This is a pantser (i.e., coming up with it as we go along) NaNoWriMo novel. There will be technological intrigue ripped from the headlines, love, danger, betrayal, and horsies. That's all we can promise for now.

The FedEx van would crest the hill at exactly 11:13 a.m. (and 42 seconds, assuming no change in velocity) on Saturday morning, November 7. Emmeline had tracked its movements for weeks with an elegant little transmitter smaller than her thumbnail, since the last time the driver tossed a padded mailer full of delicate electronics onto her front steps rather than bringing it around to her pole barn workshop like she’d asked him to. She’d been nice about it.

“Brandon!” she called as the chubby young driver bounced toward his idling van. Brandon froze at the sound of her voice and looked around, abashed. Emmeline swung her hair onto one shoulder, smiled, and sauntered at him. The bottle blonde was hell on her hair, but it had a useful effect on men.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Meurtrier,” he said. “It looked like you weren’t home so I just ….” He made a weak flinging motion with the hand that had sent her package flying a few moments earlier. He pronounced her name Mur-treer, like most people in southern Montana, and he surely didn’t know what it meant. It wasn’t worth correcting him. He’d just butcher the name a different way. It wasn’t her real name anyway, just a convenient, privately amusing little nom de FedEx that didn’t match the fake name she’d used on the month-to-month lease.

“Oh, I have the car in the workshop for some re-calibration,” Emmeline explained. “Even if I’m not here, you can just come around. I’ve got a big mailbox attached to the outside now, so you have a place to put things.” She walked right up to the van as Brendan got in and rested her hand on the fender. He was smiling now with relief at her friendly reaction. They’d been down this road a time or two.

“You bet. That’s what I’ll do. Say, what are you working on in there? You restoring cars? I do some work like that. I have a ‘67 Camaro I’m working on.”

“You have a ‘67 Camaro?” Emmeline had trouble keeping the note of incredulity out of her voice. Brendan didn’t act like the kind of guy who was good with machines. The way he braked the van made her wince every time.

“Don’t act that surprised. My grandad left it to me. The old man hardly drove it, so it looks great, but everything in the engine dried out. My buddy’s helping me take stuff apart and soak it.”

“Your buddy, huh? He knows cars?”

“Oh yeah. He did the auto mechanics class at the Career Center when we were in high school.” Brendan lingered, leaning out the open driver’s door with one hand on his hip, one hand resting on the large sideview mirror, to keep the conversation going with Emmeline. “We’ll fix her right up.”

Emmeline’s heart ached for the Camaro. It deserved better than these clowns. “Well. Good luck with it.”

“You could come see it if you want. Hang on, I’ve got a picture.” Brendan clicked through the image files on his phone until a photo of a glossy black Camaro popped up. It sat in an alley in front of a row of dilapidated garages at the back of a seventies-era two-story apartment complex. On the far side of the alley, a large brown mutt had its paws up on a high chain-link fence, barking with all its teeth visible.

“It’s a beauty,” Emmeline conceded, “but I’m pretty busy here with my own projects.”

“You got a car you’re working on?” Brendan asked. His plump cheeks had gone pink with enthusiasm. He’d stay all day if she offered to show him around the place, like a puppy. She almost felt sorry for him, but there was no time in the schedule for that.

“Smaller engines,” she said. “Just some tinkering.”

Brendan’s gaze settled longingly on the pole barn. “Sounds like fun.”

“You have a good day!” Emmeline told him. She patted the hood with what she hoped was a final-sounding tap. She needed to get back to work. Another sixty seconds and she was going to have to tell chatty Brendan to get off her property.

As Brendan put the van into gear, Emmeline simply reached up and plucked a fallen leaf wedged under the windshield wiper. He never noticed the tiny magnetic object that slipped through her fingers and attached itself to the shallow well hidden by the wipers.

