The Woman Who Stopped Traffic Page 14

  “But this is where Towse may be in the smart minority,” Ben said, in another about-turn. “He’s surely playing a numbers game here. I’ll bet he’s modelled this out to the nth degree. Doubtless the streetlights of Pac Heights or Woodside dim when he fires up the model he’s built for this one. He must be reckoning on converting some significant percentage across, and not caring about the rest.”

  Ben was clicking away, perhaps opening a forecast model of his own: “OK, so we’d been conservatively expecting Clamor to hit half-a-billion worldwide members by next year. Now, suppose this game turns out to be the phenomenon that Towse – and others in fairness – expect it to be. Assume also that this multi-identity-engine thing is firing on all cylinders, though that part is more of a mystery to me. What’s a reasonable conversion rate? Twenty percent? – of Clamor users? We can adjust the number up or down,” and she heard him tapping away once more, “but it’s important, I think, not to underestimate the fit. Again, we’re talking about a member base interested in novel online experiences...”

  “A hundred million people, then. Playing MultiQuest.”

  “Right. Now just think about that number a moment. Winston and I worked out that World of Warcraft might be worth twenty billion with just twelve million players. Natalie, it’s no exaggeration to say that if this scenario really plays out, MultiQuest could be worth as much as Google – and every other tech company combined, in time!”

  It sounded too fantastic for Ben to say out loud. A fantasy online role-playing game. And yet, so many things had seemed fantastical online. Like, 350 million people on Clamor, four years into the company’s existence.

  “But what about all those other Clamor members?” Natalie asked. “What happens to them?”

  “They’ll probably move their wagons on to the next new social networking thing. I’m afraid it pays to fire your worst customers, Natalie. Or maybe Towse will keep Clamor running as a sort of feeder engine, who knows.”

  Ben paused. “But just when we learn Towse wants to buy it, I’m getting the vibe that Wisnold doesn’t want to sell.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t think I updated you from my meeting with Wisnold, right after we got back from visiting Vogel’s place that day?”

  “No. Tell me about that,” she said.

  “Well, it was his nonchalance. It would be easy to interpret as Wisnold getting cold feet. But I was combating the same thing at that presentation in the Keaton, even before. It almost feels like he’s wanted to queer the deal from the start. So why engage bankers in the first place? Why set off down the IPO path at all?”

  “But don’t you see,” Natalie said, “that the two reconcile absolutely!”

  “How?”

  “If you’re Towse – or anyone else for that matter, and you want to acquire something rare and valuable that’s not for sale: what’s the very first step in the process?” she asked.

  “Writer a big check. Lay siege. Bombard them with lavish nights out and other, nefarious forms of entertainment. To be honest, I’ve never cracked the code on that one, Natalie. And I’m sure our M&A department would be eager for enlightenment!”

  “Ben. Create an emotional space, in which the owner can become comfortable letting go. If they can allow themselves to imagine letting go in a way that’s non-threatening, they’re so much more likely to do so. It’s mostly a fear thing that has to be overcome. People hide themselves away behind things when they’re afraid.”

  “So that’s Towse’s play: get Winsold thinking, ‘OK then, we’ll have a liquidity event so existing investors can cash out, but we’ll only sell a fractional amount of the company’ – which is what any IPO entails after all – ‘and I must remain in charge!’

  “– but,” Ben built up the theory, “by then the company’s in play. Towse is now pushing on an open door.” He thought about it some more. “Maybe you should be doing my job, Natalie.”

  “Not my cup of cha I’m afraid. But there is one person we’ve left out of the equation: Jon Vogel. Without his consent, Towse is stuck. And you mentioned that Vogel hates Towse.”

  “True, but I kinda got the feeling that Jonny V wants to cash out now. What was that organization his neighbor mentioned to you, The Protection of Hippy Camp Heaven? Well, newsflash, campers: buying up large chunks of land around Pine Glade Way does actually require billions of dollars nowadays.”

  Natalie tilted her head from side to side: Maybe. “But do we really know enough about Vogel?” she asked. “What was that ‘Deviate’ self-sufficiency group, up the canyon behind his house?”

