Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) (3 page)

He was already late, anyway.

Kurt buzzed his way into the building and knocked on Professor Walker’s door. He heard a muffled shout of “just a minute.”

His eyes darted to a text notification as he waited. The message expanded. “Sender: Randy Jacobs.
Good luck, hotshot. Just keep your head. Rx.”
Kurt reached for his phone to reply but was startled by the door jerking open.

“Jacobs! What the hell are you doing here? You should be backstage by now. And why are you so wet?”

“It’s raining.”

The professor studied Kurt’s face. “And my other question?”

“Right. I just came to thank you for everything. Not just getting me the entry... everything else, too.”

“Thank me by doing yourself justice out there. Right now I need to get going, and so do you. Walk with me.” Professor Walker reached for the large yellow umbrella behind his desk before following Kurt into the hallway. They ran down the Computer Sciences building’s four flights of stairs and arrived at its rain-splattered revolving doors. The professor held his umbrella over both of their heads as they went outside.

The campus buzzed with excitement but the air between Kurt and the professor was silent. Normally the two were full of debate about some new app or piece of hardware; not tonight. As hesitant as each was to let the other know, both were nervous.

They walked past the duckpond, gleeful rain bouncing on its surface, and Kurt thought of something to say that would take his mind off the contest for a few minutes. “I saw two birds eating a cat today.”

Professor Walker came to a halt. “I don’t even know what that means. Are you alright?”

Kurt continued for a few steps and with no umbrella to block his view he belatedly noticed the massive announcement written in the stars above the city: “#Sycamore #UltraLenses Talent Search: Live on Channel 43 NOW! ~
Brought to you by #Lexington
.”

Amos advertised the event as a Talent Search rather than a technology contest in an attempt to capitalise on the public’s insatiable appetite for televised talent shows and auditions. The professor seemed unimpressed with the message as he looked up to see what Kurt was staring at and quickly refocused on his protégé’s anti-evolutionary ramblings. “Birds don’t eat cats, Jacobs. Have you been skipping sleep again?”

“Well, yeah, but I still saw it. The Lenses said they were common ravens. The cat had been run over and they were just standing there pecking away at it. One looked up at me when I walked past, like he was trying to send me some kind of mes—

“Stop talking. Just stop. You need to get your head in the game. You know, if you win tonight I’ll have two former students working at Sycamore. I must be doing something right.” The professor resumed walking and pulled Kurt along with him.

“You mean Minter?” asked Kurt, clearly displeased. “He’s a rat.”

“Come on now, Jacobs, he apologised for all that. And he’s grown since then.”

“Yeah, into a bigger rat.”

“Fine. Let’s not talk about Terrance. How are you approaching the pitch?”

Kurt was much happier talking about this. “I’m going to sell the benefits of my idea as if they already exist and be animated while doing it,” he said. It sounded good. “The only thing I’m still debating is whether to frame those benefits in terms of power and money or innovation and progress. What do you think?”

“Amos has the final say,” said the professor, “so go for progress. The UltraLenses already have most of the market; now he wants to see what they can really do. That’s the point though, it’s about what the Lenses can do. Everyone else is going to be talking about what their innovation can do for Sycamore and trying to butter Amos up. Don’t be like everyone else. When you get on that stage and look Amos in the eye, ask not what technology can do for Sycamore but what Sycamore can do for technology.”

It was more or less the angle Kurt had planned to come from. “Thanks, Professor.”

“And remember that Amos likes to sail and he likes to fish. If you need to hook him, well, hook him with something about the sea. What are you pitching, anyway?”

“The future,” came Kurt’s automatic response.

The professor laughed. “You’ll have to be more specific than that with the judges.”

“I will be, and you’ll hear the details when they do. You always said that patience was everything.” Kurt grinned at his favourite teacher and patted his shoulder twice.

No other student, past or present, would have dared even dream of behaving so casually with Professor Walker, but he had grown to expect and more or less accept it from Kurt. He shrugged it off. “Patience might be everything to me but I’m not Isaiah Amos. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly and I stuck my neck out in giving the wildcard entry to one of my own students. I need you to grasp that.”

