tail. So much for the famous Code of honesty on the Agency.

“Well?”

Billy is not sure how to proceed. Sam and Rachel are, were, one of the best acts on the Agency. There’s no doubt about that. Just because they are so different, you know, in the VIS sense, doesn’t mean, shouldn’t mean, anything. Look at the Bum. He’s obviously smarter then he appears. He gave him ten bucks on the way here, and in return the bum said something like ‘you can throw a Message in a bottle but you better throw it through the window of who you want to send the Message to’.

Call it Ageism, call it Wierdism, Billy has a hard time rising above prejudice, like any other unpretentious human being. Only you have to rise above those things. Gals are as smart as us. Old folks can be cool. Color of your skin matters none. Hell, we’re a half century past THAT. Bury the TURF instinct, and look at the issue straight in the eye. Is this old clown going to work for a startup for no pay? No way.

“Nothing’s up, Sam, Rachel. Just been away for a while, thought I’d poke around. Just missed everyone a tiny bit.”

“Come on, Billy, you know us better then that.”

“Do I? Yeah, of course.”

“Well?”

“Like I said, I need a little help, and where better to start then down the old neighborhood where you know and trust everybody…”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. Right Rachel?”

The little dog, bitch is too harsh a word for the sweet little fury thing, a Yorkshire Terrier dominated Mongrel, agrees with a bark that sounds more like the sound of a chalk on a blackboard. Sweet when quiet, then.. Maybe he should get a little dog as well.

“Jesus, Sam. Don’t do that again. I mean I love dogs, and especially little Portables like this one, but hell, I’d hate to be your Neighbor.”

Sam is laughing. “Don’t mind him, gal. He’s an old miser who likes his Siesta between Two and Four in the Afternoon. Come on, Boy. Talk to me. Don’t let me bring the Age Discrimination Act up.”

“Well, I told you”

“You need help. I can help. Talk.”

“It’s a bit sensitive. Hush.”

“Well, you wouldn’t go through all that third party wrong address Touch and Go stuff if it wasn’t”

“You didn’t find that out.”

“It was so obvious Rachel did the work.”

Fuck. He’s being insulted by a Forty Something clown. But if he’s not FBI that man is priceless. And if he was FBI he wouldn’t tell him how easy it was to find out what Billy is up to. Or would he.

“OK, man. Where can we do the F2F”

“Now you’re talking. Wanna come down to my place?”

Billy is thinking about it, a few difficulties come to mind and then go, when Sam continues: “It’s four minutes slow walk down the road from your present location.”

Billy’s admiration turns to fear. My present location. He knows.

“Rachel can smell your fear from here”

The dog barks again. Billy is sure he recognizes that bark now. When he lived with his parents, that’s five minutes away – slow walk – that particular bark was on every time he cranked the Damian Young volume up. The dog barks again. Billy opens a window, but he no barking now. He sits back at his Cluster. The dog licks the cam, and Sam wipes it clean. Which gives Billy a chance to continue.

“How many minutes?”

“Chill out, man” Sam continues merrily “She ain’t gonna bite. Come down, we’re having breakfast in ten minutes”. It’s 00:42. Breakfast. Makes sense. He looks at the open window and listens to the sounds of the night. A thousand eyes and ten thousand ears are out there, all zooming on his hard drive. He looks at the screen where Rachel is now barking happily. Horrific sound. He kills the volume. The barking continues through the opened window. What was it about him Hating to be Sam’s neighbor?

Sam IS a clown. That’s what he does for a living.

“You wanna see my act?”

“No, thanks.”

“Come on, whatever it’s we’re on it can’t be more important than making the children of Silicon Valley happy.”

“The children of Silicon Valley are happy if they deposit their first million before they’re the Teenagers of Silicon Valley”

“All right. What do you want for breakfast. Shredded Wheat is what we eat here.”

“Dog as well?”

“Yeah, dog in particular”

“That’ll be fine.”

Sam goes to the kitchen and little Rachel follows, tail wagging at 150 BPM.

“Do you want a Non-disc?” Sam Asks while he flips the eggs in the frying pan if he was doing THAT for a living.

“Do I want what?”

“A non disc. NDA. None disclosure agreement. Don’t tell me you don’t know that that is.”

“I know” Said Billy “I just don’t have one on me. Didn’t think.”

“Of course you didn’t think” Sam said, putting the culinary masterpiece in front of the visitor ” Whatever your idea is, I can take it and run away with it, and there’ll be nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Surely you wouldn’t. Not an Agenthead.”

“That’s if by Agenthead you mean Dickhead.”

Billy doesn’t have an answer to that. Chewing on the egg is the best he can come up with. And that’s a brainbox with a lot of output – likes to talk much – even on a bad day.

“Listen, sonny” Sam keeps on track ” Take the advice of an old clown: When money talks, Values walk. Don’t tell me anything until I sign one of these things” Which he fished out of a very conveniently positioned drawer.

He throws it on the table.

“Have you got a lawyer, a good one?” He talks down to the sitting Billy while his own breakfast is burning to hell.

“Well, we were looking for one.”

“Well, find one. Take this to him and double check the small print. Bring it to me, amend it if you have to. Then I’ll sign it, and then you can tell me all about it, in total confidence. As total as total can be total, if you know what I mean”

“I don’t”

“Nothing’s Total really. Only a life. When it’s well and truly over”

“Ah”

Billy thinks this is pretty convincing as a show of honesty and is ready to tell him a few pointers anyway, but Sam insists: “Don’t. Don’t even think about it. I was burned on this in the past. Much as I enjoy clowning I’d rather be working in a genuinely great upstart. Not a half baked idea that goes nowhere, and surely not a nine to fiver. But a great one, yeah.”

Billy doesn’t know what to say.

“It’s great, that thing of yours, isn’t it?”

“I’d like to think so. It has, theoretically at least, a potential to change things in a fundamental way.”

That’s an understatement, he thinks. To a third party like Sam and Rachel here, it sounds pretty boastful. Especially as he – and the dog too – don’t have a clue about it.

“You can search for a good lawyer from here . There are lots of highly recommended sites.”

“Can I think about that as well?”

“Yeah, but this is pretty standard. I think there are two or three sites that offer a range of non discs to be tailormade for your needs. Some will check what you’ve got and zero on the dark corners. Check out for legal mines, you know.”

“Like small print detectors?”

“Yeah. It’s all the rage in the legal community these days. Those sites are putting lawyer out of work and back into society. I saw one frying burgers in McDonald’s the other day. They are starving. I could bring one up. Or two, or twenty”

“OK then, let’s see one or two”

And Sam is on his SS, milking every Search Engine for the right Non disc for the case in hand.

Billy is looking over his shoulder and stroking Rachel’s nondescript fur when his Palm makes a noise. It’s receiving. It’s pestered by one Theresa Price, the Chief, no less.

“What gives?” Theresa Price doesn’t sound happy.

“On a mission. Got somebody we might be interested in.”

“You want to be careful. Don’t give away anything.”

“Don’t worry your pretty head, Chief, I know what I’m doing. Oh, by the way, do we have any non discs?”

“NDA’s ? Yeah. Want me to fax you one?”

“Yeah. Sam, it’s alright. There’s a non disc on it’s way. Can I connect to a printer?”

Sam stopped his SSing, and connects Billy’s Palm to his printer. Best if the non disc is supplied by the none signing party. Saves on the Agro. No accusations of small print cheating months later.

