In effect, Bash had created flexible, weightless computers practically too cheap to sell.
But the difference between “practically” and “absolutely” meant a lot, across millions of units.
I2 — the age of Immanent Information — was about to commence.
A visit to the same canny lawyer who had helped his parents survive bankruptcy nearly twenty years earlier insured that Bash’s invention was securely patented. Anyone who wanted to employ Bash’s process would have to license it from him, for a considerable annual fee.
At this point, the nineteen-year-old Bash went public.
By the time he was twenty-one, he was the richest man in the world.
But he had still never even ventured out on a date with any member of the opposite sex who was not his cousin Cora on his mother’s side.
3
The Breakfast Club
Dagny Winsome resembled no one so much as a pale blonde Olive Oyl. Affecting retro eyeglasses in place of the universal redactive surgery to correct her nearsightedness, Dagny exhibited a somatotype that evoked thoughts of broomsticks, birches, baguettes and, given her predilection for striped shirts, barber poles. But her lack of curvature belied a certain popularity with males, attributable to her quick wit, wild impulsiveness and gleeful subversiveness. Her long pale hair framed a face that could segue from calm innocence to irate impatience to quirky amusement in the span of a short conversation. Dagny’s four years at MIT had been marked by participation in a score of famous hacks, including the overnight building of a two-thirds mockup of the Space Shuttle George W. Bush resting in a simulated crash in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue.
Bash stood in awe of Dagny from the minute he became aware of her and her rep. A year ahead of Bash and several years senior in age, yet sharing his major, Dagny had seemed the unapproachable apex of sophistication and, yes, feminine allure. Often he had dreamed of speaking to her, even asking her on a date. But he had never summoned up the requisite courage.
Dagny graduated, and Bash’s senior year was overtaken by the heady proteopape madness. For the next decade he had heard not a word of her postcollege career. Despite some desultory networking throughout the IT community, Bash had been unable to learn any information concerning her. Apparently she had not employed her degree in any conventional manner.
So in Bash’s heart, Dagny Winsome gradually became a faded yet still nostalgia-provoking ghost.
Until the day just two weeks ago, on June 11, when she turned up on his doorstep.
Women were not in the habit of showing up at the front entrance of Bash’s home. For one thing, Bash lived in seclusion in a fairly well-secured mansion in the exclusive town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. Although no live guards or trained animals patrolled the grounds of his homestead, the fenced estate boasted elaborate cybernetic barriers wired both to nonlethal antipersonnel devices and to various agencies who were primed to respond at a moment’s notice to any intrusion. Bash was not particularly paranoid, but as the world’s richest individual he was naturally the focus of many supplicants, and he cherished his privacy.
Also, Bash did not experience a steady flow of female callers since he remained as awkward with women as he had been at nineteen. Although not technically a virgin any longer at age thirty, he still failed to deeply comprehend the rituals of human courtship and mating. Sometimes he felt that the shortened form of his name stood for “Bashful” rather than “Basho.”
Naturally, then, Bash was startled to hear his doorbell ring early one morning. He approached the front door tentatively. A curling sheet of proteopape carelessly thumbtacked to the inner door conveyed an image of the front step transmitted from a second sheet of proteopape hanging outside and synched to the inner one. (When weather degraded the outside sheet of proteopape to uselessness, Bash would simply hang a new page.)
Imagine Bash’s surprise to witness Dagny Winsome standing impatiently before his front door. After a short flummoxed moment, Bash threw wide the door.
“Dag — Dagny? But how —?”
Ten years onward from graduation, Dagny Winsome retained her collegiate looks and informality. She wore one of her trademark horizontally striped shirts, red and black. Her clunky eyeglasses incorporated enough plastic to form a car bumper. Her long near-platinum hair had been pulled back and secured by a jeweled crab, one of the fashionable ornamental redactors that metabolized human sweat and dead skin cells. Black jeans and a pair of NeetFeets completed her outfit.
Dagny said with some irritation, “Well, aren’t you going to invite your old fellow alumna inside?”
“But how did you get past my security?”
Dagny snorted. “You call that gimcrack setup a security system? I had it hacked while my car was still five miles outside of town. And I only drove from Boston.”
Bash made a mental note to install some hardware and software upgrades. But he could not, upon reflection, manufacture any ire against either his deficient cyberwards or Dagny herself. He was pleased to see her.
“Uh, sorry about my manners. Sure, come on in. I was just having breakfast. Want something?”
Dagny stepped briskly inside. “Green tea and a poppy-seed muffin, some Canadian bacon on the side.”
Bash reviewed the contents of his large freezer. “Uh, can do.”
Seated in the kitchen, sipping their drinks while bacon microwaved, neither one spoke for some time. Dagny focused a dubious look on the decorative strip of proteopape wallpaper running around the upper quarter of the kitchen walls. A living frieze, the accent strip displayed a constantly shifting video of this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, at play in the Sino-Hindu space station, Maohatma. Embarrassed, Bash decided that to change the contents now would only accentuate the original bachelor’s choice, so he fussed with the microwave while admiring Dagny out the corner of his eye.
Serving his guest her muffin and bacon, Bash was taken aback by her sudden confrontational question.
“So, how long are you going to vegetate here like some kind of anaerobe?”
Bash dropped into his seat. “Huh? What do you mean?”
Dagny waved a braceleted arm to sweep in the whole house. “Just look around. You’ve fashioned yourself a perfect little womb here. First you go and drop the biggest conceptual bombshell into the information society that the world has ever seen. Intelligent paper! Then you crawl into a hole with all your riches and pull the hole in after yourself.”
“That’s ridiculous. I–I’m still engaged with the world. Why, just last year I filed five patents — ”
“All piddling little refinements on proteopape. Face it, you’re just dicking around with bells and whistles now. You’ve lost your edge. You don’t really care about the biz or its potential to change the world anymore.”
Bash tried to consider Dagny’s accusations objectively. His life was still full of interests and passions, wasn’t it? He ran a big A-life colony that had kicked some butt in the annual Conway Wars; he composed songs on his full-body SymphonySuit, and downloads from his music website had hit an all-time high last week (53); and he was the biggest pear-orchard owner in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley (the holding corporation was run by York and Adelaide). Didn’t all those hobbies and several others speak to his continuing involvement in the world at large? Yet suddenly Bash was unsure of his own worth and meaning. Did his life really look trivial to an outsider?
Irked by these novel sensations, Bash sought to counterattack. “What about you? I don’t see where you’ve been exactly burning up the I2 landscape. How have you been improving the world since school?”