“But nobody in that room believed you had that ability.”
“That’s what makes me different. I don’t need anyone else to believe in me. I can implant the memory of a trauma directly. Your security men were in pain. They were experiencing a physical reality, based on what their minds were telling them.”
“So did you break my bodyguards?”
“They’ll be fine,” I tell him. “It’s like any other bad memory. It passes with time.”
“And there are no permanent effects?”
“Hopefully just a strong aversion to picking a fight with me in the future.”
He considers that for a moment. “You’re fairly open about all of this, considering we only just met.”
“It’s only a trade secret if someone else can do it.” What I don’t tell him is what that little trick costs me. I can put the idea of a broken leg or a stab wound into another person, but their response echoes in my head as well—so I always get a percentage of the pain I inflict on anyone else.
“But where does it come from?” Sloan says. He really wants to understand. There’s a lot of the true scientist in him. He wants to know.
“Psychosomatic implant, delivered through quantum entanglement of consciousness,” I say.
And then I restrain a laugh, because for the first time, I detect a hint of confusion in Sloan’s brilliant mind. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?” he asks.
I shrug and smile. “Hell if I know. It’s a term I heard someone use once when he was talking about me. It was his theory. I’m not sure I can explain it.”
Sloan frowns, just a little. “You don’t have any idea why you can do what you do. And you’re satisfied to leave it at that? You’ve never looked any further?”
After the Vegas act, this is what everyone wants. They want an answer. They want to know why. And I can’t help them. I grappled with the question for years, wondered what made me different, what set me apart from everyone else. Until I decided it didn’t matter.
“I’ve lived with it my whole life,” I tell Sloan. “Do you wonder why your legs work? Or your eyes? Somebody told you something about your nervous system once, back in school, and you accepted it. But it doesn’t change how you walk or see. This is what I am. I can’t change it. So I might as well use it.”
He considers me for a moment. “Remarkable,” he says. “You know, a man with your talents could make a lot more money doing other things.”
When one of the richest men in the world wants to give you financial advice, you listen. “Like what?”
“Blackmail, for starters. You could make a fortune.”
“Blackmailers end up with a target on their backs. And it’s never a good idea to piss off the people in your tax bracket, Mr. Sloan. Just ask your friend Tom Eckert.”
“From what I saw, you can defend yourself.”
“I’d rather not live like that.”
“Well, if you find blackmail distasteful, why don’t you just steal? Pick account numbers or insider secrets out of people’s skulls, then use what you find to make yourself rich.”
“What makes you think I don’t?” I say. “You have a lot of valuable information. Why would you let someone like me this close to you?”
He shakes his head. “You’re not that sort of person.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I am. Forgive me if this sounds arrogant, but I’m in the business of knowing more than other people.”
“Your assistant had a few gaps in his knowledge.”
“True. But everything Lawrence knows about you is not everything I know about you. I knew how he would react to you. I wanted to find out how you’d react to him.”
“Did I pass the test?”
“It confirmed what I already suspected. I’ve read your file. It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that I have contacts in the government, both from my days in the NSA and from the people who depend on me to make them richer. So believe me when I say: I know everything you did while working for the CIA. I know how you came to them. I know why you left too. That’s why I don’t feel particularly unsafe with you, Mr. Smith. I know you have a conscience. But perhaps more important than that, I know you have a price. And I know that I can meet it.”
I don’t say anything. I’d forgotten what it feels like to be surprised. It’s almost terrifying.
“How are the headaches?” he asks.
Another surprise. And proof that Sloan really has read my file. Or at least part of it. “Good days and bad,” I admit.
“I can give you some respite from them. A place you can go without people. A sanctuary of your own. No other thoughts, no other interference. Just quiet.”
He takes out his phone and taps the screen. Then he shows me a map of a small chunk of green in the middle of a field of blue.
“This is Ward Island, located in Davis Bay off the coast of Washington. Thirteen acres. Zero population. There’s a fully equipped house there. Twelve thousand square feet, three master bedrooms, wine cellar, wet bar. Solar panels, dedicated broadband cable to the mainland, plus satellite backup if you need it. It’s easily accessible by boat. At the moment, it’s vacant. I own it.”
“You’re offering me an island?”
“A ninety-nine-year lease, actually. It would revert to my heirs afterward. Obviously, neither of us would be around to see that happen. But for the rest of your natural life, it would be yours. You can have servants on the island, paid for by me, or, if you prefer, you can simply have supplies dropped off and a cleaning crew on a regular basis. You can come and go as you please for your work, but in between your jobs, complete isolation. A retreat from the world, anytime you want it, with thirty nautical miles between you and the next living human.”
I look at the little green shape on the screen for a moment longer. No people. No endless chattering stream of complaints and pains and idiocies.
“That’s quite a fee,” I say. “I’m listening.”