  She briefly explained to Ben the dark ‘Chronicles of Gor’ novel-series that she’d come across while researching the background fantasy literature. “How do we know he’s not running some kind of Gorean slave-camp in the woods back there?”

  Ben: “I hardly think he’s going to have set up a female slave camp for the inspection of hundreds of high profile guests at his annual technology fests!”

  “Okay, Okay. But I did have this weird dream last night about his beach. You remember the one I got marooned on in the fog that day? It’s actually a perfectly protected cove. Perfect for smuggling illegal immigrants, that is.”

  “Oh Natalie, please! People haven’t been smuggled by boat for – I dunnow, centuries.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” she said. “Don’t you remember that case a few years ago of the ship sailing from China to the US, that got into trouble near New York?” Natalie googled it. “Here we go, the Golden Venture,” and she began quoting: “‘At least ten of the ship’s estimated 286 passengers died plunging into the icy waters off the Rockaway Peninsular, after their traffickers reportedly ordered them to’ – Jeez – ‘swim ashore. An unassuming older woman named Cheng Chui Ping stood trial for her alleged role in the disaster.’ – She was Fuzhounese by the way, Fuzhou being the capital of Fujian Province, where little Jasmine came from. Anyway, here: ‘Interpol eventually caught up with her at Hong Kong Airport, seeing her own son onto a flight’, would you believe it. ‘By that stage she’d amassed a fortune smuggling Chinese immigrants into the US estimated to be in the region of forty million dollars’.”

  “Couldn’t have taken long to backfill that role,” Ben brooded. “And the waters off the Monterey Peninsular are a little warmer than those around the Rockaways. But, there’s no way Jon Vogel would get involved in anything like that, Chevalier. Maverick though he may be.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she sighed. “I was just exploring.”

  “Well, I vote you explore the weird and wonderful world of Paul Towse. He’s the one who holds the key to all this. We’re wasting our time with anyone else at this point. And I bet he’d be willing to talk to you.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Your name came up in conversation last night. Or rather your dad’s.”

  “My father?”

  “Yup. Something about him being a philosopher. Towse likes his philosophy, it seems. Floats his boat, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

  “Ben, people died when that wreck of a ship ran aground! –”

  “Sorry, but this is all getting a little too morbid for my blood. Anyway, you’ve the perfect pretext for meeting with him, given the security report you’re due to present to the Clamor Board at some point. And I’ll guarantee you one thing: you’ll get far further with him than we bankers ever will now.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Paul Towse had been rather unforthcoming on the phone with Natalie, suggesting only that they met at his office, which was also his home. He hadn’t asked her anything about her role at Clamor, and he hadn’t volunteered anything about his own. Indeed, the only question he’d posed was whether she played chess. He struck her as one of those people for whom silence is a weapon: “He who speaks first dies,” as a deal maker at her old company had once said.

  She entered his property off Alta Plaza at the very top of Pacific Heights. It was a giant wedding cake of a house, all white and
cream stucco, complete with it own porte-cochère. Beneath glinted a dark Maybach Zeppelin.

  The property had to be priceless. In the lexicon of real estate agents, there could no ‘comparable’ across all of San Francisco’s super prime market. It occupied a city block. The main door opened as a maid greeted her in silhouette. The maid seemed tiny against the opulent interior. Natalie followed her through an enfilade of grand spaces with stone staircases leading off. At the far end was what appeared to be a ballroom, judging by the high polish of its parquet floor.

  “In Japan they call this Pin Dom,” a quiet voice said.

  His eyes gleamed like coal as he poured the pink Dom Perignon. It frothed in the champagne flutes, one of which he offered her. He was wearing a salmon colored shirt, soft herringbone jacket and gold-buckled loafers. She caught a whiff of citrusy cologne. To the side of them sat a modest repast of vegetable crudités, thin toast with the crusts cut off and sturgeon’s roe. The latter glittered delicate-black in the flickering light of a log fire. The shadow play turned them both into great dancing bears on the far walls. She looked up. Round the top ran rococo swag in striking relief: cherubs with coy faces, putti and babies’ buttocks – all vaguely obscene. This room alone was large enough to house a penthouse apartment, and yet, apart from the food table and a chessboard with chairs either side, it was absolutely bare.

