"That's it? A meeting? Jesus, it's just a meeting. He probably wants you to reassure him before he presents to the CEO, is all."
"No, I'm sure that's not it. He's got us sniffed — both of us. He's been going through the product-design stuff, too, which is totally outside of his bailiwick. I tried to call him yesterday and his voicemail rolled over to a boardroom in O'Malley House." O'Malley House was the usability lab, a nice old row of connected Victorian townhouses just off Picadilly. It was where Art consulted out of. Also, two-hundred-odd usability specialists, product designers, experience engineers, cog-psych cranks and other tinkerers with the mind. They were the hairface hackers of Art's generation, unmanageable creative darlings — no surprise that the VP of HR would have cause to spend a little face-time with someone there. Try telling Fede that, though.
"All right, Fede, what do you want me to do?"
"Just — Just be careful. Sanitize your storage. I'm pushing a new personal key to you now, too. Here, I'll read you the fingerprint." The key would be an unimaginably long string of crypto-gibberish, and just to make sure that it wasn't intercepted and changed en route, Fede wanted to read him a slightly less long mathematical fingerprint hashed out of it. Once it arrived, Art was supposed to generate a fingerprint from Fede's new key and compare it to the one that Fede wanted him to jot down.
Art closed his eyes and reclined. "All right, I've got a pen," he said, though he had no such thing.
Fede read him the long, long string of digits and characters and he repeated them back, pretending to be noting them down. Paranoid bastard.
"OK, I got it. I'll get you a new key later today, all right?"
"Do it quick, man."
"Whatever, Fede. Back off, OK?"
"Sorry, sorry. Oh, and feel better, all right?"