Stopwatch
By Jacob Magnus
Copyright 2011 Jacob Magnus
"If you want this job, you must promise me to get our new software out on time," he glared at me through gold-rimmed glasses, papa bear stuffed into a woollen suit. "On time, all features functional. The industry is watching, and we have never missed a deadline."
"Your new flagship," I said from across his desk. "Globoffice 3?"
"Right. We have a reputation. We pride ourselves on the fastest programmers in the country. No lost time," he said, tapping the Latin motto on the brass plaque on his desk. A stopwatch lay beside it. "You can do it?"
I took off my glasses and studied my reflection in the plaque. I looked thinner than usual, my dark curls taking a bronze sheen, but I'd gained a nice tan. "When is this deadline?"
"Two weeks," Garvens leaned forward, one meaty finger brushing the edge of the stopwatch.
"How close are you to completion?"
"Final stage; bug squashing. Can you do it?"
"It's a big problem, but that's why you called me. I can do it," I paused. "For six hundred dollars an hour."
"Too much. The going rate is two."
"Want to meet that deadline?"
"Not by selling my family into slavery. I'll pay three."
"For three you can have my help for half an hour. What are you willing to sacrifice; my time, or your money?"
"How do I know you can do it, even for four?"
"You know my reputation; Corben Jatthew gets it done. My only question is whether you can adapt to new ideas. Six."
"Naturally we can adapt. Can you adapt to four fifty?"
I stood up. "Nice plaque," I said, and picked up my briefcase.
"Wait," and I hadn't even reached the door. "I'll do it. I'll pay you six hundred an hour, until it’s boxed and sent."
"Put it in writing.”
...
Garvens took the stopwatch. "Mr Jatthew, this is Harding, head of the programming team, and Rendall, the lead coder."
We shook hands, and like that, and I asked about Globoffice. I watched the programmers as they spoke. They looked like teenagers in their surfer t-shirts and faded jeans. Harding was fat and sallow, with a mop of black hair, while Rendall was thin, with a blonde crew-cut and blue eyes that seemed to echo and mock all our words.
"It's a million miles beyond G2," Harding said. “We've dreamed up features our competitors have never even considered...we'll spawn a horde of copies."
"Yes yes," said Garvens. "Get to the point," he fidgeted with the stopwatch. "Tell Jatthew about the bug."
"You can do that," I said. "Tell me what's thrown a spanner in your circuits."
"Um," said Harding, looking sidelong at Rendall, who was studying the soft peach carpet. "G3 is designed to be fast."
"Extremely fast," said Garvens.
"Yeah, and it is...extremely fast..."
"That's good," I said.
"...for fifteen minutes."
"Ah. What happens after fifteen minutes?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
Garvens had gone red. "Nothing!"
I sat in front of the monitor, and opened up a spreadsheet. Harding sat at my side and led me on. "We use this to test the software. You can enter any financial conditions you want-"
"The most complex," Garvens said from behind us.
"-the most complex," said Harding.
"In record time."
Harding nodded. "Record time." He squeezed the arms of his chair. His knuckles were white. On my left, Rendall was silent.
I fiddled with the program, waiting. It worked, it was fast, and after fifteen minutes, it died.
"That's it," said Garvens. "That's your problem," and that was his goodbye.
"So how do you two get along?"
Harding wasn't ready for the question. He squirmed a little, and his face was pale. "He's a really great boss. Made everything run very fast, very efficient, the fastest software company in the country...maybe the world. Yeah," he said. "We're all really fast."
"He told me he built this company himself."
"Oh yeah," he said, "he started it all. Chips off the old circuit, that's us."
"So what's wrong with this program?"
"Timing," he said.
"Timing," Rendall broke his silence.
"Sure," I said. "It's too slow."
"It's not slow," said Rendall.
"It's not doing anything right now," I flicked the screen.
"It's not-"
"Too slow," Harding pounded a fist against his chair. "It's too slow."
Rendall dropped his head, and poured his eyes back into the carpet.
...
