Halfheroes

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  "Are you watching the planes?"

  The boy looked at her with a mixture of pity and annoyance. Abos smiled.

  "Stupid question. Right. I am here to look as well."

  The boy said nothing for a few moments. There was a plane taxiing to the far end of the runway. The boy held his binoculars up to his face, put them down again, then scribbled something in a notebook he took out of the bag.

  "Is that one interesting?"

  The pitying look was back.

  "737. Jet2."

  It sounded like code. She fell silent again. Daniel was much better at talking to people.

  The boy kept shooting sly, sidelong glances at her as if sizing her up. Abos kept looking ahead. They both watched the 737 roar overhead. When the noise had faded, the boy spoke.

  "Saw a C17A Globemaster a couple of years back. That was amazing."

  "A Globemaster? Is that unusual?"

  "Massive, int it? Military. Kuwait Air Force. Should have heard the noise. Brilliant."

  "That sounds exciting."

  "Yeah."

  "You here every day?"

  "Most days. After school."

  It was Sunday, Abos remembered.

  "Were you here yesterday?"

  "In the morning. Missed footie practice to come."

  "Why?"

  "Ma mate called me. Lives in the farm over there." He pointed across the road. "Said there was a private jet in. Fancy, like."

  "Do you get many private jets?"

  He laughed, not unkindly.

  "In Newcastle?"

  Not knowing how to respond, she said nothing. The boy produced a phone. He flicked through some images, then held it out to her.

  "Had to look it up when I got home. Gulfstream G650. Took off just before lunch yesterday. Wasn't on the list of departures, either. I couldn't find out where it was going. If I hadn't taken this photo, no one would have believed me. Me dad was fuming when I showed him. Couldn't believe he'd missed it. Want a sandwich?"

  Abos looked at him, scruffy, enthusiastic, out on his own on a Sunday morning because he loved planes. Hobbies. Another human trait she couldn't identify with.

  "No, thank you. I have to go."

  After a few steps, she turned.

  "How far can it fly? The Gulfstream?"

  "Oh, man, they're amazing. Especially the ER. Stands for Extended Range. Eight thousand miles. You could get to Japan, or Indonesia without refuelling."

  Abos walked away. If Daniel had been in one of those cars or—more likely, given the company—unconscious in the van, he could be eight thousand miles away by now. In any direction.

  Her next visit would have to be to air traffic control, for a look at their schedule, although, she suspected the private jet's itinerary would be unlisted.

  She took out her phone and checked the airport's departure schedule. No unusual flights listed yesterday. She could hardly walk up to the control tower and ask to see the logs. The last flight of the day departed at ten o'clock. She would come back at eleven.

  As she was about to put the phone away, it vibrated. The name came up on the screen: Shuck.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Have you seen the news?"

  "No. Why?"

  "You need to come home now."

  "I can't. I have to find Daniel."

  "No. You must come back."

  "Shuck. I will. Soon. But—"

  "There are more."

  "More what?"

  "More of us. I can see them."

  Abos didn't know what to say. She could fly back, see what was happening and still be back at the airport tonight. She regretted turning down the boy's offer of a sandwich.

  Shuck had said something else, but she had missed it.

  "Can you say that again?"

  "Yes. There are six of them. And he says there are more."

  19

  Geneva

  On that Sunday, one room, in one hotel, in one city, contained a group of men and women whose combined wealth exceeded that of the poorest five billion people on the planet.

  Preparations for the event had been extensive. The wing of the Grand Palace Hotel housing the ballroom had been closed to guests for a month. During that time, it had been redecorated, every item of furniture replaced. A specialist security team, brought in to provide twenty-four-hour surveillance, spent two days sweeping the building for bugs.

  Every pane in the ballroom's famous glass dome had been replaced. According to the manufacturer, the new toughened glass could withstand the impact of a short-range missile. Since the promotional video showed technical director standing behind the product while soldiers fired one such missile at him, it had become a best-seller.

  When the day of the speech arrived, every member of every guest's bodyguard team wore an earpiece, ready to take directives from their host's head of security. All the bodyguards were courteous and professional. They were also suspicious, heavily armed, and ready for trouble. If any of them were unimpressed by the average-looking, unexceptional man in charge, they said nothing.

  Robertson didn't care what they thought of him. He knew that by the end of the evening, their professional pride would be in tatters.

  The food and wine were exquisite. As the afternoon wore on, the guests relaxed, enjoying a rare occasion when professional rivalries were, if not forgotten, at least put aside. The CEO of a telecoms company shared a bottle of All Saints Museum Muscadelle with the woman who had poached a third of his North American business. A games developer shook the hand of his most bitter business rival - the brother he hadn't spoken to for over a year.

  Outside, chauffeurs polished the immaculate paintwork of a fleet of the most luxurious automobiles on the planet, before huddling together in groups of four or five, smoking and complaining about their employers.

  Everybody in the ballroom had an opinion—leaning into each other to express it—about the man sitting alone at the far end.

  At three-thirty, the subject of their gossip rose to his feet, wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin, and made his way up to the rostrum in the middle of the stage.

