It wasn’t hard to sell Matt on the idea of coming out for a couple of weeks, especially with the chance it might turn into a real job. He’d spent the last three years in Dallas working for a killer design firm which had jumped on the Web side of things at exactly the right time. He’d left them a few months before to do his own thing, so he had the experience and he had the time. Even better, he was excited and grateful to help me out. I thought it might be a month’s worth of work helping me out overall, but given that it was early December I figured we’d do two weeks then and reserve two more weeks for a second trip after the new year. He’d be paid pretty handsomely.

In the past, Matt had gotten in some trouble when it came to people. Like I said, he could go a bit off the rails. Most of my friends back in Austin understood what I liked about him — his high energy, quick with his wit. But he had a flaw, common among us nerdlings, that he rarely censored himself, and he could be abrasive. One by one, he’d alienated most of my better friends. They liked him, they simply didn’t think it was worth taking the chance that it might be one of the bad times.

The truth was I loved him like a brother. He was the only person I’d kept in my life from the bulletin-board days, and we’d been through each other’s times, good and bad. Except for Matt’s effect on my other friends, he’d only ever been a positive force in my life. He was clever and he could always make me laugh. Worst case, even if he couldn’t get along with the rest of the team at Kroll, I’d be able to get some structure from him about how professional Web projects were planned and executed.

Really, all I needed was a bit of confidence. I needed an old friend.

Within a week I was picking him up at the airport.

“Goddamn,” he said when he finally pulled away from our hug. Matt was nearly a head taller than me, long-faced and lean, bushy brown hair puffing out around his maniacally grinning face. “I’m so glad to be off that goddamn plane.”

“I’m glad to see you, too.”

He grabbed one of his two bags and started walking off, then he stopped. Looking back at the other bag, he frowned and said, “Uh, like, could you get that one?”

“Oh! Shit, sorry. Sure.”

Once we got to my place, I began to talk about the situation at work and the job that needed doing. He held up his hand.

“Tomorrow,” he said with a smile. “It’ll all happen tomorrow. Hey, ah, do you have anything to eat? I’m a little light.”

“Huh?”

“Well, after I quit my job and moved to Colorado, the chick I was with up there turned out to be, you know.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Dude, you know. You know. Anyway, I drove back to Dallas with this other girl, this stripper, and I was like, ‘Fuck me, this girl is H-A-W-T — hot.’ But she was no good, gave me herpes. Herpes, man.” Suddenly I thought he was going to cry. “My cock looked like a cob of Indian corn for two weeks.”

“What?!”

“Yeah. Then I had to get over that and everything, so this deal here is perfect. But I don’t get paid until after I’m done, you know, so I’m a little light in the cash pants right now.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Yeah, sure — that sucks, man, I had no idea.”

“Yeah, well.”

So I got dinner for us. All in all, we had a terrific evening. In the light of the energy and enthusiasm of my oldest, best friend, I began to relax.

The next morning on our short drive into work, he asked, “How much are you making? I mean, not in a year, but with stock and everything, for however long you think you’re going to be here.”

I had to think about it. “I really don’t know,” I said. “You know I never had a good relationship with money. I don’t like letting it motivate me. I mean, I know people out here who’ve made a lot, but it’s just what happened, you know?”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Throw a rock out the window and you’ll hit a bunch of people who feel strongly that they’re going to be rich soon, but really it’s a whole lot of timing and luck. I don’t think it’s anything you can helpfully plan for. I never thought I’d make even as much as I’m making now, so I get up every day and I think I’m pretty lucky. I’m happy. I know that feeling won’t last forever, but I want to hang on to it for a while.”

“But what do you want? How much do you think you’re going to get?”

“Mmm. What would make me satisfied? By the time all is said and done, I’d be happy with a quarter of a million dollars. It’s not that I have no ambition, it’s that anything more than that is like free money. I don’t want to be one of those guys who ever one time loses sleep that he didn’t hit the jackpot. You do or you don’t, and the only control you have is to keep yourself in the game.”

“I’m with you,” Matt said, staring forward.

When we got to my desk, I said, “So let me tell you what we’ve got.”

“First,” he said, “here’s the deal. Anyone asks you what I do, what do you say?”

