I wanted to help her—really—and not just because of the thunder in her eyes. But before I could figure out how, I was hit by a vision of Roger LeBrock, standing behind her, pulling her strings. And he wasn’t just asking me to pass back some data. He was asking me to pass up a golden opportunity—maybe a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—to create something truly amazing. I could understand why he wouldn’t care about that, but what about Carolyn? What earthly reason was there for my wife to side with him?
Then it struck me. All Carolyn could see when she thought of the data was base metal. The same thing everyone else could see. The vision of the gold it could become was still in only one place. Inside my head. She should have trusted me—I was annoyed that she didn’t—but if I explained to her what I was planning, I knew she’d soon understand.
“If your man Roy was going to paint what happens next in our lives, what would he call it?” Carolyn broke my train of thought. “The Kiss what? How many of them did he do? Forty-seven? Or The Break-up Two?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m telling you to make a choice. Give me the data you stole, and we’ll go forward, together. Refuse, and you’ll lose me as sure as Jeff lost that bimbo on the wall behind you.”
“You’ll walk out over a bunch of someone else’s data? You haven’t even let me tell you what I need it for, yet. If I could just—”
“That’s your decision?” She turned away, then stopped. “I’m really disappointed, Marc. But you’ve made your choice. Now live with it.”
“Wait. Come back. Let’s start this conversation again. Talk things through properly.”
She strode the whole length of the hallway, then paused with one hand on the front door handle, breathing heavily. For a moment she was transformed into the girl I’d fallen in love with at college, all those years ago. Lost. Out of breath. An air of bewilderment adding spice to her beauty as she blundered into my lecture theater. My pulse spiking dangerously before she realized her mistake and retreated from the room.
Back then, it had taken me two days to track her down. And another three to conjure an opportunity to speak to her. But now, before I could say another word she yanked open the door and walked out of our house, not bothering to close it behind her.
“You bastard, Marc.” She fired her parting shot without even turning her head. “You selfish, miserable bastard. You have no idea what damage you’ve done.”
Monday. Late afternoon.
THREE MONTHS AFTER MY FIRST CAR DASHBOARD PRODUCT launched, I brought out an even better, premium version. One that featured real-time updates. It was a big improvement. Customers loved it. I made a lot more money as a result. But as I stood in my kitchen that afternoon, listening to Carolyn’s tires crunching angrily across the gravel on our driveway, I couldn’t help but picture how my life would look now if it was displayed on the upgraded system. The “marriage” needle would be moving before my eyes, winding back from green to amber. But no farther. Not all the way to red. Maybe I’d been wrong about our issues. Maybe they weren’t as far behind us as I’d thought, but our marriage was fundamentally strong. It would survive. Carolyn would be back, once her rage had burned itself out. I mean, she’d literally left the door open. How much more symbolic could she have been?
I had no idea how long Carolyn would be gone—she’d never done anything as extreme as this before—but it made sense to take advantage of the time she’d given me. Especially now that there’d be no tequila-fueled distractions in my path. So, I went to my study, pulled out the memory sticks, and fired up my computer. I was excited. I didn’t know if I could really turn my vision into reality, but if I succeeded, it would be nothing short of the Burj Khalifa of analytical tools. It would etch my name into the competitive intelligence landscape forever. But to change the game that dramatically—whether you’re talking about architecture or software design—you need to build on solid foundations. I knew that how I approached these first steps was absolutely critical. And that by leaving me in peace to concentrate, whether she’d meant to or not, Carolyn had done me a huge favor.
Like most big ideas, mine was actually incredibly simple. The seed had been planted in my mind at AmeriTel’s headquarters over the weekend, when I was putting the finishing touches to a new report I’d created. The report contained a ton of dynamite information, but my heart sank when I pictured myself presenting it to AmeriTel’s board. It would be the same old story—their two-minute pretense of paying attention, followed by increasingly feeble attempts at disguising their boredom while one vital detail after another sailed over their empty heads. The anticipation was weighing me down until it gave way to a momentary fantasy—the thought of walking into the boardroom with a cappuccino in my hand instead of a sheaf of handouts saying, Nothing to worry about this week, guys, and then just leaving. Because it struck me: Ultimately, most people don’t give a damn about details. Busy people, anyway. They just want confirmation that things are OK, or a warning if they’re not. I’d known that instinctively when I created the Car Dashboard system, but now I thought, why not take it a step further? Why not take it all the way to its logical conclusion? What if I put an attention-grabbing object in the office of every director and every manager in the country? It could be anything. A glass sphere. A sculpture. A football-team mascot. The frame around the obligatory family photograph. And with no human interaction at all, the whole thing would change color, foreseeing the future like a twenty-first century oracle.
I pictured a CEO’s office: A meeting in progress. Four or five of the company’s top people sitting around a table, arguing. A crystal globe in the center, glowing softly. The whole thing a warm, reassuring green. Then it changes to red. The debate stops, mid-sentence. They know they have a problem. But where do they go to uncover the source? What can give them the exact information they need to fix things before it’s too late?
One thing will be able to. And one thing only. My new software.
Like most ideas that don’t seem complicated on the surface, mine was going to be fiendishly complex when I stripped it down to the nuts and bolts. But that knowledge only encouraged me. I actually have a version of JFK’s words from 1962 in a frame on my walclass="underline" We choose to do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. So, I did what I always do when I’m starting something new. I glanced up at that quotation for inspiration. Then I rolled up my sleeves and started pounding on the keyboard.
IT TOOK ME JUST over four hours to come up with a first pass for the basic algorithms I figured I was going to need. Some parts were taken from products I’d created before. Some parts were new. They were cobbled together into a very bare skeleton, and it was going to take weeks more work to even get close to fleshing the whole thing out. But the first step had been taken. Now it was time to run the initial batch of tests, which would tell me what to do next. This is where the data’s needed, so I plugged in one of the memory sticks. I drained it dry, and was about to add the files from the second when I paused. I’d already given the system hundreds of millions of bytes to chew on. That was enough at this early stage. More would just slow things down. It was time to cross my fingers and roll the dice.
When you click the mouse and set a prototype running, you don’t just trigger a program in a computer. You trigger a series of emotions in yourself. And they always go the same way. First, elation, that you’ve taken a tangible step toward your goal. Then anticipation, because you’ll soon see how big that step is. And finally impatience, because once the machine starts to run, there’s nothing for you to do till it spits out its results. Depending on the complexity of the job, that can take anything from a few merciful minutes to several torturous hours.