Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“You’re saying…”

“She’s crazy, Mom.”

As a paid-up member of the Yentas With Attitude local, Maxine has been snooping diligently into hashslingrz, before long finding herself wondering what Reg has gotten himself into and, worse, what he’s dragging her uncomfortably toward. The first thing that jumps out of the bushes, waggling its dick so to speak, is a Benford’s Law anomaly in some of the expenses.

Though it’s been around in some form for a century and more, Benford’s Law as a fraud examiner’s tool is only beginning to surface in the literature. The idea is, somebody wants to phony up a list of numbers but gets too cute about randomizing it. They assume that the first digits, 1 through 9, are all going to be evenly distributed, so that each one will turn up 11% of the time. Eleven and change. But in fact, for most lists of numbers, the distribution of first digits is not linear but logarithmic. About 30% of the time, the first digit actually turns out to be a 1—then 17.5% it’ll be a 2, so forth, dropping off in a curve to only 4.6% when you get to 9.

So when Maxine goes through these disbursement numbers from hashslingrz, counting up how often each first digit appears, guess what. Nowhere near the Benford curve. What in the business one refers to as False Lunchmeat.

Soon enough, drilling down, she begins to pick up other tells. Consecutive invoice numbers. Hash totals that don’t add up. Credit-card numbers failing their Luhn checks. It becomes dismayingly clear that somebody’s taking money out of hashslingrz and starbursting it out again all over the place to different mysterious contractors, some of whom are almost certainly ghosts, running at a rough total to maybe as high as the high sixes, even lower sevens.

The most recent of these problematical payees is a little operation downtown calling itself hwgaahwgh.com, an acronym for Hey, We’ve Got Awesome And Hip Web Graphix, Here. Do they? Somehow, doubtful. Hashslingrz has been sending them regular payments, always within a week of each almost certainly dummy invoice, till all of a sudden the little company goes belly-up, and here are all these huge fuckin payments still going to the operating account, which somebody at hashslingrz has naturally been taking steps to conceal.

She hates it when paranoia like Reg’s gets real-world. Probably worth a look, though.

MAXINE APPROACHES the address from the other side of the street, and as soon as she catches sight of it, her heart, if it does not sink exactly, at least cringes more tightly into the one-person submarine necessary for cruising the sinister and labyrinthine sewers of greed that run beneath all real-estate dealings in this town. Thing is, is it’s such a nice building, terra-cotta facing, not as ornate as commercial real estate could get a century ago when this unit was going up, but tidy and strangely welcoming, as if the architects had actually given some thought to the people who’d be working there every day. But it’s too nice, a sitting duck, asking to get torn down someday soon and the period detailing recycled into the decor of some yup’s overpriced loft.

The directory in the lobby lists hwgaahwgh.com up on the fifth floor. Maxine knows old-school fraud investigators who’ll admit to walking away at this point, satisfied enough, only to regret it later. Others have advised her to keep going no matter what, until she can actually stand in the haunted space and try to summon the ghost vendor out of its nimbus of crafted silence.

On the way up, she watches floors flash by out the porthole in the elevator door—folks in workout gear gathered by a row of snack machines, artificial bamboo trees framing a reception desk of wood blonder than the blonde stationed behind it, kids in school jackets and ties sitting blank-faced in the waiting area of some SAT tutor or therapist or combination thereof.

She finds the door wide open and the place empty, another failed dotcom joining the officescape of the time—tarnished metallic surfaces, shaggy gray soundproofing, Steelcase screens and Herman Miller workpods—already beginning to decompose, littered, dust gathering…

Well, almost empty. From some distant cubicle comes a tinny electronic melody Maxine recognizes as “Korobushka,” the anthem of nineties workplace fecklessness, playing faster and faster and accompanied by screams of anxiety. Ghost vendor indeed. Has she entered some supernatural timewarp where the shades of office layabouts continue to waste uncountable person-hours playing Tetris? Between that and Solitaire for Windows, no wonder the tech sector tanked.

She creeps toward the plaintive folk tune, reaching it just as an ingenue voice goes “Shit,” and silence follows. Seated in a half-lotus on the scuffed and dusty floor of a cubicle is a young woman in nerd glasses holding a portable game console and glaring at it. Beside her is a laptop, lit up, plugged into a phone jack on a wire emerging from the carpeting.

“Hi,” sez Maxine.

The young woman looks up. “Hi, and what am I doing here, well, just downloading some shit, 56K’s a awesome speed, but this still takes some time so I’m working on my Tetris skills while the ol’ unit’s crankin along. If you’re lookin for a live terminal, I think there’s still a few scattered a round these other cubes. Maybe a couple pieces of hardware ain’t been looted yet, RS232 shit, connectors, chargers, cables, and whatever.”

“I was hoping to find somebody who works here. Or who used to work here’s more like it I guess.”

“I did do some temping here off and on back in the day.”

“Rude surprise, huh?” gesturing around at the emptiness.

“Nah, it was obvious from the jump they were spending way over their head tryin to buy traffic, the classic dotcommer delusion, before you know it here’s another liquidation event and one more bunch of yups goes blubberin down the toilet.”

“Do I hear sympathy? Concern?”

“Fuck ’em, they’re all crazy.”

“Depends what tropical beach they’re lounging around on as we continue to work our ass off.”

“Aha! another victim, I bet.”

“My boss thinks they might’ve been double-billing us,” Maxine improvises, “we did stop the last check, but somebody thought we should introduce a personal note. I happened to be in screaming distance.”

The girl’s gaze keeps flicking to the screen of her little computer. “Too bad, everybody’s split, only scavengers now. You ever see that movie Zorba the Greek (1964)? the minute this old lady dies, the villagers all go rushing in to grab her stuff? Well, this here’s Zorba the Geek.”

“No easy-open wall safes here, or…”

“All emptied out, the minute the pink slips showed up. How about your company? Did they at least get your Web site up and running for you OK?”

“Without meaning to offend…”

“Oh, tell me, tag soup, right, lame-ass banners all over the place random as the stall walls in a high-school toilet? All jammed together? finding anything, after a while it hurts your eyes? Pop-ups! Don’t get me started, ‘window.open,’ most pernicious piece of Javascript ever written, pop-ups are the li’l goombas of Web design, need to be stomped back down to where they came from, boring duty but somebody’s got to.”

“Strange idea of ‘awesome and hip web graphics’ anyway.”

“Kind of puzzling. I mean I did what I could, but somehow it felt like that their heart just wasn’t in it?”

“That maybe Web design wasn’t really their main business?”

The girl nods, consciously, as if somebody might be monitoring.

“Listen, when you’re done here—I’m Maxi by the way—”