The Rule of Stephens Read online

  So perhaps it was in the end simple flattery that held sway in Morris’s boardroom as he finally showed the three men the door. Time for the principals to talk, lads. Coffee? Chai? Drinks? Catherine was briefly left with the dark wood and the navy patterned carpet. The green-shaded lights. A Remington sculpture on a pedestal in the corner. A cigar box on the sideboard. A long Frank McCarthy original on the facing wall, mounted Cree hunter with cocked bow, raging sea of bison all around him. None of which seemed much like the work Parmer would favour. He was dressed sleekly modern, black crewneck, Apple watch. Silver hair, dark complexion, square features. Sri Lankan, Catherine understood from the bio she’d pulled up online before the meeting. She only knew he seemed more modern than the room somehow, as if it had been put together to impress the Midwestern locals.

  Morris came back and gestured for her to take a seat near the window, a light rain rising in the east, scudding clouds, the horizon smudged. Here came a black helicopter in low across the lakeshore, up over Grant Park, climbing the skyways. Catherine saw her face in the glass. And through it, she saw the helicopter wheel up over the river and settle onto the roof of a slender tower, the surface still twenty storeys lower than where she sat, transfixed. The rotors beat the air. Men climbed out—dark suits, briefcases. They made their way ant-like to a doorway, one man holding it open while the other scurried inside. A final look around. The helicopter rising now, feathering down the air, a halo of moisture opening around it. The last man disappeared inside.

  Catherine ran him through the basic ideas. She had a vision for something that would change people’s lives, their understanding of their own bodies, their engagement with their own health. She had a vision for something that would allow people to take charge of the information their body already possessed. “They say the oceans are the world’s biggest remaining mystery,” she said to Morris. “I say yes, but it’s the ocean within.”

  Morris, who had sat utterly still listening to her, did not speak immediately now. He looked at her with a serious expression, tempered by some glimmer of recognition, as if she had told him things he’d had occasion to think of in the past, but had perhaps long forgotten in the clamour of life and other concerns. Then, with his hands flat on the mahogany in front of him, he said: “One time in ten thousand an idea walks in those doors with a limitless future and exactly the right person to pursue it.”

  He said other things. She had worked the miracle, he said. She needed now only the mystery and the juice.

  Miracles, mystery and juice. These were the conquering powers, Morris told her. The fuel for a truly Promethean will. These three and you could leave all competition behind.

  The miracle was the way you changed the world. “And you’ve done that already,” he said. “You walked in that door with that miracle story. Tell it to people and they will follow you anywhere.”

  “Juice is money, I take it,” Catherine said.

  “The resources you gather around you,” Morris said. The resources to build and deliver.

  “And mystery?” she asked.

  There were fathers woven into his answer here. His own and her own. There were families not much talked about. How he even knew that she’d struggled with her father was a mystery to Catherine. Perhaps she glowed with that resentful aura visible to one who clearly bristled at the memory of his own father. In any case, Morris was saying, there were people—entrepreneurs and investors, say—who from their own sides of the table, and each for their own particular and personal reasons, wanted nothing more in business and in life than to go it alone.

  “Your pride says a partnership doesn’t make sense,” Morris said. “Your pride says that accepting my money is giving something away, like throwing yourself into the gorge.”

  Morris stopped. For effect, clearly, but Catherine did not try to fill the silence. Then he continued.

  “But with this deal, Catherine, you’ll also make yourself the only one alive who can stop your fall, catch yourself, lift yourself up very high indeed. Think unicorn, Catherine. Think of you riding a unicorn.”

  The fabled billion-dollar valuation. It was a gauche cliché, and he made that last comment with an invisible but obvious wink.

  “What about my social justice causes?” she asked, tone pointed.

  A national network of women’s shelters, a low-income children’s literacy program. Catherine had plans for DIY’s success. Building to flip is building to flop. They weren’t in it to exit. They were in it to enter the community in a meaningful way. They were in it to get people out of walk-in clinics in the Downtown East Sides of the world.