  “The house was built by Sullivan B. Wentworth. Made his money in the silent pictures era. Very nearly bankrupted him, and ultimately became his mausoleum. He was interred somewhere beneath where we now stand,” Towse said. They sat down at the chess table. “I find I can learn so much about people by playing them at chess,” he went on, giving her white. She’d once been school champion, but again it struck her as an unorthodox way to spend a first meeting together.

  She executed a classically defensive opening. Queen’s Gambit Declined.

  “Well, this is nice,” Towse said. “And good. And right.”

  These weren’t exactly the first adjectives to pop into her head. He lost no time in bringing out his knights, bishops: the works. Out they all came, deep into her territory of the board. The pieces were large, carved-stone fantasy figures. In the ever-moving light of the log fire, they appeared to mock her.

  Towse sank into a meditative silence, surveying the increasingly complicated board.

  “I understand you’re involved in another game – a multiplayer one, online,” she said.

  He looked up. “How d’you know that?”

  She gave the name of Winston Ma’s programmer contact at Further Online Gaming, whom she implied she knew direct.

  “Yes.” He relaxed a little. “Fantasy online gaming is the new frontier.”

  Evidently he’d decided the board needed thinning out, for he was now exchanging mid-value pieces in violent, almost suicidal moves.

  “A new frontier,” she repeated. She thought of President John F. Kennedy, of a ‘man-on-the-moon’ by the end of that decade – and then of all the techies subsequently weaned on Star Trek, Star Wars and dreams of colonizing that final frontier: “Space –”

  “– is for the others,” Towse interrupted her, taking her knight. “Bezos, Branson, Paul Allen,” he sat back. “All that money they’ve poured into civilian space travel, decades after man first walked on the moon. And what do they have to show for it? I’ll tell you exactly what they have to show for it: a bunch of lunatics throwing themselves weightlessly around jumbo jets, seventy thousand feet up in the air! That’s what they have to show for it!”

  He thought about it, laughing to himself. “Let them have it!” he suddenly cried out, in spontaneous, startled delight!

  He seemed almost psychotic to her, and yet. “The new frontier is not in space! It’s where people have already begun to migrate to, in their millions, and very soon their hundreds of millions.”

  His eyes darted round the board, searching for a new victim.

  “D’you know what the most significant development of the second half of the nineteenth century was, Miss Chevalier?”

  She wondered what he was about to say. The railways? Telephone? Otis’s elevator?

  “The US Census Bureau declaring the westward American frontier finally ‘closed’, in 1890.”

  Despite her southern allegiances, she might have put it a quarter century before, with Lincoln’s 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. Still.

  “The frontier ethos descends down into the American psyche to depths no one can possibly fathom.” He removed her second knight – never her favourite piece anyway, with its weird, doglegged move. Pawns, rooks, queens and kings remained.

  “The path untravelled,” he continued. “Which is also – and by no coincidence – the very foundation of the grail mythologies: ‘And each entered the forest at a point they themselves had chosen!’ he rang out: ‘Where it was darkest, and there was no path!’

  He said: “Why ‘no path’? Just for the merry hell of it?”

  It didn’t look like he was waiting for an answer.

  “Because if there’s a path, it’s somebody else’s pissing path!”

  He picked up the knight he’d just removed from the board: “The lone horseman, answerable only to his own inviolable code of conduct, and to God. The vanguard of the few, driving forward the many, to the benefit of all. That great, heroic, westward push,” and he placed the chess piece down mournfully. “Do you think that impulse has just gone away? Do you think we’ve just – forgotten – in some collective fit of amnesia, the thrill of the undiscovered, the challenge of great new lands to be civilized, of resources to be secured, treasures to be won… treasures, that is to say, that reside in the very soul of mankind?”

  He said it like she were responsible for the frontier closing a century-or-more before.

  “No! It’s as present as ever – only, subverted, contorted, by social do-gooders and nobodies… by bureaucrats, intermédiaires … bankers,” and he hissed the last word, staring away into the fire.

  She began to feel light-headed, like she needed air.

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said, leaning in again. “What do you know about liminal states of existence?”

