“It’s in that truck. They could slip past us,” Arlo said through tight lips. The sound was almost a hiss. He flexed his white-knuckled fingers, his face contorted with urgency.
“Get back to the car. Now.”
Before
Mike and Cat, along with all employees at Sharesquare’s Silicon Valley office, were shepherded into the campus’ largest cafe on a Tuesday afternoon. There were no less than a hundred tables, two salad bars, a build-your-own-pizza station, a fully-staffed barista counter, and several other windows to get vegetarian, Tex-Mex, or Italian dishes. All the furniture details and countertops here were composed of slick lines, shiny surfaces, a muted grey and green color scheme dreamt up at significant expense by a team of postmodern interior designers. Everything was closed now though except the coffee bar, which had taken on the additional role of serving beer, champagne, and wine.
All the seats were filled, and the sides of the room were clogged with everyone else standing. An excited chatter and anticipation pulsed through every conversation.
“Did you hear they hit a billion users already?”
“I thought they were already climbing to two billion.”
“Have you tried it yet? It’ll blow your mind.”
“The ad revenue is gonna be crazy.”
They were all geeks here, mostly. That’s what they were in high school. Most of them had sojourned from across the country from places they never quite fit in. The pioneers among them, the Silicon Valley evangelists, had come here with the dream of being part of a better, more enlightened world. And for a while, everyone believed that might be the case. They built a center of innovation, a true meritocracy, and each day they plotted—never really consciously—the destruction of some ancient east coast-centric industry. Taxi cabs. Travel agents. Hotels. Bookstores. They were all being targeted. And the user would ultimately win these wars on the industries of the old, they told themselves. There would be lower prices and new economies of scale that only their newest apps could offer.
But that dream began to grow stale at some point. It turned out women didn’t fare much better in this brave new world built by the geeks than they did in the old one. Sure, there was less locker room talk, perhaps. There were no, or very few, weekend guys’ golf trips. But the glass ceilings were still the same. This was a place built by white men, and they reigned supreme. They were all still quite progressive in their politics, it should be said. Everyone was. But in the backs of their minds—as their stock options soared, their bank accounts swelled and the broader economy languished—they knew the guillotines of any socialist revolution would come for their heads first.
Right on cue, the room quieted down, and the CEO walked out wearing his trademark khaki shorts onto a small stage accompanied by Devon. The room erupted in applause. Normally, these kinds of internal meetings were kept for employees only, but there were press here today, and the anticipation in the room was sky high. The journalists sat in a row of seats near the front, and they began snapping away with their cameras. Devon and the CEO were beaming.
Technically, this was a chance for Catalina to soak in her success too. Her team had built the feature that everyone loved most about Sharebox—the virtual immersions—but she didn’t push for a spot in the limelight. She wanted to pretend she was above the petty jockeying and corporate politics.
Cat wanted to believe that merit was what mattered most. But because she didn’t push for a spot, no one gave her one—like she had secretly hoped they would—and today she sulked in the back of the room.
“We went from having a small group of beta users,” Devon announced, motioning to a screen showing three dots that represented their original thirty thousand testers. “Then we hit two-point-five billion,” he added triumphantly, and the chart expanded to reveal ten thousand times the number of dots.
Everybody started clapping, but Devon raised his hands to silence them.
“That’s not even the remarkable part,” he said. The screen changed to a slide that read “72 hours.”
“The amazing part is we reached that many users in three days.”
Then the room erupted in more earnest, unbridled applause.
“People around the world are making bootleg headsets out of paper bags and tinfoil so that they can join Sharebox. Our own Sharebox headset sold out in a matter of hours. This is what you call an international phenomenon.”
The screen showed a clip of children in Indonesia building a homemade virtual reality headset using a shoebox, duct tape and shards of a mirror that were repurposed from a junk-yard car.
“And we know everyone’s favorite part, right?” Devon said enthusiastically, the sweat beginning to gleam on his red forehead.
The screen transitioned to an old woman sitting in a modest kitchen as she was given a headset by her grandchildren. She looked skeptical, but then she put it on and laughed with surprise. Then she danced.
“We’ve created the first ever virtual reality that no one can resist. We’ve finally made VR mainstream. The Homepad of Sharebox will take you to your kids’ play recital or to the bedside of an aging relative. It can even take you to the Oscars.”
The screen showed a young woman in jeans who was wearing a headset in the front row of a red-velvet-covered auditorium, surrounded by dazzling actors and actresses. Charlotte Boone was on the stage.
Of course they chose her image for the demo, Catalina thought bitterly. She was the only actress who always failed to offend anybody.
“Our AI, Diana, lets us stitch together completely immersive virtual reality scenes from a couple photographs and her own rich repository of information.” Then he added with a wink, “And a little secret sauce guesswork, of course.”
The crowd laughed.
“We can go anywhere now. Anywhere where someone has taken a picture and shared it with you is now a place you can be. You’ll never miss a moment, you’ll never miss a scene.”
