“And don’t you think you can die too?” Jess countered. “Don’t you think your decisions are life-and-death too?”
17
Emily did not treat business decisions as life-and-death. If she was nervous, she didn’t let it show. She worked with cool confidence and inspired everyone around her. Her success inspired her employees to start dot-coms of their own. Even Charlie, the company chef, launched his own restaurant, and flush with stock, Laura’s husband dropped out of his accounting program.
Laura was a little anxious when Kevin left school, and jittery as well about purchasing a two-million-dollar fixer-upper in Los Altos.
“We always said that you would teach accounting,” Laura reminded her husband at their wood-grain kitchen table in Escondido Village. “That’s why we came here.”
“I don’t like accounting,” Kevin confessed.
Laura set down her mug of herbal tea. “You never said that before.”
“I couldn’t afford to say it before.”
Laura knit her brow. She had a gentle manner, and her sweet voice belied her reservations. “I’m just not sure we should change all our plans so quickly.”
“What plans? Our plans were to have a family and be happy,” Kevin said. “We have the family, and now we have a chance to build a house and spend time with the kids. We’re going to have a swimming pool, teach the kids to swim. You’ll have a dream kitchen!”
“I don’t need a fancy kitchen.” She glanced at her cluttered counters.
“Don’t you want more space?”
“I’d be happy with a regular kitchen with more space, not a—”
“But you deserve one. You’re amazing, Laura. Just think what you could do with counter space and pull-out pantries, and you could have a whole baking station with a marble inset….”
Laura smiled ruefully. “Stop watching those kitchen shows.”
“We’ve had this amazing luck,” said Kevin. “Don’t be afraid to do something with it.”
“But it just seems …” She couldn’t help feeling that their ship had come in rather suddenly. Laura had taken the job at Veritech only to pay the bills while Kevin was in school, but working for Emily had proved more interesting than Laura had ever dreamed. How mysterious life was. Laura and Kevin still looked like the couple in their wedding pictures, those young sweethearts who could not afford floral arrangements and decorated the tables at their reception with autumn leaves, but now, they were interviewing architects. Kevin clipped pictures from magazines and talked about a kitchen opening out onto the garden, an airy light-filled space with double ovens and a breakfast bar. “It just seems like this will cost a fortune,” Laura said.
“But we have a fortune,” he reminded her.
“I’m afraid …”
“Afraid of what?”
“I’m worried about spoiling the children,” Laura said. “I want them to do chores.”
“Definitely. Everybody pitches in,” said Kevin.
“I would like a better kitchen,” Laura admitted, “but I want everything else to stay the same.”
Laura’s kind of constancy was Emily’s goal at Veritech. Level-headed optimism. Veritech’s products were essential, its culture young and happy, liberal in all the right ways—open, green, fun-loving, civic-minded; its people were building a corporation not only great, but good. Idealistic, and entirely invested in her creation, Emily believed this. After all, she had named Veritech to soar above the rest—to merge technology with truth.
Her concerns for Jess were real, but she went to work in high spirits, thrilled with Veritech’s price, its promise, its purchase on the future. She loved her job; she loved her colleagues. Even Alex had calmed down, working in his intense and solitary way on his own project.
When Alex presented his new work on fingerprinting to the board, Emily had settled into her cushioned chair, expecting the full flowering of her password-authentication idea. No one was more surprised than she when Alex unveiled his unadulterated electronic-surveillance plans.
He had spent six months on his prototype, a surveillance tool designed to record every time a user touched a cache of data, and to follow the user’s movements through the cache without his or her knowledge. A “lookup” function identified the user, a “markup” function linked the user’s searches and retrievals to those of others, and the whole system was so devious and paranoid that Emily interrupted him in the boardroom. “What happened to Verify? What happened to the password applications?”
And Milton chimed in, “Have you considered privacy at all?”
“Remember,” said Bruno, “we are like a strongbox, a safety-deposit box. We want to be as private as a Swiss bank account for our customers. We don’t want to sell the keys.”
Alex stood before them with the last slide of his PowerPoint presentation hovering on the wall, and nervously he clicked his laser pointer on and off, pointing the red light at the floor. “Look, a parking garage has security cameras. What if every car inside had its own security camera too, and when I took out my car I knew who had parked next to me, and who tried to hot-wire me, and who maybe dented me?”
“You’re talking about spyware, aren’t you?” said Emily. “You’re talking about bundling our storage services with spyware. That’s not what we discussed. That’s not—”
“That’s not what you wanted?” Alex shot back, and she felt his anger and his disdain. Who did she think she was? He was the artist here.
“You are suggesting we live with little cameras everywhere,” said Bruno.
Tight-lipped, Alex looked at Emily. He seemed to her at once bashful and arrogant. “It’s fair to everyone,” he said, “if everyone is watching.”
“It can’t be legal,” Emily told him. “And if it is legal, then it shouldn’t be.”
“That’s what Martin’s for,” said Alex, referring to the company’s in-house counsel.
“No,” murmured Emily, furious. “No. We won’t pursue this.”
“We won’t pursue this?” Alex cried in disbelief. His Russian accent flared, along with his temper. “Just like that? You liked the idea before. You were the one suggesting I develop it.” He snapped his laptop shut.
“We discussed how you would develop it,” said Emily. “We agreed that you would have free rein. You ignored everything I said, and you went off and did exactly what you wanted.”
“I don’t work for you, Emily,” Alex declared as Milton and Bruno looked on.
“Yes, but I thought that you were working with me!”
“You don’t design my projects,” Alex said.
“You lied to me! You agreed to do something that—”
“I never lied to you.”
“You told me you were working on a plan you had no intention of following. And it’s a dangerous plan. It’s a bad plan. It’s not where we want to go.”
“Why is that?” Alex demanded. “Because you’re prejudiced! You think the storage business should be warm and friendly, right? We should sell people what they want to hear.” His eyelashes were so long that they brushed against the lenses of his glasses. He was twenty-three years old. “This product doesn’t make you feel good—is that what you’re telling me?”
“Let’s take some time,” Bruno told them, and in the heat of battle they turned on him together, surprised at the interruption.
The war waged all that day and the next. Alex told Emily that she did not understand his project’s potential and thought she could dilute his ideas into some trivial password application. He said she did not care about innovation. He said that she masked her subjective opinions in ethical language, but she only did it to get her way. Finally, he stood in the parking lot next to his glossy black BMW, and he accused her of trying to manipulate him.
He stood close to her, too close. “You like my ideas when you think you can control them. When I express myself, you reject my projects out of hand.”
“I thought we were on the same page,” Emily said.