The Big Disruption
By: Jessica Powell
Tags: Technology, Marketing, Fiction, Feminism, Equality

To: tyamada@Anahata.com, pjoffe@Anahata.com, manhelmer@Anahata.com, mahalic@Anahata.com, joobs@Anahata.com, cchen@Anahata.com, susanjacobs@Anahata.com, smoop@Anahata.com, random@Anahata.com, hr-all@Anahata.com, petra@Anahata.com, legal-all@Anahata.com, recruiting-all@Anahata.com, freespeech@anahata.com, libertarians@anahata.com, anarchists@anahata.com From: Gary Truman (gunsandfreedom@Anahata.com) +freespeech@ +libertarians@ +anarchists@ tico — your email is the kind of sentiment that is dragging this company to an early grave and sending our engineers to galt. you’re ready to shoot anyone for expressing anything that might possibly be construed as offensive. is that how the internet (or anahata) was built? NO!! the internet was entirely built on offensive content, porn, conspiracy theories, spam, and gambling. don’t kill what made our company great. don’t kill free speech. don’t kill pete or safaris.

The thread continued for hundreds of messages, cutting across racism, poverty, travel tips, sales IQs, and various engineering grosseries, but frequently returning to the issue of bare feet — the battle line falling clearly between sales and engineering. Sales currently seemed to have the upper hand, if only because they woke up earlier. The engineers’ ranks wouldn’t fill out until noon. This gave sales the chance to pile on the anti-engineer vitriol, with little more than a whimper in response.

Arsyen heard Jonas stirring to his right and turned to discover his co-worker sniffling as he read the same email thread on his computer. Jonas lowered himself in his chair and stretched his legs toward the wall, where his shoes sat unoccupied. Using his toes, he dragged the shoes toward his chair.

“I wasn’t made to wear shoes,” Jonas whimpered. The boil on his nose sizzled under his tears.

Arsyen felt a sudden flash of pity for Jonas. Even a boy genius needed to know what it was to run in the fields, to wear shoes — or not wear them — to do as he wished. Instead, Jonas had been forced to work in America at age fourteen, doomed to live as a preteen among a bunch of adults who could drink, date, and surf the internet without parental controls.

Arsyen turned his fingers to the keyboard and began to release the poetry that filled his head: a story of injustice, of choices, of freedom, and Pyrrhian military history. But after five minutes, he hit the table with his fist. His English simply could not capture the words that came so naturally in his native tongue. He deleted his message and started again, settling on something much simpler.

To: engineering_all@anahata.com, sales_all@anahata.com, warriorone@Anahata.com, thedungeonmaster@anahata.com, papage@Anahata.com, thedude@Anahata.com, sevendwarves@anahata.com, robobo@Anahata.com, coolhands@Anahata.com, kapuscinski@Anahata.com, ilovejuice@Anahata.com, ninjas@Anahata.com, doris@Anahata.com, marionetti@Anahata.com, nihilists@anahata.com , tyamada@Anahata.com, petra@Anahata.com, romansch_speakers@Anahata.com, pjoffe@Anahata.com, furries@anahata.com, manhelmer@Anahata.com, swingers@anahata.com, mahalic@Anahata.com, joobs@Anahata.com, swing_dance@Anahata.com, cchen@Anahata.com, impressionist_painters@Anahata.com, smoop@Anahata.com, gunsandfreedom@Anahata.com, libertarians@anahata.com, anarchists@anahata.com, freespeech@anahata.com, existentialists@anahata.com, random@Anahata.com, hr-all@Anahata.com, legal-all@Anahata.com, recruiting-all@Anahata.com, everyone@Anahata.com From: Arsyen Aimo (arsyen@Anahata.com) Subject: Re: On the subject of engineers’ shoelessness Sales team suck. - Arsyen

“Hooray Arsyen!” Jonas cheered, throwing his shoes across the room.

A few minutes later, Arsyen received an email from Roni.

“Awesome response. You’re a real Anahati now! And congrats — the team’s just spoken. You’ve made it past the first week!”

A few minutes later, someone from the HR team appeared next to Arsyen’s desk to hand him his permanent badge.

Arsyen floated through the rest of the day. He walked taller down the corridors and lingered crossing the lawn, flicking his new white badge as he walked, no longer afraid of any passing engineer. He even tried his hand at firing a red badge–carrying newbie, which was even more delightful than he had anticipated.

At home that night, Arsyen cradled the badge in his hand and spoke to it of handmaidens and orphans and all the wonderful things he would one day do for his country. And also which video games he would buy.

Above the profile photo, Arsyen drew a pointy crown on his head in thick black marker.

It was just like being a real prince again.

Gregor Guntlag moved across his office in efficient strides, enjoying the precise cadence of his combat boots thumping against the floor. From crew cut to coccyx, his spine descended in a long, straight line that leaned forward, diagonal to the floor, as though in constant battle with gravity.

At the moment, however, Gregor’s problem was less physics than numbers. Ugly, unsettling numbers. While few people on the Anahata campus knew of its existence, Gregor’s top-secret Project Y was the only endeavor that now mattered at the company. Everything else was an afterthought; a blip in the company’s glorious ten-year history. Were the project to fail, it would mean the end of Anahata. A victory, on the other hand, would ensure the success of Anahata, the web, and all things good for decades to come. It would be Gregor’s finest achievement, the greatest project to which he had ever put his name. He could not allow it to fail.

Yet by the numbers, it was failing, and not for any of the predictable reasons that often plagued brilliant Anahata ideas — an inability to find willing commercial partners, or criticism that Anahata was violating some silly law. Such problems, governed as they were by ignorance and reactionaries, were far outside Gregor’s control. In fact, his current inability to limit these kinds of interference was one of the main reasons Gregor found Project Y so exhilarating. If it succeeded, he would be able to protect his engineers from the ignorant masses, letting them build and create their dreams unencumbered. There would be no more defections to Galt, no more debates in the media about Anahata’s relevance. Project Y would definitively establish Anahata as the most innovative company in the world, ever.

Gregor often found himself wondering what would have become of him had Anahata or Project Y existed in his early days as an engineer, when he first landed on the shores of Baltimore, fresh from the University of Liechtenstein, his head filled with ideas for space elevators and floating castles.

His first major undertaking tackled the many lies and inaccuracies on the internet by using software that automatically corrected inaccurate opinions, comments, and blog posts. But the service never found any mainstream appeal — as one venture capitalist told him, “The internet wasn’t built for facts.”

Next, he embarked on a project to replace the planet’s slavery cages (or zoos, as they were also known) with robotic animal sanctuaries. After four years of working out of his one-room apartment in San Diego, surviving on little more than instant noodles and bananas, Gregor was forced to admit defeat.

But it was there in San Diego, standing next to a dumpster, ready to trash his metal monkey parts, that he met Bobby Bonilo. The future Anahata founder tossed him a quarter, thinking Gregor was homeless. But then Bobby saw the wires sprouting from the monkey’s tail in Gregor’s hand, took in the faded computing slogan on his T-shirt, and in a split second seemed to understand all of Gregor’s dreams — and their crushing defeat at the cruel hand of pragmatism.

Bobby had been the first to recognize Gregor’s genius. “Humans cling to the past. They will work tirelessly to destroy the most important advances of society,” he had said. “As a visionary, you must know that your ideas are ahead of their time. They must only come to light when the world is ready for them — or when you have too much power to be stopped.”

Project Y was just that — beyond its time, beyond any earthly concept of innovation. By that measure alone it would have failed in a normal environment. But Anahata now had what Gregor then lacked: boundless capital, a deep pool of engineering talent, and the power of a large country. Moreover, there was no public opinion standing in the way of Y. Its secrecy had been closely guarded, and Gregor was determined to keep its existence quiet until it was too late to be stopped.

Instead, the hurdle Gregor now found before him was a far more potent nemesis: the devil himself, Niels Smeardon, breathing fire and online advertising in the path of Gregor’s engineering team.

Niels was the reason two Project Y product managers had come to Gregor’s office that afternoon.

“For the past week, we’ve literally been twiddling our thumbs,” one said. “Every step we take is blocked by sales. We go left, there they are. We go right, there they are.”

“And why can’t you dart around them?” said Gregor, annoyed by the metaphor and his part in it.

“For example, we’re ready to run a simulation of Y at Shanley Field. But sales has the field all booked up for the next six weeks with various internal conferences — ”

“Motivational Go! Fight! Sell! conferences. Conferences…with Powerpoint,” spat the other product manager.

“Also, we need to be able to turn off advertising in one part of the world to free up some servers for Y testing. It would just be a low-volume region that we’d turn off, like Eastern Africa, but sales refuses. I was told it was escalated to Niels and he stopped the whole thing, saying the entire world deserves to benefit from Anahata advertising and that under no condition should Eastern Africa not receive our glorious ads for even a single day.”

Gregor snorted. He looked out onto the field below his office, where a group of sales employees were playing rugby. These were the men who sold Anahata’s internet ads — pithy phrases and punchy slogans advertising cruise ships and cancer treatments. They believed in dress shirts and strip clubs and golf and triathlons. He was sure he could see Niels among them, dressed in one of his shiny custom jerseys, kicking up mud clods simply to remind the earth of his dominance.

“I will fix the Niels problem,” said Gregor, steadying his voice and watching Niels’ spiky blond hair attack the sky as he ran down the field. The two product managers would never have guessed that Gregor’s body was raging inside, his blood cells taking up arms, their spears pricking the subcutaneous layer of his skin, ready to fight.

“Anything else?” he asked, turning to the two men.

“Things are still very quiet in the rest of the engineering community. The distractions have worked really well.”

Gregor nodded. When planning Project Y, he and Bobby had devised a list of “distractions” — projects like Social Car and Genie — that if leaked would capture internal, public, and media attention and let the Y engineers continue to work in secrecy on the company’s big bet.

“Go back to work, and don’t worry about this anymore.”

The duo left smiling.

Gregor remained by the window, watching the field. To any other observer, Niels might have seemed the ultimate captain, rallying his team to the win, throwing slaps and high-fives. But it was all an act. Niels was a man willing to knock down anyone who got in his way. Gregor had kept Project Y a secret from him for this very reason. Niels would destroy it for the very fact that it was Gregor’s baby. And if Niels succeeded in sabotaging Y, it would be the end of everything.

