The Steve acquired his name when he moved into Morgenthau following the disastrous end of his career as a computer programmer. The Steve had written every kind of programming code known to digital man. The short, stout Chinese immigrant could never speak English well, but he spoke poetically in binary code and had a preternatural, extrasensory ability to communicate with computers.Everything in The Steve’s life was a series of ones and zeroes. There was little grey area in his life, beginning from his strict upbringing where failure was not an option. He excelled in school, graduating high school at 16 to attend MIT at the dawn of the second age of computers. In a system of ones and zeroes, The Steve was all ones. He was so good at what he did that he developed many rivals who simply could not keep up with the insane caliber of his work. He had trouble making friends in college, especially when his perfect test scores constantly skewed the curve, causing a surefire A- to plummet to a C+. Although the human parts of his brain secretly longed for interaction with other people, the lonely boy from Flushing, Queens had long ago developed deep emotional relationships with his computers. He spoke their language and they never judged him for who he was.
After MIT, The Steve wound up at one of the top software companies in the United States writing code for all kinds of programs, revolutionizing a series of user-interface platforms. For all I know he wrote this very word-processing program I’m typing on now. His rapid success was matched only by an equally rapid rise in animosity against him. Just as in college, he had developed a series of jealous enemies who wanted nothing more than for him to vanish back into the Dungeons and Dragons lair he came from. Unlike college, however, there was a lot more at stake in the professional world. The Steve’s innovations often undercut the work of his peers, some of whom had been working on protocols for two years, only to have their puzzles solved seemingly overnight by the socially awkward human calculator. A lot of new jobs were created by his innovations, but more jobs were made obsolete because of his creations as well.
The circumstances surrounding the shocking end of The Steve’s career remain a subject of debate and scrutiny within the software development industry. Equal armies of opinion have taken the position that he was framed; set up from the get-go by a Caesar-like conspiracy. Others claim that The Steve got what was coming to him.
One night while sleeping alone in his condo apartment in Silicon Valley, The Steve’s house was raided by a platoon of FBI agents and local police officers. They grabbed The Steve, blindfolded him and brought him in for questioning regarding some e-mail that had been intercepted by the Bureau.
The agents accused The Steve of conspiring with his counterparts in China to sell a series of software secrets to Chinese software companies that were trying to cut into Silicon’s stronghold. Normally, the Federal Government would not get involved with a corporate fraud scandal, but The Steve’s company had many clients, including the U.S. Department of Defense, and some of his codes were used by the military for missile guidance systems.
The Steve, one of the highest paid developers in the world, had access to an incredible legal team who fought to expose that the allegations levied against him were false. He was able to escape the scrutiny of the government, but by the time he was exonerated, no company wanted to hire a foreign-born developer who had been accused of international espionage. It didn’t get easier for The Steve, for by the time he had dodged the spy charges, the entire internet bubble had burst and there was nobody who could hire him even if they wanted to.
He ended up working a series of jobs selling and fixing computers, but years of speaking almost exclusively with computers had rendered his English skills completely useless. He was fired from several jobs for being incapable of assisting customers who wanted to buy simple electronic equipment.
With a decent stack of cash left to his name, The Steve ended up at Morgenthau after Willie had stolen his car from a parking lot in one of the Tri-Towns. He walked around desperately for an entire afternoon before he ended up walking along the long stone walls of the campus. He was looking for a pay phone when he came across his Toyota being towed from the front of a funeral parlor. His front wheels already jacked up, he ran over to the tow truck and pleaded with the truck driver, but the driver blew him off, mostly because he couldn’t understand what the hell he was saying.
While The Steve argued with the driver, Willie emerged from the gates of the campus to collect his fee from the driver who would turn a profit from impounding The Steve’s car one way or another. The truck drove away with the Toyota, and The Steve chased it for a good 20 yards before giving up. Willie, who never really felt any remorse for his thefts, went over to comfort the strange Chinese man.
“It’s okay, baby,” said Willie patting him on the back, “They don’t charge too much for that shit. You’ll have your ride back in no time.”
The Steve responded to Willie by trying to explain that he had been living out of the car for the last three days since his eviction and that he did not have enough money on him to bail his car out of the lot. The only words that Willie could decipher were that The Steve had no place to go. Although Willie felt that there were too many people living on campus as it was, he invited this babbling immigrant back to Morgenthau, if not just to get him to shut the hell up. He also didn’t want him to arouse suspicion among the police as to who was stealing all of these cars around town and leaving them conveniently in “No Parking” areas.
The electricity had not worked in Morgenthau since the Grassos closed the school and all of the computers in the academic buildings had been pawned off long ago. For The Steve, a man whose entire world only existed in the digital realm, moving into the main residence hall at Morgenthau was like moving to Mars.
