“It doesn’t matter. By the time they find out, we’ll be gone. On the moon. And once we’re there and things are up and running, it will be easy to prove that the model works.”
Niels sighed and shook his head. He was used to arguing over dollars in well-lit restaurants, not debating with a psychopath in his wine dungeon. It was time to play the Bobby card.
“I think we need to talk about this — seriously talk about this at a very, very long management meeting.”
Gregor’s face tightened. “There is nothing to talk about. Bobby agreed to this a long time ago.”
“Then Bobby’s going to need to come talk to me if he wants those servers in Africa. I’m not going to let you thwart the part of the company that makes all the money and funds your crazy ideas.”
Niels got down from the chair and took a step toward the stairs.
“Wait! We’re not done!” Gregor yelped.
Niels suppressed a grin. Clearly, all was not lost. He counted to five in his head, and slowly, slowly turned toward his prey.
“Maybe there is a way…”
“I’m sure we can find a compromise,” said Gregor, the slight tremble in his voice confirming Niels’ hunch.
Gregor was afraid Niels would turn Bobby against him. It never ceased to amaze him the things grown men feared. Niels feared no one.
“I want ads on Moodify,” Niels said.
Gregor’s face scrunched into a sour ball, then unfolded into a scowl before disappearing underneath his skin. A second later, it was as if his face had never hosted any expression at all.
“Listen,” said Niels, “you let me put ads on Moodify and I’ll support you one hundred percent in the moon colony project. Shanley Field, servers in Africa — I’ll even give you a few sales guys who can wash your engineers’ laundry on the moon.”
Niels held out his hand, but Gregor made no move toward him. For a minute, the two men stared at each other without moving.
“Putting ads on Moodify bracelets is bad for our users,” Gregor said.
Niels shrugged. “Okay, I’ll just discuss this with Bobby tomorrow and — ”
“Wait,” said Gregor, jumping out of his seat and moving quickly toward Niels. “There is something I have to show you.”
Gregor took a few slow steps backwards toward the stairs, as if his gaze could freeze Niels in place. He then turned and bounded up the steps, letting the door slide gently behind him.
Down below, Niels crossed his arms and yawned loudly.
But once Gregor was gone, Niels began to rub his temples. Why hadn’t he just gone into banking instead? Greedy capitalists were so much easier to negotiate with than engineers.
F ive miles away, Arsyen Aimo was also thinking about money — namely, that thanks to his huge new salary, he was once again on the winning side of capitalism and ready to upgrade his entire life.
Part of that upgrade definitely involved getting a new girlfriend — preferably an American one with excellent teeth.
Of course, he already had a girlfriend, Natia, though that had happened somewhat by accident.
A year earlier, he had signed up to an online dating site as “Rick,” a blond surfer from Santa Cruz. Rick resembled an underwear model, with a chiseled body, defined jawline, and a strong nose echoing Arsyen’s own good looks.
The first woman he met was Natia — herself masking as a Romanian grad student at Berkeley. Between her confusion of Los Angeles as a Northern Californian city and Arsyen’s own English mistakes, they quickly called each other’s bluff and soon were speaking to each other in Pyrrhian.
They struck up a fast virtual friendship — not more than that initially, as they were both too practical to imagine dating someone thousands of miles away. Arsyen took pains to conceal his true identity. From his experience, once a Pyrrhian woman knew she was in the presence of an Aimo, all hopes of reasonable conversation dissolved in a puddle of sighs. Instead, he told her about living in America, about drive-through pharmacies and the endless array of flavored sparkling water, and the importance of sanitation engineers like Arsyen, who fixed the various clogs, stains, and crumbs that could slow the infrastructure of a fast-moving startup.