The problem was that Gregor had no power over Niels. They were equals, if not in brain power, then at least according to Anahata’s organizational chart. Only Bobby could tell Niels what to do. And while Gregor and Bobby dreamed up the idea for Project Y together, the founder had since taken a step back, tasking Gregor with making it a reality. This would have been fine were it not for the fact that Bobby seemed to have a weird affection for Niels, never suggesting that he really liked the guy, but also taking care to protect him from Gregor. He had even heard that Bobby and Niels occasionally did yoga together.

Gregor paced his office, Niels’ gravelly voice and sales aphorisms trailing behind him: “With courage comes determination.” “Leadership is knowing when to lead.” “Those who win are those who win.” He caught sight again of Niels on the field, this time tripping an oncoming opponent, the stunned player falling to the ground. Niels was halfway down the field before the man could even lift his face from the dirt.

Gregor needed Bobby’s help to get past Niels for good. It wasn’t simply a matter of getting a server or access to the field. Gregor needed Niels out of the picture, completely won over to the idea of Y, or contained so that he couldn’t thwart it.

He opened his messenger service. Bobby had said he would be busy much of the day at a colonics retreat but in fact seemed to be online.

Gregor: We need to talk about Y. It’s behind schedule. There are roadblocks. Bobby: You should come to colonics retreat. Good for removing roadblocks. Gregor: These are sales roadblocks. Bobby: Flush out roadblocks. Gregor: Do I have your permission to do whatever it takes? Bobby: Small things cloud the big ideas, threaten rain. At retreat now. Can’t talk.

Bobby’s online indicator switched off.

Gregor sighed and leaned back in his chair. He stared out the window for a long time without moving, the sky above him clouding with dark thoughts.

The four leaders of Gregor’s “distractions” projects were all longtime Anahatis. Any one of them could be trusted to help recruit the army of engineers Bobby had requested.

Which is how Gregor ended up in one of the company parking lots, the key to a driverless car in his hand. Nose upturned, he held the car key several inches away from his body. He believed keys were an outdated method of accessing one’s property, which was why he had an engineering team working on a simple identification solution that would require just a small incision in an individual’s pinky.

Gregor unlocked the door and settled into the front seat.

An unfamiliar beep boop beep came from the dashboard, and five red lights flashed in the center console as the Social Car software booted up. Soon, the dashboard glowed Hal-like in the early light of evening.

“Welcome to Social Car,” a female voice said. The dashboard flashed again, and Gregor was presented with a series of options on a large screen in the center console:

I want to meet… - man [specify age] - woman [specify age] - programmer [specify which languages] - designer - venture capitalist - engineers - other

Why would he want to meet someone?

“Other,” Gregor muttered.

Two faces, numbered “1” and “2,” popped up on the screen. Gregor didn’t recognize them but assumed they were the pictures of Social Car team members.

“Number 1,” he said.

“Sven Svensson is a quarter-mile away,” the voice said. “Shall I read you his profile?”

Gregor had no interest in getting to know his employees. The better he knew them, the harder it was to eventually fire them.

“Just drive me to Technology Way.”

“Driving to Technology Way,” the woman’s voice confirmed.

After yielding to two other cars, Anahata’s driverless car made its way out of the parking lot.

“There are three people near you now,” the voice said as the car turned on to Processor Street.

Gregor’s eyes flicked to the dashboard. Now a third, more familiar face stared back at him. He recognized Roni Herman, the team lead. Roni was a bit past his prime, already in his early thirties, but still a well-liked figure on campus. In reviewing the distraction projects and their leaders that morning, Gregor had thought Roni could be an interesting candidate to join the Project Y team.

“Take me to Roni Herman.”

The software beeped its assent, and a few minutes later, Gregor’s car pulled alongside Roni’s.

“Speak to Roni,” Gregor said. The dashboard beeped and a moment later confirmed that Roni had accepted the communication.

“Hello, Gregor, hello!” Roni’s eager, nasal voice filled Gregor’s car. “How do you like Pad Thai?”

“What?” Gregor never ate Thai food. He didn’t like the feeling of spice running through his body, raising his body temperature.

“You know, Pad…Thai,” Roni repeated. Gregor glanced over at Roni’s car, which was keeping perfect pace with his own. Roni climbed into the back of his car, searching for something. A moment later, he put a piece of paper against the window. On it was written in big black letters: “PAD THAI=SOCIAL CAR CODE NAME.”

“What would happen if I were to pull you off Social Car?” Gregor asked.

Roni didn’t answer immediately. Although Gregor refused to make eye contact, he imagined Roni was panicking, afraid he was about to be kicked off his project. Although Gregor volunteered at a community garden, gave millions each year to humanitarian crisis organizations, and voted only for socialists, he did like to cause a bit of microsuffering now and then. He felt it kept the engineers on their toes.

“Oh, well, you know, I don’t know how things would go if I came off it,” said Roni, the panic painted across his face in bold pinkish strokes. “I’ve really led the team from the start and — ”

Gregor frowned. In a company where sales strutted with their chins to the clouds, Gregor preferred the men who slouched. Roni could at least display a bit of faux humility.

“Slow down,” Gregor told his car. He’d ditch Roni and go talk to the Genie team lead instead.

But Roni’s car slowed to keep pace with Gregor’s.

“Pretty great, right?” Roni said. “That’s the speed-detection system we built this week. You can try to slow down, but my car will slow with yours so we can keep chatting. We’ve still got some bugs to work out, but I’m confident we’ll launch before the end of the quarter.”

What?!

The end of the quarter was far too soon for a Social Car launch. Gregor needed all of his distractions running up until Project Y was ready. He couldn’t kill this project — it was too well known and popular on campus — but he certainly couldn’t let it launch anytime soon. He needed to slow it down — like by removing Roni from Social Car and making him his Y evangelist. Gregor inhaled deeply.

“Have you heard of Project Y?” he asked.

Roni gasped. “I’ve heard…things, you know, but not all the details.”

“It’s our best shot at building the world’s greatest company. And the most important thing right now is for us to have strong leaders. People who can motivate others. People who can help articulate a vision.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Gregor saw Roni bouncing in his seat. “At many times during my career I’ve shown leadership and created visions and — ”

“Your vision isn’t required,” Gregor said. “What you’ll need to do is spread the word, win people over, recruit new team members — and eventually spread the project to all of Anahata’s engineers.”

“I organize the quarterly hackathon,” Roni said. “We now have 2,000 Anahata engineers around the world who code the entire weekend over a livestream feed in exchange for beer.”

“That’s what we’re looking for,” Gregor said. “It’s a big job. It’s historic. I need you to move over to Building 1 ASAP.”

“Building 1? Oh, yes! I won’t let you down!”

Gregor gave a small nod from his car.

“Oh, oh, one thing,” Roni said. “What do you want me to do about Pad Thai? Will you find a new leader for it?”

“I’ll find someone new. Don’t tell anyone where you are going or what you are working on.”

“I’ll get going right away!” Roni waved as his car turned and sped back toward campus. Soon he disappeared from Gregor’s dashboard altogether.

“Take me to Innovation Drive,” Gregor told his car.

As the car reversed course, Gregor contemplated how best to hinder Social Car. Putting a new technical lead on the project would undoubtedly slow it down. But he needed to throw a real wrench in the works, not simply lose a few weeks’ time as someone new got up to speed.

Gregor continued to wrestle with the problem as his car made its way down El Camino Real, a street that stretched the length of Silicon Valley in an endless loop of Mexican restaurants (Casa Fiesta, Casa Grande, Casa Lupe), energy-efficient cars, and boxy computer stores. Gregor found the relentless monotony and disinterested aesthetics pleasing.

The car passed under a billboard for Mr. Fixit, a local computer-repair service. Gregor glanced up at the tongue-in-cheek, 1950s-style image of a desperate housewife ripping her hair out as a confident Mr. Fixit repaired her computer and saved the day.

Gregor rolled down the window and craned his neck to see the ad. He ordered his car to do a U-turn. The car drove past the sign again, and then once more.

By the time he passed the sign for the third time, Gregor had the answer to his problem.

“Take me back to Anahata,” he said, “and drop me off at the lobby.”

The next morning, Gregor found himself in a place he rarely visited: the campus security control room, in Building 28. Row after row of TV screens circled the room; below them, men in matching purple polo shirts manned a dashboard of flashing red lights.

It appeared high-tech, but the reality was more panopticon of the banal. On one screen, a sales employee pulled his Porsche into the Anahata parking lot, straightening his tie in the reflection of the car window. Above him, two women did yoga on the lawn. On another screen, an aerial shot captured cubicle after cubicle of workers staring at their computers.

The cameras recorded this routine and hundreds like it each day. It was a wonder that they could even keep their lenses open on alert given how mind-numbingly boring Anahata’s security scene was, particularly during the night shift. In the wee hours of morning, nothing went into Anahata and nothing came out — minus the occasional nocturnal engineer. Otherwise the place was locked down with the tightest security in the Valley. There hadn’t been an attempted theft in more than five years.

But that morning, there had been a break-in at Building 1 — the highest-security spot on Anahata’s campus — prompting Gregor to dash out of the management meeting and make a beeline for the security office.

Footage from three a.m. showed a man dressed entirely in black sneaking across the Building 1 parking lot, hovering on tiptoe like a thuggish ballerina. He jumped behind a tree, rolled through the grass, and ended up at the building’s side entrance, where he pulled out an Anahata badge that had likely been swiped from a negligent engineer.

The man again raised the stolen badge to the access control reader, and for a second, the camera caught a shot of his face. He was Caucasian but looked more like a zebra, with black zigzags painted across his face.

Inside, he went past the molecular lab, the welding shop, the hard-hat zone, and the physical and intangible infrastructure teams, and then stopped in front of another office.

The man darted his flashlight around the room, splashing the walls with light. It was difficult to make out what he was doing, but from the shadows it seemed he had stopped in front of a desk and was pulling something out of his bag. The flashlight swung again. Suddenly, the scene was illuminated: The man was plugging a computer into a wall outlet.

“Galt!” Gregor gasped. This was nothing less than corporate espionage. The thief was going to plant something — maybe surveillance equipment or tampered data — then use it to gain access to all of Anahata’s network.

Then the thief sat down and put his feet up on the desk.

“Wait…what is he doing?” asked Gregor, crouching to put himself at eye level with the screen.

“Sir, after watching this many times, I’ve come to the conclusion that he is picking his nose,” said one of the guards, freezing the tape for a moment to show the faint outline of a finger moving toward the man’s face.

“What?” Gregor drew even closer, his face now just inches from the screen. He signaled to the guard to continue the footage.

