Chapter 0

The programmer was intrigued. He clicked the link and slipped on his cushioned headphones. The entire screen of his monitor went blank and a low throbbing came from his headphones. The throbbing became a steady, thump-thump, thump-thump of a heart at rest. The screen came alive with a kaleidoscope of colorful shapes. It was familiar to the programmer and very relaxing.

The images seemed to move to the cardio-rhythms and as the beat quickened so did the speed of the colors and shapes. The programmer became slightly agitated. The soothing images began to fade into rougher shapes with harder edges and the colors became more intense. Blues and greens and browns blurred into reds and yellows. The shapes became sharp as knife blades as the rhythm sped up.

The programmer began to get alarmed. He could feel his heart race to the increasing beats of the bass drum. He wanted to pull off the headphones and stop the animation but his arms were languid. Try as he might, he could not make the slightest move to stop the presentation. It was mesmerizing and he was locked in its grip.

The images began to fade into a fog of dark blue and gray swirling clouds. The sound began to echo and reverberate, like ambient music. The programmer swore he heard a woman wailing and the wind blowing. There were other sounds, sounds of a city, cars honking, semi-trucks braking and sirens screaming in the night. The swirling clouds faded away to a black screen and the programmer fell into his subconscious. He was floating in a world that was not his reality. It had the appearance of the real world, but it existed only in his mind's eye.

He was holding onto a cold, metal structure that consisted of three tubes and had cross braces every few feet. It was cold, terribly cold and he could feel the wind whipping past him and biting into him, chilling him to the bone. The programmer had never been that cold in all his life. He started to shake and tremble in the blowing wind. He looked down and saw that he was perched atop a radio tower on the very top of a skyscraper.

The fear of falling returned in him. It was first experienced when he was a teenager and jumped from a high dive into the neighborhood pool. It haunted him for months thereafter - the feeling of falling into an endless dark hole. He no longer had such nightmares, but he could never allow himself to be on a tall structure without becoming agitated to the point of distraction.

His mind was now running as fast as the wind and his beating heart. How the hell did he get this far up on a tower? Was this some kind of dream? More like nightmare. It was every bit as real as anything he had ever known. There was no denying that he was thousands of feet up in the sky and afraid for his life. There was no way he was going to climb down the tower to the base of the antenna. It was too far and the wind was too strong. He was doomed to fall; it was only a matter of when.

The building was swaying from the turbulent winds making him nauseous. His hands began to slip; he locked his elbows around the braces of the tower and held on. There was a flashing red navigation light below him and one above him. The light made his hands glow eerie red as it flashed. How in the hell did he get in this position? It had to be a dream. If he thought about it hard enough, maybe he would wake up. No such luck.

The programmer screamed into the wind, his voice carried away like an echo in a canyon. No one would know where he was and rescue would be impossible. His grip was loosening again. He looked down and became dizzy and weak. He was doomed to fall. His life would be over and there was nothing he could do to help himself. Fear paralyzed him.

When the hopelessness of the situation sunk in, he was ready to fall, ready to sink into the swirling abyss, ready to let go, ready to die.

The programmer closed his eyes and became suddenly still, the cold wind seemed to die away as his fingers began to slip off the freezing metal. The falling sensation returned. Now it was comforting for him. He was falling to his death and he was no longer afraid.