“Uh, you’re the guy who’s going to help me get started on this site? You’re going to give me a good structured approach to building the elements, maybe code up some Javascript—”

“No. That’s not it. I am an Internet Strategist, get it?”

“Um, you mean like how a weatherman is, I don’t know, a meteorology prognostication consultant?”

“Internet Strategist.”

“As long as we get done what we need to get done, sure.”

“Okay. I—” Matt’s phone rang. “I’m here,” he told it. “No, thanks, I just needed some advice. I’m in a situation.” He looked off into space, holding me back with one upraised finger.

“I can wait,” I told him. He stood and walked slowly toward the reception area, mumbling into the receiver. He came back with a grin.

“Okay,” he said. “I have everything I need.”

“Sure,” I said. “Now, here’s the site design I’ve got so far—”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t need to see it.”

An alarm had begun ringing in my head — had been ringing since last night, only I’d been ignoring it. I sat up straight in my chair.

“We’re going to do this,” he said, smiling, “the right way.”

“Hello,” a voice said behind him. It was Mary. “Who’s this?” she asked.

Matt turned to her, beaming charm, shaking her hand. “Hi,” he said. She smiled.

“This is an old friend of mine,” I told her. “His name’s Matt. He’s here to help get the site off the ground faster. Matt, this is Mary. She runs the place.”

Matt shot a scowl at me, then turned back to Mary with a smile.

“I’m an Internet Strategist,” he said. “I’m out from Dallas for a few weeks — maybe longer, who knows. I’ve worked with a bunch of big names, but I’m happy to see what problems you’ve got here, see if I can help.”

“Huh,” she said. “You know, I’m from Texas as well.”

“Really? No wonder things seem so awesome here.” Matt turned back to me. “We Texas people gotta stick together.” Then to her, he said, “Where’s your office?”

“I’m over here.”

“Do you have a minute so I can ask you a couple of simple questions?”

“Sure,” she said, and they went off together, Matt closing her heavy wooden door behind them.

“What just happened?” I said to the air, even though I knew.

In late 1999, the population of the tech industry was heavily skewed toward a dorkily geek crew. We’re a bunch of geeks, even today, don’t get me wrong. But the adults who’d been socialized before the rise of the Internet, before the mid-1990s, had gotten into computers because they were big, fat dorks —figuratively, for the most part, but dorky nonetheless. They were awkward socially, or they had grooming eccentricities. Speech impediments. You name it. But computing smoothed over a lot of that. In a large part, because it allowed tiny niches of very specific interests to recognize one another and come together, and to grow into something resembling a community.

I went to see a movie with Rob and some of his friends, one of whom was a slight man with a wispy beard. He cradled a stuffed animal like a baby, and it was only once the movie began that I realized it was a puppet, his left hand slipped inside so that it could respond to him when he stroked it. When something funny would happen, he’s glance at the puppet and they share a reaction.

Standing out in front of the theater after the show, after that guy had walked off to his car, I asked about him.

Rob rocked back on his heels, crossing arms over his small belly. “He’s a special one,” Rob said. “Have you ever heard the term ‘furry’?” I was still calibrating the subtleties of English accents, so I knew there was something compressed within what he was saying but I wasn’t able to unpack it.

“That’s a new one on me,” I said.

He traded glances with a couple of the other people there, most of whom looked away. Ah, I thought, he’s hoping someone else will explain.

“They…like stuffed animals,” he said. “Really, really like stuffed animals. Sometimes they have parties where they dress up in costumes. The costumes have been modified to allow —”

“I get it.”

“If you’re a furry,” said someone else, the only woman there, “it doesn’t mean you want to have sex with stuffed animals.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “It might mean you want to have sex with someone dressed up as a stuffed animal.”

“Fuck off, Rob,” she said. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, which was geek for, “I’m sorry I lost my temper, please give me a second to pull myself back together.” Then she looked at me. “There are all kinds of words for all the different varieties of people who are into whatever it is that they’re into. Maybe you just like to dress up, maybe you like to fool around, maybe you’re into stuffed animals or toys or whatever. I doesn’t matter. It’s not really about the sex. Some people would just do anything to have a friend.”

