by Richard Butner

In the center court of Bowman Mall stood the Dodecaclock, a chrome cylinder the size of a telephone booth, with two windowed bands that slowly spun around the outside over a series of numerals, one to twelve. One band told the hours and one the minutes. On top perched a translucent dodecahedron on a slender stalk, each face a different color of the rainbow. Every hour on the hour, a relay thunked inside the cylinder and a different numbered face of the dodecahedron lit up. It had been a wonder in 1975 but now nine of the twelve lights didn’t work.

The mall was dying, but we didn’t know that yet, not consciously at least. The first Friday of every month, we met in the food court there, next to the payphones. In the dying days of the 20th century, Y2K looming. There we were, most of us wearing either sunglasses or a trench coat or both, PGP keys on floppy discs in our pockets. Too cool for the blips and bleeps and flashing lights coming from the arcade, which you could see from our regular table. You could see the Dodecaclock, too. One order of french fries split between the five of us. If there was no food on the table, mall security made you get up and move along. We had a rotation of who had to buy the french fries. The fries were mostly ignored as we sat there spinning out our schemes and stories and copious bullshit. Sharing our strange intelligence that we’d gathered the previous month. Mostly it was Terry who ate the french fries, Terry with his laughable America Online account and his gym membership, his stupid gun and his legitimate ability to defeat almost any lock. Fridays were cheat days for him.

We were all there because of secrets. Learning them, revealing them to each other but not to anyone else outside our circle, no one beyond the bounds of that wobbly table in the Bowman Mall food court. Lately, we’d been talking about apocalypses. Y2K might not turn out to be the end of the world, but something was going to be.

And then on the first Friday of February 1999, there were six of us instead of five. That was the day when Bert West strolled up to our table and said, “Excuse me; mind if I join you fellows?” We were used to dealing with mall cops, and we’d discussed the possibility that someday a narc might try to infiltrate our little band. But we had never imagined that an old bald man in horn-rimmed glasses, a short-sleeved white button-down, and navy slacks would show up to ask for a place at our table. Carol, because Carol was in charge even though we’d never actually considered the question of anyone being in charge, said: “Sure, why not? What did you want to talk about? And what’s your name?”

“My name’s Bert,” Bert said, dragging a chair away from the table, through a puddle of Mountain Dew that he did not seem to notice as he sat down. He extended his hand to Carol as he introduced himself, and she took it.

“Pardon the wet hand,” he said. “I was just in the restroom and there weren’t any paper towels.” Carol didn’t flinch. Meanwhile, Terry was making some complicated hand signal to the rest of us. Terry never actually explained his hand signals before using them, but this one was pretty clear: don’t say anything around this guy.

Bert’s expression remained the same, this giddy open-mouthed smile, his tongue resting against his bottom lip. If he hadn’t been an old man with a wet hand and a pocket protector bulging with pens and pencils and other tools, you would’ve thought he was stoned.

“How did you find out about … this?” Carol said, gesturing at us and our single tray of french fries. “About us?”

“Well, I don’t know about y’all specifically. I was just flipping through a magazine at the Barnes & Noble, and saw that folks meet up at the food court of the mall every first Friday. Here and all over the country! Hard to imagine it.”

“And yet here we are, Bert. Hiding in plain sight, you might say. There’s no entrance exam, but—”

“Are you a cop? You have to tell us if you’re a cop,” Terry blurted out.

“That’s not actually true, Terry,” everyone else said, in nigh unison.

“Well, I’ve got this,” Bert said, and he produced his own floppy disc, which had the words “Cosmic Skirmish” written on the label in precise permanent marker.

“I’m not one to stereotype,” Violet said, “But you don’t strike me as the typical Cosmic Skirmish player.”

“Oh, I don’t play it. I don’t play any of them. My daughter does, but she’s more Friday Night Poker Club than Cosmic Skirmish. I just like getting into them.”

“How did you ‘get into’ Cosmic Skirmish?” Violet said. “It’s supposed to do something really screwy with the sectors. I’ve tried like seven different copy programs on it and got nowhere with any of them.”

“Don’t copy that floppy!” Raj said. It was a joke, because Raj was the only one of us who wanted to actually turn a profit out there on the dimly lit margins of legality. Raj was still in high school. He had made some money constructing and selling red boxes to local musicians so they could place free long-distance calls while on tour. The rest of us had loftier motivations than money, or at least we fooled ourselves into thinking so.