The agreement comes crawling in and Sam tears it out and takes a good look at it.

“Looks fine to me” He’s looking for a pen. He signs his name and they shake on it.

“Congratulations, sonny. You’ve got yourself a model employee. Now let’s hear about it.”

“You mean you agree to join without hearing me out first?”

“Something like that.”

“Can I have this in writing?”

“Do you have an Emplo?”

“Huh?”

“An Employment agreement? Of course not. I have a few, I could SS for one, or you can go back to whoever sent you the non disc and get one. I’m cool whichever way. What will that be?”

“None of the above, I’ll just tell you. I trust you not to bury me in more paper.”

Sam is smiling wide, his teeth are better then the rest of his features. He sits down at the table and starts munching his cold and burned breakfast. It is no pretty sight.

“Right, sonny. I’m all ears”

“OK. It’s like this. You know The SS system, right?”

“Well?”

“Heard of Ringleader?”

“Something somebody mentioned. An on line Matchmaker or something, right?”

“Yeah” Billy is searching for an angle to start from and finds himself in a bit of a loop.

“Well, it’s an idea that came to me, when SS and Ringleader sort of mingled in my mind.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Well, do you remember before SS how you’d work with a Search Engine.”

“I still have nightmares. I remember looking for an article about clown traditions in various cultures. Don’t remember which Engine it was. But I remember the number of hits. It was 1599999. I managed to get a few nines off, but it took me too long and I haven’t got the right info till this day. 1599999. Brrr. Very useful it was.”

Rachel growls. She hates old Search Engines.

“Well, with SS things are more structured, with the links being created more or less according to some sort of a system.”

“You’re not gonna teach me SS now, are you, Billy boy?”

“Sorry, no. I’m just trying to show you how my mind worked. Believe me, it’s better that way.”

“Thank god you’re not in advertising. You know, sum up in one sentence and all that Jazz.”

“And you know how people say that now we have access to so called ‘perfect info’, because it’s on the Web for everybody to reach. No more inside info and all that.”

“Well, that’s baloney. 1599999.”

“Right. I’m getting there.”

“You should sort out a pitch, Billy. For the next victim”

“That’s an idea. Anyway. What we’re trying to build is something comprehensive. A system where everybody in the world is connected to a WCB-”

“A what?”

“WCB. World Category Bank. So it’s like a level playing field. like everybody’s on the same system. Like Windows. Like the Web. There’s only one Web, right? No need for two, or ten. And there’s only one Stock Exchange. No room for two. In the US anyway. And one, I don’t know, NBA. Again, in the US, but you get the picture. And one Video, you know the VHS Betamax thing. Anyway. If we establish a Standard – Yeah, it’s a standard thing. A Category Bank that everybody uses to define one of the two: What they have, that’s a Request, and what they want, that’s an Offer. No, the other way around. Anyway – “

“Billy, relax. I’m not your teacher for crying out loud. Why don’t you just show me the thing.”

And that’s it. Their first recruit comes walking down the street, and clocks in. He will emerge after twenty straight hours of a once over with both Billy and Jimbo. They agree a small salary, to cover the loss of clown work plus ten percent – like you know how much clowning you’re gonna get next month – and some stock options. Sam is on cloud nine, and Rachel takes to the new environment like a fish to a plastic bag. She loves it. Lots of new socks to sniff, if anything. And Sam has a few friends. They are good, they are reliable, and there are seven of them, to start with. Because each of them can bring three or four more, well, it’s exponentially scalable. Matchmaker is in business. And there’s no visible blip on the landscape. It’s like a black hole as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Problem is, it’s the same with any upstart when it starts up, right? Watch out for alien searchlights.

REAL HOUSE

“What, mom” Lisa sounds as if talking to her mother is like swallowing a particularly nasty medicine. It isn’t the Lisa Amanda knew and loved. It’s an impersonator, and a bad one.

“C’mon, open that VC, I wanna see your shining woman in love face.”

“Wait a minute, mom.” A little pause, and then Lisa’s face appears on the screen.

“Are you alone, Lisa?”

“I will be if you just give me a second”

It was when Vulture walked away with a million and a half from the match with The Queen, that Amanda Rosen started to take some serious notice. That Queen person realized that whatever money he’s got in his purse, House is not his game and didn’t repeat the 53 million affair. Vulture was right there on the ball. He sensed a useless player with a bottomless pocket and was about to risk all he had. He wouldn’t dream of doing that against a player, a real one. Which brought her to the subject of that RR (Ranting and Raving) letter which was signed by Vulture on Bring The House Down. The essence of it was this: House is not fair. Good players with little funds are at a huge disadvantage against poor players (poor in the sense of playing ability) with big ones. Of course you could argue all day that the good players won their money F&S (Fair and Square), but that does not make them better. When she read that argument for the first time her reaction was something like You Stinking Commie. She still had the Cold War in the vague peripheries of her RAM. Makes sense, given her age. But it struck a chord when she looked at it again. Because there was more to it. Much more, as a matter of fact. When two players are on a level playing field, that’s the only way of finding out who’s better. But that cuts out the Fair and Square element. It works on any other walk of life, too. None more so in the field of software development. Hell, Bill Gates won fair and square. But since he got the top spot all he has to do is to do fairly well, which means create some products with not too many bugs in it, and throw money at whatever resistance he finds on his way. So yeah, it’s fair, it’s square, but the result is that not the best product wins. Only the product with more clout behind it. You – Amanda found herself reading aloud the bit that compared her to all the American Legislator bodies combined into one – are stuck with a problem: Should you be fair to Gates? Or try to level the field so that the better product wins? And I bet ya Fair and Square is not always that. Not in Gates’ case not in any other field. Hell, rich kids grow up with better education and money that will make more money for them. Poor kids will stay poor kids unless they’re better. FAR better, then the rich kids. But without a good start it’s hard for them to get better, right? So what? Give the poor kids the rich parents’ money? Why the fuck should the rich parents work hard then and EARN that money if they end up giving it away to poor kids? Hmm.

It’s all too familiar. She heard this arguments over and over everywhere from all sorts of losers. Only some of them had a case, and she felt this Vulture might be one of those who has one. Which he sort of proved when he wiped the floor with any worthy opponent that was thrown at him., That includes Queen, not because he was worthy as a player but because he probably had so much money to lose, it made him worthy. There was a formula there, Vulture said. There’s an optimal condition where F&S (Fair and Square) meets Bullying. He can prove it, given a chance.

Maybe I should give that whiner a chance.

Or not. It’s a question to be discussed with her inner circle, which includes her absent daughter Lisa.

“Wait a second, Lis. Are you with Precious little Lovegod?”

Jimbo is quite happy. He’s sitting along side a woman some four years older him, and some four inches taller, and she loves him. They watch an old movie. It’s called Pretty Woman. Jimbo feels it’s an awkward choice of streaming, but Lisa insisted on that one, and he feels as if a rich bastard turned do-gooder under the influence of a hooker is a subtle hint towards him. He feels insulted, in a way. But he’s happy. Lisa sits to his left, holding his hand, and kissing his left cheek at regular intervals. In between kisses she pets his left ear. That’s all right as far as Jimbo is concerned. His right hand is holding a mini mouse (it’s worn on the thumb and clicked with the other fingers, each finger to perform a different task) and working his Palm. Lisa’s left hand is holding HER Palm. She VC’s someone, but Jimbo doesn’t care who.

