The Future Will Be BS Free Page 5

  “Sam?” someone called.

  I looked around. A guy in a suit with a buzz cut was hurrying toward me.

  “Got a minute?” he called.

  “Sure.” I was trying to figure out how he knew me. I didn’t recognize him—he was white, in his twenties, dark hair and eyes, a Long Island accent.

  As he reached me, he held out his hand. “Xavier Leaf.”

  “Sam Gregorious.”

  “I know.” He was standing just a little too close. I took a half step back and he closed the space again, plus an additional two inches. I could smell his aftershave. “We’re both busy people, so let me get right to the point. You’re working on something that intrigues the firm I work for, and they would like to discuss—”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  He gave me a big smile, clapped my shoulder. “Come on, Sam. No one can keep a secret these days.”

  I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry. “We haven’t talked about it, tweeted about it, or posted selfies of us working on it. I don’t understand how some tech firm heard about us working on something in our garage.”

  He was one of those relatively good-looking, relatively well-built, relatively tall men who ooze confidence, and relish the fact that you don’t. “Let’s put it this way. The people I work for are in the business of knowing other people’s business. The important thing is, they want to buy the rights to your technology, and they’re willing to pay above fair market.” He leaned in even closer, and this time I pulled back emphatically. “We’re talking seven figures here, Sam. And the number does not begin with a one. In exchange, you turn over your research, forswear all rights to develop this technology, and agree never to speak about it to anyone.”

  I mentally laid out a number with a tail of six zeros. Millions. He was talking about millions.

  We’d talked about this possibility, and agreed we wanted to own the truth app. If it was ours, the sky was the limit. One day we’d be on TV, telling the story of how we started TruthCorp in our garage. Assuming the offer was legit, it meant we were on the right track.

  “I can take an offer to my partners, but I’m telling you right now, they won’t be interested.”

  Xavier Leaf looked at the ground, shook his head like he was disappointed. “Sammy, you really want to take this offer.”

  A woman pushing a baby carriage passed us. As we waited, I looked up and down the trash-strewn sidewalk, wondering why this guy had approached me here. Why hadn’t he set up a meeting with the five of us in his company’s swanky office? Come to think of it—

  “How did you find me here?”

  Xavier Leaf shrugged. “My employers can find you anywhere, Sam. Your friends, too. Theo. Molly. Rebe. Basquiat.” He rolled his eyes toward the sky. “Who am I forgetting? Oh, right—Boob! How could I forget a guy named Boob? Where I went to school, they’d have kicked his ass every day until either he changed it or moved away.”

  The way he had ticked through our names gave me a chill. And here we’d thought Theo was being paranoid.

  “Unless they keep you kids in the genius program completely separate from the rank and file so they can’t pick on you?” He spread his hands. “I’m not sure how it works.”

  “I’d like to watch someone pick on Miller Basquiat.”

  Leaf pointed at me. “That’s true. I forgot he was a running back. You’re right, no one would screw with that guy.”

  “Give me your number. I’ll let you know.”

  Leaf handed me a card. I shoved it in my pocket.

  “I really hope you take the offer, because you seem like a nice kid. These are serious people, Sam.”

  “So are we.”

  He smiled. “You think you are, but you’re not. It’s tough to be serious when you’re seventeen.” He turned, raised one hand. “Good luck with your garage sale.” The way he said it made it clear just how pathetic he thought a garage sale was.

  “How did he know where to find you?” Boob asked for the tenth time.

  “I think that was the point,” Molly said. “To show us he could find us anywhere. It’s shock and awe, to make us feel weak so we’ll sell.”

  “We should sell,” Boob said.

  “No.” Theo put a protective hand on the laptop. “They’ll probably keep the technology secret and use it to their own advantage. Or sell it to the government. I want to disrupt the status quo, not empower it.”

  “We talked about this,” Basquiat said. “We’re not going to let some corporation steal this from us.”

  “I say we take it,” Rebe said. “Millions of dollars, guaranteed?”

  I was happy to hear Theo was on my side. It was four to two against selling, but in fairness, even if Theo’s was the only no vote, he should have gotten his way.

  Boob dragged one hand through his close-cropped hair. “Who told them we were working on it?” He looked around. “One of us leaked this, after Theo warned us a thousand times not to say anything to anyone.” He pointed at the ground. “Right here, right now, everyone needs to say who they told.” He pointed at me. “Who have you told?”

  “My mother. Period. Just like we agreed.”

  “No one else? You swear?”

  “You want me to cross my heart and hope to die?” I huffed in frustration. “You know what? If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right, so there’s no lingering suspicion.”

  “Good,” Theo said. “I want to test the new modifications anyway.”

  * * *

  —

  I turned the laptop toward Rebe. “Who have you told about our project?”

  “The pope,” Rebe said. “And Santa.” She ticked the names off with her fingers as the true/false meter rose toward ten, also known as Pants on Fire. “God, Luke Skywalker, the president—”

  “Cut it out, Rebe,” Boob said. “Who have you told?”

