Up in this instance looked like the municipality of Redmond, Washington. Tall trees, sunlight glittering on the blue-green waters of Lake Sammamish. Biotech and mountain bikes. Neat landscaping and plenty of designated parking. A place dedicated to the healthy alternation of work and play. Software and jet skis. Aerospace and hiking trails. And for Arjun an American life. It had come, boxed and shrinkwrapped, thanks to the final interview, the one after which he knew he would snap, would not stay to breathe another lungful of hydrocarbon-laced valley air but would take the first plane back to New Delhi to breathe the comforting hydrocarbons of home. And instead Virugenix hired him. Virugenix. And not just any job, but a position in the holy of holies, home of the Ghostbusters, the Cyrus J. Greene Labs.
Home was now a third-floor studio in Berry Acres, a new development enclosed by high decorative ironwork gates that opened in response to a magnetic swipe card. His window in Bilberry Nook (Unit 12, located for him by the efficient Virugenix personnel division) looked out on a row of identical wooden-fronted buildings, all painted shades of grey and white. On a clear day he could also see the mist-shrouded peaks of the Cascade Mountains, hanging above the roofs like a dream of Kashmir. It was, as he told Priti, the most beautiful place he could imagine, as far away from the dust and bustle of Noida as the moon.
Some things, however, do not change. Arjun’s apartment was several degrees warmer than anywhere else in Bilberry Nook and from behind its closed door came a low threatening hum, like a wasps’ nest. The sound emanated from a quantity of elderly computer equipment which he had begged, borrowed and networked together in an insanely complex configuration that left space only for a futon and a wobbly operator’s chair, nestling among a fantastical snake-pit of cabling. Backless tower cases bristled with connectors, each resource allocated, each slot stuffed with network cards, SIMMs, removable drives and various warranty-invalidating home-made devices which gave the whole mess a dubious about-to-blow look. Here and there he had attempted to impose order on the chaos, mostly with duct tape. Intractable ganglia of wire had been plastered to the walls, the skirting, the underside of the home-made desk. On the remaining horizontal surfaces were stacks of storage media, almost all computer-related, except for a vertical tower of VHS tapes which reached almost to the ceiling. In one corner, a grudging afterthought, were a couple of IKEA storage cartons containing his clothes, mostly promotional t-shirts bearing the logos of software companies. The only concession to decoration, indeed to RL lifestyle of any kind, were the posters on the wall above the bed. To the left was Amitabh Bachchan in a still from Zanjeer, frozen in a posture so action-packed that it threatened to split his pants. Beside him was a sulkily pouting Leela Zahir, playing the role of wayward Mumbai co-ed Mini in You’ll Have to Ask My Parents.
Every weekday morning Arjun woke up in the midst of his chaos and grinned at the evergreen framed in his window. The tree presumably had a name (was it a fir or a pine?), though he did not know it. It looked like one of the trees that you could make appear with a mouse click and a little noise when playing SimCity. In fact, if he was honest, most of the Puget Sound area looked like that: perfect, glossily pleasing, somehow placed. Then he put on the cleanest of his t-shirts and took the bus downtown, past the Sim marina and the Sim park and the mall full of Sims shopping at the drugstore and drinking tea at the British Pantry. Redmond was a town with nice graphics and an intuitive user interface. His kind of town.
After his bus-ride he would buy a large-sized latte at Starbucks, add three packets of sugar, stir with the plastic stirrer (the ritual of picking up and choosing these items from the stand of assorted lids and cardboard sleeves was very satisfying), then transfer the whole lot to his own insulated plastic beaker for the two-block walk to the Virugenix campus, a cluster of low glass-clad buildings set in meticulously landscaped grounds.
In those days everyone knew Virugenix, the global computer-security specialist. Most computer users had Virugenix software somewhere on their machines, running a firewall or scanning their hard drive for malicious code. Their Splat! product suite was an industry standard. Though they had offices in twelve US cities and sales presences in many other countries around the world, Redmond was the site of their research and development operation, the prestigious Greene Labs. To Arjun r & d was it, the alpha and omega. Everything else about a software company was peripheral, more or less just selling.
Miraculously, or so it seemed to him, the anti-virus team had an opening for an assistant tester. Though it was not a position for a fully fledged virus analyst, it was the next best thing: checking that the daily batch of new definitions picked up what they were supposed to, and testing the patches the AV team produced to fix the damage. He would be working with the kind of code he loved most. Within two weeks of his interview, he had said goodbye to Ram, Shyam, the Samoans, dogshit, California and daytime TV, and moved to Washington State.
At the campus gate he would smile and show his ID card to security, who waved him through to the well-signed path that led to the Michelangelo Building. The AV group occupied the top floor of Michelangelo, and he had to swipe his pass twice to access the test lab. Whenever he entered and left the secure area, his bag was checked for storage media. As numerous laminated signs in the corridor pointed out, if a disk went into the AV lab it did not come out again.
Arjun liked the security procedures. It felt good to show his pass with its code numbers and little colour headshot, and he was excited by the rumour that Virugenix was about to install an iris scanner. Biometrics were neat. The security controls seemed to underscore his elite status, to confirm that his daily routine had drama and importance. He sometimes imagined film plots in which he (played by Shah Rukh Khan) worked against the clock to outwit evil Pakistani virus writers who were holding Leela Zahir hostage. If… I… can… just… figure… this… encryption… algorithm… out… But mostly he was too busy for daydreaming. From the time he fired up his terminal to look through the first batch of new test files until the time he powered down at night, he was deep in the netherworld of malicious code, one of the good guys, the white hats, dedicated to keeping you safe in your digital bed.
The top floor of the Michelangelo Building was just one of the nodes on what Virugenix grandly called its Global Security Perimeter. After the big email attachment scares of the late nineties, the company had decided to offer its jittery corporate clients a 24-hour service. They opened satellite labs in Japan, Finland and on the East Coast, so that whenever a new threat was identified, an analyst somewhere in the world was awake and on hand to assess it. The GSP nodes were linked by two entirely separate networks: one for ordinary corporate traffic, the other for the transmission of code samples and other potentially infectious material. This second network of computers was known to the analysts as the Petri dish. It was the place where they watched things grow.
As the morning wore on, Arjun’s first latte would be followed by several more, made at the gleaming coffee-station in the employee kitchen. Virugenix also provided a refrigerated cabinet of complimentary sodas, and some time around noon he tended to make the switch from coffee to cola. He had decorated his workspace, a standard six-by-six grey cubicle, with a mixture of family and film pictures. Priti grinning at her college graduation. Hrithik Roshan in a tight t-shirt. The cubicle was part of a cluster abutting an area walled off from the rest of the office by clear Plexi-glas panels. This room contained several racks of ordinary household PCs, a whiteboard and three large plasma displays. It required high-level clearance to enter, and the analysts nicknamed it ‘the hot zone’. The racked machines were the dirtiest part of the Petri dish, an isolated sub-net on which infections were induced to spread. Once or twice a day a gaggle of senior researchers gathered round the screens, watching some new digital creature overwrite sectors of a disk or hunt for somewhere to migrate. Arjun watched surreptitiously (an activity which involved poking his head over the top of the cubicle like a meerkat) as arguments broke out, theories were outlined, and dry markers brandished in passionate defence and refutation, all in other-side-of-the-glass dumbshow. He wished he could be part of these conversations, but underneath the informal surface of the AV group there was a clear hierarchy He had neither the clearance nor the status to join in when the Ghostbusters were at work.