The thief jumped up from the chair and turned off his flashlight. Within thirty seconds, he had crept out the back exit, barrel-rolled across the parking lot, unlocked a car, and driven off. One of the guards rewound the footage and froze it on the last full shot of the man’s face, little more than a black-and-white blur.

Although the security team had already watched the tape thirty times that morning, their collective adrenaline rose as they watched Gregor’s face for a reaction. They hadn’t seen this much excitement since an engineer’s pet boa had gotten loose on campus the previous month.

“Whose badge did he use to break in?” Gregor said finally.

The security head double-checked a pad of paper on the desk. “Someone named Roni Herman, who works in Building 7. As of yesterday, Roni Herman’s badge was cleared for access to Building 1. The perpetrator was probably tracking Roni the whole time, somehow got hold of his badge, and then got access to both buildings. This was probably the result of months of tracking and shadowing his movements. Should we call the police?”

Gregor stared at the face frozen on the screen, a black zigzag casting a lightning bolt from the man’s forehead to his neck. “Idiot,” he muttered, staring at Roni’s face on the screen.

Gregor stood.

“Idiots,” he said loudly, looking at the security team. “There is no need to call anyone.”

He turned on his heel and clomped out the door.

The security team looked at each other and shrugged.

“Man, I will never understand engineers,” said one, shaking his head before switching his attention to the cameras trained on the well-endowed girls in the customer support department.

Niels began each day with a run. The Northern California air was just crisp enough to feel clean and pure, and the occasional headwind produced a surmountable challenge — the kind of easy and achievable goal-setting that Niels liked for warming up to his workday. He followed his workout with a long shower, the rainforest setting gently splattering purified water on his head while a speaker piped in a soothing recording of a woman’s voice appraising each inch of his body.

Your muscles are so big.

Your abs are very flat.

Your Adam’s apple is prominent but tasteful.

But that morning, Niels could focus only on Gregor Guntlag. The overly German German had hated him since day one and seemed intent on turning Bobby against him.

Bobby and Gregor were both nutjobs as far as Niels was concerned, but he was used to working with crazies. Fifteen years of working in the Valley and he had never worked for a CEO or founder who wasn’t a sociopath or narcissist. They thought the world’s problems existed in part to keep them intellectually stimulated, and that all those problems — malaria, corruption, congressional deadlock, death, you name it — could be solved by technologists. Their lack of focus was confused for genius. One moment they would be asking the entire company to dramatically change course, and the next moment they’d be giving equal attention to the color of the lampshades in the lobby. And despite their staunch atheism, they all believed their success was somehow mythically predestined.

It was an absurd worldview, but one that Niels admired for its selfishness. Managing and manipulating these egomaniacs was an art he felt he had perfected.

With persistence and patience, Niels had worked on Bobby for six years, helping him understand that Anahata needed money to be successful and that Niels was the best lever he had to produce it in large quantities. As a result, Bobby generally left him alone. Gregor, on the other hand, had been less susceptible to Niels’ charm. He did everything he could to sabotage Niels, always playing the contrarian in any management meeting and sending out his engineering lackeys to turn off a sales production task here and there. It was nothing sufficiently significant to warrant an outcry to Bobby, but just enough to annoy Niels and make clear that Gregor and his foot soldiers were behind the job.

So Niels was surprised by the peace offering that had appeared the previous night in the form of a blue chat bubble on his phone — a chat message asking Gregor to come over to “work things out and bury the hatchet.”

It was a shocking olive branch from Anahata’s head engineer, and in retrospect, Niels realized he should have taken a screenshot of their exchange. Unfortunately, since Anahata chats were not stored (the result of Gregor and Bobby’s joint paranoia about government surveillance), this historic exchange of civilities would have no record.

After an evening spent trying to discern Gregor’s motives, Niels had finally replied that, yes, of course he’d be happy to talk. But the whole thing smelled fishy. Perhaps Gregor wanted something that belonged to sales. If that was the case, it meant that Niels had already achieved Master Negotiator Rule #1: Always have the upper hand. (Viewing even the most casual encounters as an opportunity for personal gain was key to Niel’s life philosophy. An ex-girlfriend had once accused him of dealing with their relationship like a business negotiation. Niels said he didn’t understand how she could possibly think that anything in life was not a negotiation. He came away triumphant, although the woman did break up with him shortly thereafter.)

Niels was confident he could work the meeting to his advantage. In fact, this could be the opening he needed to get Gregor to agree to put ads on Moodify bracelets.

In any other company, the management team would have salivated over the Moodify bracelets, with one billion dollars in projected profit in the first year alone. But not Gregor Guntlag, whose perennial argument against anything Niels wanted was that it wouldn’t be good for Anahata users. Niels believed that not giving people advertisements was bad. If they didn’t know something existed, how could they know they needed it? Only advertising could tell people what they needed to need.

Typically, Bobby hadn’t even listened to the discussion. He caught just the tail end of Gregor’s rebuttal and seemed to defer the decision indefinitely with a wave of his hands. If you asked Niels, Bobby gave his head engineer far too much rope. Gregor was holding the company back from billions of additional revenue. And what did he do to make up for it? As far as Niels could tell, Gregor was simply there to execute Bobby’s big ideas. All of Gregor’s own projects had been massive failures. He was good at implementation but had no vision of his own.

Niels stepped out of the shower and surveyed himself in the bathroom mirror. He was forty-two but didn’t show a single gray hair or wrinkle. By almost any measure, he was the picture of excellence in aging. He gave a quick, indulgent flex of his muscle and a flash of bleached teeth. He remembered that the Anahata employee he banged a few weeks back had commented on his nice smile. He racked his brain for a split second, trying to remember her name. She was that sexy hippie receptionist who kept asking him for career advice as he tried to take her clothes off. Janine. Jane. Jennie. It didn’t matter. It was probably a bit stupid to hit on someone who worked at Anahata, but he wasn’t going to worry about it. He always could have her fired if things got uncomfortable. So far, he hadn’t even run into her on campus.

Niels threw on his favorite Prada slacks — the ones he wore to close a deal — and finished getting dressed for work. He took a final look in the mirror and flashed his teeth. Never underestimate the power of a killer grin.

Master Negotiator Rule #36: Arriving a few minutes late to a meeting communicates dominance. You will wait for me. Punctuality is for the meek.

And so, despite having changed his outfit three times — should he go business casual? slouchy engineer? weekend triathlete? — then having spent two hours circling Gregor’s neighborhood, Niels made sure not to appear at Gregor’s doorstep even a minute early.

Three minutes after the appointed time, Niels arrived at the address and did a double take. He checked the house number again: 414 Tuscany Drive. This was it.

Before him was an immense silver gate — the kind of gate that only the truly rich, and truly paranoid, possessed.

Niels pushed a button on the intercom. Someone picked up, but instead of a “hello” there was simply a buzzing sound, followed by the slow opening of the gate, revealing a long driveway abutted by row after row of towering pines.

On some level, it made sense to Niels that Gregor would live in the wealthiest neighborhood in Atherton, itself the wealthiest city in the Valley. He was, after all, one of the earliest employees at Anahata and had made billions of dollars when the company went public. But Gregor was also the man who wore faded decades-old shirts every day, ate the same bland lentils at every lunch, and drove a beat-up Jeep to work. Niels had assumed he’d eschew a fancy house and live in austerity in a small condo in crime-ridden East Palo Alto, or perhaps an inconspicuous cottage in the slightly smelly, middle-class part of Mountain View. Anything but the estate that was emerging before Niels’ eyes — a sprawling mansion the style of which Niels could only describe as nouveau-chateau, and whose inhabitants Niels would ordinarily assume to be a transplanted Texas blonde and her bejeweled poodle.

The house was ostentation at its American best, its climbing spires and ornate Mediterranean palacio flourishes the odd manifestation of new money’s dream of old Europe. At the end of the driveway was a large marble fountain — six white swans spouting water onto a central lily pad. Rising up behind the fountain was a large marble staircase that led to the front door. Two long, peach-colored wings branched out from the entrance, each ending in a tall, Rapunzel-like tower.

Gregor was waiting for him at the top of the marble steps, dressed in his typical uniform of white T-shirt, khaki pants, and combat boots. In his hand he held two beers, one of which was immediately thrust at Niels, as if Gregor was following a textbook instruction on how to relate to American men. The beer was warm, likely pulled from the pantry just minutes before. Even if this was all just a plot to get something out of him, at least the guy was making an effort. And in any case, it was kind of fun to witness Gregor’s visible discomfort in his role as host.

If the garish exterior of Gregor’s palace had thrown Niels’ preconceptions, the interior only reaffirmed them. Once inside, Niels could see nothing in the house beyond white walls and a single overhead light in each room. The few windows in existence were so high up from the floor that they reminded Niels of a cathedral…or a prison. There was no artwork, no photographs, no sign of a woman, pet, plant, or any possible sign of life.

“You’re not one for decorating, are you?” said Niels, turning to Gregor with a smile designed to communicate friendliness.

“I like simplicity,” Gregor said. “I don’t really like…things.” The word lingered in the air between them.

“Except for an enormous house,” Niels smirked.

“I only bought a large house so as to have a strong fortress in the event of an anthropogenic risk,” Gregor replied.

“An anthropo-what?”

“Hostile artificial intelligence, nuclear holocaust, fossil energy exhaustion, the collapse of everything.”

“Ha ha…oh…”

Niels stifled his laugh; Gregor wasn’t kidding. The engineer’s face was as smooth as his walls, giving up nothing. He seemed to be staring at an imaginary spot just past Niels’ shoulder, avoiding eye contact.

“You like wine,” Gregor said.

“I do.”

“Fischer said you took him on a wine tasting in Napa a few years ago.”

“I didn’t know you liked wine,” Niels said. “I would’ve invited you along.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Gregor said. “And if you had, I would have said no. We aren’t friends.”

Niels coughed. Being a salesman, he wasn’t used to such direct displays of honesty.

Gregor’s eyes briefly flicked away from the wall, settling on Niels’ shoulders. “Do you want to see my wine cellar?”

Gregor led him down a white hall and through a massive, empty kitchen, at the far end of which was a wide, floor-to-ceiling steel door. Gregor pushed a button, and the door slowly slid into the wall, revealing a flight of stairs leading into darkness. In the seconds before their descent, Niels recalled an article he once read in a tech magazine, in which a successful Valley engineer kept a dungeon underneath his home, holding secret orgies while his nuclear family, clothed in matching pastel cottons, lived happily and unknowingly in the rooms upstairs.