“Come on, Lissy, Let me see your boy friend’s F. F. Face. Not THAT. I know it sounds the same, almost.( many people mistake F&S, Fair and Square, to S&S – or SS for Structured Surfing. Like falling on your F could mean two different things given a bad connection) Just want to see what you’re messing with. Isn’t that what mothers do?”

“It’s not a good time, ma.”

“You’re not, you know”

“Not what?”

“You know what”

“Of course not, ma. He’s fifteen. Just give me a minute.”

Jimbo looks sideways, having heard his name mentioned. He smiles vaguely, and looks at Pretty Woman being insulted in a fancy Fashion shop. The Girls who work there look down on her because she’s dressed like a prostitute. He really wishes he could be there and given them a piece of his mind. But he isn’t really aware of that. His mind is on his Palm, where he clicks on a List Box. It shows a list of Categories, in this case DC’s of SONG. It’s a long list, the Virtual Users have done a remarkable job of compiling it, bearing in mind they are nothing more then bits of software taking blind shots at dictionaries, directories, and pages of various colors, yellow and white mainly. When you think about it, it WOULD be long. It contains the name of each and every song ever written (or at least those in the Encyclopedias the Virtual Users laid their virtual hands on. And it also contains things like Song Categories (such a Rock, Praise and Slow). All in one big messy and unorganized list of things that SONG is the Mother Category of. The box is small, what with the small screen on the palm, and Jimbo looks at it with what he considers a human eye. That’s, the eye of someone who hates wasting time on scrolling long lists. Apparently, his virtual users love them. He makes a note. Build hatred of long lists into the virtual users. This Simulator is getting ridiculous. These Virtual Users keep coming up with demands of his time. Why can’t they behave like normal human beings? And let him develop Matchmaker?

“He’s not using your brains and tossing you?”

“No, mom. Jimbo’s too young and innocent to even try a D&D”

“A what?”

“A Drag & Drop, mom. You drag, then you drop. You at Apple invented the concept. Or was in Xerox”

“I know what Drag & drop is, thank you very much. God knows I’ve done it to enough guys before settling on your father”

“Which you dropped as well”

“Yeah, well. He asked for it. Lisa, we might be joking here but I’ll be damned if Mr. Brains here – sorry, there – gets a whiff of House innards without me OKing it. OK?”

“You’re a paranoid, ma”

“You know what Andy Grove used to say. Andy Grove of Intel”

Of course Lisa knows what Andy Grove of Intel used to say. It was something like ONLY THE PARANOID SURVIVES. Which puts him on even footing with Gates, Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Evil Emperors.

“Well, I survive”

Pretty Woman is in the bath tab, headphones on, doing a cover version for James Brown. Jimbo has a warm feeling, which goes something like this: Prostitution should be subsidized, because it makes young girls so happy and gives them such opportunities. Of course he’s not aware of those warm feeling he has towards Pretty Woman, because these are the feelings he should be feeling towards Lisa, who pecks him on his left ear, and keeps talking to whoever she’s taking to. And looking at him like he’s a pervert Peeping Tom. Jimbo knows when he’s not wanted. He puts his PalmHead on. Pretty Woman, meanwhile, is in the middle of being surprised by the entrance of her client to the bathroom. Her Walkman headphones on, she murders a James Brown classic. He looks at her like a proud father. Only he’s going to end up doing things no proper father should do to his daughter. Jimbo clicks it off. Lisa doesn’t even notice. She gets up and moves away from him. With a little peck on the cheek, and a motherly smile. Strange, that. If she’s a mother, what is he supposed to do with her? Who needs another mother anyway? Keep developing the idea. Since there’s no father in the house, mother takes father roll. Which makes mother roll vacant. Which brings Lisa in. Leave it at that. Jimbo doesn’t even formulate it all into words. He doesn’t even know about this particular train of thoughts. All he knows is his new mother figure is gone, but she’ll be back soon, because she gave him a reassuring smile, the kind Mother Theresa used to give him when she left him on the carpet to answer the phone, when he was three years old. Of course he doesn’t code that info either. So he just makes sure the PalmHead sits tight, headphones cover the ears properly (a bit of a problem with his particular design) and goggles don’t slip of the bridge of his nose. Now he’s ready to face the world.

Then Amanda Rosen gets to the point.

“So you’re alone now” Lisa looks sideways at the Palmheaded Jimbo. She sure is alone now.

“Yeah”

“Sure”

“What is this”

“Paranoia. You should try it. With Precious little Jim, perhaps”

Lisa looks at Jimbo again. He seems to enjoy himself. His right hand works the Minimouse, moving through the air and snapping his fingers. His left hand scratches his left ear. She looks at him proudly, and lovingly, equal measures.

“Mom, you actually hate the guy because he’s smart?”

“I don’t hate him. I love him if he makes you happy. I just don’t want him eavesdropping on us. Got something important, delicate to discuss with you.”

“It’s OK, mom. Speak up. I won’t tell a soul, not even the bum”

“What bum?”

“The one who always wants money in return for a piece of his mind”

Amanda seems to remember a character answering to that description. Not too many bums populate the streets of San Clemente.

“Do you ever give?”

“You nuts? I’ve got a mind and it doesn’t need any more pieces, thank you very much”

That’s my girl. Brought up just right.

“Hmm. Whatever it is he is, don’t tell him or anyone anything, please, Lis”

“Don’t worry, mom. I know what I’m doing”

“Or maybe you just could drop by the house? That’ll make me feel a whole lot safer”

“You sound like an Ad for birth control stuff”

“It’s not very different”

“Come on Mom, you’re Firewalled for chirssake.”

“It’s the P word, Lisa. Paranoia. You cannot be too paranoid”

“Well-”

“But I have to ask you something”

“Shoot then”

“It’s about fairness on House”

“There ain’t none. Why, should there be any?”

“Well, it’s not a question of should there be, but do we want there to be any”

“what?”

“Fairness”

There are two problems with the PalmHead.

One – it costs sixty thousand dollars. Down from three hundred the month before, but still a problem.

Two – it fries your brain. Problem number one is easy. There are many organizations in the world only too happy to help out. Jimbo chose the Iraqi secret service. He figured, with their track record, a PalmHead is a small price to pay, to help in a crisis situation. And sitting in Lisa Rosen’s living room watching Pretty Woman while she’s out VC’ing her mom IS a crisis situation.

As for problem two, well, frying your brain is not entirely bad for you, if you stop and think about it. If ten minutes a day of Brain Frying costs you, say, 5 IQ points, it’s still not a bad deal in the long run. And you live only once, on average. Some people live more then once, of course, but then again, some people don’t have a life.

“What’s fairness got to do with what House is all about?” Lisa is a little worried about her mother.

“What IS House all about, Lis? What do you think?”

“Mom, are you ill? What brought all that about?” All this talk about fairness is nothing short of alarming.

“Well, maybe it’s got to do with fairness as a tool for making money. That makes more sense to you?”

“Making money makes sense to me, yeah. That’s more like you. You’re not joining the Communist party or anything”

“What Communist party exactly”

“What’s so unfair in House that prevents you from making money?”