There was a sudden urgency in the professor’s voice. Kurt sensed it and sought to reassure him. “Relax,” he smiled. “You chose well; I’m going to win. This thing is too big not to.” He felt sorry for Professor Walker caring about the integrity of a rigged contest but didn’t want to burden him with the explosive knowledge of the SycaPhone deceit.

“And I’m rooting for you, Jacobs, but there are twelve other brilliant minds sitting in there desperate to impress Amos. Do you think any of them are 23-year-old kids who won’t listen to advice? I know how much you’ve put into this and I could give you tips on pitching the idea if you’d just tell me what the damn thing is!”

Kurt considered the professor’s words but decided to continue the mystery. “Sorry, but I can’t tell you any more than you already know.” As he spoke they reached the auditorium’s side entrance, where all contestants had been due to arrive ten minutes earlier. He pointed to his wrist and then the door to excuse himself.

“Fine,” said Professor Walker, more annoyed than he sounded. “But can you at least tell me why you can’t tell me?”

Kurt nodded and opened the door. “If I told you what it was, you wouldn’t let me pitch it.”

2

A clipboard-wielding production assistant confronted Kurt as soon as he arrived in the backstage area. “You are
so
late!” she shrieked. “There won’t even be time for makeup.”

“I don’t need make-up,” said Kurt, “just a towel.”

“Fine. Stay here and I’ll get one.”

He waited in the empty corridor until his helper returned. “That was quick,” he said.

“We’re rolling in three minutes! Run through to makeup and try to at least dry your face. There’s a mirror there but you seriously have to be in your seat like right now. You’re in the second row with the other contestants, eight from the middle. Whenever someone is called to the stage the rest of you are to move along one seat. Understand?”

“I’m sure I’ll manage.” Kurt opened a door marked MAKEUP and entered the small changing-room. It was deserted but for a pretty girl of around his age and the stylist who was working on her. The girl had red hair and two too-cute freckles on her nose.

He walked over to the wall-length mirror and saw that his hair and face looked even wetter than they felt. A furious once-over with the soft, Sycamore-embossed towel made him fairly presentable. As Kurt tried to move a detached eyelash from the top of his nose, his Lenses recognised their own reflection and a short annotation appeared beside his head in blue writing.

“Kurt Jacobs. 23. Single. Unemployed.”

Focusing on the words for three seconds would have called up more detailed social information but Kurt knew himself well enough to skip it. The girl with the freckles was more of a mystery, though, so he studied her eyes. She was wearing Lenses.

“Kate Pinewood. 22. Single. Occupation undisclosed.”

“Hey, Kate,” he said, holding her gaze. Nothing else appeared.

Kate’s head shot round accusingly. “What the hell are you looking at?”

“Nice. You don’t seem to be in much of a rush. What’s so special about you?”

“I’m the last pitch,” she explained, turning back to the mirror. “I can sneak in at the end of the row anytime after the contest starts. Like it’s any of
your
business.”

Occupation undisclosed. The last pitch. “So you’re the SycaPhone girl,” he realised aloud. “Best of luck out there.” A look of horror crossed Kate’s face. Kurt winked at her via the mirror. “Don’t worry, I’ll warm them up for you.”

Kurt exited the changing room pleased to know what he was up against. The corridor was still empty and a bell began to ring. He opened another door, this one marked CONTESTANTS. It brought him to the side of the stage. He excused his way past his rivals to take his seat.

The Renaissance-style auditorium was an imposing building inside and out. Its domed structure was iconic and the interior harked back to a lost age of artistic decadence with murals aplenty joined by an inscribed reading from Proverbs. Having recently graduated in the palatial building, Kurt enjoyed the advantage of not being overawed by his surroundings. And, after all that worrying about being late, he was in position with a full seven seconds to spare. He even had time to tighten the knot in his tie before the lights suddenly died, taking the audience’s chatter with them.

