We’d been hiring more and more people, mostly to keep up with the demand for our services while replacing those we’d lost to the interesting start-ups which continued to spring up all across Silicon Valley. Maybe six weeks before the DDoS attacks began, two people had suddenly appeared in an empty row of desks behind Rain Girl, a young man and a young woman with the clear faces and wide smiles of people who weren’t exactly bad but who it was easy to imagine could be up to no good.

“You know who the new kids are?” I asked Phil.

“Ah, well,” he said, “Brad’s traveling more and more — consulting for clients and doing more than his share of partying, you see, so he can’t be troubled with the daily care and feeding of Packet Storm. You got new exploits and vulnerability hints coming in every day, so someone’s gotta go through it all, figure out what’s what, and get it up on the site.”

“Is that good for you? Him not being around.”

Phil shrugged, slumping a bit in his chair. “I’m not bothered about him any more. He’s going to slip up on his own, I don’t have to be the one to give him a shove.”

“So they’re running Packet Storm now?”

“He is, the one kid, a young hacker Brad found in Chicago. A bit touched, that one.”

“What do you mean? You mean like ‘Rain Girl’ touched?”

Phil slumped more deeply into his chair and looked at me through steepled fingers.

“Why don’t you tell me,” he said.

“And the girl?”

“Dunno. She’s his girlfriend. Don’t think she does anything but keep him happy. He refused to come out unless we gave her a job as well, you see.” He scratched his neck.

“So we’re paying her a Silicon Valley salary to be his girlfriend. I think there’s a word for that.”

“Don’t go there, pally. She answers email, I guess — spends a lot of time typing, at least.” Phil sighed. “Talk to them. Make friends if you can. See what he’s got them doing. If it’s up-and-up, fine.”

“If not?”

He pushed his chair back from his desk, stretching. The conversation was ending.

“You tell me,” he said.

The happy couple spent most of their time hiding behind headphones and screens of laptops, madly clickity-clacking from when I arrived in the morning until I left every evening. The site was getting updated, it was starting to get attention.

I had my own problems, of course. I had caught up enough on the technical side that I understood exactly how far behind I was. It wasn’t simply a problem of knowledge and understanding, it was a problem of habit. Those last few years in Austin, I’d let myself develop some terrible habits, mostly around not doing much work at all. The only way to get productive was to begin producing, and the only way to produce was to develop the habit of sitting your ass down every day and doing it.

One Sunday, with nothing else to do — Jim was off on one of his multi-week trips around the world, and the Bay Area’s rainy season had well and truly settled in; the days were short and my mood was dark — I went into the office to see if maybe I could get something done that I could feel good about, in hopes of starting the week with fresh momentum. To my slight surprise, I hadn’t been there an hour when I heard the office front door click open. I clocked the tops of the heads of the Packet Storm couple walking up the corridor that’d bring them past my office.

Slowly, the guy said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said. Beside him, the girl smiled with tightly pursed lips. He stared at me for moment, mouth opening and pulling air in as if he had something to say, then he turned on his heel and strode briskly on to the back corner of the office. The girl waved at me, then quickly followed.

I turned back to my screen, completely unable to remember what I’d been doing. I stared at my screen for nearly a minute before thinking I could probably use something to drink. Off to the kitchen, near the back corner of our office.

When I passed the open door that had been serving as a kind of lab, stacked high with racks of computing equipment and unlabeled cardboard boxes, the guy was standing on a chair, trying to attach something to the ceiling. The girl, sitting primly in a rolling office chair, looked over at me through the wide eyes of someone who wasn’t sure how the current scene would play out. Clearly, in her mind, it could go any number of ways.

I found that interesting.

“Hey,” I said, leaning against the frame of the door to the lab.

“Hello,” the guy said distantly, finishing what he was fiddling with, which was mounting a small disco ball to the ceiling. Then he hopped down off the chair and stood before me, arms pressed to his side.

“Hello,” he said again, as if for real this time.

“Hi,” I said, extending my hand. “My name’s Derek.”

“Mmm, hmm,” he said, shaking my hand and then going back to staring at me. The girl put on her headphones and swiveled around to face her screen — one of the top ten non-verbal cues that someone no longer wants to talk to you, in case you didn’t know.

“You guys are working on Packet Storm?” I asked.

He nodded, seeming to breathe more quickly. He was tall and thinner than most, wispy blonde hair like a cloud that followed him around. He looked toward me, but through me.

“I’m working on Radar,” I said. That was what we were calling our scanner.

“I know,” he said.

“I don’t think our bosses get along,” I said.

He barked a laugh, looking down and away from me. “I think you could say that.”

“Hmm,” I said. “That bad?”

He shrugged, still looking away. “He doesn’t know anything,” the guy said. “He says he does, but he doesn’t, not really.”

“What got you into computers?” I asked.

He took another good breath. “Oh,” he said slowly, “I like to play with things.” He shrugged again. “You know. Explore things.”

I nodded. Okay, I thought, let’s roll the dice. I opened my mouth and I said something I hadn’t told anyone in a long time.