2

I walk to work. Besides amenities like a great gym, a rooftop pool and some of the hippest loft space in the city, my building’s other big draw is that it’s only a few blocks from the building whose sixteenth floor houses the Gerhardt Fund, the biotech venture capital fund I work for as an associate. During nice weather—and the early summer mornings have been beautiful—it’s an easy walk. I’m still enjoying my healthy body, feeling the morning sun on my maskless face, walking briskly to my amazing new job.

After Madison disappeared, the police came looking for me. They had no reason to think I had anything to do with it other than the fact that I was the boyfriend, and that I had no alibi for half an hour that night, the half hour during which I drove from Pajino’s to the country club, the half hour when people noticed she’d left the party.

The time-line wasn’t exactly damning. I had to have been traveling for most of that time. They also had to acknowledge that it would be stupid for a man to kill his rich fiance before marrying her rather than after. But for a while I was their prime suspect. By default, because it also seemed that I was their only suspect.

They never cleared me, but they moved on, only keeping tabs on me from a distance, checking in intermittently. But the damage with the Barrington’s was done. Her father wasn’t hostile, but also was no longer championing me. Her mother seemed sure I did it. I feel bad for her loss. I do. But besides being a desperate mother, I can’t help but feel that—with her priviledged background—she’s extra suspicious of the swarthy fellow from a working-class background.

And it was my loss, too. I feel guilty about getting with Janet so soon after Madison’s disappearance, and I know it looks like I don’t care, but it’s the opposite. I was going crazy. I still can’t believe she’s gone. I still can’t figure out where she went when she drove away from that party.

These new memories feel right, not just in the fact that they seem just as real as any memories I have, but also because in this alternate reality, my life was burned away at the same moment I lost Madison in this reality. It makes sense. These two sets of memories fit together, I just can’t quite fit them. They’re two images placed over top of each other, and I know that if I squint just right, focus my eyes at the right point, the point in between them, they’ll come together.

No, that’s crazy. One set of memories is right, the other was a dream that somehow expanded out of proportion.

I focus on my feet slapping the concrete, heading toward this job which is even better than working for David Barrington at Sanders & Stevens. And it happened on that night, that strange night that has split off into so many different realities, some of them with full sets of false memories.

After Madison disappeared, but before people got worried, Mr. Barrington introduced me to Tyler Norris, one of the top GPs of the Gerhardt Fund. We chatted. He asked if he could steal me away, and he seemed to mean it a bit more than most of Mr. Barrington’s friends. So when it became obvious that I wouldn’t be working at Sanders & Stevens after all, I gave him a call, and he gave me a job as an associate at the Gerhardt Fund.

As I ride a tightly-packed elevator up to the sixteenth floor, I try to clear all this nonsense from my head. What matters is what’s in front of me. What’s in front of me moves too fast to share brain space with anything else. People who can’t focus get lesser jobs and stay average.

I smile at Debra, the very attractive receptionist, and she smiles and waves at me as she says, “Uh huh. Uh huh,” over and over into her headset. Then I step into the Dungeon.

The Dungeon is a windowless room filled by four low-walled cubicles. It is where we associates narrow down the hundred applications for capital to the one package that gets handed to one of the junior GPs. There’s no question that it’s a grind, but for some reason I love the grind.

90% of what comes through our online application system isn’t just wrong for the Gerhardt Fund, but for any venture capital. The other guys get furious. If an application is especially ridiculous and the recipient sees that none of us is on the phone, the swearing goes from breathless mutters to shouts. But I love it.

Amanda and Michael are already at their desks working through applications.

“We’re a biotech fund. How fucking hard is that to understand? We won’t give you money to expand your dog grooming business. Fuck,” Michael says to no one in particular, not looking away from his computer as he deletes and moves on. Amanda smiles at me, rolls her eyes at Michael.

I smile back, shake my head in commiseration. I’m glad my cube isn’t right by his. The guy is incredibly tightly wound.

“How’s it going?” I say.

It was a general question, but Michael doesn’t even acknowledge that I spoke.

Amanda says, “It’s going to be a long day, apparently.”

Todd bounds through the door with a smile on his face. He’s a morning person, and is still probably riding his endorphin wave.

“How’d it go?” I ask.

“High-repping with 270,” he says with a smile on his face. He slaps me five on his way to his chair. Amanda rolls her eyes again. She rolls her eyes a lot.

Eventually we settle into our work, and the only sound is Michael’s muttering and the occasional phone call to an applicant entrepreneur.

I’m going through the fresh applications that came in overnight. At this point, I’m just looking for a reason to reject them. This company is a startup and could use an angel investor, not venture capital. Rejection. This one isn’t in biotech. Rejection. This one looks good until I get to the projected financials and see that they’re obviously working backwards from a number they think we want to see rather than forwards realistically. No way their personnel costs will stay that low. Their scalability isn’t even close. Rejection.

