Lost Boys: A Novel Read online

  Why don’t you just cut off my balls and hold them up for everyone to admire? thought Step.

  Then he went straight in to a meeting with Bob, the “vice-president in charge of finance”—he had been the bookkeeper until job inflation struck Eight Bits, apparently within the past six weeks. He was a lean, weathered-looking man in cowboy boots who had more of a Texas twang than a southern drawl, and the first thing he did was slide a two-page contract across the desk for Step to sign.

  “What is this?” Step asked, for he had already signed the employment contract.

  “A confidentiality agreement,” said the cowboy accountant. “Industry standard.”

  Step read it anyway, though Cowboy Bob kept shuffling papers to show his impatience with Step’s taking so much of his time. And sure enough, it turned out to be a lot more than a confidentiality agreement. “This contract buys all rights to anything I do in programming for the rest of my natural life,” said Step.

  “Well, not exactly,” said Cowboy Bob.

  “I just came from a meeting where I was specifically and totally excluded from all programming here at Eight Bits.”

  “Eight Bits Inc.”

  “So why should I sign a contract giving Eight Bits Inc. all rights to any programming I come up with during my time here? I won’t do any programming, right?”

  “Oh, that was just Dicky,” said Cowboy Bob. “He got jealous because even though you were coming in to write the manuals, everybody knew you were the most successful programmer ever to set foot on the premises, so he’s just making sure everybody knows that he’s your boss. In fact Ray and I expect that you’ll sort of do quality control over all the software, because Dicky isn’t that good a programmer and he kind of makes changes in all the programs and then they end up getting released with bugs. Sometimes. Just between you and me, of course.”

  “Dicky just forbade anyone to ask my advice about programming,” said Step.

  “Yeah, well, just don’t rub his nose in it, that’s all me and Ray expect from you.”

  “So you’re telling me that in fact, besides manual writing, I’m to be the quality control officer, only I can’t tell my direct supervisor that that’s what I’m doing and I have to carry on all such activities behind his back?”

  “That’s why we’re paying you thirty thou a year, my friend.”

  “And in the meantime, I’m supposed to sign over every idea I ever have to Eight Bits . . . Inc.? Why not just everything I come up with related to software being developed in-house?”

  “This agreement is a condition of employment, Step,” said Cowboy Bob. He still seemed friendly and genial, but if this had been a saloon in a western, the tone of his voice would have sent half the customers out into the street to avoid getting hit over the head with a breakaway chair.

  “This agreement makes me promise that if I leave here I’ll never enter into competition with Eight Bits Inc.”

  “Our lawyer said that was a real good idea.”

  “Well, try this. I came here to write manuals, not to develop software. I’ll help out with quality control if Ray wants me to, but I want it to be out in the open so I don’t have to skulk around like a spy. And I won’t sign this agreement until it’s rewritten to limit the noncompetition clause to one year, to protect my rights in all software I wrote prior to coming here, and to protect my rights in all software I might write after leaving here.”

  “No way,” said Cowboy Bob.

  Step stood up. His knees were trembling and he felt a little faint, but he also knew that there was no way he could sign that agreement. “I just moved my family to Steuben on the strength of a contract with Eight Bits that said nothing about this. As far as I’m concerned, this paper means that you are in material breach of our contract. So if your lawyer won’t revise this agreement, he’ll be talking to my lawyer about getting from Eight Bits the costs of moving here, the costs of moving back, and, if we can get the court to agree to it, and I think we can, a year’s salary. You have my phone number.”

  Step could not believe that he was already quitting and it was only eleven in the morning, but in a way it was almost a relief. The scene in Ray’s office and Dicky’s display in the staff meeting had already made Step so wary of the future here that having an excuse to leave sounded just fine to him. But his bold talk about what a lawyer could get for him was just talk—even if it worked out that way, litigation would drag on until they were long past financial inconvenience. It wasn’t just the mortgage on the house in Vigor and the cost of moving here. It was the fact that they had expected to pay last year’s taxes out of the royalty check this past fall, and so now they were deeply in debt to the IRS, and even bankruptcy couldn’t get them out of that. Quitting this job would be such a devastating blow that they’d probably end up slithering back to Orem, Utah, to live in DeAnne’s parents’ basement while the IRS auctioned off everything they owned.

