1
One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park? It had both a triple-Michelin-star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the Unsalted Hash, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to walk home and crawl into bed.
I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected—well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.
Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.
Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the Unsalted Hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone. After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked. I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.
That’s how I learned that Danny Lazer was looking for me. He was working the usual channels—DMs from people who I tended to check in with when I was looking for work—and it put a shine on my evening, because sixty-seven or no, there was always work for someone with my skill set. Danny Lazer had a problem with his Trustlesscoin keys, which relied on the best protected cryptographic secrets in the world (nominally).
So I messaged him. One rest stop later, just past Gilroy, I got his reply. He was eager to see me. Would I call on him at his home in Palo Alto?
My pathetic little ego swelled up at his eagerness. I told him I had a big dinner planned the next night, but I’d see him the morning after. Truth be told, putting off a man as important as Danny Lazer, even for twenty-four hours, made me feel more important still. I could tell from his reply that the delay chafed at him. I felt petty, but not so much so that I canceled my dinner. My dear old friend was a lively sort, and it was possible we’d walk from the restaurant to her place for an hour or three before I returned to the Walmart parking lot.
Dinner didn’t disappoint, and neither did the fun and games afterward. It was a very nice capstone to a very successful job, and a very good prelude to another job for one of the nicest rich men (or richest nice men) in Silicon Valley.
* * *
Danny was old Silicon Valley, a guy who started his own UUCP host so he could help distribute the alt hierarchy and once helped Tim May bring a load of unlicensed firearms across state lines from a Nevada gun show. He’d lived like a monk for decades, writing cryptographic code and fighting with the NSA over it, and had mortgaged his parents’ house back east to keep himself and a couple of programmers in business in a tiny office for a decade while he and Galit lived in a thirty-foot motor home that needed engine tuning once a month just so it could trundle from one parking space to the next.
It was a bet that there would come a day when the internet’s innocence would end and people would want privacy from each other and their governments, and he kept doubling down on that bet through every boom and bust, living on ramen and open cereal boxes from the used food store, refusing to part with any equity except to promising hackers who’d join him, and then the bet paid off, and he became Daniel Moses Lazar, with a 75 percent stake in Keypairs LLC, whose crypto-libraries and workflow tools were the much-ballyhooed picks and shovels of the next internet revolution. Keypairs wasn’t the first unicorn in Silicon Valley, but it was the first one that never took a dime in venture capital and whose sole angels were Danny’s parents back in Jersey, to whom Danny sent at least $100 million before they made him stop, insisting that they had nothing more they wanted in this world.
Galit picked out a big place in Twin Peaks that you could see Alcatraz from on a clear day, gutted it to the foundation slab, bare studs, and ceiling joists, completely rebuilt it while being mindful of both Danny’s specification for networking receptacles throughout, and Galit’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Arts and Crafts Movement. One day, as she was bringing out some Mendocino grig and a cheese board for the two of them to enjoy from their half-built porch, she gasped, complained of pain in both arms, then her chest, and then she collapsed and was dead before the ambulance arrived.
It had been a good marriage: twenty-two years and no kids, because there was nowhere in their old RV to put them unless they wanted to hang them from the rafters. She’d been his rock while he’d built up Keypairs, but he’d been hers, too, rubbing her feet and helping her deal with the endless humiliations that a woman doing administrative work in Silicon Valley had to put up with. He didn’t see it that way, though: after he took possession of her ashes, all he could talk about was how they’d wasted nearly a quarter of a century chasing a fortune that didn’t do either of them a bit of good, and it had cost them the time they could have spent in a beach shack in the Baja while he did two hours of contract work a month to pay for machete sharpening and new hammocks once a year.
A procession of Silicon Valley’s most powerful leaders and most respected technologists filed through the Palo Alto teardown they’d bought to perch in while the Twin Peaks project was underway. People who weren’t merely wealthy but famous for their vision, their sensitivity, their insight. They argued with him about his crushing regrets and tried to tell him how much good he’d done, both for Galit and for the world, but he was unreachable. A consensus emerged among the Friends of Danny that he was not long for this world. Not that he was going to kill himself or anything but that he would simply stop caring about living, and then nature would take its course.
They were right—given all facts in evidence, that was a foregone conclusion. But there was one hidden variable: Sethuramani Balakrishnan, who was twenty-five, brilliant, and had made a series of lateral moves within Keypairs: customer support, then compliance, and finally Danny’s PA, a job she was vastly overqualified for.
She helped him flip the house, then to turn Keypairs over to a management committee carefully balanced between hackers who’d been with Danny since the PDP-8 days, people with real managerial experience and proven experience growing companies and running big teams. He got rid of all the shares he’d taken in over the years to sit on advisory boards and stuck everything into Vanguard index-tracker funds—the ones that didn’t buy a lot of tech stocks.
