And that was how a V.T. Lemming became the V.T. Lemming, something the parents who named him Vladimir Thaddeus would never have imagined. Their goal at the time had been to offset the suicidal baggage packed into the family name. Or as his father, John Lemming, predicted, “The kids’ll be so busy trying to figure out what to do with ‘Vladimir Thaddeus’ they’ll never make it to ‘Lemming’”—a nice thought that (predictably) fell short of reality.
Quire was V.T.’s second act for which he could claim no creative input except for having enough money to buy a start-up originally named Pulp!t (pronounced “pulpit”). The platform had potential, he thought, falling as it did between the newly popular site known as Myspace and Facebook before it dropped the the.
Though younger than either, V.T. Lemming had joined Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the troika of Silicon Valley’s elders—the ones the industry pointed to whenever accusations of ageism were lobbed by critics who (it was not-so-secretly assumed) probably believed the internet was kept alive by elves pushing shopping carts full of vacuum tubes. V.T. even showed up—not entirely willingly—on the March 2007 cover of AARP’s magazine next to the words Gray Matters, when he was still in his early forties.
More than a decade had passed since that cover story, making what happened even more impressive. Because while George had imagined his hack going a number of ways, he hadn’t counted on V.T., now in his early fifties, coming along for the ride.
The Voltaire had been circling City Lights Bookstore autonomously for a half hour, sparing its billionaire owner the cost of parking while he shopped publicly for poetry. It was his PR people’s idea to dispel rumors that V.T. had actually died and been replaced by a robotic double. Something by Bukowski, they thought, to guard against seeming effete while at the same time lending a certain aura of grit and danger to his public persona.
They needn’t have bothered. Because as V.T. reached for the door handle of his idling ride, George’s daisy-chain hack completed its last link, all the doors thunked shut, and the Voltaire pulled away from the curb and back into the flow of traffic.
George could hear V.T. swearing through the phone he’d activated remotely. He planned on uploading the audio and (fingers crossed) video once the CEO removed the phone from his pocket to report a runaway EV. But then the swearing became panting. George brought up thumbnails of the video feeds from several security cams in the area. The old man was running after the car. Even more amazingly, he caught it—though its stopping for a traffic light helped.
And now—no, yes, shit—he was crawling onto the hood! Banging on the windshield? Yeah, that’ll help. No, wait, not banging. V.T. was placing his hands strategically, in various locations on the glass, perhaps trying to block whatever sensors or telemetry the navigation system was relying on. A decent thought, though ultimately unsuccessful, as the car started up again once the light changed, and the CEO of Quire almost rolled off into traffic.
Almost—but didn’t. Instead, he dug both hands into the well between windshield and hood where the wipers hid until needed.
More swearing, more holding on for dear life, more hacked security and traffic cams activated as the Voltaire-plus-CEO prepared to cross the Bay Bridge while George sat miles away at a public-library computer, monitoring, prepared to shut the stunt down if it looked like he was about to endanger the public. By the time the Voltaire made it to the middle of the bridge, George was able to dispense with the hijacked cams in favor of streaming the helicopter feed going out live to all the local television stations, thanks to the celebrity of the passenger he’d acquired for his little joyride.
The original plan had been for the car to drive itself to the library George had been surreptitiously living in since running away from foster care. He wasn’t planning to steal it, per se. He’d promised himself one ride in V.T.’s midlife crisis, after which he’d abandon it to the resourcefulness of the local, vengeful capitalists. That plan was no longer viable—not with traffic copters and highway patrol in pursuit.
And so George cut to the chase—so to speak—and drove the Voltaire straight to where he planned to dump it, taking I-80 to 880 south toward San Jose and the airport. Hopping off at the High Street exit, George piloted the hijacked auto and its impromptu hood ornament to Alameda Avenue and the Oakland Home Depot parking lot. The original plan was to do this sometime after closing—around midnight, say. Instead George found himself bringing the vehicle to a stop under the chop of helicopter rotors and the shouts of highway patrol officers demanding that the driver who wasn’t there exit with hands up. All this in the bright California sun, on live TV, already being remixed and mashed up and posted all over the world.
Why George did it was a fair question. And the answer? George knew what he’d say his motive was if he ever got caught: a smile. Sure, he could have liquidated the vehicle; he could definitely use the money, being short of cash ever since leaving the foster care system a few years ahead of schedule. But George needed the smiles more than money. He needed them to neutralize the poison in the air everywhere he went nowadays—online, especially, but in real life too. That’s what he’d say if he ever got caught, that the world had become so angry. It had been angry before but had gotten even worse since Russian hackers and sensationalism-seeking algorithms turned everything up to eleven. And George, a foster kid, had done time at both ends of the political spectrum, eating breakfast to Fox & Friends in one house, doing dinner with Rachel Maddow in another, neither meal sitting well on a stomach that felt like battery acid had been absorbed into it by osmosis.
He’d seen a series of bumper stickers on the minivan of the fosters he ran away from. “Coexist,” one sticker had said, spelled out in the range of religious icons, next to another that advised him to “Practice Random Acts of Senseless Kindness.” He’d had hope—for a second. But then his new family handed him a razor blade to scrape the stickers off. Turns out George wasn’t the only secondhand thing they’d recently acquired.
So yeah, smiles. That’s what he’d say. Little facial breaks from the general zeitgeist; that’s why he’d done it. That they came at the expense of one very unsmiling CEO, well, that was the funny thing about rich people: their smiles and the smiles of everyone else were inversely correlated, a tragedy for one being pure comedy for the others.
3
Pandora’s first idea was to beat the crap out of the boys who’d memed her—but she was concerned their balls would prove too tempting a target. It wasn’t that she had any qualms about fighting dirty or below the belt—that was Asymmetrical Warfare 101—but the knee-balls combo was such a cliché, and she prided herself for thinking outside the box. Her means of revenge, she thought, should reflect who she was as a person—but not so much so that the CSI people could trace it back to her.
Pandora decided to avoid anything overtly computer related, for fear that would point back to her. Not that she advertised her hacking chops, but her dad’s job did, what with the satellite dish outside their cabin and the fact that the Lynches were cybercitizens way before almost anyone else in Fairbanks. Add that she’d already been pulled from class twice to perform pro bono IT consulting in the principal’s office and it was pretty clear that they had her number. It was a shame, too, because there were a few exploits that would have been fun.