With a virtual 21 inch screen life is much more comfortable. You can run the Matchmaker Simulator, to show big lists, and still you can have some entertainment. With the Minimouse you can control the Palm pseudo 21 inch screen, by simply raising your hand away from it. It might be a bit uncomfortable, but, you can also put the Palm a little farther, and leave your Minimousing hand where it is. Entertainment, then. He opens up a window to the Simpson channel, the Laker Channel, the Disaster channel and brings the Damian Young backbeat on, just to justify the headphones. Driven by Damian Young’s power chords, the headphones seem to jump up and down on Jimbo’s ears. Bart Simpson, still ten years old, still surfing the Net while on his skateboard, and still doing PRB, hacks into the Nuclear plant’s intranet, just to see what his dad’s up to. Of course he sees a button saying “Do not click this button, unless on emergency” and of course he clicks it. And of course the reactor’s core melts, and of course his father gets blamed for it. Green stuff pours out of the plant’s steel gates, and half of the United States of America is in the process of evacuation (although the people of Springfield take it in their stride, as they are immuned, thanks to years of being exposed to stuff coming out of Homer Simpson’s shirt) while Bart keeps on skateboarding on. Then he’s on a collision course with Mr. Burns, but he doesn’t notice it, because he’s occupied by the Press the Right Button button that flickers and says: Press me. So he – Bart – presses the Press the Right Button button, and disappears along with the whole of Springfield, giving way to a Press the Right Button session. Of course, PRB paid three million to make that happen. When the session gets hot, and the girl’s hand reaches a particular point of interest, which almost makes Jimbo stop coding and actually pay attention, up pops Marge Simpson with a seductive smile and radiant green hair. Well, Fox paid PRB six million for THAT to happen. Which doesn’t bother Jimbo at all, because he’s busy with the list box. One of the items on the SONG DC list is ABOUT. Interesting. One smart Virtual User must have created a SONG DC that gives you a chance to find songs ABOUT whatever. He presses on that, just out of curiosity. There’s another huge list. Of all the things about which there are songs, apparently. He scrolls it aimlessly. LOVE. A few thousand items. Up again. DREAMS. He clicks on that one. ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM. CALIFORNIA’S DREAMING. DAY DREAM BELIEVER. DREAM A LITTLE DREAM ON ME. DREAMS. DREAM LOVER. DREAM WEAVER. And so on. He goes back to ABOUT, and checks its MC (Mother Category) list. ARTICLES, BOOKS, FILMS, GAMES SONGS, RESEARCHES. and so on. Not bad for a virtual user, he finds himself saying.

On the Laker channel Jack Nicholson breaks his Head Cam. And it’s not even during a game, just a press conference.

“Well, it’s just a thought. There’s this Vulture”

“The one you think his style is – “

“Yeah, that’s the one. Well, he wrote a letter in Housewatch. On Bring The House Down.”

“Whines he’s better then his rating”

“A bit of that, but more. You seen it?”

“Don’t remember”

“Well, he compares House to the World at large and to the software business in particular. It’s a bit wild. If the House equals the world, Then The Man equals Bill Gates, he says”

“That’s not a bad comparison. Does he mean by that that money makes crap players win?”

“Something like that”

“Well, how did they make their money in the first place? They didn’t inherit it. They won it. F&S.”

“That’s what I was thinking”

“And? Just another Whining Commie. A good player, I’ll give him that, but out of his depth. That’s all. No more no less. If he’s any good he’ll be The man himself, beat him at House, I mean.”

Amanda looks at her daughter on the screen and says nothing for a second or so. Just like those Agent Pauses Stan the Man used to insert in the right portion of the Welcome Speech. At Ringleader.

Now that Jimbo has got his PalmHead on, things are beginning to rock. For starters, the Palm screen becomes a 21 inch with EGUI on it.

“You see, Lis, this Vulture character makes one point that I for one couldn’t ignore. He says that we could incorporate an equity element into House.”

“What on earth?”

“We should ask the players to reveal their credit limit, better still, their networth, and then play something he calls Relative House or, better still, Real House”

Lisa doesn’t like the sound of it.

“There are a few obstacles that come to mind and I’m not even sure I see where this is going.”

“Well, here goes. Every player on Real House – or whatever we call it – declares his Networth.”

“How can we know-”

“Hold that thought. Every player comes in with his life savings. When a player of ten million meets a player of ten thousand they play level. For every dollar player B puts on the table, player A has to put a thousand dollars.”

Lisa begins to suspect her mother’s sanity. Next she’ll be playing RealHouse against bums in street corners. And take away their shoe laces.

“And that’s fair?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But what it does, they both play for their life. And if the little guy wins everything, then he becomes big. What Vulture suggests is that The Man, the Real Man, not the one who calls himself that, is the one who risks, and wins, a bigger slice of his own networth. The one who puts his House on the table. Every time.”

Lisa’s mind is racing now. Nobody is safe. But who in their right mind would -

“And I know who the Man is. Our Man.” Amanda says, which throws another spanner into Lisa’s works.

“What do you mean?”

“I know who The Man is. In real life”

“What? Who? How did you find out?”

“I’ll tell you next time we do Ringleader together”

“I’m not looking for a husband with you” Lisa takes hold of the conversation now, with the most obvious question.

“How do we know if someone’s telling the truth about their Networth?”

“Same as we do now. Let them try.”

True enough. Try to pull one over House, and you start bleeding zeroes. Or so one is led to believe. Nobody, to Lisa’s knowledge, have tried. Yet.

“And we take one percent. Of the money passing hands. As always” Amanda makes the point.

Sounds good. We will create quite a few new millionaires, and, with luck, strip a few old millionaires off their millions.

“Mom” Lisa says “I think we should look into it.”

But Amanda Rosen has another plan. She knows – if behavior patterns are anything to go by – that it’s high time The Man came to visit the House. Maybe we can drop a hint to the Vulture, when that happens. Give him a chance to play the Man. At normal House. Now if he – Vulture – wins That, well, maybe then we’ll create his RealHouse thing. So HE has the chance to lose big.

“Mom?”

“Oh, sorry, dear. Miles away. So what do you think?”

Jimbo is quite impressed with the way the virtual users have constructed their web of C’s. He looks at ABOUT again. Clicks SC. Sister Categories of ABOUT. There’s ON. And CONCERNING. He looks sideways and sees a shade of Lisa’s face, still tailing to her mom, but she’s miles away. He goes back to the list box, now containing SC’s of ABOUT. He clicks on the ABOUT, then on DC. A list of ABOUT Daughter Categories. It has a few tens of thousand items on it. Now. Even a virtual piece of code can see that ABOUT can Mother anything at all. Now, if you are human, you look at a list like that and you kick your computer. THIS is what he wanted to fix in the first place.

REAL HOUSE

“What, mom” Lisa sounds as if talking to her mother is like swallowing a particularly nasty medicine. It isn’t the Lisa Amanda knew and loved. It’s an impersonator, and a bad one.

“C’mon, open that VC, I wanna see your shining woman in love face.”

“Wait a minute, mom.” A little pause, and then Lisa’s face appears on the screen.

“Are you alone, Lisa?”

