Chapter 4
Houston, Texas
1Two years ago
James Grady sat in his cubicle amongst the run-down cube farm that contained TCP Compudyne’s technical services group, really just himself and three other engineers. Just like most mornings for as long as he could remember, he found himself in sort of a daze. 'Consumed' might be the right word. He was unable to get interested in work today. There was something weighing on him, crushing him. It didn’t help that he was also pretty bored at work.
Tim whizzed into the entrance to James’s cube in a style that reminded James of Cosmo Kramer’s famous entrances to Jerry’s apartment. Only Tim was not hip and funny and cool; he was just another geek who thought he was smarter than everyone else and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t the guy on top. His appearance in the cube rattled James loose from his daze.
“Jamesey! You catch that Rockets game last night? What is up with Meeks? That guy doesn’t snap out of it, we miss the playoffs.” He shook his head in mock disappointment.
“Hey Tim. No. I didn’t get a chance. We had dinner with Melissa’s mom last night up in The Woodlands and on the way home we blew a tire. That kind of ruined our whole evening after that, you know?”
“Yeah, well you didn’t miss much. You blew a tire, Meeks blew the game, man. Things are blowing up all over H-town last night.”
James got up from his desk, “Guess so. Hey, I’m gonna grab a coffee. You in?”
“Oh, can I?” pleaded Tim.
The two men followed the worn carpet to the break room only to find the coffee pot empty, as usual. So with a little bit of gritted teeth, James set in making another pot.
Tim Chandler was one of those “work friends” that middle class work-a-day tech people always end up with. The personality types who are attracted to this kind of work tend not to be overly social, and not much into building a consistent ring of friends and acquaintances that can endure. Ordinarily a bunch of introverts who prefer being alone, working out problems, thinking and talking to themselves over hanging out with friends or doing things together with new acquaintances, the tech set tended towards transitory “friendships” with people they work with daily.
That is, with people they work with, and who they can tolerate. For James, Tim was that guy. The overlapping area of the venn diagram of people he can tolerate and people on his team at work contained only one person: Tim Chandler. Outside of work, James and Tim wouldn’t likely be pals. But if you didn’t have someone you could have a casual conversation with at work, you’d go nuts in this place.
Maybe James was going nuts anyway.
As the fresh coffee started to drip, Tim began with a hushed, conspiratorial tone, “Yesterday I was checking up on those douchebags over at Roth. What’s our contract with those guys? Like ten K a month? Chump change. Those guys are raking in like ten K a minute, and they do nothing. Nothing! The computer system does all of their heavy lifting. Only thing the Roth dudes have to lift is a giant sack of money.”
Roth Partners managed a hedge fund in downtown Houston that relied exclusively on an automated trading platform. The system monitored a huge array of trading feeds to identify arbitrage opportunities, when at the same moment in time one buyer is offering more for a commodity than another seller is asking, and by utilizing extremely high performance network and trading systems, Roth would buy the cheap commodity and instantaneously sell it to the buyer and pocket the profit. Their system did this thousands of times per second in some cases. It really was like printing money. It hardly seemed legal.
“Yeah, well, that’s what you end up with if you have no soul, you know?”
Tim emphasized the point, “Seriously. No soul. Bloodsuckers. But anyway, you know it’s the system we built and maintain for them that does all of the work. I mean, why did we build out that network, and we only get maybe a hundred K a year and those guys make like a hundred K a minute with it. We should just be doing this trading thing and get out of this SI business.”
‘SI’ stands for Systems Integrator, which basically summarizes the business of TCP Compudyne. TCP started out at the dawn of networking when nobody knew what networks were, the internet ran at 2400 baud and Appletalk was considered revolutionary. Back then it was Thomas & Carlton Partners. When the internet began to catch on, they changed it to TCP to match a popular internet acronym. TCP would design and install networks for clueless companies around Houston. But pretty soon, by the early 2000s, networking became easy, and wireless, and college drop-outs and high school kids were wiring up smoking-fast networks for pennies on the dollar of what TCP was trying to charge, so they changed their model. They were reinvented as TCP Compudyne, building systems for the elite, those who demanded extremely high performance networks and data centers and were willing to pay for someone to monitor them and keep them in top shape.
