The day of the Pied Piper launch, Dinesh's head was swimming. He was simultaneously exhausted from the all nighter and coursing with adrenaline in anticipation of Richard clicking the submit button, so his inhibitions were at low ebb when he confronted Gilfoyle. Gilfoyle had been up all night, too, so it wasn't that surprising to find him saying a tender goodbye to his server room, but Dinesh savored the moment anyway. He didn't score too many wins over his rival, let alone wins this personal.

And then Jared said two words that Dinesh would carry around all day: 'Best friend'.

The short phrase conjured up so many memories. It was such a childish, innocent, feminine, touchy feely phrase that to hear it here, in the hacker hostel, felt indecent, like hearing someone cry in a cubicle. Because Dinesh remembered 'best friends'. But remembering took him backwards about twenty years: before Silicon Valley, before jobs, cars, girls, puberty, America, or any of the knotty complications of his bitter pill adult life.

If Dinesh was an insecure man, he had been as a boy a sort of Chicken Little, huddled in schoolyard corners, watching the other children laugh, not at him necessarily but not with him either. Introverted and nerdy, he was not, as a rule, the sort of boy people became best friends with, or friends of any sort. Somehow he'd made it through those years and soon after, the desire for a girlfriend had consumed his life so thoroughly that for a long time he had forgotten such things existed as best friends and the burning longing for them. Until now.

Dinesh swam back to the present and risked a glance at Gilfoyle. Instinctively, Dinesh noted a twitch in a normally icy countenance, and he was not sure, but he was pretty sure. The words had hit Gilfoyle, too.

Dinesh fled.

The rest of the day kept them too busy to speak to one another about anything but work. Frantically, the programmers struggled to load balance, monitor traffic, and field the same four questions over and over again on PiperChat (they had a chat client now!) from their new users (they had users now!) All this excitement drove the other thoughts from Dinesh's mind.

Around two in the afternoon, Jared declared that he could handle the support desk for a few hours and insisted the programmers all catch a bit of sleep. Dinesh gratefully complied, but before he drifted off, he idly wondered if Jared could be right. Was Gilfoyle really his best friend? Did Dinesh want him to be?

By the time he woke up, the others were gathering alcohol for a modest launch party. Invigorated by sleep, Richard was waxing eloquent about his relief that nothing had gone wrong and his hope for the future, a good long speech. Jared was beaming at him almost continuously. Dinesh, disgusted, instinctively looked over at Gilfoyle.

Gilfoyle looked away.

"Who are you inviting?" Erlich was asking. "After my last launch party I don't exactly feel like a big soiree."

"Oh no, just a few good friends," Richard assured him.

"Better invite Anton," said Dinesh.

Gilfoyle glared at him. Success.

Richard looked blank. "Anton?"

And Dinesh looked Gilfoyle straight in the eye. "Gilfoyle's best friend, Anton."

Richard chuckled. "Oh, the servers! Actually, speaking of that, I was a little concerned about the way the AWS handled ..."

"I never thought I'd say this, but I'm tired of thinking about hardware," said Gilfoyle.

"Right," said Richard. "I guess we've earned a break." He disappeared with Jared and Erlich to see to the provisions, leaving Dinesh and Gilfoyle alone.

Dinesh looked over, a challenging expression on his face.

Gilfoyle shrugged and led Dinesh to his bedroom.

The two men sat down on the bed, angled toward one another. Dinesh had never been in this room before, and he was surprised at how bare the walls looked. Other than a few scattered books, anyone could live here.

"Not much fun looking like a fool, is it?" said Dinesh, grinning smugly.

"Congratulations," said Gilfoyle. "You proved something I flat out told you a week ago."

"You're not wiggling out of this one," said Dinesh. "You said you didn't want friends. And then I caught you talking to a piece of hardware. So which is it?"

"I said I didn't trust anyone," said Gilfoyle. "I'm pretty sure Anton's not going to tell anyone what I say."

"Bullshit," said Dinesh. "You're not Walden. You live in a city, you work at a company, you have to trust people sometimes. Even if it's just the power company and the mail carrier."

"First of all," said Gilfoyle, "you mean Thoreau. Walden is the pond where Thoreau lived. Second of all, I have a detailed contingency plan for nineteen different forms of societal collapse. I use public utilities for convenience, but that doesn't mean I trust them."

"You trust Richard and me though," said Dinesh. "You've bet your entire career on a startup that is constantly going up in flames, sometimes literally."

"If Pied Piper fails, I'll go somewhere else," said Gilfoyle. "The company and I are serving each others' interests right now, but there's plenty more recruiter swag out there if we fold. Trusting no one isn't the same as never assuming any risk. Every decision I make involves carefully weighing potential risk against reward."

"Says a man with multiple tattoos," said Dinesh.

Gilfoyle smirked, flexing his bicep. "Reward."

"But..." Dinesh fumbled. "When you were having problems with Tara, you told Richard and me about it. What was the reward there?"

Gilfoyle's face froze. He didn't answer for a moment.

Dinesh smiled. "Ah, I've got you there, haven't I? It was a risk. You gave out a piece of personal information; now we can fuck with you if we want. And all you got in return was, what exactly?"

After a beat, Gilfoyle answered. "What are you trying to prove here? That I'm not a robot? I never said I was. So yes, when I'm in my own home, among familiar people, I occasionally socialize with you asshats."