  Catherine didn’t have much experience pitching the VCs. She had zero experience receiving their pitches. But Morris was in the windup now. And here it came. He’d come in big. She would get her plan financed. She would get her causes. High heat and she caught it clean.

  “Separation provision?” she asked.

  Very smart to ask, Morris said. Split pot. They’d do fifty-fifty on the founders’ stake in the company, 51 percent of DIY divided two ways between them. There would be provisions for either of them to walk any time. Let his lawyers work up papers. Say 49 percent held back for stock options and later rounds of investment. It was a good deal, Catherine thought, when she messaged a partner at Phil’s firm later that evening. She would have talked to Phil directly, but he was apparently off to Saturna Island again, one of the Southern Gulf Islands off the mainland where he owned a hobby farm. Catherine had occasion to wonder if he sought refuge there and if he did so with anybody in particular.

  Parmer Ventures? came the verdict from Phil’s partner. Moneywise there’s hardly a decision to make here. Moneywise, you just do the deal.

  What about the buy-sell agreement? Catherine queried. Isn’t that what they call a shotgun clause?

  “We don’t really use that term,” the partner said, having picked up the phone and called her, clearly concerned she might explode the whole thing at the last second. “Obviously it’s up to you. But if you don’t sign with Morris you may be wondering for the rest of your life if a shotgun in the hands of a friend is really something to be worried about.”

  And so came the early money, followed by a tsunami of work sweeping everything away in its path. Catherine rented the warehouse space. They hired. And all the full-stack programmers and developers, all the design people, the social media and market jockeys who came aboard, streaming through the DIY Warehouse, they could all sense it too. The energy of a plan in which people believed. Morris may not have been physically present, but his confidence rang in the white rafters, in the donated artwork from local street artists, in the soundtrack of conversation and keyboards and small tools. Everybody in on the weekends. Everybody working insane hours. Sure, they were paid. But they were also going for something deeper. She didn’t oversell her agenda. It grew in the cracks between people, between ideas, like wild grass, dense with life, energetically green.

  Your body. Your data.

  And that was no empty offer, either. The future of medicine, said the Mashable article. Shirt pocket MD and personal health advisor, said WIRED. Perhaps it was all that too. They had their critics. There were doctors from various quarters taking runs at them. But Kalmar was pulling down research numbers that said the potential market was huge. People want this. They want this now. If you can have information, why not have it? They were giving people back a sense of control over something they’d long ago relinquished, control over their own bodies and health, full knowledge of their inner workings and conditions.

  They did a market feasibility study through partnership with the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, all lined up by Morris and his connections. They still didn’t have the mooring tech down or any diagnostics they could specifically promote, as the development and testing of those remained top secret. But based only on the concept, user response eclipsed expectations anyway. People sensed the potential. Mentions on the tech blogs. Mentions on the local new
s. They were rising, rising. The Warehouse was hammered. Saturdays. Sundays. Repeat. There was never not a ping-pong game going on. Never not a huddle of people around the whiteboards, process flow charts with data and decision nodes, subroutines and sequences.

  Morris was on the phone daily. “Don’t worry about what you can’t do. Just start building what you can.”

  “Minimum viable product,” Catherine would say. “We are cooking here. You should see this place.”

  “I’m loving it. I’m loving this.” And Catherine knew the hand gesture Morris was making, wagging a finger back and forth in the air: me and you. “We got this.”

  They did. Up and up in a single, cresting, exultant wave. There was no sky. Catherine was the sky.

  Until she wasn’t.

  Potential continental partners, Morris said. Of course they’d fly this direction in the new year if he asked them to. But why not send Catherine to them now? A quick trip. She could tell the story far better than Morris. It was hers to tell. He’d booked and paid for a place at Hotel Brighton by the Jardin des Tuileries. Five stars, not exactly the digs to which Catherine had been accustomed. Morris would fly her back through Chicago for a debrief, he told her. Good idea for the two of them to get some face-to-face. He was a kind man in moments like those. He had a team-building character that she knew she lacked herself, always driving things down the lane of her vision, always on her messages. Make the call, make the decision. Building to flip is building to flop, people.