Devon cleared his throat and looked suddenly serious. “Listen to me, everyone. This is not hyperbole for me to say this.” He let a dramatic hush fall across the room, and then he began pumping his fist into the air as he finished his speech with three words: “This. Changes. Everything!”
The audience went wild.
A voice spoke in Catalina’s ear. It was hard to make out the words. Music was blaring now from two speakers hanging above the stage.
“You should be up there,” shouted Mike through cupped hands. “This is your victory lap too.”
Catalina looked around the room with her arms crossed. She had always felt like an outsider here in Silicon Valley, but surveying the scene now, the feeling of not belonging was stronger than ever.
“That kind of thing doesn’t matter to me.”
But even Mike knew her well enough by now to detect when she was lying. Cat had a clear tell; she bit her lower lip and tensed her fingers.
Mike looked up at the screen. It showed a reel of people exploring their friends’ photos and their own memories in Sharebox’s Homepad and gasping in awe.
“The world will never be the same again,” Mike said, but no one else heard him.
After
Lilongwe was a sprawling capital, but it grew up with nature rather than against it. Instead of ripping out every tree and patch of grass to build new high rises, urban development instead chose to simply meander around it all and shift further out into the African countryside. Now, even at the city center, the landscape was still dotted with trees and flush with greenery.
It was a three-hour drive to get there from the ranch, but it was a scenic route that followed Lake Malawi southwards before turning onto roads that cut through the hill country.
Charlotte’s eyes met Orion as she approached the truck’s passenger door.
“You look beautiful today,” he said, with that familial smile.
It was a humid morning, a
nd she was wearing a yellow dress with a floral print that reached to her knees and covered her pale shoulders.
“I see you cleaned up a bit too,” she replied, acknowledging his buttoned-up shirt and slacks.
He shrugged. “I figured a visa extension was a good time to not look like a ruffian.”
When their hands met as he helped her into the truck, Orion seemed to stand a little taller. He gave her fingers a little squeeze. Charlotte didn’t believe in falling for strangers, didn’t believe in fate. She was almost entirely closed to such ideas. Almost.
Because there was something there, right? A possibility.
“What would the world make of you out here, do you think?” Orion asked, starting the engine and rolling the truck away from the ranch house. “To see Charlotte Boone, Hollywood princess, in the African backcountry driving cattle and managing horses?”
“They’d probably say, ‘Look how far she’s fallen. Scratching a living off the land.’”
She pulled down a mirror and produced a ruby red lipstick.
“How can you do that while I’m driving? This road is more bumps than road. It would be better to call it a bump.”
“I didn’t take you for somebody who cracked lame dad jokes. If you have more of those, just let me know so I can jump out of the truck now.”
Orion laughed.
“Well, okay that was bad. But I try to get my jokes in with you wherever I can get them. And for the record, I don’t think that’s what people would say about you. I think they’d say, ‘That girl has nerves of steel. Owns the red carpet when she wants, but would rather fend off lions in the bush.’”
“I’ve never fended off a lion.”
“Well, your publicist doesn’t need to know that. Think of a movie featuring you here,” he said. “Charlotte Boone, master of the wild country. Dressed in your kickass boots, saving cattle from dangerous predators—in monsoons, no less, I’m sure—riding wild stallions bareback.”
“I don’t ride bareback.”
“Again, these are just optics, Charlotte. Use some poetic license with me.”
She shook her head, but still, she found herself smiling as she began coloring her lips.
And the long drive passed by in no time at all. Everyone in the ranch had been so charmed by Orion, and now, for the first time, Charlotte understood why. Orion seemed to know just about everything. He could talk about the geology of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, which formed the basin of Lake Malawi, or the mating rituals of the Malawi Bird of Paradise, or even the contenders for Best Picture at the Oscars four years ago, and the state of political development in central Africa. But he wasn’t a braggart. That was part of the problem. If he was just some know-it-all, mansplaining egoist, she would have been quite content finding him a disagreeable person and leaving things at that. But there was a humility to his mannerisms, to his language and face when she spoke to him. He leaned in and listened to every word that passed her lips, as if every syllable were essential and he didn’t want to risk missing even one.
And the joy. There was something so infectiously and unapologetically peaceful about the way he talked and responded to her. He seemed to know exactly how to make her laugh, how to respond to a personal anecdote in a way that felt both kind and thoughtful, how to show her something new on a subject she didn’t realize she had a passion for. In a car with him for three hours with her vigilance suddenly and unequivocally down, she did find herself charmed. She was almost embarrassed how quickly her opinion about him had turned around. And damn, he was handsome in his way. His square chin and ruffled hair and that broad chest. Maybe it was the confidence too.
Only later would she realize how unnatural it was. The conversation was the easiest she had with anyone. But that was the problem. Conversation between strangers is never so perfectly fluid, so smoothly genuine, so full of gentle chemistry. It was impossible. It was rigged.
