CHAPTER 1

Credo's Doorway

Beware of strangers who know you.

Coffee and anxiety, the lifeblood of commerce, pumped through my body and urged me forward. Yet I couldn't move.

Like every other morning, I was hurrying to work, unconsciously negotiating a path among the multitudes descending upon the financial district in early morning. As usual, the world outside my mind was an irrelevant blur as my thoughts focused on the intricate weave of computer networks I had developed to transform Banter and Associates Diversified Investors' global empire into one vast spider of a company. I was in the middle of a long, frantic slug of a super-grande, triple-shot latte with whipped cream, sprinkles and a touch of macadamia-nut flavoring, when an old man's gravelly words from nowhere pierced my concentration:

"Then what?"

That was all. Just two words surrounded by the large, hollow silence of an odd moment, appearing in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day. Normally I would have dismissed it as an intriguing overture from a street scrounger and just kept moving. But the voice was familiar, reconnecting me with a past I had forgotten since I left school at 15 and entered the frenzied asylum of high technology overtime. That was the year someone from Banter and Associates Diversified Investors discovered me at a computer fair and proposed to rescue me from the tedium of school by offering to take advantage of my talents. With the reluctant endorsement of my mother, I had left school, exiting through the cafeteria hollering, "See ya later, spirit crushers!" and immersed myself in the relentless challenge of the marketplace that school never provided. I became instantly addicted to the feeling of adrenaline spiking through my body as I sprinted to keep two steps ahead of the jaws of technical obsolescence constantly nipping at my heels. Every software upgrade, product enhancement and unreasonable demand made by an uncompromising manager who wanted me to make the network do something miraculous kept me blissfully overwhelmed. Life just couldn't have gotten any better.

My progression through the ranks had happened quickly and mostly by accident. Within a year, a fluke of reorganization made me a member of the elite Network Control unit in charge of BADI's entire North American division. A reporter for Business Life Magazine found out about it and wrote a feature article about me called "Teaching Yourself to Succeed." In it, he described me as "a testimonial to the death of formal education and the supremacy of the cult of personal initiative; one who enthusiastically retrains himself in a world of work ever roiling with change."

The following year I had been pushed into a void at Network Control created by a senior programmer's heart attack. Then someone got married and took another job, someone else had a midlife crisis and moved to Nepal in search of himself, a few others scattered to places unknown for reasons unrevealed, and there I was, the only logical choice for temporary director of BADI's entire international network while management looked for a permanent replacement. But six months later life at BADI had picked up so much momentum, and the network had continued to hum along so smoothly, that the search to fill my position was quietly suspended. Now, three years later, at 22-years-old, I had become everything I thought I wanted to become a decade ahead of schedule.

"Then what?" came the voice again, like sandpaper slowly dragged across a piece of rough wood.

Like every other morning, I had been drawing the schematic of BADI's computer network in my mind as I raced to work, girding myself psychologically to serve another day as networking god for a corporation whose survival depended upon my magic. As usual, the goal at the end of my morning power walk from the subway had been to arrive at work with a clear vision of BADI's neural pathways and international tentacles, to spot potential aneurysms and strangulation points and to anticipate the bitter struggle managers would wage for a piece of my crowded day. Normally I was flattered by their desperation to have me add a touch of wizardry to their pet projects. But today, for some uncomfortable reason, it bothered me, like an itch too far below the surface of the skin to reach. Normally I was quite happy to be rewarded with ever-faster machines so that I could kick myself up more excruciating, late-night, social-life-rending learning curves in the name of productivity. But this morning the idea seemed grotesque.

Focus, I told myself.

Normally my focus was exquisite and precise, allowing me to intertwine a number of threads of thought algorithmically, like a geometric tapestry. But two words from an invisible old man had turned my brain into a child's finger-painting of the mind, in which ideas and chatter just smeared together. Somehow those two words had pried open a storehouse of resentment that had been silently accumulating in the background of my life, like reinvested dividends in a blind trust. Suddenly so much was so simple. I wasn't happy anymore. Worse - I was angry.

Several times I had been unfairly denied a position in BADI's training division, despite the fact that I was qualified, inspired, deserving and frantic to take it on. I loved to teach. More to the point, I loved to help other people learn. I didn't understand why, exactly, and it would take me years to fully understand it. But at the very least teaching felt like a way to regain the fun I'd lost when I'd surrendered my adolescence prematurely to the world of work. I was a good teacher, and despite the fact that everyone knew it, the "suits" wanted to keep me down on the data farm, cranking out network tentacles for clients to attach themselves to. It was my fault for being so good at my work, I guessed. But I had turned some corner in my mind. Doing a million-dollar deal in a single Trans-Atlantic bit burst had lost its luster, while watching people bask in the glow of learning had become sensually gratifying. The real highs of the day were witnessing support staff in the hell of software minutiae screech the "ah hah" of self-discovery, throw their heads back with a conquering smile, and relish their newfound understanding of a computer idiosyncrasy which had theretofore made them positively cranky and temporarily insane.

"Then what?"

I loved spending time with support staff; they actually enjoyed learning. The "suits," on the other hand, just blustered away on their keyboards until they got stuck and then hollered for me to come fix something (that had only appeared to be broken because they'd never read the help sheets, which I had spent my weekends creating, which I had prepared just for them to make their lives easier and more productive, which I had delivered on their desks with a smile and the promise of help if they would just familiarize themselves with the list of simple commands, and which, which, which, fugguduh, fugguduh, fugguduh! RTFM, I wanted to yell at them — Read The Frigging Manual! — a catchall condemnation of those wannabe computer power users who were too busy, lazy or tantrum-dependent to help themselves).

I was suit-bashing again, a habit I had developed when my request for transfer to the training division had been denied. While it felt like much-needed therapy, I had to focus on the day's upcoming events or else risk arriving at work dangerously unprepared. While I tried to concentrate for the nth time on my mental model of BADI's Euro-Asian network in preparation for a leveraged buyout that was rumored to be happening any day now, I couldn't keep from musing that I was a lot like a god in the worst sense—there to blame when the going got tough, easily forgotten when life was good, but always expected to work miracles. As I struggled to draw the details of the satellite connections between London and Hamburg and Singapore in my mind, it occurred to me that no one had ever stopped into network headquarters on a good day just to tell me everything was working just fine. Life just didn't seem to work that way.

A wave of desperation suddenly swept through me. The prospect of another day at BADI was closing in on me like an endless prison sentence. Today would be the day I would tell management to either give me the training position or I was out of there. Period.

"Then what?"

Enough was enough. The network schematic in my mind's eye dissolved. The incessant grind of brain chatter ceased. I began to fidget as I squinted, trying to discern my interrupter's face in the pitch-black cavelike indentation in the side of the building.

"Then what?" came the words, gently, insistently. "Or, if you prefer, What then?"

"Say what?" I cried, clutching my latte in a death grip.

"No," the voice calmly corrected me. "The question under consideration is 'Then what?' Ready?"