Chapter 3

TimK — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:00:00 -0700

Clyde made her way past the convicts and accused, each seated at a table. All were dressed in orange prison garb. Some conversed with visitors, each seated across from an inmate. Others were waiting for someone like Clyde, someone from the outside, to pay attention to them. None smiled. Old lighting fixtures hung from the cracked ceiling, as did drab, green walls. The room smelled like a government school or a town hall.

Clyde at first didn’t recognize her friend. Mira looked battered, her hair, slightly disheveled. Bags hung from her eyes, and her cheeks sagged. She looked beaten down, run down, older. Then she noticed Clyde, and that all changed. Her face lit up like the full moon on a clear night, and Clyde suddenly felt light and energetic. Clyde wanted to run up to her, hug her, and plant a kiss firmly on each cheek. And she would have, too, except she knew it was against the rules.

Instead, Clyde sat and smiled, and she calmly and quietly said, “Hey, you. Weren’t we supposed to do this at Bertucci’s?”

“Ah, but this place provides much better service,” Mira joked. ”Bertucci’s doesn’t frisk you on the way in.”

Clyde grinned, but the lightness of the moment had left her. Her teeth clenched.

“Sorry,” Mira said. “Not so funny, I guess.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Better me than Ike.”

“What’s going on with him?” Clyde asked. She knew how Mira felt about Ike.

“What do you mean? How much did Ted tell you?”

“Not much. Nothing, really. Only the official version, same as the press release.” Clyde wondered what Ted could have told her. What did Ted know about a woman’s feelings?

“Any more news on that?”

Clyde was confused for a moment. “The press release. No. It went out, but no one seems to care. The only thing worse than being lambasted is being ignored.”

“You’d think we’d be used to it by now,” Mira said.

“So what’s with Ike? He turns state’s evidence on you? You should have seen Michael smoking at the ears!”

“Michael’s jealous of Ike’s butt,” Mira said.

“Hey, I’m jealous of Ike’s butt!” Clyde giggled.

“What do you mean? Ted’s is nice, too,” Mira said sweetly.

Clyde was aghast in mock indignation. “You just keep you’re eyes where they belong, okay?”

“Oh, that’s right. It’s almost Wednesday.”

Clyde widened her eyes and dropped her jaw. “Well, when was the last time you got any?”

Mira contemplated the question. “Too long ago,” she said. “But don’t you two have special plans for tonight?”

“Why should we?” Clyde asked.

“Birthday sex,” Mira said.

Clyde giggled. “I don’t think so. But maybe if throw him a party, I can drive him to sleep on the couch.”

“That’ll teach him,” Mira said. “He can watch all those depressing retrospectives on TV. Why doesn’t Ted like birthdays?”

“I don’t know. He thinks they’re stupid. I think birthdays are just too sentimental for his tastes.”

“How old is he?” Mira asked.

“Forty,” Clyde answered.

“That’s a milestone!” Mira said. “Are you sure you’re not going to have birthday sex?”

Clyde wanted to change the subject. “Is that what this thing with Ike is about?”

“What?”

Clyde wondered how she could say it without seeming boorish. “I mean, did you— and Ike? You know…”

“Oh.” Realization washed over Mira’s face. “You mean, did we have sex?”

“Well…”

Mira smiled sweetly again. “What’s with you?”

Clyde just blushed.

“No, nothing like that. It’s just…” She paused. “No, nothing.”

“But what was with him getting into a fight with Chief Beady-eyes? And now—”

“I wouldn’t call it a fight. More like Baedes was beating up on him. That’s probably what it was, too. Come on, the guy’s as harmless as a fruit fly.”

Clyde shook her head. “I still don’t get it? Do you think Baedes beat him up into finking?”

Mira’s expression turned vacant. She stared off into space.

Now Clyde regretted asking. “He’ll never get away with it,” she reassured her friend, craning her head to see into Mira’s eyes. “I promise.”

Mira turned back toward her friend. She spoke cautiously. “Thanks, Clyde. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But please leave Ike alone.”

“I meant Beady-eyes,” Clyde said.

Mira stared back. She just looked angry and sad.

“He’s gotta be behind it,” Clyde continued. “We’ll figure it out and get him.”

Mira’s eyes narrowed. “Oh damn. And why don’t you repeal the law of gravity while you’re at it?”

Clyde said nothing.

Mira continued. “You know, I’ve never admitted this to anyone before. I’ve been thinking about this for awhile.”

Mira’s tone got Clyde’s attention.

“You know, this whole thing started with Lando Benitez. Poor guy, wrong ancestry, gets caught sitting in his car in the wrong part of the wrong town. The cops rough him up, arrest him, trash his car, and for the privilege, they stiff him hundreds of dollars he can’t afford in bogus fees and fines. You’d think it was just some clueless jerks with uniforms and badges, who need a judge to remind them of the Fourth Amendment, right? After all, there are some of those in every city. But no, they actually get the judge to side with them. And then when poor Lando can’t pay, they harass him, arrest him, and charge him again.

