Free Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Met.”
    “You kidding, Elaine, Ernie? we go back, we used to show up at the same demonstrations.”
    “My mother demonstrated? What for, a discount someplace?”
    “Nicaragua,” unamused, “Salvador. Ronald Raygun and his little pals.”
    This was when Maxine was living at home, getting her degree, sneaking out into weekend club-drug mindlessness, and only noticing at the time that Elaine and Ernie seemed a little distracted. It wasn’t till years later that they felt comfortable about sharing their memories of plastic handcuffs, pepper spray, unmarked vans, the Finest doing what cops do best.
    “Making me the Insensitive Daughter once again. They must’ve picked up some some tell, some shortfall in my character.”
    “Maybe they were only trying to keep you clear of trouble,” March said.
    “They could have invited me along, I could have had their backs for them.”
    “Never too late to start, there’s enough to do God knows, you think anything’s changed? dream on. The fucking fascists who call the shots haven’t stopped needing races to hate each other, it’s how they keepwages down, and rents high, and all the power over on the East Side, and everything ugly and brain-dead just the way they like it.”
    “I do remember,” Maxine tells the boys now, “March was always sort of . . . political?”
    She sticks a Post-it on her calendar to go to graduation and see what the old snood-wearing mad dog is up to these days.
    •   •   •
     
    REG REPORTS IN. He’s been to see his IT maven Eric Outfield, who’s been down in the Deep Web looking into hashslingrz’s secrets. “Tell me something, what’s an Altman-Z?”
    “A formula they use to predict if a company will go bankrupt in, say the next two years. You plug numbers into it and look for a score below maybe 2.7.”
    “Eric found a whole folder of Altman-Z workups that Ice has been running on different small dotcoms.”
    “With a view to . . . what, acquiring?”
    Evasive eyeballs. “Hey, I’m just the whistle-blower.”
    “Did this kid show you any of these?”
    “We haven’t been meeting much online, he’s so paranoid,” yeah, Reg, “he only likes to meet face-to-face on the subway.”
    Today an insane white Christer at one end of the car was competing with a black a cappella group at the other. Perfect conditions. “Brought you something.” Reg handing over a disc. “I’m supposed to tell you it’s been personally blessed by Linus himself, with penguin piss.”
    “This is to make me have guilt now, right?”
    “Sure, that’d help.”
    “I’m on it, Reg. Just not too comfortable.”
    “Better you than me, frankly I wouldn’t have the cojones.” It has turned out to be a cannonball dive into strange depths. Eric is using the computer at the place he’s been temping, a large corporation with no IT chops to speak of, in the middle of a crisis nobody saw coming.Something a little different. Each time he surfaces from the Deep Web he’s a little more freaked, or so it seems to those in neighboring cubes, though so many of these spend their hours down in the mainframe room snorting Halon out of the fire extinguishers that they may lack some perspective.
    The situation is not as straightforward as Eric might have been hoping. The encryption is challenging, if not mad serious. Whereas Reg has been entertaining fantasies of a quick in and out, Eric has found the clerks at this 7-Eleven are packing assault rifles on full auto.
    “I keep running into this dark archive, all locked down tight, no telling what’s stashed there till I crack in.”
    “Limited access, you’re saying.”
    “Idea is to have a failsafe in case of a disaster, natural or man-made, you can hide your archive on redundant servers out in remote locations, hoping at least one’ll survive anything short of the end of the world.”
    “As we know it.”
    “If you want to be chirpy about it, I guess.”
    “Ice is expecting a disaster?”
    “More