  Rebe looked at Boob, resting her chin on the backs of her fingers like a cutesy model. “No one. I told my parents it was a science project. I told my sister it was none of her damned business.”

  The virtual needle didn’t budge. It sat at zero. Rebe was telling the truth.

  Boob consulted the list he’d created. “So we know there are seven people besides us who know.” Boob neglected to mention that he was responsible for three of them. “We need to interrogate those people.”

  Boob, who was slouched on the beanbag chair in the corner of Basquiat’s basement, muttered to himself. Molly was looking up something on her phone. Basquiat was sitting on the floor hugging his knees, staring off into space.

  “How can they know?” Rebe asked. “If nobody told them, how can they know?”

  “One of us must have said something to someone, but doesn’t remember,” I suggested. “If you don’t remember, it wouldn’t register as a lie.”

  “That seems like a stretch,” Basquiat said. “Theo reminds us about six times a day that this needs to stay secret. I can’t imagine one of us telling someone and then forgetting.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “Then how did they find out?”

  “I don’t know.” Basquiat bumped his forehead with his fist. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  My phone rang.

  “Sam? Xavier Leaf.”

  “Hi there, Xavier. We were just talking about you.”

  Everyone moved closer.

  “Have you had a chance to discuss our proposition with your partners? I know we never actually talked figures.”

  “I’m not sure we’ve discussed anything but your proposition.”

  “Let me fill you in on the details. The offer is eight point five million. You turn over all documents and hardware relating to the project and sign a nondisclosure and noncompete agreement.”

  I almost asked him to repeat the number. Eight? Had
he said eight? “Hold a minute.” I muted the phone. “They’re offering eight point five million.”

  “What?” Boob clapped a palm to his forehead. “Oh my God.”

  “Two, eight—the principle’s the same,” Basquiat said. “They’re offering it because the truth app is worth ten times that.”

  “He’s waiting. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down?” I said.

  Rebe’s was the only thumbs-up vote. I looked at Boob, eyebrows raised.

  “Screw them,” Boob said.

  I looked at Rebe, who was still giving a thumbs-up.

  “Okay, fine.” She turned her thumb down. “Screw them. Let’s go for the big bucks.”

  Basquiat leaped to his feet, raced over, and hugged Rebe.

  I unmuted my phone. “We took a vote, and I’m afraid it’s a unanimous no.”

  “Wow. I’m shocked. I don’t think that was the right move.”

  “Excuse me, but this is our project. We developed it. If we don’t want to sell it, that’s our business.”

  Leaf heaved a sigh. “I don’t really think it’s that simple.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” From the start, there’d been an undertone when Leaf spoke, like a bully blocking me from getting to my locker.

  “I already told you, Sam. I represent serious people.”

  “And I told you, we’re serious, too.”

  Rebe held out her hand. “Let me talk to him.”

  “Take another vote, Sam. Get it right this time. Call me back.” The line went dead.

  “What did he say?” Rebe asked.

  “He said we should take another vote and get it right this time, because he works for serious people.”

  Theo peeled his phone off his wrist, turned it around, and popped the tiny door off the back. He pried the lithium-ion battery out with his fingernail. He gestured at Boob’s phone. “Take out your batteries. Everybody. This has to be how they tracked Sam to the flea market. They hacked into a GPS satellite.”

  When we’d all complied, Theo looked around and retrieved his backpack from the couch. “We have to get to work. We have to finish this project and get the truth machine into the world as soon as possible. Whenever we’re together, we have to take our batteries out of our phones. We make sure nothing is connected to the net in the workshop.”

  “Give me those.” Rebe snatched up the phones. “I’ll disable the interactive functions so we can at least use them to lurk.”

  Watching Rebe work a phone was like watching a concert pianist play Mozart. She whispered commands that I didn’t understand while simultaneously tapping nonstop as subscreens opened inside subscreens. It was hard to believe the phone was the same device as mine. I couldn’t help wondering what Rebe might be able to do if she had a state-of-the-art system instead of the ten-year-old crap we could afford.

  She handed me my phone. I strapped it back on my wrist.

  “How are we going to communicate with people if we can’t do anything with these but lurk?” I asked.

  “Face to face,” Rebe said.

  “Night and day. We have to work night and day until we’re done.” Theo pushed the bridge of his glasses, looked at me. “Do we have enough money to buy the SQUID?”

  I looked at Boob. “As soon as he sells his car, we do.”

  Boob cursed under his breath.

  “Please. Sell the car,” Theo implored. “If the project fails, I’ll find a way to pay you back. You’ve got my word. We have an opportunity to make that mean something again, when someone gives their word. We can’t lose it. We just can’t.”

  It was dark, and raining, when I left Rebe’s, my rear tire spraying water up the back of my shirt.

  The door of a shiny black Lexus parked along Scher Drive opened. A black umbrella unfolded as a man stepped out.

  I slowed, pulled to stop alongside Xavier Leaf.

  “Not a very nice evening for a bike ride.”

  I didn’t answer.

  He gestured toward the rear door of the Lexus. “Get in. Let’s talk.”

