The Big Disruption

  Colonel Okonkwi gestured at a black screen occupying most of the wall opposite the president’s desk. An aide pushed a button, and the screen was suddenly illuminated in white. He typed something into a device, and an Anahata search box appeared, the purple-and-green logo bouncing gently on the page. He then typed “Pyrrhia” and hit the search button.

  The president gasped. The first result accused the president of sleeping with dogs. The second charged his top advisers with corruption. The third was an unfortunate photo of him vomiting at a state dinner.

  “Search for something else,” the president ordered.

  The aide tried “government,” then “elections,” then “healthy recipes for weight loss.” But no matter what the query, the results seemed to be skewed, designed to show the worst of President Korpeko and his officials. Arsyen watched as the rigged search results cascaded down the screen. One result in particular seemed to catch the president’s attention. It first appeared as the tenth result, then, within seconds, as the aide performed subsequent searches, the result moved up the list, gaining in popularity as a nation of Pyrrhians clicked to read its damning evidence — a birth certificate suggesting that President Korpeko was not actually Pyrrhian but Embrian. In a manner of minutes, it was the top search result, no matter what the query.

  The president’s officials gazed at their leader and took a step back. Only Colonel Okonkwi, the president’s longtime confidant, remained where he stood, his face hardening.

  “This is your fault,” said the colonel, turning to Arsyen. “You are a traitor to your country.” He turned to Korpeko. “What shall we do with him?”

  The president, his eyes fixed on the screen, didn’t answer. The colonel leaned in and repeated the question.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the president finally, his voice almost inaudible.

  “To the gallows!” the colonel shouted.

  The guard dragged Arsyen out the door, hauling him down a short corridor and then down four steep steps. The opulent tapestries and gold-plated furniture of the upper floor gave way to a dingier space sparsely populated with shabby chairs and cupboards.

  “The dungeon’s full today, so the old kitchen will have to do for now,” the guard said.

  Arsyen limped toward the room’s sole chair, his hip throbbing after his fall.

  The guard walked over to the far end of the kitchen and opened what appeared to be a freezer stuffed with ice packs. “You’re lucky we have these,” he said, tossing a few at Arsyen. “The president has repetitive strain injury from curling, so we keep them stockpiled here. Throw one on your hip — we don’t want people thinking we tortured you before we killed you.”

  The guard shut the door and turned the key on the other side. Arsyen’s eyes scanned the room. There were no windows and just a single door. The room was so dusty that he found himself sneezing.

  The guard returned in a few minutes with a cold potato and some salt and sugar.

  “Colonel Okonkwi wants to squeeze you into the noon executions. You’re lucky, really — the waiting list is long and the dungeon tends to make people’s limbs rot. Enjoy your last few hours.”

  Then the guard left, locking the door behind him.

  Arsyen stared at the potato and pushed the plate away. Just a few days before, he had been in sunny California; now he was about to be executed for doing something that he only sort of intended to do, for a girl he barely knew, but for whom, even in this dark moment, he still pined.

  Arsyen studied the kitchen — the chipped white cabinets and dusty floor, an old broom resting against the fridge. Of all the ironies — the prince turned janitor back in his palace, held prisoner in the filthiest spot.

  So much dirt surrounded him. And without Arsyen, who would clean it up?

  Arsyen had never loved being a janitor, but he recognized the importance of the job: Someone had to clean up the messes people made each day. All those men in the Valley went about building their riches and never looked back to see what filth they had left behind. They needed people like Arsyen to sweep things away.

  And so it was, then, just hours from death, that Arsyen wondered why, with all the extraordinary brain power in Silicon Valley today, no engineer had ever tackled the fundamental human problem of dirt. Dirt affected everyone; dirt was democratic. Dirt scaled, dirt climbed, dirt 10x’d everything it could. And there was so very, very much that lay below the surface of things. Arsyen vowed that if he somehow made it out of the palace alive, he would take the problem straight to Bobby Bonilo.

  Arsyen felt his stomach rumble. The rumble turned to a growl, and he reconsidered the potato the guard had left him.

  Arsyen sprinkled the potato with salt and took a bite. He wrinkled his nose and spit it out — there was something wrong with that salt. He poured a bit into his hand and tasted it cautiously with his tongue. It looked like salt, but it wasn’t salt. It was…saltpeter? Totally useless as a salt seasoning, but it had proven useful in a pinch during Arsyen’s cleaning experiments.

  Arsyen paused: Would God let him experiment with chemicals in heaven? Could he continue to work his Aimo Air Freshener there? Would Arsyen be a janitor or a king in heaven? Could he be a king if there was God?

  Arsyen pushed away the plate and salt shaker.

  But a second later, they were back in front of him. Arsyen stared at the potato, then looked at the salt shaker, his mind spinning. Could it be?

  His gaze moved across the table, from the saltpeter, over to the sugar, and finally to his ice pack. He smiled for the first time in hours. From his jeans pocket, he pulled out a small heart-shaped bottle — the Aimo Air Freshener he had planned to give Natia. And then he waited for the guard to return.