“Well, I disassembled the code and found the jump statement for the copy protection. Rewrote that and, well, there you go.”

“Assembly language,” Violet said, expressing her approval. “What programming environment are you using? And what OS—Linux? Windows? Mac?”

“Oh, I just use the line editor that came with DOS,” Bert said. Smile, smile, smiley smile.

“I think you just officially joined the group, Bert,” Carol said.

We introduced ourselves, in broad strokes. Terry and Raj, locks and telco. Carol and her social skills. Violet and Henry, the actual keyboard jocks.

And then before any of us could stop him Terry asked his usual question, which was so very Terry: it sounded cheesy and earnest when it came out of his mouth. But if you thought about it, it was pretty deep.

“Tell me about your monster,” Terry said. It was a question we’d all been asked and we’d all answered, including Terry himself.

But Bert didn’t answer. Or at least, Bert didn’t answer with words. Just more of that gaping smile and the unblinking stare. Tick, tick, tick. Down at the center of the mall, out of our earshot, a relay in the Dodecaclock thunked. Seven o’clock. A big teal pentagon emblazoned with a Helvetica 7 lit up.

“Everyone has a monster inside,” Terry continued, giving in and filling the silence. “Some folks just don’t know it.”

So early on we got a taste of a couple of Bert’s superpowers. Cracking sophisticated copy protection with the crudest of tools. And politely, happily, waiting you out, making you unnerved and therefore the first one to speak and therefore at a disadvantage in any transaction.

“Think about it, and maybe we can talk about it again next time,” Terry finally said, after what seemed like another vast silence where the buzz and the flash of the mall fell away around us. Of course the monster question never came up again. Not directly.

“Here’s an easier question, Bert,” Henry said. “Are you going to turn your computer off before midnight on December 31st?”

“Oh, I turn it off every time I’m done using it.”

“Listen to what the man says, Violet.” Henry and Violet had a running argument about whether it was better to leave a computer on all the time or not.

After Bert showed up, we didn’t have to do the stupid french fry thing anymore. His cloak of normality, which might as well have been invisibility, enveloped all of us.

But that’s not where the story of Bert’s first meeting ends. Raj had built a gold box, a diverter, as part of a bigger plan to steal phone service from the mall itself. Mostly as revenge for the slights and the dirty looks we had incurred from mall security. But the diverter didn’t work, not when Raj had tested it out at home. It was opened up and lying there on the table, under a napkin. Like we were a team of surgeons and this was our operating theater.

“Do you know how to read a schematic?” Raj asked Bert.

“Well, I retired about eight years ago, or was it ten? But yes, I do know how to read schematics. Used to read a lot of them.”

Raj unfolded a sheet of graph paper that he’d had tucked in his wallet, smoothing it out on the table before lifting the napkin up to unveil his gold box. The box itself was gray, not gold. Raj had written “aurum” on the side. Bert peered down into the guts of the thing, not much to it beyond some photocells and LEDs and resistors. He plucked a ballpoint pen from his pocket protector with a flourish and used it as a pointer to trace the circuit.

“Hmm. Bad boys raped our young girls but Violet gives willingly,” Bert said to himself.

“What. the. fuck?” Violet said. It took a second for Bert to realize that this was directed at him.

“Oh, it’s the color code for the resistors! Black brown red orange yellow green blue—”

“We don’t use that anymore, Bert,” Raj said. “There are lots of other mnemonics. I’m a big fan of ‘bat brained resistor order you gotta be very good with.’ It’s meta!”

Bert smiled even wider in approval. “I’m truly sorry about that, Violet,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Violet just sighed and shook her head. Violet was used to putting up with stuff for a variety of reasons, chief among them because she was black. The fact that Henry and Carol and Terry were white pretty much never came up. The fact that both Raj’s parents came from India was only rarely noted. But observations on whether it was odd or not for a young black woman like Violet to be doing this or doing that, they fell with ease from the lips of the others. Usually Terry.

Bert went back to work and spotted the problem quickly, an LED soldered in backward, which he pointed out with the pen. We all leaned in—was that the merest hint of Scotch whisky on his breath? He also suggested three different refinements of the circuit and the parts to use. Brighter LEDs, more sensitive photocells, more resistors and transistors to make it harder to detect on the line. He could bring the parts to the meeting the next month. Which was good because the alternative was that Raj would convince Henry to shoplift them from Radio Shack. Until Bert showed up, Henry was the most unobtrusive of us: white guy, khaki windbreaker, black jeans, running shoes, buzzcut. The task of shoplifting had fallen to him more than once in the past. Which was especially dumb because Henry’s family still supported him and they had money; he could afford anything he wanted. Carol wouldn’t shoplift on principle, Violet and Raj were instantly on the radar of the white cashiers. Terry stood out like a sore thumb, if the sore thumb had a mustache, a mullet, and bulging biceps.

