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“For the record,” I went on, “the jerk’s name is Paul Huygens.” I hesitated. “He used to work for CybeServe, maker of the fine line of CybeServe home VR products … specifically, the VidMaxx Dataroom. Ring any bells with you?” John’s face was blank for a moment, then Big Ben tolled the midnight hour. He cast a sharp look at me. “I’ll be darned,” he said slowly. “Is that the guy who got you canned at the Clarion?

“One and the same, dude.” I gazed out the window at the ruins of a collapsed subdivision, remembering an unsigned note that had been faxed to me only a few years ago. “One and the same …”

Time for another history lesson. Today’s lecture is how Gerry Rosen, ace investigative reporter, once again tried to get a good story and, not incidentally, save a few lives, but instead ended up losing his job. Take notes; there will be a quiz on this at the end of the postmodern era.

Three years before, I was working as a staff writer for another weekly alternative newspaper, this one the Back Bay Clarion, a muckraking little rag published in Boston. I had been assigned by my editor to follow up on a number of complaints against a medium-size electronics company based in Framingham, a Boston suburb that has been the heart of the East Coast computer industry since the early eighties. As you may have guessed, this was CybeServe.

CybeServe was one of many corporations that had cashed in on the virtual-reality boom by manufacturing home VR systems for the consumer market. It had previously lost tons of money on the cheap-shit domestic robots it had attempted to sell through department stores, so its VidMaxx line of VR equipment had been one of the few products that were keeping the company afloat. All well and good, but the problem lay in their top-of-the-line product, the VidMaxx Dataroom 310.

The Dataroom 310 was much like its competitors: the unit could transform any vacant household room into a virtual-reality environment, transporting the customer into any world that could be interfaced by the CPU-the sort of thing for which Jah now wanted to write programs. Want to see exactly what the NASA probes on Mars are doing right now? Experience a role-playing game set in a medieval fantasy world? Go shopping in the Galleria Virtual? If you had all the right hardware and enough money to blow on on-line linkage with the various nets, the Dataroom 310 would take you there toot sweet.

However, unlike similar equipment marketed by Microsoft-Commodore or IBM, CybeServe’s VR equipment had some major flaws. First, there was no built-in interrupt timer; anyone who plugged into cyberspace could stay there indefinitely, or at least until hell froze over and you could build snowmen in Cairo. Also, because of various bugs in the CybeServe’s communications software sold with the hardware, anyone with a little knowledge could hack straight through the security lockouts installed by sysops to prevent users from accessing various commercial VR nets without ponying up a credit card number.

This type of bad engineering had made the CybeServe Butler 3000 the joke of the robotics industry; CybeServe tended to do things fast and cheap in order to cash in on a marketing trend. But most people were unaware of the subtle flaws with the Dataroom 310 when they bought it and had it installed in their homes. Their kids, though, soon discovered those glitches that allowed them practically unlimited time on whatever nets they were able to access, with or without authorization. Blowing three grand on phone bills to Madame Evelyn’s House of Love is enough to make anyone break out in a cold sweat.

That’s bad. What’s worse was that, according to the tips my paper had received from distraught and angry parents, several kids were losing themselves in cyberspace. They would rush home from school to lock themselves into the datarooms and, using various commands and passwords they had learned from their friends, jack into the VR worlds of their choice … and some of them, because of the lack of an interrupt toggle, wouldn’t come back home again. It became a form of avoidance behavior for children who didn’t like genuine reality, much as drugs, excessive TV viewing, or 1-900 phone services had been for previous generations. A few emotionally disturbed teenagers had even attempted suicide this way, trying to starve themselves to death while locked into an unreal world they refused to leave.

When I checked into it, I found that CybeServe was aware of the problem yet had done nothing to solve it. The corporation had a consulting psychologist on its payroll, whose only job was to jack into the system and talk kids out of virtual reality. The company offered generous “refunds” to their families if they kept their mouths shut about the accidents that had befallen Junior and Sis and didn’t file any lawsuits. Yet CybeServe had not recalled the Dataroom 310 to install timers nor made any effort to update the communications software to prevent hacking. Instead of fixing its mistakes, the company had concentrated solely on keeping potential buyers and the company’s competitors from learning about the product’s defects.

A few local families wanted to talk; so did a couple of their kids, particularly a thirteen-year-old boy from Newton who had spent six months in a New Hampshire psychiatric hospital after he had attempted to kill himself by locking himself in the household dataroom for nearly three days. They had tipped off the Clarion, and I was put onto the story.

CybeServe’s public relations director was Paul Huygens. He had started off by affably refuting the accusations during a long phone interview. He also offered to have a unit installed in my house-free of charge, of course, for “research purposes.” When I didn’t wag my tail and roll over, he circulated an in-house memo to all key company personnel, tacitly threatening job termination to anyone who didn’t hang up as soon as I called.

It could be said in Huygens’s defense that he had only been doing his job. That’s fair; I was doing mine. After several weeks of hangups, I managed to find a disgruntled former CybeServe R amp;D scientist with a guilty conscience who told me, in a not-for-attribution interview, about the fatal flaws in the Dataroom 310. That, along with all the real and circumstantial evidence, allowed me to write an exposé about the company. It was published in the Clarion after nearly two months of grinding work, and within a couple of months after its publication, the Dataroom 310 was taken off the market and CybeServe was forced to deal with dozens of civil-court lawsuits regarding the product.

By then, I had lost my job. Almost as soon as the article was published, Huygens called Boston-area companies that had business with CybeServe, all of them electronics retailers that advertised in the Back Bay Clarion. These stores, in turn, swamped the Clarion’s publisher with threats that they would yank their ads from the paper unless an editorial retraction was published and I was fired.

Like most alternative weeklies, the Clarion was a free paper, its existence dependent solely upon ad revenues. Most publishers-like Pearl, bless his rancid heart-have an iron rod thrust down their backs, knowing all too well that advertisers need the papers just as much as the papers need the advertisers and that editorial wimp-outs only invite further intimidation. Earlier that year, though, the Clarion had been sold to a greedhead who was innocent of journalistic ethics and didn’t have the common sense not to let himself be cowed by hollow threats. This jellyfish, confronted with the notion that he might not be able to purchase a summer cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, knuckled under.

Two weeks after the publication of my CybeServe story, I was on my way to work when I stopped off at a Newbury Street deli to have coffee and read the Globe-Herald. This made me twenty minutes late for work. I had done it many times before with no previous complaints, but when I showed up at the office, my termination notice was already pinned to my door. The reason given was “chronic tardiness.”