The Cookbook Collector

Aldwin folded his hands on his knee. With his baby face and mild manners, his well-groomed curly hair, clean clothes, and matching socks, he seemed, literally, best suited of the founding four for corporate life. Jonathan was the star, but Aldwin was Dave’s favorite. Everyone knew that. Of course the idea of Dave’s favor was strange, to say the least. The four of them had hired Dave, and at the time, Jonathan had privately conceded Orion’s contention that Dave wasn’t particularly bright. “You do see that we’re in business?” Aldwin asked Orion now.

“ISIS is not the local branch of the Free Software Foundation,” Jonathan said.

“You do see how our investors are hoping to make money here?” Aldwin continued.

“Free Software is free as in freedom,” Orion retorted. “Not free as in free lunches. I never said I don’t want to make money.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Jonathan exploded. “We are selling a proprietary security system. You are going to reporters, scaring our investors, talking about giving stuff away.”

“I never said anything about giving stuff away. I mentioned Richard Stallman’s name.”

“He’s a nut case.”

“He happens to be a visionary,” said Orion, “and I find his questions very interesting. Like, when you think about it, the whole notion of intellectual property is an oxymoron. How can you own something intangible? It’s like, you can’t own souls, can you?”

“Are you trying to make me angry?” Jonathan asked.

“Maybe you should take your name off our patents,” Aldwin suggested.

“I said I admired him. I never said I wanted to be him. Jesus.” Orion turned away from the CTO and CFO, once his closest friends, and he looked through the glass wall at the programmers in their cubicles. Several guys were crowded around Sorel’s desk. Had she got the new high score in Quake III? She was keeping her head down. “I happen to have my own ideas,” Orion murmured. “I have my own opinions.”

“Your ideas are—occasionally—great,” Jonathan told him. “Your opinions suck.”

Orion sighed and turned back to listen to the rest of the tirade.

“Aldwin and I have been in Mountain View all week,” Jonathan continued. “Jake is still in London. We are taking care of customers and signing partners. We are preparing for the biggest IPO of the year. The three of us have not been home. We have not had brunch. And we do not want to come in here and find that you, with your two million shares, have been …”

“Just don’t talk to reporters right now,” said Aldwin.

“Do not talk to anyone.” Jonathan pointed his index finger directly at Orion’s chest, but Orion didn’t flinch. He had been an athlete too, although his sport was skiing and involved no contact, only swift descents.

“When you get phone calls, refer them to Vicki,” said Aldwin. “That’s her job.”

They were ganging up on Sorel. Orion could see the guys spinning her swivel chair around, forcing her to look at them.

“And another thing …,” said Aldwin.

Orion strode out of the conference room. Under his breath he murmured, “Fuck you.”

Clarence, Umesh, and Nadav were standing over Sorel.

“Lockbox went down again,” Umesh told Orion.

“She crashed the system,” Clarence said.

“What—the new version?”

“She checked in buggy code,” Umesh said.

“She gets the rubber chicken.” Menacingly, Nadav swung the rubber chicken in Sorel’s face. It was the sort of plucked rubber chicken you found in joke shops, its limp body yellow and gelatinous.

“Oh, stop,” said Sorel. She sounded indifferent, almost bored, but Orion could see that she was upset.

“You crash the system,” said Clarence, “you get the chicken.”

Nadav pitched the rubber bird directly into Sorel’s lap.

“Put that chicken nicely on her desk,” Orion ordered.

Clarence hesitated for a moment. Orion acted like one of the guys, and now he pulled rank on them.

“Now,” Orion said, and he waited until Clarence pitched the chicken onto Sorel’s desk. “She’s going to debug the code now,” Orion announced. “Party’s over.”

When the little crowd dispersed, Orion pulled up a chair next to Sorel. He watched her long fingers on the keyboard as she scrolled through code on the screen. “I break stuff all the time.”

“I know.” She smiled.

“So let me help you.”

“Aren’t you busy?”

Orion thought of Molly sleeping after thirty-six hours at the hospital. He considered Jake in London and Jonathan and Aldwin, who didn’t brunch. “Not really.”

Slowly, line by line, they combed Lockbox 2.0. He took the workstation next to hers, and they worked in parallel on separate computers. As they searched, they turned up little items and oddities: missing comments, obscure bugs, strange bits of circuitous reasoning, the dust bunnies in the code. Hours passed. They didn’t speak, but mumbled to themselves. “What happens when this line executes?”

“And what happens here?”

“What’s the value of the variable now?”

They worked until numbers seemed to imprint themselves on Orion’s eyes. The chambers of the program drew Orion and Sorel deeper and deeper into the software’s formal logic. They counted their steps as they descended into dark passageways. The voices all around grew muffled, the ambient light on the floor began to dim. Orion’s phone rang, but he didn’t even glance at it.

Night came. Programmers departed, and others took their place. Jonathan and Aldwin were long gone. Still, Orion and Sorel kept hunting underground, watching for errors, listening for rushing water, tapping walls.

“Why are you smiling?” Sorel asked at one point.

“I’m just concentrating,” he murmured, half to himself. Then he confessed, “Actually I love doing small repetitive things.”

“I don’t,” she confessed. “I need fresh air.”

“You can go home if you’re tired,” he told her. “I’ll finish.”

“No. I can’t go home. I’m responsible. I’m just going out for a minute.”

Suddenly he realized that she was going down alone into the dark. “Wait!” He ran after her. “I’ll come down with you.”

“No, don’t,” she said. She stepped into the elevator and as the doors closed she confessed, “I just want to smoke.”

How could she smoke? She was so beautiful. He hated that she smoked. While she was gone, he raided the company kitchen for salt-and-vinegar potato chips and jelly beans. He took four cans of black-cherry soda from the fridge, and lined them up on her desk. He wasn’t sure why he did that. They looked silly. He brought them to his own desk and kept working. When he heard the elevator bell he kept his head down, pretending he hadn’t been waiting for her.

“You like working all night,” she said.

“I’m good at it.” Orion was showing off a little, but he was also telling the truth. He had an eye for detail, a grasp of the small picture, the obsessive game-playing mind of a superb hacker.

They shared her computer now, and the monitor glowed before them as they found their way back inside the code. They made their way without a map; the program was their map, spreading in rivulets before them. Their hands hovered over the keyboard and overlapped. Her wrists were delicate, her skin fine as rice paper, but he pretended that he didn’t notice when their hands brushed. She pretended as well, even when she felt his fingers close reflexively on hers. The task before them made pretense easier, because they had to concentrate. They were like diviners, searching for the source of her mistake.

Suddenly Sorel found the bug. “Stupid, stupid,” she groaned. “Over there. I forgot the bounds check.”

“Aha!” cried Orion. She had neglected to specify enough memory for the number of items in her piece of the Lockbox system.

“It’s not even an interesting mistake,” she griped as she typed in proper array bounds. “Wait, why isn’t it