He had been known Steven Chin in the real world, but he acquired his nickname after another Morgenthau resident with the same first name objected to there being two Steves in the same complex. Originally, it was The Chinese Steve, but eventually it was shortened to The Steve. Even after the “original” Steve took his own life by hanging himself in the Fieldhouse, The Steve’s new moniker had already stuck and the residents got used to it.
He never appreciated the name and he was upset that other people were continuing to change his name for him. He had been forced to adopt an Americanized name when his parents moved to America when he was two, and now these junkies and deadbeats were doing the same thing to him.
The Steve was never happy at Morgenthau. Nolan’s rent was steep, but it was doable. Like The Professor, Grover and a few other residents, The Steve had enough cash left over from his previous life to pay the rent. His fortune was something of a myth, like some old pirate’s treasure chest. He kept his cash somewhere around campus, hidden in a tree or behind a wall. There were some people who would follow The Steve around for the few days before the rent was due, trying to see if he would give up the location of the money.
Knowledge of The Steve’s hidden treasure made him a marked man to some of the real desperate junkies around Morgenthau. The Steve was subject to infrequent, and often brutal beatings at the hands of the fiercely desperate hoodlums that called the campus home. Sometime before I moved in, The Steve was beaten within an inch of his life by the “original” Steve as he tried to obtain the location of the money. Several times during the beating The Steve gave up the location of his money, but the blood in his mouth—compounded by his poor linguistics—made his confessions inaudible to his aggressor. He was bedridden for almost two months after this, and would have died for sure had it not been for the kindness and compassion of Kendra.
Kendra’s death affected everybody who knew her. It devastated The Professor—who was never as happy as he was when he was with her, and was never as miserable as he was once she was gone. It was crushing for Alistair—who had temporarily given up the junk on the advice of Kendra, only to overdose twice immediately following her death. Winston’s powerful grief was matched only by the incredible artistic output he had after her death, composing his finest paintings in her honor.
The Steve owed his life to Kendra. He had never really been able to thank her for nursing him back to health, and this crushing regret drove him into a state of white-hot anger, the kind that he had always been taught to repress. He blamed a lot of people for what happened to Kendra. Of course, he blamed Nolan and The Watcher for conspiring to silence her, but he also blamed The Professor for not convincing her to keep her mouth shut. But more than anyone, The Steve blamed the addicts in the woods for failing to do protect Kendra from the awful fate that doomed her.
A lifetime of repressed rage, torment and sadness had boiled into a thick, scorching steam that had begun to spill out of The Steve’s ears in a high-pitched whistle. Without warning and without fear, he ventured deep into the forest one night to confront the addicts in an attempt to get some kind of explanation as to why justice had not been done. The addicts had a reputation for dispensing their own brand of justice on the campus, but they never punished the innocent. Kendra had done nothing wrong and there was no reason that the addicts should have allowed her to die—especially in the brutal fashion that she did.
Alistair was on his way back scoring junk when he saw The Steve speed walking towards the edge of the woods, an area that was universally considered off-limits at night. He turned back to try and stop the crazy Chinese man from doing something stupid, but he swiped his arm away when he tried to pull him back.
“I want answers!” yelled The Steve as he shook off Alistair and ventured fearlessly into the woods. Alistair ran after him and pleaded for him to come back, but he could not be reasoned with, and Alistair was way too afraid of the addicts to go any further into the woods than he already had. That night, from anywhere on campus you could hear wild, brutal screams coming from the direction of the addicts’ woods. Depending on who you asked, the screams sounded like The Steve was either being tortured or issuing a battle cry. Either way, most people believed that they had seen The Steve for the last time.
When we heard about what happened to Nolan after the addicts kidnapped him and left him shivering, shirtless and scared shitless, I started to think about The Steve and his hot-headed march into the woods to confront the addicts for their failure to protect Kendra. I started to think that maybe the addicts didn’t kill him; perhaps he had gone out there to join them, to lead the charge against Nolan and to help administer the punishment that he deserved.
To just about everyone’s surprise, The Steve was found about three weeks after his disappearance by Willie as he was on his way out to pick up another payment from the tow-truck company. He found The Steve much in the same way that Nolan’s father found his son, in a state of shock, compounded by acute hypothermia, paranoia and crippled by fear. Willie brought The Steve back to his room in the main residence hall that had been cleared out a day before he was finally found. He had never been a big talker before his brief stint with the addicts, but after that he didn’t say a word to anyone for months. He was not interested in talking to anybody until Eva arrived that summer. Then he never shut up.
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