“I will be if you just give me a second”

It was when Vulture walked away with a million and a half from the match with The Queen, that Amanda Rosen started to take some serious notice. That Queen person realized that whatever money he’s got in his purse, House is not his game and didn’t repeat the 53 million affair. Vulture was right there on the ball. He sensed a useless player with a bottomless pocket and was about to risk all he had. He wouldn’t dream of doing that against a player, a real one. Which brought her to the subject of that RR (Ranting and Raving) letter which was signed by Vulture on Bring The House Down. The essence of it was this: House is not fair. Good players with little funds are at a huge disadvantage against poor players (poor in the sense of playing ability) with big ones. Of course you could argue all day that the good players won their money F&S (Fair and Square), but that does not make them better. When she read that argument for the first time her reaction was something like You Stinking Commie. She still had the Cold War in the vague peripheries of her RAM. Makes sense, given her age. But it struck a chord when she looked at it again. Because there was more to it. Much more, as a matter of fact. When two players are on a level playing field, that’s the only way of finding out who’s better. But that cuts out the Fair and Square element. It works on any other walk of life, too. None more so in the field of software development. Hell, Bill Gates won fair and square. But since he got the top spot all he has to do is to do fairly well, which means create some products with not too many bugs in it, and throw money at whatever resistance he finds on his way. So yeah, it’s fair, it’s square, but the result is that not the best product wins. Only the product with more clout behind it. You – Amanda found herself reading aloud the bit that compared her to all the American Legislator bodies combined into one – are stuck with a problem: Should you be fair to Gates? Or try to level the field so that the better product wins? And I bet ya Fair and Square is not always that. Not in Gates’ case not in any other field. Hell, rich kids grow up with better education and money that will make more money for them. Poor kids will stay poor kids unless they’re better. FAR better, then the rich kids. But without a good start it’s hard for them to get better, right? So what? Give the poor kids the rich parents’ money? Why the fuck should the rich parents work hard then and EARN that money if they end up giving it away to poor kids? Hmm.

It’s all too familiar. She heard this arguments over and over everywhere from all sorts of losers. Only some of them had a case, and she felt this Vulture might be one of those who has one. Which he sort of proved when he wiped the floor with any worthy opponent that was thrown at him., That includes Queen, not because he was worthy as a player but because he probably had so much money to lose, it made him worthy. There was a formula there, Vulture said. There’s an optimal condition where F&S (Fair and Square) meets Bullying. He can prove it, given a chance.

Maybe I should give that whiner a chance.

Or not. It’s a question to be discussed with her inner circle, which includes her absent daughter Lisa.

“Wait a second, Lis. Are you with Precious little Lovegod?”

Jimbo is quite happy. He’s sitting along side a woman some four years older him, and some four inches taller, and she loves him. They watch an old movie. It’s called Pretty Woman. Jimbo feels it’s an awkward choice of streaming, but Lisa insisted on that one, and he feels as if a rich bastard turned do-gooder under the influence of a hooker is a subtle hint towards him. He feels insulted, in a way. But he’s happy. Lisa sits to his left, holding his hand, and kissing his left cheek at regular intervals. In between kisses she pets his left ear. That’s all right as far as Jimbo is concerned. His right hand is holding a mini mouse (it’s worn on the thumb and clicked with the other fingers, each finger to perform a different task) and working his Palm. Lisa’s left hand is holding HER Palm. She VC’s someone, but Jimbo doesn’t care who.

“Come on, Lissy, Let me see your boy friend’s F. F. Face. Not THAT. I know it sounds the same, almost.( many people mistake F&S, Fair and Square, to S&S – or SS for Structured Surfing. Like falling on your F could mean two different things given a bad connection) Just want to see what you’re messing with. Isn’t that what mothers do?”

“It’s not a good time, ma.”

“You’re not, you know”

“Not what?”

“You know what”

“Of course not, ma. He’s fifteen. Just give me a minute.”

Jimbo looks sideways, having heard his name mentioned. He smiles vaguely, and looks at Pretty Woman being insulted in a fancy Fashion shop. The Girls who work there look down on her because she’s dressed like a prostitute. He really wishes he could be there and given them a piece of his mind. But he isn’t really aware of that. His mind is on his Palm, where he clicks on a List Box. It shows a list of Categories, in this case DC’s of SONG. It’s a long list, the Virtual Users have done a remarkable job of compiling it, bearing in mind they are nothing more then bits of software taking blind shots at dictionaries, directories, and pages of various colors, yellow and white mainly. When you think about it, it WOULD be long. It contains the name of each and every song ever written (or at least those in the Encyclopedias the Virtual Users laid their virtual hands on. And it also contains things like Song Categories (such a Rock, Praise and Slow). All in one big messy and unorganized list of things that SONG is the Mother Category of. The box is small, what with the small screen on the palm, and Jimbo looks at it with what he considers a human eye. That’s, the eye of someone who hates wasting time on scrolling long lists. Apparently, his virtual users love them. He makes a note. Build hatred of long lists into the virtual users. This Simulator is getting ridiculous. These Virtual Users keep coming up with demands of his time. Why can’t they behave like normal human beings? And let him develop Matchmaker?

“He’s not using your brains and tossing you?”

“No, mom. Jimbo’s too young and innocent to even try a D&D”

“A what?”

“A Drag & Drop, mom. You drag, then you drop. You at Apple invented the concept. Or was in Xerox”

“I know what Drag & drop is, thank you very much. God knows I’ve done it to enough guys before settling on your father”

“Which you dropped as well”

“Yeah, well. He asked for it. Lisa, we might be joking here but I’ll be damned if Mr. Brains here – sorry, there – gets a whiff of House innards without me OKing it. OK?”

“You’re a paranoid, ma”

“You know what Andy Grove used to say. Andy Grove of Intel”

Of course Lisa knows what Andy Grove of Intel used to say. It was something like ONLY THE PARANOID SURVIVES. Which puts him on even footing with Gates, Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Evil Emperors.

“Well, I survive”

Pretty Woman is in the bath tab, headphones on, doing a cover version for James Brown. Jimbo has a warm feeling, which goes something like this: Prostitution should be subsidized, because it makes young girls so happy and gives them such opportunities. Of course he’s not aware of those warm feeling he has towards Pretty Woman, because these are the feelings he should be feeling towards Lisa, who pecks him on his left ear, and keeps talking to whoever she’s taking to. And looking at him like he’s a pervert Peeping Tom. Jimbo knows when he’s not wanted. He puts his PalmHead on. Pretty Woman, meanwhile, is in the middle of being surprised by the entrance of her client to the bathroom. Her Walkman headphones on, she murders a James Brown classic. He looks at her like a proud father. Only he’s going to end up doing things no proper father should do to his daughter. Jimbo clicks it off. Lisa doesn’t even notice. She gets up and moves away from him. With a little peck on the cheek, and a motherly smile. Strange, that. If she’s a mother, what is he supposed to do with her? Who needs another mother anyway? Keep developing the idea. Since there’s no father in the house, mother takes father roll. Which makes mother roll vacant. Which brings Lisa in. Leave it at that. Jimbo doesn’t even formulate it all into words. He doesn’t even know about this particular train of thoughts. All he knows is his new mother figure is gone, but she’ll be back soon, because she gave him a reassuring smile, the kind Mother Theresa used to give him when she left him on the carpet to answer the phone, when he was three years old. Of course he doesn’t code that info either. So he just makes sure the PalmHead sits tight, headphones cover the ears properly (a bit of a problem with his particular design) and goggles don’t slip of the bridge of his nose. Now he’s ready to face the world.

Then Amanda Rosen gets to the point.

“So you’re alone now” Lisa looks sideways at the Palmheaded Jimbo. She sure is alone now.

“Yeah”

“Sure”

“What is this”

“Paranoia. You should try it. With Precious little Jim, perhaps”

Lisa looks at Jimbo again. He seems to enjoy himself. His right hand works the Minimouse, moving through the air and snapping his fingers. His left hand scratches his left ear. She looks at him proudly, and lovingly, equal measures.

