PART TWO
SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA,
1993
TWO
Harold Z Martens sat in his executive office of Evrisoft Corporation of Sunnyvale, California wondering what to do with his day. Evrisoft Corporate HQ was a medium-rise building of mirrored glass and reinforced concrete. At seven storeys it was the tallest building he could get approved by the San Jose city planning authorities. The building captured the azure skies and reflected them onto large ornamental pools surrounded by cherry trees. These miniature orchards were a passing nod to the fruit tree farms that previously occupied this part of Silicon Valley before it had spread all the way south from San Francisco to San Jose in the 1970s. The flowering trees were also planted in honour of the investment from Japanese technology investors who originally provided his venture capital and reminded them of cherry blossom time in Tokyo. Harold was a sour man who privately doubted his own capability and covered this with bluff and bluster to his employees and to the public. He could never quite gain sufficient affirmation for his leadership of the IT industry to the extent he would like. He cultivated the image of the software and financial genius who had been the visionary ten years previously seeing that the future of computing was in integrating software applications, networking and data and not in the hardware technologies prevalent at the time. Whatever the truth behind his origins he had indeed been fortunate enough to be starting up the right kind of software business just as the age of the hardware dinosaurs was ending. From that point on he was riding the wave as it gathered momentum and swept the IT industry before it.
His start-up had originally been a services company that had hired a number of disgruntled software engineers who wrote utilities that enhanced the operating systems of the major hardware suppliers. In the 1970s, the major revenues and profits were in the big iron hardware that bulked up the datacentres of the world’s largest corporations and were mainly developed in the laboratories around him in Silicon Valley. Harold cornered the market in the unlauded software engineers who essentially made these big Silicon beasts work together for the world’s largest corporate customers. He could hire these engineers out of the big hardware players for higher salaries and then charge them back to the same organisations at double the price. This was fine as the market was growing exponentially and the bigger companies always needed more skills than they could develop themselves. He soon noticed that these same engineers could be encouraged to come forward with good ideas that streamlined then revolutionised the applications of these large corporate customers. Harold started patenting these pieces and assembling them into the essential parts of much more complex systems. His patents included extensions to turn flat data files into relational databases, metadata that described where real data resided in a network, enabling cloud computing and distributed storage and applications later exploited by the internet.
He was also fortunate in that soon after his business began expanding three confident and attractive women had walked into his tiny office in downtown San Jose and propositioned Harold for a job. Not only were they offering substantial investment from a Japanese multinational that had identified Harold’s tiny business as a beneficiary of the next big wave in IT but they were really hot in an oriental way to Harold’s mind and he started fantasising about the potential for physical rather than professional relationships with all three. Harold was subconsciously aware that he was not a physically attractive man, floppy lank hair of nondescript sandy colouration curling around his jowls and his loose body contours taking their cue from this bad start. This just made him more aggressive in his attitude to both female and male employees. He was arrogant enough to believe the massive improvement in his financial circumstances was his just deserts and that this alone made him an attractive celebrity that transcended normal social mores. He was totally cool that these new Japanese ladies brought not only financial gain but also added the kind of glamour to his life that he deserved so well. He was later to find that they were also brilliant software engineers and capable of architecting software that actually worked in a reliable and scalable way that really was a double bonus that he no doubt well deserved.
The fledgling Evrisoft Corporation soon became the only supplier large corporate customers could go to for the database and networking software systems that increasingly controlled their business applications and exploited the ever more powerful hardware developed elsewhere in Silicon Valley. Within two years Evrisoft Corporation had moved out of its first tiny office to its first campus and grown to nearly a thousand software developers sourced from the best software minds around the world that gravitated to Evrisoft Corporation. Harold’s recruitment people in the Human Resources department were very close to the USA Immigration and Naturalisation Service and could easily obtain the visas necessary to bring in coding talents from across Europe and Asia. These immigrant workers were overwhelmed by the pay and conditions Harold offered them and they worked long hours slavishly to complete their work and be able to send pay home to their families back in their home countries. Two more years of stratospheric growth after that and Evrisoft enjoyed a spectacular Initial Public stock Offering. They soon moved to their current premises and had grown to nearly four thousand staff. Despite the company’s growth and size Harold kept middle management to a minimum and famously tried to interfere in every department believing that his inspirational direction was essential to the firm’s remarkable success. Despite this, Evrisoft was dramatically profitable; its products were uniquely software so their only costs were development and support unlike the ageing hardware companies with their factories overheads and pedestrian gross margins. Harold was a multi billionaire within six years of the fateful day the three beguiling women arrived at his office and so convincingly blew their smoke up his spreading behind.
