Kelsey stands at the back of the line, waiting for me to catch up. As soon as I join her in the crowd, the surrounding buzz of thoughts strips the last bit of grogginess out of my skull.
That last thought is from the guy at the head of the line, a tall, skinny dude with CODER written in binary on his shirt.
“Why do you need my phone?” he says out loud. He probably didn’t mean for it to come out like a whine.
The pert blond cheerleader type behind the table gives him a smile. “It’s no big deal,” she says. “Everyone’s doing it.”
Which is exactly the wrong message from exactly the wrong person for this guy. It causes flashbacks to another blond cheerleader telling him that everyone on the senior-class trip was going skinny-dipping, so he wouldn’t need his swimsuit. I don’t need to go any deeper into his memories to see how that turned out.
But the cheerleader has backup. Big guys in OmniVore polo shirts and khakis. Corporate security. One of them steps forward. “No phones,” he says, and holds out a small metal lockbox. “You won’t need them.”
Which actually translates to: OmniVore doesn’t want any of this being recorded or photographed. Can’t blame them. Too many embarrassing pics from other tech parties have shown up in the media later. It’s cost more than one company big chunks of venture capital and punitive damages in court. It only makes sense to keep someone from bringing a miniature piece of evidence-gathering hardware into the event.
The coder knows all this intellectually. Emotionally, it’s still difficult for him to put the phone into the box, his fingers sticking to it like they’re covered in glue. Like everyone else, he’s come to rely on that thing more than his own limbs. This is because of a complex conditioning system that’s wired down deep in our brains. We pick up our phones and press a button. And every time it responds with a new email or a text or a funny cat video, our brains release a little burst of dopamine. Pretty soon we’re pressing the button every couple of seconds, looking for that next hit. We’ve turned into those monkeys who were given a lever that delivered cocaine every time they wanted it.
It’s worse for guys like the tech geek. His phone is a vital organ that just happens to exist outside his body. It carries his whole world and keeps his secrets. It feeds him data and soothes him when he looks into its screen. I can almost see the string of affection linking him and his favorite toy.
But he still gives it up, because he’s got to get into the party, and the cheerleader and the football player are both telling him this is the price of admission. With a little mental whimper, he drops his phone into the box, which I’ll bet any amount of money is RF-shielded against all transmissions. The coder gets a claim ticket, and the lockbox goes onto a set of IKEA shelves they assembled in the parking lot just for this.
Every single one of the geeks goes through this same little psychodrama, so it takes us a while to get to the front of the line.
Both Kelsey and I drop our phones in without complaint. I don’t have any reason to worry about it. Even if anyone here knows who I am—which they don’t—they’d get nothing from my phone. It’s encrypted against most of the obvious password-cracking and snooping software. I’d be shocked if Sloan didn’t equip Kelsey with the same stuff or better.
We walk up the gravel path to the lodge together.
“You sure this is the way you want to do this?” she asks quietly.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“It doesn’t seem very covert.”
“Nothing’s going to happen here,” I reassure her. “This is just to survey the territory. Get a feel for the state of play on the board.”
“If you say so.” There’s a little more skepticism there than I think is necessary, but she shoves it down and smiles brightly as we enter the lodge.
THE PLACE IS huge, decorated in early Great White Hunter straight out of Tarzan movies and Hemingway novels. There are enough dead animals on the walls to qualify for a minor extinction event. The website for the preserve boasts that it offers a chance to hunt every exotic species from “Aardvark to Zebra” and they’ve got the heads to prove it.
There are more than a hundred OmniVore personnel inside the main room, and they’re all on edge. The nervous chatter in the air is nothing compared to the anxiety bouncing around in their brains. It’s a cage full of white mice right before feeding time in the reptile house.
They cluster around the bar to self-medicate. Which means that it’s too crowded for me to do the same thing. (Dammit.)
At the front of the room is a table and a podium set up for a speech. The anticipation gets thick in the air. I snag a few impressions from some of the longtime employees. Once, when the company was starting out, Preston showed up at one of these retreats and fired half of the people in the room. Another time, he walked in and gave everyone a $20,000 bonus.
Exactly fifteen minutes after the hour, Preston appears. He jogs out from a side door like the host of a late-night show. Preston’s employees give him a roar of approval normally reserved for a rock star. I do my usual sweep of the minds around me to see what they really think of him.
This is why I didn’t waste my time on Kelsey’s carefully assembled profile. That’s only paper. It holds only what people are willing to say out loud. But people are good at lying. They do it all the time, especially to themselves. If it sounds especially convincing, they write it down.
But when they see someone in person, they’re immediately reminded of their true feelings. And I get a straight shot of what they actually believe, unfiltered by any illusions.
There are dozens of competing impressions of Preston bouncing around the room, carried forward on the waves of fear and hope generated by the crowd. I sift through all of it. It’s not easy, but I’ve had practice at this, and I assemble my own portrait of Preston directly from the memories of his people.
I’m surprised: for the most part, they genuinely love him.
