ShelfLife

by Barrie Seppings

  Shanti had been dealing with so many people over the past week – Germans wanting to know why she wasn’t coming home, Singaporeans wanting to know why she was coming, Trent wanting to know why the code was doing this, Gavin wanting to know why the user interface was doing that, nervous ShelfLife hosts wanting to know what they should do while someone else was being them, nervous ShelfLife guests wanting to know exactly how much of someone else’s life they would be getting, hosting companies wanting to know where all the traffic was coming from and how it would be paid for – she could no longer be selective about the calls she answered. Any of them could be important. Most of them were.

  ‘Shanti speaking,’ she tugged the power cable free of the nest.

  ‘It’s not too late, you know.’

  This exit was not as hasty as their ejection from Saigon, but not all the boxes in Bali had their bows tied as neatly as they should have. Now one of those boxes was calling.

  Shanti faced the full-length window, watching the tropical downpour sweep across the tarmac, sluicing off aircraft as they nosed towards their assigned gates.

  ‘Babe, why are you leaving?’ Amber’s voice floated down the line like jasmine on a breeze.

  Shanti closed her eyes to the thrumming in her temple. She had a perfectly valid reason for leaving Bali, but Amber’s voice was making it hard to locate.

  ‘I don’t think you should get on that plane. We were heading somewhere important, remember?’

  Shanti did remember. In the beginning, there had been flirting. Then drinking. Even dancing. As ShelfLife found its feet, then took off at a sprint, Shanti had converged with Amber at similar velocity, but it didn’t take Shanti long to realise they had been imagining past each other into entirely different futures. ‘Holiday romance’ was how Shanti tried to frame their entanglement; ‘soul mates’ was Amber’s leash-tugging counter. Like children with unfettered access to the ice cream tub, they continued to devour each other’s attention even as they knew it would ache.

  ‘Don’t go back to those people, Shanti. They’re not good for you.’

  Amber used ‘those people’ to refer to Trent, his mentor and the faceless money men of Singapore. In Amber’s eyes, they had rolled in like a tropical squall and removed her sunshine. Trent had phoned from a bar forty-seven storeys above the streets of Singapore, babbling about valuations and exit strategies. Gavin and Shanti had danced around the villa until the details emerged: in return for a significant investment, the incubator would require an equity stake and for the company to relocate to the city state immediately. Shanti railed at the lack of consultation. Gavin moaned at moving countries again. Trent was incensed by their ingratitude. The conflict raged until Trent’s phone battery died. When he had set foot in the villa the following morning, he delivered an ultimatum: any founder of ShelfLife who was not in Singapore within one week would no longer be considered a founder of ShelfLife.

  ‘You know the money won’t make you happy,’ said Amber.

  The absence of it wasn’t making Shanti particularly joyous either. As much as she wanted to pull the technical rug out from under Trent in that moment, Shanti conceded it would be professional suicide. The last thing she wanted to do was go home to her uncle and spend the rest of her days serving Kashmiri naan to the good burghers of Munich.

  ‘This will change you, Shanti. I’m worried for you.’

  As the point of departure approached, Amber mounted a series of ninja attacks on Shanti’s self-belief. Except these ninjas threw spiritual affirmations and wore tie-dyed fisherman’s pants. Shanti had always found it easy to leave her casual boyfriends. Leaving her first casual girlfriend was proving a more difficult dismount to stick.

  ‘I don’t need you to worry for me, Amber. I need you to dream for me,’ Shanti cupped a hand over the mouthpiece to block the noise of the departure lounge. ‘I’ve got to go, babe, okay?’

  ‘You’ll be bored. You’ll feel trapped,’ Amber began to sniffle. ‘I know you.’

  ‘How can you know me? You only just met me. Last month, you and I didn’t even exist.’

  ‘But we do now, don’t we?’

  Shanti sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, but couldn’t reach the ends cleanly. She hadn’t even had time to brush this morning. And her mouth was furry.

  ‘The trade winds are shifting, the moon’s energy is building,’ Amber began with renewed enthusiasm, ‘How much longer can you fight this, my honey bee?’