“Mom, you actually hate the guy because he’s smart?”

“I don’t hate him. I love him if he makes you happy. I just don’t want him eavesdropping on us. Got something important, delicate to discuss with you.”

“It’s OK, mom. Speak up. I won’t tell a soul, not even the bum”

“What bum?”

“The one who always wants money in return for a piece of his mind”

Amanda seems to remember a character answering to that description. Not too many bums populate the streets of San Clemente.

“Do you ever give?”

“You nuts? I’ve got a mind and it doesn’t need any more pieces, thank you very much”

That’s my girl. Brought up just right.

“Hmm. Whatever it is he is, don’t tell him or anyone anything, please, Lis”

“Don’t worry, mom. I know what I’m doing”

“Or maybe you just could drop by the house? That’ll make me feel a whole lot safer”

“You sound like an Ad for birth control stuff”

“It’s not very different”

“Come on Mom, you’re Firewalled for chirssake.”

“It’s the P word, Lisa. Paranoia. You cannot be too paranoid”

“Well-”

“But I have to ask you something”

“Shoot then”

“It’s about fairness on House”

“There ain’t none. Why, should there be any?”

“Well, it’s not a question of should there be, but do we want there to be any”

“what?”

“Fairness”

There are two problems with the PalmHead.

One – it costs sixty thousand dollars. Down from three hundred the month before, but still a problem.

Two – it fries your brain. Problem number one is easy. There are many organizations in the world only too happy to help out. Jimbo chose the Iraqi secret service. He figured, with their track record, a PalmHead is a small price to pay, to help in a crisis situation. And sitting in Lisa Rosen’s living room watching Pretty Woman while she’s out VC’ing her mom IS a crisis situation.

As for problem two, well, frying your brain is not entirely bad for you, if you stop and think about it. If ten minutes a day of Brain Frying costs you, say, 5 IQ points, it’s still not a bad deal in the long run. And you live only once, on average. Some people live more then once, of course, but then again, some people don’t have a life.

“What’s fairness got to do with what House is all about?” Lisa is a little worried about her mother.

“What IS House all about, Lis? What do you think?”

“Mom, are you ill? What brought all that about?” All this talk about fairness is nothing short of alarming.

“Well, maybe it’s got to do with fairness as a tool for making money. That makes more sense to you?”

“Making money makes sense to me, yeah. That’s more like you. You’re not joining the Communist party or anything”

“What Communist party exactly”

“What’s so unfair in House that prevents you from making money?”

With a virtual 21 inch screen life is much more comfortable. You can run the Matchmaker Simulator, to show big lists, and still you can have some entertainment. With the Minimouse you can control the Palm pseudo 21 inch screen, by simply raising your hand away from it. It might be a bit uncomfortable, but, you can also put the Palm a little farther, and leave your Minimousing hand where it is. Entertainment, then. He opens up a window to the Simpson channel, the Laker Channel, the Disaster channel and brings the Damian Young backbeat on, just to justify the headphones. Driven by Damian Young’s power chords, the headphones seem to jump up and down on Jimbo’s ears. Bart Simpson, still ten years old, still surfing the Net while on his skateboard, and still doing PRB, hacks into the Nuclear plant’s intranet, just to see what his dad’s up to. Of course he sees a button saying “Do not click this button, unless on emergency” and of course he clicks it. And of course the reactor’s core melts, and of course his father gets blamed for it. Green stuff pours out of the plant’s steel gates, and half of the United States of America is in the process of evacuation (although the people of Springfield take it in their stride, as they are immuned, thanks to years of being exposed to stuff coming out of Homer Simpson’s shirt) while Bart keeps on skateboarding on. Then he’s on a collision course with Mr. Burns, but he doesn’t notice it, because he’s occupied by the Press the Right Button button that flickers and says: Press me. So he – Bart – presses the Press the Right Button button, and disappears along with the whole of Springfield, giving way to a Press the Right Button session. Of course, PRB paid three million to make that happen. When the session gets hot, and the girl’s hand reaches a particular point of interest, which almost makes Jimbo stop coding and actually pay attention, up pops Marge Simpson with a seductive smile and radiant green hair. Well, Fox paid PRB six million for THAT to happen. Which doesn’t bother Jimbo at all, because he’s busy with the list box. One of the items on the SONG DC list is ABOUT. Interesting. One smart Virtual User must have created a SONG DC that gives you a chance to find songs ABOUT whatever. He presses on that, just out of curiosity. There’s another huge list. Of all the things about which there are songs, apparently. He scrolls it aimlessly. LOVE. A few thousand items. Up again. DREAMS. He clicks on that one. ALL I HAVE TO DO IS DREAM. CALIFORNIA’S DREAMING. DAY DREAM BELIEVER. DREAM A LITTLE DREAM ON ME. DREAMS. DREAM LOVER. DREAM WEAVER. And so on. He goes back to ABOUT, and checks its MC (Mother Category) list. ARTICLES, BOOKS, FILMS, GAMES SONGS, RESEARCHES. and so on. Not bad for a virtual user, he finds himself saying.

On the Laker channel Jack Nicholson breaks his Head Cam. And it’s not even during a game, just a press conference.

“Well, it’s just a thought. There’s this Vulture”

“The one you think his style is – “

“Yeah, that’s the one. Well, he wrote a letter in Housewatch. On Bring The House Down.”

“Whines he’s better then his rating”

“A bit of that, but more. You seen it?”

“Don’t remember”

“Well, he compares House to the World at large and to the software business in particular. It’s a bit wild. If the House equals the world, Then The Man equals Bill Gates, he says”

“That’s not a bad comparison. Does he mean by that that money makes crap players win?”

“Something like that”

“Well, how did they make their money in the first place? They didn’t inherit it. They won it. F&S.”

“That’s what I was thinking”

“And? Just another Whining Commie. A good player, I’ll give him that, but out of his depth. That’s all. No more no less. If he’s any good he’ll be The man himself, beat him at House, I mean.”

Amanda looks at her daughter on the screen and says nothing for a second or so. Just like those Agent Pauses Stan the Man used to insert in the right portion of the Welcome Speech. At Ringleader.

Now that Jimbo has got his PalmHead on, things are beginning to rock. For starters, the Palm screen becomes a 21 inch with EGUI on it.

“You see, Lis, this Vulture character makes one point that I for one couldn’t ignore. He says that we could incorporate an equity element into House.”

“What on earth?”

“We should ask the players to reveal their credit limit, better still, their networth, and then play something he calls Relative House or, better still, Real House”

Lisa doesn’t like the sound of it.

“There are a few obstacles that come to mind and I’m not even sure I see where this is going.”

“Well, here goes. Every player on Real House – or whatever we call it – declares his Networth.”

“How can we know-”

“Hold that thought. Every player comes in with his life savings. When a player of ten million meets a player of ten thousand they play level. For every dollar player B puts on the table, player A has to put a thousand dollars.”

Lisa begins to suspect her mother’s sanity. Next she’ll be playing RealHouse against bums in street corners. And take away their shoe laces.

“And that’s fair?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But what it does, they both play for their life. And if the little guy wins everything, then he becomes big. What Vulture suggests is that The Man, the Real Man, not the one who calls himself that, is the one who risks, and wins, a bigger slice of his own networth. The one who puts his House on the table. Every time.”