The door opens and Tyler steps through. I look at the clock and see that an hour has flown by.

“How’s everyone doing this morning?” Tyler asks. After a bit of small talk that even draws Michael into speaking, Tyler leans on the four-foot wall of my cubicle.

“We liked your report. I can’t wait to try out one those training machines.”

“So you’re going forward with Fortress?”

I sense Michael’s eyes on me, a glare boring into my back.

“Well, they’re not getting our investment yet, but from your report they’re definitely worth another look. We’re taking the jet to DC next week. We’d like you to come with us.”

My heart pounds so hard I have a flashback of the hypermetabolic state I’d been in when I came out of my coma. I’d be lying perfectly still but my heart would be racing, a war-drum rhythm pounding in my chest and reverberating up into my brain.

But that never happened…I’m having a flashback to something that never happened.

I brush aside the waves of confusion and focus on the enormous news at hand.

“Sounds great,” I say, my excitement and disorientation combining so that I can’t play it cool at all. “I’m so glad to have helped.”

“I bet you are, because I talked to the guys, and if this deal goes through, you’re moving up to junior GP. Say goodbye to the dungeon. And in a few years, if the liquid event is as big as it looks like it’ll be, well…Let’s put it like this: performers get rewarded. We’ve run the numbers, and our multi-million dollar investment could net a multi-billion dollar profit.”

He laughs, takes a deep breath. “Sorry. This deal is potentially so big that even I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s hatch the chickens before we count them, and let’s buy the eggs before we do that, right? I’ll let you know about the trip details. Don is still massaging his schedule. Good?”

“Good.”

Tyler pats me on the shoulder, then turns to the rest of the room. “And let this be a wake-up call. I know what it’s like to slog through hundreds of applications until your eyes glaze over and your brain goes numb. I know that you’re looking for any reason to reject an application to get it off your desk. I know that you’re trying to mitigate risk. I know that they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them, that for most of the companies we invest in, there are ten we don’t who would give us the same return. But there are exceptions, and you need to be able to spot them. Who your parents are matters. Where you went to school matters. Being willing to put in twelve, fourteen hour days day after day matters. One or all of those things landed you your spot in the dungeon. None of those things will get you out of the dungeon. Do your job well, and you get to stay here. Right here in this windowless room, pulling a very decent paycheck. It’s the details that will get you out of here. Anyone can see the solid choice. It’s spotting the exception that will get you out there, that will get you a percentage.” Tyler laughed. “I do love to give speeches. Okay, back to the grind, and keep your eyes peeled.”

I’m watching my cellmates as Tyler speaks. Michael is seething. Amanda is blank. Todd is smiling, knowing that the kindness he’s shown the new guy could pay off big in the form of an ally in the upper ranks.

The door shuts. Amanda gives me a nod, then turns back to her computer. Todd rushes over and thankfully blocks out Michael’s death stare and massive, grinding jaw.

* * *

Three weeks back I was working late when I decided to switch from going over fresh applications to my coworkers’ rejections. The Dungeon might better be called the Shark Pit, because in a feeding frenzy it wasn’t the shark who ate the most fish who survived, but the shark who ate the most of his brethren.

The pile of rejections I’d never seen was three times the size of the new applications I worked on, as it contained the refuse of all three of my cellmates. So I was cherry-picking, grabbing at anything that looked interesting enough to keep me awake, to keep my eyes focused on that screen which I’d been staring at for thirteen hours and which felt like was melting my brain.

We all knew what we were doing, and most of the rejections were easy calls, anyway. But an application by Fortress Defense Inc. grabbed my attention with its cool name, then with it’s current business, then cemented my interest with its proposal.

Fortress Defense began as an arcade game company. Of course arcades died a long, slow death at the hands of consoles awhile back. Fortress held on by making game experiences you couldn’t get at home, highly immersive games, many utilizing primitive virtual reality technology. Even that market died as the last arcades began to close and, no matter how cool the game was, they wouldn’t sell without any customers. So they switched gears.

They began creating military training simulators. Games by another name. They had much more experience than any defense contractors in creating intense games and working with VR, stretching its capabilities in cheap hardware. The political environment was just right, and they got a defense contract and sold their machines to the Army, making a killing.

The Army found that most soldiers benefited greatly by the training. They stepped into desert cities feeling as if they’d been there before, because they had been, virtually. They were less overwhelmed, and therefore less likely to freeze.

The Army reported a couple of problems, though. Some soldiers still froze up. Some never could take the stress of real combat, or even just walking a real combat zone. The VR games were intense, and weeded out some who should never step on the battlefield, but others were able to see it as the game it was, perform great and then fall apart at the real thing.

