Free The Dark Side by Anthony O'Neill Page A

business partners: Balls of Brass , Tarnished Brass , Corroded Brass, and so on. In fact, the disparity between the official and unofficial versions would leave readers struggling to work out how much is real and what is wholesale fabrication.
    The authorized versions usually begin with Fletcher Brass, the whiz-kid seventeen-year-old, going public with his very first business venture—carbonated coconut-milk drinks in distinctive brass-colored cans. The unauthorized versions meanwhile claim to prove, with documented evidence, that Brass’s venture capitalist father actually underwrote the whole business as a tax dodge, that its supposed success was wildly exaggerated anyway, and that the original recipes were stolen from a struggling Filipino soft-drink manufacturer (which subsequently sued and settled out of court).
    The authorized versions continue by covering Brass’s other early success stories: aquafarms, holo-movies, luxury hotels, ultrasonic jets, extravagantly retro airships, brass-fitted cruise ships. The unauthorized versions focus instead on his unpleasant habit of bootstrapping fledgling companies with poorly paid, geed-up employees, reaping a lot of early publicity with bold statements and dazzling stunts, and then selling off the entire enterprise at a huge profit to some starry-eyed conglomerate—often the same rival company he’d mercilessly ridiculed on the way up.
    The authorized versions portray him as a fearless adventurer and thrill seeker who somehow found enough time to also be a champion of various social issues, a major sponsor of environmental campaigns, and a generous contributor to popular charities. The unauthorized versions insist that everything, all those eye-catching stunts and altruistic charity drives, were shamelessly contrived for publicity purposes alone, and were no match for allthe rampant price-fixing, insider trading, jury tampering, industrial espionage, and bribery of public officials.
    The authorized versions find little space for any of Brass’s romantic interests other than his second wife—the one who died in a boating accident—while the unauthorized versions devote pages and pages to his affairs with bikini models, porn stars, and other men’s wives.
    The authorized versions cover “The Brass Code,” his notorious twenty-page list of business ethics and philosophies, by listing only the more socially acceptable entries: If the river bends, think about bending the river ; Acknowledge when you’re beaten, and never be beaten again ; If you fall into a hole, turn it into a strategy . The unauthorized versions, meanwhile, make great hay of Brass’s secret code, the one shared with only his most trusted, high-ranking deputies: If someone fucks you over, fuck them under ; Shareholders are like nuns just begging to be screwed ; You can’t make an omelette without cracking a few skulls.
    The authorized versions are especially rhapsodic when it comes to Brass’s contributions to lunar development, crediting him with practically everything: the first m-train, the first solar arrays, the first operational mines, the first fiber-optic cables, the first emergency-supply depots, the first reliable ground maps, the first permanent settlements. The unauthorized versions, while grudgingly admitting that his place in lunar history is assured, contend that all these efforts, despite Brass’s convenient amnesia, were underwritten by generous grants, tax breaks, mining rights, and incentive schemes.
    The authorized versions claim that Brass was forced to find refuge on Farside owing to an outrageous campaign of vilification generated by rival businessmen with inordinate media influence. The unauthorized versions are more specific, identifying one scandal in particular that brought him down: three tons ofspent rods from a nuclear power station, fired into space by one of Brass’s underfinanced waste-disposal companies, fell back to