“This was back before there were any of us to even help. And Lando was still able to get out within hours. Back then, if I had realized how much higher the stakes were going to get…”

Mira shook her head. “This whole situation is just so screwed up. I don’t belong here. I don’t even know why I am here. It’s not doing any good. I’m not helping anybody, and I… I just feel like a fool.” She regarded Clydene. “And now I’m pissing off my best friend.”

“Hey, you,” Clyde said tenderly. “You’re not a fool, and it’s not your fault. And you’re not pissing off your best friend.”

Mira’s face remained expressionless.

Clyde said, “Please, continue venting.”

“That’s okay. The venting is over. Thanks for listening.”

“Always, Mira.”

Clyde had collected about a teaspoon of cumin in her palm. Now, she tossed it into the chili pot, muscled a wooden spoon through the thick stew, raised the spoon to her lips, blew on it until it was cool, and tasted.

She stopped a moment to consider the flavor. “Mm. Just about right,” she said out loud, to herself. “Just spicy enough, but it’s missing a bit of twang.”

She stirred in several more grinds of black pepper and a dash of ground mustard seed. All the while, she hummed a tune she made up on the fly, a jazzy number patterned on a 12-bar blues. She tasted again.

“Yes. Perfect,” she said.

She lidded the pot, opened the oven, and with two sturdy oven mitts carefully placed the pot into the oven. She always cooked chili—or any type of stew—in the oven, not on the stovetop, because that was the easiest way to control the temperature, to cook it slowly and evenly. In Clydene’s hands even this simple peasant stew was gourmet cuisine, a dish to be fine-tuned and pored over. But now that the fine-tuning was done, all that was left to pore over was a sink full of dirty dishes. She would check back every hour or so to peek in and stir. But otherwise, now she just felt like resting.

Clyde turned on the kitchen faucet, squeezed out a dab of soap into one hand, took a splash of water in the other, and scrubbed the two into a thick lather. She thought it was such a fine metaphor, soap and water. Sometimes you can’t stop the devil from touching your life. All you can do is to work up a froth of tears and wrath, of drizzle and ooze, of sadness and anger. She rinsed away the slippery, sudsy residue and wished she could do he same in real life.

Clyde plodded into the den, wiping her wet hands on her jeans. She flopped down on the couch. She had hoped cooking would have taken her mind off of her troubles. And it had, but only temporarily. Again, her mind was as stuck as always. She had visited Mira in jail many times but would never get used to it. Seeing her without makeup, without stylish clothes, with that ugly bruise made this proud and beautiful woman seem homely, diminutive. Many people didn’t understand the bond between Clyde and Mira. They were like two sides of a coin. One heads, the other tails. One in the limelight, the other in the shadows. One a people person, the other a fact person. One a natural-born leader, the other coming into leadership only now in her late thirties.

But they had more in common than they were different. They were both quick on the draw. When Mira decided to put together this protest, she was making arrangements even before the idea was complete in her head. That was Clydene’s life, always deciding at the last minute what to work on next, or what to do, or what to make for dinner. But they were also both perfectionists, always tweaking everything to make it better. You kinda have to be that way when you’ve only partially thought through what you’re doing. That’s not to say that Clydene thought quickly on her feet. The phrase “unanticipated situation” to Clydene was terrifying, because it meant “stressed out, stammering, and saying something stupid.”

But Mira and Clyde both drew rapid conclusions based on little information. And they were both usually right, at least with anything they knew about. Yes, Clyde had made bum predictions before. Like when she predicted the outcome of the 2000 presidential election; her prediction was not even close to what really happened. But tell her about a software system you’d like her to design, and she understood the architecture of it even before you finished, and long before there were any architectural diagrams on paper. In music, Clyde could tell you exactly what notes to play to make your song sound better, having heard it only once.

Mira was like that, but with people instead of things. Mira did successfully predict the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, right down to the battle over Florida. She didn’t predict the hanging chads, but once they had been mentioned in the news, Mira knew immediately what would happen next. Nothing surprised her. Mira could read through a press release and tell you exactly how it would be received, and by which groups of readers. That’s why she loved working with Michael; she almost never had to ask him to revise his press releases. Or she could read a news story and immediately see opportunities to leverage it for PR, opportunities that no one else ever saw.

Given the current situation, Clyde didn’t feel like thinking about her friend, because it frustrated her and angered her. That’s why she felt like cooking. Now, however, she met a giant lull in the cooking process. And she was again thinking of all that bothered her. Maybe it was time to tend to those dirty dishes.

