The day that Bruen & Associates opened for business was one of the best days of Chris Bruen’s life—until the first client walked through the door.

Chris had always dreamed of starting his own law firm, and he’d imagined that, given a blank slate, he could create the kind of workplace that he had never found in fourteen years of practicing law—egalitarian, loose but well-managed, non-bureaucratic, fun. A place that was more about doing the best, smartest work than putting dollars in your column.

Things were still fairly quiet on that first morning in the new, red brick building on Folsom Street in San Francisco’s South of Market district. His office resembled a blast site, with open cardboard boxes and files scattered everywhere. As he listened to voicemails from clients with questions about the new firm, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos played softly in the background.

Chris was braced for possible surprises on the firm’s first day. In fact, he half-expected that one of his hacker adversaries might “swat” his new office. Swatting was a favorite hacker prank, and it involved placing an anonymous call to the police or FBI and reporting a false hostage situation, terrorist threat, or some other extreme event that would draw a SWAT team down upon the unsuspecting victims. Chris had already called the police and FBI to warn them that they might be getting that sort of anonymous tip, hoping it would at least give the authorities pause before they came in locked and loaded.

The firm was operating with a skeleton crew consisting of a receptionist, a file clerk, and the head of the computer forensic lab Zoey Doucet. There were a couple of talented associates at Reynolds Fincher whom he had trained in privacy and security law, but it would have been improper to offer them jobs before he had resigned from Reynolds Fincher. He planned to begin the process of bringing them over later in the week. By not contacting them immediately, Chris was actually doing the young attorneys a favor. Right now his previous partners would be asking them all sorts of blunt questions; this way, they could provide non-answers with a clear conscience.

Chris rolled his phone to voicemail and rose from behind his desk, deciding to take a stroll around the office. In the crush of constant deadlines, it was too easy to let a moment like this slip past. He didn’t consider it a victory lap: more like a conscious effort to imprint on his memory the beginnings of something good. He had high hopes for the firm, and he expected that Bruen & Associates would not remain a scrappy startup for long.

As he emerged from his office, the receptionist Becky Martinez quickly slid a thick book into her lap and under her desk. Becky, a night-school law student, was putting her life back together after a bad divorce. She was exactly the sort of person that Chris was committed to hiring for this new enterprise—bright, kind, and highly motivated.

“It’s okay to read if the phones aren’t ringing,” Chris said. “You don’t have to hide your law books from me.”

“Thanks. I wasn’t sure how you felt about that.”

“I don’t think things are going to be this quiet for long, though.”

“I hope not.”

“Me, too, Becky. Me, too.”

Chris walked down a short hallway off the reception area to the computer forensic lab. The secure entry keypad had not yet been installed so he was able to duck in.

Zoey didn’t notice him immediately. Nestled in a thicket of servers and computer monitors, she watched as the output from an anti-virus program scrolled across her three screens.

When she finally noticed Chris, she said, “You’re going to need to double the number of servers if we’re going to be competitive. You know that, right?”

“Good morning to you, too.”

“Sorry, but I love my new toys. I want more.”

“Is there anything that you need to do your job that you don’t have?”

“Well, no,” Zoey conceded. “But you never know when a big breach might come along and max out our resources.”

“We’ll get there. Dave Silver at BlueCloud just agreed to pay a big retainer against our fees to help subsidize our start-up costs.”

“It’s nice to have billionaire friends.”

“Well, he’s not exactly doing it out of friendship. He owes us. We sort of saved his company when they were being blamed for the Lurker virus.”

“Oh, right, there was that.”

“So how do you like having your own shop?” Chris asked, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“I’ll let you know when things are fully built out,” Zoey said. Then she broke into a grin. “But, yeah, it’s pretty awesome.”

Chris noticed a glass vase that stood on one of the lab’s wooden, non-conducting countertops. Rather than flowers, it was filled with a limp bouquet of multi-colored wires held together by a big ribbon tied in a bow. A Hello Kitty card was pasted to the front of the vase with tape. It read:

Congratulations, Geek Girl! (We knew flowers were too girly for you.)

From the Bottom of the Hill Gang

Zoey had been a bartender for several years at the Bottom of the Hill, a music club on Potrero Hill, and she stayed in touch with the crew there.

“Funny,” Chris said. “And true.”

“What can I say? They know me.”

Chris pointed at the vase. “I didn’t think of you as a Hello Kitty kind of person.”

“I’m not. That looks like Erin’s work.”

Chris examined the blank-faced, big-headed cat cartoon. “You know, I once met someone from the Hello Kitty marketing team. Do you know why Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth?” He placed both hands on his chest. “Because Hello Kitty speaks from the heart.”

Zoey swiveled around in her chair to face him. “I think Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth because, if she did, she would never stop screaming.”

Chris laughed, appreciating, as always, Zoey’s deeply twisted mind. After his wife died, Chris had opened an account with an online dating site but quickly abandoned the experiment. He didn’t like treating a relationship as if it were merely another online search that could be perfected through the judicious selection of search terms. If he’d applied only the standards of what he thought he wanted, he never would have found Zoey.

“Write up your wish list of what you’d like for the next stage,” he said. “I think I’m going to be in a position to make it rain.”

Across the hall from the forensic lab was the file room, the domain of file clerk Ira Rogers. While the file- clerk job wasn’t very demanding, Ira was a perfect fit for it. He was starting an independent record label and had proven himself a talented producer of quirky art-pop records. His natural meticulousness behind the mixing console carried over to his day job at the firm. Chris didn’t expect Ira to love being a file clerk, but he did his job efficiently and he was an interesting person to have around the office—if only to hear his critiques of Chris’s music choices and his debates with Zoey over hyper-specific ten-best lists (Ten Best Songs with a Backwards-Guitar Solo, Ten Best Songs in Which the Singer Has a Fake British Accent, etc.)

Some sort of symphonic electronic pop music played softly in the file room, but Ira was nowhere to be seen. “Ira?”

Ira emerged from between two sliding, floor-to-ceiling stacks of files. He was pale and delicate-looking, with washed-out blondish hair cut short. Even when drugs weren’t involved, there seemed to be something about the rock and roll life that kept guys like Ira as rail-thin as teenagers. Rockers like Iggy Pop and Keith Richards might grow into scaly, wizened raptors, but they never seemed to put on weight.

“Yes?”