"But that's totally not the same as having friends," said Dinesh.

"In popular semantics, no," said Gilfoyle. "We don't exactly have lengthy conversations about our favorite bands over cappuccinos."

"You just can't admit it, can you?" Dinesh challenged him.

"Admit what?"

Dinesh sat up and leaned forward. "That you have feelings."

"Yep."

"That you want to share your feelings sometimes."

"Yep."

"That talking feels good."

Gilfoyle folded his arms. "With the right person."

"That you actually start to feel lonely if you go too long without talking to someone."

"A hell of a lot longer than the average idiot, but yes."

"That you depend on that relief more than you let on."

"Why would I let on?"

Dinesh sped up. "That you started telling yourself you don't need any friends because once upon a time, you gave your friends too much ammunition and they broke you and you don't ever want anyone to have that much power over you again. That there's nothing in that precious black Bible of yours to support choosing not to have any friends, but you cling on to it anyway in the hope that you can bury the part of you that needs to talk under a mountain of over-rationalized repression, and you're so good at glaring and making speeches no one will ever call you on it. Until one morning, when you're nervous and short on sleep and think no one's listening, you start talking to inanimate fucking objects and you realize all of your brilliant life rules are totally fucking useless."

"You are such a fucking hypocrite," said Gilfoyle, his pitch rising with emotion. "I'm repressed? Every other word out of your mouth is a lie. And you're not even good at it! You named all your fake friends after nineteenth century literary characters!"

"Richard never would have figured it out if it wasn't for you making it your personal quest to humiliate me in every possible aspect of life," said Dinesh.

Gilfoyle leaned forward, his voice suddenly dropping twenty decibels. "Richard is an idiot. Did you think for one second you could possibly fool me? I know you, Dinesh. I know the exact location of every weakness and insecurity in your pathetic techie brain. I know you're shy, I know you're hopelessly uncool, I know you're halfway around the world from the dirt heap you grew up in and you're probably the loneliest software developer in Palo Alto. I know you never go out, because I never go out, so I'm here to see you not going out. I know your eyes got as big as saucers this morning when Jared said what he said to us; you wanted it to be true, didn't you? I grew up in the same world as you. Canada, Pakistan, both of us were nine years old with a pencil case full of transistors once and never really got over it. I know you because I have been where you are, you dense motherfucker, I have walked every step of your miserable little thoroughfare of self hatred and fear. And yet you're stupid enough to go through the pointless charade of trying to convince me you're some kind of social butterfly, knowing I would eventually unravel your story and tell everyone and it would be twice as embarrassing as if you'd just come clean in the first place."

Dinesh's head was ducked, legs pulled up in front of his body. Fetal.

Gilfoyle was almost whispering now. "That's why I mess with you all the time. To negatively reinforce your dishonesty. I'm karma, bitch. But apparently you're dumber than a dog because instead of giving up you just plot to get me back. It's so much easier for us to fight each other than ourselves. Do you ever wonder what would happen if we skipped the cat and mouse phase and you just told me the truth for once?"

Dinesh looked up. With kilograms of conviction he replied, "You would destroy my soul."

Gilfoyle unfolded his arms, softening. "Try me."

"Oh, you want me to trust you?" Dinesh said, mocking him.

"No," said Gilfoyle. "I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm sure as hell not going to trust you. But if you betray me, I'd recover. It's an acceptable risk. I'm a Satanist; I chase pleasure."

"Pleasure?" said Dinesh. "You finding out what I care about and stomping all over it is pleasure?"

"Talking feels good. You said that just now," said Gilfoyle. "You expect me to tell you truths when you tell me lies. Coward."

Dinesh balled up his fists.

Gilfoyle said, "There's no need for that. They're the same thing really. My stoicism. Your falsehoods. Walls."

Dinesh said, "You're suggesting we ..."

Gilfoyle nodded. "You have nothing to lose, do you? The worst that could happen is, I ridicule you. A pastime at which I am already incredibly effective. The best that could happen is, it feels good. Telling your troubles usually does, doesn't it? Or maybe you wouldn't know."

"And you?" said Dinesh.

Gilfoyle paused a moment. "I wouldn't know."

Dinesh and Gilfoyle stared one another down for a long time. Dinesh realized they didn't make eye contact very often.

After a time, Dinesh blinked his eyes once, twice, then lay down flat on the bed. "The truth is I'm fucking terrified of you. Somehow you always know exactly how to hurt me without laying a finger on me. Sometimes I think I want you to hurt me. I deserve it. And it makes me feel ... known, important, part of the group. The truth is I'm just as pathetic as you say. I've never had a ... best friend. People dislike me. I'm always trying too hard. But then if I don't try, that never works out either. Basically I'm just a miserable guy who's afraid of his own shadow that should never have existed."

And suddenly his face was in Gilfoyle's chest and long arms were wrapped around him and he sort of felt like a balloon and he honestly didn't care anymore if this was all a trick, because it would be worth all the ridicule in the world for five minutes of this.

"I'm you with a better poker face," said Gilfoyle. "I pretend nothing gets to me because everything gets to me. I despise myself for every moment of weakness. I can never live up to my own ideals. I am alone."

Dinesh eased his arms around Gilfoyle. For a long time, they said nothing.

Finally, Gilfoyle pulled away. "Let's get a cappuccino."

"What about the party?" said Dinesh.

Gilfoyle shrugged.