He let his mind drift. What was wrong, and why? Most important, what could be done to correct the course they were on? That was the dream-task at hand.
When Thom was in his mid-twenties and just starting to enjoy the stratospheric success that would come to define the next decade of his life—come to define him, if he thought about it—he’d made friends with a data-storage billionaire named Walton Scutter, in the way that rich people tend to do. Hey, you’re rich, I’m rich, let’s be friends. They’d fallen into conversation at a TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco, back before the word disrupt was on the lips of every mindlessly ambitious high-schooler in the country and seemed to stand in as a synonym for innovate, which it most certainly was not. Walton Scutter was fond of tequila, and Thom tried to keep up with him that night, mostly enjoying being seen in his presence.
“Do you know the problem with being a billionaire?” Scutter had asked twenty-six-year-old Thom that night.
“I do not,” Thom replied, “but I hope I get to find out.”
“I’ll save you the wait,” Scutter said, knocking back his fourth or fifth shot of 1800 Colección. “The problem is you lose the ability to deal with the unexpected.”
“How so?”
“I’ll give you an example,” the older man said. “A week ago, I got a flat tire. I don’t know how, doesn’t matter, I was on the freeway, it started to feel funny, then it started to go thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. But I kept driving for a good minute or two, because it just wasn’t registering that, yes, that was my car making that noise, and, yes, I had a flat tire. It’s not like I’ve never had a flat tire in my life. I’ve had plenty. But I hadn’t had one since, you know, I got rich. Not rich, but rich.”
Thom wondered if he would ever speak of being rich in such casual tones. He sure the hell hoped so.
“So I pulled over and I called my guy, and I let him have it. I mean, I really laid into him. God, I was pissed off. I love cars. I have thirty-six of them. Cars are my incredibly expensive addiction, and I have a full-time staff of five people who have nothing to do except look after them. ‘How could this have happened?!’ I yelled at the guy, over the phone. ‘This can’t be! You have nothing else to do!’ And on and on. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m pretty sure I was an asshole, because I can be an asshole, I’m told. So the guy apologized up and down, and they got a tow truck—my tow truck, by the way, from my garage—out to me in about twenty minutes. But while I was sitting by the side of the road, I realized, it’s just a flat. That’s all. I must have driven over a nail. Or a chunk of metal, or broken glass. Who knows? These things happen. But I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle the unexpected, because all I could think was, With the money I pay this should never happen.”
He tossed back another shot, checked his watch, and took his sport coat off the back of a chair. “I can’t handle anything anymore. And the truth is, I’m not interested in trying. That’s the problem with being a billionaire. Nice to meet you.”
Thom had watched the older man shuffle away. He thought back to Scudder’s early, ground-breaking work in data protection, and how out-of-the-box his thinking had been, and now all he could think about was how old, soft, and spoiled he was. Thom vowed never to be like that.
On his nap cot, as his breathing slowed and he drifted into the embrace of midday sleep, Thom wondered if he had become Walton Scutter. Unable to handle the unexpected. But, thank Christ, he was thirty years younger than that guy and wasn’t trying to self-medicate his way into an early grave.
The unexpected has occurred, he thought to himself. Not the CME or the blackout—he’d been ready for those. But human behavior, with all its rampant unpredictability, had now kicked into gear, and that, like the earth’s wobble, was far more difficult to forecast. One by one, Thom thought of the half dozen unforeseen events that were threatening his planned community. Some were bigger than others, but all were contributing to instability, foretelling a slew of consequences he could not yet imagine. He reviewed them chronologically in his mind:
Marques had shown up to the airport with a family.
Aubrey had failed to follow all his good advice.
His dentist had proven to be a bad hire.
Jimmy had asked to bring an unvetted stranger into the complex.
Ann-Sophie had returned home yesterday at dinnertime with her cheeks flushed, her speech slurred, and had lied about where she’d been, and,