That I could understand. As the days cooled down and the end of the year came near, I found myself looking for friends. Jim was looking to leave Yahoo and focus full time on the startup he’d soon be building with Doug, but his dreams of travel were still strong, and he had a ton of vacation time built up at work. This was important, because he also had a ton of stock that hadn’t yet vested. Sticking around another six months, was worth millions of dollars to him, but as hard as it was to hire good people, you still couldn’t totally check out and sail through half a year without getting fired. So he’d blocked out a good number of three-week chunks over the next four months when he simply wouldn’t be around.

I needed more friends. Specifically, I wanted a girlfriend, and this brings us back to the Mancini mansion.

At the time, the single, straight guy to single, straight girl ratio in Silicon Valley was something like 8:1. I’m not making this up — this was the number reported in the local paper. Once, an organization called something like “Single Women of America” had their annual convention about five blocks from my apartment, due to the density of relatively eligible bachelors. The year before, they’d met somewhere in Alaska. I poked my head in at one point. They had seminars lined up like, “How to Speak to Your Geek,” and “Star Trek: What You Need To Know”.

On one hand, I was shallow enough at the time that simply attending such a conference pretty much ruled you out as girlfriend material. On the other hand, there were parties at the Mancini.

At the time, and still today, the single, straight girl to single, straight guy ratio in San Francisco was not as badly skewed in favor of the guys as it was skewed toward girls in Silicon Valley, but it was skewed. Just like there was a complex web of relationships within a sizable group of geek guys, some of those relationships extended to a couple of women who lived in the city, who shared a complex web of relationships with a sizable group of women. The city girls and the valley guys sized one another up over plates of salmon and roast potatoes and bottles of totally decent wine.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t rich and I didn’t work for a well-known company. If I’d been back in Austin and I’d said, “Ah, yes, I was brought out here by an international private detective agency to do cool things I can’t talk about,” I’d have any single woman’s attention — if she didn’t think I was too full of myself to carry on a conversation, which knowing cool Texas women could very likely be the case. In the dot-com boom, it would be months before I’d register as someone interesting.

Not that I didn’t try. San Francisco was a 45-minute drive up to the end of the peninsula, and while some people simply found that an intolerable distance, I was from Texas. My internal mental yardstick of how far was “far” was different from most people. The fact that I was even remotely interested in the arts was enough to get me in the loop for when the city girls were going to live theater or see live music in a coffee-shop.

Something uncool happened on my second solo adventure up to meet up with this new group of people — there were guys in that group, too, of course, just like we had a couple of women in ours, so it wasn’t weird. I came out of the theater to find that my car’d been broken into: a window smashed, contents rifled, though it wasn’t obvious that anything had been taken. This was the same car that had been stolen and returned to me back in Austin. It had seen rougher times, but it upset me a lot more than I thought it should.

Driving home that night, I felt a dark cloud rolling in behind me. Elements in my mind that had been quiet for years were coming back online. My paranoia had found fresh fuel in my new life in California.

With my best friends either traveling, or still getting themselves back together after a long depression, by the time December rolled around I suddenly hit a pocket where I was spending a lot of time alone. I spent a bunch of money once a week at the comic store, and I ate Caribbean ribs as often as I could, but I didn’t yet think I knew people like Rob and Arturo well enough to reach out to them. I ha a hard time shaking the sense that I wasn’t dorky enough for my chosen tribe. I didn’t use Linux; I didn’t know C. I liked hanging out with Phil, who was very social, but he was my boss. So I felt a little stuck, not least of which because I could only push the dark cloud back so far on my own.

The long shadow of my relative isolation was especially unhealthy for me at work. As the only person on staff with any design skills, I’d begun working on the interface for our scanning service. If people couldn’t fire it up and see the results on a Web page then it didn’t exist, and for some reason the pages I’d spent more than a month building didn’t look “real” to me — they looked like a bunch of elements floating on a page, without anything tying them together.

Maybe they were okay. Maybe the paranoia was making me insecure. Probably. The larger problem was that if we didn’t start showing results soon, our boss would lose his political battle with the Packet Storm guy, and that would be a disaster. I’d only interacted with Brian, the guy in charge of Packet Storm, a couple of times, but he was palpably self-obsessed, and a tyrant. Phil had to win.

Doug said to be honest, so I went to Phil.

