back towards our office. “Well, come on, then! James is springing for pizza, so let’s go tell him what we want and see if we can get this puppy out the door.”
The rest of the afternoon went by in a blur of pizza, soda, frenetic waves of email, and Jude and I repeating our test sweeps when builds came out with new bug fixes. By four-thirty, the last build passed testing. By five, cheers rang out up and down the hallway as James declared the product ready to ship.
Everybody cheered but me. I wanted to go home and hide.
“Ship party!” Jude crowed as she whirled in her chair to high-five me. But she hadn’t forgotten our exchange from that morning, and though she was grinning ear to ear, she gave me a shrewd once-over too. “Are you up to it? You want happy fun party time, or quiet comfy ‘wake me up in a week’ time?”
I started to say I’d just head home and crash. Then I remembered the walk to the bus stop and the things in the tree, on the lawn, in the hedge. If I went home, I’d have to take that same route. And I thought of the eyes under the vending machine, and my own eyes turned an impossible color in my reflection. But nothing out of the ordinary had invaded our office, and in desperation, I seized on a possible explanation. In our office, I’d had Jude for company all day.
Suddenly the prospect of a boisterous ship party was tantalizing indeed. I’d get a headache—even more of one than I already had—from the loud conversation, loud music, and free-flowing alcohol. But there would be people involved. Nice, safe, not-troll-type people.
I wouldn’t be alone.
“I’ll take door number one, Bob,” I joked, and dug up a crooked grin for added plausibility.
Jude slapped my shoulder in approval. “That’s the spirit! We’ll get blitzed, and you can tell me all about your adventure last night. It’ll be fun!”
My grin slipped a little at the reminder. But I fought off the jangling chord of disquiet in the back of my head, squared my shoulders, and let her lead me off as the team gathered to head out… praying as I went that I wouldn’t see anything else.
Chapter Five
Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint the Emerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.
With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill.
The first time they see it, Linux geeks always burst out laughing at the name and the sign over the front door, a penguin in a red hat emblazoned in neon. The less technologically inclined still grin at the conjunction of a penguin and booze, and are more than welcome within as long as they can pay for the drinks, food, and games. It’s not hip enough for Broadway, Capitol Hill’s main thoroughfare; the Penguin’s too many blocks away, the atmosphere too geeky. And since it’s sandwiched on a narrow side street, it’s not easy to find unless you’re looking for it, or unless you’re a regular, like many of us.
We converged on the bar in an erratic wave, the swiftest arrivals scarfing the spots in the lot next to the building. The rest of us circled like vultures through the surrounding streets in search of somewhere
The rest of the afternoon went by in a blur of pizza, soda, frenetic waves of email, and Jude and I repeating our test sweeps when builds came out with new bug fixes. By four-thirty, the last build passed testing. By five, cheers rang out up and down the hallway as James declared the product ready to ship.
Everybody cheered but me. I wanted to go home and hide.
“Ship party!” Jude crowed as she whirled in her chair to high-five me. But she hadn’t forgotten our exchange from that morning, and though she was grinning ear to ear, she gave me a shrewd once-over too. “Are you up to it? You want happy fun party time, or quiet comfy ‘wake me up in a week’ time?”
I started to say I’d just head home and crash. Then I remembered the walk to the bus stop and the things in the tree, on the lawn, in the hedge. If I went home, I’d have to take that same route. And I thought of the eyes under the vending machine, and my own eyes turned an impossible color in my reflection. But nothing out of the ordinary had invaded our office, and in desperation, I seized on a possible explanation. In our office, I’d had Jude for company all day.
Suddenly the prospect of a boisterous ship party was tantalizing indeed. I’d get a headache—even more of one than I already had—from the loud conversation, loud music, and free-flowing alcohol. But there would be people involved. Nice, safe, not-troll-type people.
I wouldn’t be alone.
“I’ll take door number one, Bob,” I joked, and dug up a crooked grin for added plausibility.
Jude slapped my shoulder in approval. “That’s the spirit! We’ll get blitzed, and you can tell me all about your adventure last night. It’ll be fun!”
My grin slipped a little at the reminder. But I fought off the jangling chord of disquiet in the back of my head, squared my shoulders, and let her lead me off as the team gathered to head out… praying as I went that I wouldn’t see anything else.
Chapter Five
Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint the Emerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.
With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill.
The first time they see it, Linux geeks always burst out laughing at the name and the sign over the front door, a penguin in a red hat emblazoned in neon. The less technologically inclined still grin at the conjunction of a penguin and booze, and are more than welcome within as long as they can pay for the drinks, food, and games. It’s not hip enough for Broadway, Capitol Hill’s main thoroughfare; the Penguin’s too many blocks away, the atmosphere too geeky. And since it’s sandwiched on a narrow side street, it’s not easy to find unless you’re looking for it, or unless you’re a regular, like many of us.
We converged on the bar in an erratic wave, the swiftest arrivals scarfing the spots in the lot next to the building. The rest of us circled like vultures through the surrounding streets in search of somewhere
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