One guy recalls how Preston found him utterly stuck with an error in a compiler—whatever the hell that is—and Preston sat down and they hashed it out together, chugging caffeine until their vision blurred, stuck in front of their keyboards for ten hours straight. Another programmer remembers how he once mentioned he got into Radiohead when he was in college. Preston mocked him mercilessly—he called it “music for the funeral for the death of music”—but then the programmer found a custom playlist in his email, all obscure cuts and bootlegs. There’s the customer-development guy, no programming experience, just sales and marketing, who never felt like he fit in. Then Preston praised him in front of the entire company for bringing in the cash that bought all the cool geek toys.
There are a few images of Preston as the abusive dad too. One guy can’t forget how Preston screamed at him for nearly an hour over some bad coding—just utterly dismantled him, tore him down to the foundations, and left his ego in the rubble. But the guy blames himself. He mainly feels bad for letting Preston down. Preston forgave him the next day and complimented the repair work he’d done. Now he treasures that moment like the memory of a favorite toy at Christmas.
More than anything else, they think he’s cool. And he makes them feel cool. They see him drive up to work in a Bugatti Veyron, and they think
ozen memories of Preston in Vegas, taking them to Spearmint Rhino and dropping tens of thousands of dollars on strippers for everyone. Blowing off a crucial deadline so the whole company could go out and get some sun on the first decent day of spring. Sending a charter jet to pick up Five Guys burgers so they could see what all the hype was about.
Most of these guys—and they’re all guys, aside from the hired cheerleaders and Kelsey—remember all too well what it was like to be left out, to be excluded and ignored. No matter what the media says about the geek inheriting the earth, these guys all have a hard diamond of pain buried deep somewhere. They stayed inside when everyone else was on the playground. They will always know, deep down, that there was something that made them strange before it made them valuable.
Preston doesn’t suffer that the same way they do. His charisma, his charm, his confidence—it all seems to come from another planet. Right now, at this point in time, everyone in the world wants a piece of him. He could sit at the cool kids’ table, if he wanted. And he chooses to hang out with them instead. He blows right past the velvet rope and goes into the VIP section, and he takes them along. He makes the headlines, but they bask in his reflected glory. He’s their hero.
Just from swimming around in their pool of memories, I’m starting to like Preston myself.
He’s smiling and greeting everyone clustered around him. He dresses like his people, but there’s a cosmetic layer of muscle under his vintage T-shirt; nerds can afford personal trainers now. In one hand, he holds a novelty-toy key chain. He presses a button, and a tinny electronic voice from a computer chip spits out an insult: “Fuckyou! Gotohell! Eatme! Eatme!” He clicks it incessantly, even while he’s shaking hands.
This is one of his trademark kinks. He usually carries a gag gift like this—a bottle opener that says “It’s beer-thirty!” when used, a coffee cup shaped like a toilet, or a pen that reveals a naked woman when it’s flipped upside down.
The business reporters love it. It makes him colorful. One magazine profile about Preston went into detail about this little habit. His grandfather owned a novelty shop, and Preston spent a lot of time there after school while his parents were at work. The article made it sound like a cherished memory. Now he carries these toys as a way of remembering the place where he started.
Preston grips and grins his way through a half dozen more people before putting the key chain in his pocket. He takes his place at the front of the room. One of his flunkies places a black case on the table behind him. He raises his hands and gestures for quiet.
“So,” he says to the crowd. “I bet you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here. Well, it should be pretty obvious.”
Then he turns and theatrically opens the case. He brings out a combat shotgun. It’s a Mossberg 500, popular with the police and the military for busting doors and clearing rooms. I’m betting it’s the first time most of these guys have seen one outside of a video game.
Discomfort spreads like a stomach flu through the crowd. “Are we going hunting?” one guy near the front asks.
“Hunting? What makes you think that?” Preston says. He looks around the lodge, as if seeing the dead animals for the first time. “What, you think I want to kill cute little fuzzy animals? Hunt helpless, endangered species?”
He looks around. No answer this time.
“Well, where’s the fun in that? Stupid things barely know when to get out of the way of a bullet. Evolution left them behind a long time ago. That’s survival of the fittest—you’re either fast or you’re meat.”
That gets a big laugh. Then he shifts the Mossberg into ready-to-fire position, the stock braced against his body, aiming it at them. The laughter dies to nervous chuckles.
“No,” Preston says. “I’m going to hunt you for sport.”
Silence. He lets it stretch for a moment, then busts out laughing.
The OmniVore employees begin laughing too, even though they’re not entirely sure why.
“In fact, you’re all going to hunt. Each other. Every one of you gets a fine weapon just like this one. Every one of you will get twenty rounds. And then you’ll all be released out there, onto the grounds, and the last man standing will be the winner. Hunt and be hunted. The most dangerous game. The toughest, the smartest, and the strongest will survive.”
One of the techs in the crowd tentatively raises his hand. “Like paintball?”