“I’m stuck,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said. I was going along with him down to Santa Cruz, where he was picking up a few diving tanks to test some different gas mixtures from the relative safety of his apartment complex swimming pool.

“I can put some pages together, I could even get big parts of a site up and running, but it’d all be handmade, everything custom. I’m under the impression that over the last couple of years, serious Web design people have developed a lot of process and procedure around how you build something maintainable. I can figure it out, but I don’t think we have the time.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I know a guy,” I said. “Nn old friend of mine. Really old friend. Like, I’ve known him half my life. We worked together for a summer when I was sixteen. He spent a couple of years at a big Web design firm in Dallas. He knows this shit inside and out. If we could bring him out for a couple of weeks under contract, it’d be enough to get me bootstrapped. I could take it from there.”

Four years earlier, that summer I went to Seattle, the promise I’d made Karynne as she lay dying was that I would look out for Matt, her son, my friend. He could get a little crazy, sometimes, and she’d consistently been the only one who could lead him away from the edge. I felt like it was my responsibility to save him.

“How much’ll it cost us?” he asked. I gave him a number. “Piece of piss,” he said. “And who knows, friend of yours, maybe he’ll get a job, yeah?”

“That could be cool,” I said.

“You trust him, though?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Jim asked, “Can you start that salmon?” He pointed at a two-foot slab of pink fish flesh.

“How do you want it?” I asked, basically meaning, “No, I can’t.” He made an apologetic little expression, as if sorry to bother me, and inside of a minute he’d set it on a large foil rectangle, dropped some lemon slices on top, and folded the foil over, crisply creasing the edges before sliding it into one of the three grills in the backyard. Then he spun around back inside toward the kitchen, to finish preparing the soufflé in progress.

“Check on it in fifteen or twenty, would you?” he called back to me. I nodded, following.

In early October of 1999, the dot-com boom was only months away from the peak of its power. Yahoo’s stock price had soared up to over 192, from 105 a year earlier, and that was before a two-to-one split. Adjusted, the stock price had gone from 13 to 48, roughly 370% growth. Jim had come into Yahoo as part of the acquisition that created Yahoo Mail, and he’d worked tirelessly for years to make that service the valuable thing it had become, transitioning quickly from a technical curiosity to a crucial Internet service.

It was no surprise he was rewarded handsomely for it. What surprised and impressed people, especially people like me, was what he’d been doing with the money. He’d gotten his Emergency Medical Technician certification, working nights at a local emergency room as motorcyclists were regularly scraped off the road and brought into triage. He’d begun considering a stint with someone like Doctors Without Borders and taking a trip around the world, helping people where he could. In the meantime, he’d also taken chef classes and come out the other side as a more than decent dinner-party thrower, hosting little gatherings of between twenty and forty people every few weeks.

Jim had not been the most social of cats back in Austin. But in Silicon Valley, it was much easier for geeks to bond with random strangers, who were also likely to be geeks. It created an environment where people like Jim could turn to nearly anyone and talk about the recent updates to his favorite open-source mail server, and even if that person didn’t know anything about mail servers they’d probably be interested in why Jim was interested in the differences, and out of that you get a conversation. You didn’t have to start a conversation with a stranger by talking about the weather or your favorite sports team and then see where you could take it from there.

There was a distinct sense that we were all in this together, we were all successful to some degree or we wouldn’t even be there, we were going to be rich, we were finally being given the control we’d dreamed that we deserved through the entirety of our geek-oppressed lives. We were going to change the world. Hopefully, we could learn a lot and have some fun along the way.

And it’s no joke that the work was hard, so the fun was important. The place where Jim hosted his dinners was called the Mancini Mansion. It had a unique reputation in quiet little Mountain View, just off its suburban downtown yet a few blocks back from the droning strip-mall stretch of El Camino Real, that paved-over remnant of the Spanish Colonial-era. The mansion had once been the home of a self-made man, last name Mancini, an immigrant who’d come to California nearly a hundred years earlier with virtually no money but an amazing ambition which eventually led him to great heights. It wasn’t very far from a common Silicon Valley story, decades before the place became Silicon Valley.

The home Mancini built with his money was a five- or so bedroom home with a rooftop deck and a vast semi-circular driveway, with several palm trees, visible for blocks, towering over the whole place. It had been built across four normal lots, an enormous spread even when it was built. It was garishly decorated, and fairly well preserved, all things considered. Every room was unique. For example, one bedroom was set partly over a defunct hot tub.