She monitored the van until she had established a clear pattern. On weekdays, the van followed a variety of routes with different drivers, judging by their speeds, braking distances, and other driving habits. Roadrunner pushed the envelope everywhere he went, accelerating to full speed even if there was a stop sign at the end of the next block and cornering so hard that Emmeline wondered if he didn’t go up on two wheels sometimes. Tweety drove with a series of bird-like starts and stops, never too fast but always jerky and unpredictable. And Brendan, of course, drove like he didn’t care at all, parking on grass or in front of wheelchair ramps, sometimes only slowing down for a drop-off. Emmeline assumed that must be when the target porch was in throwing distance. She was expecting Brendan to get fired eventually, so she needed to move quickly.

Saturdays were the consistent day. After driving bigger trucks all week, Brendan consistently chose or was assigned this smaller van for lightly loaded Saturday trips on the more rural route that sometimes brought him to Emmeline’s secluded door. It had happened every Saturday for the last five weeks. The van telemetry on this particular morning told her that Sloppy Brendan, as she had labeled his avatar, was behind the wheel again. He’d paid a visit to the mine headquarters to the south and was headed back toward Billings on I-90, right on schedule. Cruise control was on and Emmeline had calculated the exact drag on speed the hill climb would create. She stood at the west window of the pole barn and checked her laptop clock for synchronization as the white blob flashed in profile against the sky. Perfect timing.

As the van began the long descent down the biggest hill between Billings and the state line, Emmeline lowered one close-bitten fingernail to the Enter key.

“Now or never,” she said, and hit the key. The reaction was instantaneous. The van’s front right wheel locked up. Brendan, never sharp on the draw at the best of times, took a few seconds to respond as the van began to slow down on its own. Emmeline had counted on this. All Brendan needed to do to ride out her test safely was … nothing. He was good at that. The instant he woke up enough to slam on the brakes and try to steer off the road, the van started to fishtail. Emmeline, satisfied with the test, clicked another key and the van’s wheel released. Brendan’s steering wobbled a little, then he regained control and continued at a much lower speed.

Emmeline moused onto another window and clicked to open a suspended connection. “Demonstration successful,” she said.

From a dark room somewhere in Venezuela - she thought but wasn’t sure - a man’s voice said in an American accent: “Excellent. We’re ready for step two.”

#

Nick fired up the little quadcopter with a click of the remote control panel in his left hand. After driving to Red Lodge Mountain from Billings, he was weary, but exhilarated. The quadcopter was his own design, heavier than a commercial model the same size would be, but with much more thrust and almost twice the flight time. He used these features constantly to his advantage. As the little craft hummed into the air, Nick smiled and tugged his knitted cap down over his ears in the morning chill. The mountain rose into a light fog that threaded dreamlike through the pines and made the whole scene into a passage from a fantasy novel, misty with dragon breath.

Nick had recently added a USB port that allowed him to connect items that he wouldn’t dream of using on a commercial design. Once the copter got close enough to the cables, his face closed again. One misstep, and he’d have to go home. As the copter got nearer and nearer, he slowly flicked a small lever on the controller, his eyes never leaving the little bundle of spinning blades. The effect was immediate. The quadcopter seemed to leap towards the cable, then stayed on it. Nick slowly turned down the throttle, and though quadcopter flipped upside down, it held onto the cable.

“Whew,” he said softly. Mission accomplished.

“Whatcha plannin’ on doin’ now?” A voice behind him asked. Nick jumped slightly, but didn’t turn around until he had deactivated the electromagnet and brought the quadcopter back. The owner of the voice was a smaller, black-haired girl, about his age.

“Usually it’s polite to show yourself before saying something” he replied in an angrier tone than he felt. He didn’t mind Alice, but she’d only be a bigger pest if she knew that. She’d hung around their robotics club down in Red Lodge but he’d never paid any direct attention to her. She probably didn’t think he knew who she was. And he had no idea how she’d gotten up the mountain. He hadn’t heard another vehicle climb the winding gravel road. That sound was his early warning system to box up his experiments.

