The heavy wooden door opened slowly, framing and revealing the room like a panning camera. Plain white walls, varnished pine floor. A wide bed with a cast iron frame topped with gleaming brass knobs. She knelt on it, naked, blindfolded, her face bowed between her chained, outstretched arms, half hidden in the tumble of her hair; her knees spread obscenely wide by their own fetters, stretching and parting her labia above her little tuft of soft pubic fur, revealing the darker pigment of her anus. Her beautiful skin gleaming in the soft evening light, marred and mottled with bruises. By the chain splaying her left leg, an unopened box of condoms.
-----
"Mark, can you spare a moment?"
I sat up, stretched, leaned back in my chair, and swivelled it round. David, my boss, and friend. Really. And with him, a very sleek guy. Sharp suit. Silk tie. Cuff-links, for heaven's sake! But big, well built, even slightly menacing.
"Mark, this is Tony. He's come to join us on European sales."
"Hi, Mark," said the suit, in a very upper class drawl, aggressively English, "I hear you're the wizard."
I'm the guy who writes your telephone bill. Or, at least, I'm the guy who writes the thing that writes your telephone bill. Or, at least, I used to be. Back in the day, when the company was just basically David and me and John the finance guy, I wrote the whole product. These days I'm called 'Senior Software Architect', and have a team of untergeeks who do all the boring stuff; and I mostly provide top level input and write the bit that interrogates the switch.
You really don't know how your telephone works, do you? There's this bit of string that goes from your phone to the exchange, and in the exchange, there's something mysterious that connects your call to the person you're calling. Of course, these days the piece of string is often virtual, but that really doesn't make any difference. Your call goes to somewhere, and from there it gets routed to where you want it to go. And that mysterious somewhere in the middle is the switch.
Now, switches are very good at routing calls, but apart from that they're mostly fairly dumb. They remember which line called, and where it was routed, and how long the line was up; and that's about all. So the telephone company need something to pull the data off the switch, and work out what the tariff for each call was, and which account it belongs to, and so on; and that something is my baby. I'm a geek, and geeks in our society are more or less invisible. Society needs the things geeks do in order to operate, but most of the time most people don't even realise that the things geeks do need doing. Their phone bills come through the post, and they (usually) pay them.
But I'm a geek, and I'm that geek; so next time you pay your phone bill, think of me.
The software industry is composed of two kinds of people. There's geeks. That's us: the people who can actually talk to the machines and persuade them to do things. We're very good with machines, but we're notoriously not very good with people. So we need the other kind: the suits. We don't, mostly, like them. We certainly don't trust them. And to hear us talk, you'd think the suits were a bunch of parasitic drones. Which they mostly are. They call themselves 'managers', which means they set impossible deadlines, provide inadequate resources, and then waste so much of your time with meetings and way-points and productivity metrics and other buffoonery that you can't get any work done. Or else they call themselves 'salesmen', which means they go out and sell customers something you haven't built yet with the promise that it will do something it was never designed to do.
Geeks have a word for that. It's 'vapourware'. Software that's been sold but doesn't exist, and which it may not even be possible to build. The one thing geeks hate above all else is suits who sell vapourware.
But here's the rub: geeks can't sell. It's something we're really, really not good at, and really, really don't like doing. And unless someone sells product to customers, there's no money to pay our wages. So there's an uneasy and uncomfortable symbiosis between geeks who can build product but not sell it, and suits who can sell product but not build it. We need each other. We don't like each other.
So Tony and I greeted one another with faux politesse, and after that I didn't see him for a couple of months. Until, one morning, David called me into the small conference room, and Tony was there. We exchanged greetings, sat down, shuffled papers.
"Look, Mark, what this is about, Tony's got us a deal in Ukraine which looks very good. It's the former national phone company and they've still got a very dominant position in the market there. They're upgrading their exchanges to Nokia switches over a five year programme..."
I saw what was coming. "But the sale depends on us supporting their old switches?"
