The Big Disruption

  Gregor flipped to the next article. Galt had just released an update to the productivity tool they had copied from Anahata. The company had only just released it, what, a month ago? And already it had an update. Gregor couldn’t help but admire Galt’s speed.

  He glanced again at Bobby. The founder slept at the head of the table, head thrown back, mouth open. It reminded Gregor of the war movies he watched as a child with his father, in which rain collected in the mouths of dead soldiers as the battle raged around them.

  Gregor had never been interested in the company’s financial affairs, but he had sat in enough management meetings over the years to have developed some sense of pecuniary trouble. He wondered what Fischer, Anahata’s CFCAO, really thought about Anahata’s share price. Bobby refused to discuss it and had told Fischer to keep his investor relations and PR teams from saying anything more about Niels or the moon to the outside world. The only thing he had approved was the retraction published that morning on Flitter by “Niels,” courtesy of the Progressa team. But even that effort had been lost amid the cacophony of investor and journalist voices predicting the company’s downfall.

  “Like the tide ebbs and flows, the stock moves up and down,” Bobby had said in response. “If it didn’t move one way, it couldn’t move the other, and then there’d be no point in having a stock market at all.”

  A thud suddenly sounded from the other end of the room. And then again.

  The head of security dropped a small, weighted beanbag a third time on the table, this time with even more force.

  “Blood! Guts! Swords! Chariots!” he yelled.

  Bobby’s eyes flew open, and for a brief second his arms flailed as though he were in a free-fall. His head darted around the room.

  “Where? Where?”

  “I was just explaining the Pyrrhia situation,” said the head of security, an old hand after working with the founder for six years. He quickly distributed enlarged photos, placing one directly in front of Bobby.

  “This is where we believe he’s being held — the imperial palace.” He pointed to a high-resolution aerial shot of a brown, acropolis-like structure. It sat atop a small hill, a large hunk of columns chomping down on the land like angry jaws.

  “How can we be certain he’s there?” Bobby asked. “And who’s ‘he’?”

  Old Al sighed audibly. The head of security began again without complaint.

  “Arsyen Aimo, one of our product managers. He’s been taken prisoner in his native Pyrrhia. We’ve traced his Anahata badge here,” he said, pointing to the compound.

  “It’s very important that we ensure our employees’ safety,” said HR Paul. “I think it would send a very powerful message if — ”

  “Oh, shut up, Paul,” Old Al barked. “We all get why it’s important to save this guy. No one wants a dead employee.”

  “You know,” Al continued, “none of this would have happened if we hired only Americans. Practically every year we have to go save an employee from some despotic regime. In my day, we would have hired only Americans to work in America.”

  The head of security allowed a moment of silence out of respect for the wisdom of the aged, then restarted his briefing from the top. This time, Gregor listened.

  According to the security head, Arsyen hadn’t badged into anywhere on campus in more than a week, though his own team had never reported him missing. Security had been alerted by his former manager, a guy named Roni, whom Arsyen had contacted, asking for help buying horses.

  “Horses?” asked Bobby. “One of our product managers asked for horses? That makes no sense. Horses don’t get smarter as time goes on. They’re useless. Horses don’t scale. Horses die.”

  “Then you will be pleased to know that Roni didn’t fulfill the request,” the head of security said. “In any case, the day before he disappeared, Arsyen created a GaltPage — ”

  “A GaltPage? Really?!?” Fischer moaned. “We have the same product here — Blabber. It’s just as good. Why don’t our employees use that instead? Can’t we force them to do that?”

  “As I was saying,” the head of security said, “Arsyen created a GaltPage that seems to have inspired an insurrection in the capital of his home country, Pyrrhia.”

  “Did he use his twenty percent free time to do this?” Old Al groaned. “We need to get rid of that perk — engineers shouldn’t be starting revolutions on company time.”

  “At least not ones we’re not supportive of,” Fischer nodded.

  “Also,” the security head said, “it turns out Arsyen is the son of the deposed king.”

  “We hired a prince?” HR Paul asked. “Is that good for company culture?”