She in turn wrote to him about her life in Poodlekek, Pyrrhia’s capital. Natia worked as a switchboard operator for the national telecommunications firm, a graying dinosaur that was slowly moving Pyrrhia into the 1980s. She belonged to a political philosophy group, which met weekly to discuss why Marxism failed and whether man could subvert machine in a post-capitalist society. Arsyen found her little intellectual forays rather cute. There would be no need for political philosophy once royal reign was restored, but why discourage Natia from stretching her feminine brain in the meantime?
She was particularly passionate in her dislike of General (now President) Korpeko — the source of the Aimo family’s undoing. He was a “despot,” she wrote, “hell-bent on pushing sports and false achievements instead of encouraging the true prosperity of the nation.”
Among her many gripes was Korpeko’s obsession with the little-known sport of curling. He believed it was Pyrrhia’s ticket to international fame — sufficiently obscure as to ensure little competition from wealthier countries. Korpeko had replaced all the bike lanes and gutters along main roads with curling courts, and no vacations or trips outside the country were allowed during the first week of February, now known as Pyrrhian Curling Week. Arsyen’s stomach tightened each time he imagined Korpeko’s curling lanes snaking across Pyrrhia’s unmarred hills.
“It sounds nothing like the rich cultural life that once flourished under the royal family,” Arsyen wrote to Natia, thinking of the literary salons and long afternoon croquet matches his family hosted at their summer palace for the Pyrrhian elite. The king had generously ensured that vivid accounts of the affairs were published in all of the country’s newspapers so literate citizens could vicariously enjoy the experience.
“Do you remember the photos of them playing croquet atop their verdant courts?” Arsyen asked. “It was far more dignified.”
“Yes, I suppose if you consider hitting a ball a more civilized activity than rolling a puck,” Natia replied.
Natia’s lack of appreciation for croquet was one of the many shortcomings Arsyen had been forced to tolerate as a lowly janitor. Another was the mole on her cheek — it was just a little too big for his liking; he often found himself covering it up with his thumb whenever they did video chat.
Luckily, product managers didn’t have to put up with such defects. When product managers discovered problems, they fixed them. And that’s exactly what Arsyen planned to do.
With a fat new paycheck now coming his way, Arsyen was better equipped to find himself a beautiful American girl — someone like that hippie receptionist, Jennie. Then, when the time was right, he would return to Pyrrhia bronzed and wealthy, with his beautiful queen and her good orthodontics on display. Natia and the other women of Pyrrhia would weep at what they had lost, only able to take comfort in the possibility of becoming one of Arsyen’s bathing maidens.
So it was decided: Natia was out. The only question was whether to write her a breakup email now or first play his video game.
Arsyen opted for the video game. And there he was, a half-hour later, stuck on his couch, glued to his screen, when the phone rang.
It was the chief strategist with the Throne Reclamation Committee (the TRC).
“Have you heard the news? A train went off Golden Bridge and fell into the lake.”
“Mmmhmm,” said Arsyen, drawing his sword and piercing the heart of a castle guard. “It was probably a drunk conductor. Our trains are flawless.”
The national rail service had been one of the great Aimo accomplishments — christened by his father as “locomotives of progress and prosperity.” The king even had a toy train replica built to travel over their palace moat and directly into Arsyen’s bedroom. He wondered if that train was still there —�
��particularly the first-class carriage, outfitted with miniature foodstuffs. As a teenager, Arsyen often threw the train’s gold-plated bison fries at his manservant Sklartar when the old man wasn’t moving fast enough.
“They say you could hear the screams of the children as the train flew through the air,” the strategist said, “that the flames moved across the sky like a rocket.”
“Huh,” said Arsyen, his thumb pumping up and down on the console button as he sliced through the head of one of the king’s henchmen. Tragedies often befell poor nations. There wasn’t much point in getting worked up over a handful of dead bodies.
The felled henchman rose, holding his head in his hands. He was coming back for more. As Arsyen pumped the console with his thumbs, the phone fell from his ear. No matter, if the news was that important, he was sure to hear from the TRC again. Nothing was going to interrupt his game. He had made it through his grueling first week at Anahata and deserved some downtime.