"Exactly."
"What are they? Ryskas?"
There was silence round the table. David looked pointedly at Tony. Tony cleared his throat, fiddling with his cuff-links. "They're locally made. I gather they're based on a 1960s Ericsson design, but with some modifications."
I looked, slightly eye rolling, at David. We'd been here before. "OK," I said, "what language is the documentation in?" Again, David looked at Tony, and Tony looked still more uncomfortable. "They don't seem to have any. There's a couple of old guys..."
To cut a very long story short, Tony and I flew out to Kiev, and I spent a very enjoyable couple of days with the two old guys and an intelligent young translator, and came back with what I needed. It was really very simple; it was a very simple switch. Tony was hugely relieved. I realised that this was his first significant sale for us, and that David had given him a suitably hard time about vapourware. The plane, of course, was delayed, so when we got back on the ground at Glasgow it was already late and the weather was dreich, so I wasn't much looking forward to rattling home by two busses or a very expensive taxi.
"Come back to my flat", said Tony. "Cat'll whip something up; she's pretty good at that, and I'll drive you out to your place afterwards." I accepted, and Tony got out his phone. A moment later he asked me if there was anything I didn't eat, and I said no. His car was a dark blue Aston Martin; not new, but... certainly the most ostentatiously luxurious car I've ever sat in. His flat was in one of the big old sandstone blocks off the Great Western Road. We clattered up the tenement stair, and in through a heavy front door to a white space sparsely furnished with a judicious mix of antique and starkly modern furniture. And in it...
Tall, gracile, good cheekbones, wonderful eyes. Lovely hair, long, vigorous. Elegant posture.
"Mark," said Tony, "this is Cat. Cat, this is Mark, who saved my bacon in Kiev."
"Good to meet you, Mark," she said. "I'm Catriona Stevenson."
A soft voice, lilting gently. Northwards; I wouldn't be surprised if she had the Gaelic. But also, expensively educated.
"It's good to meet you, too. Have you been kidnapped?"
She giggled. "Not yet. And you should be very glad I'm not Gertrude."
The tiredness seemed to drop off me. I grinned. "I'm sure I'd find somewhere to hyde."
Tony looked at me for a moment, disconcerted, and then shrugged. "Park your bags, old man, and come through. What'll you drink? I've got some decent Chateauneuf du Pape, or there's a rather nice Saint-Émilion. Or there's pils, if you'd prefer."
At table, Catriona served us spaghetti bolognese; simple, but very well cooked and presented, with green salad and garlic bread. She apologised for it, saying she'd have done something better if she'd had more notice, but it was delicious, and I said so. The Chateauneuf du Pape was also very good.
"They have some surprisingly good wine in the Ukraine," said Tony. "Really quite acceptable."
"I thought you went out there to work," said Catriona, "not to drink?"
"Oh, Mark did the work," said Tony. "I just kept the money men happy."
"Businessmen, they drank his wine," I said, "but the servants, regrettably, were shod."
"And all the women came and went, no doubt?"
I grinned, sheepishly. "I wouldn't know about that."
"So," said Catriona, "which one are you?"
I looked at Catriona. I looked at Tony, who looked confused and uncomfortable. I looked back at Catriona. "Oh," I said, "I think I must be the Joker. Don't you?"
She laughed suddenly, a rich, warm laugh, her eyes dancing. "I think you must be."
Sometime later in the meal, I asked her, as one does, what she did. Tony answered quickly, cutting across her. "She's a waitress in a cafe. Part-time."
Catriona looked defiant and hurt.
"Not a cocktail bar?"
"No", she said, "that much is true. No, I'm trying to write a book, a novel."
"Dear sir or madam, will you read my book?" I asked.
She nodded, and her eyes danced again. "It's the dirty story of a dirty man."
"His clinging wife doesn't understand?"
"Well, in my book they aren't actually married, but... yes. More or less."
"And have you found a publisher?"
