Cullen is twenty-six now. I think of him as a kid, even though when I was his age I was already leading a large team. He and I have excellent rapport (we have a special one-on-one once a month that we call Quattro-L, because we both have double Ls in our names). Privately, I can’t settle on how I feel about him: protective, in part; outsmarted, sometimes; jealous, though I try not to be; more grown-up; but also, despite my intense cardio regimen and flexitarian diet, flabby and aging, extra-aware of the lines on my forehead. I am a few inches taller. Sometimes I have sexual dreams about him and wake up feeling uneasy, wondering if he ever does about me.
Cullen’s pluses are that he is a genuine innovator and has strong technical skills. His drawbacks include his obsessions with a shifting array of obscure sports and all forms of marine life.
Cullen’s eyes widen as he excites himself by talking about the ocean, and his tone becomes increasingly pedantic. At these times he is undeniably attractive yet simultaneously quite boring, and it is interesting that the boredom everyone feels doesn’t diminish the attraction. “We’ve got to save the ocean while there’s still time,” he says with earnest intensity, while young women hang rapturously on his elbow, buttressing his assertions. Even lesbians and older folks pay attention. A rich man’s jokes are always funny. I don’t discourage Cullen’s interest in the sea, because I think eventually it will be strategic for him to part ways with Conch, and a new passion project and entrepreneurship-for-good venture may be the key to convincing him. When the time comes I am sure everyone will blame me, if I’m still at Conch, but I plan to say that Conch’s loss will be the ocean’s gain. I like having lines for people’s exits worked out in advance—it feels efficient; it feels like, why not? Like the way newspapers prep obituaries for the living, it’s smart: we’re all going to die. By which, in this case, I merely mean move on to other tech companies.
“Hi, Shelley, you look nice today,” he said. I looked down. He always compliments me when I wear something matronly that adds pounds and years, but I haven’t pointed this out to him. Cullen wears shower shoes and the same rumpled gray hoodie every day. He is genuinely handsome in the way that a lead movie hobbit is handsome. He reminds me a little of Nova except if Nova had a penthouse in San Francisco and her birthday party at a club in Dubai.
He came over and was telling Cass about his idea for developing a theme park based around math. He envisioned it being both educational and thrilling; there would be a roller coaster called “The Asymptote.” Cass murmured appreciatively. Our publicist had promised Cass she could sit in on a meeting to get a sense of how I work and my professional style, although details of the meeting would be embargoed.
“Did you tell her what the deal is?” Cullen said. I nodded, meaning no.
“Powerplex could be a key deal for us,” I said. In the way we have of finishing each other’s sentences, Cullen and I explained why. Powerplex develops technology to power a device while it’s being used. You can print wirelessly. Why shouldn’t you be able to charge wirelessly? Right now users charge the Conch by placing it on a plug-in charging platform, but the ideal would be to be able to harvest the energy in the air around you—to power the device through your use. Think how great that would be. Instead of having to hand off your devices so your assistant can charge them, you’d be constantly charged up.
“That seems so amazing,” Cass said, scribbling.
“You are the power supply,” Cullen said, looking into her eyes.
“It feels like I have to charge my Conch constantly,” I said. “Of course, I’m a heavy user. Most people don’t leverage the product as fully as I do…but the point is, that hassle will be gone. Users will never have to take off their device. They can have the benefits of Conch 24/7/365.25.”
“And there’ll never be a reason to take it off!” Cass said.
“You’ve got it.”
“It sounds amazing.”
“It does!” I agreed. I’m hoping to make it one of my key achievements. But implementation is, as I keep telling our board, a multilayered challenge.
“I still have doubts,” Cullen said. “People are wearing this thing. What about if it’s raining and…zap? No offense, Shelley.”
“None taken!” I said. “Safety is paramount.” Also, you have to act like Teflon as a woman in this business. Although Teflon kills birds. So recently I’ve started emulating graphene.
Willow brought in the Powerplex team, led by their CEO, Phil Furness, a skinny man in a black turtleneck with white centipede eyebrows and a tuft of thick white hair. Phil is very handsome, as CEOs so often are.
“It’s so exciting you’re here,” Willow gushed. “At my cousin’s farm, they just installed Powerplex lights in the chicken coops, powered by the movement of the chickens. It’ll save so much on their electric bill.”
Phil nodded, having clearly heard many similar stories before—at this point Powerplex is primarily used in agricultural applications. He and his team settled themselves around the table.
Fritter, our boardroom, is really no more corporate than any of our other conference rooms, like Gumbo. It’s a lot of pickled wood, a chalkboard, whiteboard, inflated blow-up whale, and pull-down projection screen. I like it; it reminds me of a classroom. There’s a big window on one side that looks out over the marshland outside the office, and another window on the inside that looks out over the customer service department. From the window, I can watch the reps shooting down trouble.
Our conference room chairs are aluminum. It keeps our meetings efficient. Cylindrical silver air ducts cross the industrial ceiling. The air ducts have the texture of those old Jiffy Pop foil pans on the stove, with their expanding foil dome. Sometimes when I am frustrated they catch my eye; I want to bite them.