I tried every trick I knew, but the machine wouldn’t play after that fifteen minute deadline. I'd switch it off, and switch it on, and curse myself for wasting time just repeating what every other person in the building had probably done, definitely done, a thousand times before.
I asked the questions anyway. "You've checked the computers, the wiring, and run it on different machines?"
"Yeah," said Harding.
"Guess it's not hardware. You've run your virus protection programs?"
"There's no virus here."
"Are you sure? Something could have got through your firewall."
"There is no firewall; this is a closed system. We have no internet connection at all, and no outside data comes in."
"No internet?" Questions flashed in my mind, but I pushed them away. "Okay, it's not a virus. What about compatibility? Do any of your subsystems compete for processor power?"
"It's not that," said Harding, but he looked away.
Rendall snorted.
"You're sure?"
"It's not that."
...
Come lunchtime, and I was striking out. They had the best machines, and the best talent, and the damn thing should have been on the market, pulling in massive green. Instead it ran for a quarter-hour, and then went away and hid behind an impassive screen.
I'd learned less than one thing from the machines. That left the people. Garvens didn't know what was wrong; when hiring me he had admitted he had a problem. For a guy with a desk like his, brass plaque and all, that meant he was desperate. I was his straw to clutch.
I looked around the office, and saw most of the coders were playing games. No one had the air of the prophet. They looked like their work was done, no fault of theirs if it wasn't well-liked. I thought about their chiefs. Harding could not or would not own to any faults in the system, except for the one we couldn't ignore. He was nervous, though, especially around his boss. I would be too, in his place.
Rendall held the key. I didn't know it, but I felt it. His constant silence intrigued me. Few people are quiet because they don't know. People are more often noisy when they don't know, shouting and waving their arms, afraid the admission is worse than the problem. Rendall knew something, but could it help me? If he had the answer, why would he keep it secret?
I needed to get him alone...
...
He didn't make it easy. I sidled into his cubicle, in the main office. He was away, a burning monitor and a heap of paper cups the only signs of occupation. The coffee residue was still moist, and the cups were crumpled.
I scoured the office. One guy said he'd gone to the server room. The server chief told me he never came that way, but he was popular with the typing pool girls. The girls said they never saw any of the programmers, but he'd probably heap his plate at lunchtime.
He didn't come to lunch. The morning had slipped away, and my one spark wasn't catching any fires. I looked back in the office, but he still wasn't there. Then I thought about that heap of coffee cups...
He was punching buttons on the percolator when I entered the ki
tchen. "Do you really drink that stuff?"
He looked me over sidelong. "Got anything better?"
"How 'bout a hefty cup of Smokin' Java at the Benson's over the road?"
"You buyin'?"
"Sure."
He smiled. "I'm in."
...
He was curious, and maybe he'd guessed at my reason, but he wasn't going to ask. We sat at a table by the window, where I could see the Globoffice building across the road. I got the coffees, and I opened the conversation with an old one. "Why'd you come here?"
"You mean the company? The big G."
"Garvens?"
He nodded. "Like, my hero. My brother played Tekken, Virtua Fighter, all that stuff. He was good, too; had every punch/kick combo, all the reversals...he knew the game the way I knew G1."
"The first Globoffice program."
"Yeah. I dug the code, the system. Got inside it."
"I like code, too."
His look told me not to go down the long-lost cousin route. I threw him another question. "Why'd you like it so much?"
"It was fast."
"I'm sure Tekken was fast, too."
"Yeah, sure, it was fast, but G1 meant something. Games don't mean much, but your office utility, what it does matters."
He looked earnest, but I couldn't grasp his sense. "How does it matter?"
"It makes your accounts clear. It tells you what goes where, and when." I must have looked puzzled. "A good spreadsheet puts the gas in your tank, and gets your momma her bed in hospital. G1 helped everyone, the whole world. That's what I wanted to do. That's why I'm here."
The quiet geek had shown his colours at last. His eyes had a fanatic gleam. "If anyone could fix this bug, it's you," he didn't deny it. "So what's holding you back?"
"Like I can tell you."
"Alright, who's holding you back?"
"Ask the big G," he said. "He's got your answers."
