The Cookie Monster Read online

  The Cookie Monster

  Vernor Vinge

  Vernor Vinge The Cookie Monster

  Man is "the time-binding animal."

  But in the future, that simple statement may take on meanings that Korzybski never imagined... . "So how do you like the new job?"

  Dixie Mae looked up from her keyboard and spotted a pimply face peering at her from over the cubicle partition.

  "It beats flipping burgers, Victor," she said.

  Victor bounced up so his whole face was visible. "Yeah? It’s going to get old awfully fast."

  Actually, Dixie Mae felt the same way. But doing customer support at Lotsa-Tech was a real job, a foot in the door at the biggest high-tech company in the world. "Gimme a break, Victor! This is our first day." Well, it was the first day not counting the six days of product familiarization classes. "If you can’t take this, you’ve got the attention span of a cricket."

  "That’s a mark of intelligence, Dixie Mae. I’m smart enough to know what’s not worth the attention of a first-rate creative mind."

  Grr. "Then your first-rate creative mind is going to be out of its gourd by the end of the summer."

  Victor smirked. "Good point." He thought a second, then continued more quietly, "But see, um, I’m doing this to get material for my column in the Bruin. You know, big headlines like ‘The New Sweatshops’ or ‘Death by Boredom’. I haven’t decided whether to play it for laughs or go for heavy social consciousness. In any case,"–he lowered his voice another notch–"I’m bailing out of here, um, by the end of next week, thus suffering only minimal brain damage from the whole sordid experience."

  "And you’re not seriously helping the customers at all, huh, Victor? Just giving them hilarious misdirections?"

  Victor’s eyebrows shot up. "I’ll have you know I’m being articulate and seriously helpful ... at least for another day or two." The weasel grin crawled back onto his face. "I won’t start being Bastard Consultant from Hell till right before I quit."

  That figures. Dixie Mae turned back to her keyboard. "Okay, Victor. Meantime, how about letting me do the job I’m being paid for?"

  Silence. Angry, insulted silence? No, this was more a leering, undressing-you-with-my-eyes silence. But Dixie Mae did not look up. She could tolerate such silence as long as the leerer was out of arm’s reach.

  After a moment, there was the sound of Victor dropping back into his chair in the next cubicle.

  Ol’ Victor had been a pain in the neck from the get-go. He was slick with words; if he wanted to, he could explain things as good as anybody Dixie Mae had ever met. At the same time, he kept rubbing it in how educated he was and what a dead-end this customer support gig was. Mr.

  Johnson–the guy running the familiarization course–was a great teacher, but smart-ass Victor had tested the man’s patience all week long. Yeah, Victor really didn’t belong here, but not for the reasons he bragged about.

  It took Dixie Mae almost an hour to finish off seven more queries. One took some research, being a really bizarre question about Voxalot for Norwegian. Okay, this job would get old after a few days, but there was a virtuous feeling in helping people. And from Mr. Johnson’s lectures, she knew that as long as she got the reply turned in by closing time this evening, she could spend the whole afternoon researching just how to make LotsaTech’s vox program recognize Norwegian vowels.

  Dixie Mae had never done customer support before this; till she took Prof. Reich’s tests last week, her highest-paying job really had been flipping burgers. But like the world and your Aunt Sally, she had often been the victim of customer support. Dixie Mae would buy a new book or a cute dress, and it would break or wouldn’t fit–and then when she wrote customer support, they wouldn’t reply, or had useless canned answers, or just tried to sell her something more–all the time talking about how their greatest goal was serving the customer.

  But now LotsaTech was turning all that around. Their top bosses had realized how important real humans were to helping real human customers. They were hiring hundreds and hundreds of people like Dixie Mae. They weren’t paying very much, and this first week had been kinda tough since they were all cooped up here during the crash intro classes.