Alice grinned and grabbed the remote. “A little surprise never killed anyone.”

He shrugged. “True, but I wasn’t worried about myself, I was worried about the copter. It kinda took me a long time to build it.”

She nodded. “Could I see it?”

Nick grimaced and snatched back the remote. “Let me get it down.”

Alice pushed against his arm to watch exactly how he maneuvered the controls. She never needed explanations to figure out how anything worked. She just watched, and next thing he knew she’d be flying it better than he could. It was irritating, if he was honest.

“Let me try,” she urged.

“Hang on.”

When he had it loose from the cable, Nick handed over the remote and helped Alice guide it back to their feet.

“I’m Nick. What’s your name?” As if he didn’t know.

“Alice” she replied absent-mindedly, engrossed in studying the quadcopter up close. “I’ve never seen a quadcopter like this before.”

Nick grinned with sudden pride in spite of himself. “You never will. This is the only one. I built it myself.”

She looked up at him from where she was squatting next to the machine, fingering the blades in a way that made him nervous.

“You built this?”

“Um, yeah. I have a little too much spare time on my hands.”

Alice raised her eyebrows. “This is a little more than a hobby. You must have spent a huge amount of time on it. The way it latched onto that cable, that’s genius!”

Nick smiled, “Yeah. Anyway, what brings you up here? I come here because there’s so few people in the summer.”

She gestured vaguely downhill. “I rode my bike. I know some trails.”

“You didn’t take the road?” It was classic Alice to figure out a way to sneak up the mountain unseen and unheard. This girl needed some adult supervision.

“No.” Alice seemed to shrink slightly. “I… may have been following you a tiny bit.”

Nick stared at her. “You’ve been following me? Thanks? What is wrong with you? What do I say?”

Alice was bright red by now. “I just saw you flying one of your drones up at the fairgrounds once. I was intrigued.”

Nick looked around for a bicycle, but nothing was visible. Alice was too stealthy for that.

“What were you doing at the fairgrounds? It’s usually deserted over there.” I thought I might have a little privacy, he didn’t add.

Alice shrugged. “I wander around. My home life is unsatisfactory.”

“Breakfast Club,” Nick said. He’d seen the movie too. Alice would make a great understudy for the scruffy Ally Sheedy character. She didn’t acknowledge that he’d gotten her reference, just kicked at the dirt and circled the quadcopter to study a different angle. She was probably used to nobody understanding half of what she said … like he was.

Nick turned the remote over a few times in his hand. “I could show you how to do the cable trick if you want.”

Alice looked at him, unbelieving, then smiled for the first time. “You’d let me do it? Aren’t you worried I’ll break it?” He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. He would never be able to tell, he figured, not with the way she said everything while staring unblinking with those dark eyes.

“You’re right, you probably would break it. Except you’re not flying this one. It’s a prototype, really delicate. I’ve got a bunch of older quadcopters from when I was starting out. Most of them are still in pretty good condition. I can show you what I’m doing with one of them.”

Now Alice scanned the area around them. “Okay. Where are they?”

Nick gestured over his shoulder. “They’re back at the car. We should probably start you off in the parking lot anyway. Come on.”

Alice put her arm through the second strap of the backpack she’d let slide half off and began hiking downhill with the speed of a mountain goat. Nick hurried to put away all his equipment and rushed after her. After they reached the car, Nick pulled out his keys, opened the hatchback, and rolled back the cover over the storage area. Underneath were almost a full dozen different black boxes of different sizes. Nick unlatched one of the medium sized ones, displaying a small, round quadcopter that looked as it could barely lift its own weight. He turned to Alice with the controller, and placed the quadcopter on the ground several feet away. She flicked on the power button, then slowly brought up the throttle, Nick watching intently all the while. After about ten seconds the spinning rotors managed to get up enough speed to pull the quadcopter off the ground. As the copter rose, a smile broke out on Alice’s face. She grinned at him, breaking concentration for a moment, and the quadcopter wobbled. Before she could recover, it plowed into the gravel. Alice killed the power, then rushed over to it.

