Paradime

by Alan Glynn

  His accent doesn’t help either.

  But he’s also pretty good because after only five minutes of conversation I hear myself saying, ‘Well, I sometimes feel . . .’

  If it weren’t for Mrs Jeong arriving in with the coffee, who knows where that might have led. Anyway, when she leaves again, I decide to ask Lessing straight out what the hell is going on, who he is, and how come he gets to walk all over Doug Shaw.

  ‘It’s not really like that,’ he says, ‘but . . . let’s just stick with you for the moment, shall we?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, and take a sip of coffee. ‘Okay, here’s my problem with the material, as you call it. It intimidates the shit out of me. I can do a good Trager now, I know that, I can chat with Cristina Stropovich for ten minutes, I can shoot the breeze on TV, but how do I talk to his friends, how do I talk about some of this other stuff . . . I mean, Jesus Christ, asteroid mining?’

  Lessing stirs some sugar into his coffee. ‘Danny, let me explain something to you. Teddy didn’t have any friends, not really, nobody close anyway. He had people who were in awe of him, and people who envied him, but that’s it.’ Lowering his voice now, Lessing leans forward. ‘You don’t have to impress them. These people are going to be bending over backwards to impress you.’ He nods his head. ‘In fact, the less you say the better. Play it cool. That’s what’s going to be intimidating.’

  I stare at him.

  ‘Believe me, Danny, no matter how weirdly you behave, no matter what bullshit you come out with, as far as anyone you encounter is concerned, you are Teddy Trager.’

  ‘But surely . . .’

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I thought this was about trying to protect the Paradime brand.’

  ‘Of course, it is.’ He adjusts his glasses. ‘You’re not necessarily going to come out with bullshit, Danny. What I’m saying is that even if you do . . . it’ll be trademarked Teddy Trager bullshit.’ He pauses. ‘No one’s going to get upset, or call you out on it.’

  ‘But Doug—’

  ‘Leave Doug to me.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Look, in my opinion, pulling you out of the hat for an occasional press conference or a photo op on the sidelines at an investors’ summit just isn’t going to cut it. Doug’s being cautious, I understand that, it’s his nature, but . . . you need to be involved, you need to be proactive, you need to be out there. Which is what you want anyway, am I right?’

  I hesitate, then nod.

  His accent is such a weird mix – South African with an overlay of regular American, as if he maybe moved here as a teenager.

  ‘And Danny,’ he goes on, lifting up his coffee cup, ‘for what it’s worth, I have every confidence in you. Besides, like I say, you’re more or less bulletproof.’

  ‘Bulletproof? How so?’

  He takes a sip from the cup and puts it down again. ‘With all that material? You can draw on stuff that only Teddy could possibly know . . . facts, dates, stories, memories. It means you can pre-empt and second-guess. It means you can cover your tracks, if necessary.’

  ‘Hhnn.’

  A long silence follows. I feel like I’ve been here before. There’s stuff I could say to Lessing, questions I could put to him, arguments I could present, but maybe it would be counterproductive at this stage.

  There’s one question I have to ask though. ‘What about Nina?’

  Lessing seems surprised. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Has she called? Or asked about me?’

  ‘No, not that I . . .’ He adjusts his glasses again, a stalling mechanism he seems to favour. Then he shakes his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little strange? Aren’t we meant to be a couple? I get in an accident, she comes to the hospital one time, and then nothing?’

  Lessing considers this. ‘Maybe so, yeah . . . in fact, that’s a good point. Let me make a note of it.’ He takes out his phone, locates whatever app he uses, and keys it in.

  As he’s doing this, I glance around the room and then out the window.

  Wispy, roiling clouds drift by.

  I turn back to face him. ‘Dr Lessing?’

  ‘Call me Karl,’ he says and looks up from his phone. ‘Yes?’

  ‘What happens next . . . Karl?’

