What he sees is a calendar page from a company called vFirm, one of SwapDrive's business partners. His mission is to dress up the page, make it look slick. First he builds a frame around the calendar. On a blank gray bar to the left, he types in five category headings such as Schedule a Meeting and Manage Tasks and begins grabbing snatches of color to put behind the words. As his right hand strokes and clicks the mouse, blue light flickers across his thin, freckled face like the glow of an electronic campfire.
Control panels flash on and off the screen so fast they're almost subliminal.
His brown eyes dart back and forth, a waking state of REM sleep. He is building buttons. Shading, layering, feathering edges, so when he's finished the five headings will look as if they rest on raised tabs that you can push down by clicking on them, like buttons. Now the Nasdaq is down 7 points. An hour later it's up 22.