“How do you think the world is going to end?” Carol asked Bert. “We’ve been talking about that. Raj thinks aliens have been listening to our television transmissions and they’re gonna show up and wipe us out.”

“I mean, maybe …” Raj said.

“Terry’s convinced that a supervirus could kill off most of humanity. Not a computer virus. A virus virus.”

“Black labs, wetware, RNA kits, it could happen,” Terry said, nodding to agree with himself.

“You know it’s gonna be a Russian nuke,” Henry said. Henry probably yearned for a Russian nuke in his future, imagining his way into a gritty life spent hacking mainframes from some radiation-proof arcology, Chinese cigarette dangling from his lips.

“The Russians like us now, Henry, keep up,” Carol said. “You should watch the news sometime. Clinton and Yeltsin are like this.” She crossed her fingers. “It’s going to be global warming. The world is becoming uninsurable. Florida and California are both gonna slide into the ocean. The icecaps are melting.”

“It’s the bees,” Violet said, not bothering to explain further. “What do you think, Bert?”

Again, that silent smile, from the man whose third sentence to us was “pardon the wet hand.”

Carol didn’t bother waiting that long for a response. “Think about it, Bert. We can talk about it next time.”

“I think it’s gonna be a lotta little things,” Bert said. That accent, where was it from? Southern yet precise, a high-pitched childlike chirp. “Whatcha call an interdependent cascading failure. I’ve never thought much about aliens. Could be a virus in the mix, though. Probably a lotta other things. Bees and icebergs are good.”

Talking about the apocalypse was optional. But the traditional final order of business at the meeting of the nameless group was this: someone had to tell a secret. This was explained to Bert, who responded immediately.

“Well, I doubt you know anything at all about me. So everything’s a secret! Here are some secrets, as far as you know. I’m an Eagle Scout. I went to college on a marching band scholarship. My father’s name was Adolphus and my mother’s name was Star. I have never broken a bone. I once met Elvis Presley.”

“No way,” said Terry.

“I did! You’re probably too young to remember the fat farm that used to be out past the Pontiac dealership. Is it OK to say ‘fat farm’? Anyway, I want to say it was 1972 when Elvis was there. He didn’t stay at the diet center, though. He stayed in a caboose on an old railroad spur nearby. My buddy Bob worked there, and he called me up because Elvis’s stereo had stopped working. It was some fancy job, German or Danish or something. Could I fix it? Bob took me and my toolbox over to the caboose and I got it sorted out pretty quick—bad capacitor, that was it. Elvis was a nice fellow, very cordial. He came over and made a joke, stuck his hand in where I was working and pretended like it was electrocuting him. Bzzzzt! Very nice fellow. We mostly talked about college football. I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t have named one of his songs if you’d put a gun to my head. And he did have a gun.”

There was further business to be done in the parking deck. Carol had worked her magic and procured a bunch of cable modems, which she needed to hand off to Violet, because Violet had acquired info on how to reprogram cable modems to get free high-speed internet access. The five of us were all extremely interested. Bert was not. Turns out he didn’t have an email address. He didn’t go online at all. He had, he explained, a rotary phone with an unlisted number and, of all things, a ham radio. Violet assured us that the hack would be essentially undetectable, a no-risk situation. We went out to where we all parked in the deck near the entrance to the food court. There they were, a smattering of Japanese and American cars no younger than ten years old, except for the Pontiac Firebird that Violet drove, the one that Terry envied so very much.

“Which one’s yours?” Violet asked Bert. He pointed to a dirty white BMW 2002.

“Made in 1968,” he said. “I work on it myself.”

“Of course you do,” Violet said. “Maybe you could tune up my car sometime. It’s been running pretty rough lately.”

“I’d love to, Violet.”

Carol handed a box that had once contained 100-proof Smirnoff vodka to Violet, who stashed the modems in the back seat of the Firebird.

“Doesn’t it attract a lot of attention, that car?” Bert asked. “What was that movie, Smokey and the Bandit?”