  “It’s neutral for the company but good for the world,” Bobby said. “We have a lot we can teach world rulers about leadership.”

  “That said,” the security head continued, “we can’t find any significant history of political involvement. Arsyen’s only connection there seems to be a young female revolutionary — ”

  “Women,” chuckled Bobby, shaking his head. “They’re harmless until suddenly they’re not.”

  “We could send in Progressa to save Arsyen,” Fischer suggested.

  “We looked into that,” the head of security said. “They’re currently in the Philippines, helping rebuild a town that was devastated in a recent typhoon.”

  “So if we divert them to Poodlekek, that town in the Philippines dies,” Bobby said.

  “Well, it’s more like that town doesn’t get computers for its schools.”

  “That town dies,” Bobby said. “So, the question is: Is an Anahata engineer’s life worth more than thousands of Filipinos?”

  The room was silent.

  “It is,” said Gregor, after a few seconds, lifting a piece of paper with some numbers scratched across it. “From a quick calculation, on average, an Anahata engineer will save 600,000 lives during his lifetime through the products he builds. If we lose Arsyen, we kill 600,000 people — and lose the benefit that his no doubt superior offspring could also produce for society.”

  “To be clear,” the head of security said, “Arsyen Aimo is a product manager on the engineering team — not an engineer himself.”

  “Fine,” said Gregor, making a few more scratches on the paper. “So he is worth a little less than that. But even a janitor at Anahata is worth several thousands of lives.”

  Bobby nodded and rose from his chair. “Our brave employee has taken it upon himself to fight tyranny in the darkest corner of the earth. He has taken the Anahata mission to heart and has set out to improve humankind. We should shut down the company until we can find him!”

  The room was quiet.

  “Or at least give him some massage credits,” Bobby said. “I’m sure that whole revolution thing is exhausting.”

  HR Paul nodded and began to pull out some of the massage coupons he walked around campus dispensing each day from twelve to one p.m.

  “As CFCAO, there’s another consideration I feel I should raise,” Fischer said. “If this guy Arsyen started a GaltPage and the government ends up being overthrown, then Galt will get all the credit for having spread a revolution and ushering in a new era of democracy. We’ve done a handful of revolutions now — that’s our space. We can’t let Galt take this by themselves.”

  “You’re right!” exclaimed Bobby, leaping to his feet. “We can’t let Galt own democracy. And…and…if we free Arsyen and Pyrrhia, then we free ourselves, too, from all this moon colony attention. All people will want to write about is our inspiring commitment to democracy.”

  Bobby paced the length of the room, then turned. “We must send him an army — an army of engineers. An army that will storm the city, turn it upside down, and show the world the truth of Anahata!”

  His eyes blazed.

  “Here!” he said, pointing to the photo showing the back entrance to the structure. “Here is where we enter! We put forty men here. And then fifty men at t
his door. And one hundred along the outer perimeter. How many men can the drawbridge hold?”

  “Drawbridge?”

  “Yes, the drawbridge, to cross the moat — here!” Bobby pointed at a dark path surrounding the compound.

  “I think that’s a road.”

  “No matter! Come bridge or pavement, our horses can cross it! What will we do if they throw scalding wax upon our heads? We must make sure that the armor fully covers our engineers’ bodies. Regular Anahata T-shirts won’t be enough. Fischer, talk to your marketing team. I want the special long-sleeved, fireproof shirts we discussed, the ones with the purple Anahata logo and the little trees sprouting out of the H. Remember that, because the other version you showed me has the tree coming out of the T, which I think looks too expected and undelightful.”

  Gregor could feel everyone’s eyes on him, hoping he would reign Bobby in.

  “Arsyen will likely be in the dungeon,” Bobby continued. “We must make sure they don’t try to ferret him away to another location. Let’s have our men dig a hole from here, cutting across over there, and then coming up on the other side. We will take Poodlekek, and we will install a new government. A good government that is reasonable and believes in the internet. Because if you have the internet, you do not have revolutions. The internet is the revolution!

  “Bobby,” Gregor began.

