April 1995


Late at night, when other women were thinking about strong hands and forceful lips and rippling stomachs, Oysterette Postman was thinking about a desk.

She dreamed of a desk, a desk piled high with manuscripts, old-fashioned typed manuscripts, and pens filled with beautiful ink. It was her desk, the desk she would someday have again at a publishing house.

She'd been thinking about it more, lately, now that the newsletter had been losing subscribers, and the dreadful electronic boxes collecting more and more. The oil traders said the boxes were faster and briefer, and that they already had too much paper on their desks.

There could be no such thing as too much paper on the desk in Oysterette's dreams. She would have endless months to read from it, leaning back in an old leather chair, the kind with buttons that hurt when you sat on them. And she would have an assistant, a shy, underpaid girl from an Ivy-league college, not an annoying smartass like Veda Bierce.
 
  
Veda, hired because she seemed quiet, had become the chief misery of Oysterette's life. She was always launching into lectures about the World Wide Web, and how they should put their oil news on it now and grab the competitive advantage. Oysterette would have liked to get rid of her entirely, but by this point Veda had developed skills and sources of her own.

It had been at the distant boss's insistence that Veda had finally been relieved of the most menial office work. They had taken on a college student as an intern, which meant she would refill the Xerox machine without being paid.

Of course, now Veda was starting to ruin the girl by telling her all about the Internet. Two days ago, Oysterette had caught her trying to give this innocent baby her own e-mail address.


It was hard for Veda to call Frederic Baby a friend, because they rarely spoke. Still, they spent hours next to each other, surfing. He had set up a computer for her next to his in the basement.

She loved the web. She found sites about thousands of things she never knew she was interested in: food production in Peru, and the top ten Danish ballet stars, and how to make a pinhole camera. She found a site that told which celebrities were secretly homosexual. She found a site with pictures of all of the horses in the Kentucky Derby, and another with tips on how to get back into the acting business, which she read quite thoroughly. She found a site listing minimum sentences for the crime that had made her flee California.

Frederic had rigged up an alarm on her computer to keep her from surfing all day. Veda learned how to make excuses to Oysterette, telling her she was going out to meet journalistic sources when she was actually only going as far as the basement.

 
  
The new intern, a Midwestern girl called Carrie Meeber, was a bit of a wet blanket, Veda thought. She had a habit of smiling and frowning, smiling and frowning, unwilling to commit to either expression. But she seemed eager to learn, and Veda was eager to teach her, because that gave her more time to disappear downstairs.

Although it was really supposed to be part of her own job, Veda taught Carrie to collect prices and update the black boxes. Characters or no characters, it was increasingly dull work, and she was a dull girl. Carrie herself appeared more interested in collecting pictures of good-looking investment bankers, which she cut out of financial journals and taped to her electronic box.

One day, when Veda could no longer wait for the new episode of her favorite online soap opera, she left Carrie in charge of the prices and went downstairs. Oysterette was out for lunch. She had warned Veda more than once not to turn the office over to Carrie, but Oysterette's lunches tended to be long.

The elevator was slow, however, and Veda began to regret making the trip.

"Look," said Frederic, when she finally arrived.

He handed her a sheaf of Xeroxed papers, folded and stapled a little off-center. Cyberswinger, the masthead said. She leafed through it, while Frederic watched. Publisher, Jason Jellyman, it said. The name sounded familiar, although she couldn't remember why. Every article was by Jason Jellyman, too.

"No, this," he said.

He directed her attention to a hastily-composed page illustrated with clip-art, glib drawings of people in 1950s formalwear holding glasses of champagne. Cybersocial, it said. Party with New York's hottest web professionals. The Roxy Disco, 6pm, Tuesday.

"Web professionals?" Veda said. "I didn't know there were any, besides us."

"Will we go?" asked Frederic, in his baby voice.

"I suppose so," Veda said.
 
  
The elevator was slow going up as well. When Veda returned, she found Oysterette there ahead of her, and the office in an uproar. Every phone was ringing and Carrie Meeber, looking overwhelmed, was picking them out of their cradles one by one and laying them on the desk, where voices babbled from their receivers into the air.

Veda lifted a phone to her ear. "I lost ten thousand dollars on your mistake," said the caller.

She hung up, and the phone rang again immediately. "You've wiped out half my gains for the month of April," said the voice on the other end of the line.

Oysterette was standing in front of her, now. Veda covered the mouthpiece.

"Did you tell Carrie to send out prices?"

"I might have," Veda said.

"Well, she made a mistake," said Oysterette. "She wanted to say 10 million dollars in oil was coming into the market, but she forgot to press "shift" when she hit the dollar-sign key," Oysterette arched her eyebrows. "She told our subscribers it was 410 million dollars."

Veda bit her lip.

"This," said Oysterette, "is what's wrong with electronic data. There's no time. There's no copy-editing process. There's no galleys, no proofreaders, no fact-checkers, no printing press. This is why no one will ever really trust electronic information."

Oysterette was trembling with excitement and triumph.

"You are fired," she told Veda.

Carrie Meeber stood there watching, smiling and frowning, smiling and frowning.
 

Library of Congress Copyright TXu 875-975