  Titus Gorman was small, slight, his blonde hair wispy and already receding. He wore rimless glasses. His lips were thin and bloodless, his cheekbones prominent. His eyes, a pale blue, were always moving. Gorman interacted with the outside world as much as he felt he had to, which was very little.

  The room went quiet as people nudged their neighbours. Someone clapped. Within a few seconds, the applause stretched to every corner of the room.

  Titus Gorman stood at the microphone and waited for the clapping to subside. Experience told him it would be a long wait. No one wanted to be the first to stop. He could buy everyone in the room a hundred times over, and they knew it. Their show of respect and enthusiasm was driven by self-interest, and a crude financial calculation.

  He smiled and held up his hands for silence.

  Titus Gorman symbolised the American Dream for millions of aspiring computer coders. Probably the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia, almost nothing was known about his background, despite a slew of theories. The likeliest explanation for the information vacuum surrounding his background was that, when it came to information, no one was more talented than Titus at manipulating it.

  Titus was a coder. Not just any coder, but a legendary figure among anyone who had ever attempted to write programs on any computer platform. His games were addictive and dominated the market in the early 2000s. His breakout hit, DieScum, was a POV shoot-'em-up combining over-the-top cartoon violence with monsters who were witty and—in a revolutionary, and much copied, twist—often sympathetic. The awe in which he was held by fellow coders, hackers, and designers was such that, even when his company became a behemoth, they separated their distrust of the corporate monster from their love of the rebel at the heart of it.

  Even the name of the company itself represented Titus giving the global market the middle finger. Glob. It was ugly-sounding, childish. Hard to t
ake seriously. Media reaction in the early months was negative, generating headlines, such as Titus Gorman admits Glob is bad name, changes to Booger.

  Titus didn't respond to press coverage. He let his product do the talking. No one thought the world needed another search engine and, when it was first released, only dedicated Titus fans tried it. They did it out of loyalty, curiosity, and the hope that they might, one day, be able to tell their kids they were among the first to realise that Glob would take over the world.

  These days, that was exactly what they were telling their kids.

  It took a week for the unique power of Glob to become clear. The search algorithm itself was a thing of beauty, but no one expected any less. Coders were loudly critical of Titus's sand-boxed programming, but, as he always delivered the best user experience, their protests were half-hearted.

  Where Glob broke new ground was in the way it handed power to the consumer. Power over the market. Titus wasn't starting a revolution. He seemed, rather, to accept consumerism. What Glob did was to transform the relationship between buyers and sellers.

  The concept was not a new one, but it was the first time it had been attempted on a worldwide scale. The first person to discover how it worked on Glob was a software designer. Everyone knew her now as Patience Zero. Back then, she was Patience Hobbes, a freelancer in San Francisco. Her story was picked up by an online news network, when, within four weeks of its launch, Glob was handling ten million searches a day. When the Patience story went viral that figure rose to over a billion searches a day. Inside a year, Glob was not only the biggest player, it was virtually the only player. Rival search engines either disappeared or became niche-based to survive.

  Patience was the first person to form a Globule. Her autobiography tells it this way:

  I was looking for a new laptop. I had narrowed my options to three different products and was globbing for prices. We didn't call it globbing back then. Hard to imagine now! When I decided the Tertia 800 was my favourite, a message popped up on my screen: would you like to form a Globule for this search? I didn't know what that meant, but, hey, this was Titus Gorman, it had to be something cool. I clicked on yes, checked a box promising hourly notifications and closed it. Next thing I know, there's a personal email from Titus in my inbox. I couldn't believe it. I printed it, emailed a copy to another account and took a screenshot. I knew no one would believe me otherwise.

  The email said I was the first user to start a Globule and it might take a little time to work. Titus asked me to give it twenty-four hours. He sent me a gift, too. One hundred Glob shares. I thought it was a nice gesture. Thought they might do ok. I had no idea they'd pay my mortgage, buy me two more houses, and mean I could give up work within five years.

  Anyway, I checked after an hour. There was a message on the right of the glob search bar. It said that sixty-four people had joined my Globule. I didn't have a clue what it meant. I went to bed.

  Next morning, I had to go pick up my kid from my ex, so I didn't get back to the computer until that evening. When I did, the message had changed. There were twelve hundred people in my Globule, and an icon had appeared - the famous green drip. I still think it's a teardrop, but my kid says it's snot. Hovering over it, I could see the three best prices for the Tertia 800. I thought it was a joke. I hadn't been able to find it anywhere for less than nineteen hundred dollars. The best price from my Globule was just over thirteen hundred, and it was from a company I recognised. There was a countdown next to it, which ran out in three hours. If I paid now, the purchase would go through the next day. The money would be held by Glob for that period, and other people could join the Globule during the countdown. Yeah, it seemed too good to be true. But I read the FAQ, and the principle made sense. If one person wants to buy a laptop, they look for the best deal and pay the asking price. If a company wants to buy twenty laptops for their staff, they get a better deal. A big company might order thousands of them. They get a much lower price per unit. Makes sense.

