“Left,” Kaito said. “You mean left left.” He had next to no accent and his English was fluent, though it was his second language. Of course, because he was a genius.
“Yeah, she left left,” I said, my voice a rasp. “So whatever you’re trying to sell me with this,” I gestured to the plane, “I’m probably not buying. I was supposed to take you and your team out for expensive sushi and talk about investing in your new project. Maybe we should stick to that.”
Kaito smiled and leaned back in his chair. He was drunk, but he wasn’t sloppy. “I knew it. As soon as I saw you, I knew something was bugging you, as you Americans say. So you love her, and she left you. That works well for
me.”
I scowled at him, though he wasn’t looking. “I’m glad you find my problems with women amusing. And convenient.” I didn’t get into the part about love. I didn’t know him well enough for that. And I didn’t want to even think it, not with Ava gone.
“Do you know what Okada is working on?” Kaito asked, ignoring my grumpiness.
“The cure for cancer.”
“You have good hacker skills,” he said. “No one else knows what we’re doing, even the Japanese government, though they’ve tried. We’ve repelled three hacking attempts by your American FBI, but somehow you know.”
Jesus, the FBI? “It’s just a theory.”
“It’s a good one. You’re close. Not exactly right, but close. What we’re working on is an improved system of chemotherapy. The next generation of chemo, perhaps. Less toxic, less invasive, and the results are faster. So not curing cancer exactly. That hasn’t been done yet. But an improvement in the treatment that will improve millions of lives and possibly save them.”
So there it was. Okada’s best-kept secret, spilled to me in this lonely airplane hangar. “Tower VC is in,” I said, knowing full well I spoke for the other three. “Whatever venture funding you’re looking for, we’ll find it.” The partners would kill for a chance to contribute to this. As would I.
“You’re not getting it yet,” Okada said. “I have skills, too. I know you’re working on a teaching system that uses AI to teach students. Languages at first, and then other things. A system that learns the strengths and weaknesses of its students and adapts to them. A system that iterates the lesson plans in response to the students’ inputs, thinking like a real human brain.”
The whiskey in my stomach turned to acid. What Okada was saying was something I’d never told anyone, even my partners at Tower. “What the actual fuck?” I croaked. “You can’t know that.”
“A simple weakness in your penthouse’s wi-fi, my friend.”
I remembered an alert that went off months ago, that I’d responded to right away. “I patched that.”
“Too slow. I got a thirty-second glimpse into what you were doing, and I extrapolated the rest. Because you think like I do, my friend. We may be from opposite sides of the planet, but in truth we’re brothers. Don’t you think?”
I leaned my head on the back of the chair, my mind spinning. “A nerd bromance,” I said, quoting Ava. “I’m not interested.”
“Yes, you are.” Okada smiled again. “You don’t spend your days doing money deals like your friends. You spend your days making things that can change the world. That teaching system—when it’s perfected it could teach people across the globe to perform surgeries, or teach astronauts in space. You’re not a money man, Dane Scotland, though you pretend to be for your company. Money doesn’t interest you at all.”
He was right. It was nice to have money, I couldn’t deny that, but for me money was a means to an end. After we closed our first deal over a decade ago, when we’d sold my first software for over forty million dollars, I could have happily moved to a shack on the edge of the woods and lived alone. I’d never need more money than that, and I had no desire to make it. I’d gone into Tower with the others because they were my best friends, the only family I’d ever had. But I’d always been slightly different from them. Aidan was a master at making money in New York; Noah was living a wild life in L.A.; Alex was doing deals in Texas. I did occasional software deals for the company, but mostly I stayed in my penthouse and worked on my own shit. Like the AI teaching program, which the other partners, my best friends, didn’t even know about.
“So what do you want?” I asked Kaito, my admission that he was right about me. “You want my AI program in exchange for a stake in your cancer program? It’s an unconventional deal, but we can probably work something out.”
“I don’t want your AI program, Dane,” Kaito said. “The reason I came all this way isn’t to buy a program. It’s to acquire you.”
“Me?”
“Yes.” He pointed to the jet. “I want you to get on that jet and fly to Japan to work for me. You think I was trying to sell you my jet? I was trying to sell you a ride on it. One way. You come work for Okada and add your brainpower to mine. We can accomplish incredible things. You can still work on the teaching program, of course. I’ll assign as many of my staff to it as you want. It’ll be finished faster than it could ever be if you worked on it alone.”
The whiskey was dissolving out of my system and I was sobering up fast. “You want me to leave Tower.”
“Like I said, you’re not a money man. You’re not happy as one. They don’t quite understand that about you, I think. So, yes, leave Tower.”
I shook my head, a reflex. Leave Chicago? Leave my friends? Leave the States? I wasn’t that kind of guy. I didn’t jet set. I didn’t go to the dry cleaner’s on the corner, let alone to the other side of the world. Like I say, a cabin in the woods, alone. That was me.
But to work on Okada’s cancer treatment? That was a pretty fucking big deal.
I stared at the jet, and the image that came into my mind was Ava. Standing at my door after all those years, looking brave as hell. Sitting in the rain in front of her mother’s home, crying and still brave as hell. To be honest, when I pictured my cabin in the woods now, I pictured her there with me. Her and our baby.
She’d never fully gotten over losing our baby eleven years ago. But what she didn’t realize was that I hadn’t either. I thought about that baby often, usually in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. I thought about how old it would be now, what school it would be going to, whether he or she would be happy. I wanted my kid, whether an accident or not, to be happy.
I could have a chance at that, maybe. Did I want it?