  Korpeko and Okonkwi

  In the lavish command room of the imperial palace, the extent of the damage to Pyrrhia’s internet was quickly becoming clear to the president and his colonel.

  News of unrest in the capital had quickly spread throughout the country. In the city of Kolkikek, a man searching for a chat room was directed to a blog post about the government’s cover-up of the train crash. In Pokikek, a woman searching for information on curling techniques was taken to a list of the government’s excessive expenditures on exotic birds. In Krakikek, a college student researching European history was redirected to a video of the demonstration outside the imperial palace. It wasn’t long before Klokikek, Pokikek, and Krakikek — and a host of other Pyrrhian cities — were up in arms, plotting action against corrupt local and national officials.

  And then Anahata played its ace, bringing citizens across Pyrrhia to their feet, pitchforks in hand, as their searches for online porn were greeted by a 404 error page and a message that the government had censored all inappropriate images.

  The president dismissed all of his officials except Colonel Okonkwi. The two sat silently before their glasses of scotch, the president thinking back on his years of rule, the colonel contemplating the best military strategy to protect the country from revolt. As night fell, the crowds outside the palace grew louder, and the first gate, then the second, gave way to the angry masses. Colonel Okonkwi wondered how much time was left before his men began to abandon their posts.

  Suddenly, a loud explosion from the floor below knocked Colonel Okonkwi to his knees. He dashed into the hall and nearly collided with an aide. “It’s Prince Arsyen. He’s gone,” the panicked aide said. “He blew up a wall in the first-floor kitchen!”

  The colonel returned to the command room and locked the door behind him, preparing to summon his reserve army.

  “My friend, sit,” said President Korpeko, handing the colonel his glass.

  The command room was dark save for the white screen; its light cast a sickly pallor across the president’s face. Just then, the search results on the screen began to melt together, dripping into a dark circle in the middle, then opening into a spiraling rainbow. The rainbow dissolved into the dancing face of Bobby Bonilo, chiseled and s
et against a blue sky. “Improve humankind!” said the talking head, floating through the clouds, blinking for just a few seconds before disappearing. And then the search results returned.

  “Who was that man?” Colonel Okonkwi raged.

  “Anahata,” said the president quietly, but his mind had moved well beyond any thoughts of revenge.

  President Korpeko had always known this day would come, but he had hoped to stave it off long enough to see his dreams to fruition. He now saw that his great hope — to ease hundreds of years of hatred between his native Embria and his adopted Pyrrhia through a mutual love of curling — would die with him. The curling high schools he had created would be restored to Aimo croquet preparatories. The lanes he had crafted alongside the main roads would be left to melt, the ice turning sooty, patches of weeds shooting up like a long-dormant plague. The statue of him in the central plaza, his body bent close to the ground, hand on the curling stone, eyes staring forward into the future, would be toppled by a gang of dirty, illiterate youths. In his place, the same statues, just with different faces and names, would be erected by Arsyen Aimo.

  He shook his head and placed his hand on the shoulder of Colonel Okonkwi. “My friend, it is over. I will see you on the other side.”

  President Korpeko walked slowly through the adjoining door to his private quarters. There, after kissing a photo of his prized curling stone and donning both Pyrrhian and Embrian bison capes, he put a bullet in his head.

  Colonel Okonkwi heard the shot from the other side of the door.

  B obby was only three seconds into his pranayamic breathing when the suits cut him off.

  “Bobby. Bobby. BOBBY!”

  He lifted his head, glancing at the figures before him.

  “We didn’t come here to watch you do yoga,” one suit said. “That’s not what a board is for.”

  Bobby projected the positive energy from his stomach onto the suits. Poor suits, they didn’t know how misguided they were. If only they would let him guide them to the light. He had been avoiding their calls for days in the hopes of teaching them the importance of patience, but instead they had stormed Anahata with their assistants and made those poor women go on a hunger strike until Bobby would agree to see them.

  Bobby stood, adjusted his turquoise pajamas, then brought his hands together in namaste. He bowed to the six suited men standing before him.

  “Board. Boardmen. Welcome.”

  The suits took their seats and wasted no time in launching their interrogation: Was there a moon colony? Who had come up with the idea? Why hadn’t the board been told in advance? Did the FTC know? The FCC? The FEC? NASA? Were rocket ships involved? Had they found aliens?

  They were such a tedious bunch. Bobby held up his hand to stop their babbling.

  “You may call yourselves ‘the board,’ but let there be no pretense as to why you are here. I could heard your little feet approaching, scampering through the clouds of capitalism, sailing down on your golden carpets, landing on my verdant lawn. I know what you want.”

  “What we want,” a suit hissed, “is to keep you from destroying one of the world’s wealthiest companies.”

  “We exist to help keep Anahata on track,” another suit added.

  Bobby again held up his hand and closed his eyes.

  He thought of the poet Rumi.

  Then he thought of freezing some vials of his blood to keep him virile at eighty.

  But then he again thought of Rumi.

  “The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.”

  The suits looked at him blankly.

  Bobby shook his head.

  “Rumi. That was the great poet Rumi. My point is you don’t know the full picture yet. So please calm down.”