  ‘Well, I’d suggest you keep reading those files, get through as many of them as you can and then just . . . show up at the office for work on Monday.’

  III

  12

  I arrive on the seventieth floor of the Tyler Building on Monday morning, and on each subsequent morning – going, as they say, forward – but in all honesty I’m not sure I can call what I end up doing there actual work.

  It involves a lot of sitting across tables from people, and listening to pitches and reports, and Skype calls, and being buttonholed in hallways and in elevators. There’s also a lot of anxious time in front of the mirror at home before heading out to the office in the first place, and time sitting alone in the back of a limo inching through traffic in order to just get there. For me, though, the hardest part of it all is learning how to be a blank canvas, how to just sit or stand there and not show my hand to anyone. But once I do learn this it becomes like a superpower. Because Karl Lessing is right: playing it cool and saying very little intimidates the shit out of people.

  It helps, of course, if you’re Teddy Trager.

  Doug Shaw is nowhere to be seen – he’s working on some deal in Florida, apparently – and Karl Lessing doesn’t show up either, but I do have two executive assistants (recent hires, I’m told) who take good care of me. Twenty-eight-year-old Nicole from Austin maps out, timetables and tracks my every move, and screens all incoming communications. And thirty-year-old Lester from Kansas – more of a chief of staff, really – briefs me on just about everything: meetings I’m about to attend, calls I have to take, presentations I need to sit through, and he has my back in the event of any unscheduled or on-the-spot encounters. When the lines become blurry, or I display worrying ‘tendencies’, Nicole and Lester are there to steer me in the right direction.

  I don’t know if these guys are on the same occult payroll as Matt and Arturo, but I don’t ask and can only assume – and hope, for their sakes – that they are. Other recent hires include a personal trainer, a yoga instructor, and a new driver, a guy called Ricardo.

  Even though I’m very busy, I’m not making decisions or anything, I’m not coming up with new ideas (I’m not actually working, in other words), but I am on all the time, and that’s tiring in itself. One positive thing I get to do is draw up a list of high-end restaurants I might like to check out (steering clear of Barcadero, naturally), and then I get Nicole to schedule me in for lunch appointments at each of them in turn. As business ‘meetings’ go, these lunches are easier than boardroom sit-downs or conference calls, because they have a rhythm to them, a built-in series of pauses and breaks.

  Most of the people I’ve been meeting up to now are anxious start-up hopefuls, but it turns out that I’m also on the boards of Facebook, Pinterest, Foursquare, Paloma, Oculus, Uber and a bunch of other companies, so it’s inevitable that sooner or later I’ll come face to face with a Zuckerberg, an Andreessen or a Kalanick. Meeting Clooney, Dalio and Clinton in the hospital was relatively easy, because, one, Shaw sprang that on me out of the blue, and, two, I had bandages on and was woozy from the morphine. But sitting across a table from Ray Dalio at some board meeting now would be quite a different experience.

  Weirdly, though – and I haven’t worked out yet why this is – it’s not an experience I’m seeking to avoid. After a month of running Paradime Capital, sort of, I’m pretty comfortable in what I’ve come to think of as my new skin. At the same time, I’m not completely deluded. I know that a concerted effort has been made to keep me out of trouble. I also know that the real business of the company may well be going on in ways I am simply unaware of.

  As the weeks go by, I get restless and feel an increasing urge to be doing so
mething, so – even if only to convince myself of who I’m supposed to be – I focus my attention on certain areas of interest that really seemed to matter to Trager. And over lunch one day at the Modern I run into the producer of that interview segment Shaw and I did on Bloomberg TV. Apparently, Cristina Stropovich is still talking about it – and about me in particular – and would love it if I came back on to do the show again. This leads to a couple of follow-up conversations and eventually a meeting, at which point some other people get involved. Then, before I know it, the original proposal has been upgraded and there’s talk of an appearance on Charlie Rose instead. Charlie is PBS, but the show is put together and taped at the Bloomberg studios, so the surroundings would be familiar but obviously the interview itself would be longer and more in-depth.

