“Way to go Mom, that’s a thousand points.”

“Actually, sort of fun.” Scanning the screen for her next target. “Wait, I didn’t say that.” Trying later to put a positive spin on it, Maxine figures maybe it’s a virtual and kid-scale way of getting into the antifraud business . . .

“Hi, Vyrva, come on in.”

“Didn’t think I’d be this late.” Vyrva goes and puts her head in Otis and Ziggy’s room. “Hi, sweetie?” The girl looks up and murmurs hi, Mom, and gets back to yuppicide.

“Oh, look, they’re blowing away New Yorkers, how cute? I mean, nothing personal?”

“You’re good with this—Fiona, virtual murder sort of thing?”

“Oh, it’s bloodless, like Lucas didn’t even write in a splatter option? They think they’re disabling it, but it’s not even there?”

“So,” shrugging away any scold signifiers in face and voice, “a mom-approved first-person shooter.”

“That’s exactly the slogan we’re gonna use in the ads.”

“You’re advertising where, on the Internet?”

“The Deep Web. Down there advertising is like still in its infancy? And the price is what Bob Barker might call ‘right’?” Air quotes, Vyrva’s hair, back in braids, bouncing to and fro.

Maxine reaches a bag of some Fairway coffee blend out of the freezer and pours beans in the grinder. “Watch your ears a minute.” She grinds the coffee, pours it into a filter in the electric drip unit, hits the power switch.

“So Justin and Lucas are branching into games now.”

“It isn’t really business the way I learned it in college,” Vyrva confides, “at this point life should be serious? The guys are still having too much fun for their age.”

“Oh—male anxiety, yes that’s much better.”

“The game is just a promotional freebie,” Vyrva frowning cute-apologetic. “Our product is still totally DeepArcher?”

“Which is  . . .”

“Like ‘departure,’ only you pronounce it DeepArcher?”

“Zen thing,” Maxine guesses.

“Weed thing. Just lately everybody’s been after the source code—the feds, game companies, fuckin Microsoft? all have offers on the table? It’s the security design—like nothing any of these people’ve ever seen, and it’s makin them all crazy.”

“So, today you were out scouting your next round? Who’s the lucky VC this time?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“What I do. Professionally D and D.”

“Maybe,” Vyrva considers, “we should pinkie-swear?”

Maxine patiently holding out her pinkie, hooking it with Vyrva’s and obtaining eye contact, “Then again—”

“Hey, if you can’t trust another Kugelblitz mom?”

So, with the usual caveats, Maxine keeps her other hand in her pocket with fingers crossed as she solemnly pinkie-swears. “I think we got a preempt today? Even back at the height of the tech bubble, this would be awesome money? And it’s not a VC, it’s another tech company? Big deal this year down in the Alley, hashslingrz?”

Whoopwhoopwhoop. “Yeah . . . think I’ve . . . heard that name. That’s where you were today?”

“All day down there. I’m still, like, vibrateen? He’s a bundle of energy, that guy.”

“Gabriel Ice. He’s made you a big offer to buy, what, this source code?”

Ear to shoulder, one of those long West Coast shrugs, “He sure came up with a impressive piece of change from someplace? Enough to rethink the IPO? We already put the red herring on indefinite hold?”

“Wait a minute, what’s with acquisition fever down the Alley, didn’t all that go belly-up last year with the crash?”

“Not for the managed-security people, they’re making out fiercely at the moment. When everybody’s nervous, all corporate suits can think about is protecting what they’ve got.”

“So you guys’ve been out schmoozing with Gabriel Ice. Can I have your autograph?”

“We went to an afternoon soiree over at his mansion on the East Side? Him and his wife, Tallis, she’s the comptroller at hashslingrz, sits on the board too, I think?”

“And this is an outright buy?”

“All they want is, there’s a part about getting somewhere without leaving a trail. The content, they could care less. It isn’t about the destination or even the trip, really, not for these jokers.”

Maxine is much too familiar by now, even God forbid intimate, with this cover-your-tracks attitude. Next it morphs from innocent greed into some recognizable form of fraud. She wonders if anybody’s ever run a Beneish model on hashslingrz, just to see how ritually slaughtered the public numbers are. Note to self—find the time. “This DeepArcher, Vyrva, it’s what—a place?”

“It’s a journey. Next time you’re over, the boys’ll give you a demo.”

“Good, haven’t seen that Lucas for a while.”

“He hasn’t been around a lot. There’s been, like, issues? He and Justin find any excuse to get into a fight. whether to even sell the source code in the first place. Same old classic dotcom dilemma, be rich forever or make a tarball out of it and post it around for free, and keep their cred and maybe self-esteem as geeks but stay more or less middle income.”

“Sell it or give it away,” some scrutiny, “tough call, Vyrva. Which one wants to do what?”

“Both want to do both,” she sighs.

“Figures. How about you?”

“Oh? Torn? You’ll think it’s just hippyeen around, but I’m not that cool with a whole shitload of money crashing into our life right now? That can be so destructive, we know of one or two people back in Palo Alto, it gets ugly and sad so fast, and I’d rather see the guys keepin on with their work, maybe start up something new.” A tilted grin. “Hard for a New York person to understand, sorry.”

“Seen it forever, Vyrva. Direction of flow, in or out, don’t matter, above a critical amount, it’s all bad.”

“Not that I’m living through my husband, OK? I just hate it when the guys argue. They’re in love, for goodness sakes. They put on all this who-are-you-again-dude, but in fact it’s like a couple of skateboarders together? Should I be jealous?”

“What for?”

“You know this kind of old-school movie where there’s these two kids are best friends and one grows up to be a priest and the other turns out to be a mobster, well, that’s Lucas and Justin. Only don’t ask which is which.”

“But say Justin is the priest . . .”

“Well, the one who . . . doesn’t get into a shoot-out at the end.”

“Then Lucas . . .”

Vyrva looks off into the distance, trying for Surf Bunny Gazes at the Sea but revealing instead a look Maxine has seen maybe more of than she wants to. Don’t—don’t put in, she advises herself, despite the all-but-irresistible question arising, Has Vyrva been shtupping, excuse me, “seeing” her husband’s partner on the sly?

“Vyrva, you’re not . . .”

“Not what?”

“Never mind.” Both women then beam elaborately and shrug, one fast, the other slow.

Another unexplored corner here, of which there are already enough. Maxine has only recently for example found out about Vyrva and Beanie Babies. Seems Vyrva’s been out running some arbitrage hustle with the trendy stuffed-toy/beanbag hybrids. Soon after their first play date, “Fiona has every Beanie Baby,” Otis nodding for emphasis, “in the world.” He thought a minute. “Well, every kind of Beanie Baby. Every one in the world, that’d be . . . like warehouses and stuff.”

As happened off and on with the boys, Maxine was reminded of Horst, this time of his blockhead literalism, and she had to restrain herself from grabbing Otis, slobbering kisses and squashing him like a tube of toothpaste, and so forth.

“Fiona has . . . the Princess Diana Beanie Baby?” she asked instead.

“‘The’? Good luck, Mom. She’s got all the variations, even the BBC Interview Anniversary Edition. Under the bed, all in the closets, they’re pushing her out of her room.”

“You’re saying Fiona’s . . . a Beanie Baby person.”

“Not her so much,” Otis sez, “it’s her mom who’s totally the obsessive in the house.”