But when Gregor turned on the lights, the illuminated space below revealed nothing more than a simple wine cellar, with row after row of bottle racks, and in the center, two chairs and a wooden table. Atop the table was a decanter filled with wine, and next to it, an empty bottle.

Instead of a toast, Gregor spent thirty minutes detailing each wine purchase in length: how much it had cost, what was said about the vintage, and when he was planning to open a particular bottle. He had built an elaborate wine management system that scanned the bottle’s label, then input each detail — including age, composition, and position in the wine cellar — into an algorithm that determined the ideal “drink date.” When the date approached, Gregor was sent a notification at two-week, one-week, day-of, and then hourly intervals, alerting him of the impending deadline.

“One time I received a notification while on a course of antibiotics,” said Gregor, leaning in just slightly and lowering his voice. “I had this bottle I needed to drink and was worried it was going to go bad. I had to save it until I was well again. It was very upsetting.”

“You don’t have to drink the bottle right that very same day. It’s not like milk.”

“But then I would get no benefit from such a complex system,” Gregor said.

He grabbed the bottle of wine from the wooden table and passed it to Niels, who let out a low whistle of appreciation. It was a Chateau Margaux — the holy grail of red wine. Niels couldn’t help but grin. He was going to crush his enemy at the negotiating table while trying one of the world’s most highly regarded wines.

Niels believed that learning to appreciate wine was an apprenticeship akin to golf — at first difficult to acquire, but then indispensable for business and generally agreeable as a pastime. And he had, in fact, come to love the taste of it. Chateau Margaux was a real bragging right, and he had never held its deep ruby on his tongue.

Niels sat down on an uncomfortable wooden chair. One of the spindles was split in the middle, and the raw edge pushed into his spine. He suspected Gregor had never been inside a home furnishings store in his life, that he didn’t see the inconsistency in offering up one of the world’s most expensive wines in such a dank and uncomfortable setting. For all his engineering brilliance, Gregor would never even have made it past the sales team’s entry-level “Hospitality & Negotiation” training course.

Gregor poured the wine from the decanter and handed a glass to Niels. The men studied the wine and took in the aroma, each eying the other over his glass.

But the deep tones of the Chateau Margaux transformed them. Niels loosened his tie, Gregor slouched just slightly in his chair. It was an exceptional wine. And after they took their first sip, Niels had the sudden realization that this was the first nondisagreeable experience the two had shared since Niels joined Anahata six years earlier. Gregor even tried to offer a slight smile, pushing it onto his face as though it were a heavy wooden beam. But at least he was trying.

Niels did not say a word — Master Negotiator Rule #33: Approach silence like a battlefield. He who speaks first shows his hand.

Niels sipped his wine slowly but decisively. He imagined his Adam’s apple bulging then receding, like a heaving warrior ready to break through enemy lines. A warrior with rippling abs and a weathered loincloth that barely covered his forceful manhood. He could crush this wine glass with just a slight clenching of his fingers. It would shatter at his feet, taking with it all of Gregor’s dreams and —

“Do you read any philosophy?” Gregor asked.

“Not really,” Niels said. “I mean, college, but that was a long time ago.”

“I thought so,” said Gregor.

Niels wanted to tell Gregor that he had graduated summa cum laude in economics from Yale, that he had been a Rhodes scholar, that he had won a Cambridge debate on the virtues of Adam Smith — but he held back. It was best to let the conversation advance smoothly toward the negotiation point.

“For centuries,” Gregor began, “people have tried to create the perfect society. To achieve what we see flickering on Plato’s cave. To transpose the ideal on our reality.”

Niels imagined Gregor sitting on his white couch, within his white walls, reading Greek philosophers after a hard day’s work.

“Many people have tried to create a community of like-minded individuals, with the aim of a peaceful and collaborative rule — a utopia, if you will. You may recall the Rappites…?”

Niels didn’t.

“Or the Oneida community.”

Again, Niels drew a blank.

“In any case,” Gregor said, “all of these attempts ultimately failed.”

“We weren’t made to live on communes,” Niels shrugged. “People are fundamentally selfish.”

“Or…perhaps it’s just a few bad seeds.”

“A few bad seeds are enough to ruin the crop.”

“Yes, Niels!” exclaimed Gregor, his chair rocking underneath him, a flush of pink invading his face. “That’s why we get rid of the bad seeds!”

Gregor took a deep breath, and the color was sucked back into his body. He coughed, then continued.

“We know how to do it. We know how to build the perfect society.”

“On campus?”

Gregor leaned forward in his chair, putting his hand awkwardly on Niels’ shoulder. In a sharp whisper, his eyes blazing, “Niels, we’re going to the moon!”

It took Niels a few seconds to realize what he had just heard. He moved to speak, but Gregor’s hand stopped him, his words spilling over his palm and rushing at Niels.

“We’ve figured out how to build the perfect society — and from all angles, from actual technical infrastructure to the societal structure. We’ve figured it all out!”

The Master Negotiator faltered and a laugh escaped from him, rudely punctuating Gregor’s plan. Niels couldn’t help himself — with just one simple, absurd phrase, six years of intimidation had evaporated. Gregor wasn’t anyone to be afraid of. He was simply insane. And that was surely to Niels’ advantage, though he knew one had to proceed carefully with crazy people. They could be unpredictable.

“Slow down,” Niels said. “Are you joking with me?”

“We have been working on the project for a year,” Gregor said. “Fifty engineers working in secret in Building 1. We’re building a colony on the moon.”

“You mean you have a spaceship and everything? How are you dealing with gravity? Wait, never mind, don’t answer that. What I mean is, since when did Anahata get into the business of humankind?”

“Anahata has always only ever been about humankind. Everything we do is done for — “

“Yeah, yeah, I know, everything we do is to improve humankind. But I mean, a society, Gregor. There are no synergies with our current business. How do you know how to construct a society?”

“Actually, a society is a lot like software. You build it on solid principles, then you iterate. Then you solutionize, and you iterate again.”

“What makes you think you can solve what centuries of wise men have failed to do?”

“Because we have something they don’t have,” Gregor said. He pushed his chair closer, and Niels couldn’t help but lean forward. The broken wooden spindle leaned with him, pushing into his back. But he did not move to swat it away; his eyes were locked on Gregor, their faces almost touching.

“Algorithms,” Gregor whispered.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Niels snorted. “These are humans we’re talking about, not robots. You can’t predict and control human behavior with algorithms.”

“That is an emotional reaction to what is a very logical project. And, yes, an algorithm could have predicted that you would respond that way. Even irrational behavior is rational when seen as a larger grouping of patterns. And as you can imagine, this project is built on patterns of success. Project Y, we call it. It will save Anahata — and, as a result, humankind.”

Niels shook his head. He had come to ask Gregor to slap some silly ads on a dumb bracelet; Gregor was telling him they were going to build a moon colony. If Gregor wasn’t crazy, then Niels was stupid for asking for so little in return.

“Let me get this straight. We’re wasting tons of company money for a totally altruistic endeavor? There’s not a single business purpose in all of this?”

“Obviously there’s a business purpose,” Gregor said. “That’s where it all started.”

Niels smirked — now they were speaking his language. The company always talked about saving the world, and sometimes really did believe in it, but Bobby always made sure there was a monetization element involved — and that Niels was in charge of ensuring the project’s economic success.

“Tell me more,” said Niels, leaning back in his uncomfortable chair.

“Project Y is fundamentally about protecting our employees and our company from outside threats,” Gregor said.

“So this is about beating Galt.”

“And any future Galt. We have the world’s best engineers, and if we lose them, we lose everything. But if we build them a utopia, they will never have any reason to leave.”

“Don’t you think the company’s already done a pretty good job of building a worker’s paradise?” Niels said. “If anything, we’ve made all these engineers into self-entitled, smoothie-guzzling cult members who will never have any reason to leave. Where else could they have job titles like ‘Evangelist,’ ‘Security Warrior,’ ‘Protector of All Things Internet,’ and ‘Debuggenator’?”

Gregor shook his head. “It isn’t enough anymore. Free food, massages, and light-saber aerobics were revolutionary when we first started the company. But nowadays, every startup has them. The smaller companies can offer faster career mobility, wider remit, and most important, by dint of being small and under the radar, they can innovate wildly through illegality. Just think — when was the last time we were able to get away with selling a user’s private data or violate someone’s copyright? Those golden days are gone. We simply can’t compete. And Galt knows it. Everyone knows it.”

Niels couldn’t disagree. Galt was a real threat, particularly in the Valley, where the average shelf life of even the most successful tech companies was just a decade or two. Anahata was already ten years old. Practically ancient.

“So, if you build a colony on the moon…”

“The better way to state it is, if we build an isolated utopia — which just happens to be on the moon — then we will secure the future of this company. No more Galt headhunters. No more Galt stealing our great ideas.”

“And you’ll just lock the employees up there on the moon? Give them a one-way ticket?”

“Imagine — a planet full of geniuses!”

Niels shook his head. “Surely there are easier ways to do this. What about raising employees’ salaries or giving them longer vacations? Going to the moon seems extreme. I see no value add to the company.”

“Value add?” Gregor sneered. “Your statement is not made true by its redundancy. There is indeed value. It’s only by tackling what seems impossible that you can ensure no one else will do it. Galt can compete with bigger salaries and fancy perks, but they won’t be able to compete with a moon colony. Plus, we’re building a utopia that no engineer will ever want to leave. We’ll be unstoppable! All other utopian societies have failed — it’s a big problem that no one’s solved. It’s a huge opportunity for us.”

“Or the sign that we will fail like all the others,” Niels sighed. A moon colony was crazy even by Anahata standards.

“Our utopia will be different. We’ve spent several months analyzing the best combinations of political thought, philosophy, and technological advances necessary to achieve a better society. We’ve also looked at societal failures through the centuries — Rome, Byzantium, and so forth. What was consistent throughout was a lack of individual purpose. As a society progresses, it becomes more specialized, and while its citizens become ever more dependent on each other, they have no relationship with the tasks they perform. They are cogs in a wheel they never wanted to build.”

Niels remembered late-night pot-filled conversations in college that sounded a lot like this. He fiddled again with the wooden spindle digging into his back. When the first ad appeared on Moodify, he’d send Gregor a new chair as a snide gift. Nothing was more insulting to a rich man than to send him a better version of what he already owned.

“We will take the best sampling of society and give people roles that fit their skills,” Gregor continued. “The man born to be a mechanical engineer will be a mechanical engineer. He who cooks well will be a cook. There will be no anomie — I guess you don’t know the philosopher Émile Durkheim? But in any case, every man will have his place. Every man will work together, for himself and for the greater good of the group.”

Niels put one hand behind his back and began to twist at the base of the wooden spindle, trying to wrench it free from the chair. It wouldn’t budge no matter how hard he tried. He could feel the sweat forming amateurish circles under his expensive shirt.

“This goddamn chair — “

He looked up and saw Gregor studying him, expressionless.

“I mean,” Niels said, “how are you going to transport all of mankind to the moon?”

“Oh no,” Gregor said. “That would just be bringing along the bad seeds and all their earthly problems. There is a full selection process. The bulk of the group will be engineers, of course, as they perform very well across every factor we’ve determined necessary for success. You see, we have calculated a target percentage for every category of person and skill type that we need in order to have a high societal success rate.”

“Argh!” growled Niels, the spindle behaving even more egregiously than before, pushing on his spine, scratching at his well-buffed skin. Such a crappy chair had no place in his existence. He worked way too hard and earned too much money to have to sit in chairs like this.

He scooted to the edge of his chair, but the spindle followed him, digging into him, pushing him forward and downward as though he were Gregor’s supplicant. Unacceptable!

Niels leaped to his feet.

“Sit. Please,” said Gregor, leaning across and pulling the the spindle out of Niels’ chair in one single, swift movement.

“As you may have guessed,” said Gregor, laying the spindle next to the bottle of wine, “sales employees won’t be as likely to be admitted to the moon colony given the high bar, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a shot. If you help us, I can even imagine we’d raise the percentage of acceptance for the sales employees. Provided, of course, that they pass the necessary tests.”

Niels snatched the spindle from the table and pointed it at Gregor. He thought the move looked intimidating, menacing even. But then he glanced down and realized he looked more like an orchestra conductor. He threw the spindle to the ground.

“You always get so upset when I speak in a factual manner about the sales team’s IQ,” Gregor continued. “But you should listen objectively to this plan, because there’s a part that you’re going to love.”

Gregor paused, then drew out his words. “I…will…let…you…monetize.”

Niels eyebrows shot upward in genuine surprise.

“Monetize the moon? You’ll let me do that?”

“Yes.”

“But…you never let me monetize,” said Niels, sitting down. “What’s the catch?”

“I’ll let you export the moon minerals,” Gregor said. “You and your team will go down there and pull them out and — ”

“Minerals!” roared Niels, rocketing out of his chair. “My team sells internet advertising, Gregor, not minerals! Internet advertising!”

“Well, before they can sell the minerals, they need to get them out of the ground, so the selling part is sort of a moot point at this stage.”

“You want my sales team to become miners?”

Gregor looked puzzled. “Oh, I hadn’t really thought they would be the miners. But now that you suggest it, it’s not a bad idea. The skill sets do overlap, I suppose. The ‘core competencies,’ as you call them, are the same — dirt digging, rubbing elbows with worms, hunting for gold — ”

“Gregor!”

“One thing,” said Gregor, holding up his hand. “I don’t want you to get too excited. We can’t export minerals right away. It really doesn’t become economical until we build the space elevator, and that’s not on the roadmap until late next year.”

“Space elevator?!? You are going to sink this company!”

Niels knew it was time. He jumped onto his chair and stomped his feet. He waved his arms in the air again, willing his face redder and redder, sputtering a few expletives to express his outrage at Gregor’s ridiculous plan. While not all business meetings required such theatrics, almost one hundred percent of Niels’ negotiations involved either throwing a pen or stomping away from the table. He found it was often the best way to force a rapprochement from his opponent.

“Sit down,” said Gregor, pouring them both more wine. “You have nothing to be concerned about. Project Y is highly economical. By retaining our best engineers and protecting our most secret projects, we save hundreds of millions of dollars each year. And that’s before even calculating the potential upside from building the world’s first functioning utopia. Ultimately, we think this could generate tens of billions of dollars of new revenue.”

Niels slowly lowered his arms, but he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Feigned outrage was a tried-and-true technique — why hadn’t it worked this time? Just the previous week, Niels had used the same approach on the CEO of the world’s largest advertising firm, and in a matter of minutes the guy agreed to make his own car a surface for real-time Anahata ads.

He decided to continue standing on the chair. Niels threw his hands on his hips and puffed out his chest, then clenched his fists to make his biceps pop.

“So you’re going to put a whole bunch of male engineers alone on a planet, huh? Sounds to me like this will last up until you have your first system downtime and your engineers are no longer able to stream porn from Earth.”

Gregor said nothing for a few seconds, as if it took him a moment to understand.

“Oh,” he finally said. “No, we’ve thought of that already. There will be women.”

“I mean real women, not robots and avatar women. Or holograms,” said Niels, referring to the recent Anahata prom, for which Bobby had commissioned Japanese nurse holograms to accompany dateless engineers.

Gregor waved him away, but Niels wasn’t sure whether he was ignoring him or missing Niels’ swipe entirely.

“Our engineers have found ways to solve all of the many dangers that could befall a young society — famine, natural disaster, war. You think they can’t solve the simple problem of women? History has shown that if you give an engineer a problem, he usually can solve it. Again, that’s why our society will primarily be made up of engineers.”

“Most of your engineers can barely dress themselves,” sniffed Niels, staring down at Gregor from atop the chair. “Besides, I heard what happened last year at your winter retreat — hardly the outcome one would expect from superior beings.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Gregor, but the hint of a grimace suggested otherwise.

As part of a team-building exercise, Anahata had put its engineers into teams for a virtual trek through the Amazon. Along the way, the engineers were met with various obstacles — wild animals, tree loggers, and angry environmentalists.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Niels said. “Your engineering teams abandoned sick and injured teammates just so that they could make it out of the Amazon first. A bunch of the employees got fed to anacondas.”

“We didn’t use real snakes,” Gregor protested.

“They left their teammates to die.”

“Only in a virtual world!” Gregor’s face burst in splotches of red.

“Your moon colony is a virtual world!”

A few seconds passed, then Gregor spoke.

“I agree it would have been good of our engineers to save their colleagues. But at least their motivation was pure — to escape the jungle on behalf of Anahata. This is why they are the ultimate citizens of our new society. They will always work for its greater benefit and not be led astray by the petty distractions that affect so many other people. Distractions like…”

Gregor’s eyes flashed.

“Distractions like pots of gold.”

It was clearly a dig. But last year’s sales incentive — in which Niels had promised a pot of authentic gold doubloons to any sales team member who doubled their returns in a quarter — had proved to be a brilliant motivational technique. Anahata had tripled its profits that year thanks to a bit of luck o’ the Irish. Niels wasn’t crazy; he was shrewd. And that, he believed, was the difference between him and the man seated below him. There was no reasoning with insanity.

“What do you want from me,” Niels asked, throwing his hands up. He was no longer certain of his next move. Should he come down from the chair? Or maybe it was best to speak to Bobby directly, though that also carried risks.

“Stop blocking my teams from testing on Shanley Field,” Gregor said. “Free up the servers in Eastern Africa. Basically, get out of our way. In exchange, I will give you full transparency into our plans and eventual access to the moon minerals.”

“No, I don’t like this,” Niels said. “It’s not right for Anahata. And what will the rest of the world think when they find out? Our shareholders will freak out and the stock price will tank.”

“It doesn’t matter. By the time they find out, we’ll be gone. On the moon. And once we’re there and things are up and running, it will be easy to prove that the model works.”

Niels sighed and shook his head. He was used to arguing over dollars in well-lit restaurants, not debating with a psychopath in his wine dungeon. It was time to play the Bobby card.

“I think we need to talk about this — seriously talk about this at a very, very long management meeting.”

Gregor’s face tightened. “There is nothing to talk about. Bobby agreed to this a long time ago.”

“Then Bobby’s going to need to come talk to me if he wants those servers in Africa. I’m not going to let you thwart the part of the company that makes all the money and funds your crazy ideas.”

Niels got down from the chair and took a step toward the stairs.

“Wait! We’re not done!” Gregor yelped.

Niels suppressed a grin. Clearly, all was not lost. He counted to five in his head, and slowly, slowly turned toward his prey.

“Maybe there is a way…”

“I’m sure we can find a compromise,” said Gregor, the slight tremble in his voice confirming Niels’ hunch.

Gregor was afraid Niels would turn Bobby against him. It never ceased to amaze him the things grown men feared. Niels feared no one.

“I want ads on Moodify,” Niels said.

Gregor’s face scrunched into a sour ball, then unfolded into a scowl before disappearing underneath his skin. A second later, it was as if his face had never hosted any expression at all.

“Listen,” said Niels, “you let me put ads on Moodify and I’ll support you one hundred percent in the moon colony project. Shanley Field, servers in Africa — I’ll even give you a few sales guys who can wash your engineers’ laundry on the moon.”

Niels held out his hand, but Gregor made no move toward him. For a minute, the two men stared at each other without moving.

“Putting ads on Moodify bracelets is bad for our users,” Gregor said.

Niels shrugged. “Okay, I’ll just discuss this with Bobby tomorrow and — ”

“Wait,” said Gregor, jumping out of his seat and moving quickly toward Niels. “There is something I have to show you.”

Gregor took a few slow steps backwards toward the stairs, as if his gaze could freeze Niels in place. He then turned and bounded up the steps, letting the door slide gently behind him.

Down below, Niels crossed his arms and yawned loudly.

But once Gregor was gone, Niels began to rub his temples. Why hadn’t he just gone into banking instead? Greedy capitalists were so much easier to negotiate with than engineers.

Five miles away, Arsyen Aimo was also thinking about money — namely, that thanks to his huge new salary, he was once again on the winning side of capitalism and ready to upgrade his entire life.

Part of that upgrade definitely involved getting a new girlfriend — preferably an American one with excellent teeth.

Of course, he already had a girlfriend, Natia, though that had happened somewhat by accident.

A year earlier, he had signed up to an online dating site as “Rick,” a blond surfer from Santa Cruz. Rick resembled an underwear model, with a chiseled body, defined jawline, and a strong nose echoing Arsyen’s own good looks.

The first woman he met was Natia — herself masking as a Romanian grad student at Berkeley. Between her confusion of Los Angeles as a Northern Californian city and Arsyen’s own English mistakes, they quickly called each other’s bluff and soon were speaking to each other in Pyrrhian.

