rules around here, but we already knew that, didn't we? This isn't the first time such calamities have occurred on your watch now is it, Ms. Clarke?"
"Just doing my job," Kandhi sputtered.
"As for the third of our friends," Ginger went on, ignoring her. "That remains to be seen. We have secured the address of this Mister Dave Claunney and are now helping the police to locate him. Given the other two cases so far, this one could be quite the emergency. It seems he was forced from his comfy little closet. God only knows how he'll react. Such matters don't always go well, don't you know?"
Ginger spun around and strode to the door.
"Someone will keep you informed," she promised. "In the meantime, please don't do anything, and by that I mean really, don't do anything at all. You will turn off your computers and you will not leave the premises. Someone will be in touch with you shortly."
She gratuitously slammed the door on her way out. Everyone on the floor had heard everything anyway, and nobody dared to look up. It was never a good idea to draw attention to yourself in the vicinity of Ginger MacAvoy. Kandhi, Fred and Wen remained in Kandhi's office for several more minutes. Kandhi did turn off her machines and, looking glum and nearly in tears, finally waved the others away. After they'd left the office, she just sat there, staring at the wall.
- - - - - - - - -
Fred and Wen returned to their cubes and kept to themselves, Wen disobeying instructions and getting right back to work on her stats. There were still quite a few to be analyzed, especially the friends' incoming data, which was interesting in itself. She was curious about the shapes the data would take when they were perennially unoccupied otherwise. She would map and reduce until physically restrained. Ideally, all three friends' data should be identical, but it wasn't. There were unanticipated variations which she sought to explain algorithmically. At one point she even called over a couple of developers to look at her charts. They too were intrigued, and so the afternoon passed in relative normalcy for her.
Not so for Fred. He had followed Ginger's orders and turned off his laptop, and also the servers on which he'd been running regressions. Then he sat back and realized he was unable to function without his machines. His brain had nothing to do, so he pulled out his phone and tried to go about working on that, but it just wouldn't do. He couldn't install all the Python libraries he needed, for they simply hadn't been ported yet to the bleeding edge OS he had rooted on the device. He gazed longingly at his laptop and considered turning it on once again. Only dread kept him from actually doing it. He was forced to think long and hard about what he had done, and whether or not it could really be traced. After all, once a message was slipped in the stream, did it really retain its trajectory? Was the origin IP embedded inside of the protocol, or was it replaced, overridden by the messaging objects? He wished that he could remember, and the answer was so tantalizingly close. He could definitely find out right away, if only he could turn on the laptop, run a quick diagnostic, and capture some packets, just to be sure. The fact of not knowing was driving him crazy. His fingers were practically twitching in his frantic anxiety. The hours passed slowly for Fred.
He felt no remorse. That was certain. He'd done what he'd done because it had to be done. Letting the project go on as it had been was going to lead them nowhere, he knew. It was a bad beta batch, not because he'd paired them up wrong, and not because Kandhi had let him pick out the subjects, and not because of anything anyone did. It just was, and was destined to be, by the nature of the product itself. Friendship was a slippery thing, solid one day and vanished the next. People changed, they moved on. Good friends were not only hard to find, they were nearly impossible to keep, at least at the same level forever. Your best friend one day could be your enemy the next, or just drift away, become an acquaintance, before you even had any idea what had happened. And there were so many facets of friendship. It could never be clearly defined. There were friends who knew what you liked, and friends who knew what you WERE like, friends who knew your heart, and friends who knew only your wallet. What kind of friend could these beta friends be? It was open to whim, to accident, to happenstance. You couldn't let people be merely themselves and expect to end up with useful results!
So the boat must be rocked. The match must be lit. He'd seen it, he'd known it, and he'd done it. He didn't have any idea what would happen, only that something might, which was infinitely better than the nothing he was already sure of. The way that the test had begun was like filling a pot with water and putting it on a table. Fine, if what you wanted was a pot full of water, useless if you wanted hot tea. Well, now it was done and there was no use in crying about it. Chances were he'd be able to get another job in some other city someday! After all, he was still an experienced tester, and for some reason companies thought that they needed such persons. It was on the long checklist of things they felt they needed to have, like offices offshore, corporate culture and slogans.