Chapter 1

Joshua Jones couldn’t sleep. The image of his father turning to look at him one last time, before their car dove into the icy water, would not leave him alone. His mother’s scream as the river ice broke and water rushed over the front window, rang in his ears like the shrill of a silver screen femme-fatale. No matter how hard he had tried to forget the nightmare of his parent’s death, it always came back to haunt him sooner or later. This night it was particularly bad. Every time he tried to shut his eyes the images came back as if he were stuck in some kind of real life code loop. Listening to music, turning his damp pillow over, changing his position and even the couch could not ward off the suffocating feeling of guilt he felt for his parent’s death. They were driving up to their cabin in McCall, Idaho and the roads were slick with ice and snow. Joshua was sixteen and just learning to find his way around a compiler. His dad was answering a question that Joshua had asked about programming. John Jones loved to talk with his hands and in responding to his son’s question he let go of the wheel just as the car began to slip on the ice. It was only for a brief second. One careless move brought on by Joshua’s question and now they were both dead. For the past six years Joshua blamed himself for the accident. No amount of counseling or therapy could remove the guilt he felt for their deaths. He suffered bouts of insomnia that lasted anywhere from a few days to a week several times a year. It was no way to live, but it was the only way he knew. The lack of sleep and complete exhaustion usually caught up with him and he was able to resume his life afterward with some degree of normality. But for those nights when the dreams held him in their painful grip, he was helpless to stop them. Around three in the morning he gave up on sleep and tried to watch TV to clear his mind. Staring at sitcoms that had run the night before did not help. He left the TV on and went into his den to try coding. Sometimes it was his only refuge from the feelings of guilt. He could lose himself in the deep meditation of programming and forget the disturbing images. Over time he would begin to release his guilt, but he was never fully free from it. If he had not asked his father that stupid question, his parents would still be alive and he would not be having these horrible night mares. That simple fact was so desperately hard for him to let go of. There was always someone on-line at all hours of the night. The coding chat rooms he frequented were alive with chatter about obscure code constructs and light hearted banter about favorite editors. He slowly pulled himself out of his depression and started focusing on the code. There was a particularly tricky algorithm he was wrestling with at work and the solution to it popped into his head unannounced like all bursts of inspiration and suddenly he felt the need to get to work and finish it. #

A light snow was falling as Joshua flashed his ID card at the reader and entered building four of RegTech. It was a dark morning in November and he was sure that he was the only person crazy enough to be in this early on a Friday. The white ear buds of his iPod were pumping the staccato beats of his favorite rock band into his head as he strolled past the empty cubes carrying his laptop in a shoulder pack. He had the kind of likable face that women called cute and immature men liked to beat up. He wore a brown jacket with a hooded dark blue sweatshirt underneath. The dress standard was pretty lax at the tech company and he wore the same faded blue jeans and black Cons that got him through his college years. Joshua's mind was not on the music. He was thinking about how to handle a tricky array construct and the music helped him to concentrate, helped him keep out the bad dreams that were the real reason he was awake. His father used to say he was part of Generation Multi-task, and always gave him a hard time about it. Joshua just shrugged it off, a body does what a body needs and his body needed music to concentrate. As he strolled down the hall and turned down the rows of cubicles, the lights winked on a few rows ahead of him. Even a big multi-national company like RegTech had some energy conservation policies in effect. The lights may have been out from lack of movement, but the building was still a warm and cozy seventy-five degrees. Joshua started unzipping his coat before he made it to his row. He had three PC's in his cube and two big screen monitors that radiated plenty of heat. A rotary fan in the back of his cube ran constantly, to keep him cool in both the summer and the winter. As Joshua strolled