tell you that. Not after what we did. Not even letting him pitch.’ Chris shook his head in disgust. ‘So what? You don’t want my advice now? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I do. But I want to ask for it. I want you to wait for me to ask for it. And I don’t want you turning up like it’s your office. You never wanted a formal role, remember? You said that wasn’t the way you worked. Well, you don’t work here, Chris. You’re an investor.’
‘I never said I—’
Chris stopped. Tony Yao came around the screen with their food, beaming broadly.
‘Special treatment,’ said Chris.
‘You should come more often, like you used to,’ said Tony.
Andrei nodded.
Chris waited until Tony had gone. ‘Well, you’re the CEO.’ He took a piece of his kung pao chicken and ate it. His teeth continued clenching after he had swallowed. He put down his fork. ‘Let me tell you something, Andrei. You would never be where you are if it hadn’t been for me. You would have crashed and burned that first summer if I hadn’t found Eric for you. You guys didn’t even know enough to know how close you were to the edge. If it wasn’t for me, Andrei, you’d be sitting somewhere in someone’s programming department right now, saying, “Oh, there was this great idea I used to have for a website.” Mike Sweetman’s department, probably.’
‘I’m not saying that isn’t true. And you’ve turned your one million investment into eleven billion. So I think, you know, we can call it evens.’
Chris shook his head, steaming. ‘You’d never have created a new model of advertising. You’d never have come up with the idea of Farming. That was me, Andrei. Me!’
Andrei was silent. He took a mouthful of his noodles and chewed it. ‘I hoped you wouldn’t take this the wrong way,’ he said eventually.
‘I’m taking it like it is, Andrei.’
There was silence again. Chris chewed his chicken angrily.
‘Obviously, I hope you’ll still be a member of the board.’
Chris snorted.
‘You know,’ said Andrei, ‘I wanted to talk to you about Farming as well. I’m going to stop it.’
Chris stared at him, then put down his fork. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m going to stop Farming.’
Chris laughed.
‘I’m not joking.’
‘You spent half a billion dollars—’
‘More, actually. With Los Alamos, we’re over a billion.’
‘And you’re going to stop it?’
‘And I’m not going to license it, either. Not for advertising, anyway.’
Chris sat back. ‘And what, if you wouldn’t mind telling me, are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to stop advertising on Fishbowl. Any kind. It’s always been a necessary evil. Well, now, thanks to the IAP, it’s not necessary. Fishbowl’s going back to what it was.’
‘What it was when you were a kid in a dorm in Stanford.’
‘I’m going to license the IAP for other things – to do all the other things we said it could do. What we’ve developed is amazing. It’s Deep Connectedness in a truly radical and ground-breaking form. Can you imagine bringing education to Africa through a palotl in every classroom?’
‘It’s my word, palotl! That’s my word, Andrei! I invented it.’
‘Do you want me to call it something else?’
‘Call it what you freaking want! Andrei, listen to yourself! What the fuck are you talking about doing?’
‘Think of it, Chris. Education … medical care … citizens’ rights … We can bring all of that and more. Isn’t that an awesome vision?’
‘Every advertiser on every site across the net using our IAP, that’s my vision,’ said Chris. ‘A trillion-dollar company, that’s my vision.’
‘The revenue I get from the IAP I’ll use to run Fishbowl as a site for Deep Connectedness.’
Chris snorted. ‘What revenue?’
‘Governments will pay. Aid donors. I won’t need much.’
‘You’re out of your mind! You want to do all that stuff? Great. Do it. But don’t think anyone’s going to pay you for it. Not in this world. Don’t think you can do it if you stop Farming on Fishbowl.’
‘Fishbowl’s a sewer, Chris. It’s a stinking mess riddled with selling. It’s a place to sell stuff. That’s all it is. It’s a goddamn place to sell stuff.’
‘You are out of your fucking mind.’
‘I watched my testimony to the Senate committee. I looked at it and I saw myself and I saw someone I didn’t recognize, someone saying things I could never have imagined saying. You know who I saw? Mike Sweetman, only a hundred times worse. I saw the sum total of every hypocritical, money-grubbing, monopolistic tech CEO I’ve always despised. And I don’t want