  Shanti was no stranger to spirituality, but she detected something closer to manipulation in Amber’s celestial arguments.

  ‘I think my ship is sailing in another direction right now,’ said Shanti, trying to close the door as gently as she could.

  The sobbing began in earnest. Shanti rolled her eyes, but also bit her lip.

  ‘Amber, look, I don’t want to wind up in a dead-end life with my uncle on the other side of the world. I need to focus, OK?’

  A crackling, blowing sound crashed over the departure lounge as the gate attendant fumbled with the microphone.

  ‘Shanti?’

  The phone vibrated in her hand. She held it out and squinted. A US number she didn’t recognise.

  ‘I’m boarding now. I have to go,’ Shanti turned to see the flock of passengers rush the gates like seagulls at hot chips.

  ‘If this thing does change your life, who will you be then?’

  ‘I’m always going be me, Amber. I’m pretty sure of that,’ said Shanti, just as the call dropped.

  Who will you be then? The question careened about in Shanti’s head. Maybe that was a reason she’d only dated boys up to this point: sure, they wanted to get in most places but at least they didn’t seem to get lodged inside her brain.

  She shuffled down into the jetway where every passenger was impatient to buckle in so they could get a head start on sitting down for the next couple of hours.

  Staring through the small convex window as the airport terminal slowly backed away from the plane, Shanti felt a tap on her shoulder.

  ‘Miss, can you please stow your laptop for takeoff?’

  Dragging her focus back into the present, she asked the attendant for some water.

  ‘After take-off, Miss, but I will need you to stow that.’

  Shanti looked down to find the laptop sitting, appropriately enough, in her lap. She opened the seat pocket but as she lifted the machine, she noticed something stuck to the underside. In contrast to Gavin’s heavily-stickered laptop, Shanti maintained the outside of her computer exactly as she maintained the innards: clean, neat, ordered, unblemished. Turning it over, she discovered a small adhesive sticker on the battery cover, one she was certain she had removed long ago. Flipping her machine open, she discovered it wasn’t her laptop.

  ***

  A tsunami of sweat broke out in the time it took Gavin to wrangle his luggage from the boot of the taxi and into the air-conditioned foyer of the office tower. He took the lift to the twenty-third floor and found himself in a small lobby. The signboard on the wall indicated only one tenant: Vertica. Gavin opened his backpack to retrieve a small black notebook. He rifled through the pages to confirm he had the right building and the correct floor, but the name on the signboard meant nothing to him.

  The frosted glass door at the end of the corridor swung open and a blast of airconditioning rushed into the lobby. A couple of Chinese youths emerged, talking simultaneously in a mishmash of English, Mandarin and html5. They wore colourful hi-top sneakers, brand new denim, knitted long-sleeve tops, dramatically undercut hairstyles and horn-rims. They pointed at each other’s handsets, occasionally swiping or tapping on the screens and jabbing repeatedly at the elevator call button.

  ‘Excuse me, guys,’ said Gavin.

  The Chinese youths were visibly startled, but made no sound.

  ‘Umm, yeah, I’m looking for my office,’ Gavin continued. One of the youths blinked. The other reached slowly for the elevator button without breaking eye contact and gave it another ca
reful jab.

  ‘Do you know where I can find ShelfLife?’ asked Gavin, making an effort to sound friendly.

  ‘No,’ the youth replied with a note of disappointment. The elevator bell struck true and clear. The other youth jabbed the call button again, just to be certain, said, ‘Sorry’ and disappeared. The doors hushed themselves to a close and the elevator excused itself.

  ‘I see you’ve met the neighbours.’

  Gavin wheeled around to see Trent standing in the doorway, wearing a pale linen suit and a grin the size of a Bentley.

  ‘Mate, it is good to see you,’ said Gavin. ‘I thought I was lost or something.’

  ‘You are very much found, my friend,’ said Trent, striding out to the lobby where the two men exchanged bro hugs, keeping their hips spaced apart and pummelling each others back’s gently with closed fists. ‘You just land?’

  ‘I did,’ said Gavin. ‘They don’t serve food on these short flights so I’m pretty hungry.’