past the cubicles in his row he noticed the distinct aroma of Flying Pie pizza. It indicated that someone had been burning the midnight oil. Glenn, the coder in the cube before Joshua's was in his cube, sitting at his computer, motionless. There was a pizza box open on his desk with a few crusts scattered about. It looked to Joshua, as he silently slipped past, like he had consumed an entire large pizza. Joshua back stepped until he could peer around the padded cube wall. Yes, it really was his coworker, slouching back in his chair, head turned away, fast asleep. Joshua grinned as he realized the programmer had fallen asleep at his computer. He continued on to his cube beside Glenn's and slipped off his shoulder bag that carried his laptop and into his own chair. With a few quick keystrokes he was logged into his computer and already working on a piece of troublesome code. He implemented the solution that had come to him after two days of pondering it and compiled his code. It worked, just like he wanted it too. He made a fist and pumped it with enthusiasm. Feeling elated and full of momentary self-confidence, he got up and grabbed his coffee mug. It was time to make the first pot of coffee for the day. Thoughts of his parent’s demise and his nightmares faded from his head. Sometimes having an obsessively detailed job was a good thing. It freed his mind from the mundane regularities of life. He strode past Glenn's sleeping form and made his way down the hall, lights winking on as he walked. As he took out the coffee and dumped it into the filter he started to wonder why Glenn had pulled an all-nighter on a Thursday. There were no pressing deadlines and Glenn was not the type to come in off-hours and work for no reason, unlike other programmers Joshua knew at the company. Glenn was strictly an eight to five kind of guy. For most of the other employees in Joshua's web group, that was too much time with him. Glenn was not the most well liked individual. He was arrogant and loud and he always seemed to take the opposing viewpoint in any debate. Joshua figured he just liked to argue, but most people were just put off by it. Glenn was always the first to point out the flaws in other people, but regarded himself as nearly perfect in everything he did. The irony was not lost on Joshua that Glenn had been caught snoozing at his desk, even if it were not technically during working hours. People would be streaming in soon enough and someone would probably find him asleep and make a big scene about it. Joshua decided that would not be in his best interest as Glenn's cube was beside his and that would mean undue noise and attention throughout the day. Better to wake him now and save himself and Glenn the grief. Joshua left his mug at the coffee station as the fresh java brewed and headed back down to Glenn's cube to wake him up. When he stepped inside the entrance to Glenn's cube, he pulled out his head phones and touched the coder on the shoulders. The hairs on the back of Joshua's head suddenly stood up. Glenn was not breathing. A fact that was hard to deny when you considered how rotund the man was and how heavy people usually made a wheezing sound when they were sleeping. Glenn's body was as still as a boulder. The second thing that Joshua noticed was that Glenn's chubby fingers were still wrapped around his laser mouse and his ergonomic keyboard. It was as if he had died suddenly and without any kind of a struggle. His first instinct was to step back and take a deep breath. The memory of his parents’ lifeless bodies on a slab in the morgue rushing back in his mind's eye, their loving faces, blue and cold from having drowned in icy water. Joshua forced the unpleasant memory from his mind and studied Glenn's cube. Open soda cans and candy wrappers littered the messy desk. Joshua supposed that Glenn had the kind of brilliant mind that could not be bothered with the mundane details of life, like decorating his personal space. There were no family pictures or plants on his desk other than a few old O'Reilly programming books on his shelf. Technical specification papers and an industry magazine that was about two years old were usually the only items on his desk. Glenn's monitor was in standby mode which meant he may have passed on some time ago. Joshua went back to his cube and turned off his iPod. Then he dialed the security hot line for the building. An alert sounding man answered the phone and immediately contacted Emergency Services. A security person was dispatched and a cryptic message was soon blaring from the building's speaker system. Joshua stood there looking around, realizing that the rest of his day was now shot. #