They struck up a fast virtual friendship — not more than that initially, as they were both too practical to imagine dating someone thousands of miles away. Arsyen took pains to conceal his true identity. From his experience, once a Pyrrhian woman knew she was in the presence of an Aimo, all hopes of reasonable conversation dissolved in a puddle of sighs. Instead, he told her about living in America, about drive-through pharmacies and the endless array of flavored sparkling water, and the importance of sanitation engineers like Arsyen, who fixed the various clogs, stains, and crumbs that could slow the infrastructure of a fast-moving startup.

She in turn wrote to him about her life in Poodlekek, Pyrrhia’s capital. Natia worked as a switchboard operator for the national telecommunications firm, a graying dinosaur that was slowly moving Pyrrhia into the 1980s. She belonged to a political philosophy group, which met weekly to discuss why Marxism failed and whether man could subvert machine in a post-capitalist society. Arsyen found her little intellectual forays rather cute. There would be no need for political philosophy once royal reign was restored, but why discourage Natia from stretching her feminine brain in the meantime?

She was particularly passionate in her dislike of General (now President) Korpeko — the source of the Aimo family’s undoing. He was a “despot,” she wrote, “hell-bent on pushing sports and false achievements instead of encouraging the true prosperity of the nation.”

Among her many gripes was Korpeko’s obsession with the little-known sport of curling. He believed it was Pyrrhia’s ticket to international fame — sufficiently obscure as to ensure little competition from wealthier countries. Korpeko had replaced all the bike lanes and gutters along main roads with curling courts, and no vacations or trips outside the country were allowed during the first week of February, now known as Pyrrhian Curling Week. Arsyen’s stomach tightened each time he imagined Korpeko’s curling lanes snaking across Pyrrhia’s unmarred hills.

“It sounds nothing like the rich cultural life that once flourished under the royal family,” Arsyen wrote to Natia, thinking of the literary salons and long afternoon croquet matches his family hosted at their summer palace for the Pyrrhian elite. The king had generously ensured that vivid accounts of the affairs were published in all of the country’s newspapers so literate citizens could vicariously enjoy the experience.

“Do you remember the photos of them playing croquet atop their verdant courts?” Arsyen asked. “It was far more dignified.”

“Yes, I suppose if you consider hitting a ball a more civilized activity than rolling a puck,” Natia replied.

Natia’s lack of appreciation for croquet was one of the many shortcomings Arsyen had been forced to tolerate as a lowly janitor. Another was the mole on her cheek — it was just a little too big for his liking; he often found himself covering it up with his thumb whenever they did video chat.

Luckily, product managers didn’t have to put up with such defects. When product managers discovered problems, they fixed them. And that’s exactly what Arsyen planned to do.

With a fat new paycheck now coming his way, Arsyen was better equipped to find himself a beautiful American girl — someone like that hippie receptionist, Jennie. Then, when the time was right, he would return to Pyrrhia bronzed and wealthy, with his beautiful queen and her good orthodontics on display. Natia and the other women of Pyrrhia would weep at what they had lost, only able to take comfort in the possibility of becoming one of Arsyen’s bathing maidens.

So it was decided: Natia was out. The only question was whether to write her a breakup email now or first play his video game.

Arsyen opted for the video game. And there he was, a half-hour later, stuck on his couch, glued to his screen, when the phone rang.

It was the chief strategist with the Throne Reclamation Committee (the TRC).

“Have you heard the news? A train went off Golden Bridge and fell into the lake.”

“Mmmhmm,” said Arsyen, drawing his sword and piercing the heart of a castle guard. “It was probably a drunk conductor. Our trains are flawless.”

The national rail service had been one of the great Aimo accomplishments — christened by his father as “locomotives of progress and prosperity.” The king even had a toy train replica built to travel over their palace moat and directly into Arsyen’s bedroom. He wondered if that train was still there — particularly the first-class carriage, outfitted with miniature foodstuffs. As a teenager, Arsyen often threw the train’s gold-plated bison fries at his manservant Sklartar when the old man wasn’t moving fast enough.

“They say you could hear the screams of the children as the train flew through the air,” the strategist said, “that the flames moved across the sky like a rocket.”

“Huh,” said Arsyen, his thumb pumping up and down on the console button as he sliced through the head of one of the king’s henchmen. Tragedies often befell poor nations. There wasn’t much point in getting worked up over a handful of dead bodies.

The felled henchman rose, holding his head in his hands. He was coming back for more. As Arsyen pumped the console with his thumbs, the phone fell from his ear. No matter, if the news was that important, he was sure to hear from the TRC again. Nothing was going to interrupt his game. He had made it through his grueling first week at Anahata and deserved some downtime.

Arsyen glanced at his email on his way to the bathroom a few minutes later and saw that Natia had written. She too was obsessed with the train accident. She claimed the government had stopped any media from reporting the event, fearful that the news could put a damper on its bid to host the International Curling Championships the following year. Government workers had already begun repairing the bridge, and no effort was being made to dredge up the train. Meanwhile, the police were arresting anyone they believed was spreading rumors. All internet services were blocked in the capital, and Natia had been forced to travel outside the province to get to any café with open access. “If they find out I am here, they will arrest me, or worse!” She wrote. “Help us get the word out about what happened. Hundreds are dead!”

Arsyen had assumed the TRC had been talking about ten people. Hundreds of people elevated the train wreck to a national disaster — the kind of thing worthy of a future king’s attention.

“What would a king do…?” Arsyen wondered aloud, imagining himself laying his healing hands upon thousands of maimed Pyrrhians, their bodies draped in rags — rags he would eventually replace with velvet robes! — as they lay prostrate before him. They shielded their eyes from his divine light, and chanted his name to the ground below them. King Arsyen. King Arsyen.

He shook himself back to reality. His dream was still far off. Whatever happened in Pyrrhia now would certainly be repeated in a year’s time, with a new set of mothers rolled out to despair over the loss of their children at the hands of Korpeko’s corrupt and negligent government. He needed to be patient and let these minor catastrophes accumulate. At the point of ten train wrecks, the time might finally be right for a royal coup.

But in the meantime, Arsyen could at least give a nudge toward revolution and have some quick fun with Korpeko. If working in technology had taught him anything, it’s that the internet loves a troll.

While working at Galt, Arsyen had learned about GaltPages — a popular tool that aggregated everything people had to say on all the different Galt apps. He even half-started his own GaltPage a few months earlier to promote his Aimo Air Freshener — a custom pink mixture he invented out of cleaning supplies so he could cover up the persistent stench of body odor that permeated the Galt meeting rooms. Its cotton candy scent would one day make Arsyen millions — provided he could figure out how to keep it from combusting.

He hadn’t gotten very far with his page back then, but Galt seemed to have made its product easier to use since he last tried. He could easily repurpose his early work to suit Natia’s social justice needs — the fluffy pink plume of cotton candy in the page’s background no longer suggesting a sweet scent but rather an artsy take on a nuclear holocaust. And, Arsyen told himself, there was a potential bonus to be had in all of this: If enough people were interested in what he posted about Poodlekek, he could collect their contact info and sell them his air freshener once all the furor died down.

Arsyen had worked in the Valley long enough to know that the key to social media was virality, not sincerity. So he renamed the page “Justice for Poodlekek” and posted Natia’s text about the accident, calling for action. He then posted the link to Justice for Poodlekek in the comment section of every Pyrrhian blog and newspaper article he could find and wrote a review of Korpeko’s government on the restaurant review site Help! Then he added pictures of Golden Bridge to his Photomatic account, using the retro and futuristic filters, as well as a bleaker one with a sprinkling of decapitated bodies.

Arsyen leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. It was an awfully nice thing he had just done for Natia, and it would hopefully assuage her disappointment when he broke up with her in favor of dating Jennie.

He returned to his video game and quickly forgot about the page. But a while later, passing by his computer on the way to the kitchen, he saw that the previously blank comment section of Justice for Poodlekek now hosted a long list of responses. The view count was already in the thousands and climbing with each minute. Arsyen did a double take: People seemed to really be upset by this train thing. And not just the train, but about Korpeko and his government as well.

The street light has been out for two weeks. Why is there no bison milk on Mondays?

Arsyen squealed with delight. His people seemed so unhappy! He hit the refresh button again and again, each new complaint augmenting his euphoria.

Korpeko will drag our country into further poverty! I hate curling!

Arsyen couldn’t resist posting a comment under a fake name.

This never would have happened when the Aimos were in power!

Someone replied immediately.

That’s true. King Aimo would’ve made us play croquet until our fingers fell off.

Arsyen laughed. That had indeed happened to a few unlucky peasants who had trespassed on the royal croquet court.

As the minutes passed, complaints about bison milk were replaced by complaints about potholes, potholes by accusations of corruption, corruption by torture.

Arsyen did a small jig before his computer, then paused — first to check out his flexed biceps reflected on his computer screen, and then to update his page with a new message.

My people, we must take action!!

Of course, Arsyen knew President Korpeko would put it all down. That’s how it happened in Pyrrhia and the rest of the poor world. People protested and waved hand-painted signs, and then, if they weren’t disappeared by the government, they trudged back to work on Monday.

But Arsyen’s well-meaning but rather stupid Pyrrhian subjects couldn’t see that far ahead. Instead, the misery of Pyrrhia wrote itself across the Justice for Poodlekek page. The decay of the streets, the decay of the nation, the decay of everything, really, but the country’s gleaming curling lanes. The page’s followers swelled into the thousands within minutes. Soon they were asking about the creator of Justice for Poodlekek, calling on him to lead them forward.

It was terrible timing. He still had six levels to go in his video game.

“Men of action take action,” Arsyen said to himself, repeating a poster he had seen outside one of Anahata’s sales buildings.

He composed a short note to Natia:

My dear Natia, I have made a GaltPage to help you spread the word. Also, I am sorry but I think we will have to break up because I am not going to be able to come to Pyrrhia anytime soon.

Arsyen paused. What if Natia showed up one day in California without that unfortunate mole and wanted to sleep with him?

He began to type again.

Let me know if you ever come to California. Keep in touch!

Then he left the house to go grab a burrito. He needed some fuel to keep him going if he was going to conquer the six-headed henchman later that night.

Whatever Gregor Guntlag was trying to prove, Niels was determined to ignore it. He would meet Gregor’s final, desperate plea for cooperation with the same dismissal with which Gregor had treated Niels’ chair-jumping antics.