“I can assure you I’m an extremely safe driver,” Violet said with a wink. “But you let me know when you wanna drag race. I gotta go now. Don’t want to be late for Iron Chef.”

• • •

We got on our private IRC channel later that night, to discuss Bert.

“What do we think?” Carol asked.

“Nark,” Terry typed.

Henry: “Not a narc. Too weird to be a narc. There was a narc at this bar I go to.”

Violet: “Henry, you’re 22. How long you been going to bars?”

Henry: “Well I had fake IDs, so long enough. Point is, I’ve seen narcs. They’re pretty dumb. They wear polo shirts and Members Only jackets and they don’t shave off their mustaches.”

Terry: “Do I have to give the, ‘There’s nothing wrong with mustaches’ speech again?”

Violet: “Please gopod no.”

• • •

At the next meeting, Bert was already sitting at our table when the rest of us filtered in. Violet and Raj—Raj always rode with someone; he was the only one of us still in high school, and he didn’t have a car. Terry got there last, taking his time as he made his way across the food court to us, probably doing some kind of useless tradecraft to make sure he wasn’t followed.

“I’ve got the modems in the car,” Violet said. “They work great. Just put a splitter in your distribution box and hook it up. Leaves your 56K dial-up in the dust.”

“So how did you five get together?” Bert asked.

“That sounds like a question a narc would ask, Bert,” Terry said. “What’s Bert short for, anyway? Robert? What’s your full name?”

“Bert is short for Engelbert. Goodness, that takes me back. Engelbert Aloysius West, that’s how my mother addressed me whenever I got into trouble. Would you like to see my driver’s license? I don’t know what I am exactly but I can assure you I’m not, as you say, a narc.”

“You don’t need to assure us, Bert. We get it. Terry’s just the suspicious type,” Carol said. “You see, we five didn’t get together. We six got together. There’s someone you don’t know, the guy who actually got this group started. Vince Timken.”

Carol told the story of Vince. In the beginning, there was only Vince. He had put the ad in 2600 magazine for what would become our local meet-up. Over the course of a few months, the group stabilized and then it stuck that way, the six of us showing up there at the mall, just us and no one else. In our flesh prisons instead of cyberspace, as Henry would say. Vince claimed that he’d already done time for a variety of offenses including hacking into corporate computers and voicemail systems, downloading the source code for games and operating systems, cloning cellphones. All of this before he moved to town. It sounded a lot like a Canadian girlfriend story, but Vince was thirty and authoritative. He was also really, really good at thinking on his feet, so what was the point in pushing back on his stories? We all came into it with our own interests and backgrounds, but Vince pushed us further along those paths, so that we covered a lot of ground. We were six fingers on one hand. He kept dropping hints that we should try something big together. Wasn’t there an NSA listening site over in Taylor County? What about that supposed black ops training area at Jarvis Ridge? It was hard to tell if Vince was an actual blackhat or if he’d just watched War Games and Hackers too many times. Certainly, the only rule our group had was this: If you’re flipping around on TV and you come across Hackers, you have to watch that horrible piece of garbage to its glorious end. But the rest of us couldn’t get excited about doing penitentiary time for trying to crack the feds, no matter how much Vince insisted that we could do it and get away with it. It wasn’t what we wanted. Carol and Violet wanted to live in a better world. Raj wanted to make an easy but not too dangerous buck. Henry wanted to escape into one of those paperback novels he read and re-read, which was why he was always bugging us to go out for the sushi that none of the rest of us could afford, and why he’d cultivated a double espresso habit that was boring a hole in his guts. Terry just wanted someone, anyone, to recognize him for his intelligence instead of his muscles. Not that Carol was discussing our motivations out loud with Bert.

And then one meeting Vince didn’t show up. And he never showed up again. That was a year ago. Since then, we’d been meeting at the mall every month but it was always just the five of us. No one new until Bert.

“It’s like Vince just disappeared,” Carol said.

“Or got disappeared,” Terry said.

“We’re all going to disappear sometime,” Bert said.

“Vince didn’t disappear. I saw him the other day,” Henry said. “At the Java Jar.”

“What?”

“I was going back to the counter for my second double espresso, and I looked over and he was sitting in one of the back booths. He was talking to some blonde, taller than he was and way out of his league, but they seemed to be getting very chatty about something. I caught his eye and gave him the ‘be seeing you’ salute, y’know, The Prisoner. He saluted and then went right back to yapping at the blonde. I got my coffee to go.”

