she wouldn’t have to take the T at all hours. They didn’t have the money yet, but they would in six months. They could solve almost all their problems soon.
The next day at ISIS, Orion kept busy writing code, but he could not stay inside it. Numbers no longer printed themselves on his retina. He saw Sorel’s face instead, and heard her low voice. Her chicken song. Where was she? Her desk was bare, her cubicle empty. Was she somewhere in the building? Out on the sidewalk smoking? She was such a strange, compelling person, the only one he liked at ISIS. Why, then, had he kissed her under false pretenses? What a stupid thing to do. He sat at his desktop and typed:
Sorel: How was breakfast?
He deleted the line.
Sorel, he typed, forgive me if I made you uncomfortable.
Forgive me? Uncomfortable? He deleted again.
Sorel, how are you? Delete.
Sorel, who are you? Delete.
Sorel, you didn’t come in today. Delete. Obviously she knew that.
Sorel, where are you? The moment he sent this message, his own words returned to him in his in-box, and for a split second he imagined she was writing back. New message. Subject: Where are you?
But the message wasn’t from Sorel, it was the usual ping from Jonathan. Orion was late. The R & D meeting had started. Where are you?
R & D meetings weren’t bad—just Orion, Aldwin, Jake, Jonathan, and Oskar, their old advisor, now chief scientist. As students, Orion and his friends had gathered in Oskar’s office and worked for results worthy of a paper at STOC or FOCS. Now the aim was new product and patents for the company: more customers, fresh revenue, to build on the upcoming IPO. The stakes were higher now, the goals financial, but meetings with Oskar were the same as always. Four guys in mismatched swivel chairs, vying to impress their difficult-to-please professor.
Oskar did not acknowledge Orion when he bounded in and took his seat in the corner. He continued scribbling on the oversized whiteboard covering his office wall. When Oskar finished, he stood back and everyone gazed at his new model for a secure system. The drawing looked like an exploding star.
“What if you drew these edges together?” Jonathan asked.
“Show me.”
Jonathan took a green dry-erase marker and simplified the star.
Oskar shook his head and took the marker out of Jonathan’s hand. “This is the flaw. Do you see?”
Orion didn’t see, but Jonathan flushed a little where he was standing by the board, and tried to explain himself.
“N-N-N-No.” Oskar wagged his finger at Jonathan, shooting him down.
“What if you tried this?” Jake rubbed out half of Jonathan’s star with his hand and redrew it in red.
Long pause, as Oskar considered the board, and his students waited for his verdict. Their resident cryptographer was a lively seventy-year-old who had come to America by way of Israel. His eyes were small and gleaming, as was his bald head. He had been married “once upon a time” as he put it, and his son and daughter were both theoretical computer scientists, one at Hebrew University and one at Carnegie Mellon. Oskar’s accomplished children were nowhere near as accomplished as he, but Oskar did not lose sleep over this. He was accustomed to his superiority.
He was so much fun, thought Jake. Otherworldly, mused Orion. Egomaniacal, Jonathan protested silently.
Jonathan was slightly out of sorts, annoyed with Orion for coming late, jealous of Jake’s easy brilliance. As CTO, Jonathan did the most on a day-to-day basis to build the company. He did the most and cared the most, and yet, in Oskar’s office, Jake’s ideas were the best. Jake did not work for those ideas; he did not have to travel or negotiate or fight for them. He was original. And Jonathan was smart enough to understand the value of everything Jake said. The businessman he was becoming rejoiced and looked for ways to capitalize on Jake’s gifts, but the boy in Jonathan felt differently.
“Don’t you think it’s good for you to fall short sometimes?” Emily had suggested once, a question sweet and also cutting as she lay folded in his arms.
“No,” Jonathan had retorted. “I don’t think it’s good for me at all.”
“This may be possible.” Oskar delivered the verdict on Jake’s drawing. “This is slightly faster.”
“I don’t think slightly faster is really what we’re after,” Jonathan said. “We want more than incremental improvements.”
Oskar spread his hands. “What you want,” he said, “is not always what you get.”
“Then we need a different paradigm,” said Jonathan.
“A paradigm is not a dime a dozen,” Oskar pointed out.
“I never said it would be easy,” Jonathan said. “We need new products, and we need to start developing them now.”
“You have a proposal?” Oskar’s challenges were all the more potent because they were so gentle, always so bemused. “Tell us!”
And that was the moment of temptation. That was when Jonathan wanted to pull out electronic fingerprinting and say: Look, surveillance is where we should be going. Record every touch on every piece of data, know its security status at every turn. Other companies are starting to pursue this. We need to move into this space too. He knew Oskar would turn toward him, fascinated. He would say, Ah, now this is interesting. And in his pride and his frustration, in the heat of the moment, with Oskar calling his bluff and Jake standing there, and Orion daydreaming in the corner, Jonathan struggled against the impulse to shock them all.
“I see you have not yet decided on your new paradigm,” Oskar taunted Jonathan mildly.
“I do have one.” It was against Jonathan’s nature to turn the other cheek, and yet, once again, he felt Emily near him, and remembered her voice.
“I have to trust you,” she’d told him late that night in his apartment. “I have to, if I’m going to love you.”
He had never known anyone like her. She made his previous relationships seem trivial. It was her unusual strength, the courage of her convictions that drew him to her. She insisted she was nothing like him, but he understood her differently. He saw himself in Emily—not the man he was now, but the man he could be. Sometimes he rebelled against this solemn feeling; sometimes he didn’t want to love her quite so much, and he was secretly, cruelly relieved to leave her in California and return to his less-reflective life apart. He felt unready to give up childish things like rugby and lying and beating the crap out of Green Knight. But he never stopped thinking about her; he never stopped longing for her or anticipating their time together. Being with her was still new for him, her warmth still startling because she was also so reserved. When she kissed him and wrapped her arms around him, she seemed to overcome something in herself, and he knew that he was exceptional in her life as she was in his.
“So when you are ready, please let us know,” said Oskar.
“Oh, I will,” Jonathan said, and he pretended that his phone was buzzing, and left the room.
He wished his phone really was ringing. He had to speak to Emily, to hear her steady voice.
He closed his office door and dialed. Her phone rang and rang again, and each time it rang he missed her more.
“Hello?” Emily answered at last, surprised.
“Did I wake you?” He looked at his watch. It was only seven thirty in the morning in California.
“No, no,” she said sleepily. “I’m up. I’m on the phone with Jess.”
“Do you want me to call you back?”
“No, that’s okay. I think we’re done.”
“You’re never done,” he said.
“She’s making me crazy,” Emily admitted. “Hold on….” When she got back on the line he heard her sigh.