Niels pictured Gregor lugging the mysterious proof of his superior world order down the stairs, his combat boots thudding against the wooden steps, then stomping to the table. What did he want to show Niels? A philosophy book? A line of code? A diorama? Regardless, Niels’ expression would remain placid, unmoved, mouth silent in Guntlagian style until Gregor’s desperation grew to the point where Niels would only need to repeat three words: “Ads on Moodify.” Maybe he would even agree to let Niels put ads on employee T-shirts and the meeting-room chairs.

When had Gregor left exactly? Half an hour earlier? An hour? It was starting to seem like an awfully long time to leave someone waiting in a basement.

It was obvious what Gregor was trying to do. He had locked Niels in the cellar in order to assert his dominance and put Niels on edge. But these kinds of mind tricks and one-upmanship were old hat for a Master Negotiator. After all, Niels was the man who had challenged a quadriplegic music executive to a game of rugby; the man who hid E. coli in an opponent’s entree so he could pitch him on a business proposition as the other lay prostrate before the toilet for six hours. This wine cellar act was amateurish.

That said, why would a grown man lock a work colleague in his basement? Was that something Germans found funny? Or maybe Gregor was in fact Austrian. The Austrians were famous for their appreciation of basements. For a split second, Niels’ body tensed as he imagined Gregor descending the stairs in a pair of leather pants.

Niels closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them again. He couldn’t help but respect his opponent for planting these seeds of doubt. Five minutes passed, then ten. Niels felt splinters from the chair making inroads into the back of his arms. Shapes emerged from the shadows, then receded. Another twenty minutes passed.

Niels knew he shouldn’t panic, but the shadows, the quiet, the unpredictability of his opponent all began to cloud his confidence. The longer he sat and paced and sat and paced, the more Niels became convinced that the taciturn Teuton was planning to leave him there all night, returning only once confident that he had broken the Master Negotiator.

Niels needed to plot his escape. From his shirt pocket, he pulled out the pen and pad of paper that he always carried with him. In a world of internet intangibles, Niels found reassurance in last-century items.

His high-level plan of attack was fairly easy to map. First, Niels needed to get himself out of the basement, and second, he needed to stop Gregor’s moon colony plan. (Third, he needed to destroy Gregor, though that was a longer-term goal that would require a separate strategy and PowerPoint deck.)

The question, of course, was how to go about these things. Niels considered the obvious — he could call another member of the management team. But as soon as Fischer, HR Paul, or Old Al showed up, Gregor would have some story ready and they would all have a good chuckle over Niels’ paranoia. Word would get out around Anahata, and even his own team would eventually find out about his panicked call for help. Exhilarated by the scent of weakness, the salesmen would circle him like the killer sharks he had trained them to be. It would be the end of him.

Instead, Niels sketched a mountain. At the base, he wrote, “Me.” At the summit, he wrote “FREEDOM.” Then he paused, realizing that he had failed to capture the full complexity of the situation. So he drew a second mountain next to the first. Now he had a mountain range. At the base of that second mountain, Niels wrote, “Gregor announces Moon Colony Plan.” At the top, he wrote, “I DESTROY the Moon Colony Plan!!!”

After a few minutes, and a few trees and shrubs added to his drawing for good measure, Niels had the entire route mapped, from base camp to summit. He was ready to go. He leaped out of his chair and did fifty jumping jacks, followed by one hundred situps, enjoying the rush of blood through his body. Niels would save Anahata from the worst decision it could ever make, and possibly even get Gregor fired in the process.

The first step was simple. He would ring Bobby and suggest that he pick Niels up at Gregor’s house for a midnight yoga class. Bobby was a sucker for yoga invites and had stated on numerous occasions that he wished the management team would chant together. Niels, for his part, thought yoga was the lazy man’s excuse for exercise, but like golf and wine, he saw value in its acquisition. Yoga had not only helped him meet several lonely housewives, but had also distinguished him as the only member of Bobby’s team who could execute Chaturanga Dandasana — providing a reasonable excuse for him to seed business ideas over sun salutations.

Niels pulled out his phone, selected Bobby’s number, and was soon hit by his mountain’s first boulder. There was no reception in Gregor’s basement.

He was not used to being knocked down so early in the game, but like a true sales champion, Niels rose quickly. “Only losers lose,” he whispered to himself, quoting one of the motivational posters in his office. He did five pushups with one hand, then jumped to his feet.

Niels tapped his phone’s email application and began to type:

Bobby, have just heard of a killer nighttime yoga studio in Mill Valley. Fantastic kombucha bar. I can get us in. Can you meet tonight? I’m at Gregor’s — stuck in his basement actually, funny story. Come grab me and we can head straight to the studio.

He paused. Would Bobby sense desperation? He needed to make his message appear as normal and Niels-like as possible.

Also, Gregor told me all about Project Y. Fascinating idea. I have some ideas about how we can monetize.

Niels smiled. He could feel his bed and a good night’s sleep within reach.

He pushed “send” and immediately began composing a second email, this time to HR Paul. Gregor’s insanity needed to be recorded somewhere — even if in the short-term Niels had no intention of compromising Anahata’s public reputation and Niels’ own financial stake in the company — by outing its head engineer as a psychopath.

Niels decided to attach a photo of himself in the basement. He raised his phone camera to get an angle that captured both the rows of wine bottles and the staircase leading up to a locked door. Then he hit “send” and took a swig of the Chateau Margaux — it would make for great bragging rights at next month’s HBS Successful Man Golf Tournament.

Niels opened the email application again, and his face fell. His email to Bobby hadn’t gone through. In its place was a time-out message — the data connection just wasn’t strong enough. Niels tried to send again, and then again and again, from different parts of the basement. But each time he was met with the same result.

The Master Negotiator was hit with a strong dose of reality — there was no phone connection, only a very weak data connection, and he was trapped in an Austrian psychopath’s basement.

Niels scanned the room. Aside from the bottles of wine, it was absolutely empty. The staircase led to the locked door on the first floor, but otherwise there were no windows and no way out. He couldn’t go to work. He couldn’t make money.

He couldn’t make money!

“No!!!” he screamed, kicking over one of the chairs. He bounded up the stairs and began pounding on the door. “Let me out! You can’t do this!”

Niels pounded for several minutes, but there was no answer from the other side.

Niels crumbled on the top step and was at first shocked, then horrified, then just miserable to discover that the wet feeling on his face were tears, actual man tears. His body shook, and he began to feel cold. He wanted his mother, or the ex-girlfriend he had cheated on, or even just that hippie receptionist he had slept with.

Or even God. Niels clasped his hands in prayer, unsure whether the gesture was necessary for the Almighty to hear him. Did God have to listen to him? Didn’t God love rich people?

Just in case, Niels apologized extra hard for ignoring Him the previous four decades and promised that he would be good from now on. He wouldn’t sleep with receptionists, he’d mentor inner-city entrepreneurs, and he’d teach the homeless how to code. He’d get rid of moon colonies and pop-up internet ads, and he’d fix piracy on the web once and for all. Above all, he’d be a good citizen and son and follower of whatever religion God turned out to belong to.

He looked down at the useless mobile phone in his hand. Tears had formed pathetic puddles across its surface, distorting his Flitter application, which now seemed to sprout wings from the “f” of its logo. Niels stared at it for a few seconds, watching the “f” heave under his tears, like a bird dreaming of flight.

And then it hit him. Flitter — Galt’s popular thought-sharing tool — was famous for working in the lowest-bandwidth parts of the world. They were always bragging in the press about how someone had used their tool to escape an oppressive regime. It drove Bobby crazy — he thought Anahata should have a monopoly on freedom and hope.

Niels didn’t care about any of that. In fact, he had zero interest in Galt or Flitter or in reading anyone’s thoughts other than his own. But a year earlier, he had tried to convince Galt to run Anahata’s ads on their apps and opened a Flitter account, Niels_1973, to show them he really cared about their product. But eventually the deal fell through, and other than a few half-hearted fleets about some Anahata sports matches, Niels’ account lay dormant for months. He had practically forgotten he even had it installed on his phone.

The likelihood Flitter would work in the cellar was low, but Niels had nothing to lose. He fired up Niels_1973 and, hands shaking, expressed his panic in fewer than one hundred thirty-five characters (the limit set on any Flitter message):

Help me! Trapped in basement at 13 Willow St, Atherton.

Niels hit “send,” and in a split second, the post was successfully transmitted. Niels jumped up from the step, pumping his fist in the air. “Yes!” he cheered. He sat back and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Twenty minutes passed, and there was no response — no “we’re coming,” or “hold tight, buddy!” For a moment, Niels wondered whether his message had indeed been delivered — or fleeted, as the Flitterati would say. But he could see there were millions of other live fleets coming in from the rest of the world — fleets about politicians, fleets about celebrities, fleets from companies hawking their products, and fleets from celebrities hawking those same products. Clearly someone was getting through to someone.

The problem, Niels quickly realized, was that no one was listening to him. He had only two people following his fleets: agefshgr_74 and tina_xxx. Niels didn’t even know who they were or how they had found him in the first place.

“Failure is not an option,” Niels whispered to himself, repeating the Smeardon family motto. He took a gulp of Chateau Margaux and reminded himself that the important thing was that Flitter worked. The next step was simply to make it work better for him. He needed something more eye-catching — something that would get people so excited that they would want to refleet his message to all of their friends and followers.

He quickly settled on Tech Geek, the Valley’s hottest tech gossip site. Including the @techgeek Flitter handle was his best bet to be seen by someone following their account. So Niels tried again, decades of Chateau Margaux life force moving him into a new world of confidence:

@techgeek Love your hard-hitting tech analysis. Also: Help me! I’m a prisoner of #Anahata.

Up in San Francisco, Tech Geek’s social media manager stared at the fleet from Niels_1973 and groaned. Of all the Galt apps, Flitter definitely had the most crazies. There was something about giving people just one hundred thirty-five characters to express themselves that made them even more desperate — fueled by the hope that a bite-sized thought would be small enough to penetrate the world’s scattered attention.

It wasn’t just weirdos like Niels who drove him crazy. It was the number of people who didn’t properly understand Flittiquette. They exhibited a poor use of hashtags, a tendency to refleet every compliment or inane statement made by a follower, and an inability to craft something eye-popping in one hundred thirty-five characters.

Social media was a twenty-first-century art, and a true amateur (“in the French sense,” he explained to anyone who would listen, “meaning a lover of social media”) had to spend time honing his craft. He often reflected that his title should have been Master Craftsman of Social Media. Or simply God.