The rumour was that Harold Z Martens surrounded himself only with female managers in executive positions so that he would be the undisputed alpha male in the upper echelons of his own domain. Harold had never seen any reason to get married. When he was poor he could not get attractive women to notice him. Now he was rich he believed he could have any woman he wanted by indulging their career aspirations and gracing them with his smallest consideration. Pop culture exterior to Evrisoft said that his female senior management team was also where he chose his lovers and that the executive team was regularly changed around to suit Harold’s baser instincts. The executive team were all slender and athletic in build in contrast to Harold who was tall but had become increasingly fleshy in proportion to his business success. His burgeoning success and penchant for the luxuries that afforded allowed little time for healthier pursuits. Harold had not been interested in progressing young fit men in his senior management as that ran increasingly counter to his self belief that his mental powers were the source of attraction for him in his female staff. He saw little reason for the competition of the presence of attractive men at executive levels. In essence Evrisoft ran an unwritten policy of reverse glass ceiling; only women could aspire to the very top positions.
The three oriental lady executives were particularly effective at pumping Harold’s ego and in the rarefied atmosphere of Evrisoft’s executive suite there were no challenging voices asserting that this particular emperor wore very scant executive clothing indeed. Harold was serenely unaware that the three women who had arrived in such surprising circumstances, who made his company the fastest growing company in the Valley, were actually Zarnha agents of the race Spargar attracted to Evrisoft as an ideal crucible to produce the technology needed to integrate later to their Mind system under the control of the Spargar empire across a host of earth-like planets. Equally Harold Z Marten was the perfect stooge to play the earth-born puppet that could be subordinated by Zarnha agents surrounding his executive management. The oriental lady executives that really ran the Evrisoft Corporation were born of race Spargar from planet Spargan in the Hyades star cluster in the constellation of Taurus. Within Spargar the Zarn
ha agents are responsible for the campaigns that drive the political success of Spargar across worlds with freshly emerging human civilisations. On developed worlds the Zarnha managed their assimilation to Spargar as dictators enforcing Spargar rule. In the case of the infiltration of Evrisoft they had been sent to planet Earth to further the covert goal that this newly technological human race would soon be ripe to be assimilated into Spargar technology and be subservient to their leader, the part-human, part-computer, Omeyn MuneMei.
The three women led day-to-day software development at Evrisoft with remarkable insight, there were no product failures on their watch and their programs, databases and networks led the market to such a great extent that they soon came to be de facto standards in the market for enterprise class business systems. Harold sat atop this empire and to the business community and media it was he who was the dark genius that masterminded the giant of the Information Technology market that was Evrisoft Corporation. It was easy for the Zarnha agents to stand quietly in the background pandering to race and gender stereotyping in this industry in the infancy of its technological age. Meanwhile Evrisoft continued to attract the brightest talents not just for the high salaries and small fortunes that spun off in company stock options as the stock price rose, split and then rose again but also because working at Evrisoft meant that you were at the hub of the Information Technology world that all others were measured against.
In addition to the three Zarnha Senior Vice Presidents who ran the three main product divisions, Harold’s most senior management team also included the female Chief Finance Officer and another female Senior Vice President of Human Resources. Harold had much more spare time than he pretended and whimsically took pleasure in summoning individual junior staff members to his office if he took exception to their ideas or decisions. He would lose his temper with them on these occasions and his features would swell and redden in a genuinely scary way, if only for the magnitude of his blood pressure. He was known to throw items across the room if he was piqued. He would occasionally summarily fire one of his senior managers in such ‘meetings’ without recourse to Human Resources department rules and regulations. This would bring the long-suffering lady Senior Vice President of Human Resources running to calm him down and find a way to paper over the busted regulations to which the unfortunate employee was entitled while simultaneously smoothing Harold’s indignant ruffled feathers. In truth these excesses of behaviour from Harold were a neat cover for his heightened sensitivity to an advanced persecution complex. He perceived enemies both businesswise and personal that were seeking to reduce him to the nervous individual he had been in the early days. The ‘Foxy Veeps’ as he thought of the lady senior vice presidents had fuelled his fears by telling him that there were indeed others who wanted to see him fail and were working every day to do him down. Harold became increasingly persecuted by thoughts of secret agents sent to topple him from his position and he saw shades of these threats in the scared faces of his employees and all he came into contact with on rare excursions into public view.
As comprehensively understood by all the most exquisitely persecuted some of Harold’s darkest fears were indeed true and forces were moving in the cosmos to oppose both him and the threat of the Evrisoft technology monopoly. Darryl and Robert, young men born of the fusion of Gayan souls with earthly infants and educated at Stanford University, were opposed to the progress of the unholy alliance of Harold Z Marten and his Zarnha agents to dominate the entire software industry. Known on planet Gaya as Keeran and Alron, they were Pointers of Dawn, who led campaigns of enlightenment within human races on developing worlds. They had been sent to California and reborn as Darryl and Robert to counter Zarnha plans to enslave humans on Earth with newly emerging software technologies that could be incorporated into their Spargar central Mind system. Zarnha agents of Spargar would often be found at the dawn of the technological age on a newly developing human world. They would be found dictating the nature of the computer and military systems that would ultimately grow to interface into the Spargar system hosted on their home planet Spargan and thereby bind new races of humans to the Spargar Empire.