“Great to see everyone!” I said, nodding at Phil and his team.
“Great to be out here,” said Phil. Powerplex is headquartered in the Midwest, which is a leading region for energy harvesting.
“Instead of the pitch deck, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek at the new video spot we’re developing—this is brand-new, part of our new market positioning, and we’re really excited about it. Then we can field questions and talk synergies. Sound good? Great, Willow, can you cue us up?”
Somebody flicked off the light and the screen lowered with an asthmatic wheeze.
Thumping music started, with some little saxophone swizzles.
The video hit the aspirational touchstones: beautiful, lush, intercut scenes of starry nights in national parks, a lean adult running across a meadow, a serene gray-suited Caucasian twenty-four-year-old ascending an escalator surrounded by Japanese people, a family pressing their foreheads together ecstatically in a luxuriant rain (although Conch is not recommended to be used in rain). The drumbeats sped up. Clouds rapidly traversed a heartland sky. Two beaming parachutists fell to earth holding hands. A pregnant woman outswam an otter. A horn wailed, plangently. Night fell on a farmhouse as a windmill turned. The earth spun. More saxophone swizzles. The screen brightened.
Cullen added, “We’ll be premiering a new tagline: ‘The Future Is Hear.’ ”
“We’re still tweaking the creative to bring it all the way to bright,” I said, noting their underwhelming reaction. “But what I am personally so excited about is that our new campaign is based around how Conch is for those who want more. Conch makes you more alive, more vibrant, more ‘Conch-us.’ ”
“Or—unconscious,” Phil said. He sees himself as a slightly more promising Steve Jobs. In every group, there’s always one person like this, who has to prove that he got an allusion, though everyone else in the room has not only gotten it but simultaneously comprehended that everyone else did too. But it’s my job, these days, to amuse and seduce Phil. Not literally, just from a business standpoint, because we want Powerplex’s technology on terms that are favorable to us.
I glanced at Cass. She was leaning forward in her chair at the side of the room, taking notes. She’d set her voice recorde
r on her knee. Its “needle”—a digital representation of a needle—swayed between us, flicking back and forth, as if it couldn’t decide which of us was at this moment making more fascinating rustles.
“One of the best parts of Conch,” I said, “is that it’s not tying up the ear. Conch doesn’t use up any existing orifices. It creates an additional input jack.”
“It augments your life,” Cullen said. “It pushes you to expand your consciousness, do more, be more.”
“To have the information you need at the moment you can deploy it.” I nodded vehemently. “Conch makes all of us more interesting, deeper…”
“Richer,” Woody suggested.
“Not till we go public, pumpkin,” I said dryly. They all laughed.
“Richer in a couple of ways, including money,” Phil clarified helpfully.
“You know how I thought of it?” Cullen said. “I was at an art museum once and we had those devices that tell you about the art. But other people can’t hear them.”
I have heard our origin story one million and one times, so I made extra sure to look peppy and attentive. “You can’t,” I agreed reverently.
“Like a one-way phone. And I thought, what if these told you cool stuff, like funny stories, or the score of the, um, team you follow—” I could tell he was flailing for an example. Mainstream sports are not Cullen’s thing—“or how your friends are doing.”
“Genius,” Phil said, beaming.
The Powerplex business development guy added, “Where are you going with this, down the road?”
“Seamless AI, totally immersive contextual knowledge,” I said confidently. “Think about how amazing this would be for someone with Alzheimer’s. Their selves would still be there. It’s like an external drive, with everything about you on it. Sort of.”
“I’m not totally sold on that angle,” Cullen said. “I feel like there are some risks to pushing it as far as Shelley wants to go,” but then we smiled at each other because we didn’t want Powerplex to have any concerns about Conch’s management getting along. Already we’ve gotten attention for the way we pronounce “Conch” differently; Cullen says the ch at the end like a K, the way people do in the Caribbean. I say it like people in Wisconsin do, with a ch like in “cheese.” This is enough public discord for any management team, but we’re cute about it. Together, we talked about Powerplex, how their wireless charging could work for Conch, and what a great fit we could be together.
The Powerplex biz dev guy broke in. “It’s great to hear all this, but what do you guys make of these new, uh, Conch stories?”
“People are constantly discovering new ways to use their Conch,” I said. Most of our users use Conch for a narrow range of services—traffic, email, read-aloud texts—but that’s not why they buy it. Conch’s ability to curate social media posts of particular interest (because of the poster or the content or whatever, based on previous behavior) and read them to you wherever you are, so that while you are in a boring meeting you can peruse the Facebook posts of old summer camp friends, or while brushing your teeth you can be alerted to a new test to determine which type of tooth brusher you are—that’s actually one of our most popular features based on user tracking, although it’s also become a little bit of a meme where people refuse to admit to using it.
“You’re not concerned?”
I glanced at Cullen. “Our users are creative. The Conch Community is a rich tapestry of whisperfeeds.” I was pleased to see Cass was scribbling again.
“What about the issues?” Phil said.