“Is it all right?” she asked.

Nick walked over and gently picked it up. One of the blades was a little dented, but nothing he couldn’t bang out with a hammer. He turned it over to check for further damage, but this was the bombproof model he’d flown into trees a couple of times. Alice would have to work a lot harder if she wanted to break it.

“Looks fine to me. Wanna try again?”

Alice flashed a split second of brilliant smile before restoring the sullen mask.

“Sure, why not.”

#

Six hours into his shift, Argent finally had his work queue close to under control. He pushed back the ergonomic chair and balanced his bare feet on the desk, leaning at an angle that was irresistibly relaxing but had proven catastrophic in the past. The admins for the Walmore website were complaining about faulty performance again and had posted three different tickets right at the start of the shift.

    Apache webserver performance below expected.

    Actually Apache fine, it’s the MySQL database that’s not working right.

    No, really it’s Apache again. Why don’t your machines work like they should?!

Argent picked up his third can of Mountain Dew and sighed into the empty echo. Time to send an intern on a soda run.

“Louis!” he barked. “Why is there no Dew left in the fridge?”

A banging sound responded from the far edge of the cubicle farm, then the sound of the fridge opening, followed swiftly by profanity.

“On my way.”

“We’re out of gummy bears too,” came another voice from Argent’s left. Sammy couldn’t live without those damn things and he was starting to look like one. A brown one.

“Got it,” Louis answered as he banged out the door. In his absence, a new quiet settled and keyboards began to tap again.

The truth was that cut-rate contractors who were borderline incompetent had built Walmore’s website. Argent knew them. Fun guys. They were probably out summiting a last couple of 12,000 foot peaks before the snow hit. Since Walmore had fired all their internal programmers in the last round of cost-cutting layoffs, they were stuck with a site that needed to be burned at the virtual stake and rewritten from scratch. To say that to anyone over at Walmore would be a career limiting decision, so all Argent could do was to check and recheck that Apache and databases were confirmed to be running correctly, and suggest that Walmore upgrade its server configuration to something beefier. Beyond that, well, they couldn’t blame him for failing to give them advice they would never take.

Argent took aim at the blue recycling bin next to the door and sank the empty can. Nothing but net. Where was Louis? 

While some of Yellowstone Cloud Solutions’s customers seemed to know what they were doing, there were far more Walmores than not. As a regional cloud provider, YCS had customers that were mostly midsized and smaller companies based in eastern Montana or northern Wyoming: car dealerships, golf courses, restaurants, dentists’ offices and the like, companies too small to afford a real IT staff, much less good web developers. They relied on Argent and his team of not-so-merry men to keep things rolling, more or less.

Many larger businesses in town like the sugar beet factory and the three petroleum refineries ran on fairly old school models and didn’t have much need of computing services. Those like the hospitals, school district, and colleges that did have a lot of data mostly knew enough to use the bigger cloud providers like Amazon.  

YCS worked with the small players, selling them servers and a lot of hand-holding along the way. That meant Argent’s job was about as exciting as driving an Oldsmobile. But it also meant that most of his customers weren’t very good at figuring out how much computer they needed for their work. For each Walmore that underestimated what they needed, there were two other companies that would go and buy ten times the power they could ever use.  

That was one of the funny games about being a cloud host: customers would come in and “purchase” a machine that they’d use for hosting their website, holding a database, maybe backing up data that needed a spare copy kept offsite. But since they were signing month-to-month contracts, it was more like renting than buying. When they rented a particular configuration it wasn’t as if the provider would go out and purchase a tiny anemic server just for them. Realistically, a lot of small business websites like their dental and restaurant clients could be run on an absolutely tiny computer including some of those little $40 single board computers that had been so popular at the local makerspace.

