Shimmer by Eric Barnes

first the secret systems lived within the cracks of our normal operations. They were funded without the knowledge of our internal and external auditors, hundreds of millions of dollars shuttling between field offices, subsidiaries, foreign bank accounts and, increasingly, a series of shell corporations owned by me personally.
    This was the shadow network, and, in the first months of ourgrowth, I accessed it through the main control center for all of Core’s systems. Comprised of ten huge status boards and four long, dense rows of computers and monitors, the control center was staffed twenty-four hours a day by thirty technicians—a kind of small-scale Johnson Space Center in the heart of lower Manhattan.
    Soon, though, I realized I couldn’t manage the shadow network through the control center. Too many people had access to those systems. Too many people might see what I was really doing. And so I’d led Leonard and his tech team in the creation of a single server that would control the flow of all information through the company. It was located off to the side of the control center, behind a heavy door leading to a small, temperature-controlled room only I could access. No one but me could log onto the machine. No one but me could even touch it.
    The machine was called Shimmer.
    To all the employees, to the observers from the outside world, Shimmer was Core’s ultimate corporate secret. By managing the movement of information among all our Blue Boxes, Shimmer was the key to having solved the problem of the Fadowsky Formula.
    But in truth Shimmer was much more than anyone realized—more, even, than what the programmers themselves realized. Shimmer was an interface between the company and what soon became the thousands of pieces of the shadow network.
    And so, late at night, I stared at Shimmer, Shimmer representing all the information in full motion, data transformed into images and color, curling shapes and ever-turning lines. Shimmer was omniscient, the infinitely powerful reflection of the secrets it tracked. And, of course, this was yet another reason I was the only person who had access to Shimmer. Because Shimmer simplified everything it controlled. With Shimmer, the shadow network could be displayed in the simplest of images, made clear to every manager in the company, to every analyst on the outside, and to Whitley and her SWAT team.
    Imagine a dream, a dream with clarity and precision, a dream thatcan’t be explained or deciphered, but a dream so real you believe it, you touch it, you remember it completely because every idea in that dream, every person, every notion and decision, every part of it makes sense. That was Shimmer.
    And so it was Shimmer that kept Core Communications alive. Because without it, without the simplified images and controls Shimmer gave to me, I would never have been able to manage the shadow network, its breadth, its changes and constant growth.
    By the year 2007, Shimmer controlled a shadow network made up of almost two hundred locations inside and outside the company. Shimmer made sense of the elaborate mix of technology, finance and deception that drove the shadow network. Faced with handling an ever-increasing amount of information from the new clients we brought on, Shimmer could easily decide which part and place of the shadow network would be used to sustain the company. Shimmer might instantly decide to use one of Core’s own satellites to bounce information to a strategic partner in Mexico, who in turn might send the information to a set of mainframes housed in a building managed by Tech Now, LLC, in San Antonio, Texas, one of the faceless locations that made up the shadow network. Essentially an air-conditioned warehouse feeding uninterruptible power to twenty-four mainframes and a satellite dish, Tech Now was housed in a building owned by an Arizona-based real estate development company of which I, personally, was sole shareholder. The mainframes in