When Doug had first moved to California, he’d worked a network admin job for Electric Communities, the early virtual worlds startup. When Doug got promoted, he needed someone to take his place so he’d convinced Jim to move out and take over for him. When Jim eventually needed replacing, a young Englishman named Harry had passed the opportunity to a school friend of his, Rob.

Rob and Harry had gone to Cambridge together. While Harry was the rail-thin, long-fingered anti-social type, Rob was the slightly more stocky, strong voiced, hyper-social type, though once you got them talking it was obvious how they could hardly be more alike or better friends.

Rob had eventually moved on from Electric Communities — the place was so ahead of its time that it crashed and burned years before the rest of the Internet startups — but the larger social circle which had grown out of the E.C. people would persist. Rob ended up working for Stanford’s research arm, S.R.I., and renting a room in the Mancini, where Jim ended up throwing his parties. Between the long indoor dining room and the patio tables, there was enough room to seat around forty people.

That night was my first time at the Mancini. We were celebrating Harry’s return to California. He had moved back to England a few years before, but somehow he’d heard about a job working on my team, and had flown out for an interview, which we all presumed was merely a formality. After all, you couldn’t hire remotely decent people for any amount of money, so moving a super-talented guy over from London was a no-brainer.

Personally, I don’t remember talking a lot that night, though I’m sure I did my share. I was dizzied by the nested social connections of how everyone had worked together previously at one or more companies. Keeping tens of new faces straight was a real challenge, no matter how similar we’d eventually discover we were. There was a reason that you could draw a straight line from Doug to Jim to Harry to Rob, and that was because they had a lot in common. No surprise we’d all get along so well.

But that’s today. Then, I was just trying to get through the evening. Another of their friends, Arturo, also seemed glad to meet me. He was from Mexico, though he and Harry had been at the same IBM internship in London. After Arturo made his leap from Mexico City to Silicon Valley, he pulled Harry over from London, who’d referred Rob to Jim. Like I said, it’s a tightly nested mess of people who liked one another.

Arturo was doing security things at Yahoo, where Jim also worked, further entangling the relationships. Jim caught us both in the hallway between kitchen and dining room and introduced us, telling Arturo where I worked, that I was a friend of Doug’s, and then walked away.

“Oh!” Arturo said. “You’re at Kroll. Where Harry’s interviewing.”

“Yes, it seems.”

“Huh!” He thought for a moment. “I’m a customer, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You’ve done some security work for us.” He thought for a moment. “Do you know C?”

I know now, and I suspected at the time, that I could pick up C — which is, by the way, a computer programming language. I’d touched on it in college, before changing my major away from the Computer Science track, and I already knew enough about the security side of things that I probably could’ve faked my way into a job. I would’ve been granted stock, real Yahoo stock, the value of which seemed to be approaching escape velocity.

But one of the first things that Doug had told me, reinforcing what I already felt, was this: “Just be brutally honest about what you don’t know. One of the best things you can do is not be afraid to ask questions. I mean, you can ask too many questions, but be clear about what you do and don’t know. Start at first principles if you have to. The right people will happily tell you what you need to know, when you really need to know it.”

So I told Arturo, “I don’t know C. I’m more a designer than a programmer.”

“Ah,” he said, hands up in apology, backing away. “Ah, I see.” Then he paused, something close to confused. “But you know Doug?”

“Yes,” I said, happy to find a touchpoint we shared. Arturo tilted his head slightly, looking at me through heavy eyebrows. “Why?” I asked.

He took a shallow breath. “We worked together at E.C.” There was only a hint of Spanish in his accent.

“Uh-huh,” I said. There seemed to be a bit he wasn’t telling me.

“Where is El Doug?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” I said.

“Ah, a secret.”

“No, I really don’t know.”

Veiled curiosity gave way to the softness of concern. “Oh,” he said.

“At least I got my shotgun back,” I said.

He shook his head, clearly confused. Jim walked by, so I asked him, “Did you hear I got my shotgun back?”

He stopped in his tracks. “What?”

“I didn’t tell you about the shotgun?”

He laughed. “Somehow, no.”