I finally get something concrete from Sloan. A feeling of satisfaction. Once again, it confirms for him that everything has a price. It’s not so much that he believes in money as a supreme power above all else, but it restores his faith that everything can be quantified. He lives in a world of absolute limits and measures, and he knows he’s found mine: a home of my own, quiet and secure against the constant noise invading my head.
The offer alone is enough to buy my loyalty; he really is a very smart man.
Sloan checks his watch, a vintage 18-karat gold Hamilton Pulsar.
“Then I should probably tell you why I wanted to meet you,” he says.
“ELI PRESTON,” SLOAN says. “You’ve heard of him.”
“At this point, who hasn’t?”
Sloan smiles. “He’s been making a lot of noise, that’s true.”
Eli Preston is not on the Forbes 500 list, but everyone in the financial press says it’s only a matter of time. He’s the founder of OmniVore Technology, a small, privately held company, which is expected to make him a billionaire once it goes public.
Preston is supposed to be the next Zuckerberg, or at least one of the candidates: smart, ambitious, and insanely rich; lives on bulletproof coffee, energy drinks, and high-protein sushi prepared by a personal chef; lectures about the future at TED one week, then shows up courtside at a Knicks game the next.
He just turned twenty-six. I know this because he rented out the entire Bellagio in Las Vegas for the party. I read about it on Gawker.
I’m not, however, completely clear on what exactly OmniVore does, or why it’s worth so much money. So I ask.
For a brief instant, I get a slight weariness from Sloan. His IQ scrapes the limits of the tests made to measure it. He’s constantly explaining things, stopping his own personal train of thought and waiting for everyone else to catch up. To him, the rest of us move in slow motion, taking forever to understand what is clear to him in an instant. For a moment, I sense how tiring it must be to be so much smarter than ever
yone else. To know the answers so long before everyone else does. To see clearly while they’re still blindly groping around in the dark.
But he explains anyway.
“OmniVore is what we call a data-miner,” he says. “It sifts through massive amounts of information for its clients. You see, most companies are drowning in facts. Thanks to the Internet and cheap digital storage, they have access to incredible levels of detail now—they can track down to the minute the last time you purchased razor blades at the store, and it goes into a little file that contains every other fact about you. Your credit-card number. Your birth date. What car you drive. Your sexual preference. Your favorite flavor of ice cream. Everything that might be considered even remotely relevant to extracting another couple of dollars from your wallet. And they have that for everyone. They can track the number of left-handed divorced women who visit their website, or gauge the reaction on Twitter to their latest ad campaign from Denver Broncos fans or vegetarians or even rape victims, if they want to go that far. But it’s all too much. They have more raw data than ever, and they actually know less. It’s like drinking from a fire hose, as they say. They can’t narrow it all down. That’s where OmniVore comes in. It applies its software to the data, and it finds out exactly what the companies actually need to know. It identifies problems before they happen. It learns the patterns inherent in a business, and makes predictions for the future. It discovers threats and eliminates them.”
“Threats? Like what?”
“It depends. For a tech company, it could be hackers or industrial espionage, someone trying to steal next quarter’s product designs. For a retailer, credit-card fraud or employees stealing merchandise. For a bank, embezzlement or tax fraud. Could be anything. The idea is that OmniVore’s software is smarter than humans. It’s like chaos theory in reverse: we see a hurricane, but they know where and when a butterfly flapped its wings.”
He’s dumbed it down significantly for me, but it’s close enough.
“And that’s profitable?”
“God, yes. Eli is turning away the biggest companies in the world. He’s got government agencies, automakers, studios, TV networks—everyone you can think of, really—lined up and waiting on him. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, there are people with deep pockets willing to pay a great deal for this service.”
“So what’s your problem with him?”
“Not many people know this, but Eli used to work for me.”
“That doesn’t seem like something he’d be shy about. I imagine it would look good on his résumé.”
“We didn’t part on the best of terms. I recruited him out of Harvard as an analyst. I thought Eli would be perfect for the job. As it turned out, he got bored very quickly. He didn’t care for sitting in an office and crunching numbers. He wanted to be out in front, playing at the high-stakes tables.”
Right. Where the hookers and free drinks are. It wouldn’t be the first time a young guy thought he could do better than his boss. “You fired him.”
“We came to a mutual understanding. A few months later, he had raised enough capital to start OmniVore. And his success story began.”
“But you don’t think he did it himself.”
“You really must be psychic,” he says, smiling. I hear that joke a lot. I smile along with him anyway. “Yes. He’s built his company—everything he’s done since he left—on the strength of my ideas, my intellectual property.”
Something about the timeline seems off. I interrupt Sloan. “Let me ask you a question here: He hacked your files two years ago, and you’re just finding out now?”
“Do you understand what I do, Mr. Smith?”
