Signal to Noise, Chapter One

by Jim Newman

Hawthorne Fellow 2012

I've been writing all my life and completed three novels prior to this one.  My agent tried manfully to sell them and failed.  Somewhere along the line I learned that I'll write for the pleasure of it even if seeing my work between hardcovers is  a pipe dream.  I wrote as a career too, though it was always nonfiction.  First I was a TV newsman in Portland and Minneapolis, and later I worked at Oregon Public Broadcasting where I produced stories for Oregon Field Guide. But of all the writing I've ever done, this book is the most fun (for me) of all.


Author's Note
My novel is called "Signal to Noise."  The phrase is a technical term, as in, that recording has very little rumble or hiss and thus a good signal to noise ratio.  I use the phrase to talk about the noise in a person's head that sometimes clouds the signal at the expense of clarity.  My main character doesn't see things too clearly.  I try to find humor in that. But, like all of us, what he sees or fails to see makes him who he is. He meets lots of people who see things in their own way and each is very very confident of his or her insights.  As the story unfolds the concept of what is signal and what is noise gets confusing. How do we know the difference?
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The wipers were worse than useless.

Tad’s VW bug was hurtling blind through space. A streak on the windshield -- once some sort of large wasp, apparently -- mooshed back and forth and spread itself like butter on the glass. The whole freeway was hidden, a finger painting, really, of bug juice and grit. It made him nervous. Somebody behind him laid on the horn. “Pass me you bastard!” he shouted. The horn hit its peak as he abruptly slowed to make the exit at Fort Lewis.

Tad didn’t need to dwell on the incident, and yet the guy had honked for over thirty seconds and Tad knew from what he’d read on a prominent website that that’s road rage, a growing problem in America.

It was already nearly four p.m.

North Fort, as opposed to the main fort itself, was funny. The buildings were so old they looked almost like regular houses not barracks. But Tad had no time to think about interesting stuff. He unloaded his shit and climbed to the second floor. The stairway mildew gave way to aftershave and socks and familiar voices.

“The mob’s got a big piece of it. Internet poker’s all off shore. Some of these generals’ll get burned and I could name a few,” said Ronnie Underwood, to no one in particular because everyone was talking.

Tad was already twenty-eight. Once skinny as a rail, he was now linebacker size and he looked his best when he remembered to leave his shirttail outside his pants.

Computational Physics Group Alpha, 11th Reserve Brigade, Cybernetics Div., First Team, Fort Lewis, WA, sounded like an actual Army unit, and technically it was true. But everybody was under contract and still a civilian. “Team Goddamn Awful” was what the guys called themselves. They were the US Army’s top computer unit, recruited from the very best at Microsoft, and Adobe, and Alpha Graphics, and elsewhere in the universe of geniuses that went from Seattle across Lake Washington to Redmond and Bellevue and Issaquah.

The team was the brainchild of Universal Services Corporation, out of Memphis, which was building a highly profitable quasi-military services unit. The company kept a real low profile. Every decision, all the little details that gave Team Goddamn Awful its sense of itself came, so far as Tad knew, from the unit’s enterprising commanding officer, General Hicks. He’d once been real Army, and though at US Corp., Memphis, now, General Hicks was, in Tad’s opinion, a hard charger you needed to respect. He’d gotten to know the big man personally because he was dating his stepdaughter, Karen.

The barracks second floor was one big room and it was echoey. There were open rafters. There were lots of beds that were neatly spaced along opposite walls with a nice waxed floor down the center.

Tad could still hear Ronnie Underwood 12 bunks back. “The Pentagon’s going to clean house, blah, blah, blah.” Who knew what he was saying? Everybody said he was smart. Naturally, he had a lot of money.

Tad walked to bunk 41. He could never really track Ronnie. He said weird things but people laughed. Somehow he recently got a big promotion. But nude Ronnie looked like a deflating balloon like everybody.

Lance Dupuy was on a bunk in his little panty briefs. His Porsche Boxter was at the far end of the gravel lot where it couldn’t get smashed if somebody parked within twenty feet.

