Earth isn't a "deathworld." We're the galactic QA test environment, and humanity just found the patch notes. Chapter 5: Standup

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I sat in the Tercel for six minutes before Delphine's Civic pulled in.

It was the same Civic. Same green. Same dent in the rear quarter panel where, in 1995, she had backed it into a fire hydrant at three in the morning at a gas station off I-57 on the drive back from Champaign. I had been in the passenger seat. The dent was the kind of thing you forget you remember until you see it.

She pulled into the spot two over from mine. She did not look at the Tercel. She got out. She locked the Civic. She walked to the bakery door. She paused at the door for one second, and in that second she looked at her watch, the way a person looks at a watch when they are going into a meeting they did not want to take.

She went inside.

I got out of the Tercel.

I locked it. I locked it twice, because I had checked the floppy twice that morning and I was apparently the kind of person now. I put the notebook under my arm. The cold spring air smelled like exhaust and, faintly, like bread.

The bakery door had a bell over it that rang when I came in.

Heinemann's was as I remembered Heinemann's, with one exception. The exception was that everything was smaller than it had been three years ago. The case at the counter was smaller. The booths were smaller. The pictures of pastries on the wall, painted by someone in 1979 and never updated, were smaller. The older woman behind the counter, who I had met dozens of times across the years of my life and whose name I had never learned, was also smaller. She nodded at me, the nod of a woman who recognized my face but had not been informed I was coming back into her bakery this morning, and was filing the question.

Delphine was in the booth in the back corner, the same booth, with her back to the wall.

I went to her.

She looked up.

"Mariani."

"Vargas."

"You look like hell."

"Yeah."

"Sit down."

I sat down. I knew what she was looking at because I had seen it in the bathroom mirror at five thirty that morning. The button-down shirt I had put on Tuesday at seven AM, slept in twice over, which was now Wednesday's shirt by the inverse property. The same khakis. The same jacket I had owned since 1993. The same New Balance sneakers. Glasses with a smudge I had been seeing through for about four hours. A person who would not pass an inspection by anyone who cared.

She had moved past us. I could see it in the way she looked at me. She had filed it and processed it and put it where it went. Three years was, for her, three years, not the equivalent of last week, the way it was for me.

She had dark hair, shorter than I remembered, cut to about her jawline. She was wearing a dark gray cardigan over a black tank top, dark slacks, the kind of sensible shoes a person buys when they have to stand on a call center floor for nine hours. She had switched to contacts at some point in the last three years. She had the kind of tired that came from a nine hour shift under fluorescent lights, which is a different kind of tired than the kind I was wearing.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"This is weird."

"Yeah."

"Let's not do it. The catching-up thing. Not now."

"Okay."

"Maybe never."

"Okay."

She nodded once. The nod was a small mercy. It was also a small door closing. I noticed the door close and decided to feel it later.

"Coffee," she said, and got up, and went to the counter.

She brought back two coffees in heavy ceramic mugs and a paper bag.

"I ordered you a kolacky," she said. "You are not going to argue with me about it."

"I was not going to argue with you about it."

"Yes you were."

She set the bag in front of me. The bag was warm. Inside the bag was a kolacky filled with apricot, which had been my order, the order I had always had, the order she had not asked me about and had not had to ask me about. I opened the bag and took out the kolacky and started eating it without saying anything else, because the alternative was saying something I was not going to be able to take back.

"Mariani."

"Yeah."

"What do you have."

I told her.

I told her the same way I had told her on the phone, which was in order, which was the way I told a story when I wanted to make sure I did not lose a piece. The skybox seam. The email Tuesday morning. The bounce tests at two ten PM. The Berenstain on Brett's shelf. The sunset Tuesday evening.

I told her about the architect's reply. I had read it enough times now that I could recite it. I recited it.

She listened the way she always listened, which was not to listen, which was to stop existing while another person was talking. When I got to the line about the escalation paths looping back through us, she sat back in the booth and did not lean forward again for the rest of the recitation.

When I finished, I told her about the draft.

"You wrote a reply," she said.

"Yes."

"Did you send it."

"No."

"Where is it."

"On my hard drive. Saved as groceries.txt."

She made a noise that was almost a laugh.

"What did it say."

I told her, in summary. The numbered list of questions. The argument. The closing line. Please write back.

"Don't send it," she said.

"I wasn't going to send it."

"You were thinking about it."

"Yes."

"Don't."

"Okay."

I told her about the hotfix email. The two fifty-one AM arrival. The Wednesday timestamp that was now correct. The fact that I had not opened it.

"You have not opened it."

"No."

"Why."