As far as anyone could tell, Sethu didn’t try to talk him out of any of this, just offered efficient, intelligent, and supremely organized help in getting Danny’s life’s work out of a realm in which it had to be actively managed by someone with Danny’s incredible drive, insight, and technical knowledge, and into an investment vehicle managed by an overgrown spreadsheet, one that would multiply his money ahead of the CPI, year on year, until someone built a guillotine on his lawn.
What Sethu did talk him into was buying a condo around the corner from that Palo Alto teardown, an eight-story place, quiet, built on the grave of another Palo Alto teardown that had been snapped up by property developers in the glory days before NIMBY planning ended all high-density infill within fifty miles of Stanford.
The Camino Real had excellent security, as well as all the amenities: a pool, a gym, and a set of spring-loaded seismic dampers set deep into the bedrock that turned the whole place into a bouncy castle whenever the San Andreas Fault got a touch of indigestion.
It was steps to California Avenue and five Michelin-star restaurants—one with three stars, two with two—and it cost him eight million, plus furnishings, which Sethu oversaw, going all in on Danish woods for a midcentury modern feel that went great with the rooftop garden that came with the penthouse unit. Sethu got him interested in trying all that Michelin star food, a far cry from ramen and slightly irregular breakfast cereals, and from there, it was the chefs’ tables, and then the private cooking classes, and then a major reno to the penthouse to fit it out with a kitchen that would have made Heston Blumenthal gasp and twirl.
They spent the month that the renos took in an exclusive lodge near a slightly active Costa Rican volcano, checking out the bromeliads and howler monkeys. He came back bronzed and fit from all that volcano hiking and became one of the great chefs of the new aristocracy, even pulling out the old alt.gourmand posts from the prehistory of Usenet.
I don’t know when they became a couple, but I imagine it was a natural thing. Danny had a big heart, and he’d loved Galit with all of it, and with Galit gone and Danny still around, his heart wasn’t going to sit idly. Sethu is beautiful and brilliant and good at what she does, and those were all the traits that attracted Danny to Galit in the first place.
The Camino Real’s security gave me the twice-over and then emitted me. The elevator doors gave a sophisticated sigh and welcomed me in, and the buttonless panel lit up PH, and my blood pooled a little in my feet as I attained liftoff.
Danny looked at least ten years younger than the last time I’d seen him, craggy but handsome, and the pounds he’d put on had only filled him out so he wasn’t such an ectomorphic scarecrow.
He’d definitely been hitting the kettlebells, too, and his tight Japanese tee clung just enough that I could see he’d gotten some definition in his pecs and biceps. That’s hard muscle to acquire once you hit your fifties. Someone had been making Danny put in his reps.
Danny’s an intense guy who believed so fiercely in the significance and beauty and urgency of cryptography that he could easily captivate a roomful of people with an impromptu lecture on the subject, and he would not relinquish that hold until they all had to leave. He wasn’t a bore, but he wasn’t exactly normal, and yet as far as I knew, everyone who’d ever become personally acquainted with him liked him. A lot.
“Well, you don’t look like a man who got through a prix fixe at the Palmier. Even with the flights, you shouldn’t be that bilious, Mart. What’d you do, stop for Oreos on the way back to your double-wide?”
I let this pour over me as he showed me into the foyer and I shucked my scuffed old loafers, the ones I saved for personal days when I didn’t have to impress a client. “First of all, Lazer, the Unsalted Hash is a forty-foot, state-of-the-art touring bus with seven feet of internal clearance, an induction range, a deep freeze, and a sound system that can set off car alarms for a block. It is not a double-wide.
“Secondly, the Palmier was great, and I didn’t get the prix fixe—I got a taster at the chef’s table with a friend, and we stayed up later than we should have, and I still managed to drag myself here for a business conference at this unholy hour. I’m running on three hours’ sleep and digesting a good three-thousand-calorie dinner, is all.
“Finally, I don’t stop for Oreos, ever. I have a supply of 1995-vintage Hydroxes in one of the deep freezes. The original recipe contains all those great trans fats that make for excellent long-term frozen flavor and texture retention. I would offer you a package, but I won’t, because they are mine, and I treasure them beyond all reason and plan to make my stash last until I can no longer consume solid food, whereupon I plan to consume the balance in smoothie form.”
He took my shoes and tossed them into a closet and slammed the door, making a face, then burst out laughing and grabbed me in a bear hug that reminded me of those new biceps of his. “Man, it’s good to see you, Marty. Come in, come in. We’ll go out onto the roof.”
I got a quick tour of a lot of teak and curves and angles, like a set dresser had been given an unlimited budget to decorate the boss’s office on a midcentury period drama. Then he opened a sliding door out onto the roof-deck, which had some very nice landscaping and potted shrubs, a meandering stream patrolled by fat koi and fed by a two-foot waterfall, some comfortable-looking and elegant teak loungers, and Sethu.