Darkness. Silence. Showtime.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” boomed a smooth baritone voiceover, “please welcome to the stage Sycamore’s founder and CEO: Isaiah Amos.” The style of introduction befitted a heavyweight title fight and the audience reacted accordingly as Amos rose from his front-row seat to ascend the stairs and assume his role as MC. Everyone around Kurt stood for the welcome. He was comfortable sitting down.

Amos loved the limelight like the limelight loved him. Kurt had never seen him in person and was surprised by how youthful he seemed. In interviews Amos’s face always showed its 54 years, but tonight his dynamic stage-presence drew all of the attention. From a distance he could have passed for 30.

“This is an occasion to be savoured,” Amos began, lowering both hands in front of his stomach to encourage a resumption of the silence, “and savour it we shall. Tonight we welcome millions of viewers on TVBytes, available on-Lens through any internet device and apparently also on channel 43 of those quaint little teleboxes.” Most of the audience laughed, mainly out of social obligation. “We welcome them to our Sycamore UltraLenses Talent Search, brought to you by Lexington, in which we aim to unearth a talented innovator and give him — or her! — the opportunity to realise their potential at Sycamore.

“Each contestant will be judged primarily on their innovation but also on the quality of their pitch. There are thirteen contestants in all, twelve of whom have been selected as the best of over 9000 online entries. The field is rounded out by a wildcard entrant selected by Professor Dale Walker; our way of thanking this famous university for hosting the Talent Search in its magnificent auditorium.

“They will each be given five minutes to pitch and a further five minutes to answer questions from the board. The board will choose three finalists and I will personally select a winner after interviewing those final three onstage at the end of the evening. And now, without further ado, allow me to introduce our first contestant... Kevin Chang.”

Kurt watched with interest as Kevin took the stage and Amos returned to his seat. Kevin’s proposal was purely hypothetical and took less than a minute to explain. He had decided that the UltraLenses should allow people to see as well underwater as they could on land. If the Lenses could do that then everyone would buy them, he reasoned. Amos asked how Kevin proposed this be achieved, to which he replied: “I’m not clear on that yet.”

The audience applauded politely at the end of Kevin’s pitch and he sat down at the far end of the row. Kurt was pleasantly amazed that the next few pitches saw no increase in quality and that his rivals’ ideas were either tiny modifications of existing services or utterly impossible pipe dreams. The first reasonable suggestion was that Sycamore develop commercial lie-detection software. 100% accuracy wasn’t beyond modern facial-recognition services, the contestant claimed, but he failed to capture the board’s imagination.

Before long the seventh entrant was introduced and Kurt felt his nerves building. He had been using the time during the previous pitches to finalise his own and knew that it was as polished as it was going to get.

The seventh pitch was by far the strongest so far. It was the first specific and plausible idea, and Amos seemed interested. The concept was for a home and workplace security system. A user would set a six-digit combination as normal, but the twist was that the pressure-sensitive keypad fitted on their door would have no visible numbers. Only the appointed user’s UltraLenses would reveal the numbered zones (0-9), which would shuffle their position every few minutes. In the contestant’s words, “it doesn’t matter if someone learns your passcode; to get in, they need your eyes.”

It wasn’t the kind of Hollywood idea that would excite the viewers but Amos appreciated its simplicity. “I like that,” he said. “It would sell.” His fellow board members nodded their agreement and the man seemed sure to reach the final three.

Him, me and Kate
.

“And now for the wildcard entrant... Kurt Jacobs.”

There was more cheering than there had been for any of the previous contestants because many of the audience were students and faculty who knew Kurt, or at least knew that he was a former student. When he had graduated on that very stage only two weeks earlier, Randy had been there. Kurt searched the room for a friendly face and eventually found Professor Walker near the middle. The professor mouthed “it’s yours” and Kurt’s nerves evaporated.

Because Professor Walker was right: it
was
his. Kurt had been working on this idea for years and it was galactically superior to the best anyone else had offered. His pitch would be the most polished, too. Confidence bordering on arrogance convinced Kurt that only the SycaPhone could stand in his way, so all he had to do was make it impossible for Amos to justify choosing Kate over him.

One deep breath and away he went.