Chapter 16
The sun was setting behind the mountains that surrounded the lake of Silvaplana, Switzerland on the evening of July 26th, 2013. Dora and Louis were walking the final meters to the Piz Corvatsch refuge, where they had booked a room for the night. Beyond them, the massive Piz Bernina was already glowing in the pink sunset light.
“You hike remarkably fast for a seventy-nine-year-old, Louis. Oh sorry, I mean, Richard”.
“And you are without any doubt the most beautiful sixty-year-old the world has seen so far, Dora, whoops, Heidi. Your birthday cake is waiting for us!”
The cake had exactly thirty candles, which Dora blew out in a puff after they finished dinner.
They had decided to celebrate this birthday alone, leaving their new circle of friends from the Zurich business community behind.
After a final round of schnaps, the high-proof German drinks, Dora changed the subject to business.
“So how was the trip to Hong Kong? You have not told me anything since you came back yesterday and I can’t control my curiosity any longer. I guess it went well seeing that you got home safely I did not find any anonymous threat letters in our mailbox.”
Louis appreciated her patience. She had given him all the time he needed to mentally process the meetings from the previous week, with Mr. Lee and his team, made up of the Italian from London and the Mexican from Los Angeles.
Mr. Lee had insisted to have the periodic progress meeting with Louis. He had been wanting to meet Louis in person for several months.
Eventually, Helena and George settled for one of the many luxury hotels of Hong Kong.
“He spent the first half an hour asking me questions about my boyhood and the early stages of Telomerax,” said Louis. “I got the impression that he was genuinely curious, at times even amused. Then he left the floor to one of his partners, the Mexican named Guillermo, who gave a presentation on the current diffusion of Telomerax.”
“Basically, they have around a thousand clients on Telomerax. They started from top-notch cocaine users that wanted to pull out because the drawbacks were starting to outweigh the benefits and the results have been amazing. All of them continued with cocaine usage and accepted to pay a hefty amount for Telomerax.
They roughly get one million dollars per user for every year, which, when you deduct the cost of the reduced amount of cocaine and the supply of Telomerax, makes up for a profit of almost nine hundred million dollars a year.”
“Louis, you were feeling greedy when George asked for five thousand dollars per pill! We should ask for more!”
“I think it will go in the opposite direction. Mr. Lee and his team know their customers. They are spread across the world, roughly a quarter of them are Asians, a bit less than half are North Americans, and the rest are Europeans and Middle-Easterns - mostly consisting of rich entrepreneurs, financiers, celebrities, a few politicians. Now they want to expand the market five-fold every year, reaching more than two million customers by the end of 2018.
This means they need to bring down the cost of the cure to less than one hundred thousand dollars per year per person. So they want the price to drop, to at least one fifth of the present value. If everything goes according to their plan, they will make one hundred billion dollars in revenue, and a ninety billion dollar profit, in the next five years. The planet will see the first legion of one million immortals, although most of them won’t be aware since the pill is marketed only as a remedy to cocaine side effects.”
“One million people on Telomerax? In less than five years?” Dora asked, skeptically.
It was bigger than anything she had ever imagined.
“Yes, it is huge. There is something that scares me more, though. Mr. Lee and his friends do not see this mainly as a ticket to immortality. They see Telomerax as a vehicle to bring the planet, or at least vast parts of it, to cocaine addiction, almost a fully legal one. And they are not aware of superintelligence.”
“This means that in the long term, or even in a few years time..”
“…we might have a serious conflict with these gentlemen. Nonetheless, for the time being, we have no choice but to follow them in the drug use expansion. I will have to extend the production facility. The only deal we made was Mr. Lee agreeing not to expand in territories like Africa, India and the Middle East, where there is no activity right now.”
“And how about the distribution? Will that scale up as well?”
“The Italian guy - I think his name is Paolo - openly praised the system, and those types do not give credit easily. In the two inspections that the shipments incurred, the customs officers simply thought that Telomerax was part of the chocolate found inside, as it does not react positively to any known drug test.
That way, every country is receiving his share of chocolate via Dubai but customs officers would not be immediately able to correlate to our chocolate factory in Switzerland.
And we are just sending unmarked chocolates to our Dubai trading partner, with a clear agreement that they can repackage and resell them to whoever they want. As for the quantity, I do not think we have a problem, I read in the in-flight magazine that Emirates is upgrading the Zurich daily flight to an Airbus Superjumbo. We can send two tons of chocolate per day.”
“Louis, am I wrong or do you seem quite happy about this? I mean, despite your thoughts on how ‘Prosperity’ intends to use Telomerax…”
“You are right, the system is working. We are starting to spread the drug, in a way we did not imagine but nevertheless it is moving forward. Most importantly, I felt Mr. Lee respects me and he won’t try to screw us over, or at least he will do it in the most honorable way if he is forced to.”
“And how about Helena and George? How are they doing? We have not met since that meeting in Abu Dhabi, when all of this got started.”
“Oh, they look great. George is perfectly integrated in the Hong Kong life. Aside from coordinating Telomerax distribution with Mr. Lee, he is also trying to start up new ventures with the Chinese.
As for Helena, I do not know if it was a new makeup trick or if she also had a bit of a facelift, but she looks a bit more Asian. Last, I almost forgot to mention that, she is three-weeks pregnant. Please, keep that for yourself and do not tell Tarek or Valerio.”
Dora stopped with her spoon of raspberry yogurt in midair and stared at Louis intensely, forcing him to continue,
“I know what you are going to say. I also thought about it during the whole journey back from China. I think it is a risk now. I do not know if there might be side effects with Telomerax. For some reason, Helena really wanted this. You know her, she does not stop at anything. Let’s first wait to see how it goes, please.”
Dora nodded, trying to conceal the envy she was starting to feel for Helena.
The Last Enemy - Part 2 - 2011-2023 Page 16