Ed King (40 page)

Speaking once more through the synthesizer, she said, “So how does that feel? Do you like it?”

From a drawer she took a pint can of Boddingtons, popped the top, then poured some into Club’s eyes. The rest got poured into the funnel, where it pooled and drained gradually. “Delicious,” said the Goddess, as the can slowly emptied. “I’m sure you’re enjoying this.”

She set the empty Boddingtons on the bedside table, where Club could read its label. “Irony,” she said. “Well, I better run and pee.” Then she slipped off her gloves, tossed them on his back, and left the room.

The ascendance of Pythia proceeded apace—600 million raised in a just post-millennial IPO—with Ed as overlord and tyrant. He kept his finger on the company pulse and put his imprint—publicly—on each gamble and initiative. New products were unveiled at monster events, carefully crafted, zealously produced, and scheduled to crown huge hype campaigns aimed at cranking up hysteria for launch dates. Ed, as chief pitchman, was a dazzler, a shill, an icon, and a superstar genius, and so visible, available, prominent, and profiled that in the public eye, worldwide, Pythia and Ed were the same. What happened to one, happened to the other. Pythia was built around a charismatic leader whose persona demanded constant monitoring by a team of propagandists who fretted and bit their nails. All it would take was a slip, they knew—the wrong words out of Ed’s mouth, say, or a bit of unsavory personal news—to
send Pythia’s stock price spiraling. Worst-case scenario was personal catastrophe—that might spell the demise of Pythia. He could go to jail, like Martha Stewart or Bernard Madoff, or go crazy, like Howard Hughes.

It didn’t help—as it might have helped—that in 2013, at the age of fifty, Ed handed over day-to-day operations to President Buddy Singh. It didn’t help because Ed didn’t leave the stage—he just stopped attending to every detail, in favor of continued media intensity, continued unilateral decision-making, and more time for neglected personal matters, foremost among them, the long deferred need to exercise. Over the years, his curved feet had caused damage to his knees, so now he had his knees replaced by the best doctor in the business; then he had laser eye surgery, which improved his vision to twenty-fifteen. All of this felt so renewing and invigorating that Ed, wanting more of it, hired a personal longevity consultant, who advised, and administered, treatments to stave off aging. Diane got on that wagon, too, and they both began taking not only human growth hormone and the steroid known as DHEA, but intravenous infusions of phosphatidylcholine isolated from egg yolks. Diane replaced estrogen, and Ed took testosterone. Diane had another face-lift; Ed had his chin tucked.

With more time on his hands, Ed became—besides the King of Search—the king of acquisitions. He got addicted to buying companies, at first via cooperative and friendly mergers, then through management-endorsed tender offers, and then—whatever it took. He had a knack for lightning-fast due diligence investigations, loved a complicated proxy fight, and rained enough generosity on defeated CEOs to incline future victims toward buckling. At a daily meeting with generals, he evaluated targets and heard battle updates. They convened in a war room. A general would describe a target’s defensive posture, and Ed would throw money at it to make it go away. He was like a snowball rolling steeply downhill, always bigger, always gathering mass, to the point where a cascade, or even an avalanche, could be generated across a sector of the economy by virtue of his motion and growth.

At a war-room meeting in June of ’14, a general suggested that Pythia acquire GameKing—Simon’s company—after detailing how it was getting hammered of late by PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. Ed said, “Okay, but get there invisibly,” and within a few months he’d amassed
control of Simon’s company, at which point his brother, ferreting out the truth, stopped speaking to him and moved to Santa Barbara to grow a beard and teach. Just as well, thought Ed, because Si lacked the killer instinct. He found, reading Si’s post-GameKing think pieces in journals, that Si liked ruminating on “algorithmic culture” more than he’d ever liked superintending his bottom line. Sloppy business practices had been fine when Si was on a roll, but as the real players in gaming became more ruthless, Si hadn’t been able to contend or even stay at the table. On top of this, he suffered, at midlife, from abstract passions that were taking him out of the game anyway. Toward the end of his career as GameKing’s kingpin, Simon’s big subject had been “narrative transitivity.” He’d come to believe in not meeting expectations, in contradictory logic, in challenging “the mainstream gaming industry,” in disruption, estrangement, and intellectual provocation, and he’d predicted confidently that, not far in the future, “representation in gaming narratives” would give way significantly to a blurring of reality, and after that to a more compelling paradigm, the harbinger of which was good old tried-and-true reality TV. When that happened, Simon would be poised for the changing of the guard and recognized as prescient. It hadn’t worked, but no matter. Simon had money put away for a rainy day and, by keeping things sleek, could do what he wanted, which was to write, and lecture, on “Counter Gaming,” “Representational Modeling,” “Non-Diegetic Machine Acts,” and—his favorite—“Parallels Between the New Gaming and New Cinema.”

