The Sensory Deception (16 page)

She said, “I’ve got everything ready—why cut us off now?”

“Them,” Bupin said. “Cut
them
off. You work here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Your career, maybe you cut off your nose in spite of your face?”

“They won’t accept a licensing model.”

“Gloria, you knew from the start we would land here.”

Bupin made a single nodding motion that stopped with his head bent forward. “You have one problem which can be solved many ways. Your job is to assemble this puzzle.”

“There shouldn’t be a problem,” she said, now with an ironic grin. “We’re less than two months behind an ambitious schedule. All we need—”

“You talk too much. Think instead. Think of how to assemble pieces to make what you want.”

“We’re out of money. Farley’s house is mortgaged, everyone’s credit cards are maxed out—even mine.”

“Your own money in play?” Bupin cocked his head to the side and unveiled a toothy grin. “I like that you are all-in. It tells me that you will solve this. Inside you, maybe not in your consciousness, you know that you will solve this. Yes, I like that.”

“Without Series B funding, there is no solution.”

“Reconsider the problem. Just one issue sits between you and product. Let me query you. This killer app, you think it can disrupt the game?”

“Yes, I really do. You should come down and experience the demo.”

“Gloria, if I sing your solo, then what do you sing?”

“I’m sorry, Bupin—what do you mean?”

“I hired you for passion and intelligence, your potential. My interest is you. Not VirtExArts. It is Farley Rutherford, not his company. Two young people in face of a challenge. Not my challenge.”

“You have the solution?”

“No, Gloria. You have the solution. It is right in front of you. Right on one of your slides.”

She furrowed her brow and stared at her hands. He could sense her neurons firing. He counted the seconds, guessing that she’d see the solution in less than ten.

She did it in seven.

“I can put Farley and Chopper on that whale-wars ship off the coast of East Africa for less than five thousand dollars.”

“Business is simple problem, two-dimensional optimization, risk and reward are the only parameters.”

“What if Farley won’t do it?”

“He can be persuaded.”

“What if?”

“Aah, I see. You want to know the stakes.”

“I guess.”

“If you are unsuccessful, I will fire you and Sand Hill will sue VirtExArts and get licensing rights. Since they have no money we will win the suit quickly, and they will lose everything.”

Gloria rubbed her eyes.

“Further,” Bupin said, “should Sand Hill Ventures discover that VirtExArts is associated with eco-terrorists, we will have to sever our relationship, sue for licensing rights, and fire you.”

Bupin tilted his head to the other side, lower and lower. “You have many options. You can give up this project. A few years from now, you will have overcome the obstacle of losing ten million of my dollars. Do you want to see other proposals? Maybe you want to scout an accounting database company?”

She pulled her hands away from her face and Bupin was thrilled to see that she was smiling.

“Gloria, how have you not convinced Farley to fund his fishing expedition by selling licenses to other developers?”

She shook her head. “Okay, Bupin. I understand.” She stood, still smiling, still shaking her head.

“As you appreciate your position, do you feel excited?”

“Something like that.”

“It is just business.” He jerked his head upright. It had the desired effect of catching her attention. “Do you believe in your system, your product, and your people?”

She looked away for a few seconds and then nodded. “I’ve never known three smarter, more dedicated people in my life. The product is mind-boggling. My system? I’m not so sure.”

“Do what you must to catch your big fish.”

G
loria didn’t sleep that night. She sat on the couch in her Silicon Valley condo sipping hot chocolate and trying to relax. With the contracts piled on the coffee table in front of her and Bupin’s comments bouncing around in her head, sleep was pointless. She wrapped a blanket around her legs and tucked them beneath her. Her mother had made this blanket when Gloria was a little girl, before she, her mother, and father moved to the United States. Gloria talked to her mother every week and had dinner with her mother and stepfather every month plus Jewish holidays. She didn’t see her father more than two or three times a year. She owed him so much, but spending time with him taxed her.

Gloria’s father, Tahir Baradaran, was both a warm and a ruthless man. Who knows what he would have been like if circumstances had been different. Gloria was born in the Ayatollah’s Iran just a year after the revolution. Her parents named her Golie, but from their first day in America, everyone but her father called her Gloria.

Tahir hadn’t had the wealth or connections required to take refuge in the United States. God had called on him to protect his wife and daughter from the horrors and discrimination of the ghetto, and he had answered. They escaped the ghetto and lived a better life, but under Islamic Sharia law her mother had
to dress in a
hijab
and Tahir had to roll out a Muslim prayer rug five times a day. Gloria understood Tahir, knew what drove him. Containing his rage had taught him discipline, and the false assimilation to Sharia law taught him how to deceive an entire culture.

By the time the Iranian Army conscripted Tahir to fight the invading forces of Iraq, his senses were keyed to the slightest opening of opportunity’s door. From the Ayatollah’s Iran, Saddam Hussein looked more like a progressive savior than the Butcher of Baghdad, so Tahir smuggled his wife and four-year-old daughter across the front and through the desert, all the way to Baghdad. By forging papers to portray himself as Saddam’s distant cousin, Tahir obtained a position in Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, and his family lived a charade in relative prosperity and safety.

Several years later, when Gloria was ten and Saddam invaded Kuwait, her father took another chance. He smuggled his family in an Iraq Army personnel carrier—that is, a cargo van—across another front, this time into the not-so-waiting arms of the US Army. Gloria and her mother were held in a Kuwait hotel while Tahir provided the army with Iraqi battle plans. He crossed the front, back and forth, a dozen times to update that information until his family was finally granted asylum.

