Amor Towles
YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DESTINATION
It had been years since Sam had been this far out on the expressway. For a few summers when he was a boy—before his family moved out west—they had driven almost to the end of it on their way to a seaside rental on Orient Point. At the time, there was nothing from Exit 40 to Exit 60, not even a gas station. Each of the off-ramps led to a little tree-lined road that led to a little tree-lined town with its own movie theater, pharmacy, and hardware store. When Sam was twenty-two, he traveled it again to spend Labor Day weekend with a college roommate. By then, every few exits you would come upon a cluster of big-box stores like AutoZone, Home Depot, and Toys “R” Us—the category killers designed to make the small towns even smaller. Now, twenty-three years later, Sam was paying witness to the latest phase in the expressway’s evolution: the so-called Millennium Miles. Thanks to a demographic analysis that sought to maximize proximity to an educated workforce, a university center, and reasonably priced housing, various members of the “new economy” had opened large, gleaming facilities along this stretch of road.
In one mile, take Exit 46, then bear left, said the pleasant voice of the GPS.
Earlier that month, having told Annie that he didn’t want anything for his birthday, Sam had bought himself a Model S. The car had cost him more than he’d intended to spend, but as his colleague covering luxury goods never tired of observing: You get what you pay for. The Model S could accelerate from zero to sixty in two seconds, travel three hundred miles without a recharge, and the engine had been designed with such care, you could hardly hear it hum. It also came with a self-driving system. By means of cameras mounted on the four corners of the car, it could follow roadways, moderate speed, make turns. The sales consultant at the dealership had conceded that it wasn’t quite foolproof yet (there had been a fatality, in fact). So the official recommendation was to use the system with one’s hands on the wheel, one’s foot on the brake, and one’s eye on the road. For the fun of it, Sam took his hands off the wheel and his foot off the gas, then watched as the blinker turned on, the engine decelerated, and the car followed its own instructions onto the off-ramp. Bearing left, the car passed over the expressway, took another left onto an access road, and a right into a parking lot.
You have arrived at your destination.
Sam wasn’t particularly surprised to find that Vitek had a crowded parking lot. But as he reassumed control of the car and steered toward the building’s entrance, he was surprised to find just six spaces reserved for customers, three of which were empty. Sam knew that Vitek’s services were expensive; he just didn’t know how expensive. When Annie had returned from an introductory meeting saying that the price was almost “unconscionable,” he had brushed the matter of expense aside. But having done so, he felt that to wade back into specifics would have diminished the nobility of his gesture. So he had never found out the actual price. That only three customers were currently shouldering the entire cost structure in front of him probably didn’t bode well. But then, by all accounts, at Vitek you got what you paid for too.
The clock on the dashboard indicated that Sam was a few minutes early. Looking through the windshield, he saw a sunlit sitting area just outside the main entrance, where some younger employees (or associates or stakeholders) were drinking coffee by a fountain.
Sam shook his head.
In the last decade, he had visited hundreds of regional power companies across the country. The meetings with management generally took place in offices that could have been in the administration suite of a public high school from the 1960s—with gray synthetic carpets, ceiling tiles, and fluorescent lights. Sam always took some comfort from the outmoded decor, because there was no better predictor of an earnings disappointment than a brand-new corporate headquarters. And while one “disruptive” business model would inevitably replace another, the good old power company would always be there to turn on the lights.
From the passenger seat came the ting of a text message. Picking up his phone, Sam saw that it was from Annie: Have Fun!
Sam typed: Will do
Then, after a moment, he added a reciprocal exclamation point.
At the front desk, Sam gave his name to an attractive young woman wearing a wireless headset. She promised that someone would be with him in a moment and invited him to take a seat. Sam chose one of the Mies van der Rohe chairs arranged around the white marble coffee table. From somewhere in the sunlit lobby came the sound of moving water.
“Is there a waterfall in here?” he asked.
The woman at the front desk looked up. “Excuse me?”
He gestured around the lobby with a smile. “I can hear the sound of water.”
Smiling back, she pointed outside. “Dr. Gerhardt had a microphone put in the fountain so that the sound could be piped in. Isn’t it soothing?”
Before Sam could answer, another attractive young woman—this one in a black skirt suit, holding a black portfolio—emerged from an elevator.
“Mr. Paxton?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Sybilla. I work with Mr. Owens. Won’t you come this way?”
Sybilla took Sam up to the third floor. When the elevator door opened, there was the distinct smell of popcorn. Sam wondered if Dr. Gerhardt was having that piped in too. But as they passed through a sitting area, he saw the brightly lit carnival-style popcorn machine in the corner.
“I think you’re really going to enjoy meeting Mr. Owens,” Sybilla said with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm. “He’s been with Vitek practically since the beginning. No one knows the company better.”
She led Sam through an open-plan workspace to a small conference room with a flat-screen television mounted on the wall. At her invitation, Sam took a seat. It was one of those ergonomic office chairs that rock and spin.
“Would you like some coffee? Sparkling water?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Mr. Owens will be joining you in just a few minutes. I’m sure you’ve read our brochure and that your wife has told you all about our work, but while you wait, Mr. Owens thought you might want to watch a short introductory film on the company.”
Without waiting for a reply, Sybilla opened her portfolio, which turned out to be an iPad, and tapped on the screen. The television on the wall lit up with the company’s logo, and as she quietly closed the door behind her, the video began.
“Welcome to Vitek,” said a voice that was at once friendly, assured, and upbeat. What followed was a typical ten-minute informational video, complete with photographic shots of Dr. Gerhardt and his partners as younger men, an animated graphic of a spinning double helix, clips of white-coated technicians in labs, news of a breakthrough, and testimonials from “actual” customers as indicated by the names, ages, and cities of residence at the bottom of the screen.
Sam hadn’t actually gotten around to reading the brochure, but the video recapped what he had gathered from Annie. A twenty-first-century fertility lab, Vitek had combined the decoding of the human genome and recent advances in behavioral science not simply to help couples become pregnant but to give them some influence over the intelligence and temperament of their child. When the company’s logo returned to the screen, the conference room’s door was simultaneously knocked upon and opened. In walked a good-looking man who was a little bit taller than Sam, and maybe a little bit younger too.