Then What - Chapters - Chapter 1

A Then What? sampler

Chapter 1 - Credo's Doorway

Beware of strangers who know you...

Coffee and anxiety, the lifeblood of commerce, pumped through my body and urged me forward. Yet, I couldn't move.

Like every other morning, I was hurrying to work, unconsciously negotiating a path among the multitudes descending upon the financial district in early morning. As usual, the world outside my mind was an irrelevant blur as my thoughts focused on the intricate weave of computer networks I had developed to transform Banter and Associates Diversified Investors' global empire into one vast spider of a company. I was in the middle of a long, frantic slug of a super-grande, triple-shot latte with whipped cream, sprinkles and a touch of macadamia-nut flavoring, when an old man's gravelly words from nowhere pierced my concentration: "Then what?"

That was all. Just two words surrounded by the large, hollow silence of an odd moment appearing in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day. The voice seemed to come from a doorway not ten feet away, though when I squinted all I could see was an empty space filled with shadows. Normally I would have dismissed the incident as an intriguing overture from a street scrounger and just kept moving. But the voice was familiar, reconnecting me with a past I had forgotten since I left high school and entered the frenzied asylum of high technology overtime that everyone else called the real world. I was only sixteen when a headhunter from Banter and Associates Diversified Investors (badi) wandered into my high school computer fair looking for talent and, after watching me demonstrate how to access my principal's credit card information over the Internet, offered me a job. It was a deal I couldn't pass up: he promised to rescue me from the inane tedium of school and fully utilize my talents, as long as I agreed to show up for work on time.

With the reluctant endorsement of my mother, I had left school (hollering "See ya later, spirit crushers!" as I exited through the cafeteria doors) and immersed myself in the unrelenting challenge of the marketplace that school never provided. I became instantly addicted to the rush of adrenaline spiking through my body as I sprinted to stay two steps ahead of the jaws of technical obsolescence constantly nipping at my heels. Every software upgrade and unreasonable demand made by an uncompromising supervisor kept me blissfully overwhelmed. And I got to wear jeans, T-shirts, a pocket protector and propeller beanie just for goofs. Life just couldn't have gotten any better.

My progression through the ranks at badi had happened quickly and mostly by accident. Within a year of my arrival, a fluke of reorganization had made me a member of badi's elite International Network Control department that was in charge of, basically, everything; such is the power of networks. A few months later, on Christmas day, my supervisor died of a heart attack, apparently caused by an allergic reaction to the walnuts in his mother-in-law's turkey stuffing. By that evening, a shake-up in Network Control was underway. Sensing opportunity for advancement, I retired my propeller beanie and moved my pocket protector to the inside pocket of my black vinyl jacket. At a meeting the next morning, I was assigned my supervisor's old position.

Then, on the first Friday following New Year's Day, a cavalcade of misfortunes befell badi suddenly and powerfully, like the events of a bad day on the stock market. At 9 am, the director of Network Control was fired for showing up at a stockholders' meeting inebriated and waving a sheaf of printouts implicating badi in a slew of illegal deals. It didn't help that he was wearing women's clothing, which caused a gossip columnist to comment: "Never before have we seen a male member of the corporate world wear yellow chiffon and a full compliment of accessories with such flourish." He immediately left for Nepal on a spiritual quest to find his inner-self, which seemed at odds with his insistence on keeping the bmw he had just received as a year-end bonus. By 9:30, just about everyone in Network Control who wore a suit to work was implicated in the scandal and was out the door with a fresh resumé in hand. By 10:30, the guy who ran the espresso bar in the lobby of the badi building was wondering where all his customers had gone.

And if that weren't enough for one day, around 11 am some guilt-ridden anonymous someone blew the whistle on a video cam hidden in the ladies restroom on floor two of Mergers and Acquisitions. The video cam could only be seen on the Internet by the select few who knew the password, who, it turned out, was everyone in Network Control tech support except me. Years later I learned that no one had told me because I was a minor. By mid-afternoon, just about anyone in Network Control who didn't wear a suit to work was looking for a new job and wondering how expensive a sexual harassment lawsuit might be. When the dust had settled by early evening, there I was, one of the few untainted and seemingly sane people in a vast corporate department that had been stripped of most of its employees. Before I had reached my eighteenth birthday, fate had conspired to make me the only logical choice for temporary director of badi's entire international network.

Although management had made me director, they assured me a search for a more permanent replacement would commence immediately. However, a year later the search had been quietly suspended. Life at badi had picked up so much momentum, and the network had continued to hum along so smoothly, that management gave me the job without fanfare or announcement, probably afraid of what would happen to investor confidence if everyone knew that a kid was running one of the world's most important financial networks.

