“I sucked at math,” T.R. remarked as he piloted the flock on an obstacle course among the skyscrapers of downtown Houston. This was just a few kilometers to the east of the posh leafy neighborhood where they had lifted off a few minutes earlier. It was not, Saskia suspected, the important part of the tour. It was just T.R. getting the touristy bits ticked off the list, making sure the drones were all working.
“Or leastways, math as it was taught in the prep schools my folks sent me to. ‘How do we get to AP calc?’” He chuckled. “That’s what that’s all about. I was a twenty-seven-year-old college dropout before I finally met some real mathematicians and found that those people don’t even give a shit about calculus. My Ph.D.’s in probability and statistics. Took me ten years to get it because I was building a business and raising kids at the same time. You could say I went to grad school on the short bus.”
Alastair had warned her to expect this, encouraged her to watch a few online videos of the real T.R. Schmidt. Ninety-nine percent of all T.R. content on the normal Internet was him twenty years ago during the business-building phase of his life, making an ass of himself in deliberately amateurish television ads for his chain of family-themed strip mall restaurants, which catered to the child
birthday party market. Eventually he had hired a younger actor to slip into the role of T.R. McHooligan: a sort of goofy slapstick dad/cowboy figure, beloved of kids, relatable to men in their twenties and thirties. He was masculine enough to seem like a regular guy you could go have a beer with but not rising to the level of a potential wife-beguiler. That actor had eventually fallen into disgrace and been replaced by an animation, a change that had coincided with a rebranding and expansion of the chain into something called T.R. Mick’s. The small （by Texas standards—unbelievably colossal to Europeans） standalone restaurants had been phased out, only to crop up on yet larger parcels on the edges of cities, where they served as the central anchors of truck stop/gas stations designed around the slogan “Never Less Than a Hundred!” meaning—as every motorist in Texas understood—that the smallest T.R. Mick’s Mobility Center had a hundred fuel pumps. That did not include electric charging stations, of which there were also plenty. All sheltered from sun and rain by wide solar-power-collecting awnings and all connected into the central restaurant/entertainment plaza with moving walkways like in one of your longer airport concourses. Everyone knew and understood that this business strategy had enabled T.R. to parlay the tens of millions he had inherited from “Daddy” Schmidt into billions.
Not a whole lot of billions. T.R., over drinks last night, had been keen to make this understood. On a good day in the stock market he might be worth ten billion. He was not, he wanted it understood, one of “those tech boys” who had, as the result of an IPO, overnight come into more money than Dr. T.R. Schmidt would ever be able to accumulate simply by dint of actually growing a business. He’d made this statement matter-of-factly, in the same emotional tone he used to describe the underground plumbing that fed gasoline from central tanks out to the hundred pumps. He was not, in other words, bitter. In no way did T.R. wish to deprecate “the tech boys” who had ten times as much money as him. No, it was that the rootedness of his fortune in “steel in the ground” was somehow going to become a part of the argument he was making today.
They swung north up a downtown thoroughfare that was labeled “Main Street” on the augmented-reality overlay in the drone’s bubble. In a few moments this terminated in a small plaza on the edge of a swollen brown stream. Another stream of about the same size emptied into it here. Several bridges had been thrown over these watercourses. “I promise I’m about done with the tourist shit,” T.R. said. “This here, the confluence of Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou, is Allen’s Landing, where Houston was founded two hundred years ago. Y’all ought to be seeing a little old 3D movie playing right about now. Holler if it ain’t.”
The glass bubble darkened, cutting down the brightness of the incoming sunlight, and the landscape seemed to turn green. The bridges and streets were still visible, but they’d been overlaid with an artist’s conception of what this place had looked like a couple of hundred years ago. Mostly it looked like the same kind of vegetation Saskia and her companions had traveled through between Waco and Sugar Land. In this fictional rendering, some sail-and oar-powered wooden vessels, including some indigenous canoes, had congregated on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, right where the present-day historic site was located. A man in a broad-brimmed hat was standing on a platform reading from a fancy document. Basically it looked like a cut scene from one of your more expensively produced video games: close to photorealistic if you didn’t zoom in too far. The actor who had recorded this dialog had done the best he could with the material that had been handed to him. But at the end of the day, the words were those of a real estate prospectus that had been written in 1836—not exactly Shakespeare.