At its core, the cloud business was all about buying very large reliable servers and using virtual machine software to carve them up into little pieces that were the right size for whatever the customers needed. Instead of buying lots of little one CPU computers with a small amount of RAM, he could buy a large server with many CPUs and the virtual machine software would just make it pretend to be a whole group of smaller machines. That saved money, which kept him in plaid flannel and Mountain Dew. It also shut up his boss down the hall, the owner’s idiot son Dewey, who knew just enough about Argent’s job to be dangerous. Win win.

Argent’s phone chimed; a new job in the work queue. Bad luck. Just as he was above water…  

client: PDVSA

job: new server

vmspec: 10xlarge

rush job

That was about the most bizarre ticket he’d seen in forever. First of all there was the client name.  Clearly somebody needed to hold a charity event to buy those guys some vowels. But the VM - virtual machine - was what really surprised him. He’d been working at Yacs, as the programmers called it, for almost three years, and he’d never seen anyone request an xlarge VM. This was a 10xl -- an entire new server. Actually, their standard Dells weren’t even that big, they’d have to go purchase a new piece of hardware. Dewey was going to plotz.

“Boss,” Argent hollered at Dewey’s open door, “did you see the new order from PDVSA?  How the hell do you pronounce PDVSA anyway?”

“What the hell?” Dewey burst out of his office still in the act of zipping his trousers. Argent reflected, not for the first time, that he would pay good money never to find out what Dewey did in that office all day. Everyone made a point not to walk by, which was easy because everything they wanted - fridge, restroom, exit - was in the opposite direction.

“Yeah, just came in. From what I can tell, brand new client, wants a 10x.”

Dewey walked up and leaned over Argent’s shoulder, smelling of sweat and stale coffee. His belly brushed against Argent, who cringed away as subtly as he could.

“Guess I owe marketing a case of IPA,” Dewey said. “When we were fighting about the different VM options, they insisted that we include the 10x and I bet them that nobody would ever use it.”

“So do I do it?  We actually have to purchase a new piece of iron to make it happen.  Probably $15k.”

“Well, you were going to buy a new one anyway next month. Let’s just push up the timeline and the size of the order a little bit. In the meantime I’ll reach out to them to see what’s going on.  Guess you’re getting that big iron you’ve always wanted!” Dewey slapped Argent’s shoulder hard enough to hurt and mercifully distanced himself to shoulder surf a few other programmers. A line formed outside the restroom.

Alone again at his bank of monitors, Argent Googled PDVSA, not expecting to find much. Instead of a collection of nothing in particular, however, the hits popped up instantly. He leaned forward with an intake of breath. On the right side of the screen, the Wikipedia summary had populated:

Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. is the Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company. It has activities in exploration, production, refining and exporting oil, as well as exploration and production of natural gas.

“I’ll be damned. What do they want with us?”

#

June 2001

“Aquí, por favor,” Emmeline told the driver.

She could hear the music from inside the taxi, around the corner, windows rolled up. The bass nearly vibrated them off the pavement with every beat. She passed several crumpled bolívar notes over the front seat and pushed open the sidewalk side door. Julian had better be here. This wasn’t a great neighborhood for a lone gringa - or any woman, for that matter - in the middle of the night. The rich Caraqueño playboys were always a lot of fun, but they weren’t always gentlemen. Emmeline felt for the slim flip phone tucked into the pocket of her skin-tight jeans and wobbled on heels toward the corner.

“Buenas tardes, guapa,” said a passing local who didn’t come up to her shoulder. His buddies laughed as she ignored him and walked by. She used to give the finger to guys like that, but it only encouraged them. They’d follow for blocks, commenting on her ass and calling her a gringa virgin who just needed some manly … well, it was predictable. From observing Venezuelan women, who were masters, she’d finally learned the right expression of hauteur to keep the ligónes walking right on by.