  There is initial resistance from Lester (and whoever he and Nicole are talking to), but Lester is just my assistant. He’s an adviser. So I tell him his advice has been duly noted but that as far as I’m concerned the interview is going ahead.

  And it does.

  The following week.

  I expect a last-minute intervention of some kind, but it never comes.

  It seems I’m on my own.

  *

  Charlie Rose says he’s happy to have me at ‘this table’ and then proceeds to question me about the PromTech deal and tech trends in general. I have no problem answering questions like these, not after Shaw’s little bootcamp a while back, but what I try to do then is steer the conversation in a direction I want it to go in. It takes me a while, but I get there.

  ‘So,’ Charlie says eventually, ‘a subject we’re hearing a lot about these days is asteroid mining. Now, as ideas go, this one is pretty high in gee-whiz factor, I think that’s undeniable, but what I’d like to know is – and explain it to me if you would because your name has been linked to it many times – how practical is this whole thing?’

  ‘Well, Charlie,’ I say, shifting in the chair, my heart starting to pound, my mouth dry, ‘it all depends on how you look at it. I mean, the exponential rate at which the human race is consuming the earth’s resources right now . . . is that practical? Is it sustainable? No, it isn’t. And if we continue tearing the planet apart looking for precious metals to extract so we can put them in our cellphones and games consoles, just to keep shareholders happy, how’s that going to end? So it seems to me that it’s eminently practical – putting it at its mildest – to start searching for an alternative. And once you do, once you look up, and out into space, and realise what’s there – i.e. literally billions of mineable asteroids, some of which are gigantic rocks packed tight with platinum or nickel or gold or thanaxite, others of which contain copious amounts of what may well turn out to be the most valuable substance of all, water – once you realise that this effectively infinite supply of resources is out there and accessible, you have to wonder what the hell we’re doing down here on earth squabbling over carbon emissions and fracking and water rights.’

  ‘Okay, but I think if—’

  ‘So, yes, of course,’ I say, cutting across him – because if I don’t keep talking I may just keel over and die – ‘there’s practical and there’s practical, there’s We have to do it and there’s Can we do it?, and without a doubt, Charlie, many obstacles lie in our path, not the least of which is cost. I mean, we’re talking mammoth amounts of money, multi-tier, investment structures, but there’ll also be technical difficulties and challenges at every phase, at exploration, at extraction, at processing, there’s working in zero gravity, there’s how do we mount the damn things, on top of which’ – I clear my throat quickly here – ‘you have the questions of ownership, of patents, of property and naming rights. It’s not going to be easy, and no individual, no one person, is going to do it alone – not Teddy Trager, not Elon, not whoever.’

  ‘Okay,’ Charlie says, ‘but if I understand it correctly, this would still be an old-fashioned land grab, right? And the normal rules of commerce would apply. So if asteroid mining ever does happen . . . we may well be looking at the world’s first trillionaire.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ I say, ‘maybe so’ – ideas and phrases from Lessing’s flash drive now seeping out of my brain – ‘but you know what, Charlie? After all this time, after all we’ve been through, the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, the Jazz Age, the post-war boom, the . . . the . . .’ – I want to say the fucking, but I hold back because we’re on PBS – ‘the nineties, the dot-com thing, and then . . . what? We step out into actual space, ready for humanity’s next big evolutionary phase, and it’s still that guy? It’s still Rich Uncle Pennybags? It’s Mr Trillionaire? He’s the one leading the way and calling the shots?’ I make a gesture of incredulity here, an exaggerated one, for the camera. ‘No, Charlie, I think we have to do better than that, I think we have to devise a new way of doing business.’

