Blown Away

by K'Anne Meinel

  * * * * *

  “You should see this,” Ryan said with a smirk as he showed her a rectangular box like thing, half the size of a shoe box.

  Ellen slumped her shoulders in defeat. “Don’t tell me, you found some gadget to invest all our hard-earned money in?” She looked genuinely worried.

  “No, I haven’t invested all our money,” he assured her with a smirk and handed her the gadget.

  She looked down at the plastic thing in her hand. Frowning she said, “This looks like my car phone.”

  “Yeah, without the car,” he laughed at her as he answered.

  “Cellular phones have been around for like twenty years,” she told him prissily.

  “Not like that they haven’t,” he pointed at the box in her hand. “That’s the future, making them smaller, portable, and without that bag that you have to carry from your car.”

  She was intrigued despite herself and she looked at the technology before her. She shook her head as she sat down and examined it closer. “Can we get in on this?” she asked wonderingly.

  “I already have,” he told her as he began to explain about accessories, towers, and other after-market things that would make them more money than the actual phones.

  “So you are saying the technology is changing so quickly it’s actually a better idea to not only invest in the main companies that will be mass-producing these,” she hefted the rectangular plastic box for effect. “But, we should invest in this,” she indicated the papers that showed a network of lines crisscrossing the United States as well as other countries.

  “Diversifying baby, diversifying,” he said as he leaned back on his couch, crossed his hands behind his head, and put his feet up on the coffee table they were sitting before.

  She grinned at him. “You are still like a little boy with your toys,” she indicated the gadget in her hand.

  “Oh yeah, and someday I’ll be able to watch my cartoons on it,” he assured her.

  “Yeah, right, like they will ever get a TV screen that small,” she pointed to the digital numbers that were on a screen about half an inch high and about an inch and a half wide.

  “Maybe not on that screen, but they’ll figure it out,” he assured her with a knowing smile. “Games too,” he added for her benefit.

  “You’ll never get any work done,” she assured him as she got up to hand him the cellular phone back. She went to leave his office and looked around at the clutter, the various jobs in their various stages of completion. A healthy mess, he had assured her on many occasions. There was a sign posted above his desk, it read: A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered mind.

  “Okay but if they come out with centipede on one of these things, don’t tell me you won’t be one of the first to go buy one,” he said, hefting the cellular phone and pointing the antennae at her.

  “Yeah right,” she grinned, knowing he probably already had the inside track on such a gadget. “So,” she turned at the door. “Where’s mine?” Her eyebrows raised and indicated the box he was pointing at her.

  “Should be on your desk,” he said with a grin, knowing she loved the gadgets he found or got first shots at.

  She stuck out her tongue at him as she left the office.

  “Hey, don’t stick that out unless you know how to use it,” he called.

  She flipped him off good-naturedly, giving him her middle finger before shutting his office door.

  * * * * *

  “But look at this, if I do this,” he showed her under a microscope that was hooked up to a television screen. “I can get more data into the chip,” he droned on until his enthusiasm waned and he looked up to see Ellen with glazed over eyes. “What?” he asked, to snap her out of it.

  “Can we commercially sell these?” she asked him pointedly. “Will there be a market for it?”

  He sighed exasperatedly. “Yes, there will be a market for it, if you would please just get on the paperwork to not only copyright this, but to patent it?”

  “I’ll get right on that, but I’m going to need your schematics and then I will want to discuss marketing it. Can you have working prototypes so we can release it at the con?”

  “Working prototypes?” he asked stupidly, and when he saw the light of battle come into her eyes he grinned. “Look at this,” he said, as he turned around to a keyboard and put something new on the screen.

  Ellen watched in wonder as some of the best animatronics she had ever seen came up on the television. “We need a better screen,” she breathed.

  “We’re working on that too,” he told her, and she smiled back at him. That’s why they worked so well together. They both knew their jobs and ideas had merit, that they complemented each other. “There’s a company in Japan that has…” he started enthusiastically, telling her where they could buy the components and be able to put their own brand on it.

  “But really Ryan, what market will pay to have such fantastic visual effects for cartoons? I miss Bugs Bunny, but I’m not paying big bucks to see him up there,” she gestured at the screen where some pretty impressive cartoon graphics were showing.

  “It won’t be just cartoons. With effects like this, with super-fast micro-conductors and chips that can handle the data, we can create realistic photos and manipulate them,” he explained. “At this rate, someday, we might not need real actors in the film industry at all. We can generate them like this,” he showed her another clip.

  She breathed out through her mouth as she realized the possibilities. “Who knows of this technology?” she asked.

  “There are a few people here in the valley working on something similar from what I have heard. Japan has an incredible market for things like this. Get me my patents; get the copyrights and other legal jargon going. Let’s hit the con with a ‘WOW’ feature,” he emphasized with quotation marks in the air. “We are going to have to spin off a division or two with this alone,” he said pointed at the graphics on the screen.