Darryl and Robert, with their earthly bodies and Gayan souls, were two of the most potent forces in all the worlds of men, named as human leopards by their Zarnha enemies for their stealth and power. They had been sent to California at this time as it was the clear centre for technological development on Earth. They were reborn and grew up in Silicon Valley, indistinguishable from the local population, so that they could discover and counter Zarnha activity. In this way they could promote Gayan values of enlightenment and discovery with the ultimate goal of this new human race becoming the long-term ally of Dawn of Gaya and not being assimilated to the Spargar empire. In these latest incarnations Keeran had been named Darryl by his natural earthly parents and Alron was called Robert. Darryl and Robert had been raised in Palo Alto before attending Stanford together during the years Evrisoft had emerged to dominate the software industry. The two friends and colleagues had founded their own organisation to promote open and free software standards with the quirky title Pengey Corporation. Pengey sounded more approachable than the big corporate titles and attracted free-thinking individuals from the technology space that would not conform to the major corporates such as Evrisoft. They were working with this small group of like-minded IT professionals to generate alternative solutions to compete with the major Evrisoft products. These new solutions were open, which meant that developers worldwide on the web could add their own software patches in their own time and at their own expense. This allowed Pengey systems to grow much quicker than traditional methods. In return Darryl and Roberts’ small group at Pengey provided the overall architectural design framework for the software developed by the open developer community and obtained some funding for marketing the project. This gave the new Pengey company the basics required to establish a business but it was the worldwide development community that provided the bulk of the software programming. This caught the imagination of programmers worldwide and because so many were engaged then it could grow swiftly and the usual delays in testing and releasing products were short-circuited by the sheer numbers of enthusiastic developers giving their time for free. Darryl and Roberts’ product direction was unerringly accurate as, like the lady vice presidents over at Evrisoft, they had the unfair advantage of having seen this development stage played out many times in their cosmic experience.
It came as no great surprise to Darryl that Harold Z Marten’s office at Evrisoft called him one morning. Their activities were guaranteed to come to the attention of the software giant at some stage. It was in Evrisoft’s nature to research all new competitors and remove their threat by buying them or hounding them out of business. In this particular situation Darryl was also fully aware that there must be Zarnha operatives controlling the running of Evrisoft at the highest level and they were bound to be checking continually for threats to their ongoing success. It was Harold Z Marten’s executive assistant on the line requesting a meeting with Darryl and Robert at his office to discuss potential synergies between the software giant and the start-up open systems Pengey organisation. It was clear to Darryl that this would be a fairly one-way conversation as their nascent open systems offerings were a small but potentially serious threat to Evrisoft’s proprietary and very expensive products. Evrisoft’s best strategy would be to buy and kill off the fledgling competitor with its innovative funding model and potential for speedy growth. On the other hand it was reasonable to accept the invitation as Pengey’s ethos was to cooperate with all potential stakeholders that wanted to participate in their offerings and that ease of access and this welcoming attitude was its greatest strength. It was in this business spirit Darryl and Robert agreed to go to the meeting. Their secondary purpose was to meet the infamous leader of the software giant and his close acolytes to check for Zarnha infiltration and measure their capacity as a vehicle for the ambitions of Spargar on Earth.
They arrived at Evrisoft in Robert’s old silver Porsche 911. Down the aeons Alron had always been the flamboyant one of the two Gayans and he saw little reason not to enjoy the many delights of the beautiful worlds he had lived and worked on where human races had emerged across the galaxy. After all, that was the fundamental reason for their lives’ work so why not participate in the best features of those cultures as you went along? At this specific point Alron, now he was reincarnated as Robert, was neither wealthy nor famous but he definitely lived in a beautiful part of a most well-resourced part of this world and he meant to enjoy it. His little sports car was certainly not new and surprisingly affordable but gave him considerable pleasure compared to most transport systems he had seen elsewhere. Evrisoft’s visitors’ parking was laid out in a white-painted herringbone close to the atrium main entrance and Robert’s veteran coupe slid in next to the shiny new sedans in executive slots on the other side of the entrance.
Darryl and Robert were duly impressed by the scale and futuristic material of the atrium as they crossed the white marble floor to the reception desk. Two smartly dressed young women in Evrisoft royal blue dresses checked them in and issued them with passes. The two colleagues had dressed up marginally more formally than usual for the call; ‘business casual’ meant chinos, open-neck shirts and sport coats. The sun was very bright but not too hot yet in early spring. The vintage cherry trees were in full blossom in the landscaped grounds hemming the ornamental pools. Darryl and Robert carried no bags or cases; a folded piece of A4 and a Cross ballpoint was all they required. They were expecting an introductory rather than a meaningful business meeting. They took a seat in low-slung Scandinavian chairs in aluminium and black leather and settled in to wait and enjoy the spring view.
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