Emmeline turned the corner to take in the dark glass facade of the nightclub across the street, the line of women in nearly nonexistent skirts and extraordinarily well-groomed men, all shouting at the bouncers. Smells were everywhere: the cachapas corn cakes, fried plantains, Pampero rum and Cerveza Polar.  She loved the irony of the favorite Venezuelan beer being named Polar, with a polar bear on the label. For people so close to the equator, Venezuelans had a weird sense of humor about temperature. But then again, considering how hot downtown Caracas could get on a night like this, a polar cooldown sounded about perfect.

Still no sign of Julian. It was only blocks from here where she had met him at her “escuela técnica” the Instituto Técnico de Venezuela in the Chacaito district, where exchange students from more affluent countries picked up a few useful skills while enjoying one of the party capitals of South America. Of all the overblown names. ITV was on the second floor of the strip mall facing the Metro stop. Each day of class, Emmeline walked up the stairs to get to one glass door with bars, was buzzed into a foyer, then had to wait by a second barred door as the indifferent secretary checked, in her own good time, to make sure Emmeline had paid her month’s tuition. Beyond that bottleneck was another impossibly cramped space: a central hallway so narrow that students had to turn sideways if somebody was coming the other way, and a series of four tiny classrooms, each with barred windows facing the hallway, big enough for maybe ten students, and a single computer lab in the back.  

Registering at the ITV was one of the few ways Emmeline could rebel against her overbearing family. Her dad was an oil exec for one of the American oil companies hoping to break into the nationalized Venezuelan industry by skill or graft. Mostly the latter. Every night her dad would come home and talk about the most recent official he had to bribe with this or that or the other thing. Corruption was to the point that they kept an appropriate bribe in the glovebox of each car, in case the police decided it was their turn to get pulled over for no reason because the vehicle looked worth shaking down. They also kept a Glock and a tire iron under the front seats, in case of other kinds of trouble.

When they arrived in the middle of her senior year in high school, Emmeline was told that she would study at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in the far southern reaches of the city, because it was the best and safest place in the country. She was dropped off and picked up every day by a chauffeur who she convinced was just another spy for her parents, and never allowed to do anything fun or interesting unless it was with somebody from one of the “acceptable” ex-pat oil families. It’s not that Simón Bolívar was that bad of a place, but it was so isolated it was practically a military base, and there was nothing to do. After a short while, what had started as an annoyance became completely unreasonable, so she dropped out and enrolled at ITV, exchanging beautiful architecture for strip mall, elegant gardens for a Metro station, fresh air for smog, and world class faculty for teachers one paycheck from driving one of the minibuses that terrorized pedestrians across the city. But Chacaíto and the region around ITV were alive: street vendors and performers, bars and restaurants and discothèques, life unfiltered.

Meeting Julian Johnson was one of the results of that life unfiltered.

She wasn’t really sure who Julian was. He spoke with an American accent, but he gave off the vibe of someone who’d gotten an American education, or had American parents, but wasn’t committed to the nationality per se. Emmeline had met enough of this type that she wasn’t falling for his hippie “citizen of the world” line. He came from somewhere, and he was after something, but he was too sophisticated to let it drop easily. She’d find out some time, and probably not from Julian.

Tonight wasn’t so much a date as a business appointment. Julian - or Julian’s friends, or family, he was always so vague - had some sort of interest in the hottest new spot in town, Las Palmitas. He wanted Emmeline there to add a little more foreign cachet. Free VIP entry pass, drink tickets, access to the VIP salon in back, the whole nine yards. And that was what he wanted: someone who would use phrases like “the whole nine yards” and lighten up the dark coffee of the crowd with some creamy white, for excitement. Emmeline just wanted to escape from her parents idea of a happening Saturday night: entertaining loud oil executives who would do nothing but drink all the rum in the house and brag about their yachts.

At last, Julian’s bright blond head appeared in the doorway. He spotted Emmeline instantly and waved with his whole arm. She bounded across the street. Cries of protest erupted from the waiting crowd as the bouncer blocked a dozen people with his body and held aside the rope for Emmeline to enter.