  There was a thud of familiarity – and a falling feeling in her stomach, as she lost her queen to a rook-based skewer. She sacrificed it for his rook; she’d no choice.

  “– About that threshold place, between illusion and reality? Because you should know about it, Miss Chevalier, given how eloquently your father wrote on the subject.

  “You see, these immersive fantasy worlds are really no different from this world – the Lebenswelt, or life world, as I like to call it – which your father wrote about so brilliantly. Because in the end, all of us are just playing out some role that we chose, or that was chosen for us: father, mother, journalist-philosophe, businessman, security consultant, whatever it might be. We can look to the Lebenswelt’s greatest role players, by which I mean movie stars or theatre actors – indeed, let’s look at Olivier.

  “When Olivier plays Hamlet, who exactly are we looking at, up there on the stage? Who is he? Is he the man whom someone happened to name Laurence, who longs for greatness and for love, as any human being does? Is he an actor, performing the emotions and feelings of the role, memorizing his lines and sometimes suffering stage fright? Is he – rather more improbably now, I accept – the bodily facsimile of some mythical Danish prince? No! Laurence Olivier, up there on that stage playing Hamlet, is none of those things. He is in fact not there at all! The audience sees only Hamlet – in somebody’s physical presence.

  “And so we can conclude then that the greater the role player is, the more he or she dissolves. That the role becomes their existence.

  “Now, you may think that all of this is rather fanciful, highbrow nonsense. But all of us are playing roles that are in essence theatrical: scripted, situated and performed in front of an audience in accordance with some set of social norms. And allow me to add my own prediction: that during the twenty-first centu
ry, our lives will become as much narratively constituted as actually lived. That we will story ourselves. Three hundred and fifty million stories, buzzing away on a social networking site: ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ People treating weekends away as carefully staged photo opportunities, uploading the results before they even return. Do you think the vast majority of peoples’ lives are in reality anything like those glamorous, carefree and socially voracious existences as seen on Clamor.us? When they get back to their bed-sits, and eat alone, and don’t even know the name of their neighbors, the other side of a shared apartment wall? – whom they’re ten times more likely to meet on Clamor than ever run into in real life? Do you think half of them have even met most of the people they claim as friends on that site? No! But in their minds this is how things really are, which is all that matters in the end.”

  He shrugged, and Natalie thought again about her fake profile page – wondering increasingly about Paul Towse…

  “Film! Was the natural art form of the twentieth century, but it was already a ghost form, of the old frontier. The itching, phantom, forward movement of it all. The movies!” and his eyes danced crazily, “with the audience sat there in their hundreds, in dark picture houses, immobile!” His loafer tapped softly on the parquet floor, beneath which Sullivan B. Wentworth lay interred. “Whereas now we author our own stories in these new online realms. Co-author them I should say, self co-authorship being the emergent art form of the twenty-first century. Because these are interactive, immersive worlds – audience, performer and interface being one now.”

  It was his move. Cursorily, he looked over the board. Then he castled abruptly, tucking his king in protectively behind a row of pawns.

  “I want to tell you a story about a man called Jim, I believe his name was. Actually, his life story was a non-story: fantastically and representatively so, which is what makes it such a story.

  “When we began to develop MultiQuest, five years ago, we did a large amount of focus group work, is how I came across him. He worked by day as ‘Customer Assistant Manager’ – a title which, by the way, nobody, anywhere, could define for us. This was at the Check-in desk of a major airline at O’Hare International Airport, in Chicago. Back in the days when I still flew on commercial jets. Anyway, Jim was that man who, when his workday went exceptionally well, nobody remembered at all. Perhaps he could cajole the system into giving an occasional upgrade, and the grateful passengers concerned would recall his face for about thirty seconds, before realizing that they had not worn their slip-ons and would need to remove their shoes going through the radiation machine, or whatever. In any event, mostly Jim’s day was filled with this unimaginable level of rancour: passengers who’d booked the cheapest, most restrictive fares, visiting the full force of their stress and frustration upon him when they ‘found out’ their tickets didn’t allow them to re-book onto an earlier or a later flight, or whatever the fuck people do when they’re not flying by private jet. Jim made it quite clear to us that his workday was rather lacking in meaning.