  But Dixie Mae didn’t mind. "Lotsa-Tech is a lot of Tech." Before, she’d always thought that motto was stupid. But LotsaTech was big; it made IBM and Microsoft look like minnows. She’d been a little nervous about that, imagining that she’d end up in a room bigger than a football field with tiny office cubicles stretching away to the horizon. Well, Building 0994 did have tiny cubicles, but her team was just fifteen nice people–leaving Victor aside for the moment. Their work floor had windows all the way around, a panoramic view of the Santa Monica mountains and the Los Angeles basin. And li’l ol’ Dixie Mae Leigh had her a desk right beside one of those wide windows! I’ll bet there are CEO’s who don’t have a view as good as mine. Here’s where you could see a little of what the Lotsa in LotsaTech meant. Just outside of B0994 there were tennis courts and a swimming pool. Dozens of similar buildings were scattered across the hillside. A golf course covered the next hill over, and more company land lay beyond that. These guys had the money to buy the top off Runyon Canyon and plunk themselves down on it. And this was just the LA branch office.

  Dixie Mae had grown up in Tarzana. On a clear day in the valley, you could see the Santa Monica mountains stretching off forever into the haze. They seemed beyond her reach, like something from a fairy tale. And now she was up here. Next week, she’d bring her binoculars to work, go over on the north slope, and maybe spot where her father still lived down there.

  Meanwhile, back to work. The next six queries were easy, from people who hadn’t even bothered to read the single page of directions that came with Voxalot. Letters like those would be hard to answer politely the thousandth time she saw them. But she would try–and today she practiced with cheerful specifics that stated the obvious and gently pointed the customers to where they could find more. Then came a couple of brain twisters. Damn. She wouldn’t be able to finish those today.

  Mr. Johnson said "finish anything you start on the same day"–but maybe he would let her work on those first thing Monday morning. She really wanted to do well on the hard ones. Every day, there would be the same old dumb questions. But there would also be hard new questions. And eventually she’d get really, really good with Voxalot. More important, she’d get good about managing questions and organization. So what that she’d screwed the last seven years of her life and never made it through college? Little by little she would improve herself, till a few years from now her past stupidities wouldn’t matter anymore. Some people had told her that such things weren’t possible nowadays, that you really needed the college degree. But people had always been able to make it with hard work. Back in the twentieth century, lots of steno pool people managed it. Dixie Mae figured customer support was pretty much the same kind of starting point.

  Nearby, somebody gave out a low whistle. Victor. Dixie Mae ignored him.

  "Dixie Mae, you gotta see this."

  Ignore him.

  "I swear Dixie, this is a first. How did you do it? I got an incoming query for you, by name!

  Well, almost."

  "What!? Forward it over here, Victor."

  "No. Come around and take a look. I have it right in front of me."

  Dixie Mae was too short to look over the partition. Jeez.

  Three steps took her into the corridor. Ulysse Green poked her head out of her cubicle, an inquisitive look on her face. Dixie Mae shrugged and rolled her eyes, and Ulysse returned to her work. The sound of fingers on keys was like occasional raindrops (no Voxalots allowed in cubicleland).

  Mr. Johnson had been around earlier, answering questions an
d generally making sure things were going okay. Right now he should be back in his office on the other side of the building; this first day, you hardly needed to worry about slackers. Dixie Mae felt a little guilty about making that a lie, but ...

  She popped into Victor’s cubicle, grabbed a loose chair. "This better be good, Victor."

  "Judge for yourself, Dixie Mae." He looked at his display. "Oops, I lost the window. Just a second." He dinked around with his mouse. "So, have you been putting your name on outgoing messages? That’s the only way I can imagine this happening–"

  "No. I have not. I’ve answered twenty-two questions so far, and I’ve been AnnetteG all the way."

  The fake signature was built into her "send" key. Mr. Johnson said this was to protect employee privacy and give users a feeling of continuity even though follow-up questions would rarely come to the original responder. He didn’t have to say that it was also to make sure that LotsaTech support people would be interchangeable, whether they were working out of the service center in Lahore or Londonderry–or Los Angeles. So far, that had been one of Dixie Mae’s few disappointments about this job; she could never have an ongoing helpful relationship with a customer.