The lot always felt like a putdown because Tad only had the bug. Phil Barber drove a pearl Lexus that was always clean. Zell Kent had the jumbo Beamer. Flint Koster’s Icon sort of looked like a 1974 Toyota Land Cruiser (ha!) but it was worth a hundred-thousand-plus. Flint’s dad, was none other than the “Spin” Koster, father of the micro-switch, and he bought it for him. There was a new Audi station wagon out there, too. It was next to Ronnie Underwood’s really pretentious classic Jag, which looked okay but was for sure under 10 Gs.

Dupuy. All you had to do was say it. “Dupweee.” There was something stupid about that name. It was a name that you really should change. Maybe to Depp. Johnny Depp. Tad bet Johnny Depp was a guy who’d walk away from a name like Dupwee because he had too much pride to let people call him Dupwee. Dupwee. Dupwee. Tad muttered the name to himself all the way down to his bed. “Lance is French, isn’t he, Kos?” he asked Flint Koster who was on the top bunk.

“Don’t know,” said Koster.

Tad nodded. “Thought so.”

Flint lived in West Seattle, too, only up on the bluff where you could see the bay and downtown from your windows. It was a lot different.

Miklos Desoukis sat on his bunk looking like a pumpkin. He was an okay guy, though he was Greek. And he was old. He had been in the Navy or something and said he wanted to give back to his country meaning the US even though he was an immigrant. “Emdee” is what you called him. He was Booker Labs’ resident kick-ass genius. Booker Labs supplied Electronic Arts with most of their plots and scenics. Booker deserved just about all the credit but never go it.

But this situation gave Tad hope. It meant all you really needed were the right people at your back. The right people, the people in this room, he figured, were what he had to have to really make it. They knew their way around. He loved them.

Emdee flew to Singapore lots of times. Also, he went to Tokyo, and Bangladesh. Tad said hi to Emdee, by raising his right index finger in a casual way.

Tad had joined the unit three months ago but he hadn’t permanently bonded with Emdee or anybody else. They’d never even had a beer. Tad tried to connect, lots of times. But every one of the guys ignored his frequent texts.

Still he had plenty of time to get closer to everybody. The next two weeks, in fact, would be his perfect chance. Corporate higher-ups and the Army brass had dumped unexpected opportunity in Tad’s lap with what they called “field maneuvers.”

For two weeks, starting really early tomorrow morning, the entire unit would be living– even eating and shitting and sleeping – out-of-doors.

Tad remembered – at unit muster six or seven weeks ago -- Ronnie Underwood had the balls to complain about being ordered to play around in the mud.

“General Hicks,” Ronnie said, holding up the email everybody got, “we’re – what – getting ‘provisions for an incursion’? That kind of language sounds, you know, a little ominous. Could you enlighten us, sir?”

“Well, no, Ronnie,” said the general. “No more’n it says here in plain print. ‘Location, at or near Battalion Idlewild. Duration, tactical-level 12.’ Which is, ummm, adding up to, say, 14 days in the field. Idlewild’s on Rainier, of course.”

“When was this going to get talked about, general?” said Ronnie.

The general wore his heart on his sleeve. Tad supposed it probably hurt him to see his men getting ordered into the woods to prove their manhood, or whatever. That was why it didn’t come up earlier, he thought. For sure, General Hicks wouldn’t command his unit to get wet and lose sleep unless it was absolutely mandatory.

Ronnie Underwood shot off his mouth some more. “Technically, general, Team Goddamn Awful works for Universal Services Corp, and not the US Army. So fuck you, General Hicks. I’m not going anywhere.”

It was a very surprising outburst. But General Hicks seemed not to hear Ronnie’s exact words. In any event he nodded in a sad way. “Read the contract,” he said. “I got my hands tied.”

And so Tad had a heaven-sent chance. He’d bond with the greats of his chosen profession. Two weeks in a rainy mountain forest far from civilization was a cheap price to pay for a leg up on his career.

Tad got to work unpacking. Across the aisle Emdee was writing something in a notebook. The old man was probably coming up with a great idea that would make Electronic Arts a million dollars with a new video game nobody ever thought of before.

This was September. Tad’s dream was to maybe have Thanksgiving on the lake at Bellevue, at Emdee’s big house, with the old man’s wife and kids if he had any.

 

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