didn’t know if Sweetman had been offering high or low – Mike Sweetman had been known to pay over the odds in the acquisitions Homeplace had made as it became the world’s leading social networking site, and a couple of his deals had been at prices that hadn’t only raised eyebrows but made people laugh out loud. But even if Fishbowll was worth only half of what Sweetman had offered, or a quarter, it was still worth a significant sum. And, anyway, that wasn’t the most relevant point. Andrei had barely begun to make Fishbowll what he thought it could be. He wasn’t going to let someone else get their hands on it now.
The episode also made something else clear to him. People were watching Fishbowll.
Despite the fact that by now he had close on a million and a half users, and a Grotto full of people yelling and screaming about what they wanted out of the site, somehow it had still felt like a world in itself – as if Fishbowll and its users existed in some kind of quiet, protected space, unnoticed by anybody else. Not even the interview with the Stanford Daily had changed that feeling. It was a student newspaper, the ‘journalist’ had been a liberal arts major. That interview hadn’t felt as if it was something out there in the real world. But this was. Suddenly the real world was all around him, imposing itself. It was as if some false, illusory walls had collapsed and suddenly he could feel the cold wind of reality blowing in his face – a wind that had actually been blowing all the time.
Out there, people were watching Fishbowll. Not only were they watching but they were prepared to hit, and hit hard. Mike Sweetman had been prepared to go to war with the search engines to take him out.
In a way, it was a compliment. A very, very dangerous one.
Andrei wished now that he had never given the interview to the Daily. Fishbowll’s explosive growth had happened without any publicity, and it seemed to him that was the best way to do it. Rightly or wrongly, he connected Mike Sweetman’s attempt to strangle them with that nterview.
But the genie was out of the bottle. And the truth was, even if Andrei had never spoken to the Daily, it would have jumped out by itself. The buzz around Fishbowll was like a brushfire fanned by the wind, visible as a glow even from a distance away.
People were becoming aware of it. People who had their ears to the ground of the internet for all sorts of reasons.
At around 11 a.m. on a day in late February when Andrei, Kevin and Ben should have been in class but were Fishbowlling in the common room, there was a knock on the door. The visitor was a slim, trim man in his thirties, wearing a suit. He asked if this was the office of Fishbowll Inc.
Kevin laughed. ‘Dude, no one’s ever called this an office.’
The man repeated his question, unsmiling.
‘I guess it is,’ said Ben.
‘I’d like to speak with your chief legal officer.’
10
THE MAN WAS an FBI agent called John Dimmer who worked out of the Palo Alto resident agency. After he had established that there was no legal officer in the company, and after he had identified which of the three young men in the common room was Andrei Koss, he asked Andrei if there was somewhere private that they could go.
For want of anywhere else, Andrei took him into his bedroom. As they stood between two unmade beds in a room that could have done with an airing, Dimmer took an envelope out of his pocket and explained that he had brought it over personally because he knew this was the first time the company had received one of these and the FBI didn’t have a named officer to send it to.
Andrei took the envelope hesitantly.
‘It’s a National Security Letter,’ said Dimmer. ‘Do you know what that is?’
Andrei shook his head.
‘It requires you to hand over data on a number of specified internet address holders.’
‘What do you suspect these people of doing?’
‘That’s none of your concern, Mr Koss. This request is part of an investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, which gives us grounds to issue you with this letter. That’s all I can tell you. Read the letter. I’ll wait. You may want to consult an attorney, but I’ll answer any questions you have.’
Andrei opened the envelope.