by Tony Salter
There had been moments back then when I’d wondered whether I should have left her with boring Damian and Akiko, but there was no going back and Joe’s paternity test was already registered with the court. It was going to be over soon enough.
I looked at the pretty young girl sitting in front of me and watched as she dismissed her demons, opened her eyes and smiled. ‘I really don’t believe I’m telling you all this,’ she said.
‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘I wanted to get to know you and we all have secrets in our past. It’s what makes us who we are. At least the story seems to have a happy ending. I assume that, once your dad found you, things improved?’
‘After a while,’ she said. ‘I think it took me a couple of years to learn to stop being so defensive. Luckily, Dad’s always been amazingly kind and patient and I calmed down eventually. In a weird kind of way, I think he’s always felt guilty for not having known about me before.’
‘You’ve been through a lot in a short life,’ I said. ‘At least that’s all over now.’
‘Not quite,’ she said, shifting in her chair. ‘My adopted father, Damian, got in touch with me last week. He wants to meet.’
‘Really? And you’ve not seen him since …?’
‘No. I think he went to prison and my mum went back to Japan. I’m pretty sure he’s not supposed to contact me, though.’
‘Will you see him?’
‘I think so. I’m in a good place now and I’ve always wanted to hear his side of things. I googled his trial transcripts a few years ago and saw that he denied everything right to the end. There was such a lot of evidence against him, but he never changed his story.’
‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘That’s probably not so unusual, but you have to do what you feel is right. I’m sure you’ll be OK as long as you take care to meet in a public place.’
We spent over two more hours in the bar, drank too many cocktails and got to know each other. Or rather, she learnt as much about me as I wanted her to and, let’s face it, I probably knew more about her than she did herself.
Even so, taking my puppet-master hat off for a moment or two, there’s no substitute for direct interaction and Nicki had turned out to be everything I’d hoped she would be, and more. Nature or nurture, it didn’t matter – it had been worth the wait. If I could manage the next ten years as well as the last, I would have my perfect successor.
The whole business with Damian was a wrinkle I didn’t need and would have to be dealt with. People should know when to stay away.
2037
Plans, Plans, Plans
‘Jane?’
‘Yes, Ms Martin.’
‘I left some details for a company called Odell Services on your desk last night.’
‘I saw. I was about to ask you what you wanted me to do with them.’
‘Send them to Nicki Taylor and ask her to carry out an acquisition target analysis, please.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll need it by Monday close of play … And Jane?’
‘Yes.’
‘Book in a follow-up meeting with Nicki on Tuesday afternoon. Block off half an hour.’
It had been ten years since Nicki won the Pulsar scholarship – no surprise there – and it had equally been no surprise that we’d then offered her a full-time job. She wasn’t perfect by a long way, but she was smart and learned quickly. I still felt confident that we were on track.
Pulsar was a big company, and I’d worked hard to develop my reputation as a reclusive, semi-mythical founder. It allowed me to minimise the time I spent with ambitious idiots trying to further their careers. They weren’t idiots, of course – over three hundred of our employees had one or more PhDs – but that didn’t stop them behaving as though they were.
My stand-offish reputation meant it would have been highly unusual for me to have much contact with a junior employee – even a high-flyer like Nicki – and, for a long time, I’d only been able to justify seeing her a few times a year. And when we did meet, it was always in a larger corporate context – conferences, product launches or strategy meetings.
She’d needed to make her own way through the Pulsar organisation until she was ready for the next big step. Or at the very least, she’d needed to believe she was making her own way.
During those years, I’d devoted my time to building the company from big to huge and, by the time Nicki was closing in on a senior management position, Pulsar was closing in on the world number one spot. Global population figures had stabilised at just under ten billion and by March 2037, over four billion of them were using a Pulsar product to manage their online security.
They were marvellous years – I loved the feeling of being in control of everything around me – and most of the time, I managed to discipline myself to only think about Nicki and Sam once per month. On the appointed day, I would take a day trip to my place in Provence, catch up on everything going on in their lives and initiate any necessary tweaks and nudges. I would then have dinner delivered to the villa and would sit on the balcony with a glass of wine. As the sun sank slowly into the sea, I built the future in my mind, layer by layer.
Finally, the long wait was coming to an end; six months earlier, Nicki had been promoted to Vice-President of our small acquisitions department, elevating her to the senior management team for the first time. It had given me more opportunities to have one-to-one meetings with her and I was finally ready to move on to the next stage in my strategy.
As for Sam, my plans were just about to begin …
Nicki sat across from me, sitting bolt upright and occasionally straightening the document in front of her while I made a show of leafing through my own copy.
‘Interesting report,’ I said, once I felt she’d suffered enough. ‘But I was unsure quite what your recommendations were?’
I’d not left my office until almost midnight the previous evening. The eight-page report in my hands was exactly what I’d been hoping for. The analysis was precise and the research impressive, considering the time available. The conclusions were weak, but I had a sense there was more to come.