  “And,” said Bobby, holding up a finger, “this won’t just help solve the moon colony problem. If we can get a new world order going on over there, I’m sure we can sell the government all of our enterprise solutions. Pyrrhia will run on Anahata technology!”

  Bobby paused to catch his breath.

  “Bobby, this won’t work,” Gregor said.

  Bobby looked at Gregor, then turned toward his head of security, who nodded in agreement.

  “We can’t do this on our own,” Gregor said. “For one, we don’t have an army.”

  “Gregor, didn’t we discuss you building an army just a few weeks ago?”

  “It will take some time,” Gregor said. “And as I understood it, it was an army of engineering evangelists you were asking for, not an army of real soldiers.”

  “Clearly our army should be multipurpose,” Bobby said. “In the meantime, what if we just made some fighting robots? How long would it take us to build some Terminators?”

  Gregor had run those numbers a few weeks earlier and was annoyed to discover he couldn’t remember them. He grabbed a Post-it and began to run the necessary calculations.

  “Regardless,” the security head said, “we’d need to work in collaboration with the U.S. government.”

  “Aw c’mon,” Bobby whined. “We’ve done it before. Besides, if Anahata were a country, we’d be the fourth wealthiest nation in the world. Doesn’t that give us some kind of extra rights? Fischer, has your legal team looked into this?”

  Fischer shook his head. “Don’t you remember the warning the president gave us last time? If we’re going to have anyone on the ground, we need to involve the State Department.”

  “Over my dead body,” said Old Al, rising from his seat. “We have a strong libertarian contingent here. If the engineers find out we’re working with the government, we’ll have a mutiny on our hands.”

  Bobby’s gaze wandered to the whiteboard. “I wonder…” He was silent for a minute as his eyes darted across the empty canvas. He turned back to the group.

  “Your verdict tries to put me in chains, but I am a chain breaker. In fact, I now realize that I was overlooking our greatest strength. We do have an army. One that never needs to touch the ground, that the government never needs to know about. An army that never sleeps. It is…”

  Barry paused, looking around the room. “It is the internet!”

  Fischer snorted, but Gregor leaned forward in his chair.

  “We will point our weapons in one direction. Our search engine, Flitter fleets, F-Square check-ins — wait, never mind, no one uses F-Square anymore. But the rest of them, we will use and expose Poodlekek and free Arsyen through the internet! Gregor, go work up the plan.”

  A nahata loved democracy. Democracy meant free speech. Democracy meant an open internet. Democracy meant a boundless sea of opportunity for online advertising.

  But there was even more at stake in Pyrrhia. This wasn’t just a battle to free an inconsequential country. If Anahata could succeed in overthrowing the government, Bobby was convinced the company would see a democracy uptick in its stock price.

  Under Gregor’s direction, Anahata’s infrastructure engineers harnessed all their skills — IP prestidigitation, networked hot-air balloons, Wi-Fi-enabled squirrels — to work around the government’s block and make the internet accessible again in Poodlekek.

  The search engineers created a new ranking algorithm, designed to ensure that negative articles about the despotic government would appear in the topmost position of Pyrrhia’s search results. Immolated monks, raped women, limbless elderly, and dead orphans would all be listed on the first page for any number of search queries, with graphic images and tales of atrocity immediately leaping to the eyes of anyone searching for even the most innocent information. Even if the government managed to keep the internet down in Poodlekek, Anahata would flood the rest of the country with the reranked results. If previous Anahata revolutions were any indication, the incendiary results would incite unrest elsewhere in the country, eventually leading to revolt and a total collapse of the government. A new, progressive leader would take over, Arsyen would be freed, and the world would celebrate the triumph of democracy and Anahata.

  For eight hours, the Moodify team worked to build a new Pyrrhian search engine, going through thirty cans of Red Bull, twenty bags of Anahata’s signature organic potato chips, and trying their best to ignore the beckoning Circean pings from their Social Me app.

