He guides you straight through the office toward a small reception lobby. On the wall behind the front desk is a colorful street-art mural framing the words IDEALISM IS SIMPLY LONG-RANGE REALISM! Something about it seems familiar. You want to stop, to look more closely, but Tim is urging you on.
Outside, it’s even brighter. You gasp and shield your eyes as he steers you past a polished steel sign saying SCOTT ROBOTICS, the initial S and R like two upended infinity symbols, toward a waiting Prius. “The city,” Tim tells the driver, while you struggle to fold your unresponsive limbs into the back. “Dolores Street.”
Once you’re both in and the Prius is moving off, his hand reaches for yours. “I’ve waited so long for this day, Abbie. I’m so happy you’re finally here. That we’re together again, at last.”
You catch the driver looking curiously at you in his rearview mirror. As you leave the parking lot he glances up at the sign, then back at you again, and something dawns in his expression.
Understanding. And something else as well. Disgust.
ONE
The very first we knew of Tim’s plan to hire an artist-in-residence was when we heard him talking to Mike about it. That was typical of Tim. He might exhort all of us to work more collaboratively and openly, but the same directive blatantly didn’t apply to him. Mike was one of the few people he would sometimes actually listen to, on account of them starting Scott Robotics together in Mike’s garage, almost a decade ago. But still: It might have been Mike’s garage, but it was Tim’s name on the company. That told you pretty much all you needed to know about their relationship.
So, regarding the artist-in-residence proposal, it wasn’t as if Tim was discussing it with Mike so much as telling him. But it was also typical of Tim that his announcement had to be prefaced by a loud, passionate tirade about what was so stupid and wrong and screwed up about the way we currently did things, even though we were only doing them the way he’d argued equally passionately for the last time he made us change everything.
“We need to wake the fuck up, Mike,” he was saying in his rasping British accent. “We need to get more creative. Look at these people”—and here his gesture took in all of us, working away in Scott Robotics’ open-plan HQ—“and tell me they’re thinking outside the paradigm. They need to be stimulated. They need to be excited. And we’re not going to do that with free bagels and Pilates.”
Tim once told a reporter that having an idea about what the future would look like and then waiting for it to happen was like being permanently stuck in traffic. He’s not a patient man. But he is the closest thing to a genius most of us have ever worked with.
“Which is why we’re hiring an artist,” he added. “Her name’s Abbie Cullen. She’s smart—she works with tech. She excites me. We’re giving her six months.”
“To do what?” Mike asked.
“Whatever the hell she likes. That’s the whole point. She’s an artist. Not yet another time-serving worker-drone.”
If any of us were offended by that description—among our number we counted quite a few millionaires, veterans of some of Silicon Valley’s most notable start-ups—none of us showed it, although we were already wondering how long the free bagels would continue now.
Mike nodded. “Great. Let’s get her in.”
We waited for the cry of Listen up, people! that usually prefaced Tim’s announcements. But none came. He’d already gone back into his glass-walled cubicle.
Many of us, of course, were already typing Abbie Cullen artist into our search engine of choice. (When you actually work in tech, using Google or Bing would be a bit like a craft brewer drinking Budweiser.) So pretty much instantly we knew the bare facts about her: that she had recently exhibited at SXSW and Burning Man; that she was originally from the South; that she was twenty-four years old, a redhead, tall and striking and a surfer; and that her website said, simply, “I build artifacts from the future.”
We had also found, and circulated, some video clips of her work. Seven Veils was a circle of electric fans, pointing inward at one another to create a vortex in which thin strips of colored silk tumbled and twirled perpetually. Earth, Wind, Fire was a cyclone of flame, bouncing like a roly-poly toy atop a gas burner as it battled competing blasts of air. Most spectacular of all was Pixels, a grid of dozens of what looked like Ping-Pong balls that floated as if on a cushion of air, but also interacted with the gallery visitor. Sometimes the balls seemed to flicker, like a shoal of fish; sometimes they pulsed lazily, like water streaming behind a boat, or formed almost recognizable shapes: a head, a hand, a heart. In one clip a child visiting the exhibit clapped her hands, causing the globes to drop abruptly to the floor before warily creeping back up, the way a herd of heifers noses up to a hiker. They were beautiful and strange and playful, and although they had no meaning or message you could easily take away, they also had a kind of purpose; they expressed something, even if what that something was couldn’t be put into words.
What had they to do with us? We were engineers, mathematicians, coders, developing intelligent mannequins for high-end fashion stores—shopbots, Tim’s big idea, the idea that had pulled in nearly eighty million dollars in start-up funding over the last three years. What did we need with an artist? We didn’t know. But we had long ago learned not to question Tim’s decisions.
He was a visionary, a wunderkind, the whole reason each one of us was at that company in the first place. What Gates was to personal computers, Jobs was to smartphones, or Musk was to electric cars, Tim Scott was to AI; or would be, very soon. We idolized him, we feared him, but even those who could not keep up and had to be let go respected him. And there were many of the latter. Scott Robotics was not just a business. It was a mission, a first-to-market blitzkrieg in a war to mold the future of humanity, and Tim was not so much a CEO as a battlefield commander, charging from the front, our very own Alexander the Great. His gangling physique, rock-star cheekbones, and goofy giggle failed to mask his iron determination, a determination he demanded from each of us in turn. Twenty-hour days were so common they were barely worth remarking on. The postdocs fresh out of Stanford who were his usual hires felt empowered, rather than exploited, by the insane work ethic. (On which subject, his interview technique was legendary. You were ushered into his cubicle, where he would be working on emails, and waited patiently for him to say—without looking up—“Go.” That was your cue to pitch why you wanted to work at his company. Assuming you passed, next came what was known as The Timbreaker. Sometimes it was a computational question: “How many square feet of pizza are eaten in the US each year?” More often it was philosophical: “What’s the worst thing about humanity?”—or practical: “Why are manhole covers round?” But mostly, it was to do with code. Such as: “How would you program an artificial politician?” And the answer you were required to give was not just theoretical: Tim expected you to come up with actual lines of working code, one after another, without the use of pen and paper, let alone a computer. If you did well, it was signaled by a single word, delivered in the direction of the emails he was still working on: “Cool.” If he said quietly, “That’s pretty lame,” you were out.)