Free Shimmer by Eric Barnes Page B

went away. From the moment he told me the truth on that plane,my thought was to move forward, to do the best work I could. And if I did that, then soon, soon, I was sure, I would overcome Trevor’s lie.
    And so I set us out to grow. Adding staff, adding office space, adding computers and networking and servers and satellite connections, adding departments and managers and production capacity and adding clients and vendors and suppliers and partners.
    And from that first day, adding pieces to a hidden series of mainframes and satellites and servers. Creating, almost immediately, a shadow network that made the Blue Boxes work.
    Or, really, that made the boxes appear to work.
    As Trevor had said, his Blue Boxes did do one thing as promised. Trevor had come up with a way to pull information from a mainframe forty times faster than a Fadowsky Box. The problem was that the information could not be sent to its destination—another mainframe or server—without a massive amount of processing.
    What this meant was that for every minute of processing time we saved a client, we created five minutes of processing time for ourselves. And it was processing that could only be done by a mainframe. Many mainframes. Given the number of Blue Boxes Trevor sold in just the first few weeks, and given the huge amount of information being passed by the clients we were signing up, I could see that I would immediately be forced to set up a series of farms of dedicated mainframes. Soon the math became very simple. For every pair of Blue Boxes Trevor sold, Core was $100,000 in the hole.
    In the first weeks after the demonstration, I spelled this out to Trevor. He only shrugged.
    â€œTrevor,” I said, “it will only take us a few months to spend what this first group of clients has paid.”
    He smiled. “Then I guess I’ll have to bring in more money.”
    And that was something Trevor could do. He was on the road seven days a week, traveling across the country, across borders, across time zones and oceans. Calling me from cell phones and pay phones and hotel phones to report his sales for the day, the week or month. He sold Blue Boxes to banks, government agencies, defense contractorsand insurance companies. He began to hire a sales staff that, by the end of the first year, numbered three hundred, all of them working from the road. No office, no desk at headquarters, they were trained by Trevor in hotel rooms worldwide, then given a corporate credit card, a stack of business cards and two rolling silver cases holding demo Blue Boxes and satellite dishes.
    Soon they too were reporting sales to the New York headquarters.
    Within a year sales reached $50 million a week.
    And soon we were deep into a course that was part shell game, part Ponzi scheme as I took money from new clients to pay for the processing of the old, secretly buying services from vendors around the world, rapidly buying our own mainframes to covertly process the clients’ information. It was a race, really, that we could lead, for now, by adding new clients, by finding outside investors and by taking the company public. And we did all that. In a flurry of glowing press coverage, singularly positive word of mouth, and the flawless analysis of the Wall Street brokerage houses.
    Within six months of the first demonstration, Core was a phenomenon. First we were pictured on the covers of some twenty niche computer magazines. Then we started finding our way onto the front pages of major newspapers and the covers of national magazines. Trevor and I were hailed as groundbreaking and tenacious entrepreneurs, farsighted capitalists who’d outlast the faddish dot-coms, new-thinking visionaries climbing to the forefront of the newest of the new economies.
    Meanwhile, the incoming money meant that, in the first year, I’d been able to build a massive secret network of satellites and mainframe computers. Stretching from Oregon to Ireland to Indonesia, at