He’s right. I don’t. I’m not ashamed to admit it. “Not even a little.”
“You invest in the stock market?”
“Not really.”
That surprises him. “Where do you keep your money?”
“In my wallet, mostly.” He laughs at that, but it’s true. My fees are high, but so are my expenses. I also don’t trust money I can’t pull out and spend whenever I want. I know it’s not very smart, but old habits die hard.
“Well, if this all works out, maybe we can set you up with a starter portfolio,” he says. At the same time, in his head, he prepares to give me the Fisher-Price explanation of his job, the one he uses for people he meets at parties.
“Stock picking used to be about people making educated guesses based on the companies,” he says. “Profit and loss statements, supply and demand, market conditions—but really, nothing more scientific than throwing darts at a board with names on it. Most investment firms are lucky if they do as well as an index fund—that’s a collection of stocks that simply mirrors the market, goes up when it goes up, goes down when it goes down. What I do is different. Have you ever heard of algorithmic trading?”
You don’t work for rich clients without picking something up. “You use computers to analyze the market and make stock trades for you.”
“Close enough,” he says. “I invented it, more or less. I created an algorithm—that’s a mathematical formula that you enter into a computer—that analyzes data. Essentially, it was a way to look at any set of data and organize it, and even make predictions based on it. It could find the underlying patterns in the numbers, when a human being would see only a mass of random information. This was something I discovered when I was looking into Sienkiewicz-Moore theorems, a subset of Big Number theory, back when I was still in graduate school.”
All I get from that is the ice wall again. He sees he’s lost me and tacks quickly back into simple concepts. “So I take a series of facts, translate them into numbers, plug them into the formula, and it makes a series of educated guesses about the future. What made the algorithm so interesting was that the predictions were almost always right. I could take any facts that could be reduced to mathematical inputs—migration patterns of birds, or tide tables, or annual rainfall in the Gobi Desert, for instance—and I would get a very good idea of how those same numbers would turn out in the future. Then it occurred to me, what if I entered something a little more concrete than rainfall estimates?”
I’m starting to get it now. “Like, say, stock prices.”
He smiles again, and I sense genuine pride still lingering there. “Exactly. I quickly found the algorithm was a great deal more valuable to me in practice than as a theory published in an academic paper. That’s how I began trading. I’d use the algorithm to predict the rise and fall of the market, and I’d make bets accordingly.”
“And you got very rich.”
Another small burst of pride. “Yes. Other people noticed. They hired their own computer engineers and math professors. Now there’s a whole industry of traders and programmers analyzing market data using algorithms and computers. Each firm has something they call their ‘secret sauce.’ That’s a proprietary algorithm that’s the heart of their trading. It tells their computers how to interact with the markets. I called mine Spike. To find the spikes in the markets.”
He looks at me. I smile, to show him I get it. “Your secret sauce is better.”
“Much, much better. Not to boast, Mr. Smith, but nobody else has come close to understanding what I did when I broke that problem back in graduate school. And we’re constantly refining the process, feeding more data to the algorithms. Spike, like every other piece of trading software, makes millions of decisions every second. Literally billions of dollars every minute, all moved around by computers. That requires incredibly smart people to analyze market trends, to see risks and opportunities and then translate them into the kind of math that machines can understand. Everyone is trying to beat the odds, trying to get their computers to think a little faster, a little smarter. It’s not easy. As I said, most firms are lucky to match the market. The best ones can offer you perhaps a ten percent return over time.”
“What’s your return?” I ask.
“Eighty to ninety percent,” he says. “Even when the economy collapsed, w
e managed to make a profit. All with Spike. It’s simply smarter than anything anyone else can come up with. Other people will promise you pennies. We double your money, or close to it.”
Bullshit. That’s Ponzi scheme territory. Nobody can guarantee that kind of return. I don’t get any active deception off Sloan, but people have a habit of buying into their own hype. After all, it’s not a lie if you really believe it.
Some of my skepticism must show up on my face, because Sloan smiles and asks, “You don’t believe me?”
I try to be diplomatic. “That’s quite a return,” I say. “Warren Buffett only manages nineteen percent, and he’s supposed to be the most successful stock picker in history.”
Sloan smiles again. “Warren’s a friend. But he’s a very public figure. People follow him. They jump into his stocks when he buys and run away when he sells. We don’t allow that. We keep our trading secret. We’ve got a dedicated dark pool that hides our trades, and we spread them over a variety of market makers. And we control our overall investment. I could have a half a trillion dollars in assets under management if I wanted. I’ve got the clients lined up outside my door. But then we’d be big enough to tip the market. People would see our trades move the prices. We’d have information leakage, and we’d lose our advantage. I don’t need that. That’s why we’ve kept the heart of Spike a secret ever since I invented it.”
“And you think Preston stole it from you.”
Some anger finally slips past the ice wall.
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