  Ellen was already ahead of him on that. She could visualize the brochures, the prospectuses for potential clients. Hollywood, Bollywood, London, Tokyo, Toronto, everyone would sit up and take notice as they realized the aspects of this incredible technology. He was right; they would have to have a division that developed this, and only this. “You realize how much work this is going to take to pull this off and in secret?”

  He grinned. They both knew about secrets and how hard it was to recruit good people who would keep them. They’d taken a page out of a couple of companies play books and started recruiting at the high school and college levels to people, men and women, who showed the aptitude to develop the technology they wanted in their company. The results Ellen was being shown were by Ryan’s team, but he had discovered the final elements that his fine mind now showed her. His team didn’t even know these final things.

  “We are going to need a few clean rooms to develop this technology,” he warned her.

  “How about another building?” she countered thinking ahead and planning already.

  “With hi-tech security,” he added as a reminder.

  She nodded as she quickly grasped the idea. “And then smaller,” she indicated the small chip under the microscope as he grinned and nodded. Smaller was better when you were trying to put more things on less space.

  Proving his mind was multi-dimensional he asked, “Did you look into that prospectus on the new Apple since they rumored that Steve Job’s would be returning?”

  She nodded, proving her agile mind was up to his. “Yeah, how much do you want to invest?” She was always willing to follow his lead, he hadn’t steered them wrong and as a result they both had reserves to reinvest in their own company and make it grow. They’d already instituted a buy back on the stocks they had to give up when they got their initial investors, as a result they owned seventy-five percent of their company and the employees and a few investors owned the other twenty-five.

  “Let’s call this one Gig-a-Tech,” Ryan put in suddenly, his multi-faceted mind t
hinking of the possibilities it would infer.

  “That’s brilliant,” she put in. “They will think of Giga as in watts or many and of course Tech for the technology we will develop,” she added finishing his train of thought.

  “Here, that’s it exactly,” he said as he began to show her again how it would work and what she was looking at.

  They discussed their investments and got back to the matter of hand, having multiple conversations at the same time. Had anyone listened to them they would have been confused by the jumping from one subject to the next, but both of them were used to this and with their long standing friendship, could keep up. They couldn’t of course develop all their own technologies that they would need but they knew who and what others were developing that would enhance their own.

  Several times during the conversation Ryan interrupted with a hacking cough, sometimes it was worse, sometimes it was light.

  “Are you going to have that looked into?” Ellen asked pointedly.

  “I have, they said it’s the air here in the valley, must be too dry or something,” he told her dismissively.

  Ellen looked at him sardonically. Silicon Valley had some of the best weather anywhere in the world. It was situated between a desert and the ocean. The temperature swung between that of an arid climate with the more moderate temperatures of the seaside towns. It was sunny, most days, and on average two-hundred days of the year! Even the cooler nights that would get down to the forties had a welcome feel to the air, but never lasted very long. Rarely did the summer temps get above one hundred or equally rare the winters down to freezing. She knew it was a line of bull that Ryan was handing her, but she let it go as they moved on to other subjects.

  “So, how is Bill?” she snuck in at one point.

  Ryan would get a beatific look on his face at the mention of his boyfriend. “God he is something,” he frequently said in wondrous awe that this amazing man loved him. “You should have someone love you as much as he loves me. When he goes down on me…” he started but Ellen interrupted.

  “No, no, no, no, NO,” she waved at him to stop. “I don’t need the details!” she finished with a laugh at her exuberant friend.

  “But the way he curls his tongue…” he started again to get a rise out of her, she didn’t disappoint.

  “La, la, la, la, laaaaa,” she said covering her ears to end that particular conversation.

  He laughed at her antics. It was only with him that she allowed her guard to relax and he appreciated it. She was better than the sister he had left behind in Michigan. She was closer, understood him, and didn’t judge. She had her own demons to exorcise, and while he had exorcised his in college, she hadn’t, not yet. What the world saw when they saw Ellen Christenson was the red-headed bitch that ran a tech company. She was good, she hired good people, but she was cold, ever so cold. She discarded girlfriends like some discarded old or used clothing. “You know, you could have that too if you wanted,” he said quietly.

  “I have it now and then,” she countered as she fiddled with some of his gadgets in the lab. It was obvious she knew what he was talking about and wasn’t comfortable with it.

  “But you don’t, your longest relationship lasted what, six months?” he asked knowingly, persistently. “And you have got to stop dating the help,” he finished with a grin.

  “That only happened twice and I learned my lesson. Moira I am sure now works for one of our competitors, so now the hiring applications include a non-compete clause,” she assured him.

  “You think she took trade secrets?” he asked concerned.

  She shook her head. “She didn’t get them from me if she did. I think, she thought she had something, but it wasn’t from between my legs,” she finished crudely.