I didn’t have to wait long to find out. ‘I’m sorry about the weak summary,’ said Nicki. ‘There is a reason. Some of my conclusions are controversial and I wanted to explain them face-to-face.’ She was still sitting upright, a picture of corporate confidence. She had come a long way, but I could see her right thumbnail digging hard into the soft pad of her forefinger. It was all right to be nervous, but she would need to learn to hide it better.
‘Odell is an interesting business,’ she continued. ‘Very secretive, but I’d expect that for a political consultancy. They appear to have attracted some impressive clients over the past few years, although I should stress that it was hard to find any solid data.’ Nicki opened her copy of the report and turned it towards me. ‘You can see the provisional client list in the appendix here. I’ve marked the ones I’m confident about in red, the others are mostly hearsay and rumour.’
‘As, you say an impressive list,’ I said. ‘If you’re right, this company has been involved in every major election campaign for the past three years.’
‘Indeed. And working for the winning side every time.’ She closed the report and put it on the desk. ‘Especially impressive for a company that materialised from nowhere less than five years ago. They seem to have left the competition in the dust. And I can’t trace the actual ownership. Lots of holding companies, but drill too far and there are brick walls everywhere. I might be able to dig deeper, but not without flagging our interest.’
‘There are ways,’ I said. ‘I can explain how, but another time.’
‘I’d love that,’ said Nicki, ‘and I won’t forget to remind you. Anyway, I want to run through a bit of historical context before I get to my real point. It’s going over familiar ground, but please bear with me. It won’t take long.’ She seemed to take my lack of response as agreement and continued.
‘As you know, there’s been a huge amo
unt of money and research spent on social media influencing ever since the infamous Facebook experiment in 2012 and the scandals of election-rigging which followed for years afterwards. Brexit, both Trump elections and dozens more – the Russians and the Chinese had their fingers everywhere. By 2020, there was a huge amount of hard evidence proving that massive focussed use of bot and troll armies could leverage social media to influence people’s views, opinions and, in a significant percentage of cases, their actual decisions. Cognitive linguistics was the hottest skill in tech and, in a world where most elections balance on a knife edge anyway, democracy was up for sale.’
‘It was a fascinating time,’ I said, nodding. ‘I enjoyed watching the liberal media thrashing around like dying catfish in a half-drained swamp. They’d been wallowing in smug complacency for too long and couldn’t understand why their influence had evaporated. As a result, election-rigging scandals were much more newsworthy than personal security and identity protection … fortunately for me.’
Nicki gave me a sideways look before continuing. ‘As you also know, the end of democracy turned out to be yet another storm in a teacup. I wanted to understand why and have been working on a detailed meta-analysis of all related investments. According to my numbers, between 2020 and 2040 at least twice as much money and resource was devoted to blocking social media manipulation as was applied to actually doing it.’
‘That is interesting,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen it quantified. The numbers make sense though.’
‘And if you combine that with the collapse of Facebook and the fragmentation of social media channels, it’s not that surprising that the rumours and scandals around social media influencing have faded rather than grown.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘These things often tend to balance themselves out, don’t they? Laws of Nature.’
‘Yes.’ Nicki leant forward. She was excited about something. ‘Until Odell Services came along. They seem to be playing by different rules …’ She paused and sat back in her chair. ‘Can I ask why you asked me to prepare this analysis?’ she said. ‘Are you thinking of acquiring them?’
‘Do you think we should?’
‘Well, on paper they’re a long way from our core business, so it’s not an obvious call.’ She drew a deep breath before continuing. ‘But it might just be a very smart move.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘That’s the part of my report I didn’t want to write down,’ said Nicki, her thumbnail pressing even harder into her soft skin. ‘I don’t want to speak out of turn. And I think Pulsar is an amazing company, but in my opinion we’re nothing like as strong as we think we are. We’re vulnerable in a fundamental way – even great people, innovation and exceptional new product development can’t be relied on to protect us. There are fundamental threats which are out of our control and, perversely, they become stronger at the same time as we do.’
She looked up at me with puppy-dog-pleading eyes, unsure whether she was about to get a pat on the back or a sharp rap on the nose.
‘Go on,’ I said, not willing to indulge her with either response. Not straight away, at least.
‘OK,’ she said, a slight tremor creeping into her voice. ‘My thinking needs a bit of context. We’ve seen a new pattern over the past thirty-odd years. From the turn of the twentieth century, technology created a platform for global monopolies to exist in a way that they hadn’t for a long time, if ever. The big monsters like Google, Facebook and Amazon came from nowhere and took over everything. With their hyper-dominant scale and market share, there was a moment when it seemed that they were invulnerable. They had moved beyond governments, stepped outside the normal rules.’
‘Particularly the rules about paying taxes,’ I said, trying to stay with the subject and stop my thoughts running backwards against my will.
I couldn’t separate those rollercoaster years from the shock of Fabiola’s death. If only I could have brushed over those memories, redacted them with a fat, black marker pen … I’d done my best, but the harder I tried, the sharper the memories became.