Lisa’s mind is racing now. Nobody is safe. But who in their right mind would -

“And I know who the Man is. Our Man.” Amanda says, which throws another spanner into Lisa’s works.

“What do you mean?”

“I know who The Man is. In real life”

“What? Who? How did you find out?”

“I’ll tell you next time we do Ringleader together”

“I’m not looking for a husband with you” Lisa takes hold of the conversation now, with the most obvious question.

“How do we know if someone’s telling the truth about their Networth?”

“Same as we do now. Let them try.”

True enough. Try to pull one over House, and you start bleeding zeroes. Or so one is led to believe. Nobody, to Lisa’s knowledge, have tried. Yet.

“And we take one percent. Of the money passing hands. As always” Amanda makes the point.

Sounds good. We will create quite a few new millionaires, and, with luck, strip a few old millionaires off their millions.

“Mom” Lisa says “I think we should look into it.”

But Amanda Rosen has another plan. She knows – if behavior patterns are anything to go by – that it’s high time The Man came to visit the House. Maybe we can drop a hint to the Vulture, when that happens. Give him a chance to play the Man. At normal House. Now if he – Vulture – wins That, well, maybe then we’ll create his RealHouse thing. So HE has the chance to lose big.

“Mom?”

“Oh, sorry, dear. Miles away. So what do you think?”

Jimbo is quite impressed with the way the virtual users have constructed their web of C’s. He looks at ABOUT again. Clicks SC. Sister Categories of ABOUT. There’s ON. And CONCERNING. He looks sideways and sees a shade of Lisa’s face, still tailing to her mom, but she’s miles away. He goes back to the list box, now containing SC’s of ABOUT. He clicks on the ABOUT, then on DC. A list of ABOUT Daughter Categories. It has a few tens of thousand items on it. Now. Even a virtual piece of code can see that ABOUT can Mother anything at all. Now, if you are human, you look at a list like that and you kick your computer. THIS is what he wanted to fix in the first place.

THE WORLD CATEGORY BANK

Lisa is staring at the World Category Bank. Not the Virtual bank – the one created by the virtual users – The real one. And the Bank is empty. Jimbo is sitting next to her, scratching his head. No sign of dandruff, Lisa thinks. Interesting. She thought dandruff was the hallmark of a future software baron. Before PR takes over. Sometimes even after. Some bring white powder to spray on their client’s head before an important appearance.

“Jimbo” she says “I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but your Bank is empty”

“Of course it’s empty. It will be filled up by the users”

“Which users?”

“The users that will buy, or download the system.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Do what?”

“Download”

“Because” and he stops. He looks at his older girlfriend or whatever she is and the look just hangs there. Strange question, that. Why would anybody want to use an empty bank.

“That’s a good question, Lisa” Which is one good question among many. The kind of relationship they are having at the moment is another question, or a set of questions. Here is this twenty year old bright and beautiful girl, Woman really, and well off too, and here is a fifteen year old geek. And they’re an item. And neither of them ever stops to think whether there’s anything in this Itemship, and if there is, then what.

“You know the drill, Lisa. Matchmaker is a system where you can find anything and offer anything”

“Based on what?”

“Based on the World Category Bank’

“Which is empty” she says. A bit like the thing we’re having, is an extension to that sentence which they both could share, without words.

“The users will fill it up, as they go along. “

“What users?”

“Those who sign up.”

“Why would they sign up?”

“Because it’s the best thing to find anything in”

Lisa looks at him, and he looks back at the three monitors on which he’s reshaping the interface to the World Category Bank. None of which is the monitor Lisa was looking at.

“Jimbo”

“What?”

“You’re not listening” She puts a hand on his shoulder, then squeezes. It hurts a little.

“I’m all ears”

He’s all ears all right. Only his attention is on something else. He’s changing the interface to the WCB. On the Simulator.

“It will be worth your while if you listened to me more often” Lisa says and gives the ear a little twist.

The list box gets two view options now:

*Alphabetically

*By Popularity.

Big lists should be able to be viewed by popularity. In other words, the most used items on the list should be on top. This will help finding useful and wanted items, especially on lists such as the DC of ABOUT. Which are lists of everything.

Jimbo isn’t sure where to stick the two buttons, or maybe whether to make them one, or maybe two tick boxes. Or one. Or maybe hide it under the bonnet. Which means another thing for the poor user to know about. He tries a few options. The screen is getting too full. Too many options, the user’s learning curve gets steeper. How about, if the number of items on the list exceeds a certain amount, the tick box, or radio button, or whatever, pops up? If so, can the user decide what that certain number should be? Some people like to scroll a 100 items list, others can’t handle 20? But if they can adjust that number, well, here’s another feature to learn, and another inch to the learning curve.

How about the list being shown TWICE, simultaneously? Or maybe –

It’s a loop. And here’s Lisa with another loop.

“So why would they sign up?”

“Who?”

“The users. Why would they sign up? If the bank is empty, that is”

“That’s the loop right there” He concedes. His fingers still dragging and dropping radio buttons and tick boxes.

“If you stop D&Ding, and start listening to me, for a change, you might be able to -”

“I AM listening. It’s a loop. You’re RIGHT” The list box is left as it is. Lisa has a point. She always has a point, and he’d better give her more then the five percent attention.

He has been on to it for quite some time now. Of course it’s a bit like the chicken and egg thing. What came first. Like who would buy the first telephone, or who would buy the first television before any broadcasting. Or who would build a web site when there’s no one with a browser around. All those situation are ancient history, of course. He was born into a Webbed world. But guess what. A telephone network got of the ground. And so did television. And the Web. It will sort itself out. Or not.

“Jimmy”

“what”

“Do you love me?”

“Course”

“How do I know that?”

“You don’t. You just take my word for it”

He’s smiling that silly shy sort of a smile that caught her eye in the Internet Cafe, Linky or whatever the name was.

“What is love then?” she asks. Would be nice to have a good organized-Jimboized answer to THAT.

“It’s one of the terms that are flexible enough to use in any context. Like – “

And he kisses her on the cheek. Just like that.

“Correction”

And he zeroes on her lips. It takes some courage to do that, but he’s OK. He’s just trying to drive a point home. One of the ways with which to demonstrate the meaning of love.

“I guess that would pass for love in some quarters”

Lisa is taken. She thinks, yeah. Good boy. I love you. It’s confusing. There are so many question marks, so much uncharted territory, for both, but they feel so comfortable in each other’s company, it’s embarrassing. Like a husband and wife. Seven years in. Make that seventeen. Part of the furniture. She’s thinking birds and bees now and again. Throw him on the sofa and just make him do it to her, like a man should. It’s not exactly legal, but who’s gonna know. She thought he could look really handsome if she blurred the vision a little bit. The spots become invisible, nearly, and narrowing the field of sight makes the whole Jimbo image a little more LANKY. Which is the sort of male she would normally go for. The same goes for those EARS. But Jimbo’s brain sort of radiates the space between them and becomes emotion. Thinking about it she finds it weird.

“Jimmy, if you’re looking for love on Matchmaker. Will you find it?”

“Eventually”

“But say I want love NOW”

“Do you?”

Of course she wants love now. But he’s too young. She dives in.

“Just suppose”"

“OH” He’s a bit disappointed, but relieved.

“Well, if you want love then you go to the WCB and type it in. If it ain’t there you create it. Next think someone out there who has love to give goes to the WCB and finds you. That’s it. The Bank creates itself. You saw how it worked with VU (that’s the Virtual Users). I thought you were on pace with it, Lis.”