“Oh.” I glanced to see if Arturo was still listening. He was standing patiently. “When I drove out last month, I’d brought everything I could fit in my car that I’d grief over having lost, like my great-grandfather’s old shotgun.”

Jim laughed again, almost nervously. “And how did we get here?”

“Ah,” I said. “Okay, first principles. So, there’s this guy named Doug.”

“I know him,” said Jim.

“Si,” said Arturo.

“He let me stay in his spare room when I first moved out here. I don’t even have any ammunition for the shotgun, but I’d tucked it between two bookshelves in Doug’s spare bedroom just to keep it out of my car once I got here. Then when I moved into my own place, I forgot about it.”

“So you saw Doug?” Jim asked.

“No,” I said. “This guy named Doug, he broke up with his girlfriend.”

“Oh,” Arturo said again. “I’m sorry to hear.”

“I think it was for the best, though I learned the hard way not to say.”

“Though you just did,” Arturo pointed out.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d been exchanging messages with his girlfriend for a few weeks, trying to meet up with her. She wanted me to come by her place and pick it up there so I could fix something on her computer.”

“I bet,” Jim said.

I sighed. “That’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

“So did you…fix her computer?”

“No!” I said, glancing around to see who else might have been overhearing. My “no girlfriends of friends” policy still extended to ex-girlfriends, especially recent ex-girlfriends. Especially her. Jim and Arturo were grinning. “I mean, no,” I said more like a normal person. “So I had her bring it to the office. It was almost a disaster.”

“How so?”

“Ah, well, she saw the danger well before I did, and called me from the parking lot. She said, ‘It occurs to me that your co-workers might become a bit worried if Doug’s ex-girlfriend walked in the front door carrying a shotgun.’”

“Oh, holy shit!” said Jim. Arturo put both hands up to his face in sympathetic mortification.

I nodded. “So like I said, I got my shotgun back.”

Jim smiled, then he turned to Arturo. “Your head’s looking okay,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Arturo, nodding slightly. His hair was closely cropped.

“He made a bet,” said Jim, pointing a thumb at Arturo before moving on to get some other piece of the dinner party together.

“A bet?” I asked Arturo.

“When I interviewed at Yahoo a little more than a year ago, one of the guys there said that he thought the stock would hit X value—” He held his hand up at roughly shoulder height. “—where X was a multiple of the stock’s value at the time. I told him no way, it would never happen. That if it ever did, I would shave my head.” He grinned like a boy and rubbed the top of his closely cropped hair.

“Wow,” I said. Then, not knowing how to respond, I said, “I’m sorry I don’t know C.”

He shrugged. “It’s very hard to find people,” he told me, then he waved, and made to move down the hall toward his original destination.

Before the end of the year, Yahoo’s stock would more than double again, going from 48 to 108, adjusted to today’s values. We had know way of knowing, overwhelmed by euphoria and lacking the precognition we enjoyed attributing to our fine selves, that this would be the high water mark. Everything after that would be a decline, and then a fall.

But in those final days of the first global Internet boom, we were at the top of our collective game — except for me, I felt. While the other great geeks of the age were toasting one another about having finally overthrown the shackles of nerd-dom and taken over the world, I’d soon begin sliding in the grips of what would be one of my deepest and longest lasting depressions.

Given that most everyone would be joining me within the year, you could say I was simply once again ahead of my time. Here’s what happened.

Doug didn’t vanish immediately, though. As the vice-president in charge of our security consultants, who were the people who made us our money, his calendar stayed full until he simply stopped showing up.

One of the last times I saw him in a work-related context, he’d just flown to New York City and back — putting in a full day with a client before flying back that afternoon, returning for the Bay Area’s evening. I’d offered to pick him up at the airport. He looked wrecked, of course, if well dressed, this still being Doug. He sighed, pulling at his collar and his already loosened tie.

“God,” he said. “I’m never doing that again if I can help it — though I could get used to flying business class.”

“Really? Business class?” That was a distant if absurdly wasteful dream for me. I’d flown a lot, and I’d always been fine with cattle-car tickets. The higher class seats seemed like outrageous luxuries. I’d rather buy a new computer.

“I told them that the only way I’d make the trip was if they sent me business class,” Doug said.

“Was it worth it?”

