That was when Chip Craft realized that the ES Quantum 3000 was seriously damaged. But it was exhibiting a strange kind of logic, of a kind Chip realized was well-advanced of any artificial intelligence then devised. So he decided to humor the ES Quantum 3000, hoping to learn more.
"Okay," Chip had said. "Make me rich."
And Friend had. Not overnight, but steadily, incrementally. Inexorably.
First Friend had given him a Pick 4 number to play. And Chip had won nearly ten thousand dollars on a two-dollar bet.
"Pretty good. Let's do it again."
"Small potatoes," Friend had said.
"Not if we put all ten grand on Saturday night's lotto game coming up."
"Nickels and dimes."
"The jackpot is almost ten million dollars."
"Paid out over a twenty-year period. We will need more money than that to achieve our goals."
"Which are?"
"Owning Excelsior Systems."
"Impossible."
"The first step is to put you on the fast track, Chip."
"I like where I am."
"I have the design for a biological electronic microchip that guarantees one hundred percent wafer yields."
"You created a self-healing microchip?"
"No. But the Nishitsu Corporation of Japan has. And I have cracked their computer system and downloaded the specs."
"This is industrial espionage."
"No. This is industrial counterespionage. The Nishitsu design is based on an IDC prototype stolen by a planted worker."
"Okay, let's see the design," Chip had said.
The design was everything Friend had said it would be. It revolutionized microchip technology, landing Chip Craft in a senior vice presidency in a matter of three months. From there it had become just a matter of surfing from position to position.
Things happened at Excelsior. Higher-ups moved on, were demoted into oblivion, and one even died in an elevator accident. The events were all random and irregularly spaced, but within three years Chip Craft was president of Excelsior Systems. Only one man stood between him and the office of CEO.
That one man abruptly cashed out his stock and launched his own company. He was bankrupt and back looking for a job. And the man who sat in his chair was Chip Craft.
By then the company had been renamed XL Sys- Corp. It was the early nineties, and the computer business was reeling under a punishing recession.
One day Friend announced that they were downsizing.
"How many do we lay off?" Chip had asked.
"Everyone."
"We can't lay off everyone."
"We will replace them with outside contractors who will be paid on an assignment basis, requiring no medical insurance and avoiding payroll taxes."
"Sounds drastic. But what are we going to do with this building if we don't have staff?"
"Rent it out. We are going to build a new building that will serve our needs better."
"Where?"
"Harlem."
"Harlem! Nobody builds office buildings up there."
"We are building in Harlem because it is cost- effective, there is ample land available, and no one will notice us."
"It's not exactly safe. People won't come to work."
"They will not have to. Only you will."
"I don't want to work in Harlem," Chip had protested.
"Are you offering your resignation, Chip?"
"I'm CEO."
"I will interpret that as a negative response."
When he first saw the new XL SysCorp building, Chip Craft almost forgot he was smack in the middle of Harlem. It was a magnificent twenty-story building of blue glass and steel. It towered over everything else on Malcolm X Boulevard, and once Chip entered the lobby and saw the marvels it had to offer, his reservations melted away.
XL SysCorp really took off after that. It was a new way of doing business. No employees—only an army of consultants, contract-service workers and free-lance technicians.
The entire building was computerized and controlled by Friend, who could be contacted by intercoms from all over the building once the ES quantum 3000 had been moved into place on the thirteenth floor surrounded by the best XL mainframes and other slave computers.
It was a concept so new a name had to be coined to describe it.
They called XL SysCorp the first virtual corporation. It had the legal status of a corporation and all the tax benefits, but operated like a loose alliance of skilled free-lancers, some permanent, some temporary, all working out of their homes or small business storefronts. Only Chip Craft actually worked in the headquarters building itself.
Oh, there were problems. Community activists did not appreciate the revolution in business that XL SysCorp represented. All they cared about was that a new business had come to Harlem and no blacks were being hired. That no one was being hired of any color at all seemed not to matter.
"We gotta hire some of these people, sir," Chip had complained to Friend one day.
"We are in need of installers at the moment," Friend said.
"These guys don't have that kind of background."
"What is their employment background?"
"I'm not sure, but I think a lot of them don't have any."
"Educational backgrounds, please."
"Some high school, maybe a few GEDs. Most are dropouts."
"They are not qualified to work for XL, then," Friend said in the same smoothly inflected voice he always used.
"But we gotta hire some anyway."
"Why?"
"Community relations."
"Will community relations increase our profits?"
"Forget profits. They picket the building, blocking the entrance, and if we don't cave in, someone's going to bounce a brick off my skull one fine morning."
"What makes you conclude that, Chip?"
"One of them threatened to do exactly that."
Friend then said, "I cannot afford to lose my CEO to a brick. Hire them."
"All of them?"
"All. Set them up on the fourth floor."
"Doing what?"
"Give them busy work. I will take care of the rest."
Reluctantly Chip had done exactly that. He hired every picketer, installed them in fourth floor cubicles and telephone pods at better than average starting salaries and watched as they sat behind their desks making unauthorized long-distance phone calls and pilfered office supplies for resale on the street.
This went on for precisely a week.
One by one the new hirees began calling in sick. They began getting sick on the job.
"What's going on?" Chip asked Friend at the beginning of the second week. "They're all falling ill."
"I have hired an environmental engineer to furnish a professional opinion."
"A what?"
"One who inspects buildings for environmental problems."
The environmental engineer showed up the next day, made a three-week examination of the XL SysCorp building environmental systems and pronounced it a sick building.
"Sick!" Chip blurted out when he heard the news.
The environmental engineer went down his checklist. "This building is unfit for habitation by more than twenty persons at a time. The air-conditioning system is substandard, air is not circulating properly, there are airborne toxins present, and it's a miracle you haven't gotten Legionnaires' disease."
"Legionnaires' disease?"
"It's caused by faulty air-conditioning equipment. Your workers all have it."
"Damn. The lawsuits will kill us. What about me? Why aren't I sick?"
"You work on the fifteenth floor, correct?"
"That's right."
"Well, through some freak of construction, the air on that floor is fine. As long as you stay there and it's not occupied by more than twenty persons, you should be okay."
"We're not in danger of being condemned, then?" Chip had asked in relief."No. But if you rehire, the board of health will shut you down cold."