“You made it!” Julian cried and greeted Emmeline with a quick embrace and kiss on her cheek. “Everybody who’s anybody in Caracas is here. Come on. I have to introduce you to the guy who’s planning the next coup.”

#

“I’d better be heading back home before my parents freak out. You want a ride, or you want to bike back down?” They’d been flying drones for the better part of the day, under a Montana sky so saturated with blue that it looked like a paint can spilled across the heavens. Nick loved these flawless days in the mountains. They made him believe that he - that everyone - would live forever in paradise, and then they were over in an instant and snow was flying.

Alice brought the drone she was controlling to the ground at her feet with a whisper-light landing. “I suppose I could say yes to that, but what about your copters? Won’t they get damaged if I put my bike in the back?

Nick snorted. “Those boxes are as close to bulletproof as I can make them. I drag them everywhere. If they get damaged, we have far bigger problems.”

Alice raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

Nick carefully brought down his own drone - the prototype, performing beautifully - and glanced at the dirty, scratched Subaru his parents let him use when he’d softened them up with good performance on chores and grades.

“Basically, anything that would damage those boxes would seriously injure or kill a human being. Chances are my copters would survive the car crash that kills me.”

Alice thought for a minute and laughed, apparently at some idea of her own rather than what Nick had said. “It wouldn’t look too good on an obituary. ‘Surviving members of the family are his dozen quadcopters and whoever is willing to take good care of them.’”

“At least I’d leave something behind, right?”

Alice let her dark hair fall back over her eyes. “That’s what they say, isn’t it? Live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory. Maybe they didn’t mean drones, though.”

“Maybe not,” Nick agreed.

“All right, I’ll get my bike,” she said. “But I want to make it home alive.”

“That might be a good idea.”

As Alice ran off, Nick wondered about why she had followed him. He knew that she was interested in his quadcopters, but that didn’t seem like a very good reason to bike over seven miles on incredibly sketchy uphill roads. Another good question was why he had let her fly his quadcopters. He never let other people fly the copters. It was the cardinal rule. Other people couldn’t be trusted. But she’d come all that way.

Nick watched Alice to see where she had put her bike. She’d hidden it in a clever little cranny next to the ski shop. In plain sight, but easily overlooked. Clever. Nick jogged over to the car, opened up the hatchback again, lowered the rear seats, and arranged the boxes into a flatter pattern that would let them slide the bike right in. Alice was wheeling her stickered-over old mountain bike around the edge of the retail shop. Double suspension. No two components alike, he noticed as she came closer. Alice was in no hurry. She walked more slowly the closer she came to the car. Nick played with his keys and started to whistle, but she didn’t move any faster. When she finally reached him, Nick reached out to grab the bike. Alice tightened her grip and pulled it out of his reach. Nick raised his hands into the air, stick-up style.

“Hey, you can put it in if you want.”

Alice made a long, three hundred sixty degree study of the low ski resort buildings, the bottoms of the lifts with their massive counterweights, the dirt and gravel parking lots, the trees, the startling rise of granite peaks around them, the smugly perfect sky. Her eyes fell back to Nick.

“You know,” she said. “I think I’d like to ride after all. But thanks. I’ll see you around.”

She was on her bike and pedaling so fast Nick hardly knew what happened. He spun around to watch her retreat and just managed to keep his cool enough not to shout after her. She dropped off the lip at the far end of the lot like Thelma and Louise taking flight, and was gone.

#

“Hey, thanks for coming over tonight. The day got weird at the end and I’m not sure what to make of it.” Argent wandered to his fridge to grab an ale for each of them.

“I always wondered what your apartment would look like,” Benner said. He took the beer and examined the local microbrew credentials. It passed. He drank. “You’re not really known for having a lot of people over. I thought either you lived in your parents’ basement or you were a serial killer.”

