He told the assembled cohort that the work they were going to undertake together in that place would one day be looked back upon as having changed the world. There were no smirks, no rolling of eyes. This was a collection of men and women of such talent that a comment like that didn’t seem to them in the least hyperbolic.
‘What’s this project called?’ asked one of them, when Andrei had finished.
Andrei glanced at Chris. They had been referring to it simply as the Farming Project, which wasn’t very inspirational. ‘We thought we’d leave it to you to come up with a name. There ought to be enough brainpower here to think of one.’
A ripple of laughter ran through the group.
‘What about the Manhattan Project?’ said a Spanish accented voice from the group, citing the name of the Second World War project that had spawned the atom bomb. ‘We’re on Manhattan Avenue, no?’
‘That’s right,’ said a third voice. ‘And, like you said, Andrei, we’re changing the world.’
Chris laughed. ‘Let’s just hope we don’t blow it up.’
34
THE PLAN WAS for Kevin to be in charge of the project. He relocated to Manhattan Avenue, leaving Fishbowl’s projects in the hands of two senior programmers who became joint heads of development.
Initially, Andrei planned to drop in from time to time to check on progress, but he soon found that he couldn’t stay away. The office on Manhattan Avenue housed the smartest, sharpest group of people Andrei had ever come across, passionate about knowledge, about their own areas of expertise, about breaking new ground. Just walking in there gave him a buzz. The thought that he had brought this group together made him feel both uniquely privileged and proud. He would go over to Manhattan and sit there for hours, listening, immersing himself in the detail. As people from so many varying disciplines came together, there was much shared education. There were long discussions about the nature of linguistics and its programmability and what amounted to seminars by the artificial intelligence gurus as they explained their field to everybody else. People from different disciplines brought new perspectives that opened up new ideas. The place was a hothouse of creativity.
And yet nothing much happened. Weeks went by, then months. Despite the sharing of so much knowledge, communication about the actual work underway seemed poor. Andrei knew about individual pieces of investigation that other people in the office seemed to be unaware of. He heard about collaborations that started, then stopped. Work was being done, interesting work, but it was going in a thousand directions.
After three months Andrei asked Kevin to organize a week-long seminar in which everyone would present the work they were doing. He asked Chris to join them. Chris didn’t care too much about the detail of how the problems were being solved and hadn’t spent much time in the Manhattan office, so most of it went over his head, but certain things were clear. At lunch on the second day he said to Andrei: ‘This is all over the place. These guys are running amok. And you can see they don’t think shit of Kevin.’
That was what Andrei had been thinking. The Manhattanites were treating Kevin with disdain. It was obvious that they didn’t respect him – at least partly because Kevin, from his side, didn’t seem to have put any kind of order into what they were doing and appeared to be waiting for it to emerge by itself.
The following week, Andrei went to the Manhattan office for a talk with Kevin. Kevin’s response made it the toughest conversation he had ever had. He asked Kevin to go back to Embarcadero and take up overseeing other projects again, while he, Andrei, led the Manhattan project personally. Kevin asked for more time, then begged for it. Andrei said he couldn’t give it to him. The burn rate on the project was in excess of $10 million a month and, every month, Jenn McGrealy would ask him what was happening out there. Even if it had been a tenth as much, he would have done the same thing. He had assembled the smartest team of people that probably existed anywhere on the planet at that point in time. He couldn’t waste that firepower.
Kevin left and Andrei moved in.
Andrei had already realized that the ways he had conceptualized the problems to be solved in the months prior to setting up the project were simplistic. They were much more complex. If the project was to