Two o'clock came, and three o'clock went, and Fred stayed right there in his cubicle. He had fallen into a sort of reverie, contemplating the doom which had suddenly befallen him, when he was startled by a tap on his shoulder. It was Wen Li. He nearly leaped right out of his seat, and managed instead to fall on the floor.
"Steady, there," Wen chuckled, leaning over to offer him a hand up. Fred shook off the gesture and got to his feet.
"We've been summoned," Wen informed him.
"Oh, that's just great," he replied, following her out of the cubicle area.
"Summoned by who?" he asked. Wen just shrugged.
"I don't know. I was told to come get you. We're supposed to go down to a basement meeting room called Lafayette. Ever heard of it?"
"Nope," Fred said.
"Well, it shouldn't be too hard to find," Wen considered. They passed a few people on their way to the elevator, colleagues who conveniently found other places to look instead of at them.
"Are we being shunned?" Fred grumbled. He recognized some of his most antagonized developers among those who were studiously avoiding him. Fred silently swore an oath of revenge. He was certain they were all snickering into their sleeves.
"They're just worried the project's been canceled," Wen told him. "The rumor is going around."
"Good!" Fred spat as they waited for the elevator. "That's the best that could happen. Stupid computerized friendship bracelets!"
"I thought they were cool," Wen mildly replied. The elevator door opened and revealed Ginger MacAvoy waiting inside.
"Going down?" she sneered. Wen and Fred exchanged worried glances.
"Come on in," Ginger ordered. "I was just coming for you anyway."
They obeyed, and the three rode in silence down to the basement. Wen was thinking that at least this way they'd be having no trouble finding that meeting room, and she was correct. Ginger knew exactly where they were going. The only surprise was that she didn't enter the room along with them. Instead, she said "bon voyage," and facetiously waved them goodbye.
Wen and Fred entered the small meeting room. It was barely large enough for one meager table and four wicker chairs, all of which had been painted bright white like the walls and the floors and the ceiling. Kandhi Clarke was sitting in one of those chairs, shaking so hard her shoes were rattling on the floor. The chair to her right was occupied by the company's legendary co-founder, Chris.
"Please, come on in," Chris said, rising to greet them. He towered over the two, and his toothy white grin seemed hellish to Fred, who was immediately overwhelmed with emotion. Only Wen seemed immune to his spell, as she casually shook his hand, and then took her seat.
"First of all," Chris began, after they all had sat down. "I want to begin by saying 'thank you'. I know you've worked hard, and you've done a fine job."
Fred could only gape at the man. Whereas earlier he'd found it so hard to keep his mouth shut, at this moment it couldn't have opened for anything in all of creation. Kandhi merely sat there and blinked. It was unlikely she could absorb any of this, her mind
was so far gone from stress, but Chris was still talking.
"We've all been impressed by how rapidly you've managed to validate the essential life transformative power of our latest technology. We already knew of this power, of course. That much was clear from the start, but to have such a clean demonstration is truly amazing. We never expected such an immediate impact. Why, the intervention potential alone is enormous."
Chris glanced around, and realized the team was in no way prepared for this kind of briefing. There were dozens of use cases he could easily mention, and the co-branding potentials were staggering, but all of that would be lost on this crowd. He smiled and took a deep breath.
"Ah," he went on. "The Ginger effect! No, no, I can see it in your faces," he said as Kandhi attempted to speak. "I do apologize about that. She has a tendency to get carried away, I'm afraid. She was only supposed to inform you that we'd found the devices. We were sure that you must have been worried. After all, transmission can only terminate when the device is physically removed, and the subjects were instructed never to do that. They were so instructed, were they not?"
"Yes, of course," Kandhi managed to say.
"It was the police who removed them in two of the cases," Chris told them.
"And the third?" Wen spoke up, "Did you find