Aurora(53)

Thom settled himself in the nook, arranging the accoutrements of his nap just so. He had two white-noise generators that he used—one near the office door, to block out distractions from the living areas of the house, and the other on a table beside him, in case any sounds in the room should seek to disrupt his dreamy inspiration. Thom liked four pillows on the bed, two for his head and two longer, king-size pillows he used to form a tent over his face. The pillow bases were kept close to his ears, and the apex of the triangle had to be close enough to block out light but not oxygen. He’d tried a sleep mask earlier in his napping career but found they worked too well, sending him deep into the dark waters of slumber rather than skimming along on the surface. It was there, just over wave top, where Thom’s moments of genius fluttered.

He’d taken to the cot today because he knew when a situation was in the early stages of spiraling out of control. Like the Chandler wobble—the unpredictable, irregular rotation of the earth due to its nonspherical nature—the imbalance Thom had detected in his meticulously planned disaster community was difficult to observe and maddening to anticipate. But if anybody could predict the unpredictable, he felt, it was him. He just needed to get himself in the right, deeply concentrated mental state.

He laid back on the cot, sound machines batting away all atmospheric distractions, pillow tent over his face, and he closed his eyes. The first moments of quasi-sleep were the most valuable, and the yellow legal pad was always on the cot beside him, lest he awaken and lose his thoughts in the time it would take him to get out of the nook and over to the desk.

He let his mind drift. What was wrong, and why? Most important, what could be done to correct the course they were on? That was the dream-task at hand.

When Thom was in his mid-twenties and just starting to enjoy the stratospheric success that would come to define the next decade of his life—come to define him, if he thought about it—he’d made friends with a data-storage billionaire named Walton Scutter, in the way that rich people tend to do. Hey, you’re rich, I’m rich, let’s be friends. They’d fallen into conversation at a TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco, back before the word disrupt was on the lips of every mindlessly ambitious high-schooler in the country and seemed to stand in as a synonym for innovate, which it most certainly was not. Walton Scutter was fond of tequila, and Thom tried to keep up with him that night, mostly enjoying being seen in his presence.

“Do you know the problem with being a billionaire?” Scutter had asked twenty-six-year-old Thom that night.

“I do not,” Thom replied, “but I hope I get to find out.”

“I’ll save you the wait,” Scutter said, knocking back his fourth or fifth shot of 1800 Colección. “The problem is you lose the ability to deal with the unexpected.”

“How so?”

“I’ll give you an example,” the older man said. “A week ago, I got a flat tire. I don’t know how, doesn’t matter, I was on the freeway, it started to feel funny, then it started to go thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. But I kept driving for a good minute or two, because it just wasn’t registering that, yes, that was my car making that noise, and, yes, I had a flat tire. It’s not like I’ve never had a flat tire in my life. I’ve had plenty. But I hadn’t had one since, you know, I got rich. Not rich, but rich.”

Thom wondered if he would ever speak of being rich in such casual tones. He sure the hell hoped so.

“So I pulled over and I called my guy, and I let him have it. I mean, I really laid into him. God, I was pissed off. I love cars. I have thirty-six of them. Cars are my incredibly expensive addiction, and I have a full-time staff of five people who have nothing to do except look after them. ‘How could this have happened?!’ I yelled at the guy, over the phone. ‘This can’t be! You have nothing else to do!’ And on and on. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m pretty sure I was an asshole, because I can be an asshole, I’m told. So the guy apologized up and down, and they got a tow truck—my tow truck, by the way, from my garage—out to me in about twenty minutes. But while I was sitting by the side of the road, I realized, it’s just a flat. That’s all. I must have driven over a nail. Or a chunk of metal, or broken glass. Who knows? These things happen. But I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle the unexpected, because all I could think was, With the money I pay this should never happen.”

He tossed back another shot, checked his watch, and took his sport coat off the back of a chair. “I can’t handle anything anymore. And the truth is, I’m not interested in trying. That’s the problem with being a billionaire. Nice to meet you.”

Thom had watched the older man shuffle away. He thought back to Scudder’s early, ground-breaking work in data protection, and how out-of-the-box his thinking had been, and now all he could think about was how old, soft, and spoiled he was. Thom vowed never to be like that.

On his nap cot, as his breathing slowed and he drifted into the embrace of midday sleep, Thom wondered if he had become Walton Scutter. Unable to handle the unexpected. But, thank Christ, he was thirty years younger than that guy and wasn’t trying to self-medicate his way into an early grave.

The unexpected has occurred, he thought to himself. Not the CME or the blackout—he’d been ready for those. But human behavior, with all its rampant unpredictability, had now kicked into gear, and that, like the earth’s wobble, was far more difficult to forecast. One by one, Thom thought of the half dozen unforeseen events that were threatening his planned community. Some were bigger than others, but all were contributing to instability, foretelling a slew of consequences he could not yet imagine. He reviewed them chronologically in his mind: