Coward, he thought.
Will paid—cash—and left the Internet café, stepping out onto the sidewalk on the northern end of Times Square.
He zipped up his coat and walked east, no particular destination in mind.
More than two hundred people had died in the Oracle riots, all over the world. Twelve had died at the Lucky Corner.
He could hear Hamza’s voice in his head, telling him that those things were not his fault. How people chose to use informationthe Oracle put out into the world was not his responsibility. He hadn’t killed anyone. He hadn’t hurt anyone.
All that was true. But it didn’t change the fact that if he hadn’t put up the Site, then those people would still be alive.Hamza didn’t get it, or chose to pretend he didn’t, and that was why Will hadn’t spoken to him since Union Square.
He continued east, weaving through the scrum of Times Square tourists without thinking about it, walking with that sidewalkautopilot longtime New Yorkers developed.
Will had gone to the Internet café with the idea—the hope—that if he shut down the Site and the Oracle went silent, maybethe world would just move the fuck on. The whole thing would just be one of those blips people barely remembered five yearsdown the road, like the Chilean miners or the winner of the last World Cup.
No one else would get hurt. No one else would die.
And then the moment came, and all he’d needed to do was hit that enter key, and he hadn’t, and so the Site was still up.
Why? Money?
He considered, trying to come up with a single purchasable thing—anything at all—that he didn’t already have enough moneyto buy.
Hamza had finally figured out a way for them to access the Oracle funds safely from inside the United States. It involvedCaribbean shell corporations, an ersatz Panamanian hedge fund that had hired them both as its sole, insanely highly paid employeeswhile relying on automatic algorithmic trading to operate, and a thousand other things that ultimately meant they were hidingin plain sight.
It wasn’t too far from the methods the Florida Ladies used to handle their data security, even if Hamza would never admitit. The Oracle network of businesses paid every fee, every tax bill, on time and in full. Everyone got their cut, everyonewas happy, so there was never a reason to look into things too closely.
Hamza was convinced that once they’d been in operation for a few years, it wouldn’t matter where the money originally camefrom, because they’d have a history of legitimate business activity to hide behind. They didn’t need to hide the money. Theyjust needed to hide the fact that it was the Oracle’s money.
The main thing, as far as Will was concerned, was that he could go to any ATM and see a seven-figure bank balance. He hada few thousand dollars in his wallet right at that moment. The only other time he’d had that much at one time was at the endof a tour a few years back, when the promoter had paid the band in cash for the whole run all at once.
So, no. Not money.
Will looked up, realizing where his feet had brought him—Forty-Eighth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. What wasonce known as Music Row.
During Will’s first several years in New York, he’d been on this block nearly constantly, at least once a week. Until fairlyrecently, it had been the home of a number of guitar shops—Sam Ash, Rudy’s, several others—each with its own staff of frustratedworking musicians trying to take advantage of tiny employee discounts to keep themselves stocked with gear while sufferingthrough the indignity of selling instruments and effects pedals and amps and strings to the city’s many, many amateurs.
Will had worked at one of these shops when he’d first moved to New York. That was back when he’d still assumed the break wascoming. Maybe one of the bands he was playing with would get signed, or one of the tracks he’d cowritten would blow up, orhe’d find his way into the really high echelon studio work with stars who could afford to pay their bands salaries whetherthey were recording or not, plus benefits.
Players with all that and more were everywhere in New York. You ran into them all the time, at open mics or at the storesor just in the bars where musicians hung out. There was no real reason Will couldn’t be one of them.
After all, Will had been far and away the best bassist—the best musician, really—in his high school. College, too. He couldsing, and more importantly, he could write. His was a special talent. Musical fame and fortune were his destiny. It was justa matter of time.
And then that time had gone by, and Will had come to realize something very important. There was good, and then there wasNew York good. Will Dando was Chicago good. Austin good, definitely. L.A. good, probably.
But New York good? No.
It turned out that Will Dando, at least from a musical perspective, was not particularly special.
And then he woke up from a dream with a hundred and eight bits of the future in his head. Not what he would have expected,not what he would have chosen.
But pretty fucking special.
Will walked out of Music Row into the broad concrete plazas laid out beneath the skyscrapers on the western side of SixthAvenue. An electronic news ticker ran around the façade of a building a block south, displaying an endless, ten-foot-tallstream of headlines.
His cell rang. Will checked the ID—his mother. He sent it to voice mail and slipped it back into his pocket.
She called a lot, and so she got his voice mail a lot, as did Hamza, Jorge Cabrera, and anyone else who tried to get in touchwith him these days. Will couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually spoken to his mother, or his father, or his sister.He texted, sent the occasional e-mail—they knew he was alive, and vice
