Shimmer (8 page)

A few days after Trevor arrived in New York, we made our first demonstration. Trevor had hooked the first company he'd called, an international auto parts supplier outside Detroit. We flew to Michigan the next day on four overextended credit cards and the last of our frequent-flyer miles. We met with the financial controller and the head of information technology, leading them through the demonstration. First Trevor told them about the many benefits of our Blue Boxes, described the development effort we'd put into them, and pushed the long and successful history of my father's company. Meanwhile, I connected a Blue Box to the Fadowsky Box on a mainframe in the company's headquarters, then drove with one of the company's IT people to a field office sixty miles away. There I connected the second Blue Box to a second mainframe. For the next twenty minutes, a series of small lights blinked on the Blue Box at the headquarters as the company's information was sent to our network.

“What is about to happen,” Trevor told them, “is that, over the next twenty minutes, we will pull forty times more information from your mainframe than normal. And your mainframe will be ready for other uses.”

The controller nodded warily. The head of IT frowned dismissively. Trevor smiled again, nodding in agreement with his own presentation, even casually offering both men a mint.

An hour later, Trevor arrived at the field office with the controller and the head of IT. At four
P.M
., on schedule, the information from the headquarters arrived at the field office, hitting our mobile satellite dish after spending two hours in our network. Once more Trevor emphasized that the delay had in fact created an opportunity. “Look at the many mainframes you have in operation, add up the total time now spent sending information from those mainframes, consider the speed at which data can now be sent not just to mainframes but to any type of computer, and you'll see what a series of Core Blue Boxes can do for you.”

The head of IT checked the accuracy of the information that had been sent. The controller wrote numbers on a notepad. The two of them left the room. Trevor and I sat in silence, as if by speaking we might break some spell being cast around us.

When the two of them returned half an hour later, the head of IT sat down quietly. After a moment, he said only, “Interesting.”

The controller nodded carefully, sitting down slowly, absently tapping his pencil on his notepad. “Yes,” he said. “Interesting.”

“We like to think so,” Trevor said, smiling, leaning back in his chair, and I realized I was leaning back as well, legs crossed just as Trevor's were, hands in my lap just as his were.

The controller sat forward. “How much?”

I winced slightly. Throughout the development cycle, Trevor and I had argued back and forth about pricing for the Blue Boxes, Trevor pushing for a higher price, me pushing for a lower one, the two of us finally settling on $40,000 per box, which were always sold in pairs. Now even that price seemed embarrassingly high.

Trevor glanced down at his lap. He nodded slowly and seriously, his voice seeming to echo even before he spoke. “Eighty thousand per box,” Trevor said, “with an annual service fee of twenty thousand.”

The head of IT sat back, eyes getting wider. The controller very slowly licked the end of the pencil in his hand.

Meanwhile, I had lost the ability to breathe. My stomach had gone stiff. All light in the room was turning bright yellow. Never in my life have I had to urinate so badly. If I'd had a way to reach Trevor without standing, I would have shoved his head into the conference table.

If I'd had a way to speak, I would have dropped the price immediately.

“Well,” I heard the controller say, his voice drifting toward me through the swirling, fading vortex into which I had sunk, “at that price we'll only be able to take delivery of ten boxes this year. But I think we can budget for another twenty in July.”

And so it began.

The pricing was set. The boxes were in production. The expansion was in motion. Over the next three weeks, Trevor and I pitched another ten companies, each time running the same demonstration. Six of the companies said yes on the spot, two took just a few days to respond, and the other two—a California-based insurance company and a Boston-based pension-processing center that each bought thirty Blue Boxes—wrote us down-payment checks before we left the building.

“Certainly this will get you to the front of the line,” Trevor said, shaking the hands of everyone in the room, thanking each person individually, making a joke tailored to some line or bit that each person had revealed during the meeting, ultimately leaving not as a salesman but as a revered ambassador sent to help that company.

He was brilliant. And I was in awe.

I remember flying back to New York after that tenth meeting, the two of us sitting in first class, a previously unheard-of luxury that, this time, Trevor had insisted on. I remember each of us replaying the day's presentation. I remember Trevor running his long fingers across
the two down-payment checks—$300,000 sitting on the tray in front of him. I remember talking about plans for hiring a whole new staff of sales and customer service reps, network administrators, programmers, a marketing department and more. We would have to find larger office space. We would have to consult with bankers, lawyers, a new accounting firm. I remember Trevor making a toast to Fadowsky, who had made it all possible. I remember us smiling, the two of us laughing, these young men in fine suits so happy with the world.

I remember Trevor saying we would want to take the company public as soon as we possibly could.

And I also remember the blue and white fabric covering the seat in front of me. Remember the flight attendant passing by, remember each line and turn of her round face, the tray she held in her thin hands, remember the sound of the woman behind me clearing her throat, remember Trevor's eyes so black and wet and bright, remember the lights above us flickering for a second as I heard Trevor say that we would definitely need the money from an IPO. We would definitely need as much money as we could possibly get.

“Because now,” I heard him saying, “now you've got to figure out how to make these Blue Boxes work.”

I turned to him.

He smiled wide.

I said to him quietly, “You told me they worked.”

He was still smiling. He nodded slowly but eagerly. “Yes,” he said slowly, “but I lied.”

I felt myself breathing carefully, speaking but not sure I was making sound. “About how much?”

“All of it, Robbie,” he said quietly. “All of it is a lie.”

“The demonstrations,” I heard myself say. “How?”

“The information was sent to a couple of mainframes,” he said. “In India, as a matter of fact. They processed the information, then sent it on to the destination.”

I managed to put down my drink rather than spilling it in my lap. “Other mainframes,” I said emptily.

“Yes.”

“There was no Chinese programmer,” I said. “No family that sold you this system.”