They also reported that some soldiers who’d had lackluster performance in simulation were amazing in the field. In the simulator’s role as a tool to choose commanding officers, this was a huge failing. The problem was that these soldiers were so able to keep their cool that the simulator was only a game to them, and was unable to inspire their best performance.

Fortress Defense had a slight edge over their competition, but if they could fix these problems, they could sell their machines to every branch.

The issue was cognitive. It was in the nature of the product, the fact that it was really a game. No matter how realistic they made their simulations, they couldn’t get rid of the soldiers’ knowledge that it wasn’t real.

Except that they thought they could, and they tested their method on themselves. A bunch of mild-mannered game programmers and computer engineers took a low dose of LSD and then began the training simulation. The result was absolute realism, to the point of several mental breakdowns requiring extended leaves of absence.

That was exactly what the military wanted: to find out who couldn’t take the stress of combat before putting soldiers into combat. The results would be fewer casualties, fewer suicides, less PTSD.

Fortress Defense hired a pharmacologist to study the medications currently on the market. None were ideal. They needed to develop their own. They had a starting point. They’d found several patent-lapsed formulas they thought they could tweak to get the proper results, but it would take a lot of money to develop and then to put through the proper FDA tests.

If they could expand their simulators into every branch of the military, the potential payoff was enormous. Defense money wasn’t like other money. Most government contracts overpaid by two or three times, but defense…Defense money was how the government gave tax dollars to their rich friends, and the profits were beyond belief.

Beyond the military, if Fortress Defense Inc. became the only name in simulation, with small software modifications these machines could be sold to law enforcement, opening another huge market.

Michael had rejected the application, and for good reasons. The Gerhardt Fund required a solid sales record. They didn’t give money to startups. Fortress Defense had a solid sales record, but only of simulators, not of pharmaceuticals and simulators. They had no proof that their current customers would be future customers. We saw that situation a lot, where a company decided to branch out and thought their current success would guarantee venture capital, but the differences made their situation more like a startup. Startups were too risky. Angel investors handing out their own money might assume that risk, but the Gerhardt Fund had limited partners who expected returns on their money.

The other problem with Fortress Defense was that it wasn’t a biotech company. Yes, this new move was into biotech, but really it was ancillary. Our LPs had made their millions in medicine. Many were doctors. They understood medicine, so they invested in medicine. They wouldn’t understand Fortress Defense. The Gerhardt Fund passed up good opportunities every day because they were in the wrong fields.

Michael played by the book. He was solid. But he didn’t look much past the filter. When he dabbled in day trading, like we all did, he never varied from his buy and sell formulas, to such a degree that he let his software sell for him. He never lost big, but he also never won big. When his investment had tripled, he sold, regardless of if it might shoot to a hundred-fold profit later in the day. He didn’t look for exceptions. What he didn’t see was that the potential rewards made Fortress Defense at least worth a deeper look. Any of the junior or senior GPs would have seen it, but they couldn’t spend their days going through the slush.

For about a minute I considered passing the application back to Michael, telling him his mistake, giving him the chance to pass Fortress Defense up to the bosses.

I didn’t seriously consider it, though. Not even for a minute. It was more like a thought experiment of what someone who wasn’t me might do.

* * *

So now everyone in the company knows that at best, Michael could be utilized in the Dungeon, and at worst, he should be let go for someone more intuitive and he could go work for a mutual fund or something where the investors would be ecstatic to get 10% annual return.

He looks like he wants to kill me.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to say on the jet?” Todd asks.

I drag my eyes away from Michael. It’s difficult. When I was a kid we had a cat who would stare at me like he was better than me and I covertly kept a little squirt gun handy to blast him when he wouldn’t look away.

“I just found out two minutes ago when you did.”

“And I’ve already thought of about fifty topics. You’ve got two hours alone with them. They’re all tired of each other. You’ll be the new toy. It’s a huge opportunity.”

Todd sometimes seems like he received brain damage during a keg stand gone wrong, but there’s a reason he has even an entry-level spot at the city’s hottest venture capital fund.

“That’s a good point.”

“You’re the golden boy. You might never get this lucky again. Don’t squander it.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’ll think on it.”

He slaps me on the shoulder and stands up. “And remember who gave you such great advice. Don’t forget me when you get a window, brah. My God, a window. Actual sunlight!”

Taking a notepad, I begin to scribble ideas for topics of conversation as I go through applications. The others can pick up the slack today.

As the adrenalin wears off, my worries from earlier that morning begin to creep in. I’m still unable to sense a significant difference between these two sets of memories.

I shake it off. I’m doing it. I’m a hair’s breadth away from realizing my lifelong goals. I’m living the dream.