They arrived at the American embassy before noon. She was wearing a pink scarf around her head and sunglasses that masked her face, but her presence still seemed to draw attention. He carried a brown satchel across his chest. Charlotte did not know about the little black box that was in there, always whirring, always scanning for wireless network coverage and hijacking bandwidth and cloud computing power where the box needed it. The AI there never stopped; night or day. As long as it was close enough to a tower, it never ceased applying its big, beautiful, machine mind to the problems set before it.
“Lunch?” Orion asked as they concluded their business at the embassy. “I know a great place in New Town. Tacos. I really miss tacos.”
On any other day, she would have said no. It wasn’t worth the risk of being spotted. But today she looked at Orion’s bright brown eyes—one third roguish, two thirds trusting—and fought down the urge to weigh the risks, to play it safe.
“Lead the way,” she said.
They parked on the top floor of a garage across from a large, open-air street market. Then they slipped into a café with a Bohemian, international flair—burgundy walls, live music and a sidewalk terrace of iron-wrought chairs. Orion put a hand on her lower back as they wound their way to a pair of seats. His touch was warm, and she did not mind.
There was an open-air market across the street and a large mall down the block. Orion assured Charlotte that no one would recognize her, and she was feeling just impulsive enough to enjoy the feeling of sitting outside, exposed, without being bothered by it.
She had been successful in Hollywood because she had been cautious—always treating every role and decision as a career-defining moment and appraising all the things that could go wrong with each one. But now she realized, as she sat here dining with a fellow American, affable and funny, mysterious though he was, how all her second guessing and scheming had robbed her of the joys of spontaneity.
He looked at her with that boyish grin, like he adored her, like he was the luckiest man in all of Malawi to be sitting across from her. That’s the feeling that seemed to radiate from him, and it made something flutter in her stomach to have someone so confident and charming look at her like that. A round of drinks was served, and then another.
“Did you know that your eyes are so green, I can see the color through your sunglasses?” he said.
“I don’t think that’s possible. Like literally, sunglasses don’t work that way.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he replied, leaning in and looking serious. “Maybe it would just be better to take them off to be sure.”
“Must I?” she asked, looking around. There was a sound of live drums from a corner behind her somewhere, and Charlotte felt the beat through the table, through her fingers and up her arms.
“You don’t have to do anything, Miss Boone. This is an afternoon where no one is counting on you for anything, least of all me. And I imagine you’re probably tired of being complimented on your eyes. Folks like me only get so many glimpses at your kind of savage beauty.”
“Savage beauty? That sounds like a pickup line, and not a good one.”
“You know what I mean—you’re just…exhausting. In a good way. The kind of charming that makes your heart ache. ” He wore a crooked smile, as if a part of him really meant it. “And you’re not half as scary as I expected either,” he added, reaching for his drink.
“Well, if I’m not intimidating you, maybe I need to try harder.” She felt the tingle of tequila emboldening her veins.
“You do have that fierce reputation to uphold. I won’t tell anyone though.”
“Tell anyone what?”
He blinked at her earnestly. “That you’re just as gorgeous on the inside, Charlie. That you’re tough as hell, sure, but also loyal and funny and impossibly more clever than anyone with your looks has any right to be, if the universe were a fair place, that is.”
There was that pull again. She felt it in her stomach—the urgency, the s
ense of connection with the man sitting across from her. Her cheeks were flushing, and she admitted to herself that something was passing between them. She studied her drink. Did she actually like this guy? For this one moment, it seemed like a possibility, like a risk she’d like to take.
Then she reached up to take off her glasses, and everything was turned upside down.
A boy, maybe no older than seventeen, darted behind Orion and seized his satchel and Charlotte’s purse before running off across the street and disappearing into the open-air market. The word “thief” caught in Charlotte’s throat.
But no sooner had the boy stepped into the road had Orion sprinted out of his chair. His relaxed posture, his easy smile, were wiped away in a blink, and he was on his feet, moving between chairs with uncanny agility. He followed the boy into the crowd, into a maze of vendors hawking everything from bootleg DVDs to sweet potatoes, and Charlotte watched Orion as he zigzagged around a pair of loose chickens and leapt over two boxes of used bicycle parts.
The thief, for his part, shot a glance over his shoulder as he slid between two stands—one selling children’s clothes, the other selling vacuums—and was alarmed to find his victim in such tight pursuit. Mzungu tourists didn’t often put up a fight, and when they did, they rarely kept up. The satchel was surprisingly heavy too, and the thief found it slowing him down. But still, he was a native, and he was flushed with confidence as he emerged from the chaos of the market back onto the open street and towards the mall, where he disappeared into a small side entrance.
Charlotte heard others shouting during the chase, but Orion paid them no mind. He probably didn’t want to create a bigger scene than he was already making.
He sprinted to the mall just behind the boy, a look of intensity on his face that did not seem warranted by a stolen purse alone. The distance between thief and victim was closing.
The shopping structure was composed of three sub-basements ringed with clothing boutiques and electronic stores. There was familiar fluorescent lighting reflected off white tile floors and high ceilings built in the Western fashion. Arlo and Darnell watched as the thief quickly made his way down an escalator.
The Echo Chamber Page 7
