Quotients by Tracy O'Neill

Author:Tracy O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2020-05-11T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Across from Lyle, M was speaking, his hands in constant motion. An erect index. Then fingers splayed in roots, pushing something, maybe doubt, down. Their relationship had advanced enough that Lyle could ask about the background, the textures and turns, he’d elaborate in the book, that led to M’s brief career with the agency.

Online, M had discovered there were message boards full of names who had loyalties to Linux, channeled hearts full of anarchy into fast type. There was an elasticity to the boards; language sprang back. Someone could respond to you, wherever you were, if you spoke through fingers in downward patter. They called themselves RabbidUnicorn, CommanderUnix, or LordNowuSemen. They were brash, and they were civil. They wanted to keep the internet free, but their mores were practical—don’t file a bug report, you enable crises. They were principled haters, generous in advice and criticism, pointing, always pointing to new directions, thinkers, and most of all, they were, even when degreed, anal autodidacts with fuck-you attitudes and enthusiasms for building, dismantling. RabbidUnicorn had even been part of DoS attacks that crashed credit card websites, jabs at the market.

Recess, he called them.

RabbidUnicorn had a mean sense of humor.

And from RabbidUnicorn, M had learned the language you worked in telegraphed your identity. Ruby or PHP: soft. C or Assembly: brawny. So on. He wanted to be legitimate, so he had spent hours tinkering with the least efficient codes. You could do that there, mean what you wanted by taking the long route, do what meant who you wanted to be.

He built programs to model poker hands and made pages of famous maneuvers. He showed his work to people he knew only by prose style. They began to call him the one-eyed king, a Cyclops or Oedipus programming strokes of fortune. The King of Diamonds. He was invited into an internet relay chat channel. The name of the channel was dynamic, fit to lock out malicious intruders. He wore their name for him: OneEyedRoyal.

Late night, he had stayed up in the screen of ideas, the electronic breath of vigilante dialogue. He got in arguments over whether a line of code should contain more than eighty characters. Sometimes, RabbidUnicorn would give him word problems to solve in algorithm. He was testing M, or it was the way he played, or both. It was training or it was evangelizing or it was ritual, and maybe it didn’t matter because M liked to listen with his eyes to RabbidUnicorn’s ideas about human rights: Most people deserved pursuit of happiness; major party politicians deserved to be pursued by anthrax twat napkins. The freedom to usurp. So on.

But M had wanted to perform addition, create a sum. He thought up ways to bring everyone from the boards into four walls. He thought of establishing a software company or a custom computing service. They could build precise inventory systems, genealogy trackers, systems that counted all the expense and profit accumulated. They could turn detective computers, matching frauds with crimes, find the people who opened credit cards and never paid.

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