and could now splinter as much as I liked, but I couldn’t tell anyone that. I’d already paid off our family mortgage and was well on my way to amassing a sizeable personal fortune.
Vince wanted something, I could tell, but had an air of desperation surrounding him. My ego was flattered that one of the richest people in the world would make a personal house call for a favor from me, but his nervousness made me nervous. I didn’t like the way he was looking at all the activity below us.
I wondered what could be making him so jumpy. He had all the money in the world to burn as far as I could tell.
“Yeah, I’d noticed you’d amped up your Phuture News services pretty dramatically,” he said carefully, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’ll just send you the details of what I need right now. I can see you’re a busy man.”
A description of a financial event was uploaded and instantly analyzed by one of my splinters.
“You want me to what?” I exclaimed. “You know this is going to look suspicious, especially with me working for Infinixx.”
“From what I’ve heard, you don’t work for them anymore.”
I stopped fidgeting and stared at Vince, wondering how much he really knew. “Yeah that’s right, but it will still look odd.”
“You wouldn’t be making any profit off this, and nobody will know,” he explained. “I know it seems crazy, but if you could do this for me, and keep it quiet, I can pay you an awful lot of money. I need you to dump all that stock and chalk up a huge loss for me, and I need you to do it from New York.”
I could see Vince had ulterior designs afoot, and that was fine with me. He was offering a princely sum for almost no work. So this was what it was like to be in with the big boys. I didn’t care what he was up to and it didn’t look illegal—at least, my end didn’t.
“You be careful,” said Vince after a moment.
“It doesn’t look like there will be any problems with this transaction, Vince, in fact…”
“No, not with that,” he said simply, stopping me in my tracks, “with what you have going on here.”
“There’s nothing going on here.”
We both stood and stared at each other.
He sighed. “Just be careful, okay?”
“No problem, Mr. Indigo,” I replied immediately, shrugging, and I offered my hand to shake. He shook it, smiling weakly, and then flitted off without another word.
Wally materialized facing me on the white couch in my apartment. A dense security blanket shimmered around us like sparkling neon plastic wrap.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
Wally knew both as much and as little as I did. He shrugged and shook his head.
“Listen, Wally, I’m suddenly feeling very nervous. We have a great thing going here, but we need to protect ourselves.”
Being splintered into a hundred pieces was great for business, but it was taking a toll on my mind. Focusing on the market all the time left me a little stunned when I returned into real space, and I was letting details slip more and more often.
On the other hand, I felt like I was approaching some new kind of state of being, a perfectly self-sufficient and self-contained human being. I spent all day talking with various parts of myself, and held forth on meetings of mind with dozens of my splinters at a time. The only distinctly different entity I spoke with was Wally, who was basically a copy of me anyway. Vince and Bob were the first real humans I’d spoken to in days, perhaps even weeks now.
“Wally, when I’m off in the cloud, I need you to protect us here. I need you to make sure we’re safe, okay?”
He looked at me steadily and replied, “Sure thing, boss.”
We looked at each other for a few seconds. With that I flitted off to New York to get working on Vince’s project.
If I didn’t need anyone else’s help anymore, I definitely didn’t want anyone interfering. More than anything, though, I absolutely didn’t want to get caught.
10
THE LAST FEW weeks had been a compressed explosion of frenetic activity at Infinixx. Our hundred or so team members had managed to output the workload of a thousand, and then two thousand, workers compared to outside levels of productivity. We touted our accomplishments almost hourly as the launch date arrived. The world’s business community couldn’t wait to get their hands on it.
Building out the platform itself had been fairly straightforward once we had the core in place. A bigger struggle than the technology had been all the internal Atopian politics.
Since I was pushing to have my own launch before the Cognix release of pssi, and we needed to embed some pssi technology into our systems, the result was a messy cross-licensing arrangement. I had Aunt Patricia on my side, but it had still been a fierce fight.
“Give me one good reason we should let this happen,” fumed Dr. David Baxter at the Cognix meeting when we’d finally gotten it all approved.
He’d been steamed since Infinixx would be stealing some of his thunder as the first Atopian-platform product release, and wouldn’t be under his direct control as PR Director.
“David, you’ve seen all the phutures Nancy presented. Almost every scenario comes out pushing the Cognix stock higher as we establish this with early adopters,” countered Patricia. “You’re just annoyed because it’s not under your thumb.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” replied Dr. Baxter, and the tumult had continued as the assembly argued back and forth while Kesselring sat quietly and watched us all, sighing.
We’d been at a stalemate when Jimmy had magically produced the trump card.
“Okay everyone, I will give you one very good reason,” Jimmy shouted out above the arguing as he stood up, raising his hands to quiet everyone. He winked at me.
Until recently, I hadn’t spoken to Jimmy in years, ever since the incident at my thirteenth birthday party. I felt somehow responsible, and it had been just too awkward to talk about. But since he’d been nominated to the Security Council, however, we’d been reintroduced on a professional level, and it was as if nothing had ever happened. In fact, Jimmy and I had immediately struck a close working relationship, and he’d been a big supporter of my bid from the start.
I had no idea what he was going to say and we all waited in anticipation.
“I’ve managed to secure an agreement with both India and China to launch simultaneously with us.”
Gasps issued forth around the table. Getting India and China to agree on anything these days was close to impossible with new Water War skirmishes springing up almost daily. Details of the negotiations sprang into everyone’s workspaces the moment Jimmy spoke and we all dropped off a splinter to have a look. Having India and China agree to a simultaneous launch wouldn’t just be a commercial coup, but a major political one for Atopia as well.
“How in the world?” said Dr. Baxter, his voice trailing off while his mind assimilated the back-story.
“Jimmy, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked breathlessly in a private world I opened to him.
This was it. This was what would make my dreams come true. Thankful tears streamed out from my eyes.
“I just didn’t want to get your hopes up,” replied one of Jimmy’s splinters in our private world. “It was a long shot. I wanted you to focus on getting it done yourself and not have to rely on me, but, hey, it worked.” He shrugged and smiled.
“You’re giving up a lot here,” said Kesselring back in the conference space, speaking for the first time as he reviewed the details of the deal.
“A lot,” he repeated, “but I can see the balancing act, and the payoff. And this will help to keep the media