She had an easel set up and was painting in oils, an impressionistic landscape of Palo Alto’s nimbified one-family houses and dinky main street. It was a couple of billion dollars’ worth of real estate dressed up as middle-class houses from the same midcentury dreamland as the furnishings in the living room.
She turned and saw us and narrowed her eyes, just a tiny amount, before cleaning her brushes and hanging up her smock on the easel’s corner.
“Hi, hon,” she said. “This must be your friend Mr. Hench.”
Danny beamed at her, an expression I remembered from his most successful demos, that prideful look he got when his code performed some miracle. “Marty, I don’t know if you ever met Sethu, back in the old days.”
“I don’t know that we were ever introduced properly,” I said. She’d let me in, once or twice, when I’d come by to see if I could pull Danny out of his tailspin. But she’d been his PA then.
“Well, in that case, Sethuramani Lazer, meet Martin Hench. Marty, meet Sethu.”
I’m pretty sure my facial expression didn’t change when he dropped that last name on me. I’d already noticed the rock on her finger, of course—a bachelor of my age and experience takes note of these things automatically, without conscious intervention. I’m pretty sure what Danny said next was that same pride speaking, not a failure of my poker face.
“Married her last year. Or rather, she married me, despite being significantly out of my league.”
“Lucky fella,” I said. “Congrats to both of you.”
He got us settled into loungers, and Sethu mentioned that she was going in for lemonade and offered us some. She brought it out in sweating tall glasses with silicone straws and then went back to her easel, far enough away that it wouldn’t seem odd not to include her in our conversation.
I sipped as Danny scrolled his phone for a moment, double-checked his notes, and took Sethu in. She was beautiful, of course, but I’d known that since I’d first met her at the door of that teardown that Danny had settled into as his final resting place. Now, though, she had the kind of haircut that some very bright topiarist had charged her at least a thousand bucks for, and with it, the kind of poise I associate with very beautiful, very accomplished women who are also very, very rich. Something in the posture, a kind of deep relaxation that you rarely see. Having a very deep cash buffer can give a woman the same tranquility as any middling specimen of manhood gets for free, the liberation from casual predation that men don’t even notice.
Danny put his phone down at last. “So I hear you did some work recently? Bonwick. Rearden Factoring?”
I nodded. “Yeah, Brian and I did some business, but it’s not the kind of thing I can discuss. You know that. He lost something, I found it, and I made him whole.”
He snorted. “Marty, you don’t make people whole. Your commission still twenty-five percent?”
“It is,” I said. “And I still don’t charge anything to take a job, not even expenses or a retainer. I take the risk, I get the reward. That’s a proposition I think you probably relate to.”
“I’m familiar with the general idea.” He looked around at his penthouse garden, his beautiful young wife, his view of the strivers of Palo Alto and their Leave It to Beaver houses, all a testament to his willingness to take all the risk and his unwillingness to share his rewards. “You ever take payment in crypto?”
“I prefer fiat”—this being the cutesy word that crypto weirdos use for real money—“I have smart accountants who keep my tax bite down to a manageable slice, and I’ve got no other reason to accept distributed sudoku puzzles in lieu of greenbacks.”
“Very funny,” he said. Cryptocurrency hustlers hate it when you point out that the whole blockchain emits billions of tons of CO2 to help repeatedly compute pointless mathematical puzzles. “You’re familiar with how crypto works, though, right?”
“Danny, I love you like a brother, but I hope I’m not about to get a sales pitch for Trustlesscoin.” The only sour note in the previous night’s dinner had been a couple of bros at the chef’s table who spent the first hour talking about smart contracts. It was a hazard of any public space in SV, and I accepted it with good grace, but I wouldn’t tolerate it in private places. Life is too short.
“No pitch, but I just want to make sure you’re up to speed for what I’m going to tell you next. Forensic accounting is one thing, but when you throw in crypto, it’s a whole different world.”
I grunted noncommittally. Danny had been around since crypto meant “cryptography,” and I hadn’t figured him to become one of these blockchain hustlers. They’re the kind of smart people who outsmart themselves, especially when it comes to shenanigans, forgetting that their public ledger is public and all their transactions are visible to the whole world forever. Forensic accounting never had a better friend than crypto, with its mix of public ledgers, deluded masters of the universe, and suckers pumping billions into the system. It was full employment for me and my competitors until cryptocurrency’s carbon footprint rendered the earth uninhabitable.
“There are certain technical differences between Trustless and other coins. Will you allow me to explain them to you? I promise it’s germane and I’m not trying to sell you anything.”
Copyright © 2023 by Cory Doctorow