A month after the last Desert Storm skirmish, Gloria was attending school in San Jose, California. She fit in immediately. Her mother adapted to the easy life, too, getting a job at the community college teaching Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi. But Tahir didn’t fit in. The skills of a spy and a mercenary, a survivor, didn’t translate to the technology-driven economy of Silicon Valley.

Less than a year later, Gloria’s parents divorced, and a few months after that, her mother introduced the man who would become her stepfather. He was a good man, a better dad than
her father was capable of being, and a high-tech titan. Even in her rebellious adolescence, Gloria had understood her mother’s choice and believed it was the right thing for them. Her mother, on the other hand, couldn’t forgive herself for betraying the man who had saved their lives.

Gloria loved and respected her stepfather. It was his suggestion that she legally change her name from Golie to Gloria—the last step in her conversion to red, white, and blue-blooded American girl. She followed his advice and even called him Daddy. Tahir she called Father. And while she loved her daddy, she worshiped her father; she just couldn’t find a day-to-day role in her life for him.

The sound of the furnace clicking on brought her back to the present. She sipped her hot chocolate and stared at the contracts. Bupin had advised that if she believed in the people, the product, and her system, then the decision should be easy. The problem was what Bupin had called her system. The business plan that she and Farley had devised more than a year earlier was seriously out-of-date. Everything she’d done had either conformed to that plan or been a reaction to conditions. All reactive, nothing proactive. If the professors in her MBA program at Stanford found out, they might want to foreclose on her degree.

She leaned forward, set down her mug, and picked up her laptop. She needed a system she could believe in. She opened a Microsoft Project document and marked out a road map.

She understood that Farley had to go to the Indian Ocean, get the data, and get out of there. Sometimes business decisions make for strange bedfellows. But in her mind, awkward alliances were not an indictment of business but rather the ingredients of capitalism that bring peace to trading partners with large cultural differences.

She listed contingencies:

Plan A: Farley and Chopper collaborate with the radical environmentalist for a month, maybe two, get the Moby data, and develop the killer app. Meanwhile, she gets the contracts in motion and prepares the VirtExReality Arcade launch.

Plan B: The team gets mainstream apps ready to go, in case anything goes wrong with the Moby data or the killer app turns out not-so-killer. At the end of the meeting, when Farley whispered to her, he’d given her authority to offer Bupin those apps, complete with delivery dates. And she hadn’t had to use it. Yet.

Plan C: She finds out the value of development licenses, so that if the bottom falls out, she can sell them fast and, in this worst case, salvage her career and the Captain’s house.

The last one left a bad taste in her mouth. For a second, she wondered if Chopper was right about business, at least sometimes.

At four in the morning, she put on a pot of coffee and set to work on Plan A’s administrative details. She dug through her notes and refreshed her memory: the pod of sperm whales was a few miles off the coast of the Horn of Africa being monitored by a man named Randy Gaynes, captain of the
Cetacean Avenger
. She did an Internet search on the ship’s name and got a slew of YouTube videos and news reports about the “outlaw antiwhaling vessel.”

She brought up a travel booking website. The closest major city, Mogadishu, didn’t seem to have a functioning government, much less daily flights from San Francisco. They’d have to fly into Nairobi. It took another two hours to figure out the paper trail she’d have to blaze to get their sensor and DAQ equipment through both US and Kenyan customs. Red flags popped up at every turn. Though Kenya had the most stable government in the region, it also had plenty of theft, kidnappings, and carjackings. The deeper she dug into the details, the clearer it became that she needed expert advice.

She knew an expert on traveling in that region of the world, and not only would he be wide-awake at this time of day, but he’d be tickled to hear from her.

Gloria’s father answered on the first ring. “Golie! Why do you never call me?”

“I’m calling you right now.”

“Of course; I’m sorry.”

“Do you have a fare?”

“No, I am crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.” Tahir had been driving a taxi for nearly twenty years now.

She tried to ask questions about travel to Somalia without providing details. She should have known better. It took half an hour to explain the situation.

“All this to put a camera on a fish?”

“It’s an entire sensory data acquisition system. They need to record everything the whale experiences.”

“Why not use American fish?”

“Oh, never mind. I’ll ask someone else.” Gloria didn’t mean to be cruel. “Can you at least help me find a guide?”

“A guide to take your friends to Somalia?”

“No, to a ship off the Somalian coast.”

“Do you care for these men?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You care for them a lot?”

“They’re good men, my business partners.” She said it with warmth and pride.

“Then tell them not to go to Somalia.”

“That’s why I’m trying to find a guide.”

Tahir went silent. She could hear him driving, and then the engine cut off. He said, “You insist that they’re going, and you want someone to go with them to provide advice on their safety. Is that right?”

She said, “Yes, someone who knows the customs of the region in case anything comes up.”

“Do you love this man? What is his name? Farley?”

The question shouldn’t have caught her off guard, but it did, and she answered without thinking. “Yes.” A beat later she added, “Not like that though—I mean, not romantically. He’s my business partner. A very good man.”

“Two men will be going?”

“Yes.”

“But you only love one of them.”

This was the reason she didn’t call her father more often. Regardless of the subject, he managed to confuse everything she said.

“Never mind. I’m sure my firm can find someone.”

“Golie, wait. I’m sorry. You know I don’t understand how you live. Always I say the wrong thing and push you away. This time, though, I can help you. Please let me. This once, please.”

The unspoken reference to her stepfather stung. Developing her career as an Iranian female, even in egalitarian Silicon Valley, required guidance that her stepfather had provided. “You think you can help?”