“No.”

“You had an idea. You needed my help.”

“Yes.”

“The Blue Boxes do nothing,” I said slowly, empty, even emptier.

“Actually,” he said, “I did have quite a bit of code written just to pull the information from the mainframes correctly. And I did come up with a way to pull information faster than ever before. It's just that the information can't be received without, well, without a lot of work.”

I started to say it but stopped, knowing what Trevor would say next. Knowing exactly what words he would use.

“I mean, Robbie, why else would I need this bizarre two-hour delay?”

And I could only close my eyes.

Later I would tell myself it had all happened too fast for me to respond any other way. I would tell myself I had to fulfill the promises we'd made to these first companies. I would tell myself Core's reputation, my reputation, my father's, all had been put on the line.

But none of that is true.

There'd been time to stop this.

There had been plenty of time.

Instead I made a decision, made it in the first moment after Trevor told me the truth. I made a decision when I did not, immediately, say no to Trevor. When I didn't reject what he had done. When I didn't call him what he was—a fraud, a liar, a high-tech con man. The awful, sick feeling that spread through my chest as I rode on that airplane, the anger and disgust, the deepest disgust pushing down on me already—all of it was real. But even then I was thinking about something else. Already my thoughts had, at the lowest level in my mind, turned to something else entirely.

How to make this work.

And I can't say I was trying to protect my reputation or Trevor's. Not the company's. Not even my father's.

And I can't say I was doing this for the money—the $28 million in sales Trevor had closed in those first three weeks. The hundreds of millions we could raise in venture capital and an IPO.

And I can't say it was fear. Fear of being caught, of being embarrassed by the exposure of the lie. Fear of being arrested for the fraud we had already committed.

I thought about those things. All of them. But it was something else that drove me to push forward despite the lie. Something in myself. Something I was already repeating as I sat on that plane.

I can make this work.

All my life, I have worked. As a boy I went to my father's office on the weekends and during the summer and often after school, trailing him around the company he ran, happily doing whatever work he would give me. I took out the trash, I sorted papers, I typed nonsense on computers with fingers that couldn't spell my own name. I did anything he would let me do. Because that was my world. There was a comfort in that place, a warmth in the sounds of people talking and the sounds of computers and the sounds of the programmers and salespeople who all worked for my father. Over the years I would work hard in school, would take after-school jobs doing landscaping, construction, tech support. College, then graduate school, jobs during school and after, working sixty then seventy then eighty hours a week, programming, managing, coordinating the growth and development of new products, new applications, working till I was breathless and spent, and never once during that time did I question why I was doing it. All of it was work, and I enjoyed every moment. All I had ever wanted was to finish the task in front of me, then pick up the next, then another, then look around for more.

Faced with the lie Trevor had laid out in front me, my response was the same one I'd always had. Work. Work harder. Work until the problem went away. From the moment he told me the truth on that plane,
my thought was to move forward, to do the best work I could. And if I did that, then soon, soon, I was sure, I would overcome Trevor's lie.

And so I set us out to grow. Adding staff, adding office space, adding computers and networking and servers and satellite connections, adding departments and managers and production capacity and adding clients and vendors and suppliers and partners.

And from that first day, adding pieces to a hidden series of mainframes and satellites and servers. Creating, almost immediately, a shadow network that made the Blue Boxes work.

Or, really, that made the boxes appear to work.

As Trevor had said, his Blue Boxes did do one thing as promised. Trevor had come up with a way to pull information from a mainframe forty times faster than a Fadowsky Box. The problem was that the information could not be sent to its destination—another mainframe or server—without a massive amount of processing.

What this meant was that for every minute of processing time we saved a client, we created five minutes of processing time for ourselves. And it was processing that could only be done by a mainframe. Many mainframes. Given the number of Blue Boxes Trevor sold in just the first few weeks, and given the huge amount of information being passed by the clients we were signing up, I could see that I would immediately be forced to set up a series of farms of dedicated mainframes. Soon the math became very simple. For every pair of Blue Boxes Trevor sold, Core was $100,000 in the hole.

In the first weeks after the demonstration, I spelled this out to Trevor. He only shrugged.

“Trevor,” I said, “it will only take us a few months to spend what this first group of clients has paid.”

He smiled. “Then I guess I'll have to bring in more money.”

And that was something Trevor could do. He was on the road seven days a week, traveling across the country, across borders, across time zones and oceans. Calling me from cell phones and pay phones and hotel phones to report his sales for the day, the week or month. He sold Blue Boxes to banks, government agencies, defense contractors
and insurance companies. He began to hire a sales staff that, by the end of the first year, numbered three hundred, all of them working from the road. No office, no desk at headquarters, they were trained by Trevor in hotel rooms worldwide, then given a corporate credit card, a stack of business cards and two rolling silver cases holding demo Blue Boxes and satellite dishes.

Soon they too were reporting sales to the New York headquarters.

Within a year sales reached $50 million a week.

And soon we were deep into a course that was part shell game, part Ponzi scheme as I took money from new clients to pay for the processing of the old, secretly buying services from vendors around the world, rapidly buying our own mainframes to covertly process the clients' information. It was a race, really, that we could lead, for now, by adding new clients, by finding outside investors and by taking the company public. And we did all that. In a flurry of glowing press coverage, singularly positive word of mouth, and the flawless analysis of the Wall Street brokerage houses.

Within six months of the first demonstration, Core was a phenomenon. First we were pictured on the covers of some twenty niche computer magazines. Then we started finding our way onto the front pages of major newspapers and the covers of national magazines. Trevor and I were hailed as groundbreaking and tenacious entrepreneurs, farsighted capitalists who'd outlast the faddish dot-coms, new-thinking visionaries climbing to the forefront of the newest of the new economies.