don’t just look at social networks, right?’ said Ben.
‘Dude, ninety-eight per cent of our names come from social networks. We’re a meta-network. You can’t be meta if you’ve got nothing underneath you. The social networks cut access – we’re dead.’ Kevin glanced at Andrei. ‘Should have taken the money when it was offered.’
‘I never had an offer,’ said Andrei impatiently.
Charles Gok came out of the room he shared with Ben. Normally he walked straight through the common room, ignoring the wheelspin or the discussion or whatever Fishbowll activity happened to be taking place. But this time he stopped. Even Charles could sense that something was wrong. The room was silent. Andrei, Kevin and Ben were just sitting there, looking miserable.
‘Guys,’ he said. ‘You OK?’
They nodded gloomily.
He sat down. The silence continued.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘This is fun.’
More silence.
‘I’m going to go get breakfast on the way to the lab. Anyone want to come?’
‘Not me,’ said Kevin.
Andrei shook his head.
‘Later,’ said Ben.
Charles got up. ‘OK, well, I’m going to go get dressed, and if anyone wants to, like, come to breakfast, that’s cool.’ He paused. ‘OK,’ he said, and he went back to his room.
The silence continued.
‘So what the fuck do we do?’ said Kevin. ‘Do we just sit here and let them kill us? I just put fifty grand into this thing. My parents think I’ve got a girlfriend who’s pregnant with twins.’
Ben laughed. ‘Twins!’
‘Dude, I don’t know if I’d be so cheerful. You put in thirty. Well, that thirty will be a big fat nada if this doesn’t get fixed.’
Ben’s face changed. ‘Can’t we get it back? We only put it in, like, two weeks ago.’
Andrei sighed. ‘Most of it’s committed. I got a great deal on server space for paying up front.’
‘And Kevin’s right? Are we dead?’
‘We have one and a quarter million users,’ said Andrei. ‘If we had a billion and a quarter, we’d be fine. But a million and a quarter … that’s not enough. We need access to social networks. That’s our oxygen, Ben.’
‘Shit,’ said Ben. ‘Isn’t there anything you can do? You know …’
‘What?’ said Andrei. ‘Write some code that gets around whatever they’ve put in place? Hack into them? Is that what you mean?’
‘I don’t know. Is that what I mean? Well, OK, maybe we should do that.’
‘I don’t know if that’s a very sustainable way to build what we’re trying to do here,’ said Andrei.
‘But if it’s necessary for survival? Would it make the world worse?’
‘To hack into Homeplace?’ A bout of hacking always appealed to the libertarian in Kevin, regardless of the justification. ‘To give our users the full level of connection they had before? No, I don’t think it makes the world worse. I think it makes it a hell of a lot better.’
‘If it means we don’t survive in the long term because of legal issues,’ said Andrei, ‘then it does make the world worse, because we’re not in it. A world without Fishbowll is definitely worse than a world with it.’
‘And dead men don’t get sued,’ said Kevin pointedly. ‘Dude, we’re going to be road kill. We’re going to be dead before Mike Sweetman even knows we existed.’
Andrei frowned. ‘You know, my father is no businessman, but he knew a few. Back in the nineties, he saw the way guys in Moscow made billions. He often says to me that timing is the most important thing. You wait, you wait … and then you do what you have to do.’
‘What does your dad teach again?’
‘Linguistics.’
Kevin raised an eyebrow.
‘Kevin, he’s an academic. He’s not good at doing stuff, but he’s very good at analysing stuff. And he’s seen some people operate. You don’t know what Moscow was like in the nineties.’
‘So without the homespun Russian philosophy,’ said Ben, ‘what exactly are we going to right now?’
‘Well, first of all,’ said Andrei, ‘we don’t know that Mike Sweetman has done anything to shut down access. It’s a possibility. It’s also a possibility that there’s a bug in our program.’
‘Andrei,’ said Kevin, ‘we’ve been all over our—’
‘And secondly,’ continued Andrei, ‘if he has done something, we’re going to know about it soon enough. Or, as my father would say, Slukhom zemlya polnitsya.’
‘Which means?’
‘We’ll hear about it.’
They did. A day later, the world’s biggest search engine announced what the blogosphere was already saying: it was being blocked from Homeplace. Immediately, the cannons were lined up. The usual hackneyed transparency arguments on one side were launched against the usual hackneyed privacy arguments on the