  Of course all that had worked fine up to a point. Fine and dandy, and she had the sound of ping-pong in her dreams to prove it.

  Then AF801 went down and she survived.

  The phone had been ringing for a while by the time she noticed. Some strange number, which made her curse aloud. Damn you. Damn you and whatever you want. Two years into survival and this was a terrible place to be, hating a phone call when you had no idea if good or bad news was in the offing.

  She picked up. She forced herself to speak. She said: “Yes?”

  DR. MICHAEL ROSTOCK

  HE HAD AN ELEGANT VOICE. “Terribly sorry to bother you. My name is Michael Rostock. Is this Catherine Bach?”

  Measured, cautious, considerate yet with determination in reserve. He sounded older.

  Catherine listened to the ethereal crackle of phone space for several seconds, a long, steady series of audible breaths signalling that Rostock hadn’t rehearsed what came next.

  “How did you get this number?” she asked, finally.

  “Google, LinkedIn, the National Cellular Directory. It took three minutes, I’m afraid.” Rostock’s turn to pause. “I’m sorry if…”

  “What can I do for you, Michael Rostock?” she asked.

  Then he came back with it so quickly and firmly that, in a single sentence, he changed from a question to a certainty the most crucial issue of her entire survival. Did she alone obsess about who the others might be, thinking of them, trying to ignore them? Had she alone looked at the seat maps, memorized those magical numbers, recited them in times of distress and anguish?

  “Catherine Bach,” Rostock said. “You were in 2L, weren’t you?”

  She couldn’t gasp or feel angered at the intrusion. There was no shock. When Rostock said her seat number, she had instead the feeling of something released within. A flutter of wings, briefly agitated, then stilled. A calm descending. It was quite unlike anything she’d felt since before the incident itself. She felt inexplicably and finally safe.

  Of course, Catherine did not make a practice of revealing immediately the emotional currents within. So here she registered the feeling: a spreading calmness, the time-lapse shuddering of lake water from ripples to glass in the wake of a breeze. And she did not share a word of it.

  Catherine said instead, “And you?”

  “70F,” he said.

  So, Michael Rostock. He gave her the basic details quickly, as if to establish that he was ordinary enough to be trusted. He was a recently retired oncologist, research side. He lived alone in Hyde Park in Chicago, used to work out of the Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center at the university there, but had also partnered with the Stanford Cancer Institute and Johns Hopkins Hospital. Married twenty-five years. Rostock’s wife had died ten years previously of breast cancer.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Catherine said.

  Rostock murmured his thanks and the line ran silent.

  “Question?” Catherine said, unsure why on earth this next thing really needed to be asked at all. “Do you still fly?”

  He did fly, he told her. He’d never let himself stop. He admitted to a struggle. He’d had all the anxiety that the experts said he was supposed to have.

  “You’ve seen experts,” Catherine said.

  “Cognitive behavioural therapy,” Rostock said. “I did a year or so of that. Cognitive restructuring, stress inoculation training. That and a tapering dosage of benzodiazepine seemed to deal with it.”

  “And did they help you with the flying?” Catherine asked.

  Rostock wasn’t sure they had, directly. He’d white-knuckled his first few trips afterwards. Then steadily gotten used to it. “How about you?”

  She’d tried three times to buy a ticket, made it as far as the gate and turned around. Not fear exactly, she said. It was a stranger sensation. Like there was something up there she did not feel like meeting again.

  Rostock paused on that. She appreciated that he didn’t try to complete the package of every idea. “And therapy?” he asked, finally.

  She tried but couldn’t stay with it, even though the Paxipam prescribed did work to modest effect for sleeping.