Arsyen glanced at his email on his way to the bathroom a few minutes later and saw that Natia had written. She too was obsessed with the train accident. She claimed the government had stopped any media from reporting the event, fearful that the news could put a damper on its bid to host the International Curling Championships the following year. Government workers had already begun repairing the bridge, and no effort was being made to dredge up the train. Meanwhile, the police were arresting anyone they believed was spreading rumors. All internet services were blocked in the capital, and Natia had been forced to travel outside the province to get to any café with open access. “If they find out I am here, they will arrest me, or worse!” She wrote. “Help us get the word out about what happened. Hundreds are dead!”
Arsyen had assumed the TRC had been talking about ten people. Hundreds of people elevated the train wreck to a national disaster — the kind of thing worthy of a future king’s attention.
“What would a king do…?” Arsyen wondered aloud, imagining himself laying his healing hands upon thousands of maimed Pyrrhians, their bodies draped in rags — rags he would eventually replace with velvet robes! — as they lay prostrate before him. They shielded their eyes from his divine light, and chanted his name to the ground below them. King Arsyen. King Arsyen.
He shook himself back to reality. His dream was still far off. Whatever happened in Pyrrhia now would certainly be repeated in a year’s time, with a new set of mothers rolled out to despair over the loss of their children at the hands of Korpeko’s corrupt and negligent government. He needed to be patient and let these minor catastrophes accumulate. At the point of ten train wrecks, the time might finally be right for a royal coup.
But in the meantime, Arsyen could at least give a nudge toward revolution and have some quick fun with Korpeko. If working in technology had taught him anything, it’s that the internet loves a troll.
While working at Galt, Arsyen had learned about GaltPages — a popular tool that aggregated everything people had to say on all the different Galt apps. He even half-started his own GaltPage a few months earlier to promote his Aimo Air Freshener — a custom pink mixture he invented out of cleaning supplies so he could cover up the persistent stench of body odor that permeated the Galt meeting rooms. Its cotton candy scent would one day make Arsyen millions — provided he could figure out how to keep it from combusting.
He hadn’t gotten very far with his page back then, but Galt seemed to have made its product easier to use since he last tried. He could easily repurpose his early work to suit Natia’s social justice needs — the fluffy pink plume of cotton candy in the page’s background no longer suggesting a sweet scent but rather an artsy take on a nuclear holocaust. And, Arsyen told himself, there was a potential bonus to be had in all of this: If enough people were interested in what he posted about Poodlekek, he could collect their contact info and sell them his air freshener once all the furor died down.
Arsyen had worked in the Valley long enough to know that the key to social media was virality, not sincerity. So he renamed the page “Justice for Poodlekek” and posted Natia’s text about the accident, calling for action. He then posted the link to Justice for Poodlekek in the comment section of every Pyrrhian blog and newspaper article he could find and wrote a review of Korpeko’s government on the restaurant review site Help! Then he added pictures of Golden Bridge to his Photomatic account, using the retro and futuristic filters, as well as a bleaker one with a sprinkling of decapitated bodies.
Arsyen leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. It was an awfully nice thing he had just done for Natia, and it would hopefully assuage her disappointment when he broke up with her in favor of dating Jennie.
He returned to his video game and quickly forgot about the page. But a while later, passing by his computer on the way to the kitchen, he saw that the previously blank comment section of Justice for Poodlekek now hosted a long list of responses. The view count was already in the thousands and climbing with each minute. Arsyen did a double take: People seemed to really be upset by this train thing. And not just the train, but about Korpeko and his government as well.
The street light has been out for two weeks.
Why is there no bison milk on Mondays?
Arsyen squealed with delight. His people seemed so unhappy! He hit the refresh button again and again, each new complaint augmenting his euphoria.
Korpeko will drag our country into further poverty!
I hate curling!
Arsyen couldn’t resist posting a comment under a fake name.
This never would have happened when the Aimos were in power!