  He grinned. He was also sad for his friend. She had helped him build this company from day one and to not find love in the many women she dated saddened him. He shrugged though, they were still young and the world was their oyster.

  * * * * *

  “You did what?” she asked incredulously.

  “I invited my sister and her boyfriend. They weren’t doing anything that weekend and I know she wouldn’t be able to afford such a vacation. I knew you wouldn’t mind,” she added.

  “I wouldn’t mind?” she repeated dumbly.

  “Well, it’s not like you can’t afford it…” she began.

  Ellen looked at Casey, waiting for her to dig the hole deeper. When she didn’t squirm over realizing what she had done Ellen began, “I thought that weekend was for us, to get away from the city, to enjoy being together?”

  “Well, it is. It’s not like the place isn’t big enough for several couples…” Casey began.

  Ellen held up her hand to silence her current girlfriend. “Just because it’s big enough for them doesn’t mean I want them there. We planned that weekend for us. It was to be the two of us,” she stressed trying to make her point.

  “But she can’t afford…” she began again with a whine, but Ellen waved her protest aside.

  “Then let her find a boyfriend who can afford such weekends.”

  “It’s not like we will even see…”

  “I don’t care, you should have asked me before you invited her. I invited you because we were dating.” At the past tense of her phrasing Casey began to get a clue.

  “It’s a huge cabin,” she said knowledgeably. They had gone away there before and she’d been impressed. Ellen and Ryan had purchased a cabin in Tahoe, it was a great get away and a tax write-off for clients they wanted to impress, as they both were fond of saying, you couldn’t go wrong with real estate.

  “Yes, and I welcomed you there. I didn’t however sign up for your sister and her boyfriend.”

  “They could stay in the other…”

  “And I didn’t want a romantic weekend away with them,” she finished forcefully.

  “It’s not like they would…”

  “But they would. I’ve met your sister. I’ve met her obnoxious boyfriend. I’m not footing the bill for them to…”

  “It’s not like you can’t afford it.”

  Ellen looked at the woman carefully, wondering at her previous attraction. She wondered what she had ever seen in the woman in the first place. It was obvious that the woman was only interested in what Ellen could provide to her materially. She was disappointed, once again, in another. “I think it’s best Casey if we don’t see each other anymore,” she began.

  “You are going to break up with me over our weekend away?” Casey was surprised.

  “No, not just over the weekend away. That’s just icing on the cake of what is wrong with this relationship. Not once during the course of it have you ever done anything for me. You expect me to foot the bill for everything and apparently everyone. It’s not like I can’t afford to but I’d prefer it to be my choice. Not my obligation.”

  Casey flushed as she realized Ellen was right. She had used her for what she could get out of her. It hadn’t been intentional originally. It was just that Ellen made it so easy, picking up the checks with her platinum or black credit cards, buying her little things to make her happy. It had become a habit. She realized that she taken her for granted and assumed she would continue to buy her things. She had been generous, caring, but not loving. She’d screwed up a good thing and wanted to make amends. “I’m sorry. I will uninvite them then!”

  Ellen shook her head in resignation. The woman didn’t get it. “You do that and while you are at it, uninvite yourself too. I’m done Casey.” She got up to grab her jacket and glanced around her girlfriend’s apartment. This one hadn’t lasted but a few months, but enough that she had bought her some nice gifts. Nothing too ostentatious but nice things. She was welcome to keep them, they were only things.

  “So you are going to end this, end us over a weekend away?” Casey asked feeling desperate as she realized what she was losing.

  Ellen shrugged. She wasn’t that upset. The sex had been good but this wasn’t the first time
someone had dated her for what she could provide. “Have a nice life Casey. I wish you well,” she told her the familiar refrain. Some took it better than others. She walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind her. She hoped Casey would be one of those who took it well. As the elevator closed and she saw no sign of her now former girlfriend she hoped it had gone well enough that she wouldn’t have to deal with a distraught woman. That had happened once too often over the years. She would inform her secretary to not accept any calls from her. It would just be one on the ever lengthening list.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LIFE SUCKS

  “You can’t leave me!” she pleaded with him.

  “Well, this time, it’s not either of our choices that matter,” he laughed, but ended up coughing. He grabbed a handkerchief and they both stared in horror at the blood on it when he was done. “Yeah well,” he shrugged philosophically.

  “There has to be a cure, this is the modern age for Christ’s sake,” she raged. She looked at him sadly, he was skinny. No, he was beyond skinny. He reminded her of a holocaust survivor with their absolute lack of fat or muscle. He was paler than she, and that was saying something since she was a natural redhead.

  “Not this time hun, I screwed the pooch and the pooch bit back,” he joked, but elicited absolutely no smile from her.

  “What the hell am I going to do without you to spar with?” she asked sorrowfully.

  “You are going to go on, you are a survivor and you know it,” he told her, but looked very intently into her eyes. “I’m leaving everything to you; take care of Bill for me, okay?”