Doug looked at me over the rims of his glasses as if reconsidering my level of intelligence. Apparently it was worth it.

“We’re opening a new office out there,” Doug said. “It’s a good space. There’s a woman out there named Linda Kay who’s stepping up to manage the consultants out there. They’re hiring like crazy.” As VP of Consulting, Doug needed to be in on all that.

I don’t remember what else we talked about on the way home, though I do remember it being the first time I dropped him off at his place, driving away from his shiny suburban duplex to my modest 1980s-era ground-floor apartment.

It wasn’t long after when Doug broke things off with his girlfriend for good, moving out and slipping into a bit of a depression. I only heard about it after the fact, really. All I knew at the time was that he wasn’t showing up in the office or answering his phone. Work kept me busy and I spent most of my free time with Jim, the both of us hoping Doug was okay and presuming he’d surface when he felt better.

Doug’s disappearance only sped up the process of getting to know my co-workers. I loved the office itself, with its tight central cluster of high-walled cubicles, perfectly Silicon Valley conference rooms along the two outward-facing walls. I spent months in those rooms, listening to people far wiser than I was argue about Internet security. I took it all in, staring out the wide, top-floor window over the late-afternoon commute traffic through the thin gray limbs of an increasingly leafless tree. The office itself was great, but it was the people and their energy that got me out of bed every morning, grinning like an idiot in the shower with what luck I’d had.

There were basically three types of people lurking around our quiet, dimly lit office.

First you had corporate people — like Mary, who ran our little store, and her administrative assistant, who’d followed her out from Texas through at least two previous jobs. Then there was an accountant, and an HR person, and a salesman who seemed to spend all his time pacing slowly up and down the cube aisles, muttering quietly into a headset microphone he perpetually pinched to one corner of his mouth. The final wood-trimmed office on the far inside corner of the building belonged to Taher Elgamal, the actual boss of the operation and one of the two founders of our consultancy, before being bought out by the detectives.

Taher was genuine royalty in Silicon Valley, having been Chief Technology Officer at Netscape as they’d made their titanic heave to take over the Web browser market for the explosively growing Internet. He’s credited with inventing SSL, the basic encryption scheme used to protect passwords and credit card numbers and anything else you wouldn’t want prying eyes to see as they moved from your device at home to some server somewhere. Few people understood it, but it basically made commerce possible on the Internet. Maybe it was more like a story we told ourselves to help us believe we were safe, but it was one of the most successful stories to come out of that early growth era.

What Taher was actually planning for us wouldn’t be clear for a few months, but it didn’t seem like he was there to retire. True, he was rarely in the office, though his presence and its calmly solid energy suffused the place, seemed to inform our approach to nearly everything. I guess that made him a good leader.

I once caught the eye of a client, an older woman in what looked like a Chanel suit, white-knuckling a tiny leather clutch as she waited outside Mary’s heavy wooden door, just outside my cubicle. Older women always liked talking to me, and she was no different.

“I haven’t seen you before,” she said, glancing across the cube tops behind me. “So many new people, though, more new faces every day.”

“May I help you?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “I’m waiting for Taher. Always waiting for people.” Her eyes grew wide in an instant, looking for all the world like a worshipful little girl. “He’s a great man, you know. Egyptian.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said.

“Egyptian,” she said again, “in the real way.” She lowered her voice. “Descended from the pharaohs. He could be a king if he wanted to.”

“What makes you think he isn’t?” I said, trying to find a way to joke my way out of the situation.

“He isn’t,” she said. “But he can be.”

Mary opened her door, all smiles. Behind her, Taher leaned against her desk. He was not smiling.

“Excuse us,” Mary said to me, and I turned on my heel, making for the break room.

The second kind of people in our office were the Engineers. There were three groups of us: the scanner team, where I spent most of my time, the Packet Storm team, a couple of newly hired hacker kids from Chicago who had nearly recussitated the attack-tool and vulnerability archives we’d just purchased, and a small group of mostly older guys who were working on some kind of network monitor.

I could identify that last group of people only by process of elimination. They were engineers and they weren’t on either of the other two teams. I knew precisely who was working on the scanner and who was assigned to Packet Storm because Phil, my boss, and Brad, the Packet Storm lead, were openly at war with each other, which meant you had to be super careful what you said with people from the other team around. Anything, however jokingly, could be turned around and used by one side or the other in Mary’s weekly staff meeting as a way to score points. It was an ugly reality, and in a few months it would make our office politics very dark.

