“So, hopefully, with this feature, we’re going to see a real growth in new accounts at IQID, and thus be able to start building toward our goal of being able to tailor responses to client need. And remember, we need more clients for more capital… So what are we focusing on?”
The room was too warm to be productive for this kind of meeting, he realized. When the eleven men before him responded with “more clients!” it was not only less hearty than he would have liked, several of them looked genuinely confused as to what the meeting had actually been about. Damian couldn’t talk to anyone about turning up the air conditioning without being reminded that their planet was being destroyed because of their need for ultimate comfort—at least, that was the way Brian in HR put it every month when Damian went to complain.
“Okay,” he continued. “Let’s all look forward to tomorrow’s recap email; you can shoot back any questions—”
“I’ve got a question,” said Jamie in his jagged baritone. He leaned back in his chair, his lids drooping as he spoke. “Is the retreat still going to be catered?”
At the mention of the quarterly retreat, every man in the room straightened up. This year, they would be in Maine in a luxurious resort where they could request more types of massages than they could possibly have time to receive. It was one of the perks that many higher-level employees signed on for exclusively, partially because of the parties Damian tended to fund while they were there—Damian Wyles’ parties had always been worthwhile in Silicon Valley.
Jamie was still speaking. “Those salmon rolls were divine last year. Most perfect things ever. I’ve been dreaming about them every night since the last one cleared my system.”
“With Lola next you?” Gary said, leaning across the gleaming table to show Jamie his roguish wink. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all.”
Damian closed his eyes, resisting the urge to roll them. “Guys, can we keep things professional here?”
Jamie snorted. “You wouldn’t be so eager to jump behind the wheel with Lola if you’d been on the rides I’ve been on,” he said darkly.
Gary’s expression turned curious. “What do you mean?”
Jamie shrugged. “My tastes are a little more vanilla, I guess. Once I start bruising, I’m out. There’s a reason Lola has so many private tennis lessons—better him than me.”
“Okay, gentlemen, it’s nearly eight,” Damian said hastily, waving his arms toward the door. “We should all head out. We can talk about the retreat as we get closer to the event.”
The men finally started to stand, but now they’d all broken out into various shades of lewd conversation. Damien pulled his blazer on and walked through the long, mirrored conference room, thankfully slipping out before Jacob could finish telling Miles about the time he and his girlfriend went skinny dipping in Majorca and nearly got arrested for indecent exposure. Someone near the door called his name before he closed the door, but they were pulled into another conversation before they could even finish addressing him, so he turned out and completed his exit uninterrupted.
The dim fluorescent lights told him it was past eight o’clock now, so the silence of the hall wasn’t at all out of place. His footsteps were completely swallowed by the plush blue carpet, the fibers reaching up to sweep the top of his gleaming black loafers. Damian caught sight of himself in the glass door of his office before he unlocked it, and he was shocked to see that his skin was far paler than usual, his wavy black hair making him look more vampire-like rather than camera ready. His legs were aching as he closed the door behind him, and he took solace in the fact that it was Friday—meaning he could sleep in as late as eight or nine if he wanted, though his body surely wouldn’t let him lay around that long.
Damian’s office sat in the corner of the thirtieth floor of a slate gray building on Palm, two blocks from the center of Mountain View’s downtown area. He could see the bay, and the windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling of his back wall also gave him an incredible view of a good half of the city, and even parts of Palo Alto if the fog wasn’t pressing against the glass. He remembered the first time he’d seen the view from his window, four years before; IQID had just begun to come into its own, with its first televised commercials rolling out around Labor Day.
“IQID is Identification protection—that’s the ID—that works smarter to keep you safe—that’s the IQ!” Chirped the bubbly young woman in front of her laptop. The letters floated above her as she spoke, and Damien was so shocked at seeing his company name in glossy, computer-generated letters on his flat screen that he had been momentarily convinced that someone was actually pranking him. By the fifth time he’d viewed the commercial, things were starting to feel real, and his half a million subscribers went a long way toward helping that feeling solidify. Then Damian got the news that they could buy three floors of the huge building on Palm he’d strolled past a million times while he interned at Intracode, and his dream-like sensation sharpened and receded at the same time, somehow—like he was trapped in limbo, or that strange space between sleep and waking where thoughts and words drifted away and were never heard from again. He got that feeling every time he looked out the window for nearly two years; after that, the reality of the relentlessly gray life in the tech capital of the world started to dull his reactions to everything else. Damian kept his shades drawn during the daytime, especially.
A soft chime filled the room, and the cool voice of his assistant followed. “Will you be needing takeout ordered, Mr. Wyles?”
“No, Alexis,” Damian answered, “and hey—go home. Have a good weekend.”