Clyde leaned forward and grabbed the TV remote from the coffee table. Click. Within a few seconds, the Mythbusters appeared on the screen, trying to find the fastest way to cool a 6-pack of beer to 40 degrees.

“Ooh! Is this the Baghdad battery episode?” Clyde said to nobody in the room. “That was a nasty trick Tori and those guys played on Adam.”

She set the remote back down on the table and picked up a magazine. On the cover was a giant colorized green and orange photo of a retrovirus. The headline read, “Computer Viruses Strike Back: How a new breed of computer virus is terrorizing today’s office.” She had bought the magazine on a whim, now opened it, and began to read the article. Apparently, hackers were now imbuing their email worms with artificial intelligence, allowing them to hide themselves. Yeah, right, she thought. It sounded too fantastic to be accurate. Besides, she still hated the word “hacker” in that context, even though most of the rest of the world had learned to accept it. Damn it, she herself was a hacker, a computer maestro, a wizard’s wizard. She could hack code with the best of them. Yet she had never cracked into a computer system.

Cracker was the correct term, because a cracker was someone who cracked into another computer system. But crackers didn’t write worms, and worms aren’t viruses. Two separate things, Clyde thought. And what this article was talking about was Trojan horses, not “email worms.” It was probably old technology, anyhow, easily blocked with any off-the-shelf virus scanner or personal firewall. If they really wanted to talk about computer security threats, they’d talk about cross-site scripting attacks, and XSS viruses.

She tried to read the article, but every time she got through a few sentences, her mind would go off on a tangent. She was just too keyed up, and not actually interested in the article. Still, she struggled to read it, probably because the alternative would be even more uncomfortable, even with the TV to distract her.

In the middle of all this, Gary called to complain about the QX project… Again. She muted the TV before picking up the phone. Gary said the software was malfunctioning. Except that the software was behaving exactly as they had specified. This was just the latest call in a long series of exasperating communiqués. She had repeatedly explained, if the computer wasn’t doing what he wanted it to, all he had to do was to tell her what he did want, and she would make the computer do it. And she did. And then he changed his mind without telling her about it. How can a company run this way? she thought. Oh, forgot. Government contract.

No, he said, it was still not working right. So Clyde stepped into her office and pulled up the latest specification on her computer. Unfortunately, Gary wasn’t at his computer. He doesn’t have a computer in his office? Where was he calling from? His car? She read him the corresponding part from the spec, but if that isn’t what he wants, she can change it to do whatever he wants, as long as he explains what he wants. Yes, he agreed that what she read was all true, but that part of the specification didn’t apply in this particular case, and didn’t the spec say so? No, it didn’t. And if he had actually read it, Clyde thought, he might even know that. Good thing Clyde had an ongoing hourly contract with them, so she could charge thm for all the time she wasted going around in circles on this project, dancing with the project manager and business analyst. Otherwise, she’d be paying out of her own pocket for all this fun.

She said, “The behavior as it is now is what was specified. As I’ve explained, I’m happy to make the software do whatever you want. You just have to tell me exactly what you want.”

He said he’d have to get back to her. They hung up. This phone call was only the latest volley in a long chain of pointless complaints, and Clyde was beginning to wonder whether she’d be working on the project very much longer, or whether it would be worth it if she did.

The QX project was fun to work on. That is, she got to play with some interesting technology. She even got to meet interesting people, on the few occasions she visited the client’s site for meetings. But Clyde began to wonder whether it was turning her into less of a human being. She worked on this project as a sub-contractor for a government contractor. The project itself was a workflow application being deployed in a number of local government offices, including those in Abe’s Turn. It helped government employees keep government records and do their jobs.

That was the ultimate irony. Clyde was doing business, indirectly, with the very people against whom she passionately fought. Fought, not hated. Even in her mind, she avoided the word hate, because hate was far too weak a word to describe what she felt. She honestly believed these people were going to hell. Not all of them, but a few at least. They surely were not making it to heaven. She knew this, because of the bible story, about the rich, young ruler.

The rich, young ruler comes to Jesus, asks him what he needs to do to make it to heaven. Jesus tells him to follow all the commandments. He replies that he’s done that since he was little. Okay, so Jesus tells him the only other thing he needs to do is to sell everything he has, give it to the poor, and then follow him. The guy can’t do it and walks away, sad. Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “Verily, I say unto you, it’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a politician to get into heaven.” Or words to that effect.

But with regard to the QX project, Clyde calmed her conscience by pushing it off to the side. She was not, after all, doing evil. She was merely providing technology that could be used for good or for evil. That some people would use it to execute evil or misguided actions, was that her fault? Occasionally, however, her conscience refused to shut up, and she wondered whether she was fooling herself. Some part of her knew that if God asked, she may not be able to justify herself in good conscience. And isn’t that what morality was all about?