“Well, I like to ask silly questions. You should try that sometime. Ask the first superdumb Q that comes to your mind. You’d be surprised how well directed such a question can be.”

“Fire away then”

“Well, you, we, want to release Matchmaker into the world with an empty WCB, in the hope that the world will fill it up for us, right?”

“Yeah. For itself, too”

“Well, I think that’s stupid”

“Fine. So Alex Graham Bell was stupid. And Tim Berners Lee was stupid. But, hey, telephone emerged, and the Web emerged, and – “

“That’s still stupid” Lisa doesn’t think Jimbo is stupid. But if he thinks that every good idea would flourish just because it’s a good idea, well - ” It just that I think you should recruit, or hire, a group of people, maybe ten or twenty, or even fifty, and make them create the basis of the Bank. Give it a jump start”

“If you could elaborate”

“A jump start. Something for the world to hook into”

“They’ve got enough to hook into. There are tons of search engines they can hook to. We need something fresh. Virgin”

“Did you say Virgin?”

“Yeah”

“Right. Forget that. You need to fill the bank. Hire people and start pumping”

“What, just write categories, and Mother and Daughter them? And Sister them?”

“Exactly. Twenty people writing 10,000 categories a day and linking them should give you a good basis after a couple of months”

Jimbo shuts his eye for a moment, horrified by the picture of rows and rows of low life, doing the donkey work. He tries to imagine himself going to someone he knows – say Charlie Burlow who shares a monitor with him when he bothers to go to school – and giving him the job description. And what does he pay such a life form? Probably what they use to pay cashiers at supermarket. When there WERE cashiers at supermarkets. When there WERE supermarkets. That last thought was jumping the gun. But Supermarkets with people sitting at tills and scanning products ARE a rarity. And then Lisa’s gaze demands some sort of a reply, so he gives her one.

“I think I see what you mean. They like take the Oxford dictionary and open at page one and take the first word, I don’t know, Abortion (what?) Well, it would be in the first page, wouldn’t it, then think: What’s a Mother C of Abortion, hmm, Procedure and Operation, and Delivery, and then look for Daughter C’s like, hmm, Against Will, Natural, great. That’s Abortion done. Next. A, A, Aboriginal. MC – People, Tribe, and so on etceteras. Hell. Whatever. I give up. That’s what you had in mind?”

“Yeah, something along this line” Lisa is getting into it big time. “Then they can get into specialization”

“What’s that?”

“Say they deal with cars”

“Deal?” Jimbo has a picture of a fat smug car dealer, which doesn’t sit with the population he imagined. “But they aren’t car people. They’re just simple people building the bank”

“Simple” Lisa confirms.

“What do you mean DEAL with cars?”

“You know, they create the part of the bank that handles cars”

“Right. Of course. Go on”

“Then they have to deal with technicalities, and parts, and model, things like that” Lisa’s voice is cool and collected, but Jimbo feels a great urgency in the background. There’s no doubt about it. She’s a visionary.

“So they can use help for that. From car dealers or car manuals, or whoever. Anyway”

“Why would anyone help?”

“Bear with me, dear boy”

Jimbo bears with her. He enjoys the bearing.

“After a good half year we have a real World Category Bank”

“We have nothing. Nobody can get anything even remotely-”

“The bank will be nowhere near complete, it can NEVER be, but it will have a good basis. People will subscribe to Matchmaker because they will feel there’s something there. They type ‘Car’ and it’s there. If they want to sell their car, someone looking for a car is at the other end waiting. Because they typed ‘Car’ and it was there. And they typed it because they knew someone else has typed “Car”, because it’s there. Ad infinitum like”

She’s right, Jimbo thinks. She’s got it.

“Of course nobody can write a comprehensive Bank. That’s the whole idea of the bank, isn’t it? It’s never complete, by definition. But if there’s a solid base people will feel the need to add to it.”

“Why?”

“Well, because we can make it worth their while.”

“What, money?”

“Yeah, we can make people want to improve on the WCB by offering money for improvements.”

“Hold that thought right there” Jimbo never thought about the business model before, not really. Does Lisa have any concrete plan?

“I’ve got a plan, In my head right here. I’ll just have to sit down with myself and work it out.”

“It’s funny, what you just came up with, with the group of WCB builders” Jimbo is up from his chair, waving his hands in the air like windmill in the middle of a twister “We don’t have to pay them.”

Lisa knows where he’s coming from.

“Like you said about the users. Same diff. Every person, company, whatever, which makes a contribution to the bank, will reap a reward in the future. These people will just make a small – or big, depends on them - investment of time and effort, and they’ll be rewarded when the whole world will be using their stuff!”

Jimbo is dancing on the table, figure of speech. “That what you had in mind?”

“Something like that” And she smiles a smile that her namesake who posed for Leonardo De Vinci would have been proud of. Mysterious and penetrating. And following your gaze without actually moving. Which was quite an achievement considering video was not an option in the sixteenth century. Have a look at the Mona Lisa sometime. It’s everywhere on the Net.

“Lisa, you’re a genius.”

“Thought you had the brains, and me the looks”

“Well, you DO remind me of Mona Lisa, what with that know-it-all smile. But you’re a brainbox as well”

“Guess if we operate this way there’s no need for money. At all. Or not as much as we thought” Lisa is still keeping the Mona Lisa pose. As Jimbo is pacing up and down building a Moneyless business model is constructed before her eyes, which are follows him, while her face doesn’t. Calm is what she personifies

“Mr. Bright sticks his Digi ID on a link, say, Love -MC – Emotion, and when somebody will be looking for Love via Emotion, Cling! one Digicent is deposited in Mr. Bright’s Account. And then someone else looks for Love/Emotion, and Click! Another cent. Mr Bright can be a very rich man if he creates the popular links. Hurry Hurry or somebody else will create the good links. The early bird” Jimbo’s mind is locomoting and he’s commentating live as the thoughts are been formulated, very much the way his buddy Billy does when inspiration takes him.. And Lisa just sits there, smiling. Very much unlike her.

“What’s with the smile?” He stops pacing.

“You know.”

“You thought all that and you’re one step ahead? Like a script that writes itself?”

She smiles, actually it’s the same smile as before, but when you look at a smiling face several times who’s to say that a smile is the same. He feels like he’s a puppet on a string, like he was an actor in her play. And he likes it. And doesn’t, at the same time.

“I guess your mom can relax a bit” She finally says, maybe the muscles of her lips are getting numb, or something “No need for all this dance with the VC people.”

“She wasn’t dancing. She wasn’t going to give anything away.”

“That’s what she told you? But she’s in the opinion that we need money- tons of it – or we go belly up. Right? Where is she going to get the money?”

He isn’t going to get into the Mom V. G.friend mortal combat again.

“I’ll tell you. I offered to bring MY mom in. My MOTHER for crying out. She should trust my mother.”

“She will, maybe. A bit of time. I mean you don’t trust HER. Do you? And she’s MY mother.”

“I trust your mother. I think She’s got drive, and she’s got guts. But she’s got to face fact. If you want to get financing you’ve got to give something away.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. If our – Your – idea is workable, then who needs five millions or whatever she said we needed? A few hundred grand would keep us floating nicely.”

“So?”

“So maybe she’s got foresight that says don’t rush out to get VC money, maybe we’ll manage. Right?”