“Yes, sir,” Alexis said, and he could hear the relief in her tone, though she tried hard to hide it. “You, too. Don’t forget to find your dress shoes tonight.”
As the intercom fell into silence again, Damian felt confusion tint the words tumbling around his skull. Dress shoes? What did he need dress shoes for?
Damian’s eyes rose to the LED calendar he kept on the wall at the exact moment he remembered his gala. Despair flooded his weary bones, and he collapsed into the chair behind his desk as his visions of a relaxing Saturday evening at home were dispelled. He’d forgotten he bought a $20,000 table at a charity gala a month ago, and not only did he invite friends to fill the seats, the chairman of the Lupus charity was expecting him to show. That would mean a minimum of three hours of rubbing shoulders with men who would kill their own trophy wives to be able to steal his youth and vigor, and women who would smother their lauded husbands for a weekend with him—every one of them climbing all over themselves to impress or undermine him with every word. He got enough ass-kissing in his school days; he’d done enough ass-kissing, too, come to think of it.
A crowd of voices moved down the hall toward the bank of elevators around the corner from his office. His inner door was open, so their words were just clear enough to make out as they went by.
“Yeah, I’d like that too,” someone was saying. “But we already know that doesn’t work.”
“Those women went about it all wrong,” said a second voice. “You have to be accommodating and transparent every step of the way—or at least appear that way.”
“For the shareholders?”
“No,” the second voice said mildly. “For the public. That was their downfall—the public can and will affect your success, even before you open the doors on your product.”
“How do you even call a people tracking app a product, anyway?” the man said, who sounded a lot like Gary.
“Don’t call it tracking, for one,” said the other man, who was probably Miles. “It’s surveying. Curating. Recording.”
“Stalking,” said a third man. “You can’t have an app where you review people, period. I know you want this to work, Miles, but it’s going to fail. Hell, the boss tried to do it before you did—you think you have a better shot?”
Damian rose from his seat and closed the door to his inner office before he had the time to catch Miles’ indignant reply. His face was burning, and he was struggling to contain his shame at the mention of his old project, even though the name hadn’t even been uttered aloud. A people reviewing app. Damian smiled, bittersweet memories rushing back as he recalled his time only seven years before.
The app had begun as a way to alert vulnerable people about abusive men in their area, aptly named Lookout4. Damian’s younger sister June had a habit of attracting men who were as violent as they were good looking, and he wanted a way to warn other women before they walked into the same trap. After a year, the app had a respectable presence on college campuses, and the then 24-year-old Damian Wyles was riding high on his own success. He felt that he’d done his duty to make sure the app was stable and functional, so when a buyer came forward with a price tag far higher than the app’s worth, he jumped at the chance. Suddenly, he had enough money to start a new business while the app he founded spiraled into a bloated platform for advertisements and pointless features that turned Lookout4 into more of a social media hangout than an alert system.
“They added aesthetic ratings,” Damian told June over the phone one night. “And stickers. You can slap on a cherry stamp or a sparkly birthday cake next to Richard Banks’ long list of domestic offenses, if you want.”
“Good thing you got out,” June said calmly. “Sounds like it really changed.”
“It changed because I left,” Damian replied. “If I hadn’t sold the company, who knows what it would have been.”
This wasn’t how the rest of the world saw it, however; because of media spin, the world thought Damian Wyles’ pet project tanked after a year, only to be rescued and then eventually mercy killed by Johnathan “Jack” Summers, the investor whose managerial and operational tweaks often rescued a project that should have been dead. Worse, Jack Summers didn’t deny this rumor at all—it was better than letting people know the truth, which might lead them to realize that his success rate wasn’t as high as it seemed. Damian didn’t push the issue, because Lookout4 was long gone—plus, he really hated dealing with Jack Summers. Jack loved riding his old friends’ coattails to his destinations and then throwing them under a passing bus if it felt convenient, so they were closer to enemies than former business partners; still, Jack’s acquisition of Lookout4 made IQID possible, so Damian tried not to harbor too much animosity toward him.
Damian realized the hall had been silent for quite some time. He put away his notes and locked the drawers on his desk, pulling his phone off its charger before switching off the overhead light in his inner office. His outer office was already dark, but he knew how to locate the door handle from five years of making this exact trek in various states of darkness and daylight. This office had been his home more than the apartment he owned had been at first; Damian remembered his long nights of coding and correcting with a mixture of fondness and joy—he’d never be so young and energetic ever again, but he also was far more confident now, and his success was undeniable. He might get nostalgic, he decided, but he was definitely happier now.
The elevator doors showed him his face again in their reflective surface as they slid closed, and he was struck by the depth of the circles beneath his eyes—they were soft and purpled, like two impressionist black holes beneath twin pools of crystal blue water. He closed his eyes again.
I need a drink.