  I remained straddling my bike. Ms. Holbrook, our social studies teacher, once told us part of winning a negotiation was to take control of the situation—who sits where, who talks when—because it makes your adversary feel like a child. Maybe Leaf just wanted to stay warm and dry, but I wasn’t going to let him tell me where to sit. “What do you want?”

  Leaf looked into the dark sky from under his umbrella. “The offer is seven point five million. It drops a million a day.”

  “So in eight days it’ll be zero, and you’ll stop bothering us.”

  Raindrops pattered on Leaf’s umbrella. “Man. I’m trying to help you, and you’re just not getting it.”

  I stood still, rain pouring down my face, shocked by his words. There was no mistaking it this time—it was a threat. “What are you saying?”

  He tilted his head. His brown eyes were cold and flat, like a lizard’s. “You know, when I was in high school there was this kid named Arthur Modell. Skinny kid. He had a mouth on him, and ended up getting into an argument with this girl, clueless to the fact that her boyfriend was Ralph Shapiro, whose nickname was Conan the Barbarian. Conan leveled Arthur with one punch.” Leaf demonstrated the knockout punch in slow motion. “But he didn’t stop there. He lifted Arthur off the floor by his hair and was about to punch him again when guess what idiot stepped in to stop him?”

  He waited for me to guess. I waited for him to make his point. Since I didn’t know where Leaf had gone to high school, or when, the answer seemed pretty damned obvious.

  He pointed to a thin scar running through his right eyebrow. “I’d like to think I put up a better fight than Arthur, but Conan gave me this, along with a lot of bruises. My point is, I’m one of the good guys. I’m trying to step in before you guys get creamed.” He got into his Lexus. “Tomorrow the offer is six point five.”

  I clutched my bike’s handlebars, too shaken to ride.

  Mom leaned so far forward, her hands gripping the wheelchair’s armrests, that I was sure she was going to topple out of it.

  “Seven and a half million dollars? Is he serious?”

  “I think so.” These are serious people, Xavier Leaf had told me, although he’d clearly meant it in a different way, as a threat.

  She pressed one finger to her lower lip. “Both times he approached you in the street, though. That sounds like a scam.” She held out her hand. “Let me see the card.”

  Mom studied it, turned it over, held it up to the light. “We have to contact a lawyer. A lawyer’s going to want ten percent, but it’s the only way to be sure they don’t cheat you.”

  “I told you, we don’t want to sell.”

  “Sam, it’s seven point five million dollars. Do your friends’ parents know about this?”

  “It’s none of their business. We did this, not our parents. You gave me grief about selling my dress shoes to fund the project, now you’re going to jump in and tell me what to do?”

  Suddenly I wasn’t so sure about this plan. Mom had been in a Special Ops unit after being outfitted with bionic legs. She understood threats and intimidation. I figured she could help me figure out whether the threat was real, and if it was, help us deal with it. Instead, she was latching on to the damned money.

  “You can’t take a chance with this much money on the table. Your invention might not work, or someone could beat you to it.” She threw her hands in the air. “How are you going to manufacture it? Who’s going to distribute it?”

  “We have ideas. We’ll sort it out once we have a working prototype.”

  Mom swept Leaf’s business card from the coffee table. “I’m calling him.”

  I lunged, ripped the card from her fingers. “Did you hear what I said? They’re criminals. They probably surveilled our phones. They threatened us.”
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  “Everyone’s a criminal,” Mom said through her teeth. She tossed her hair out of her face. “I lost one leg in that firefight in Portland.” She slapped her right leg. “They cut this one off because you can’t run thirty miles an hour if one of your legs is mechanical and the other isn’t.”

  I nodded impatiently—she’d told me this a dozen times.

  “If they’d left that leg, I wouldn’t be in this.” She slapped one arm of her wheelchair. “Of course they’re criminals. That’s why we hire a criminal of our own to make sure you’re not cheated.”

  She was so cynical. She had no faith in anyone, and that included me.

  “Even if I wanted to, it’s not my decision,” I said. “There are six of us. Theo’s done half the work, and he doesn’t even care about the money.”

  Mom jerked her head back in surprise. “What does he want, then?”

  “He wants the future to be bullshit-free.”

  The answer threw her. It wasn’t what she’d expected. I don’t think she’d really considered the full implications of the truth machine until that moment.

  “It’s tough to be a criminal if everyone knows you’re a criminal. Theo thinks whoever Leaf works for will keep the truth app for themselves. They’ll use it to rig the stock market, or sell it to the government for billions.”

  Her eyes went soft, unfocused. “Theo sounds paranoid,” Mom said, but she was staring off into space, distracted, as she said it.

  Molly had skinny bird legs, and sort of walked like a bird, her head bobbing from side to side. I liked noticing her flaws. It gave me hope. And that was kind of pathetic, really. I thought a lot of pathetic things when I was tired, and right now I was exhausted.

  I sat on the grass beside Molly and grabbed a slice of the pizza that had just been delivered by a guy on a motorized bicycle. No one wanted to eat in the garage. We were sick of the garage.