If I were casting the movie, John Krasinki (Jim on “The Office”) would play Robbie Case. Krasinsky’s cute, looks intelligent and could play a multimillionaire computer nerd who really isn’t. But I’m ahead of myself. Robbie’s the 35-year-old protagonist in “Shimmer,” a 2009 novel by Eric Barnes, a newspaper publisher in Memphis.
As the CEO and majority shareholder of Core Communications, a $20 billion darling of Wall Street, the “de facto highway for the nation’s critical financial information,” Robbie’s in trouble. Events take place three years after Robbie, a 15-year veteran of Silicon Valley, inherits 80 percent of his dad’s Mainframe Supply Center in Redding, Calif. Robbie moves its headquarters to New York City, where he plans a modest expansion.
When a “jaywalking computer engineer” gets hit by a truck in New Jersey, Robbie’s focus changes, as does the name of the company, which grows from 30 employees to 5,000. The secret of its success is in a box, literally. A box made from an algorithm developed by the engineer in Jersey. Attached to mainframes, Core’s Blue Boxes increase the speed of information transfer by a factor of 80. Except they don’t.
The boxes do pull a mainframe’s data faster than anyone’s ever seen, but it goes to another mainframe, owned by Core, from which it is then transferred, at normal speed, to its final destination. Because of this, Core must acquire “farms of dedicated mainframes”; thus, “for every pair of Blue Boxes Trevor sold, Core was $100,000 in the hole.” No way to run a railroad. Robbie owes some of his “success” to his 36-year-old cousin, Trevor, who inherited 20 percent of Mainframe Supply. For it was Trevor who procured the software essential to the development of the box.
An acknowledged supersalesman, Trevor’s also the most feared person at Core. He leads conference calls on airport payphones, outlines revenue goals at “poorly lit cybercafés,” and fires “whole teams of underperforming sales reps” via overnight mail. Trevor will be played in the film by Dean Winters, the “Mayhem” guy in the Allstate ads and cop Johnny Gavin in “Rescue Me.” With good intentions, Robbie seeks ways to make the boxes work and develops additional revenue sources. But to keep what’s clearly a Ponzi scheme afloat, he creates a network of mainframe-owning shell corporations. And Shimmer, the computer program that tracks the “shadow network.” Only Robbie knows Shimmer’s deepest details. He thinks … and hopes.
But then there’s Whitley, “day-to-day manager of the entire company” and head of the Subversives & Intrusions Task Force. Her SWAT team investigates security threats due to hackers, spies and the like. She’s the one most likely to discover Shimmer. As the first person narrator muses, “My own secret police, unintentionally hunting me down.” I’m giving Whitley’s part to Natalie Portman. Barnes masterfully interweaves the lives of Core employees. There’s enough detail to empathize and sympathize with the likeable ones and to pity the others, but not so much detail that you choke on it. He also handles a complex factual pattern with a deftness that belies this novel’s debut status. With no blood or gore, “Shimmer” treats readers to cut-throat competition, cyber sabotage and more, with realistic overtones of Madoff, Enron, Facebook and Google.
“Shimmer” is well-written, intriguing and suspenseful, with a plotline I’ve not seen before and a surprise ending. What more could you ask? It’s never too late to read a good book! Check this one out.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Ark., where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.