  ‘But is that even—’

  ‘Back in 1967 we all signed up to an agreement – the Russians, the Chinese, us, everyone – it’s called the Outer Space Treaty, and it’s a foundational document that sets down how we should conduct ourselves in space, as a species. Now I think that’s a start right there . . . but today, fifty years later, when we finally have a realistic shot at this, at going out into space, what’s happening?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There are bills coming before Congress and more at committee stage that want to tear up that agreement and make new rules – rules that will almost exclusively benefit who? The shareholders of private American mining corporations, that’s who. I mean, Charlie . . . haven’t we learned anything?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that, but . . . let me just ask you one final question, Teddy. Have you ever considered running for public office?’

  *

  After the recording, there’s a definite buzz around the studio, and, as I chat to a couple of the producers, I notice that Lester is busy networking and tapping numbers into his phone. On the way down to the car, he remains silent, reminding me of how Shaw was after that first interview, but this time I think it’s more that Lester is puzzled. It’s as if he somehow never got the memo.

  When the segment airs the following night, the reaction is similarly buzzy. It attracts a lot of attention and generates a surprising amount of comment. Because of the asteroid thing, some of this is dismissive, ridiculing the idea as a pipe dream, but others point out that advances in technology make it at least potentially feasible. However, it’s my statement at the end of the interview – when I said I wouldn’t rule out running for public office – that gains the most traction. Soon the hashtag #voteforteddy starts trending, and blogs everywhere pick up the story, some concentrating on my radical views in relation to corporate profiteering, others declaring what an attractive candidate I’d make. Shaw once pointed out to me that Teddy Trager was actually quite a private individual, well known inside the tech and VC bubble but with a low enough profile otherwise (I know I’d never heard of him), so, given all of that, it’s entirely possible that this is the widest net of media attention he’s ever been caught up in.

  But the reality, of course, is that I’m now the one who’s caught up in it. And maybe the irony here is that, as an equally private individual, I don’t seem to mind at all and, in fact, am even quite enjoying it. I conduct a few short interviews by phone and email, and Nicole tells me that she’s getting requests every day for me to appear on other news channels, on talk shows and on podcasts. Again, I’m waiting for some form of intervention from Karl Lessing or Doug Shaw, a slap on the wrist maybe, or just a quiet word in my ear telling me to shut up, to keep a low profile, but no direct contact is made.

  So . . . how far could I go with this? Could I run for public office? Most of the coverage I’ve seen, on blogs and even in comment boxes, is positive, a lot of it actively encouraging me to speak out further.

  But just as I begin to believe that this is real, and that I might have a genuine opportunity here, there’s the inevitable backlash.

  A
few nights after the Charlie Rose broadcast, I’m sipping a glass of single-malt Scotch whisky and flipping around the channels when I come across a still shot of me on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. That’s weird enough, but then they cut back to studio and an interview with Bulletpoint.com reporter Ray Richards. ‘. . . So seriously, Rachel,’ he’s saying, ‘on the one hand you have this guy preaching about corporate profiteering like he’s Ida Tarbell’ – and here a mock-indignant Richards bangs his fist on the desk – ‘these mining companies can’t be allowed to plunder the resources of space. And, on the other hand, this same guy buys Prometheus Technologies, a company he swore blind he wouldn’t go near, and then proceeds to pretty much plunder them. It’s outrageous.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, and by the way’ – ramping up the sarcasm now – ‘elect me to the Senate, would you, cos I’m only thirty-three, and that’s a little young for the White House . . .’

  I sit forward, glass in hand, and stare at the screen in shock. Being talked about publicly is strange at the best of times, but like this? Being turned on and attacked? It’s awful.

  ‘. . . and I don’t really understand it,’ Rachel Maddow is saying, ‘it’s kind of a mystery, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Richards goes on, ‘because, I mean, you’ve got to ask . . . whatever happened to the great Teddy Trager? Was it the auto accident he had recently? That must have been a traumatic experience, no question about it, but one thing is clear, since then, whenever it was, a couple of months ago . . . Teddy Trager simply hasn’t been himself.’