I was clutching the cheque with both hands like I was afraid I’d drop it and a rogue breeze inside the conference center would sweep it far, far away. “How will I convince him? How do I find him?”
“He’s having a networking event at his company headquarters next week, similar to this one, in fact. I’ll get my marketing team to send you some materials – based on your pre-existing ones – to tailor your pitch slightly better to his clientele. And who knows, you might pick up other work – while you’re there, and also from me, if you do a good job with this.”
I nodded, blankly. It was a lot to take in.
“I’ll get the information sent to you. Don’t worry about anything at all.” He stood up, turned around, and started to leave. “I’ll be seeing you soon, Miss Moon.”
And then he was gone, and I was alone in the tent, contemplating whether or not I should be feeling guilty about all of this. In the end, I decided I would not and could not feel guilty for agreeing to breach confidentiality. My mother’s life was at stake. No one could make me feel bad for putting family first.
A week later, my bus was pulling into its destination. Just one leg of the journey left, on the subway, and then I’d just have to convince a billionaire to receive an unwanted tarot card reading.
I’d done a little bit of reading on Forest Brock since being given my assignment, but there wasn’t much information out there on him. In terms of personality, anyway. He seemed to resist the culture nowadays where the heads of large tech companies were figures of personality and celebrity as much as they were business leaders.
In the end, I’d resorted to staring at pictures of him, squinting slightly in a my-Grandmother-esque way, hoping to ascertain something of his personality from photos. As if I were psychic or something.
He was much more good-looking than your average tech entrepreneur. In fact, besides the glasses, which were stereotypical for the role, I’d not have pinned him as a tech guy. A model, maybe. An older model, for distinguished late-thirties rich-man clothes.
Interviews with him, which were rare, oscillated between describing him as ‘mild-mannered’ and as ‘commanding and formidable’. They were absolutely no help. And neither were the photos, in which, besides looking quite smoldering, he looked decidedly neutral.
I was sweating profusely by the time I finally hauled my rucksack off the Subway and walked the few blocks to the company headquarters of Brock Technology. The building itself was certainly not ‘mild-mannered’ – it was a ‘formidable’ looking darkened glass ensemble that looked both modern and futuristic. The signs outside indicated the Community Technology Fair, the event I was attending today. I, a small business owner – tiny, really – was the ‘community’.
Inside, it wasn’t like any ‘community’ event that I’d seen. The community of the rich, maybe. Even with my finally crease-free blazer, and Apollo-improved marketing materials, I was definitely the table there with the least technological marvels. Most of the other displays had huge monitors, projectors. I had zero, unless you counted the small device I used to take card payments.
You see, my business wasn’t a service that anyone else was providing. Not in the same way I was, anyway. ‘Tarot for Success’ was my attempt to bring the psychological and symbolic principles of tarot cards, and tarot reading, to business leaders of all industries to help them succeed in areas where they were most stuck.
The ideas behind it were strong. Creativity was where real success – big league success – came in business. New approaches, new ways of thinking. Innovation. But the everyday mundanities of running a business – balancing books, hiring and firing, allocating budgets and resources – tended to easily drain leaders of their creative energies. Other types of leaders were very adept at running a business but less adept at coming up with new ideas – so if they hit upon a good idea once, they would then be unable to easily meet pressure to keep coming up with more.
That was where tarot came in, and where I came in as a facilitator of such a relationship. In the right hands – mine, my pitch went – tarot could be a powerful tool for taking business leaders out of their constrictive box and opening their minds to new ideas, all by harnessing the creative potential that was already in their minds, but which was so often stifled. By drawing patterns and meaning out of the symbols of the card, they could unlock the key to their own success.
Now, I was born into a family of psychics, but I’ve always been on the fence between believing and skeptical. In debate, I’d argue the opposite of the position that the other side took. I made compelling arguments both for and against the spiritual and magical realm’s existence.
But I did believe in the power of the human mind. I’d been a psychology major before I’d had to drop out of college when my mom got sick and my gran needed looking after. For reasons that I’m sure anyone would understand, knowing my family, I’d always been interested in the idea of ‘magical thinking’ in psychology. The idea that, by believing in something magical, human minds created their own magic.
That was how I’d settled my faith in regard to my tarot hobby, how I created a truce between my rational and spiritual sides. The cards did have meaning, but not because they could tell the future. Instead, because we could reasonably predict ourownfuture – if we could abstract the ideas from cards, pictures and symbols.
I was a big believer in free will.
That’s why it rankled somewhat that I was here only under Apollo Brock’s beck and call. But I intended to make the most of this event, even if part of it was going to leave a sour taste in my mouth.
The PA system announced that the event had officially begun. Somewhere out there was my mark, Forest Brock. Somehow, I had to lure him in.
FOREST
Normally, I’d put on a big show for the employees, but not for Mandy, as she wasn’t into being “with people”.
They were often a nice change of pace. Computer programmers and tech workers often remained in their little bubbles, but that did not make for a happy, healthy or productive worker. They needed to be reminded sometimes that companies existed outside of ours, and that industries existed outside of tech. At least we weren’t based in Silicon Valley, though we did have offices there, as was basically a requirement in the tech industry, even these days.
But today I was tired. As I was most days recently, admittedly. And I’d predicted this the night before, after the depressing meeting with my brothers where I’d had to admit I had no plans to counter Apollo’s attacks. I’d stayed up in my office until around three in the morning, when my eyes had started to feel heavy enough that I decided I may be able to pass out and get a few hours of sleep. I’d decided to do that at my desk, and had woken at five with a twinge in my back and a desperate need to go home and shower before heading straight back.
I’d received a direct message from Jude. Sometimes he appreciated that the group chat wasn’t the place for sensitive conversations, an opinion I shared.
Jude: Are you doing alright? You went quiet last night, then left abruptly.
Jude: I don’t know if the Apollo thing has you shaken, but we’ll work on it together.
Despite my doubts about the whole situation, I sent back a perfunctory message.
Forest: Yeah, I’m okay, just tired. The Apollo thing is nothing new really. We’ll figure it out.