Ten hours later, Joshua was pulling his silver Porsche 356 convertible into the parking garage at the apartment complex where he lived in downtown Boise. The car's black fabric top was zipped up but he was still cold and tired. He was glad to be home despite barely being able to drag himself into his apartment. Once inside he grabbed a beer and fell into his easy chair in front of his high definition TV. The cat was sitting contently on the back of the couch, his body snug in the collapsed back cushion that the cat had declared his own years before. He watched Joshua eat for a while before his eyes slowly closed. Joshua had picked up some Korean food on the way home and placed the Bulgogi and Kimche on his lap. He stared silently at the HDNet World Report news and kicked off his shoes. He had been out of touch with the world during the hours he spent talking to the Police and his co-workers about Glenn's death. The consensus was that Glenn had suffered a massive and sudden heart attack and died sometime during the night. It was something anyone could have guessed yet somehow it required two hours of his time at the Police station and endless interruptions at work by people from all over the company who had heard what happened and just had to stop by to get the details. At one point Joshua was sure the Police were convinced he might actually be a suspect, just because he had come in early and no one else was in the building for most of the night. Nobody actually came out and suggested it, but he got some cold stares at times and he felt more than a little uncomfortable by it. Nobody really liked Glenn much, but he was not so bad a person as to be worth killing. The guy was overweight and had bad eating habits. He was always eating junk food and consuming Mountain Dew and energy drinks like an alcoholic drinks cheap beer. His lifestyle finally caught up with him. Joshua was no pillar of health himself, but at least he had good taste in food. He took another beef strip in his chopsticks and shoved it into his mouth then followed it with a chaser of Grolsch. The Kimche was particularly hot and he was quickly into his second beer and beginning to feel a slight buzz. He stared at the life-like images on the huge TV hanging on his wall. Sometimes when he was relaxed and still he felt like it was a portal to another part of the world, like a bad Star Trek episode. The picture clarity was phenomenal. It was easy to lose yourself in it. He changed the channel to a nature program and was transported to Africa where he sat quietly in the tall grasses of the Serengeti with a den of lions. Joshua saw the back of Glenn's head in his mind, the slightly balding scalp with thinning brown hair. The complete stillness that was death unnerved Joshua. Just yesterday Glenn was speaking to him about a World of Warcraft on-line gaming campaign he was leading. Joshua did not play the game and he had not really been listening to Glenn's excited descriptions or boastings about his military prowess. Try as he might, he could not remember anything that Glenn had said to him about the game during their conversation. But he could picture Glenn's face, pink skin wet with small beads of sweat and so completely full of life. The dead man in Glenn's cube was no longer Glenn. Glenn was now gone from this world and it seemed to Joshua incredibly unfair. Joshua still could not sleep. As tired as he was from being up the night before, the last thing he wanted to do was fall asleep and relive the nightmare of his parents’ death. The TV had changed to an aquarium, showing an underwater documentary about tropical fish. He sat up and felt a painful rush in his head. He put the remains of his dinner aside and slowly stood. His cell phone went off in his pocket and startled him. He glanced at the phone's clock; it was just after two in the morning. "Hello?" "Josh, let me in," a female voice pleaded. "Sure," was his response as he closed the phone and opened the door. It was Dancia, and she was wired on caffeine. She brushed past and handed him an empty coffee container then she headed toward the computer room. "Have you heard the news? A hacker was killed today." Joshua padded along after her. "I know, but I wouldn't say he was a hacker, more like a hack." She was already logged on to his main workstation and was opening an Internet Relay Chat session by the time he got to the den. She looked back at him through her black rim glasses. "What?" "It was Glenn from my work group. He must have had too many pizzas and Dews." She looked at him like he was speaking another language. Finally she said, "Glenn died?" "Yeah, I found him dead in his cube this morning. Didn't you hear about it?" She stared at him for a moment her eyes wide and then looked back to the dual plasma screens and opened a connection to her favorite server and coding channel. "Holy shit, I didn't know about that. I've been off line until this evening. I was chatting with DrunkMonk on pound coders and he said that Zemo was found dead last night in Stuttgart." Joshua sat down on a bean bag near the workstation, "Wait, our Zemo?" Dancia nodded as she was typing, "Our interface guru for MyMovies. He was found in his room by his parents. No official cause of death. He was only sixteen. I had no idea he was that young." It was strange that two coders that he knew had died on the same day. What were the odds of that happening, he thought to himself. It never occurred to him that they had both died without apparent malfeasance. "I wonder who will die next," Dancia said, turning back to Joshua. Her tone was solemn. She had dark black hair cut in a bob and deep brown eyes behind her glasses. Her skin tone was pale white; no self-respecting geek had tanned skin, even in Idaho. She was wearing a black t-shirt that read "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" under her black leather jacket. She wore no watch; nobody under the age of thirty did anymore. It had been replaced with the ubiquitous cell phone. Her cell was tucked into the front pocket of her tight, low riding jeans. Joshua shook his head and looked away. He didn't believe in superstitions, like people you know dying in threes, but she did so he kept his skepticism to himself. Her voice lowered a bit, "What was Glenn's body like?" Joshua looked up at his friend. Her voice was morbid sounding to him. "Still," he said, "very still," not really wanting to rehash the experience for her lurid interest. "You were his friend weren't you? Didn't you guys hang out together at work?" "Yeah, I guess so. Listen, I've got to get some sleep. It's been a long day for me. You staying?" he said standing up. She looked back to the screens, "Do you mind if I work from here tonight? I don't feel like being in my apartment alone." He rested a comforting hand on her shoulder, "Nope, see you later." She smiled up at him as he left and then returned her attention to the IRC chat. Dancia was always coming over and hacking on his machines at all hours of the night. She worked a night shift at the local microprocessor plant and the only time she could see her friends was when she had the day off which was usually during their night time hours. Joshua didn't mind, he let anybody use his place. It was not unusual on the weekends to find six people crashed on the floor from an all night LAN party. He preferred that they spend the night rather than risk driving home drunk or tired or both. Joshua padded back to his bedroom and flopped down on his bed. But he did not sleep. He laid there trying not to think about his parents. Then he took out an old composition book he used for recording his dreams. Ever since the nightmares had started after his parent's death, he had found it cathartic to write down his dreams. He read through the familiar passages from the last several times he dreamed of the accident. Something was not right. He flipped back further going back in time three, four and five years. Skimming through the passages, he stopped when he found it. In his dreams he used to be playing Nintendo's Game Boy before the accident, not talking about coding with his dad. Either his dreams had changed or his memory was becoming more challenged the older he got. He thought about the changes and tried to recall playing the game. Try as he might, he could not recall ever playing his Game Boy on that trip. He remembered the games he used to play, but that was all. It was late into the evening before he finally fell asleep.

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