“We can’t sell it. I can’t have someone turn it into a hack meditation app like all the other ones out there.” They had labeled it a meditation app, but Shloka was really a tool that helped you come back to yourself. It monitored your vitals during episodes that made you feel out of control and helped you work through and calm your emotions. It worked with the Neuroband Cullie had designed, a bracelet that measured heart rate and breath so the app could match them with ancient chants. Shloka realigned you.
Millions of people needed it to get through the day. Anxiety was at epidemic levels in the world right now.
“I know,” CJ said. “That’s why a subscription is our only answer. The projections are bad. It’s going to be worth your while. Trust me.”
“I already have more money than I know what to do with. I won’t compromise something that helps people.”
CJ let out the deepest sigh. “Just twenty-five,” she said, almost to herself. “I’d like to meet your mother someday.” She scratched her cropped hair—almost the exact same style as Cullie’s—and studied Cullie as though she were a wonder. Well, she was, but the CEO had never looked at her this way. “My children blow through money like it’s dust in a sandstorm. And they haven’t made any of it themselves.” Just as easily, her frustrated-mom face swapped back to her CEO face. “I need this subscription fee to meet my numbers, or it’s my job on the line. We had a bad year.”
“So did our competitors,” Cullie countered, ignoring the sound Steve made somewhere behind her.
“Fair enough. But I can’t save everyone else’s job if I don’t save mine.”
“You said it was past its download prime in the life cycle. A subscription fee will make that worse. It will make customers drop Shloka en masse.” Which meant people who needed it wouldn’t be able to keep using it. “What if I gave you another app. A new one that starts a life cycle. One that uses the Neuroband so we get fresh sales on that hardware. But only if you keep Shloka funded and free.”
Cullie had no idea where that had come from, but one elegantly tweezed brow rose as CJ met her eyes. “You have something you’ve been working on?” Her gaze swept to Steve, who’d been breathing heavily but wordlessly. CJ and the board had been begging Cullie for something new for two years.
Throwing Steve under the bus, wiping that patronizing smirk off his face: it would be delicious. But she couldn’t do it. “I haven’t told him about it. It’s a passion project. No one knows about it.” Not even Cullie herself, because she’d just pulled that out of thin air. Well, she’d simply have to come up with something.
“Can I talk to you alone?” Steve said behind her.
Cullie was about to tell him to take a hike when she realized he wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to CJ. A fresh wave of betrayal rose like water in her lungs, so swift and brutal the Neuroband on her wrist vibrated for her to calm down. To hell with that. She was angry enough to blow out Shloka’s algorithm.
She stepped between him and CJ. “Actually, CJ, I have some things I’d like to discuss with you privately first.” If she sounded like a child, so be it. She might as well play to the audience.
CJ looked from Cullie to Steve and weighed their value in this situation against each other. Then she turned to Steve. “Why don’t you wait in your office, and I’ll let you know when Cullie and I are done.”
CHAPTER THREE
ALY
She had no idea I knew that the bikini she was wearing was stolen. But not too many women wore red bikinis in Goa in 1974. And no woman I ever met wore it quite like that. As though the scraps of cloth were a lover and she knew exactly how lucky the bastard was.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
Aly adjusted her gray silk jacket over her trousers. She’d remembered to leave the jacket on a hanger, but she could hardly take her pants off at the office.
Aly hated—loathed—wrinkles. They were a simple thing to control about your appearance. Aly had no patience for the kind of person who shuffled through life with crumpled clothing as though they couldn’t even bring themselves to care about their own appearance.
Joyce Komar, Aly’s boss and the head producer at Southwest Florida News, never had a wrinkle on her clothing. Aly’s own mother, the always perfectly put-together Karen Menezes, most certainly never did either. And here Aly was wearing wrinkled pants on a day as important as today.
Thanks to Meryl Streep, Aly’s career dreams were about to come true. No more spot reporting on diversity stories. Finally, Aly was going to anchor her own segment, do a full interview.
Ms. Streep was scheduled to spend the winter on Marco Island as part of her research for her next film, which according to Aly’s top secret insider intel was set in a retirement community there. Aly’s best friend’s son’s boyfriend worked for Ms. Streep’s talent agency, and he’d been able to get Aly in touch with her people. And Aly had snagged an exclusive interview for SFLN.
What on earth had possessed her to experiment with a new brand of trousers? There was a reason why Aly stuck with tried and tested things. The trousers were covered in those ugly horizontal wrinkles that ran across your crotch when you dared to sit down. It was the twenty-first century. Why did companies still make clothing that punished you for the act of sitting?
Aly checked her wristwatch. She had twenty-seven minutes before the editorial meeting that was going to change the trajectory of her career. She could feel it in her bones. Grabbing her purse, she ran out of her office. Wrinkled pants were not going to keep this from her.
It took her three minutes to drive to the Ann Taylor store, then another five minutes to run in and grab a pair of slim-fit black pants in a size six, twenty-nine-inch inseam. It had taken her years to zero in on the perfect combination of an interval workout routine and a diet so she could wear these pants and look like someone who fit the role of a news anchor. It took another five minutes to pay, then another five to drive back—because this was Naples, and she got stuck behind a driver who had nowhere to be.
Switching the pants out took two minutes. After that she touched up her lipstick, sprayed the flyaways from her chignon with her travel-size antifrizz mist, and gathered her iPad for notes. She was still the first person in the conference room.
Joyce followed half a minute later and smiled when she saw Aly. Her “There you are, on time as always” smile. As always, Aly wasn’t sure if it was admiration or annoyance—another trait her boss shared with her mother.
“Our ratings are down two and a half points,” Joyce said five minutes later to the seven people sitting soldier straight around the conference table she commanded like the captain of industry she was. Her perfectly styled blonde hair, polished blush nails, the humongous cluster of diamonds on her ring finger: it all announced, rather loudly, exactly how much she “had it all.”
“Honestly”—she threw a loathing look around the table—“our content has been so boring these days, even I don’t want to watch us.”
They were a news channel; entertaining content should not be their job. But not one person at the table pointed that out. Aly sure as hell didn’t.