“Paintball?” Scorn oozes from Preston. “Paintball is for pussies. Go to Google—hell, go to Facebook—if you want to play games. You might as well be playing Candy Crush or Angry Birds. We deal in real threats and real results. Every day, out there, when we are facing the unknown scumbags who attack our clients, when we engage with our competitors and enemies in the market, we are not playing games. We don’t do trust exercises at OmniVore. We don’t do drum circles or sharing time or Pictionary. We are free-range capitalists. We use real guns.”
There’s a long moment of uncomfortable silence. Preston breaks it with another huge, mocking laugh.
“Oh relax, you guys. Human Resources would have a shit fit if I gave you live ammo. This gun is loaded with beanbag rounds. Totally nonlethal.”
That same guy in the front row—clearly a favored employee, to be so close to the boss—speaks up. “Don’t the cops use those?”
Preston looks at him blankly. “Yeah. What’s your point?”
The guy looks around for support and chuckles. “Well,” he says, “won’t that—won’t it hurt?”
Preston shrugs. “You tell me.”
Then he shoots him.
The sound is huge, a thunderclap echoing off the walls and ceiling. The employee goes down with a sudden cry of anguish. Some of the OmniVores scream. A couple even dive for cover.
For a moment, nobody moves. There’s a murmur through the crowd. Panic and fear and disbelief, straining against one another.
They realize, one after another, that the howling noise is the guy who was shot. He’s wailing in pain. But he’s still alive.
Preston gestures, and a couple of guys from security haul the guy to his feet. Tears are streaming down his face. He’s bent in half, but they keep him upright.
Preston lifts the guy’s shirt. There’s a pattern of fat red welts all over his torso, standing out vividly against the flabby white skin. But no blood.
“Yeah, that sure looks like it hurts,” Preston says. “Better try not to get shot.”
He pulls the guy into a bear hug, and the crowd starts laughing and cheering. Preston shoves him away, and the guards take him over to a medic with an EMT’s kit. The shooting victim is helped from the room by the musclemen and the medic. He looks like he’s aged twenty years, shuffling his feet along the floor as if he’s on thin ice.
Nobody’s really paying attention to him now, though. Their focus is back on Preston.
“Of course, I wouldn’t expect any of you to take a risk without a reward,” he says. “That’s the whole point of what we do. So the last man standing, when all the smoke has cleared, he gets one hundred thousand dollars. Not in equity. Not in options. I’m talking one hundred K, cash, to whoever wins.”
He lets that sink in for a beat. Then he smiles.
“Who’s ready to start shooting?”
The crowd lets out an animalistic roar. I feel the consensus wash over them like a wave. This is all part of the game, they decide. Only a loser would complain about the rules.
“Weapons and gear are out front,” Preston tells the others. “You get a fifteen-minute start, and then it’s every man for himself.”
The OmniVores knock back their drinks and stampede for the exit. Preston wades into the crowd, gives high fives and fist bumps to his chosen favorites. He takes the key chain out again.
I step back to where Kelsey is waiting, drink in hand, close to the wall. The OmniVore crew streams past us toward the door. The tide of bodies is bringing Preston slowly in our direction.
His eyes lock on to Kelsey and there’s a spike of lust
as he recognizes her.
“Kelsey,” he says happily, voice booming, walking past two other guys to get to her. “So glad you could make it.”
She offers her hand, he takes it and pulls her closer, going for a kiss and hug. She manages to deflect both with a turn that’s almost like a Krav Maga move.
“Eli,” she says. “Thanks for the invite. I know Everett really appreciates it.”
“Well, I’d hoped I would get to see him in person.” His voice is still way too loud. He looks at me. “You must be the new errand boy, then.”
With that, he turns to me and steps just to the edge of my personal space. It’s a frat-boy/Business 101 intimidation tactic, and it’s all I can do not to laugh.
Now that Preston is close enough, I realize why he’s been shouting since he entered. It wasn’t just to reach us in the back. He has foam plugs stuffed in his ears, the same kind they hand out on gun ranges to protect your hearing. He was ready to shoot someone before he even stepped into the room.
He puts out his hand. “Eli Preston,” he says.
“John Smith,” I say, and take it.
He hits the key chain and smiles. “Fuckyou! Gotohell!”
Then I see it. In his memory: A dingy closet of a store in a mall, almost always empty, every surface covered in thick dust, cheap crap on the shelves that no one ever bought. The looming, sullen figure of his grandfather, who rarely smiled. The other kids who didn’t have to work for their money, who came into the store and mocked him. The computer in the back office, a lifeline to a whole other world.
Looks like Preston knows a thing or two about being excluded. And resentment.
He hits the button again. “Gotohell! Gotohell!” His bodyguards are at his shoulder the whole time, watching me, making sure I don’t get too angry at the joke.
Up close, I notice something off about them. I expected a couple of bored former cops, hanging around to satisfy Preston’s ego. Private security is usually nothing more than a status symbol, another way for rich people to keep score. Despite some of the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, bullet wounds are an occupational hazard for a dealer working a corner, not executives moving credit default swaps.
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