“What issues?”
The biz dev guy opened his mouth and then closed it, abandoning whatever it was he was going to say. He and Phil looked at each other.
I felt I might be missing key data. But I just blinked a lot, rapidly, which centers me and speeds up my cognitive processing.
“Our guys are combing through your stuff. Here are the key questions we need resolved,” I said, laying it out. “Is the market receptive? Will pricing be competitive? Can we go to market by Q2 next year? Is this technology ready to play internationally, and if not, is that going to chip away at our competitiveness in the overseas markets?”
Phil spoke. “We love Conch, but what we’re hearing is really worrying us.”
“Are you talking about the charging issue? That’s where you guys come in. That’s one of the main obstacles our users report to sustaining their Conch use over time.”
His colleague had a funny expression on his face. “I’m talking about the news story.”
“Be more specific?” I said.
Nobody else spoke. They were looking away. I pushed. I looked at Cullen and Woody. Both looked blankly back at me, waiting for me to do something. Finally the other Powerplex guy spoke.
“The man who jumped off the cliff into the Hudson River? I heard that it was his Conch that told him to jump.”
I have a pretty good poker face. I squeezed my toes together to hide any expression from crossing my face. “We’re investigating,” I said. “But I assure you, that’s not Conch behavior.”
“There was that other thing,” Phil said. “The older woman, the sex thing.”
His colleague pinkened around his shirt collar. “Right,” he said. “I’m less worried about that one.”
Cullen looked up. “Can you recap for the group?”
“Our counsel came across the report. An older woman, single. She was wearing her Conch and one night, she says, her Conch suggested she proposition a guy in a bar. Then she brought him home and they were in the middle of having sex and the Conch called an ambulance.”
“That’s all?”
“It could have been better. The paramedics broke down the door.”
Cullen broke in. “Right. From the product’s perspective, that reaction’s understandable. It was responding to a divergent health event. Had she been having a stroke the Conch’s response would have been appropriate.”
“People aren’t going to want to buy it,” he said.
“It’s non-optimal,” I agreed.
I blinked, very hard and fast. I hadn’t seen anything about this in my clipbook. I was not actually well aware of the issues they were raising. I had, somehow, missed all this. “We’re on top of investigating and ensuring quality control,” I said with firm, gentle reassurance. “These are highly unusual events.”
Cass had perked up and was writing notes in her notebook.
“You know, let’s take this conversation offline. I’m interested in filling you in on some of our other initiatives. Right now I’m concerned because we have a journalist who I think is late for another meeting. Is that right, Willow?”
“Oh,” Willow said. “Yes. Cass, you have a meeting with our amazing CFO. Let me walk you down.”
“Really?” Cass said. “I thought you weren’t making Stefan available.”
“He’s eager to talk to you,” I said. “He’s here today. Just knock on the windows.” Stefan works at home or out of an old Volkswagen bus in the parking lot. He can’t come inside the office because he is violently allergic to dogs. “So great to chat, Cass. We’ll catch up in a bit.”
Willow followed Cass out the door, shutting it behind her. She turned so I could see her through the glass door and gave me a freaked-out look.
“We’re excited about partnering,” Phil said. “But this a big issue. I don’t want to get in bed with a company that is flopping.”
“Flopping?” I said indignantly.
“It’s not really a problem,” Cullen said. “But we have a fix. I’ll dive into that with you later.”
We walked Powerplex out. Phil was cool, I perceived, in his goodbyes. As soon as they left I pulled the team back into Fritter.
“What’s going on?”
Cullen shrugged. “I have no idea what they’re talking about.”
“Has anyone here personally experienced any problems? Have the customer service people gotten reports? Willow!”
Willow brought over the custom
er service manager, who filled us in: “The suicide happened two days ago, but it just came out this morning that he was wearing a Conch when he jumped into the river. It was reported by the local news in Dutchess County this morning. I can’t believe they knew about it.”
“It’s preposterous,” I said. “Even if the Conch told him to jump—and why would it?—he didn’t have to listen. It’s a voice. It’s a suggestion. Just as we say in our user agreement, users must exercise independent judgment and use Conch at their own risk.”
“It shouldn’t have said jump,” Cullen said.
“People really like to do what their Conch suggests,” the customer service person said. “Not having to make decisions is very satisfying.”
Cullen and I exchanged unhappy looks. Our internal research has shown this to be true. It’s part of why the product succeeds.
“We’re examining our records to look for any cases connected to the incident.”
“Such as?”
“Weird stuff. Conches telling people to speed up while driving. Advising them to drop out of school. That kind of thing. Just random stuff that people blame on Conch, to see if there might be an underlying connection. The bad part of the river story is that it’s starting to get attention. The OK part, which everybody seems to be missing, is that the guy who jumped was wanted for embezzlement. And now they got him. Thanks to Conch. That part is getting severely underplayed by the press.”
I sighed.
“Well, let’s deal with it,” I said, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. “Let’s not minimize it. We need to figure out what’s going on. I need you to be the point person to brief me and develop a plan.”
The Glitch_A Novel Page 16