  ‘We can fix that. Great food around this area. I might have found you some decent coffee, too,’ Trent said as he marshalled the luggage stack. ‘Although, as an American, I completely accept I’m not qualified to make that call.’ Trent paused in front of the glass door, pulled a keycard from his pocket and waved it near a small square mounted on the wall. ‘Let’s go inside, take a look at our set-up. It’s a bit different to Seminyak, but I think you’ll like it.’ Trent pushed through into the brightly lit space beyond.

  The floor was roughly circular and arranged in a hub-and-spoke layout, with long rows of desks radiating outward from the central core of lift shafts and bathrooms. Laptops and monitors sat cheek by jowl along the desk surface, in an alternate facing pattern to maximise occupancy. Circular conference tables, mobile whiteboards and small clusters of bright red sofas interrupted the long rows of desks. Everything looked like it had been delivered yesterday and the air smelled faintly of cleaning fluid and carpet glue. As he walked along the rows, Gavin could see the harbour through full-length windows that wrapped the entire floor. Hundreds of cargo ships and oil tankers dotted the sapphire waters of Singapore’s harbour, waiting to unload and reload.

  A small army of mostly young, mostly Asian programmers stared either at their monitors, their phones, or both. Even in these numbers they produced almost no noise. A few glanced up to assess Gavin and his luggage as he passed by.

  ‘Did you hire all these people in the last week?’ Gavin whispered.

  ‘We don’t actually have any staff just yet. These are all the other startups the incubator is backing,’ said Trent as they passed rows of workers. ‘These guys here are doing a thing called Maidly. Fractional ownership of domestic help. And those guys along there are looking at real-time market-based pricing for higher education. Think NASDAQ for degrees.’

  Every wall and partition was a whiteboard, and every whiteboard was covered in task lists, infrastructure diagrams and business plan outlines.

  ‘This whole floor is for startups like us?’ asked Gavin.

  ‘This floor plus another two above us. Literally every day another bunch of dudes walks in, sits down, plugs in their laptops and starts building a new company. If they make their milestones within three months they get to stay another three, with another set of milestones. Beat your targets and you get to move upstairs.’

  ‘What’s upstairs?’

  ‘Kinda the same as this, but the fit-out is much nicer. Lower density, bigger kitchen, more meeting rooms and fridges have beer.’

  ‘What do our fridges have?’

  ‘Energy drinks and hydrolytes. This place is even sweatier than Bali.’

  ‘And where’s our meeting room?’

  ‘See that big cube of frosted glass near the middle? Just one, for everyone to share.’ Trent guided Gavin by the shoulder. ‘Come on, we’re over here.’

  Trent walked around the perimeter of the floor, nodding occasionally to individuals as they glanced up from their screens. He reached some vacant chairs at the end of one of the rows and parked Gavin’s luggage beside the window, which overlooked an office tower under construction and a massive hole in the ground next to it, where another building would soon begin to rise.

  ‘Some view.’ Gavin placed his hands on his hips.

  ‘Yeah, well, the ocean views were all taken. But a window seat is better than aisle, which is definitely better than middle. This is us.’ Trent gestured to four chairs, two facing two, each with a computer-printed sheet of A4 taped to their backs that read ‘shelf life’.

  ‘Comic Sans? Are you fucking serious?’ Gavin yanked off the sign and let it fall to the floor.

  ‘I knew that would get you,’ Trent laughed. ‘C’mon, let’s get you some breakfast.’

  A whirring noise – part vacuum cleaner, part chainsaw – sliced through the hushed atmosphere of the office. Everyone seated went full meerkat, straining to locate the source. Trent jogged towards the centre of the floor, waving for Gavin to follow. ‘Oh man, she’s got the prototype working again. You have to see this.’

  A knot of people had formed around a group of sofas, but they reared back in unison as the whirring sound increased in pitch. A tiny helicopter swung above the group, halting and swaying as it moved, causing some to duck and others to gasp. A ripple of applause broke out and spread through the floor, followed by a couple of hesitant whoops.

  ‘Haven’t these guys seen a drone before?’ Gavin scoffed.