"Because I did not want to be alone when I opened it."

She nodded. She nodded the same way she had on the phone, the small once-nod that meant she had heard me and was filing it. She tapped a fingernail twice on the formica.

"Okay. Now me."

She pulled a manila folder out of the bag she had brought in with her. I had not noticed the bag, which is to say I had noticed it the way you notice a bag a person is carrying, which is to say I had not noticed it at all. It was a black canvas messenger bag, the kind a person who took it seriously to work bought from a catalogue in 1996 and was still using.

The folder was thick.

She set it between us, on the formica, next to the kolacky bag. She did not open it yet.

"I've been logging tier-two tickets I think are connected since November," she said. "Sixty-three of them. There are more, those are just the ones I printed."

"How many more?"

"I don't know. I stopped counting in February."

"Why."

"Because the answer was getting in the way of doing my job."

She opened the folder.

Inside the folder were three quarters of an inch of printouts. The printouts had been organized with handwritten tabs in different colors. I could see the topmost tab: TIMESTAMP. The next: DOMAIN. The next: CONTENT. The next: ACCOUNT GHOSTS. The next: GEOGRAPHY.

I leaned in.

She pushed two printouts across the formica to me.

TICKET #98-1117-2847
DATE OPENED: NOV 17 1997 14:23 EST
CUSTOMER: HARWELL, ELAINE J.
LOCATION: AUSTIN TX
TIER 1 OPERATOR: P. NGUYEN
TIER 2 ESCALATION: D. VARGAS

ISSUE: Customer reports receiving email from her late
husband on Nov 16 1997, dated Sep 4 1997. Customer's
husband died Aug 28 1997. Email is from his AOL account
which customer reports she closed Sep 1 1997. Customer
requests we explain how this is possible. Customer is
not distressed but is asking us to investigate. Customer
is, per her words, "a retired computer programmer."

T1 NOTES: Suggested possible delay in mail server queue
or third party spoofing. Customer rejected both. Customer
provided email headers which appear authentic.

T2 NOTES (VARGAS): Reviewed headers. Headers appear to
originate from internal AOL routing. No record of the
account being active after Sep 1 1997. No record of the
account ever sending the message in question. Customer's
account log confirms message received Nov 16 1997 with
no anomaly. Recommend further investigation.

STATUS: CLOSED 11/19 (BRIAN K.). REASON: USER ERROR.

TICKET #98-0203-9118
DATE OPENED: FEB 3 1998 09:11 EST
CUSTOMER: LAU, KEVIN
LOCATION: PALO ALTO CA
TIER 1 OPERATOR: J. PORTER
TIER 2 ESCALATION: D. VARGAS

ISSUE: Customer reports receiving email forwarded from
his sister referencing a film they both saw in 1996
called "The Coriolis Effect" starring Tom Cruise.
Customer believes this film does not exist. Sister
insists it does and she has watched it on VHS recently.
Customer wants AOL to verify whether the email is real
and whether he is having a stroke, in that order.

T1 NOTES: Confirmed email is real and was sent by sister.
Could not verify film. No record of any film by that title
released in 1996. Suggested customer contact sister
directly for clarification.

T2 NOTES (VARGAS): Customer's sister confirms purchasing
VHS at Blockbuster three weeks ago. Customer drove to
Blockbuster. No record of title in inventory. Sister
unable to locate VHS in her home. Sister now also
distressed. Recommend further investigation.

STATUS: CLOSED 2/06 (BRIAN K.). REASON: NOT AOL ISSUE.

I read them.

I read them twice.

I did not know what to say. I sat at the formica table with a half-eaten apricot kolacky in my left hand and two pieces of paper in my right, looking at the names of strangers in cities I had never been to. Elaine Harwell of Austin Texas. Kevin Lau of Palo Alto California. People who had called AOL because something had gone wrong in their lives that they did not have a vocabulary for, who had been sent to Delphine because she was the escalation point for things tier one could not explain, who had been logged by Delphine in a folder she now kept in her car because the folder would get her fired if Brian found it.

"Sixty-three of them," I said.

"At least."

"All like this."

"In one way or another."

"Different states."

"Different states. Different income brackets. Different age groups. Different ethnicities. Different account ages. Different time zones. Different volumes of usage."

"What's the common factor."

"There isn't one. That is the point."

I put the printouts down.

"Wes."

"Yeah."

"There are more of you out there."

"Okay," she said. "What do we do."

"That is a question I have spent the entire night not answering."

"Yeah. Me too. For longer."

I drank some coffee. It was bakery coffee, which is to say it was hot and good in the way nothing else in the world is.