  “Xanax, for me,” he said. “Do you still take it?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “But I’ve also found pinot noir works if you can hold off until 8:00 p.m. or so.”

  Rostock’s laugh was low and restrained. Like a man who’d laughed more at one time but had grown cautious. “I’ll take a gin and tonic on the odd day,” he said. “You have to be a bit gentle on yourself. And I didn’t go cold turkey on the Xanax either. I tapered off, then quit when the memories became manageable.”

  He might have been a researcher, Catherine thought, but he had the clinician’s touch, gently pointing them back to the central inquiry. So now he was probing, sketching the first moments he remembered himself, a shaking in the fuselage, a shudder then a bang. A sense of falling before the actual start of the descent. Catherine began to cough, a paroxysm of lungs and emotions and the inflamed brain. And she took the phone away from her ear as she did so, staring at it in her hand as if the little wafer with its screen icons might itself be responsible.

  Rostock, to his credit, had stopped talking by the time she returned the phone to her ear. He was waiting for her. “Sorry,” she said. And so they moved on, having established that she had memories too, probably the same ones. But that they were not going to be discussing them just at that moment.

  Rostock changed the subject. DIY. “I’ve read a bit about the company,” he said. “Quite a remarkable thing you’re building there.”

  He knew the story, roughly. High anticipation surrounding the release of the second prototype to test. All the speculation on the DIY blogs. Catherine confirmed what he knew already and then spoke a bit about the germ of the idea. She was still quite capable of remembering what excited her about it, if not always able to fully energize in response.

  “They say the biggest remaining mystery on earth is our oceans,” Catherine said, repeating a phrase she’d heard herself use often. “I say yes, but it’s the ocean of our own bodies.”

  “Well said,” Rostock answered. “And can it really sniff up T-cell counts, liver enzymes, your gizmo?”

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, assuming Rostock was smart enough to know she never actually would. “It’s a wearable. But it’s also an ingestible.”

  “Honestly,” Rostock said, with a small sigh, “you lost me at wearable.”

  A whole array of device
s that could be placed on or near the body, Catherine explained in brief, fitness trackers and smart watches all deployed with a view to tracking the data available there. DIY just went a little deeper, sending the device inside. You swallowed it.

  “And how do you get it to stay inside?” Rostock with that pressing first question.

  She deflected. They were still testing that aspect of the technology, but feeling confident.

  “Remarkable,” Rostock said. And Catherine could hear the next set of questions shaping themselves. She’d had this conversation enough to know what came next with doctors, the concerns about having their own expertise taken out of the loop. The apparent danger of raw, unfiltered data.

  “Well, there are health care professionals involved,” Catherine said, pre-empting the question. “Data goes to the cloud, where paying subscribers can have their data reviewed.”

  “And non-subscribers?”

  This was the trickiest of her critics’ questions. What if someone buys the hardware and swallows this thing, but doesn’t pay for the input from experts? There might be liability issues, though DIY lawyers seemed a long way from giving a clear answer on that. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe DIY alerts someone to risk factors for kidney disease and they end up taking a toxic dose of milk thistle. Maybe they get sick and someone sues. Maybe.

  “It’s new territory, not well charted,” that particular lawyer had said in a meeting with her and Kalmar a few months back. “But where it gets really interesting is if someone overreacts to an alert that turns out to be false. Guy ODs on some crank remedy to a problem your diagnostics identified, but which autopsy proves was never there at all. Then it’s DIY against the aggrieved and we’re into complete terra incognita.”

  “Information wants to be free,” Catherine had said then. And she said it again now to Rostock, though feeling measurably less convinced. “I suppose you disapprove. Quite a lot of docs seem to, although plenty of others ask me about buying stock if we go public.”

  No, no. Rostock laughed his low laugh again. He was fine with the concept, only perhaps because it didn’t seem to interfere with his own former area of research. There you’d still need eyes on microscopes, testable hypotheses, blind tests, peer reviews, et cetera.