  So what the devil was this all about?

  "Ah! Here it is." Victor waved at the screen. "What do you make of it?"

  The message had come in on the help address. It was in the standard layout enforced by the query acceptance page. But the "previous responder field" was not one of the house sigs. Instead it was: Ditzie May Lay

  "Grow up, Victor."

  Victor raised his hands in mock defense, but he had seen her expression, and some of the smirk left his face. "Hey, Dixie Mae, don’t kill the messenger. This is just what came in."

  "No way. The server-side script would have rejected an invalid responder name. You faked this."

  For a fleeting moment, Victor looked uncertain. Hah! thought Dixie Mae. She had been paying attention during Mr. Johnson’s lectures; she knew more about what was going on here than Victorthe- great-mind. And so his little joke had fallen flat on its rear end. But Victor regrouped and gave a weak smile. "It wasn’t me. How would I know about this, er, nickname of yours?"

  "Yes," said Dixie Mae, "it takes real genius to come up with such a clever play on words."

  "Honest, Dixie Mae, it wasn’t me. Hell, I don’t even know how to use our form editor to revise header fields."

  Now that claim had the ring of truth.

  "What’s happening?"

  They looked up, saw Ulysse standing at the entrance to the cubicle.

  Victor gave her a shrug. "It’s Dit–Dixie Mae. Someone here at LotsaTech is jerking her around."

  Ulysse came closer and bent to read from the display. "Yech. So what’s the message?"

  Dixie Mae reached across the desk and scrolled down the display. The return address was [email protected]. The topic choice was "Voice Formatting." They got lots on that topic; Voxalot format control wasn’t quite as intuitive as the ads would like you to believe.

  But this was by golly not a follow-up on anything Dixie Mae had answered:

  ...

  Hey there, Honey Chile! I’ll be truly grateful if you would tell me how to put the following into italics:

  "Remember the Tarzanarama tree house? The one you set on fire? If you’d like to start a much bigger fire, then figure out how I know all this. A big clue is that 999 is 666 spelled upside down."

  I’ve tried everything and I can’t set the above proposition into indented italics–leastwise without fingering. Please help.

  Aching for some of your Southron Hospitality, I remain your very bestest fiend,

  –Lusting (for you deeply)

  Ulysse’s voice was dry: "So, Victor, you’ve figured how to edit incoming forms."

  "God damn it, I’m innocent!"

  "Sure you are." Ulysse’s white teeth flashed in her black face. The three little words held a world of disdain.

  Dixie Mae held up her hand, waving them both to silence. "I ... don’t know. There’s something real strange about this mail." She stared at the message body for several seconds. A big ugly chill was growing in her middle. Mom and Dad had built her that tree house when she was seven years old. Dixie Mae had loved it. For two years she was Tarzana of Tarzana. But the name of the tree house–Tarzanarama–had been a secret. Dixie Mae had been nine years old when she torched that marvelous tree house. It had been a terrible accident. Well, a world-class temper tantrum, actually. But she had never meant the fire to get so far out of control. The fire had darn near burned down their real house, too. She had been a scarifyingly well-behaved little girl for almost two years after that incident.

  Ulysse was giving the mail a careful read. She patted Dixie Mae on the shoulder. "Whoever this is, he certainly doesn’t sound friendly."

  Dixie Mae nodded. "This weasel is pushing every button I’ve got." Including her curiosity. Dad was the only living person that knew who had started the fire, but it was going on four years since he’d had any address for his daughter–and Daddy would never have taken this sex-creep, disrespecting tone.

  Victor glanced back and forth between them, maybe feeling hurt that he was no longer the object of suspicion. "So who do you think it is?"

  Don Williams craned his head over the next partition. "Who is what?"

  Given another few minutes, and they’d have everyone on the floor with some bodily part stuck into Victor’s cubicle.

  Ulysse said, "Unless you’re deaf, you know most of it, Don. Someone is messing with us."

  "Well then, report it to Johnson. This is our first day, people. It’s not a good day to get sidetracked."

