They were remixers—hot young things living off the pop cred of turning data into apps—and I worked for robots. They wore threadbare T-shirts under designer-distressed sports jackets, both boys and girls. I was surprised they even talked to me.

I’d been wearing that same striped button-down shirt for probably five years. My tie hung dead from my neck like a rabbit by its ankles. Only reason I wore it was so I’d feel like I was at work.

We ended up in the same bars, a little late for the after-work crowds, in what I sensed was the middle of their day. These were tinted-glass places, hotel bars with internet feeds in the tables, where the dim light kept everything at the same nebulous hour all the time, and only the occasional cable news feed on the monitors gave you any sense of time. Since all the TV streamed onto the tabletops and the windows from online, you couldn’t keep time by the TV schedule, either.

They always seemed to celebrating, having a drinking lunch, in high spirits because they were young and their jobs were fun. I was young, too, I thought. Late twenties. But I wasn’t having such a good time.

I knew enough to be on the hipster-programmer bar circuit, at least. Knew where to hang out in the hopes that some kind of decent job would rub off on me. That I’d catch one like a cold.

A lot of the crews that came in were game developers, sassy and foul-mouthed and turning everything into a joke. Tax breaks and promises of new city-wide fiber optics had lured slices of companies in from Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin and Iceland. Parent companies shipped them here, to shitty weather and good times, like it was college. Except they were all making sick amounts of money instead of racking up student loans.

All they did was work and spend money. Jackets from Britain. Sunglasses from Italy. Phones from Japan. They smelled expensive and some of them had accents.

Looking at my reflection in the tranquilly animated oceanscape of the bar’s interface, I didn’t think I looked so different from them. From the neck up I looked like one of them, soft-haired, disheveled and unshaven. But my hair just dried that way. So I wasn’t doing it right.

Rain threw spots of water at the tinted windows. Little animated droplets dripped across the bar’s countertop interface like sweat running down a cold beer. A Budweiser logo materialized. “Click here for refreshment,” it read. I pinned the logo with one finger and side-armed it down the bar. It slid to a stop in front of an empty stool and waited, sweating.

I scrolled through cheap scotch options, double-tapped some Canadian whiskey, and when I looked up she was there. Rebekah. One of the remixers that worked on the other side of the skywalk, in the big glass needle across the street. Her straight blond hair fell into a tangle at the collar of her sports jacket. In profile, all I could see past her hair was the tip of her nose, an elfin button at the end of a long slope.

Near as I could tell, she was the arty one; the one who knew theater and literature. I don’t know shit about theater or literature, but I know enough about movies and books to find theater and literature attractive in someone else. She leaned into arguments about subtext and symbolism in a way that was so hot.

The loading graphic on her credit card’s screen was some hand-drawn cartoon dude from a French web comic I couldn’t remember the name of. He danced, capped it off with a flourish, and held up a sign that said “Approved!”

“Hey, Bekah,” I said.

She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked over. “Oh, shit, man. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. How’re you doing?”

I nodded. “Oh, you know.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

She pulled down a menu on the bar’s interface and poked around for a while before settling on a Belgian beer with a long name. She tapped the menu once with the corner of her credit card. The little loading graphic on her card’s screen was some hand-drawn cartoon from a French web comic I couldn’t remember the name of. He danced, then capped it off with a flourish and a sign that said “Approved!”

We sat there while the bartender eyeballed his monitor and dug around in the back of the fridge for her weird beer. We sat there while he dropped off our drinks. We sat there, watching television in two different directions.

“How’s work?” I asked.

“It’s good. Busy. You know.” She turned to look at me. “What do you do again?”

“I’m a leader,” I said. “For robots. Scrapers. You know.”

She smiled. “Harvesters.”

“They’re harvesters or ‘importers’ when you’ve got a nice firm and a respectable application. Contractors like me and the spiders I work for? Are scrapers.”

She smiled and nodded, turning back to the plasma screen.

Leader. It sounded so much better than it was. I was a leader the way a bloodhound leads a sheriff: on a leash.

My sheriff was some remote investor in Beijing. His deputies—my bosses—were off-the-shelf internet robots, commercial-grade information scavengers, but ordinary mass-market software troopers all the same. Get together enough start-up money and you could buy the software robots, the servers, and a top-speed Internet connection in China, then double-click the software and be mining data inside of a week. A month after that and you’ve probably got enough email addresses and phone numbers to sell that you’ve recouped your investment. Every month after that is profit.

She turned back to me. “Do you like it?”

“It’s easy,” I said. “The hours are good.” We nodded again, glanced at our televisions. “But no. Not really.”

© 2008 Will Hindmarch