"Option one," I said. "We go public. Newspaper, internet forum, something."

"No."

"Hear me out."

"I have heard you out, Wes. I have heard myself out. For six months. I have walked to the phone three times to call the Tribune and walked back."

"Why."

"Because the architect is not making it up. The escalation paths loop back. I have escalated sixty-three tickets and they have closed sixty-three tickets and not one of those closures was visible to me. I do not know who closed them. I know Brian signed them off but Brian does what he is told. Brian was told. By whom, Wes. By whom."

"Okay."

"Option two. We stop."

"No."

"Hear me out," she said.

"I have heard you out. We are not stopping."

"I know."

"So option three."

"Option three," she said.

We sat with option three for a minute.

Option three was investigation. Option three was what the two of us, sitting across from each other at six fifty in the morning in a bakery, had been doing all along and would keep doing, separately and now together. Option three was the slowest option, and the option that, of the three, contained the highest probability of one of us being wrong in a way that mattered.

Option three was also the only option.

"Conditions," I said.

"Yeah."

"You first."

"Don't send the draft."

"I told you I wasn't going to."

"I am putting it in conditions. You do not send the draft. Not without telling me first. If you change your mind, you tell me first."

"Okay."

"Open the hotfix email today. Not at work. At home. Tonight. Tell me what's in it tomorrow."

"Okay."

"My turn," I said. "You pull the full ticket archive. Not on AOL's machines. Print every one you have on paper at home if you have to."

"I am ahead of you on that. I have been printing four a night since November. The folder is the ones with patterns. The rest are at my apartment."

"Okay. Then this. We do not meet at Heinemann's again. Not for a while."

"Why."

"Because we used to come here. If anyone is looking, this is the first place they would look."

"Mariani, no one is looking."

"You don't know that."

"You don't know anyone is."

"I know there are sixty-three of me out there. I know they have all been closed as user error. I know somebody made those closure decisions. I don't know who that somebody is. Until I know, we don't meet at our bakery."

She looked at me.

"Okay," she said. "Fair."

"And one more thing."

"What."

"We find one of them. One of the sixty-three. The most local one. We approach carefully. We listen."

She thought about it.

"There's one in Schaumburg," she said. "I will look him up tonight."

"Okay."

"Okay."

She nodded the small nod. We sat there for a few seconds without saying anything else. The bell over the door rang and a man in coveralls came in for coffee. The older woman behind the counter said something to him I did not understand. He said something back in the same language. The bakery hummed at, I noticed, a low B, which was its own kind of completeness, the way an old building knew its key.

"Mariani."

"Yeah."

"How is Karen."

"She is good. She had a dream Monday night."

"Yeah?"

"She dreamed I came to the door and she did not recognize me."

Delphine looked at me for a long second.

"Wes."

"Yeah."

"Open the hotfix email tonight."

"Okay."

"And eat the rest of that kolacky."

I ate the rest of the kolacky.

We left the bakery together at seven oh four. The older woman behind the counter said something to me on the way out, which was a thing she had never done before. I did not know what it meant. Delphine did. She said back to her, in the same language, something I did not understand. The woman nodded.

"What did she say."

"She said I look like my mother."

"What did you say."

"I said she always does."

We walked across the parking lot. The morning had become morning while we were inside. The sky was full daylight now, the kind of blue that meant it was past seven and the world was open for business. Cars had appeared in the lot during our hour. The Tercel was at the far end. The Civic was two spots over.

We stopped between the cars.

"Forty-eight hours," she said.

"Forty-eight hours."

"Not here."

"Not here."

"You have my home number?"

"From memory."

"Of course you do. Call me from a pay phone if it matters."

"A pay phone."

"Yes, Mariani, a pay phone. We are not on AOL for anything that matters until we know more."

"Okay."

She got in her Civic. She started it. The engine made the noise a 1990s Civic makes, which was a noise that had not changed in three years and that I knew the way I knew her voice. She backed out of the spot. She raised her hand off the steering wheel to me, a small flat goodbye, and she drove out of the lot.

I watched her pull out onto Oakton and turn east toward the city.

I sat in the Tercel for another minute after she was gone, just to make sure she was gone.

Then I opened the notebook.

WED 4/22/98, 07:08 CT. MET D. VARGAS, HEINEMANN'S.
SIXTY-THREE TICKETS. AT LEAST.
THERE ARE MORE OF ME.
DECIDED: OPTION 3, CONDITIONS APPLY.
NEXT: OPEN HOTFIX TONIGHT. FIND SCHAUMBURG.
NOT THIS BAKERY AGAIN.

I started the engine.

I drove to work.