  That brought Ulysse down to earth. Like Dixie Mae, she regarded this LotsaTech job as her last real chance to break into a profession.

  "Look," said Don. "It’s already lunch time."–Dixie Mae glanced at her watch. It really was!–"We can talk about this in the cafeteria, then come back and give Great Lotsa a solid afternoon of work. And then we’ll be done with our first week!" Williams had been planning a party down at his folks’ place for tonight. It would be their first time off the LotsaTech campus since they took the job.

  "Yeah!" said Ulysse. "Dixie Mae, you’ll have the whole weekend to figure out who’s doing this–and plot your revenge."

  Dixie Mae looked again at the impossible "previous responder field." "I ... don’t know. This looks like it’s something happening right here on the LotsaTech campus." She stared out Victor’s picture window. It was the same view as from her cubicle, of course–but now she was seeing everything with a different mind set. Somewhere in the beautiful country-club buildings, there was a real sleaze ball. And he was playing guessing games with her.

  Everybody was quiet for a second. Maybe that helped–Dixie Mae realized just what she was looking at: the next lodge down the hill. From here you could only see the top of its second story. Like all the buildings on the campus, it had a four-digit identification number made of gold on every corner. That one was Building 0999.

  A big clue is that 999 is just 666 spelled upside down. "Jeez, Ulysse. Look: 999." Dixie Mae pointed down the hillside.

  "It could be a coincidence."

  "No, it’s too pat." She glanced at Victor. This really was the sort of thing someone like him would set up. But whoever wrote that letter just knew too much. "Look, I’m going to skip lunch today and take a little walk around the campus."

  "That’s crazy," said Don. "LotsaTech is an open place, but we’re not supposed to be wandering into other project buildings."

  "Then they can turn me back."

  "Yeah, what a great way to start out with the new job," said Don. "I don’t think you three realize what a good deal we have here. I know that none of you have worked a customer support job before."

  He looked around challengingly. "Well I have. This is heaven. We’ve got our own friggin’ offices, onsite tennis courts and health club. We’re being treated like million-dollar system designers.


  We’re being given all the time we need to give top-notch advice to the customers. What LotsaTech is trying to do here is revolutionary! And you dips are just going to piss it away." Another allaround glare. "Well, do what you want, but I’m going to lunch."

  There was a moment of embarrassed silence. Ulysse stepped out of the cubicle and watched Don and others trickle away toward the stairs. Then she was back. "I’ll come with you, Dixie Mae, but . .

  . have you thought Don may be right? Maybe you could just postpone this till next week?"

  Unhappiness was written all over her face. Ulysse was a lot like Dixie Mae, just more sensible.

  Dixie Mae shook her head. She figured it would be at least fifteen minutes before her common sense could put on the brakes.

  "I’ll come, Dixie Mae," said Victor. "Yeah... . This could be an interesting story."

  Dixie Mae smiled at Ulysse and reached out her hand. "It’s okay, Ulysse. You should go to lunch."

  The other looked uncertain. "Really. If Mr. Johnson asks about me missing lunch, it would help if you were there to set him right about what a steady person I am."

  "Okay, Dixie Mae. I’ll do that." She wasn’t fooled, but this way it really was okay.

  Once she was gone, Dixie Mae turned back to Victor. "And you. I want a printed copy of that freakin’ email."

  They went out a side door. There was a soft-drink and candy machine on the porch. Victor loaded up on "expeditionary supplies" and the two started down the hill.

  "Hot day," said Victor, mumbling around a mouth full of chocolate bar.

  "Yeah." The early part of the week had been all June Gloom. But the usual overcast had broken, and today was hot and sunny–and Dixie Mae suddenly realized how pleasantly air-conditioned life had been in the LotsaTech "sweatshop." Common sense hadn’t yet reached the brakes, but it was getting closer.

  Victor washed the chocolate down with a Dr. Fizzz and flipped the can behind the oleanders that hung close along the path. "So who do you think is behind that letter? Really?"