Now, at twenty-two years old, I had become everything I thought I wanted to become a decade ahead of schedule. My jeans and T-shirts were nowhere in sight, replaced by tight, black non-designer clothes that wrapped my tall, unnaturally thin body like an extra layer of dry skin. It was my attempt to look professional without looking like one of them.

"Then what?" came the voice again, like sandpaper slowly being dragged across rough wood.

Like every other morning, I had been drawing the schematic of badi's computer network in my mind as I raced to work, girding myself psychologically to serve another day as networking god for a corporation whose survival depended upon my magic. As usual, the goal at the end of my morning power walk from the subway had been to arrive at work with a clear vision of badi's neural pathways and international tentacles, to spot potential aneurysms and strangulation points and to anticipate the bitter struggle managers would wage for a piece of my insanely crowded day. Normally I was flattered by their desperation to have me add a touch of wizardry to their pet projects. But today, for some uncomfortable reason, it bothered me, like an itch too far below the surface of the skin to reach. Normally I was quite happy to be rewarded with ever-faster machines, so that I could kick myself up more excruciating, late-night, social-life-rending learning curves in the name of productivity. But this morning the idea seemed grotesque.

"Then What?" came the voice once again, engaging the periphery of my attention.

"Focus," I whispered to myself.

Normally my focus was exquisite and precise, allowing me to intertwine a number of threads of thought algorithmically, like a geometric tapestry. But two words from an invisible old man had turned my brain into a child's finger-painting of the mind, in which ideas and chatter just smeared together. Somehow those two words had pried open a storehouse of resentment that had been silently accumulating in the background of my life, like reinvested dividends in a blind trust. Suddenly so much was so simple. I wasn't happy anymore. Worse--I was angry.

Several times I had been unfairly denied a position in badi's training division, despite the fact that I was qualified, inspired, deserving and frantic to take it on. I loved to teach. More to the point, I loved to help other people learn. I didn't understand why, exactly, and it would take me years to fully understand it. But at the very least, teaching felt like a way to regain the fun I'd lost after I surrendered my adolescence prematurely to the world of work. I was a good teacher, and despite the fact that everyone knew it, the "suits" wanted to keep me down on the data farm, cranking out network tentacles for clients to attach themselves to. It was my fault for being so good at my work, I rationalized. But I had turned some corner in my mind. Doing a gazillion-dollar deal in a single Trans-Atlantic data bit burst had lost its luster, while watching people bask in the glow of learning had become sensually gratifying. The real highs of the day were witnessing support staff in the hell of software minutiae screech the "ah hah" of self-discovery, throw their heads back with a conquering smile and relish their newfound understanding of a computer idiosyncrasy, which had theretofore made them positively cranky and temporarily nuts.

"Then what?" the old man asked me again.

I loved spending time with support staff; they actually enjoyed learning. The "suits," on the other hand, just blustered away on their keyboards until they got stuck and then hollered for me to come fix something (that had only appeared to be broken because they'd never read the help sheets, which I had spent my weekends creating, which I had prepared just for them to make their lives easier and more productive, which I had delivered on their desks with a smile and the promise of help if they would just familiarize themselves with the list of simple commands! rtfm, I wanted to yell at them--"Read The Freaking Manual!" It was a catchall condemnation of those wannabe computer power users who were too busy, lazy or tantrum-dependent to help themselves).

I was suit-bashing again, a habit I had developed when my request to be transferred to the training division had been denied. While suit-bashing felt like much-needed therapy, I had to focus on the day's upcoming events or else risk arriving at work dangerously unprepared. While I tried to concentrate for the nth time on my mental model of badi's Euro-Asian network in preparation for a leveraged buyout that was rumored to be happening any day now, I couldn't keep from musing that I was a lot like a god in the worst sense: there to blame when the going got tough, easily forgotten when life was good, but always expected to work miracles. As I struggled to draw the details of the satellite connections between London and Hamburg and Singapore in my mind, it occurred to me that no one had ever stopped into network headquarters on a good day just to tell me everything was working just fine. Life just didn't seem to work that way.

A wave of desperation suddenly swept through me. The prospect of another day at badi was closing in on me like an endless prison sentence. Today would be the day I would tell management to either give me the training position or I was out of there. Period.

"Then what?" the old man coaxed insistently. Enough was enough. The network schematic in my mind's eye dissolved. The incessant grind of brain chatter ceased. I began to fidget as I squinted, trying to discern my interrupter's face in the pitch-black cave-like indentation in the side of the building.

"Then what?" came the words, gently, insistently. "Or, if you prefer, What then?"

"Say what?" I cried, clutching my latte in a death grip. "No," the voice calmly corrected me. "The question under consideration is 'Then what?' Ready?"

Keep reading: go on to Chapter 2

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