Nicki continued, oblivious. ‘But look at what happened. Facebook lasted barely twenty-five years, Amazon not much longer. Google is still around, but a shadow of what it was.’ She leant forward again, face alight with the passionate certainty of youth. ‘None of that could have happened without government and media interference. There is a well-developed theory that the writing was on the wall for them when the US government started referring to them as Standard Social, Standard Search and Standard Commerce. Just like Standard Oil a century earlier. Too big to fail, but too big to be allowed to continue.’
‘I’m sure you’re planning to tell me something I don’t know at some point, Nicki.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, apparently unfazed by my tone. ‘My point is that we’re in a different era, but the old rules still apply, whether in politics, media or in finance. There have always been rich and powerful people and they’ve always done whatever it took to stay rich and powerful. What they can’t allow is brash new kids on the block threatening that power and control.’
I raised my eyebrows and struggled to restrain myself from drumming my fingers on the table. When would she get to the point?
‘Bear with me,’ she said. ‘The campaigns which undermine the usurpers are often framed in terms of populist memes – tax avoidance, labour exploitation, privacy breaches – but these public outcries are always orchestrated from behind the scenes. Orchestrated by the vested interests who feel threatened. I’m not saying it’s some sort of co-ordinated global conspiracy. It’s instinctive. Like cornered animals, self-protection is in their blood.’
‘And you’re saying that they’re going to come after Pulsar in the same way? Because we’re too successful?’ Nicki needed to work through this process for herself, and I needed to allow her to. Her conclusions were, however, not exactly news. A global company as powerful as Pulsar might as well have had a big archery target as a logo.
‘Maybe not this year, maybe not for a few more, but at some point soon,’ she said. ‘We’re too big, too influential. We’re Standard Personal Security. They’ll have to clip our wings.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Whether or not that’s true, it’s a coherent argument.’ Of course it was true; I knew of at least ten major government bodies which were investigating ways to either force us to share our technology or to tax us into oblivion. ‘Let’s say you’re right,’ I continued. ‘How would owning a political consultancy like Odell Services help us to protect ourselves?’
‘Odell has become an important tool for a lot of influential players. Incumbents will want Odell to help them in the future and they certainly won’t want them helping their rivals. Governments, businesses, it’s all the same. They rely on the goodwill of their customers or voters. It’s an existential necessity for them. But goodwill is fragile and a company like Odell can help them to keep it for longer.’
‘That sounds like you’re proposing a very expensive lobbying strategy.’
‘I think it’s more than that,’ she said. ‘I know you already have close relationships with the great and the good, but I’m not sure that’s enough. If we could add Odell to the mix with its kingmaker reputation, it might be possible for Pulsar to stay on top of the wave for longer.’
‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘But how does that fit with your earlier examples? Cambridge Analytica wasn’t able to help Facebook. Let’s face it, they couldn’t even protect themselves.’
‘I know,’ said Nicki. ‘But that was very different. There was no co-ordinated strategy involved, and Facebook had no control over Cambridge Analytica. They both got caught with their pants down.’
Nicki sat back in her chair. Having said her piece, she was looking at me for clues. Did I agree? Was I impressed? Or had she just committed professional suicide?
Unfortunately for Nicki, looking at me wasn’t going to help; I was impressed by her analysis and delighted by her conclusions, but I’d learnt my poker face from the S
phinx herself and wasn’t planning on giving anything away. Surprisingly few people understood the power of silence in discussions and negotiations. Quiet nothingness is often more powerful than words, and when you allow it to grow … and grow …
Nicki crumbled quickly enough. She needed to fill the void. ‘In any case, I’m not saying that it would be easy, or even possible, it’s just something that is worth considering …’
I left Nicki hanging after the meeting. Told her that I would re-read her report and think it over. She’d done everything I’d hoped for, but it wouldn’t be good to move too quickly – and besides I needed to spend a little time on my other project. Luckily, I’d made sure I had a good team in place to run my businesses on a daily basis. That stuff was becoming boring while my personal projects were turning out to be anything but.
I imagined it must be similar for those people who lay down a wine for twenty years. All the anticipation building as the ideal drink date approached. Personally, I preferred to order the twenty-year-old wine whenever I wanted. Then, if it turned out to be no good, I could always send it back.
I didn’t have that luxury where Nicki and Sam were concerned. If either of them turned out to be corked or simply vin ordinaire, there were no alternatives. I’d been forced to be patient, which had been painful but, as I started to taste the first bottles, I could see the upsides. Every sip had the potential to be a little sweeter after such a long wait.
Nicki was developing well, and it was finally time for Sam and I to meet. He’d been two years old when Fabiola died. Not able to be guilty of anything, or at least not consciously. My feelings were inextricably tangled; Sam was both her final gift and the catalyst which had led to her death. I didn’t know whether to love him or to hate him. The future would have to decide.