Page 125 of Moonlighter

By the time I eat two egg sandwiches and slurp down the coffee, we are almost all the way to my brother’s building on West Eighteenth Street. And I am feeling almost human.

I pull out my phone and text Alex.Honey, I’m sorry I showed up to see you when I was in no condition to communicate. Can we talk? Are you free later?

She responds immediately, but only with one word.No.

Well, fuck. I tap her number anyway, and let it ring. It rolls to voicemail immediately. And then her clear voice says: “You’re reached the personal voicemail of Alex Engels. If this is a business call, kindly dial my office number instead. If this is Eric Bayer, please lose my number.”

I let out a groan.

“Tummy bothering you?” Duff asks as he turns onto Eighteenth.

“No. But Alex hates me.”

“Hate is a strong word,” he says soothingly. “The word she actually used wasloathe.”

I groan again as the garage door lifts on my brother’s garage. Duff parks next to the Maserati. “Hang in there. I’m sure you’ll find a way to apologize.”

“But then what?” If I tell her I really do love her, she won’t believe me.

“Baby steps,” he says. “Obviously you can’t repeat the proposal for a while. Until she trusts that you mean it. But you’ll get it done.”

“Wait.” I stare at him, shocked. “You think Alex and I will really end up married?”

I don’t know why it’s such a tricky concept when I’m sober. It’s just that I’ve never pictured myself as a married guy. With half a bottle of tequila up me, it seemed rational, though. Maybe my drunken subconscious knows things.

“What I’m saying is this—I look great in a tux, and I like to dance. So don’t give up.”

That makes about as much sense as anything else this morning. “Thanks for the sandwiches!”

“Anytime. Tell Max I’m headed to the off-duty room to crash out.”

That’sthe first thing I tell my brother when I find him bent over a project in the middle of the open office space. And the second thing is, “I need more coffee.”

“In a minute,” he says without looking up. “You have to see this.”

It’s hard to say what “this” is, though. There’s a beehive of activity around my brother. A large worktable has been moved into the center of the testing area. On the table are two workspaces, with a track stretching above them. The thing on the track might or might not be a camera.

On the other end of the table are parked several computer monitors, complete with a handful of my brother’s hired nerds peering at them.

“Test number twenty-seven starts…now!” someone says.

The camera glides to a location over one workspace, which seems to contain a blueprint for something inscrutably technical. I see a flash of light. And then the camera is on the move, gliding to the other workspace. That one has the guts of some kind of computing device lying open, its circuits and chips exposed. The light flashes again.

“Now watch this,” Max says, towing me by the elbow over to a computer monitor, where a whole lot of code is scrolling past the screen. There’s a status bar across the top.SCANNING, it says. Then it changes to ANALYZING as the bar crawls from the left to the right.

As it reaches the point of conclusion, everyone cheers. “Five point two seconds!”

It’s a match, the screen declares in red text.

“What’s our accuracy?” Max asks.

“Eighty percent and climbing.”

Max turns to me with a smirk. “Not bad for forty-eight hours work. We should reach full potential on this thing by the weekend.”

“What is it?” I ask, glancing around to try to spot my father’s assistant. Maybe she’d be willing to find me some coffee. My head still throbs.

“Well, I realized that manufacturers will need a quick, reliable way to verify the accuracy of their designs. I’m building a device that can screen electronics for unwanted extra hardware. Every single internet device should be checked before it ships. Every smart speaker. Every computer. Every smart doorbell. Every internet-connected microwave…”