“You think she’s a cop? You think he’s going to roll over on us?” Terry said.

“I think it was a blind date. How’s he going to ‘roll over’ on us, anyway? Turn state’s evidence that you sent email spoofed as butthead@whitehouse.gov one time?”

“We’ve done lots of other things, many of questionable legal status.”

“Richard Feynman used to crack safes when he was working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos,” Bert said cheerfully.

“You see?” Henry said. “And did they arrest Richard Feynman? No, they did not. They let him build atomic bombs.”

• • •

The next night, on our private IRC channel, Terry insisted that we get together again IRL, but not at the mall. Not at Java Jar either. We ended up in the snack bar at the bowling alley. The bowling alley didn’t care whether you bought one order of french fries or not.

“I followed Bert last night after the meet-up,” he began.

“And?”

“And, it was really weird. I mean, his car is pretty identifiable, so he was easy to follow. He always drives the speed limit, smooth as glass stopping and starting, uses his turn signals, stays in the right-hand lane. He left the mall and started driving west on Friendly. Past the high school, past the hospital—I’m thinking, oh, maybe he lives out near the airport. No. Once we get out to the airport, he hops on the loop. So we’re circling town, and get this, he does an entire circuit. Twice.”

“Maybe he knew you were following him,” Violet said. “He was messing with you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Isn’t that the exact thing that Bert would do, something inscrutable?” she asked. “What happened next?”

“He got off the loop and drove right back down Friendly the other way, headed back to the mall. Then on past and headed out to the river and the abandoned textile mill. Which, by the way, is the place I’ll be holed up with my bug-out bag should any kind of RNA virus or Y2K or rogue antiquated Russian nuke scenario or whatever go down. Anyway, at that point I was running low on gas, and it had been over an hour of aimless driving, so I turned around and got gas and went home.”

“OK, so what did you learn? That Bert likes to unwind by driving around town at night? It’s not the weirdest kink I’ve ever heard of.”

“We should ask him about it.”

“So he can stare at us and smile? We should accept whatever gifts Bert brings us, and be happy that a weird old guy who can hack, crack, or fix anything mechanical or electronic isn’t pulling a Vince Timken, asking us to break into a government facility with him.”

“I called him,” Raj said. “It’s not that hard to get an unlisted number.”

“What?” and “What happened?” we said.

“Well, a woman answered. ‘West Residence.’ I asked for Bert. ‘Please don’t call here again,’ she said, and then she hung up.”

“We should follow him again,” Terry said.

“Aren’t we invading his privacy that way?” Henry asked.

“Since when did you start worrying about invading people’s privacy, Mister Hotmail Account Cracker?”

“Bert’s a nice guy, he’s not some faceless Hotmail loser. Let’s table this for now.”

• • •

Spring started to happen. Raj tried the salt-water trick on a vending machine at his high school and got caught and suspended for three days. He was grounded for a while, but Violet managed to talk his parents into letting him out for the April meeting, convincing them that we were helping Raj write his college entrance essay. Carol delivered the secret at that meeting.

“Remember that big thunderstorm a week ago? I was at my apartment, watching The Simpsons and having a nice cup of green tea. It was getting pretty hairy outside—living on the top floor of a house, I keep wondering which tree is going to keel over into my living room, will it be the elm or the oak? I turn the TV off, but of course I don’t turn my computer off. Then, ZAP, there’s the loudest thunder I’ve ever heard in my life. Like a bomb going off.”

“Have you ever actually heard a bomb go off?” Terry said.

“Terry!” the rest of us said.

“The power just immediately dies. Before I’ve had a chance to recover from the loud noise, I smell something burning. I pull out my trusty keychain flashlight, and I’m looking for a fire. But there is no fire. What there is, is that lightning had hit the power and the cable lines outside, and had run in and fried the modem. Poof, out came the magic smoke and it stopped working. Then ZAP, another lightning strike nearby, and that one took out power to the whole neighborhood. Blew the transformer, I guess. I’m sitting there thinking, where’s that box with the candles, is it in the kitchen or is it in the little closet in the bedroom? Before I get up I hear this noise. Like a voice. ‘Keh.’

“It seems to be coming from the computer, or maybe under my desk, so I scramble across the room and get my back up on the opposite wall. I’m not sure whether I want to shine my flashlight over there or not. What’s under my desk and why does it have a human voice? Or maybe it’s just my ears, because of the loud noises. I’m just hearing things, or hearing things that are outside or something.

