Starfish

Scene 1

Kirito pours a little coffee into the hole in the countertop. He assumes there must be a waste basket beneath. He hopes the baristas put a lining in it, otherwise that will be one hell of a mess to clean up. But then, he did ask them to make room for cream. Their problem now. He sweeps twinkling specs of sugar off the countertop to join the top ounce of his coffee in the darkness of that hole. He doesn't like leaving a mess for anyone, even if that's part of their job.

He sits down across from Agent Gill. She looks bleary as all hell. Pretty face for an agent in her mid-forties. Some women her age have a face wracked by the gore of child-rearing. She doesn't have that, but those eyes though. She's seen some shit. Obviously she's not the only one who didn't get much sleep last night.

"You can call off the dogs."

Gill just stares at him for a while, sizing him up. Probably estimating the chance he's got a weapon, and where it's hidden.

"Go to two," she says finally into the ether, touching her right ear gently and then taking a sip of her coffee. No steam rises from the sip hole. She's been here a while.

Kirito doesn't break eye contact, but in his periphery he notes the black cargo van pulling away from the curb across the street.

"You know, I listened to this podcast one time," he says in his best attempt at a let's-grab-coffee-and-hang-out tone of voice. "It was an interview with the guy who invented Wordpress. He was talking about a bunch of shit I didn't care about, but then he said one thing that really stood out. He mentioned this book... the Starfish and the Spider.

I don't know what it was about that name. It hit me. It was like... I had the podcast playing through the radio speakers in my shitty old Ford Escort while I was driving through shitty 405 rush hour traffic trying to get to my shitty job as a movie theater projectionist. You know, I... I wasn't even really listening, just zoning like you always do when you find yourself stuck in the loop of your pointless life, knowing that you could make five times as much money writing code if you could just find a way to stop yourself from cussing out your douche bag of a boss every few months.

But then that name jumped out at me through the speakers. The Starfish and the Spider."

"That's how we know about you, you know," Gill interrupted. "The NSA pulls all purchases of certain books and flags their readers for review. That book put you on their list, and your profile review slotted Adam Hindeman, a 29-year-old movie theater projectionist, as an 86% corporate espionage risk. That's our area of expertise, so they sent your profile to us. We noticed how much money you were making in the stock market all of a sudden. From there, it wasn't hard to connect you to the flashcrash."

Kirito's brow narrowed. "You don't have a damn thing on me, so don't push your luck. I came to you, remember? Now, are you going to let me finish?"

"Go ahead."

"Like I was saying... The Starfish and the Spider. Great book. Sounds like that book is where this all began for both of us. Have you read it?"

"No, but I understand it's some kind of anarchist manifesto."

"That's not exactly accurate. It's just a theory that says that the Napsters of the world are stronger than record companies in the long term."

"That would explain why the latter didn't sue the former into oblivion. Oh wait, they did do that, didn't they?"

Kirito smiles.  "The point in that example is that Napster reared its head so quickly, so violently, that the incumbents didn't stand a chance without invoking laws that didn't really exist yet. Without the government stepping in, the spider would have been helpless against the starfish.