  And still it felt pretty good to be walking toward the door in Cowboy Bob’s office.

  “Wait a minute, Step,” said Cowboy Bob.

  Step turned around. The vice-president of finance was reaching into a drawer of his desk and pulling out another paper. “Since you didn’t like that first one, try this one before you walk out on us and we have to sue you for breach.”

  Step came back and took the paper out of his hand. He read it without sitting down. To his disbelief, it was a version of the agreement that could only have been written for him—it excluded prior software, it excluded programming on computers for which Eight Bits Inc. was not publishing software, and the noncompetition clause was for exactly one year.

  “You already had this written,” said Step.

  “Yep,” said Cowboy Bob.

  “So why did you show me that other?”

  “Because you might’ve signed it.” Cowboy Bob grinned. “This is business, Step.”

  Step stood there looking at him, debating inside himself whether he wanted even to live on the same planet with this guy, let alone work with him.

  “We’ve met every one of your objections, Step,” Cowboy Bob prodded him.

  “I’m just wondering whether there’s another paper in that drawer.”

  “There is. It has our lawyer’s phone number on it. How do I put this kindly, Step? Sign or be sued.”

  “Gee, Bob, is this the way you talk to all the boys?”

  “Look at it this way, Step. You won’t be working with me. The only thing you’ll know about me is that I sign your paycheck, and after you get a few of those you’ll like me just fine. You’re pissed off now, but that’ll pass, and in six months maybe we’ll have a couple of beers together and laugh about how mad you were this first day.”

  “I don’t drink,” said Step.

  “Yeah, I forgot, you’re a Mormon,” said Cowboy Bob. “Well, then, that’s out. Because looking at you, I’d say you could never forgive me without a couple of beers in you.”

  He said it with such a twinkle in his eye that Step couldn’t help but smile. So Cowboy Bob knew he was a son-of-a-bitch, and didn’t particularly mind. Well, Bob, I know you’re a son-of-a-bitch, and I guess I don’t mind that much either.

  Step laid the paper down on the desk, signed it, and walked out.

  It was nearly noon, and even though he was probably supposed to go find Dicky and ask where his office was, Step needed to stand outside this building for a minute and decide whether to scream or cry or laugh.

  On the way to the staff meeting he had seen a back corridor that led to a door on the north side of the building—Dicky had told him in passing that everybody in the staff used that door, since that’s where the parking lot was. That’s where Step headed now.

  The scenery wasn’t all that pretty outside—just a narrow parking lot, a high chainlink fence with barbed wire on the top, and then an overgrown pasture where the only things still grazing were old tires and a rusting refrigerator with the door off. Ray’s Mercedes was in the only assigned parking place in the lot,
directly across from the north door. Step felt a sudden urge to go pee on the tires like a dog, but he was satisfied just to imagine doing it.

  I’ve been a free man for the past five years, he said to himself, not working for anybody. Living on student loans, I taught myself programming on the Atari just to get history out of my mind, and I ended up creating a program that gave some pleasure to a lot of people and it made me about a hundred thousand dollars in a year and a half. All that money is gone, I owe taxes on it that I can’t pay, and I’ve just signed a contract to work for a company with byzantine internal politics, an owner on a power trip, a vice-president of finance who thinks that being in business means screwing anybody who’ll let you screw him, and a supervisor who’s so incompetent that they want me to clean up after him without letting him know I’m doing it. All for thirty thousand dollars a year. Twenty-five hundred a month. That’s the price of my soul.

