Meet At Joe's

2 More Strangers

I don't know whether to call the crowd that invaded us on Tuesday night a nerdiness of nonconformists or a tediousness of tech types. There was a dozen of them. They were all shapes and sizes, mostly male, mostly subdued and most were carrying laptop computers. Besides the laptops, they also brought enough cables and other electronics to set up their own "wired" network. Yes, I said "wired" network. That is not a typo. I am aware everyone uses Wi-Fi now.

As they were setting up and wiring their laptops together, I told John, "You know, we have Wi-Fi you can use. It will save you the trouble of running all these cables."

He just smiled and said, "Like I said, we really like our privacy. Wireless coms even with encrypted VPNs are never really private."

"Okay, make yourself at home. Julie will be in to take your drink orders as soon as you're settled in."

I went back to the main bar more worried than ever about all this concern for privacy. So, as soon as Julie returned from taking their orders, I asked her, "Did you hear anything while you were serving them?"

"I did," Julie whispered conspiratorially making fun of my concern. Then she smiled and said, "Four suggestive comments, three invitations to Netflix and chill, two marriage proposals, and the old guy offered to adopt me.

Destiny who overheard Julie's answer asked her, "Any new lines?"

"No, the typical nerd lines. You know, 'You turn my software into hardware,' and 'If you were a Transformer, you'd be Optimus Fine, and 'Is your name WiFi? Because we have a connection.'"

I interrupted their giggling, "Did you hear anything we should worry about?"

"Well, I am seriously considering the adoption offer; so, you may be short a server if I do." She grinned and both women went back to putting in the orders.

The group enjoyed their dinner and chatted. From the little I overheard it sounded like normal tech talk. When their plates were removed, they appeared to go to work on their laptops only occasionally speaking to each other or gathering around someone's computer for a general discussion and occasionally ordering drinks from Julie. They stayed until closing time.

As they were taking down their network and preparing to leave, I asked John, "Wouldn't it be more convenient to rent some office space where you could leave your network set up permanently?"

"A permanent set up could get broken into when we were not around. Besides, this is cheaper, the food and drink are a nice perk, and no one would expect to find us working here." He handed me his credit card and said, "If you need to charge us for tying up your room for so long, go ahead, whatever is fair."

The name on the card was John Galt. I assumed it was a fake identity he had set up to remain anonymous, but the card went through without a problem, and I checked his I.D. and he also had a driver's license for John Galt. It was obvious, they were definitely going to extremes to hide what they were doing from someone, but from whom? And what were they hiding? And why?