This is Part 4 of “Root Two,” a serialized novella about numbers, love, and lunch.
If you you need to catch up or refresh, find:
[Est. reading time: 9 minutes]
A call woke me up again. Still disoriented, but further from death.
It was Hemmy. Who else?
"What's up," I mumbled.
"You gotta tell Bao we're at a dead end. Another payment dropped into our account this morning. I don't wanna get sued."
I rolled over. "It's money. The contract is vague. What are you worried about?"
"THAT'S what I'm worried about. Some accountant or something over there is going to realize it's a garbage contract, and then — or Bao will ask for progress — has he, by the way? If we don't have something to show him — I mean do YOU want BAO FREAKING LEE to be pissed at us? I think we would just stop existing. Like, just stop. He wouldn't even need to do anything. Just BECOME displeased, and we wouldn't BE anymore."
"You're freaking out," I explained.
"I'm not."
"Listen, Hem, like you said yesterday, this is my thing. You guys do the other client work, I'll handle Bao."
"No. It is NOT your thing. This is a PokkoDev contract, which means your little obsession could end up being a PokkoDev disaster. You want to keep the contract, get it rewritten in just your name."
"Why are you being such a baby about this?" I was awake now.
"I don't like taking money I didn't earn."
"WOW. I had no idea. Are you also a secret agent?"
"What?"
"I mean what ELSE don't I know about you."
And then he hung up on me. I blinked. I rubbed my face. My phone rang again.
"WHAT."
"This is Bert. I agree with Hemmy. I don't think this project merits your considerable talents."
"...thank you?"
"Yes. You're welcome."
I took a deep breath.
"OK," I said. "Give me one more day. Bao knows we haven't made any real progress, and he paid us anyway. But if I don't get something new by tonight, I'll close the contract."
"Let me talk to Hemmy."
The phone went silent. I couldn't believe they were ganging up on me like this. I fumed that I wasn't the boss. That none of us were the boss. It was a three-way partnership.
But this had never happened before, especially not to me. I wasn't the type to fly off the rails. I was offended and embarrassed and offended at myself for being embarrassed and offended.
Finally, Bert got back on. "We'll plan on having you working with us again tomorrow."
I laughed joylessly. "Great," I said.
But Bert had already hung up.
Absent that friendly exchange, I might not have worked up the nerve to follow through on the thought that had sent me to sleep. But work is work. I opened up a new message to KrisLove.
After a long, hard stare into the everlasting void, I started typing.
Sorry for being a bitch. I've got something I want to ask you about if you're willing to give me a few minutes. I understand if you don't.
She'd answer or she wouldn't. She'd have a recording or she wouldn't. I at least owed her the apology.
Maybe KrisLove hadn't spent the last two days obsessing about that night, but it had been playing on repeat in my brain as the theme song for my maniacal fixation on those 42 digits. The numbers haunted my every waking thought and unconscious dream, each one pairing and unpairing with some element of Krislove's rebuke — a word, a look, a gesture. And like a machine learning algorithm gone awry, my brain had tried to find the perfect combination.
Because some batshit piece of me believed I was this close to solving KrisLove's exit with those 42 numbers.
What was next — JFK? Moon landing? Flat earth?
I caught myself staring at my inbox.
Dude, if she's gonna respond, it's not gonna be now.
While I waited for the reply that might never come, I decided I might as well play my last card. It wasn’t a great one, but hey.
Before PokkoDev, I worked at a much larger company with a lot of very smart people, the smartest of whom was my former boss, Jared — a guy I had managed NOT to piss off, even as I was learning I didn't work well on large teams.
Anyway what I needed right then more than anything was a very large meal. I thought maybe I could put this problem in front of Jared and wait for a fresh perspective while I gorged on food that didn't come wrapped in some kind of plastic.
Assuming he'd meet with me. It had been a while. What the hell, I thought as I placed the call.
"Cyn!"
The enthusiasm was encouraging, but also, this was Jared, a perfect incarnation of positivity. One of the reasons he kept getting promoted. The other reason is that he's a genuine, authentic, USDA certified genius.
"Hey..." I said, wishing I could mirror his sunny disposition.
"It's been forever! How are you?"
"I'm good. Can you meet me for lunch? I've got a...weird problem I want to run by you."
"Sure! Let me check my calendar —"
"I was actually hoping it could be today."
"Um..."
I held my breath.
"Yeah, actually, how's noon?"
By the time we took a table at The Forgotten Turtle, I'd been aggravated by a nagging suspicion that Jared was exactly as generous and cool as he pretended to be. There was not one shred of benefit he could get out of meeting with me that morning, and yet...