“Again, ‘Keh, keh. Care, care.’

“That’s when I realize that whatever it is, it’s trying to say my name, but can’t make it past the first syllable.”

“Did you see anything?” Violet said.

“Oh, I didn’t look. Hell, no. I went downstairs and hung out with the neighbors on the front stoop. I could hear them just fine. They had some horrible beers and worse whiskey and I ingested a lot of it. The power came back on in a couple hours, but I still slept on their couch that night. And by slept I mean passed out.”

“And then you got up and burned the whole place down, I hope,” Violet said.

“No, once it was daylight again, I was more concerned about my fried modem than about … transient auditory hallucinations. Here’s the thing, though: whatever was making that noise that might’ve been my name? It sounded like you, Bert.”

“Goodness!” Bert said, then nothing more.

• • •

The mall on a summer Friday night was packed with humans and air-conditioned to arctic levels. Our regular table was occupied. This time Bert was late, so we’d gone ahead and taken the precaution of buying an order of french fries just in case he didn’t show. Then there he was, slicing through the crowds in that same get-up he wore no matter what the weather was.

“Sorry to be late,” he said. “Couldn’t find a parking space.”

“It’s OK, Bert. Have a french fry,” Carol said.

“Oh, I can’t eat fried foods. My daughter would get after me about it.”

“What’s your daughter’s name?” Terry asked.

“Peggy. She’s an art historian. Can’t say that I really understand what she does.”

“Have you run across Hackers yet on TV, Bert?”

“I did! It wasn’t really my speed, but it was interesting. I was wondering why y’all don’t rollerblade. The movie made it seem like rollerblading was a crucial part of this whole thing,” he said, gesturing to the table as if we were a whole thing, as if we were anything. “But I liked the happy ending. And I liked how the leading man and leading lady did stuff like y’all do, like we do—getting into things. But they were still the good guys! Like y’all.”

“I think the point is that the movie is bad, Bert,” Henry said. “An unrealistic depiction of what we do, with cheesy references to great writers like William Gibson.”

“Blessed be his name,” said Violet, solemn enough to where only Henry got the sarcasm in it.

“It’s kind of like Rocky Horror for hackers,” Carol said. “You know Rocky Horror?”

“Well, I’ve never seen it myself. But yes, when Peggy was in high school, she and her friends would go out to that all the time, just about every Friday night, not wearing much of anything beyond a lot of eye makeup and a smile. Had a heck of a time keeping toilet paper in the house then.”

“What did you think of that?”

“Well, my daughter was a very attractive young lady. Still is! And what I think is: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. She never got in any trouble with that bunch, I guess because they spent all their money on lingerie instead of beer and marijuana. Which is more than I can say for some of the other neighborhood kids.”

Violet had figured a way to chain together Geocities accounts so you could use them for free online storage. Henry had a list of some anonymous mail servers to explore, including some .mil sites that no one else wanted to touch. Raj was still futzing with his gold box, and had added even more junk to it—a relay, a transformer, a voltage regulator. Bert looked at it and nodded approvingly. Eight o’clock rolled around, time to wind things down and leave. No one could think of a secret to share. We walked out into the night, the heat and humidity like a Turkish towel straight to the face. We waved goodbye to Bert and watched him walk off to his distant parking space.

We waited, and then we all piled into Carol’s gray Camry, the most invisible of all our cars. Terry called shotgun, which was fair enough because he was the biggest, and we rolled out into the night behind Bert’s BMW. He turned right off Friendly and started heading out Highway 8, an old state highway that if you took it far enough, you’d end up in the mountains. The city fell away quickly and it was just stars and the lights of an occasional farm, and the circular taillights of Bert’s old car, going exactly 55 mph because that’s what the signs said to do. Cracking a copy of Cosmic Skirmish was almost certainly illegal, but Bert’s driving was not.

Bert’s car passed over a rise and we lost his taillights for a moment. Then a deer flashed into view, yards away from the nose of Carol’s car. She hit the brakes and the horn, but kept the steering wheel steady. She slowed enough to miss the deer, which crossed the road and kept on going to its cervine destination.

“You think he heard that? You think he thinks it’s suspicious that our headlights mean we’re the only other car on this road besides him?” Carol said.

“I don’t know,” Henry said. “Keep going.”

“I need to get back home,” Raj said. “Curfew.”

