The day that Bruen & Associates opened for business was
one of the best days of Chris Bruen’s life—until the
first client walked through the door.

Chris had always dreamed of starting his own law firm,
and he’d imagined that, given a blank slate, he could
create the kind of workplace that he had never found in
fourteen years of practicing law—egalitarian, loose but
well-managed, non-bureaucratic, fun. A place that was
more about doing the best, smartest work than putting
dollars in your column.

Things were still fairly quiet on that first morning in
the new, red brick building on Folsom Street in San
Francisco’s South of Market district. His office
resembled a blast site, with open cardboard boxes and
files scattered everywhere. As he listened to voicemails
from clients with questions about the new firm, Bach’s
Brandenburg Concertos played softly in the background.

Chris was braced for possible surprises on the firm’s
first day. In fact, he half-expected that one of his
hacker adversaries might “swat” his new office. Swatting
was a favorite hacker prank, and it involved placing an
anonymous call to the police or FBI and reporting a false
hostage situation, terrorist threat, or some other
extreme event that would draw a SWAT team down upon the
unsuspecting victims. Chris had already called the
police and FBI to warn them that they might be getting
that sort of anonymous tip, hoping it would at least give
the authorities pause before they came in locked and
loaded.

The firm was operating with a skeleton crew consisting of
a receptionist, a file clerk, and the head of the
computer forensic lab Zoey Doucet. There were a couple
of talented associates at Reynolds Fincher whom he had
trained in privacy and security law, but it would have
been improper to offer them jobs before he had resigned
from Reynolds Fincher. He planned to begin the process
of bringing them over later in the week. By not
contacting them immediately, Chris was actually doing the
young attorneys a favor. Right now his previous partners
would be asking them all sorts of blunt questions; this
way, they could provide non-answers with a clear
conscience.

Chris rolled his phone to voicemail and rose from behind
his desk, deciding to take a stroll around the office.
In the crush of constant deadlines, it was too easy to
let a moment like this slip past. He didn’t consider it
a victory lap: more like a conscious effort to imprint on
his memory the beginnings of something good. He had high
hopes for the firm, and he expected that Bruen &
Associates would not remain a scrappy startup for long.

As he emerged from his office, the receptionist Becky
Martinez quickly slid a thick book into her lap and under
her desk. Becky, a night-school law student, was putting
her life back together after a bad divorce. She was
exactly the sort of person that Chris was committed to
hiring for this new enterprise—bright, kind, and highly
motivated.

“It’s okay to read if the phones aren’t ringing,” Chris
said. “You don’t have to hide your law books from me.”

“Thanks. I wasn’t sure how you felt about that.”

“I don’t think things are going to be this quiet for
long, though.”

“I hope not.”

“Me, too, Becky. Me, too.”

Chris walked down a short hallway off the reception area
to the computer forensic lab. The secure entry keypad had
not yet been installed so he was able to duck in.

Zoey didn’t notice him immediately. Nestled in a thicket
of servers and computer monitors, she watched as the
output from an anti-virus program scrolled across her
three screens.

When she finally noticed Chris, she said, “You’re going
to need to double the number of servers if we’re going to
be competitive. You know that, right?”

“Good morning to you, too.”

“Sorry, but I love my new toys. I want more.”

“Is there anything that you need to do your job that you
don’t have?”

“Well, no,” Zoey conceded. “But you never know when a
big breach might come along and max out our resources.”

“We’ll get there. Dave Silver at BlueCloud just agreed
to pay a big retainer against our fees to help subsidize
our start-up costs.”

“It’s nice to have billionaire friends.”

“Well, he’s not exactly doing it out of friendship. He
owes us. We sort of saved his company when they were
being blamed for the Lurker virus.”

“Oh, right, there was that.”

“So how do you like having your own shop?” Chris asked,
resting a hand on her shoulder.

“I’ll let you know when things are fully built out,” Zoey
said. Then she broke into a grin. “But, yeah, it’s
pretty awesome.”

Chris noticed a glass vase that stood on one of the lab’s
wooden, non-conducting countertops. Rather than flowers,
it was filled with a limp bouquet of multi-colored wires
held together by a big ribbon tied in a bow. A Hello
Kitty card was pasted to the front of the vase with tape.
It read:

Congratulations, Geek Girl! (We knew flowers were too
girly for you.)

From the Bottom of the Hill Gang

Zoey had been a bartender for several years at the Bottom
of the Hill, a music club on Potrero Hill, and she stayed
in touch with the crew there.

“Funny,” Chris said. “And true.”

“What can I say? They know me.”

Chris pointed at the vase. “I didn’t think of you as a
Hello Kitty kind of person.”

“I’m not. That looks like Erin’s work.”

Chris examined the blank-faced, big-headed cat cartoon.
“You know, I once met someone from the Hello Kitty
marketing team. Do you know why Hello Kitty doesn’t have
a mouth?” He placed both hands on his chest. “Because
Hello Kitty speaks from the heart.”

Zoey swiveled around in her chair to face him. “I think
Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth because, if she did, she
would never stop screaming.”

Chris laughed, appreciating, as always, Zoey’s deeply
twisted mind. After his wife died, Chris had opened an
account with an online dating site but quickly abandoned
the experiment. He didn’t like treating a relationship
as if it were merely another online search that could be
perfected through the judicious selection of search
terms. If he’d applied only the standards of what he
thought he wanted, he never would have found Zoey.

“Write up your wish list of what you’d like for the next
stage,” he said. “I think I’m going to be in a position
to make it rain.”

Across the hall from the forensic lab was the file room,
the domain of file clerk Ira Rogers. While the file-
clerk job wasn’t very demanding, Ira was a perfect fit
for it. He was starting an independent record label and
had proven himself a talented producer of quirky art-pop
records. His natural meticulousness behind the mixing
console carried over to his day job at the firm. Chris
didn’t expect Ira to love being a file clerk, but he did
his job efficiently and he was an interesting person to
have around the office—if only to hear his critiques of
Chris’s music choices and his debates with Zoey over
hyper-specific ten-best lists (Ten Best Songs with a
Backwards-Guitar Solo, Ten Best Songs in Which the Singer
Has a Fake British Accent, etc.)

Some sort of symphonic electronic pop music played softly
in the file room, but Ira was nowhere to be seen.
“Ira?”

Ira emerged from between two sliding, floor-to-ceiling
stacks of files. He was pale and delicate-looking, with
washed-out blondish hair cut short. Even when drugs
weren’t involved, there seemed to be something about the
rock and roll life that kept guys like Ira as rail-thin
as teenagers. Rockers like Iggy Pop and Keith Richards
might grow into scaly, wizened raptors, but they never
seemed to put on weight.

“Yes?”