Then there was the third group.

We didn’t see each other much that weekend. Doug and Jim had a lot of work to do on the business plan for Mojo Nation, and I spent a lot of time simply driving around the peninsula, trying to wrap my head around living in the dream that I’d always imagined to be Silicon Valley. I’d passed most of Sunday with Charlie, one of my old friends from the gaming industry, playing board games with his old group of older guys. They’d been meeting about once a week to try one game or another for more than twenty years; for a while, I was a welcome drop-in addition, and I was extremely grateful, even well after I’d moved into my own home. Charlie’s game room would be an island of sanity in what would be my increasingly unpredictable world, and that first time there was no different.

On my way away from Charlie’s place — in a suburb south of Oakland, just on the other side of the bay — I got a call from Doug to meet up again with Jim for dinner. He had news.

“We broke up,” he told me.

“Oh, wow,” I said, “I’m really sorry.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging. He seemed tired, for sure, but he looked a lot better. His shoulders weren’t slumped. He was almost relaxed.

Jim was eyeing him with quiet distance. I should’ve taken that as a sign.

“I hope I didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said.

“No, no,” Doug said. “I mean, you did — but not in a bad way.” He thought about it. “Having you here showed me how unhappy I’ve been. You reminded me what it was like…to have fun. So, thanks.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’m really sorry to hear that. I mean, I guess I’m glad it’s been fun and everything, but yeah: I’ve been wondering what was up. You’re not the same Doug I remember from Austin. You haven’t seemed very happy.”

“I’m not very happy,” he said with a laugh. “At least, I haven’t been. I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thanks. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better. Honestly, I had no idea what you were doing with that girlfriend of yours. I thought she was a terrible fit for you.”

“How so?” he asked, so I went off on what I didn’t like about her, because I’m a very stupid person.

The next day, Doug called me at work and asked if I could stop on my way home and pick up some steaks for him. He was grilling for some people — I would need to make my own plans for the evening — but he was too busy with work and the like to hit ths store himself.

When I got to his place with the steaks, Doug was so upset he was flustered.

“These are not—” he started, pointing at the steaks.

“What? I got what you wanted.”

“Yes,” he said, “but don’t you know what the important part of this cut is? It’s this little piece of meat right here.” He pointed. “You always get the ones with the largest part of this cut. That’s the best part, everybody knows it.”

I felt more than a little side-swiped. “Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” He waved it off. “I was going to ask you, though: What’s going to happen with you and your girl?”

Doug looked at me like I wasn’t making any sense, then his eyes snapped into focus. “Oh!” he said. “Yes. We talked about it, and we got back together.”

Oh, shit, I thought. “How do you feel about that?” I asked.

“Good, actually!” He smiled, opening the steaks. “We had a long talk, and it was good. I brought up with her a lot of the points that you’d made about her, and I think it was a productive conversation.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Did you tell her that those thoughts came from me?”

“Of course,” he said. “She’d actually like to talk with you about them as well.”

“I bet,” I said, and excused myself.

“Yeah, well,” Jim said, when I told him what had happened. “Doug doesn’t always break up with people on the first try. I learned a long time ago not to say anything until it’s definitely over, and sometimes even then I don’t ever.”

“I feel like an ass,” I said.

“Don’t,” Jim said. “It’s just what happens.”

The next day, I snuck out before anyone else was awake, made my way into the break room at work with a copy of the local peninsula phone book, and began calling apartments. There were no vacancies. In the city, where things were even hotter, people were paying as much as a thousand dollars a month just to crash on someone’s couch for a month. Having spent the past two years with a $500 monthly budget for living expenses, this seemed out of control. On the other hand, it was Silicon Valley.

Eventually, I found a complex that had a single one-bedroom open. While I was still in Austin, I’d been saving up for a new computer, one of the recently iMac releases. My monthly rent in Mountain View would cost more than an iMac each month. Luckily, if unreasonably, I could afford it. It made my head hurt, but the numbers were clear.

In less than ten days, I’d move into my own place. Not long after, for a while, Doug simply vanished.