"Made like he didn't."
"He does."
"If he could fix it, why'd he hire me?"
"You don't come cheap, huh? Worth all that, I guess you should figure it out for yourself. But I can shorten your trail; ask him. Ask him about stopwatch."
"I wondered about that thing; why's your boss carry a racetrack watch everywhere? What's he timing?"
"Go ask him."
"I'm asking you."
He looked into his coffee cup. I did the same. There were no oracles in the black mirror, only slow-melting cream.
"I'll go to him," I said. "I'll talk about it...maybe I'll mention what you said."
He flinched. "Oh?"
"Maybe I'll ask him why his head of programming is afraid of him."
"I've told you all I can."
I stood. "All you want to," I turned my back on him.
"Wait."
"Bye," I started for the door.
"Wait!"
I paused. "Why?"
"Promise you won't tell anyone about this," he said. "About me."
"Why should I promise?"
"I'll tell you. I'll tell you what's going on."
...
"Like I told you, the big G changed the world with G1."
"Globoffice One."
"Yeah. But it wasn't so much the basics, the spreadsheets and word processors. What made G1 special was the speed."
"Garvens likes speedy things."
"He's obsessed. That's the angle he took with G1; he made the whole system run faster than anything before."
"How?"
"He coded a module, a subsystem, that monitored all the other parts of the system, analysed their performance, and worked them over itself."
"The program rewrote itself?"
"Hands off. Machine evolution. It was a secret, back then, and it's not well-known even today. Only those of us on the inside really understand."
"But this is old news. How does this old program affect the third generation of Globoffice?"
He laughed. "Old news? It's archaic! It's a paleolith, fossil silicon! The evolution program has been out-evolved. We have new codes now, stuff the G-man never dreamed of, but still there it is, sitting on the system, strangling it."
"The old code is dragging on the new code? Making it crash?"
"It's the old code that's crashing! Like a t-rex trying to drive a Maserati. Here, mister consultant man, riddle me this: if G3 takes two seconds to wake up, how long does the G1 relic take?"
I didn't need to think. "Fifteen minutes."
...
I asked Rendall to keep quiet, but I needn't have bothered. He'd been buzzing with the coffee, thrilled to spew out his tale of tragedy, but as he left to return to work, I saw the fear and the silence descend on him.
He'd left me with a tiger in a bottle. I knew how it'd got in there, but how to get it out without getting shredded by broken glass and buzz saw claws? If I told Garvens the exact story, how would he react? His pride was invested in two things: being the zippy programmer, and the golden man of business. He might have been zippy once, but if he couldn't see a problem so plain to his coders, it meant he hadn't kept up. And he didn't know it.
Those same coders were too scared to tell him. That left me with the question. If he found out, what would he do? My reputation was what got me customers. If I solved his problem at the cost of making him mad, mad at me, making an enemy out of the boss of the biggest serious software firm in the country, who would hire me?
I thought about that for a bit, and a line I'd heard someplace kept floating into my mind: what do you do when you master chess? You learn backgammon.
...
There was no machine work to do in the office, so the coders were killing time. I watched them play games like solitaire and poker, and I moved on until I found one that might work. The guy, another kid, in jeans and a red t-shirt, looked guilty. "We're moving like a tank outa gas," he said. "So what should I do?"
"S'okay, I draw doodles when I get stuck. What is it?"
"An old shooter," he said, "Paris Apache."
"Indian on holiday?"
"Naw, it's about the gangs of fin-de-siecle Paris. You run around in a maze, shooting bad men in top hats. Wanna try?"
"It's kinda jerky, isn't it?"
"All these classics are slow. It's part of the price."
"Classics?"
He looked hurt. I apologised, and asked him for a copy of the game. His lights came back on, and I walked away with a fresh CD.
...
"Rendall, do you want to save G3?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"Do you?"
He squashed the latest coffee cup, and buzzed it across the cubicle. "You know. What can I do?"
"This." I handed him a CD and a note.
He looked sceptical. "This is only half the problem," he said. "The baby half."
"Can you do it?"
"Sure you know what you're doing?"