So Ed and Si didn’t talk, and Ed got used to it. He began to see himself as youthfully emeritus, and felt good about being looked to as a visionary. He was a steady, bubbling font of new ideas, and directed his company via inspirational appearances at Pythia campuses worldwide. In Mumbai, he talked about Universal Search, in London about Voice Search, in Moscow about the Ultimate Encyclopedia, in Sydney about the Human Genome Project, in Shanghai about Pythia’s nanotech research, in Palo Alto about its new analytics engine. He promoted Diane’s foundation—the Edward and Diane King Foundation—which, he told audiences, had in one year alone put seven billion dollars to work against some of the world’s most intractable problems (seventy-two clinics and hospitals, fourteen refugee camps, medical services in thirty-two countries—the Daniel King Memorial Medical Corps—removal of land
mines in seventeen countries, planting of new forests in twenty-four countries, R&D on fusion reactors, capitalization of desalination plants in locales where the supply of fresh water was dwindling, numerous grants to clean-energy innovators, and investments in solar, wind, hydrogen, clean coal, and carbon-sequestration technologies). He promoted Pythia’s Global Warming 2030 Campaign and urged governments to get serious about climate change. He spoke in Istanbul about information and political transformation: “The winds of freedom are blowing from our servers, and people around the world are finding in Pythia an ally in their pursuit of liberty. I’m proud that our hard work and vision have fostered freedom, and I’m excited to think that, in the world of tomorrow, Pythia has yet a larger role to play, so long as we walk shoulder to shoulder with commitment, passion, and strength.” In Tel Aviv, Ed made a moral case: “What you know about,” he told his audience, “you have to face. What you see, you have to confront. That’s the beauty of information, and of search. Search brings us face to face with the world, and so revolutionizes our relationship to it. I, for one, am optimistic about that. I think it augurs a seismic shift away from the errors and calamities of the past. We are at the beginning of a new millennium, in which knowing means doing and seeing means change. Our moment has come. Our time is now. We must handle it wisely and confront the risks, but we mustn’t pass on the opportunity for a better and brighter tomorrow.” Then on to Rio, where he delivered “The End of Babel”: “Our cross-language tools,” he said, “very soon, will allow for the immediate and seamless translation of
any
information from one language to another. Your native language might be Farsi or Amharic, but that will present no obstacle whatsoever to information in Basque or Babylonian. Regarding this, we are nearing completion; within a year and a half, we will have successfully integrated every language currently in use, as well as the known languages no longer spoken. When we’re done, we will have rendered the borders of language irrelevant. Literally everything will be instantaneously translatable. If only Pythia’s translation tools had been available for construction of the Tower of Babel—but, of course, everything in its time. And
now
is the time—today, this hour—for the end of language as a barrier to commerce, art, politics, science, entertainment, social life, and global progress.”