  ‘A drone, yes. But the mind-control part is pretty new.’ Trent pointed to a young man, sitting on one of the red sofas, arms folded as he smiled at the tablet cradled in his lap. He wore an elaborate skullcap knitted from sensors and wires.

  ‘OK Tran, do a sweep and look for the red X on the ground near me.’

  Gavin turned to the voice and saw a tall, slender woman in black leggings and tank top standing by the far window. Trent was standing next to her, grinning. Skullcap guy swept his eyes left then right, and the small lens on the front of the drone followed suit, hovering above an X of red duct tape on the carpet in front of the black-clad woman.

  She offered a double thumbs-up to the camera and the drone released a small package, which landed near the X, before whirring back towards its take-off position. The woman leant down to retrieve the package when a loud snap stole the attention of the room.

  The crowd let out a collective shriek. People scrambled for cover as tiny pieces of helicopter showered nearby desks. Gavin dived behind a large concrete column.

  ‘What the fuck, Tran?’ the black-clad woman’s shout erased the momentary silence in the room.

  Tran winced as he peeled the sensor cap from his scalp. ‘Sorry, boss. I think I sneezed.’

  Gavin felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘It’s a cool idea, but they’ve still got some kinks to work out. Now, how about that breakfast?’

  ***

  Trent led him across the street and down a shaded, narrow laneway between two tall buildings. Within minutes Gavin was sweating again. Brightly coloured market umbrellas stood like garish toadstools at the base of a sombre forest. The footpath was awash with plastic stools and foldable tables. A flock of ancient bicycles and heavily stickered small-capacity motorcycles surrounded the makeshift restaurant like animals gathering at an oasis.

  ‘There aren’t too many places like this left. Any building older than a quarter-century is slated to be torn down and redeveloped,’ Trent pulled a couple of stools out from under a table, looked up to check they had the protection of the umbrellas and began ordering, using mainly hand signals.

  ‘Sorry I had to leave Bali on such short notice, but it was important to show the investors we’re committed. You understand, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, I get it. I’m just not used to how fast these startups move. I went and stayed with Marty for the last couple of nights. Shanti went to some sort of retreat with her yoga instructor. She’s coming in on a flight later tonight,’ said Gavin. ‘It’ll be good to get the band back together.
’

  An old Chinese woman in t-shirt and shorts shuffled up to their table, her flip-flops scraping in protest as she deposited two glass mugs of milky tea. Trent waved away Gavin’s feeble attempt at a wallet fakey and handed over a bright green note. The woman counted out the change methodically, releasing each coin as if it were a child she may never see again.

  ‘There’s no tipping here. It’s totally amazing,’ said Trent. ‘Some stuff is crazy cheap. Like this breakfast.’

  ‘I guess you’re paying for the ambience,’ Gavin joked as one of the motorbike couriers fired up his modified two stroke: the sound bounced off the concrete walls of the narrow laneway like bullets, the smell of oxidized oil wafted through the stall.

  ‘And some stuff is stupid expensive. Cars are the worst. And booze. And office space.’

  ‘But I thought our investors are covering the rent?’ asked Gavin, taking a chunk of the roti and popping it in his mouth. ‘Oh wow, this is good.’

  ‘I know, right? They’ll be covering rent for a while, but nothing comes for free in this town,’ Trent took a mouthful of his tea. ‘The going commercial rate for this sort of space in the CBD is around fifteen per square.’

  ‘Is that high?’

  ‘Fuck yes, that is high. Have you never rented commercial space before?’

  Gavin shook his head.

  ‘That’s almost up with Tokyo prices and not far behind Hong Kong. But it looks like I’ll be travelling a fair bit, so you can give my seat to one of the new hires when they come on board.’

  ‘And we’re supposed to just keep on pounding the keyboard while you jet-set around the place?’

  ‘Don’t be too jealous, man. It’s hard work getting up on stage and pitching at hackathons.’

  Gavin raised an eyebrow.

  ‘OK, some of it can be fun,’ said Trent. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I’m putting in a submission for us to feature on a panel at the next SXSW. If we get selected you can go and do that one.’

  ‘For real?’ Gavin’s mood brightened.