Someone replied immediately.
That’s true. King Aimo would’ve made us play croquet until our fingers fell off.
Arsyen laughed. That had indeed happened to a few unlucky peasants who had trespassed on the royal croquet court.
As the minutes passed, complaints about bison milk were replaced by complaints about potholes, potholes by accusations of corruption, corruption by torture.
Arsyen did a small jig before his computer, then paused — first to check out his flexed biceps reflected on his computer screen, and then to update his page with a new message.
My people, we must take action!!
Of course, Arsyen knew President Korpeko would put it all down. That’s how it happened in Pyrrhia and the rest of the poor world. People protested and waved hand-painted signs, and then, if they weren’t disappeared by the government, they trudged back to work on Monday.
But Arsyen’s well-meaning but rather stupid Pyrrhian subjects couldn’t see that far ahead. Instead, the misery of Pyrrhia wrote itself across the Justice for Poodlekek page. The decay of the streets, the decay of the nation, the decay of everything, really, but the country’s gleaming curling lanes. The page’s followers swelled into the thousands within minutes. Soon they were asking about the creator of Justice for Poodlekek, calling on him to lead them forward.
It was terrible timing. He still had six levels to go in his video game.
“Men of action take action,” Arsyen said to himself, repeating a poster he had seen outside one of Anahata’s sales buildings.
He composed a short note to Natia:
My dear Natia, I have made a GaltPage to help you spread the word. Also, I am sorry but I think we will have to break up because I am not going to be able to come to Pyrrhia anytime soon.
Arsyen paused. What if Natia showed up one day in California without that unfortunate mole and wanted to sleep with him?
He began to type again.
Let me know if you ever come to California. Keep in touch!
Then he left the house to go grab a burrito. He needed some fuel to keep him going if he was going to conquer the six-headed henchman later that night.
W hatever Gregor Guntlag was trying to prove, Niels was determined to ignore it. He would meet Gregor’s final, desperate plea for cooperation with the same dismissal with which Gregor had treated Niels’
chair-jumping antics.
Niels pictured Gregor lugging the mysterious proof of his superior world order down the stairs, his combat boots thudding against the wooden steps, then stomping to the table. What did he want to show Niels? A philosophy book? A line of code? A diorama? Regardless, Niels’ expression would remain placid, unmoved, mouth silent in Guntlagian style until Gregor’s desperation grew to the point where Niels would only need to repeat three words: “Ads on Moodify.” Maybe he would even agree to let Niels put ads on employee T-shirts and the meeting-room chairs.
When had Gregor left exactly? Half an hour earlier? An hour? It was starting to seem like an awfully long time to leave someone waiting in a basement.
It was obvious what Gregor was trying to do. He had locked Niels in the cellar in order to assert his dominance and put Niels on edge. But these kinds of mind tricks and one-upmanship were old hat for a Master Negotiator. After all, Niels was the man who had challenged a quadriplegic music executive to a game of rugby; the man who hid E. coli in an opponent’s entree so he could pitch him on a business proposition as the other lay prostrate before the toilet for six hours. This wine cellar act was amateurish.
That said, why would a grown man lock a work colleague in his basement? Was that something Germans found funny? Or maybe Gregor was in fact Austrian. The Austrians were famous for their appreciation of basements. For a split second, Niels’ body tensed as he imagined Gregor descending the stairs in a pair of leather pants.
Niels closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them again. He couldn’t help but respect his opponent for planting these seeds of doubt. Five minutes passed, then ten. Niels felt splinters from the chair making inroads into the back of his arms. Shapes emerged from the shadows, then receded. Another twenty minutes passed.
Niels knew he shouldn’t panic, but the shadows, the quiet, the unpredictability of his opponent all began to cloud his confidence. The longer he sat and paced and sat and paced, the more Niels became convinced that the taciturn Teuton was planning to leave him there all night, returning only once confident that he had broken the Master Negotiator.
The Big Disruption Page 12