I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: this writer just wants to have a sidekick character who’s a minority. “I have black friends.” Yeah, we know. And your Asian friends and your gay friends..but how well do you know them? And this writer, you’re thinking, gives Gao a ricey car—how corny is that: he drives an Eclipse and smokes meth. He’s Chinese, he’s the greatest video conferencing programmer who ever lived..or at least the greatest in this country. But he is. Gao is the greatest video conferencing programmer in this country. Possibly the world. Mead Research hired him special. That’s why they brought him over here. If you’re a programmer, half your friends are Indian or Chinese. But sometimes Gao does culturally-specific things..like he drinks green tea every morning. Classic, right? How likely is that? But he does. He mixes it at his desk and he buys it from this place in New York and he doesn’t call it “tea”—he calls it sencha. Which is actually Japanese but you get the point. I’m not gonna make shit up. If he drank green tea and called it “sencha”, then he drank green tea and called it sencha. And if he drove an Eclipse and smoked meth..well..what do you want me to do about it? His name is Gao, he smokes meth, drinks green tea and drives a fucking Eclipse. Oh yeah: and he’s the greatest video conferencing programmer on the planet. He also shot a bullet through the wall of his condominium one time..but you know that.
“Gao, sit your ass down.” I push his trivia console over to him.
He half-picks-up a drink. “Why are there only two drinks here. Where is my other drink?”
“I’m drinking slow you motherfucker, cause I want to drink with you.”
He and the bartender—this waitress we like—she works as waitress and bartender this time of day—she and Gao do this special handshake. It makes me feel very un-cool.
“You didn’t drink my other drink?”
“No!”
“Did he drink my other drink?”
Jesse leans across the bar. I can see her tits. They’re warm-looking, they’re kind of plush—they remind me of this Aaron Copland song I like. It’s from Rodeo (it’s not Hoe Down, it’s this other one). Her breasts make me think of cows, or teenage girls growing up on farms, drinking milk and milking cows. Girls eating beef. Beef-fed women. Anyway—
Jess touches Gao’s forearms. He’s got tattoos there. (Typical, right?) Jess tells him that I haven’t drank his drink, that she’s only served me two and that I’m drinking my second one, and that the two in front of Gao are exactly the same—made from the same mixer—as the one I drank, and the one I’m drinking.
Gao points behind the bar. “Why is there curacao in the well? These drinks aren’t made with curacao. I don’t see—I didn’t see anyone drinking anything with curacao in it. Them?” Gao points at a table: a manager and an employee, doing hours or talking schedules or something. They’re drinking Cokes. “Them?” Gao points his face at a table on the back wall: retired couple. Menus large against their frames. Gao starts to laugh.
Jesse traces her fingers along his one arm. “I love this. Where did you get this?”
“I did it myself.”
“Is he lying?”
I say: “No.”
“What does it mean?”
Gao won’t tell her.
“What does it mean?”
“It’s a program,” I say. It’s this long-ass hexadecimal number. I copied down most if it, once, before Gao saw me doing it. I can’t memorize that well. “It’s a self-replicating program,” I say, “It’s a virus. If it ever got off his arm it would destroy the world.”
She’s rubbing it. “That’s sexy.”
Gao’s watching the trivia screen. He punches an answer.
I punch mine. He’s got this one; I suck at trivia.
“Who had the blue curacao?” Gao slams his first drink on the table (glass empty). The manager, sitting with the employee, looks over. The old people still have their faces in their menus; they probably didn’t hear that.
Jesse turns around. She mouths the words, like the opposite of a ventriloquist. I had it. She doesn’t want the manager to hear. Before Gao got here she made herself a tiny, tiny drink.