  He projected a serene, benevolent smile.

  “To protect our company’s future, it was clear we needed to start from scratch, to rebuild the rules and fundamentals of society. You see, I looked up one day and there was this fiery sun and — ”

  “Is there a moon colony or not?” said one of the suits, glancing at his watch.

  Bobby sighed. Why was everyone so hung up about the moon? The important part was the society.

  “Yes, it’s on the moon. But don’t pretend you care about the moon. I bet none of you even know your astrological sign. You just care about our rapidly tanking stock price, yes? Let’s just put that out there and be clear with one another.”

  “I didn’t think any of us were hiding it,” said the suit. “This is all about the stock price and the fact that there are already indications that your shareholders may sue.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Bobby said. “The PR team put out a blog post refuting the whole moon thing.”

  “That was days ago, and in case you haven’t noticed, it’s had zero effect,” said a different suit, a suit whose name Bobby could never remember but whom he recalled was the richest man in India. “Your PR team has managed to write a blog post where they say nothing at all.”

  “Well, yes, but that’s the purpose of a PR team,” Bobby said. “Like I said, we’ll be fine. The stock moves up and the stock moves down. Things come and go. Yin and yang.”

  “Do you understand how serious this is? When people find out how much money you are wasting on a moon adventure — ”

  “Look,” Bobby said, “on the advertising side, everything is great. We essentially automated the sales team, and our whole sales operation is more efficient and profitable than ever. And as for the rest, we just need a few weeks to get everything ready. Our earnings are going to be well above the street’s forecasts. You’ll see, all will be fine.”

  “All will not be fine if you have to wait a few weeks to be able to prove that Anahata isn’t run by a nutjob looking to befriend aliens,” the Indian suit said.

  “Ah, but you have all forgotten about this, my trump card,” said Bobby, pushing that day’s newspaper toward the center of the table. He had asked his assistant to pick it up that morning — wherever it was these days that one could still buy a print newspaper.

  The Indian suit read the headline aloud.

  Pyrrhian Ruler Ousted by Anahata

  Bobby beamed.

  “You must not have seen the stock price this morning,” said the Indian suit, tossing the paper on the table. “It’s down another five percent. The street doesn’t like revolutions. Philosophic ideals are rarely connected to the promotion of successful economic models.”

  “But the media is loving it,” Bobby protested. “We ushered in democracy!”

  “Human rights don’t benefit anyone but humans. The market sees no upside.”

  “Hmm.” Bobby paused, irritated by this wrinkle. How could people expect you to be a visionary if they were constantly fogging your glasses?

  “I think Bobby should call the Fixer,” the Indian suit said. “The Fixer can fix this.”

  “The Fixer’s a great idea,” another suit said. “He doesn’t even really need to fix anything. People just need to think you’ve brought in some adult supervision.”

  “Wall Street likes adults,” nodded the suit next to him. “The Fixer can action any action plan, synergize any synergies. Provided, of course, that you open the kimono and — ”

  Bobby looked down — he had not worn his kimono today. This suit spoke in riddles.

  “The point is, the shareholders will sue if they feel you are destroying their company.”

  “My company,” Bobby said. “It’s my company. I own fifty-one percent.”

  “Bobby, take this seriously. You don’t want to be sued,” another suit said.

  “Or be pressured to resign,” said the Indian suit.

  Bobby turned toward the suit closest to him. With his pale, wrinkly body, he looked just like the suit next to him, who looked just like the two men sitting next to him, who — well, didn’t look anything like the Indian billiona
ire. But in spirit, at least, the suits were all the same. In Bobby’s new society on the moon, there would be no suits. There would only be…progress.

  Bobby crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, throwing his feet up on the table. He contemplated whether falling into a sudden nap would send the capitalists away. He wanted more time to think about innovation…or breasts…or innovation.

  “Look at it this way,” said the Indian suit, cutting into his thoughts. “If you don’t get the share price back up, you’re not going to have any money left to reinvest in the moon project. And then the moon project will collapse.”

  “Or worse — Galt could beat you to it,” another suit said.

  Bobby’s feet dropped to the floor. He hadn’t considered that possibility — or any others, really, as he had forbidden Fischer to distract him with financials.

  “If you want to save the moon colony, you have to save Anahata,” the Indian suit said.

  Bobby frowned. It did sound like he might have a problem.

  “Fine, I’ll call him. But you’ll see that this will all blow over. The market shouldn’t be so focused on the short term. You know, when we designed Anahata, we didn’t want to be a normal company. We wanted — ”

  The Indian suit stood, signaling Bobby to stop. “Bobby, you’ll have to excuse us. There are children dying in Africa — and, you know, other corporate issues — that we must attend to at our own companies. Let us know when you have the Fixer.”

  F or a man who seemed to be everywhere and on everyone’s lips, the Fixer was an elusive figure. He popped up now and then at internet conferences and industry events, but even then he was more whisper than presence. He hid in green rooms and VIP suites, sipped his cocktails in the shadows of discreet Davos and Sun City condos. But only those as powerful as the Fixer could claim to have seen him.