  But it was no worse than what his dad had gone through, over the years. A sign company that went belly-up when Dad broke his back, and yet Dad refused to declare bankruptcy and paid it all off, slowly, over the space of ten years, during which time he went back to school, got his B.A., taught at San Jose State for a while, and ended up working at Lockheed designing training programs for missile operators. If Dad had ever had half as much money as I made last year, he would have made sure he was set up as a free man forever. He would have had money in the bank against a rainy day. I spent it like it was going to last forever, and now I’m right where my dad was, all those years at Lockheed, saying yessir to assholes and moonlighting weekends at a camera store in the Hillsdale Mall. Never heard him complain, except that he apologized to Mom when she had to go back to work as a secretary in the public schools.

  That’s why I signed that paper, Step realized. So I don’t have to make that same apology to DeAnne.

  And if I don’t find a way to make some extra money in the next year or so, the IRS is going to put us in that situation anyhow.

  The anxiety, the desperation, the memory of his father’s defeats—it all surged through him and burned in his throat and he thought, If I let myself get emotional about all this, it’ll show on my face when I go back inside. He swallowed hard and breathed deeply, slowly, forcing himself to calm down.

  Somebody opened the door behind him and came outside. Step didn’t turn around at first, half afraid and half hoping that it was Cowboy Bob or even Ray Keene himself, worried about him, wanting to smooth things over with him.

  It was just a kid, looked to be still in high school, who wandered a few yards away from him and lit up a cigarette. He took a deep drag, let the smoke out slow, and puffed it into rings.

  “How long did it take you to learn how to do that?” asked Step.

  The kid turned to face him. He had black-frame coke-bottle glasses so his eyes looked like they were swimming around in a specimen jar. “I been blowing rings since my mom taught me how when I was ten.”

  “Your mom taught you how to blow smoke rings? When you were ten?”

  The kid laughed. “This is tobacco country, Mr. Fletcher, and my people are all tobacco people. My mama used to blow smoke in my face when I was a baby, so I’d grow up knowing the difference between the cheap weed in Reynolds cigarettes and the good stuff in E&Es.”

  Step hoped that his shudder didn’t show. When he and DeAnne were house-hunting, they had had to rule out the whole eastern edge of town, where the Eldredge & Emerson Tobacco Company kept the air filled with the pungence of tar and nicotine, like being trapped forever on an elevator with someone who put out his cigarette just before stepping on.

  What business did Mormons have moving into tobacco country? Especially since DeAnne was so allergic to tobacco smoke that it made her throw up even when she wasn’t pregnant. The idea of somebody blowing smoke in a baby’s face made Step angry. There’s things you just don’t do to children, if you have any decency. And teaching a ten-year-old to blow smoke rings . . .

  “I don’t want to sound like some kind of dumb fan or nothing, Mr. Fletcher, but I thought Hacker Snack was the best game anybody ever did on the Atari.”

  “Thanks,” said Step.

  “Of course, your A.I. routines really sucked.”

  It hit Step like a blow, that forced change from shyly, genially accepting a compliment to suddenly having to take criticism.

  “A.I.?” he asked.

  “You know—artificial intelligence.”

  “I know what A.I. stands for,” said Step. “I just don’t recall ever trying to incorporate any of it into my game.”

  “I mean, you know, the way the bad guys home in on the player,” he said. “The machine intelligence routines. Way too predictable. It stayed too easy to dodge them until you finally beat the player down with sheer speed. Like bludgeoning them to death.”

  “Hey, thanks,” said Step.

  “No, really, I loved the game, I just wished you had kept the bad guys moving in a kind of semi-random way, so the player wouldn’t catch on that they were homing in. So you couldn’t quite be sure where they were going to go. Then the game would have stayed fun into much higher levels, and you would never have had to include that killer speed level where you can’t outrun the bad guys.”

  “There is no killer speed level,” said Step.

  “Really?”

  “Not if you find all the back doors out of the different rooms.”

