Free Shimmer by Eric Barnes Page A

managed to put down my drink rather than spilling it in my lap. “Other mainframes,” I said emptily.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThere was no Chinese programmer,” I said. “No family that sold you this system.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou had an idea. You needed my help.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThe Blue Boxes do nothing,” I said slowly, empty, even emptier.
    â€œActually,” he said, “I did have quite a bit of code written just to pull the information from the mainframes correctly. And I did come up with a way to pull information faster than ever before. It’s just that the information can’t be received without, well, without a lot of work.”
    I started to say it but stopped, knowing what Trevor would say next. Knowing exactly what words he would use.
    â€œI mean, Robbie, why else would I need this bizarre two-hour delay?”
    And I could only close my eyes.
    Later I would tell myself it had all happened too fast for me to respond any other way. I would tell myself I had to fulfill the promises we’d made to these first companies. I would tell myself Core’s reputation, my reputation, my father’s, all had been put on the line.
    But none of that is true.
    There’d been time to stop this.
    There had been plenty of time.
    Instead I made a decision, made it in the first moment after Trevor told me the truth. I made a decision when I did not, immediately, say no to Trevor. When I didn’t reject what he had done. When I didn’t call him what he was—a fraud, a liar, a high-tech con man. The awful, sick feeling that spread through my chest as I rode on that airplane, the anger and disgust, the deepest disgust pushing down on me already—all of it was real. But even then I was thinking about something else. Already my thoughts had, at the lowest level in my mind, turned to something else entirely.
    How to make this work.
    And I can’t say I was trying to protect my reputation or Trevor’s. Not the company’s. Not even my father’s.
    And I can’t say I was doing this for the money—the $28 million in sales Trevor had closed in those first three weeks. The hundreds of millions we could raise in venture capital and an IPO.
    And I can’t say it was fear. Fear of being caught, of being embarrassed by the exposure of the lie. Fear of being arrested for the fraud we had already committed.
    I thought about those things. All of them. But it was something else that drove me to push forward despite the lie. Something in myself. Something I was already repeating as I sat on that plane.
    I can make this work.
    All my life, I have worked. As a boy I went to my father’s office on the weekends and during the summer and often after school, trailing him around the company he ran, happily doing whatever work he would give me. I took out the trash, I sorted papers, I typed nonsense on computers with fingers that couldn’t spell my own name. I did anything he would let me do. Because that was my world. There was a comfort in that place, a warmth in the sounds of people talking and the sounds of computers and the sounds of the programmers and salespeople who all worked for my father. Over the years I would work hard in school, would take after-school jobs doing landscaping, construction, tech support. College, then graduate school, jobs during school and after, working sixty then seventy then eighty hours a week, programming, managing, coordinating the growth and development of new products, new applications, working till I was breathless and spent, and never once during that time did I question why I was doing it. All of it was work, and I enjoyed every moment. All I had ever wanted was to finish the task in front of me, then pick up the next, then another, then look around for more.
    Faced with the lie Trevor had laid out in front me, my response was the same one I’d always had. Work. Work harder. Work until the problem