Carol kept going, over the rise and onto the next long straight stretch of Highway 8. Bert should’ve been out there somewhere in the distance. There were no side roads. There were a couple farmhouses far back on either side of the road, but neither one of them had an old white BMW cruising up the gravel drive. He was just gone.

Terry immediately started talking about a magic show he’d seen where the magician made a car disappear. But this wasn’t a magic trick. It was a mystery. The mystery just made Henry want to work with him even more.

• • •

The heat had lifted by the next meeting, and our usual table was once again ours. Terry checked the bottom for hidden listening devices. He was extra paranoid because a hacker had been sentenced to eighteen months in prison the week before. Of course, the hacker in question was in Hong Kong, and had crashed an ISP and had transferred actual money from a bank to his personal accounts. But Terry upped his already considerable precautions anyway.

“What do you do when you’re not here, Bert?” Carol asked.

“Oh, I putter around my workshop, mostly. Or I play music. I have to keep my embouchure in shape! I switch on my ham radio and pound some brass. And my daughter comes around to check on me and to bring me food. Sometimes we play gin rummy.”

“Do you really, though—” Violet started, but Henry interrupted.

“Vince Timken always said we needed a mission. A purpose. And whatever else he got wrong, I agree with him,” Henry said.

“Vince Timken wanted to break into an NSA facility,” Terry said. “That’s just pig dumb.”

“A supposed NSA facility. And pigs are very intelligent. I’m not saying we crack the NSA. I’m saying, we need a project. Something we can work on together. It doesn’t have to be destructive. It can just be, like, an extremely elaborate prank. Like what they do at MIT. Hell, they put a cop car on top of a building there.”

“Wasn’t a real cop car,” Violet said. “It was one they dressed up as a cop car. But I take your point. Would’ve been much cooler if it had been a real cop car.”

“What if we fix something?” Bert said.

“What do you have in mind?”

“Well, how about that,” Bert said, pointing down into the center court at the Dodecaclock.

“We’re breaking into the mall?” Raj said, equal parts fear and excitement.

“Well I doubt they’d like it if we started fiddling with it while the mall was open,” Bert said.

“We are gonna party like it’s 1999,” Terry said, unable to suppress a smile at the thought of finally getting to use some of his skills.

“It is 1999,” Bert said. “How else could we party?”

“The Prince song?”

“Oh, yes. I’m not that familiar with his work. I should ask my daughter.”

We started talking through how it all could work, who would do what. Terry had ideas about the alarm system and security cameras and locks.

We were all worried that Terry would bring a gun. He said he wouldn’t. Eventually we made him hold his hand up and swear on an imaginary VHS copy of Hackers that he would not bring a gun.

“I solemnly swear on the holy movie Hackers that I will not bring a gun. Not even a stun gun, not even mace. OK?”

“OK,” we all said.

• • •

And then we embarked on months of prep work. In the movie version of our lives it would’ve been a planning montage. Not at all like the montage in Hackers, nor the one in War Games for that matter. No peppy music, no scaling of tall buildings, no rollerblading. Also, one of the people involved in our planning montage didn’t seem to actually exist outside of the mall and his car. Terry and Raj worked on alarm systems. Henry and Violet pulled off a spectacular entry into the scheduling system for mall security, ensuring that there would be no one scheduled for night duty on New Year’s Eve. Carol befriended several members of the janitorial staff, and also got a complete set of floorplans sent to her private mailbox, having convinced an executive assistant that she was the American contact for a Dutch company that wanted to purchase the mall. And she got the schematics for the Dodecaclock, which it turns out were in the archive at the university, because the original designer had been a math and engineering professor there. Bert worked on a microcontroller system which would completely replace the relays in the clock. Where did the parts come from? On what astral plane did his workshop actually exist? Mostly we tried not to think about this. We were learning how to accept a gift. It was a good lesson.

• • •

The mall closed at six on New Year’s Eve. We’d been there since five. Violet and Carol brought most of the gear in, carrying the biggest purses they owned. Terry had his fanny pack. Henry brought a calfskin bag, as if he were checking in to a luxury hotel. We hadn’t parked in the deck, but instead at the old steakhouse up the hill. We did not come in together. Terry had scoped out a vestibule near the alarm system. He and Raj hid in a janitor’s closet near there. It was a holiday; the janitorial staff had the night off.