  It was the kid’s turn to look embarrassed. “Back doors?”

  “Hacker Snack isn’t an arcade game, it’s a puzzle game,” said Step. “Don’t tell me you were trying to outrun those little suckers at every level.”

  “I got up to half a million points doing it that way,” said the kid.

  “That is the most incredible thing I ever heard. You should’ve been creamed before you got twenty thousand points. You must have the reflexes of a bat.”

  The kid grinned. “I’m the best damn video wizard you’ll ever meet,” he said. “You got to show me those back doors.”

  “And you got to show me what you mean about randomizing.”

  “Come on inside, I’ve got your game up on one of my machines, just in case you came by.”

  “You got an Atari here?”

  “Hey, there’s not a soul here who doesn’t know the Atari is ten times the computer the 64 is. The only reason we’re all writing 64 software is that millions of them are getting bought and the Atari is still going for like a thousand dollars which means nobody buys it.”

  Step followed him into the building. “How come you came outside to smoke?” he asked. “I notice people smoking in most of the offices.”

  “Not in mine,” said the kid. “I don’t let anybody smoke around the machines. Fouls them up. Like pouring Cokes on them.”

  The kid didn’t let anybody smoke around any of the machines?

  “What’s your name?” Step asked.

  “My parents call me Bubba, I was baptized Roland McIntyre, but I kind of think of myself as Saladin Gallowglass.” He glanced back over his shoulder at Step and grinned. “You ever play D&D?”

  “My brother tried to teach me Dungeons and Dragons one time, but after five hours the game itself hadn’t actually started.”

  “Then he’s a piss-poor dungeonmaster, if you ask me, no offense of course since he’s your brother. A good dungeonmaster can get you into the game in half an hour and make it move along like you were watching a movie. Almost. Here’s your office, by the way.”

  It was an empty room. They had known he was coming, and there wasn’t even a desk inside.

  “They had a desk in here but I made them move it out,” said Bubba Roland Saladin Gallowglass. “I told them you weren’t here to write prissy little maiden-aunt letters to your nieces and nephews, you were here to write manuals and for that you needed a full computer setup, complete with a word processor and at least one of every computer we do software for. So they’re coming in this afternoon to put up a computer counter like the one I’ve got here. Thi
s is my office. You’ll be sharing with me till yours is ready, if you don’t mind.”

  Step walked into hacker heaven. Two desk-height counters ran along both the long walls of the room, with a couple of shelves above them. The lower shelf held monitors for a half-dozen computers, and the upper shelf held books and papers and stacks of disks. And the counter itself was crowded with 64s, a couple of VICs, a TI, a Radio Shack Color Computer, even one of those crummy little Timex computers. Also an old monochrome Pet, which was apparently used as a word processor. And an Atari, with Hacker Snack up and running in demonstration mode. Except that the demonstration mode was supposed to have the game at level one, and this one was running at level twenty.

  “You broke into the code,” said Step.

  “I like to use the game as a screen saver, because everything shifts on it. But level twenty has the prettiest colors.”

  “That was copy-protected six ways from Tuesday.”

  “Yeah, well, it was a ten-minute job to break the scheme and another hour or so to disassemble the code.” Bubba Roland Saladin Gallowglass looked proud of himself, and Step couldn’t disagree with him. Step was a pretty good programmer, but this kid was a true hacker, a boy genius of code. And somehow this same kid had the authority to make Eight Bits Inc. remodel Step’s office.

  “What’s your job here, anyway?” asked Step.

  “Oh, I just hang around and do some programming. I’m really supposed to be a student at UNC-S, but I’m sort of between semesters right now.”

  “Spring break?”

  “Yeah, for about a year now. I tried taking computer classes but they wanted to teach me COBOL, if you can believe it. Had to have FORTRAN or I couldn’t graduate. Like making you study dinosaur anatomy in med school. A bunch of us are going to Richmond for the David Bowie concert this weekend. Want to come?”