It sounded pretty awesome and high-tech, but really once you had half a clue what you were doing, it was pretty simple and even somewhat boring. Modern computer systems and networks are very high performance and very stable. TCP would usually just buy the best stuff on the market for their clients, install it with well-known best practices, and then have James, Tim and the other guys on his team check up on these systems regularly, preemptively fix issues that may come up, and keep collecting the monthly bill.
“Tim, if we were nearly as smart as those guys, we’d be the ones who were rich. Face it. The big money is not in building computer systems. This stuff is a commodity. Anyone can do it. My kid, Joey, knows like ten times as much about this stuff than I do, and he’s only fifteen. Those dudes at Roth, they’re the geniuses. Figured out how to use something cheap and available to make a mountain of money.”
“Yeah, well they still have no soul.”
“That’s true,” James conceded as he poured his coffee.
As they shuffled back to the cube farm, James asked, “So what was up with Roth yesterday?”
“Oh, nothing. Routine check. It’s one of my Monday to-dos. They monitor the log to make sure I’m logging in and looking around. I think they are hoping I miss something, then they’ll sue us.”
“No, they won’t sue us. We don’t have enough money. But they are basically relying on glitches in the system to make money, but one glitch in their operation could wind up costing a ton of money very fast. They are just trying to be smart.”
Tim’s comment about being sued did hit a nerve, and James had to work hard to keep himself from dropping to rock bottom for the few seconds he thought about it.
Almost a year ago to the day, Melissa had sat down with James and they had to face some tough facts. Eli’s scholarship was not nearly enough to cover the entire cost of Rice, and even though he had stayed home they were still racking up debt way too fast. Mark would be a senior in high school the next year and this problem was only going to get bigger. He didn't even want to think about Joseph. He thought Eli and Mark would probably both go on to have killer careers and take over their own payments but Joseph didn’t look like the career type. He’d probably wind up with a degree in literature or art history or the like from U of H, then become a rafting guide and move to Utah or something. Or become a helicopter pilot and work for some aid outfit flying food and medicine into third world countries. Who knows with that kid.
They were lining up for a difficult financial time. James had not made it to the top of his career ladder despite the fact that he was a smart, hard worker who really cared about his company’s success. He was just not a shrewd, dog-eat-dog, cut-throat business type. So he collected a decent paycheck but it wasn’t making them rich. And right about then, he needed to be rich.
TCP had all the business they could handle and wound up throwing back some little fish when they came along. The little startups on a shoestring budget or deep into venture capital that needed some help usually didn’t want to pay for a big monthly retainer. The one-man-shows, like private day traders or guys running their own service like network security a
nalysts or private investigators, all had needs that TCP could fill but they didn’t have the money to get TCP’s interest. So TCP let these scraps fall off of the table. Last summer, James picked one of the scraps up for himself.
Tony Greer was a lawyer who had moved into the network surveillance, corporate espionage, digital investigative side of things. He wanted TCP to put together a one-off system for him that was too small potatoes for his employer: about a hundred thousand dollars upfront and no recurring monthly maintenance. TCP declined, but James knew he could do the job and he sure could use the hundred thousand. He should have known better than to do business with an underhanded lawyer.
James took the contract and worked it on his own time, putting in forty or fifty hours extra for a couple of weeks to set up a beautiful system for Greer, and then by the end of the summer he got paid. Right about the time Greer’s check cleared, he did just what Tim suggested Roth was going to do. He produced some log data that suggested James had deliberately screwed something up. Never mind what it was, James didn’t do it. It was pure fabrication, but being an expert at computer forensics, it was a nearly perfect fabrication. Perfect enough to convince a judge. Greer sued James personally and won a roughly four hundred and thirty thousand dollar judgment. The court seized the Grady family’s assets, all of them. They had to sell the house, they were already upside-down on the cars and the chances of paying for Mark’s college were completely blown away. At the end of the day, the Gradys found themselves with ruined credit, renting a house half the size of the one they had once owned, and an additional three hundred thousand dollars in debt.
What had been a difficult financial challenge had suddenly turned into a crushing financial disaster for a middle-class, work-a-day tech guy. The irony was that Tim was right. With his own mind, James had designed and built Roth’s system, and for what? A TCP Compudyne paycheck? And Roth made enough money in ten seconds off of that system to not only pay off all of James’s debt, but to ensure that the Grady family would never again be in debt.
Maybe it pays to have no soul.