Because as far as he could tell, there was no job with more prestige. Sure, he told his friends, he could take a high-paying social media job at a big corporation, but that wasn’t his style. He didn’t want to be the guy fleeting “Not feeling fresh? Try the new #Summer_douche in fresh lavender.” He had done his college senior thesis on Che Guevara’s influence on scatological pop art. He could hardly sell out to the agro-chemico-industrial complex to be their social media plaything. He was part of an #online #revolution #disrupting #everything.

That’s why he was at Tech Geek, by all accounts the heart of the universe — or, at least, his universe, and the universe of anyone who mattered to him. Tech Geek was where all things tech and Valley were beating, throbbing, iterating, de-duping, compiling, normalizing, and randomizing. As far as he saw it, if you did social media for the Valley, you were, in many ways, the Valley. In fact, he liked to think of himself as a modern-day William Randolph Hearst. The decisions he made — whether to refleet someone’s comment, post a piece of news or gossip about another company, or (shock!) ignore it altogether — these were the things that made and broke powerful men and their companies.

So it annoyed him when fools like Niels_1973 would fleet things that were clearly false, just in the hope of grabbing his attention. It was irresponsible and a waste of his time. Niels_1973 was probably the same guy who had tried to send a “tip” to Tech Geek a few months earlier that Anahata had discovered Atlantis and was refurbishing it so that Bobby Bonilo could have an underwater pleasure kingdom. Or the guy who had fleeted that Anahata was suggesting its lowest-performing employees take performance-enhancing drugs. Granted, the latter proved to be true, but the source had missed a crucial detail. Anahata was randomizing who would get the drugs so they could analyze the effectiveness of the trial — a piece of research that would be helpful for the entire scientific community. #Detailsmatter

Niels_1973: @techgeek Love your hard-hitting tech analysis. Also: Help me! I’m a prisoner of #Anahata.

He reread the fleet and shook his head. He spent several minutes contemplating the various punishments he could mete out, finally deciding to block Niels_1973 from his list altogether. It was an extreme punishment, but he couldn’t condone such outrageous, attention-seeking behavior.

Then, feeling like he had done yet another great service for the world, Tech Geek’s social media manager called it a night and made his way to bed.

It took total isolation from the outside world for Niels to discover what millions of Galt fans around the world already knew: There was no longer any point in real conversation when you could just communicate in short phrases and poop emojis.

As night gave way to morning, Niels found himself deeply focused on a handful of celebrities and their preferred hair products and was closely following the reports of a burgeoning relationship between two contestants on a popular reality TV show. His concern for smooth hair and the couple’s happiness grew stronger as he finished off the bottle of Chateau Margaux, then opened a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafite.

Niels’ innumerable fleets about captivity, despair, and Anahata had gone unanswered despite variations in text, creative spelling, and attempts at haiku. Despite hours of nonstop fleeting, there were still no refleets by his two followers, and still no acknowledgment from Tech Geek. Nor had he gained any new followers who could potentially spread the word on his behalf.

Ever the mountaineer, Niels devised a new plan, with a new mountain range that showcased the complexity (but also the conquerability!) of his current situation. This was one of his favorite mountain-range models to use at work. It had switchbacks and a very large boulder. The point, he often told his team, was to not get distracted by the boulder and to stay focused on the switchbacks.

Flitter users were switchbacks.

No, they were boulders.

Well, whatever they were, they weren’t the point. The point was, he had been foolish to think that people on Flitter would care about him, Niels Smeardon. What they cared about was the content he himself had been sucked into — the celebrities, the gossip, the lifestyle guru tips. The trick was to make these idiots care about him through his connection to the people they worshipped. They were like lichen growing on top of the boulder. Or maybe the sign at the bottom of the mountain marking the trail. Or…

“I don’t need mountains,” Niels growled. “Mountains need ME.”

He crumpled the paper and tossed it to the ground, then immediately started fleeting again.

His first pass was a flop, despite referencing the biggest pop star on the planet — the sexy blonde singer named La Lala who was known for hitting high notes while writhing on the floor with pythons.

#OMG LaLala making new video with #Liberace! A duet with a legend!

The only reaction came from Tina_xxx, who removed herself from his list of two followers. No one else responded to his fleet.

Niels sipped some wine and took a few minutes to study the most popular tweets about La Lala. Then he tried again.

#LaLala sings at #Nashville high school, discourages #bullies. Wears pythons in school uniform. Such an #inspiration!

Niels doubted La Lala had ever been to Nashville. But no matter, within minutes, he had been refleeted. There was even a string of responses, most of them from Lala fans in Nashville asking where she had sung. Niels responded:

My friend said #EmersonHigh. She wore band aids instead of clothes!!

Within a few seconds, he had two new people following his account. He stretched his fingers and typed his next set of messages.

#LaLala wears no makeup to remind us that talent is more important than beauty. #LaLala pythons remind us that in every snake is a beating heart. #LaLala spotted at #LAX, straddling a plane. Anyone have pictures?

The popularity of Niels_1973 began to climb. The more inane his posts, the more misspellings and melodrama (driven more by inebriation than calculation), the more followers he gained. Niels felt his blood begin to pump again. He gave one of his help me! posts a go, just to see if someone would respond. But despite having amassed four thousand followers in thirty minutes, all hanging on every word he had to say about La Lala, there didn’t seem to be anyone interested in helping the man behind the fleets.

Niels scratched his head, then returned to his notepad. He drew a SWOT analysis listing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of his pop star. When he hit the “weaknesses” box, he realized his error: La Lala skewed toward a much younger audience. Was it really plausible that a pimply fourteen-year-old fan would come to his rescue?

Niels groaned. His demographic targeting had been all wrong. La Lala fans were too young. He needed serious people. People who had driver’s licenses. People who thought a bit more about the consequences of social media. People like…thirty-year-olds.

Niels flipped back to the Flitter homepage to study the most popular age-appropriate topics. What were people fleeting about on a random Monday morning? Scrolling through the list, Niels saw that most of the topics were things he knew nothing about. In addition to the perennial pop music favorites, the list included things like #bitchslap, #whatimknitting, and #blessedmoments. Niels kept scanning, moving farther and farther down the list. And then he saw it: #Poodlekek.

“Yes!”

Niels knew all about Poodlekek. It was his friend’s heavy metal band in college. He was surprised they were still together after two decades, let alone had become so popular. He remembered going to their shows at the campus coffee house, cigarette lighter waving in the air as he and his then-girlfriend sang to guitar-heavy ballads about twisted love, rocky family relationships, and starving children in Ethiopia. Their fans would likely be Niels’ age, the kind of people who would take seriously his cries for help. And Niels had plenty of interesting things he could fleet about them to get people’s attention — like the lead singer’s bad case of the Herp. Women would totally refleet that.

But first things first. He needed to build a new fan base. Niels kicked off his first Poodlekek fleet with a bit of nostalgia.

Raise your lighters for #Poodlekek

Arsyen rose from his bed, ready to conquer an American woman.

It would not be his first attempt. He had made several passes at courtship since arriving in the United States, but most women were too intimidated by his overwhelming virility.

But Jennie, the Anahata receptionist, struck Arsyen as the confident type. She shook his hand without averting her gaze and even scolded him during their campus tour when he complimented Galt. He liked a sassy lady with good teeth.

He had the day all planned out. After lunchtime, he’d surprise Jennie in the reception area and give her his Aimo Air Freshener. Then, after a bit of chitchat, he’d suggest they head to his apartment for some video games and sex. It would be the perfect first date.

The only potential hiccup was keeping his words straight. He wondered whether Sven would practice his English with him that morning.

But Arsyen had no such chance. Sven greeted him as he entered their cubicle, waving a hand bloodied by jelly doughnut. Jennie — his Jennie — was standing next to Sven.

She spotted him and smiled. “Oh, hi! How are you liking Anahata?”

Arsyen shook his head vigorously. He did not have an answer prepared for this.

But Jennie seemed to have no difficulty continuing the conversation by herself, telling Arsyen something about her feminist book club. Little of what she said registered with him. He was watching her lips move, fascinated by the way they came together and then parted as she spoke just to him. They were so different from Natia’s lips, which moved together in fits and jerks, all depending on the bandwidth of her internet connection.

Sven cleared his throat.

“Jane here was just about to tell us what she’s doing here.”

“It’s Jennie,” she said, turning to Sven. “And I’m here because I’m the new nontechnical technical lead.”

“Huh?”

“I’m your new manager,” Jennie said.

It was as if Vesuvius had exploded across the well-manicured lawns of Palo Alto. Sven’s nose twisted until the rest of his face followed in a spiral of despair. Jonas’ mouth froze in a perfect, horrified O.

Arsyen understood their reaction immediately: They were as upset as he was about having a female boss.

“This sounds like the kind of subterfuge the sales team would instigate, sending a nonengineer in here to sabotage our project,” Jonas said.

Sven jotted some lines on a piece of paper and threw it in front of Jennie. “What do you see here?”

Jennie took the paper in her hands, and Arsyen noticed that her wrists bore the remnants of a henna tattoo. She took a few seconds to study the crude drawing, which showed a graph with a diagonal line descending from the top left-hand side to the bottom right.

“Um, a descending line?” she said.

“And what’s the first thing you think of, in the context of Anahata?” Sven asked.

“I don’t know…falling profits?”

“I knew it — imposter!” he yelled, leaping to his feet.

“But I’m not from the sales team. And that was just a line — ”

“You could’ve said it was a Pareto curve, or a drop in latency, or a decrease in the number of users,” Sven said. “There were endless acceptable possibilities.”

“The possibilities were indeed infinite, in a figurative if not exact sense,” Jonas nodded.

“You had so many options, and yet what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Money. You are from sales. Out with you!” Sven’s finger pointed toward the hall, its edict winding across the floor and out the exit door, sending Jennie back to the reception area from whence she came.

Jennie glanced at Arsyen. Help! her eyes seemed to plead. It was clear she didn’t belong there — maybe she had also been trying for a janitorial position, like Arsyen, and had been mistakenly rerouted to Social Car.

“Did you come to clean?” whispered Arsyen, stepping closer. He reached into his pocket to grab the air freshener.

Jennie shot him a dirty look. “You think because I’m a woman I’m supposed to clean your cubicle?”

Jennie opened her leather fringe vest and shoved her chest at Arsyen. Feminism Happens Here, the T-shirt read.

Arsyen froze. He was not used to such forwardness in American women.

Jennie turned back to Sven and Jonas.

“Gregor Guntlag himself asked me to do this. He said I didn’t need to know how to code — just to lead. I’m a tour guide. I know how to lead people.”

Sven