Then on to Milpitas, where he preached to the choir at a Pythia
Research and Development Center: “I’m amazed,” said Ed, “by the incredible growth and proliferation of the blogosphere—and that’s not to mention social networking! I would venture to guess—based on our latest assessment, which is of course already out-of-date—that there are as many as twenty million active blogs on the planet as I speak, and many million more RSS feeds. Traffic in and out of social networks is immense—not only rich in nuance and statement but, more important for Pythia, fertile ground for new crawlers that will soon make our search engine more subtle and intelligent as we pursue our effort to realize perfect search. At our research lab here in Milpitas, some very fine people are enthusiastically gaining ground on a new analytics engine capable of classifying Web pages, broadly, across semantic categories. Small teams of Pythians are working on new and powerful filters that will be crucial to advances in global security, providing ways of analyzing diverse click-streams that will allow us to ferret out developing threats, filters that will be crucial to the government agencies and contractors who rely on us for help in determining resource allocation. With the blogosphere and social networks in hand, not to mention some very good algorithms, we’ll be providing hard, precise information to our clients along the lines of ‘The statistical odds favor a budget allocation for physical search of Container Number 114 aboard Ship X, scheduled to dock in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, in two hours and twenty-three minutes.’ Now, that,” said Ed, “is the raw power of search—’the power of search to power our world,’ as we say in our ad campaign.”

On home ground—at Pythia—Ed spoke about his genome project: “At the moment, we still have some distance to go, but truly we are making stunning headway. We are ultimately headed toward dominance in this sector, and by all measures, we’re closing the deal, which means—now that a new era is imminent—that it’s time at Pythia for more comprehensive advance planning. When, soon, we reign supreme as the best and most efficient direct pipeline for large volumes of genetic information, how will we connect with medicine and pharmaceuticals? With health care and health insurance? With the public sector and the NIH? With companies dedicated to biotech and nanotech? With the companies of tomorrow that are right now little known but destined, soon, for acclaim and prominence? How will we identify them? How will we know our partners when we see them? What will tomorrow look like for
human health? Well, fellow Pythians, I have an answer. Tomorrow, together with our partners in industry, governments around the world, the Centers for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization, we at Pythia will consign disease to the dustbin of history.
And that will be just the beginning
.”

The older Ed got, the more he sounded like a futurist whose optimism knew no bounds. His primary subject became the Singularity, which, as he described it, was “a soon-to-arrive watershed in human history, when the efforts we’re making at Pythia in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence yield, at last, an intelligence superior to our own. This new entity will beget a second-generation entity even more intelligent than it is, the second a third, the third a fourth, the process unfolding in great leaps and bounds and at ever-increasing speeds. When that happens—when the Singularity occurs—everything will rapidly, and radically, change. There will be, inexorably, an explosion in knowledge, and in technology and its applications. Superior intelligence will beget superior intelligence, until, in theory, all problems are solved—that’s the promise, the hope, the glory, the Holy Grail, the dream of a messianic age. Gutenberg changed the world with his printing press, Galileo with his telescope, Einstein with his theory of relativity, and now—in our time—we at Pythia will surpass them all by bringing about the Singularity. And I mean
change the world
,” said Ed. “I mean overcome
death itself
. We are going to achieve immortality—literally. We human beings are going to live forever. The means are not yet at our disposal, but the research is there, and the commitment and dollars, and there is light at the end of the tunnel, dazzling light. And we will have, at the same time, and for the first time in human history, a comprehensive predictive capability. The more information we amass at Pythia, in conjunction with exponential increases in raw high-speed
massive
computational power, the more capable we will become of knowing not only what the world is like, in all its specificity, at any given moment, but what it is
going
to look like tomorrow. Imagine that. Imagine knowing what is going to happen. Imagine with me. Think of the convergence of information and biology, the synthesis of the human with the algorithmic—imagine that and all things are possible, from quantum processing to virtual reality, from human immortality to an understanding of the universe, from space travel to conscious machines, from settling distant planets and obliterating
asteroids to time travel and invisibility, from the end of war to the onset of eternal peace, and, finally, imagine the culmination of our human aspiration in the very heart and mind of God, who will no longer be separate from us. We will have ascended. We will be living in the long-longed-for Messianic Era. The sky’s the limit, as they used to say, except that now the sky is
no
limit—there
are
no limits, in short, for Pythia.
No limits
,” Ed told audiences around the world. “Absolutely no limits for us anywhere.”