Interestingly, these thoughts plagued her most at certain times, those times when what she accomplished were forgotten by the corporate machine, those times when corporate politics took precedence. When Clyde first worked with a larger corporation, she was surprised at how rabid the politics were. She delivered exactly what she was asked to deliver. Unfortunately, the project manager didn’t actually sign off on it, in writing. Then when one of the managers at the client complained, they blamed her for reneging on the contract. From then on, she got specifications in writing, and kept written records of all communications with the client. And she used these things as political ammunition. She very quickly learned how to blame someone else, even though it made her feel slimy, dirty, sick to her stomach. And Clyde sometimes felt being in this situation made her less of a human being, because she couldn’t trust her co-workers, even though they were all on the same team.

Despite her quiet, reserved demeanor, Clyde enjoyed working with and trusting others. And situations that involved big-company politics tore her in two. On one side, she trusted; on the other, she was logical. The trustworthy side, versus the cold side. The person who stuck up for others and what was right, versus she who was crudely practical about getting the job done. In Clyde’s mind one side was not better than the other. She had always lived with both, learned to respect both, to value and admire both equally. And she hated when the two were in disharmony, when she felt she was being forced to choose one or the other.

And too many clients did force her to choose. Big corporations had built-in lethargy and in-fighting that kept them from accomplishing anything. Stupid. And so they hired her to get the job done. Then they put roadblocks in her way and dragged her into their fights. Stupid. Big companies are stupid. As Professor Bernardo de la Paz said in one of Clydene’s favorite novels, “More than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better—and one is perfect for a job one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.” Or a few strong women.

But Clyde didn’t see herself as one of those few strong women. Yes, she had the drive and the initiative. But she was a technology person, not a people person.

Clyde stood from her chair in her office and began to return to the den and her TV show, now almost over.

They really were clueless. You’d think a government project would be constructed with more care. But QX was designed merely according to predominant industry standards, which means what it sounds like: a piece of crap. The software was full of bugs, and the project team just accepted it. There was little oversight over the development process. This caused issues with the project, and any of them could become a problem at any time. And QX was even connected to the Internet. What if some Internet cracker got in? Theoretically, there could even be saboteur on the project team.

Rather than a government project, QX was run more like a government contract, which it was. Naturally, the project was plagued with cost overruns and schedule slips. As a result, corners were cut. The first thing to go was the test plan, because test plans take time. It’s much quicker to throw software together and ship it without testing it, without knowing whether it actually works. But at least they peer-inspected the code, right? Are you kidding? That would use up several man-hours a day. Who had time for that? They didn’t even do security background checks. After all, this wasn’t a stealth bomber they were building.

Good thing, too. Because Clydene had seen the code. The QX project had more holes than a colander. Ironically, all these holes could be plugged easily. But no one was willing even to pay for a security audit and come up with some safety guidelines. As she worked on the project, Clyde did what she could to fix problems and plug security holes. But she was just one engineer, and a mere sub-contractor at that. In order to fix QX, she needed help from the project team. But the project team did not care; Clydene had asked.

At least her mind was no longer dwelling on Mira.

Clyde picked up her magazine again. If only these reporters knew how bad it really was, what kinds of new-fangled threats there were on the Internet, and how vulnerable most software was to attack, especially corporate software. They would have another issue they could ignore, because it’s too complicated, as they claim, for the layman to understand.

Mira’s probable cause hearing went about as Murphy would have predicted. And this depressed Mira even more than she had been before the hearing.

Baedes testified, weaving a tale Stephen King would have admired. It involved a crazed woman, shouting obscenities and reaching for a weapon while she lunged at him. The judge asked almost as many questions as the prosecutor, which was a little odd. Maybe the D.A. was off his game. Baedes’s awesome presence on the stand indeed intimidated everyone in the courtroom, except the judge, Ted, and Mira herself. At least that was what Mira thought. Far from intimidating her, Baedes incensed her. Maybe that’s why he hated her so, because she was one of the only people he couldn’t bully.

Ike also testified for the prosecution, and perjured himself in the process. Mira feared for him for what could happen if it became known that he was lying under oath. Part of her just wanted to give up, in order to keep this truth secret. Ted seemed to have no such fear. He tried to break Ike’s story. But someone had thought his story through very carefully. There was no way to prove it was a tall tale. And Ike stoically maintained his version of the tale, even as Ted threw around words like friendship, betrayal, lies, and perjury.

Judge Spiller had no choice but to bind her over for trial. But Mira knew by looking at him that this is what he wanted to do, and he would have found a way to do it, no matter what the evidence was.

The Conscience of Abe’s Turn - Chapter 3 - Comments

Chapter 3