  Finally, in the darkest hours of morning, taurine and glucose dripping from their pores, they reached the last, dramatic step. The team typed in the final line of code. The cursor blinked back at them, pulsing like an explosive light. They turned to Gregor, who gave them the nod. The team lead put his index finger atop a single “enter” key, closed his eyes, and on the count of three, pushed.

  P resident Korpeko was not so much fat as oversized, each part of his body a comic exaggeration of what it was intended to be. His ears hung like drooping question marks. A flat, expansive nose dominated his face as though a manifestation of his own imperial ambitions. The bones of his fingers popped in and out of their joints as his pudgy hands moved across his desk, sometimes reaching for a paper, other times for his porcelain teacup.

  The president leaned toward Arsyen, his pale, pockmarked face punctuated by bursts of red veins. Arsyen met his gaze and jutted out his chin but hardly felt so confident. He wiggled his hands behind his back, trying to loosen the ropes, but they seemed to grow tighter the more he squirmed.

  It occurred to Arsyen that the president might kill him. He was the exiled prince, after all. And while he had no desire to die, any outcome less than that was slightly insulting to someone of Arsyen’s standing.

  But none of this was really his fault, and Arsyen hadn’t truly intended to take back the throne just yet. It had just been an idea — a passing fancy brought about by the intoxicating influence of the internet. Perhaps Arsyen could offer up the Throne Reclamation Committee in his place. Korpeko could save face, do a nice Sunday execution jamboree of the committee leaders, and everyone could go on their merry way.

  Arsyen’s thoughts turned to Natia. Did she know where he was? Had she thought he was brave when she saw him dragged off by Korpeko’s men? Perhaps he would never know.

  An aide tiptoed toward General Korpeko. The president’s head cocked like a teapot to receive the whispered briefing. This had been the routine for the past ten minutes: a thirty-second briefing from an aide, a long study of Arsyen’s face, then the arrival of a new aide and his news. Finally, after several minutes, the general addressed his prisoner. />
  “Well, Prince Arsyen?”

  “Look,” Arsyen said, “Pyrrhia doesn’t interest me. The television here has only four channels. In America, we have ten thousand, and we watch all of them. Here the people sleep on blankets and hay. In America, they have this thing called 1–800-MATTRESS, and, I mean, you get a mattress like an hour after you call. And then — anyway, my point is it’s the TRC you want. They are behind all of your problems. Them and a group of dirty revolutionaries led by a young man name Vgad. I will lead you to him.”

  The president laughed without smiling. “Yes, I must be mistaken. You didn’t create the Justice for Poodlekek page. The impassioned speech you gave just now in front of that motley band of whistlers wasn’t you. Anahata, the company you work for, isn’t the company that my telecommunications minister now tells me is trying to hijack our Great Pyrrhian Wall of Fire.”

  An aide whispered in the president’s ear.

  “Our, firewall, I mean. Our Great Pyrrhian Firewall. I am sure none of these silly political matters have anything to do with you. You are just a good Poodlekek boy who happens to be the son of the deposed leader and came to Pyrrhia for a little vacation.”

  Arsyen sighed. It was clear that Korpeko would not be won over easily.

  Arsyen grimaced as he lowered himself from the chair to the ground to perform the traditional Pyrrhian bow — nose to the ground, fanny pointed skyward. It was a humiliating posture for a prince, and he knelt only long enough for Korpeko to register his submission. Then he sat back on his heels.

  “Please let me go,” said Arsyen, his head still bowed. “I promise you’ll have no more trouble from me.”

  “Silence!” said Korpeko, throwing his teacup past Arsyen’s head, shattering it against the opposite wall. From his belt he pulled a gleaming Pyrrhian lobate blade, slicing the air with a swish.

  A guard materialized and yanked Arsyen to his feet, only to then knock his legs out from under him. Arsyen fell and landed squarely on his hip. He howled, but no one cared. The president already seemed to have turned his attention elsewhere. He was conferring with someone new, a man Arsyen recognized as Colonel Okonkwi, Korpeko’s right hand. Colonel Okonkwi’s face was red and he sputtered as he spoke. A storm moved across the president’s face, his eyes flicking rapidly between the two men.