He smiled so big when he saw me. Clapped me on the back and gave my shoulder the warmest squeeze it had ever gotten.
An hour of this guy's time was worth more than what lots of people made in a month. I wasn't sure if I was still one of them, but if he offered to take the check, I was gonna let him.
"Tell me everything," he said as we sat down.
I chuckled nervously. The great beaming spotlight of his attention was on me, and I couldn't think of what to do with it. Was this how guys like him made straight girls feel?
With a shiver and a shrug, I put on my best-worn demeanor. "Not much to tell," I said.
"Oh don't. You left Trulia to start your own BUSINESS. I want to know how it's going. Everyone does."
"Don't bullshit me."
"I'm not! People talk. It's been mentioned."
"In the last six months?"
He put up his hands. "Hey, if it's that bad, we can change the subject.”
I shrugged again. "We do alright."
"I knew it! You're rich already. Here I am ladder climbing like a chump, and you just went and built something of your own."
He made me sound so cool I probably even smiled.
"Well what about you?" I asked. "You own the place yet?"
He tapped the side of his nose and winked at me. "Almost."
"Need me to knock someone off for ya?"
He laughed. "OK, tell me about this problem you can't hack. Must be a helluva bugger."
I laid it out. Every detail. May have TMIed the bits about KrisLove, but what can I say. My obsession had left me raw, and he kept asking questions.
Finally, he sat back and stared at the numbers.
"It came out in binary."
"Yep," I said.
He folded his arms and drummed his fingers. The silence yawned while it waited.
Finally, he said, "Have you double-checked to see if you got routed into a different system?"
"I thought about that. I couldn't come up with a single good reason someone would counterfeit a free CrossWorlds space."
Before he could counter, I went on. "But on the slim chance that I stumbled into some kind of phishing scam, I actually checked, and the logs are consistent. No weird addresses, no deviations, nothing."
He shook his head. "It doesn't make any sense. I would say you were hallucinating but —"
"Why?"
"Exactly. And anyway, your business partner AND Bao Lee himself saw the video. So the only other thing that I can think of is that you wound up in a counterfeit. But, again —"
"Why."
"Why indeed. Not only would something like that be very expensive, it would be illegal. There are at least one billion ways to send a message — any message — with total anonymity. And this is just a string of 42 digits pulled from the square root of two. You can write it on a napkin!"
"I did write it on a napkin."
"You DID write it on a napkin!" He shook his head. "Maybe this is the incurious bureaucrat in me, but I think you might need to let this one go."
"No hope, huh?"
"I'll say this: you win weirdest story of the week." With that, he opened the menu.
As gracious as Jared was, as smart and as helpful, only one thing had changed: I was officially out of ideas. On the ride home, I typed out the message to Bao that would terminate the contract.
But the task was painful and discouraging enough that I was home by the time I felt ready to send it.
Reading over it one last time, walking up to my apartment, I got a ping.
KrisLove had responded.
I froze on the stairs.
Cyn,
Thank you for the apology. What did you want to ask me about?
Time slowed as I tried to read way more words than there were.
Eventually, I wound up on a chair at my pullout table, typing out a reply one painstaking character at a time. Second guessing all of them. Winding up with:
Can you meet me in IRL? Anywhere is fine.
It wasn't until after I hit send that it occurred to me I could have included a “Thank you.”
I went back to the message I almost sent to Bao.
It would be irresponsible of me not to at least check and see if KrisLove had a recording of that night.
Or so I told myself.
Another ping…
Sure.
We settled on lunch the next day.
The wait revealed to me a degree of agony I had never before experienced.
The first hour or so wasn't bad. I busied myself with updating Hemmy and Bert, then looked over the new client work that had come in. I ate.
Then it got bad. I couldn't concentrate on anything. I thought I had replayed that fateful night in my mind as many times as was neurologically possible. I was so wrong. Pretty soon, my prefrontal cortex got busy scrutinizing every detail at 2…3…10X speed.
I got the shakes before the sun went down.
What would I ask her?
I started talking to myself, which, as a rule, I don’t do. I tried to talk myself out of the madness, but every word I said drove me further in. I laughed at myself. An unhealthy, unhinged sound that self-perpetuated.
What would she say?
It seemed very hot, and very cold, and I became convinced I had a high fever, that I had contracted typhoid, and that this was a good explanation for my insanity.
I moped.
I raged.
I cried.
I went back to laughing at myself.
She won't have any answers.
At some point, I settled into a long stare at one of my apartment's many blank walls. Just listening to the dull thrum of the building I lived in.
Maybe there was no such thing as answers.
A thought drifted through the haunted sky of my mind.
I was the bug in the system. And a bug can't fix a bug.
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