Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“Which is…”

“Like ‘departure,’ only you pronounce it DeepArcher?”

“Zen thing,” Maxine guesses.

“Weed thing. Just lately everybody’s been after the source code—the feds, game companies, fuckin Microsoft? all have offers on the table? It’s the security design—like nothing any of these people’ve ever seen, and it’s makin them all crazy.”

“So, today you were out scouting your next round? Who’s the lucky VC this time?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“What I do. Professionally D and D.”

“Maybe,” Vyrva considers, “we should pinkie-swear?”

Maxine patiently holding out her pinkie, hooking it with Vyrva’s and obtaining eye contact, “Then again—”

“Hey, if you can’t trust another Kugelblitz mom?”

So, with the usual caveats, Maxine keeps her other hand in her pocket with fingers crossed as she solemnly pinkie-swears. “I think we got a preempt today? Even back at the height of the tech bubble, this would be awesome money? And it’s not a VC, it’s another tech company? Big deal this year down in the Alley, hashslingrz?”

Whoopwhoopwhoop. “Yeah… think I’ve… heard that name. That’s where you were today?”

“All day down there. I’m still, like, vibrateen? He’s a bundle of energy, that guy.”

“Gabriel Ice. He’s made you a big offer to buy, what, this source code?”

Ear to shoulder, one of those long West Coast shrugs, “He sure came up with a impressive piece of change from someplace? Enough to rethink the IPO? We already put the red herring on indefinite hold?”

“Wait a minute, what’s with acquisition fever down the Alley, didn’t all that go belly-up last year with the crash?”

“Not for the managed-security people, they’re making out fiercely at the moment. When everybody’s nervous, all corporate suits can think about is protecting what they’ve got.”

“So you guys’ve been out schmoozing with Gabriel Ice. Can I have your autograph?”

“We went to an afternoon soiree over at his mansion on the East Side? Him and his wife, Tallis, she’s the comptroller at hashslingrz, sits on the board too, I think?”

“And this is an outright buy?”

“All they want is, there’s a part about getting somewhere without leaving a trail. The content, they could care less. It isn’t about the destination or even the trip, really, not for these jokers.”

Maxine is much too familiar by now, even God forbid intimate, with this cover-your-tracks attitude. Next it morphs from innocent greed into some recognizable form of fraud. She wonders if anybody’s ever run a Beneish model on hashslingrz, just to see how ritually slaughtered the public numbers are. Note to self—find the time. “This DeepArcher, Vyrva, it’s what—a place?”

“It’s a journey. Next time you’re over, the boys’ll give you a demo.”

“Good, haven’t seen that Lucas for a while.”

“He hasn’t been around a lot. There’s been, like, issues? He and Justin find any excuse to get into a fight. whether to even sell the source code in the first place. Same old classic dotcom dilemma, be rich forever or make a tarball out of it and post it around for free, and keep their cred and maybe self-esteem as geeks but stay more or less middle income.”

“Sell it or give it away,” some scrutiny, “tough call, Vyrva. Which one wants to do what?”

“Both want to do both,” she sighs.

“Figures. How about you?”

“Oh? Torn? You’ll think it’s just hippyeen around, but I’m not that cool with a whole shitload of money crashing into our life right now? That can be so destructive, we know of one or two people back in Palo Alto, it gets ugly and sad so fast, and I’d rather see the guys keepin on with their work, maybe start up something new.” A tilted grin. “Hard for a New York person to understand, sorry.”

“Seen it forever, Vyrva. Direction of flow, in or out, don’t matter, above a critical amount, it’s all bad.”

“Not that I’m living through my husband, OK? I just hate it when the guys argue. They’re in love, for goodness sakes. They put on all this who-are-you-again-dude, but in fact it’s like a couple of skateboarders together? Should I be jealous?”

“What for?”

“You know this kind of old-school movie where there’s these two kids are best friends and one grows up to be a priest and the other turns out to be a mobster, well, that’s Lucas and Justin. Only don’t ask which is which.”

“But say Justin is the priest…”

“Well, the one who… doesn’t get into a shoot-out at the end.”

“Then Lucas…”

Vyrva looks off into the distance, trying for Surf Bunny Gazes at the Sea but revealing instead a look Maxine has seen maybe more of than she wants to. Don’t—don’t put in, she advises herself, despite the all-but-irresistible question arising, Has Vyrva been shtupping, excuse me, “seeing” her husband’s partner on the sly?

“Vyrva, you’re not…”

“Not what?”

“Never mind.” Both women then beam elaborately and shrug, one fast, the other slow.

Another unexplored corner here, of which there are already enough. Maxine has only recently for example found out about Vyrva and Beanie Babies. Seems Vyrva’s been out running some arbitrage hustle with the trendy stuffed-toy/beanbag hybrids. Soon after their first play date, “Fiona has every Beanie Baby,” Otis nodding for emphasis, “in the world.” He thought a minute. “Well, every kind of Beanie Baby. Every one in the world, that’d be… like warehouses and stuff.”

As happened off and on with the boys, Maxine was reminded of Horst, this time of his blockhead literalism, and she had to restrain herself from grabbing Otis, slobbering kisses and squashing him like a tube of toothpaste, and so forth.

“Fiona has… the Princess Diana Beanie Baby?” she asked instead.

“‘The’? Good luck, Mom. She’s got all the variations, even the BBC Interview Anniversary Edition. Under the bed, all in the closets, they’re pushing her out of her room.”

“You’re saying Fiona’s… a Beanie Baby person.”

“Not her so much,” Otis sez, “it’s her mom who’s totally the obsessive in the house.”

Maxine has noticed that at least once a week, as soon as she has Fiona safely delivered at Kugelblitz, Vyrva is off on the 86th Street crosstown bus headed for yet another Beanie Baby transaction. She has compiled a list of retailers on the East Side who get the critters shipped all but directly in from China by way of certain shadowy warehouses adjoining JFK. ’Suckers don’t just fall off the truck, they parachute out of the airplane. Vyrva buys them up dirt cheap on the East Side, then rushes back to various West Side toy and variety stores whose delivery schedules she has carefully recorded, sells them for a price somewhat lower than what the stores will pay when their own truck shows up, and everybody pockets the difference. Meantime Fiona, though not much of a collector, gets to keep on accumulating Beanie Babies.

“And that’s just short-term,” Vyrva has explained, quite, it seems to Maxine, enthusiastically. “Ten, twelve years down the line, college looming, you know what these are gonna be worth to collectors?”

“Lots?” Maxine guesses.

“Uncomputable.”

Ziggy’s not so sure. “Except for one or two special editions,” he points out, “there’s no packaging on Beanie Babies, which is important to collectors, and also means that 99–plus percent are out there loose in the environment, getting trampled, chewed apart and drooled on, lost under the radiator, eaten by mice, in ten years there won’t be one in collectible condition, unless Mrs. McElmo is stashing them in archival plastic someplace besides Fiona’s room. Like dark and temperature-controlled would be nice. But that’ll never occur to her, because it makes too much sense.”