Argent took a slug of beer. “I haven’t ruled out number two.”

“True.”

“Yeah, it just never seems to come up. I’m usually brain dead by the time I leave work.”

As they left the kitchen, Benner paused to study the three fractal posters framed on the wall above the sofa.

“Where did you buy those?” He gestured. “Those are cool.”

“I actually found those myself and had them printed.”

“What do you mean ‘found?’”

“Found. Made. You know. Fractals are just math. When you graph a parabola all you’re doing is visualizing something that was already there. The parabola exists, in as much as anything mathy exists, whether or not somebody looks at it.”

“Too deep for me. Next thing you’re going to tell me you have a half-dead cat locked in a box with a vial of poisonous gas and radioactive stuff.”

Argent raised his beer in a half-toast as he dropped into the leather recliner. “Next to the freezer where I keep the neighbors’ heads, you bet.”

Benner turned back to the fractals, not looking alarmed at all. Argent was going to have to work on his bad guy persona.

“This is some kind of equation, then?”

Argent nodded, but Benner wasn’t looking at him. “Yeah. A process in a feedback loop. A picture of chaos.”

“And you made all this up?” Benner asked.

Argent was getting impatient.

“I didn’t make up anything. It’s like I picked up the prism and held it the right way. Look, nobody ever saw a Mandlebrot set until 1978 when somebody wrote the first program to draw it. But it’s not like it didn’t exist before then, it just hadn’t been found yet. It’s like when you hear about somebody discovering a new kind of caterpillar. The caterpillar didn’t spring into existence. It was always there. Nobody noticed.”

“This is your rare mathematical caterpillar? Yeah. Hey, whatever warms up your hard drive, dude.” Benner turned his attention back to his beer and started looking around the room for something else to comment on. He didn’t seem keen to sit on the sofa. Argent couldn’t blame him. He’d gotten it used in college. Now it was a placeholder piece of furniture, because a living room with nothing but a recliner and a TV tray to hold his laptop looked kind of weird.

“I’ll show you something cool,” Argent offered.

“Yeah?”

Argent pulled the laptop into striking distance and tapped a query into Google.  

“My latest passion is what’s called a Buddhabrot. It looks a bit like a Mandlebrot set, but if you turn it on its side suddenly you see Buddha. Or Ganesh, but probably only if you’re Hindu.”

Argent opened a Wiki page about it, and the image of Buddha jumped out immediately. To him, anyway. Benner had moved behind him to a place where he could see the laptop screen without getting too close.

“Not really sure …” Benner equivocated. “Can you turn it right side up?”

“Hang on.” With a few keystrokes, Argent produced a better, full-screen image. “There. Now you see it?”

“Hm.” Benner made an appreciative noise that Argent took as encouragement.

“I didn’t invent it or anything, but it blows my mind that something mathematical like this bears such a striking resemblance to an Indian philosopher from 2500 years ago. I mean, if Buddha managed to work a self-portrait into the essence of math itself, it’s almost enough to make you want to convert. But the Buddhabrot is really poorly studied because it is so much harder to make than an ordinary fractal. Each individual pixel of the Buddha comes from an entire Mandlebrot set, so to build it requires a fantastic amount of time and memory. Bertha here has been cranking away at it for weeks and the best version I’ve been able make myself looks like an Macintosh icon from the early 80s.”

Benner let out the kind of snort that had kept Argent from talking to him unnecessarily for the first several months they’d worked together. Finally, he’d decided it was a quirk he could live with in exchange for having a halfway intelligent conversation.

“Too bad you didn’t have access to any bigger computers,” Benner said.

Exactly. This ability to put 2 and 2 together was the reason Argent had decided Benner was worth talking to.

“That’s a firing offense.”

“I thought you said that you had to buy a new monster server to get that new account up and running.  Surely you have to put the thing through its paces before you hand it over to the client?”

“In the immortal words of Bart Simpson: you didn’t see me. You can’t prove anything.”