Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

Maxine was looking for a chance to get into a conversation with her when the landlord showed up, one Dr. Samuel Kriechman, a retired plastic surgeon, along with a small posse of heirs and assigns. “Why you miserable, greedy old bastard,” March cheerfully greeted him. “You dare to show your face around here.”

“Ugly cunt,” replied the genial patriarch, “nobody in my profession would even touch a face like yours, who is this bitch, get her the fuck out of here.” A great-grandson or two stepped forward, eager to obey.

March produced from her purse a 24-ounce aerosol can of Easy-Off oven cleaner and began to shake it. “Ask the eminent physician what lye can do for your face, kids.”

“Call the cops,” ordered Dr. Kriechman. Elements of the picket line came over and began to discuss matters with Kriechman’s entourage. There was some, well, argumentative gesturing, extending to casual contact which the Post may have amplified slightly in the story it ran. Cops showed up. As light faded and deadlines approached, the crowd thinned out. “We don’t picket at night,” March told Maxine, “hate to step off the line personally, but then again I could use a drink about now.”

The nearest bar was the Old Sod, technically Irish, though an aging gay Brit or two may have wandered infrequently in. The drink March had in mind was a Papa Doble, which Hector the bartender, previously only seen drawing beers and pouring shots, assembled for March as if he’d been doing it all week. Maxine had one too, just to keep her company.

They discovered they’d been living only blocks from each other all this time, March since the late fifties when the Puerto Rican gangs were terrorizing the Anglos in the neighborhood, and you didn’t go east of Broadway after sunset. She hated Lincoln Center, for which an entire neighborhood was destroyed and 7,000 boricua families uprooted, just because Anglos who didn’t really give a shit about High Culture were afraid of these people’s children.

“Leonard Bernstein wrote a musical about it, not West Side Story, the other one, where Robert Moses sings,

In a shrill Broadway tenor plausible enough to curdle the drink in Maxine’s stomach. “They even had the chutzpah to actually film West Side fuckin Story in the same neighborhood they were destroying. Culture, I’m sorry, Hermann Göring was right, every time you hear the word, check your sidearm. Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.”

“You should meet my parents sometime. No love for Lincoln Center, but you can’t keep em away from the Met.”

“You kidding, Elaine, Ernie? we go back, we used to show up at the same demonstrations.”

“My mother demonstrated? What for, a discount someplace?”

“Nicaragua,” unamused, “Salvador. Ronald Raygun and his little pals.”

This was when Maxine was living at home, getting her degree, sneaking out into weekend club-drug mindlessness, and only noticing at the time that Elaine and Ernie seemed a little distracted. It wasn’t till years later that they felt comfortable about sharing their memories of plastic handcuffs, pepper spray, unmarked vans, the Finest doing what cops do best.

“Making me the Insensitive Daughter once again. They must’ve picked up some some tell, some shortfall in my character.”

“Maybe they were only trying to keep you clear of trouble,” March said.

“They could have invited me along, I could have had their backs for them.”

“Never too late to start, there’s enough to do God knows, you think anything’s changed? dream on. The fucking fascists who call the shots haven’t stopped needing races to hate each other, it’s how they keep wages down, and rents high, and all the power over on the East Side, and everything ugly and brain-dead just the way they like it.”

“I do remember,” Maxine tells the boys now, “March was always sort of… political?”

She sticks a Post-it on her calendar to go to graduation and see what the old snood-wearing mad dog is up to these days.

REG REPORTS IN. He’s been to see his IT maven Eric Outfield, who’s been down in the Deep Web looking into hashslingrz’s secrets. “Tell me something, what’s an Altman-Z?”

“A formula they use to predict if a company will go bankrupt in, say the next two years. You plug numbers into it and look for a score below maybe 2.7.”

“Eric found a whole folder of Altman-Z workups that Ice has been running on different small dotcoms.”

“With a view to… what, acquiring?”

Evasive eyeballs. “Hey, I’m just the whistle-blower.”

“Did this kid show you any of these?”

“We haven’t been meeting much online, he’s so paranoid,” yeah, Reg, “he only likes to meet face-to-face on the subway.”

Today an insane white Christer at one end of the car was competing with a black a cappella group at the other. Perfect conditions. “Brought you something.” Reg handing over a disc. “I’m supposed to tell you it’s been personally blessed by Linus himself, with penguin piss.”

“This is to make me have guilt now, right?”

“Sure, that’d help.”

“I’m on it, Reg. Just not too comfortable.”

“Better you than me, frankly I wouldn’t have the cojones.” It has turned out to be a cannonball dive into strange depths. Eric is using the computer at the place he’s been temping, a large corporation with no IT chops to speak of, in the middle of a crisis nobody saw coming. Something a little different. Each time he surfaces from the Deep Web he’s a little more freaked, or so it seems to those in neighboring cubes, though so many of these spend their hours down in the mainframe room snorting Halon out of the fire extinguishers that they may lack some perspective.

The situation is not as straightforward as Eric might have been hoping. The encryption is challenging, if not mad serious. Whereas Reg has been entertaining fantasies of a quick in and out, Eric has found the clerks at this 7-Eleven are packing assault rifles on full auto.

“I keep running into this dark archive, all locked down tight, no telling what’s stashed there till I crack in.”

“Limited access, you’re saying.”

“Idea is to have a failsafe in case of a disaster, natural or man-made, you can hide your archive on redundant servers out in remote locations, hoping at least one’ll survive anything short of the end of the world.”

“As we know it.”

“If you want to be chirpy about it, I guess.”

“Ice is expecting a disaster?”

“More likely just wants to keep stuff away from inquiring minds.” Eric’s original tactic was to pretend to be a script kiddie out for a joyride, seeing if he could get in with Back Orifice and then install a NetBus server. A message came up immediately written in Leet characters along the lines of “Congratulations noob you think you made it in but all you’re really in now is a world of deep shit.” Something in the style of this response caught Eric’s attention. Why should their security be going to the trouble to make it so personal? Why not just brief and bureaucratic, like “Access Denied”? Something, maybe only its amused vehemence, reminded him of older hackers from the nineties.

Are they playing with him? What sort of playmates are they likely to be? Eric figured if he was supposed to be just some packet monkey nosing around, he’d have to pretend he doesn’t know how heavy-duty, or even who, these guys are. So at first he goes after the password as if it might be something old-school like the Microsoft LM hash, which even retards can crack. To which Security replies, again in Leet, “Noob do you really know who you’re fucking with?”