Santa’s Castle still sat in one of the side courts, uninhabited since Christmas Eve but not yet dismantled for the season. Santa’s Castle had room for Santa on his throne, Mrs. Claus making cookies in her kitchen, elves scurrying around assisting, and a snaking line of parents and children. Which meant that Santa’s Castle had plenty of room for us as we casually sauntered over, through the gate in the white picket fence and into the unilluminated structure. Bert was the last of us in.

“Hi, fellas!” he chirped as he came in to the throne room. We shushed him and he hunched down in apology.

Mall security checked the bathrooms before the mall closed, but they did not check Santa’s Castle. The main lights went out, leaving dim auxiliaries on. Then the mall was empty, except for us. In Santa’s Castle, we waited for the predetermined signal. Once Terry and Raj got set up on the alarms and cameras, they would flash the main lights three times. If this didn’t happen by ten, we’d abort the mission and head out to scramble up the hill to our cars.

It was 9:45 when the lights flashed. I realized I’d been holding my breath. That’s right, I. It’s probably the right point to stop talking for everyone else and just be me. Henry, which isn’t my real name anyway. I helped the others carry the bags out to the Dodecaclock. Bert handed Violet the special hex driver to use to get the big access panel open while he set out the rest of his gear. I strung extension cords along to an outlet in back of a giant potted plant so that Bert could plug in his soldering iron. He clambered inside the clock and then it was surgery time once again, his hand flashing out when he asked for a tool or a gadget from Carol.

“You want to go wander around?” I asked Violet, after a few minutes of doing nothing. “We’re not much help here.”

“I’m good. What if that microcontroller code we wrote doesn’t work?”

“It’ll work. I’ll be back soon.”

I wandered down toward the Sears, then up a frozen escalator to the second floor. Blacklight posters glowed behind the closed gates of the Spencer Gifts. I made my way to the food court and sat at our table. Down in the center court, the faces of the Dodecaclock flashed as Bert tested out the new circuitry. A red twelve, a chartreuse five, a purple ten. Then I realized that the mall wasn’t completely quiet. A jaunty tune was playing from inside the arcade.

The gate was down over the dark maw of the arcade, but one of the machines in there was still on. I walked over and peered in. Against the far back wall, Ms. Pac-Man. Already retro then, but still popular enough to stand there between Virtua Fighter 3 and Dance Dance Revolution. There she went, being chased by the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Winky, and Sue. Powering up and turning the tables and chasing them. Over and over.

I went back to the clock just before midnight. Bert was sealing it up, happy with the work he’d done. Raj and Terry had shown up too. We didn’t just fix the Dodecaclock. We enhanced it. At midnight that night, we encircled the relic to observe our handiwork. When the new millennium arrived, the lights on the twelve faces flashed and then chased their way around the polyhedron before flashing again. Bert assured us that this would happen at midnight on the solstices and equinoxes as well, not that there’d be anyone there to see other than possibly a security guard. That wasn’t the only enhancement. We added sound, too. If you stood close enough, every hour on the hour you could faintly hear our little 8-bit circuit chirping out the riff from “1999.” That had been Bert’s idea. The key changed every hour, so it ran through all twelve keys of Western music twice a day. But no one was going to know that other than us. The average shopper, if they heard it at all, would probably think it was someone’s ringtone. There it sat, hiding in plain sight. Our little hacker Stonehenge, our triumph, until years later when we forgot about it.

We were tired and it was time to go, time for Terry and Raj to get us out of there without tripping an alarm, which they did. The rest of the town was out at the baseball field watching fireworks, at home watching a ball drop, asleep on the couch after too much cheap fake champagne. We were the secret fixers of time, and no one would ever know but us.

In the parking lot of the steakhouse, after we’d loaded our cars, Bert said goodbye. He shook hands with each of us in turn. “Pardon the wet hand.” I had ridden there with Violet. I felt a powerful, powerful urge to ask Bert for a ride. But I stayed quiet. He started up the old BMW, rolled down the window and waved and said, “Goodbye, fellows!” Then he carefully pulled away, activating his turn signal as he made a right on Friendly and headed out toward downtown. We never saw Bert again.

The mall is gone now. I wonder if they pulled the Dodecaclock out before the demolition, if it survives somewhere or if it was just part of the rubble, gutted and then melted down and recycled. I wonder a lot of things, things I don’t know. Is Bert still out there, endlessly meandering around the roads in his old white car, needle sitting dead on the speed limit, smiling to himself as he hums a tune?

There are things I do know, and they include the following. Try and fix things. Leave your little square of the world a better place. Stick around as long as you can. Maybe longer, if you can swing it.