  My Globule comprised everyone else in every country on Glob looking for a Tertia 800. Twelve hundred of us. Glob pooled our money, and the algorithm negotiated for us, bringing down the price of each unit. They would be shipped to a warehouse, then Glob would ship them to us.

  I clicked on the button and paid my money. If it had been anyone other than Titus Gorman, but... it was Titus Gorman!

  I made sure I was in front of the computer when the deal went through.

  We got our laptops for just under a thousand dollars. Nine hundred under the retail price. I told everyone I knew about it, they told everyone they knew about it, and the global economy never saw what was coming until it was too late.

  Patience Zero still gives interviews. Since no one can get to Titus himself, the earliest Glob adopters have become minor celebrities.

  Gorman's masterstroke, the touch of genius which made business people across the planet gasp with admiration, frustration, or sheer jealous hatred, was the monetisation of Glob itself. During the twenty-four-hour period that the Globule's cash was held by Glob, it generated interest for the company. In the case of the first Globule, if the only cash in the company account had been that generated by the Globule, it would have made about a hundred bucks in interest. Not very exciting. Today, an average of 2.6 million Globules are running per day, with an average value of ninety-four dollars. Conservative estimates put Glob's daily interest on its Globule accounts at two and a half million dollars. Add that to the revenue generated by sponsorglobs, the ads that run next to search results, and Glob's rise to becoming the world's richest company should have been no surprise to anyone.

  In reality, though, it was a surprise. Even in the tech world, where change is eye-wateringly rapid, no one foresaw the potential of Titus Gorman's search engine.

  And Glob's motto - Never The Same Old Sh!t wasn't just deliberately provocative. A year after Glob launched, Titus turned the burgeoning tablet market on its head with the Globlet. Made mostly from recycled materials, it was described by Time magazine as "the most counter-intuitive product of a generation." Under the hood, the Globlet didn't try to compete with other tablets. It had two operating systems. The first, lightweight and lightning-fast, was designed for internet browsing, emails, and simple games. The second, which could be booted up separately, ran programs that rivalled mid-range laptops. But the most revolutionary move was the product's lifespan. Everything could be replaced or upgraded. If a new processor came out, you popped the back off your Globlet and swapped out your old one. It took three minutes, cost twenty to thirty bucks, and a toddler could do it. Same deal with the screen, the sound card, the graphics chip. The tech giants of the day said people were happy to replace their tablets, computers, and phones every two to three years. Titus Gorman said the tech giants were wrong, that people would like to own a product which might last a lifetime. And Titus was right.

  Now, looking out at a room full of the richest people in the world, Titus smiled.

  He glanced at the cameras on the corners of the stage. Then he looked at the security teams standing ready to protect their employers. Lastly, he looked at those men and women who had risen to the top in the Darwinian arena of global capitalism.

  "All of you know I only make speeches when I'm about to do something crazy," he said, still smiling. "You're not here for the fine wine and the ambience. You want to know what I'm up to."

  Muted applause greeted his opening remarks.

  "I'm known for writing code, for coming up with ideas. Ideas that I often express in elegant algorithms. My algorithms have changed the world of commerce. My secret—the secret of my success, if you like—is very simple. I'm going to let you in on it. But you won't like it."

  The few chuckles that greeted this remark sounded forced and quickly died away.

  "When Glob became the world's most popular search engine, you were all affected. Adversely affected. You had to adapt. Consumers had the power for the first time. Bulk-buying through Globules led to a tighten
ing of your margins. Many major players have disappeared because they did not recognise what was happening. You are still here because you were the fastest to act, the most ruthless. You cut staff, you cut wages. The only thing you didn't cut was, if you'll excuse the pun, your cut.

  "None of you saw what I was trying to do. Not a single one. I wasn't trying to become the world's richest man. I was trying to redistribute wealth. I naively hoped that Glob would help raise standards of living, narrow the gap between the richest and the poorest. It didn't happen. We still believe in capitalism, supply and demand, market forces. In theory, that should mean economic growth and higher standards of living. Yeah, sure. The theory sucks."

  The silence was thick in the room now.

  "Economic growth can only continue if the population continues to grow. Let me qualify that. Worldwide economic growth can only continue to grow if the population continues to grow. If you set aside the global aspect, individual countries can continue to grow economically, but only at the expense of other countries. The world cannot sustain a constantly growing human population. Only a fool would claim otherwise, although we have a few of those. If the population cannot continue to grow indefinitely, what happens to a global model whose only measure is economic growth?

  "I'm not about to give you a lecture on socialism. Or any kind of ism. I'm no student of economics. But I can see when something is wrong.

  "People still die from starvation. They die from diseases we could eradicate. We make our charitable donations, become patrons of foundations. Anything rather than take a good look at the facts."

  Titus sighed. His audience was murmuring restlessly.

  "I'll cut to the chase. You must think I'm the worst kind of hypocrite, with the wealth I'm sitting on. And you'd be right, if I wasn't going to do something about it. But I am doing something about it. I've written a piece of code. It's an algorithm for the planet. I've had this idea for most of my life, but I never thought it could be anything more than a dream. A few years ago, that changed."