“A fraction of their soul?” Now she was truly lost.
“Absolutely. It’s way less threatening than the whole thing, and it’s funnier. But it’s also about resale value. You gotta think long term. We’re going to open up the market on securitized souls, but there’s no limit to how much we can expand. Once this becomes a standard, we’re going to be the market maker.”
This. This had to be what had Luke so upset.
Brad continued. “Who makes money in a gold rush, huh? Because we’re sitting on the edge of a gold rush here.”
Morgan kind of remembered this from history class. “The shopkeepers?”
“Exactly. Sell shovels. Do you know who reliably makes out in something like crypto? The folks who handle the transactions and take a tiny cut of each one. This is only the first step. We’re going to get the market up and running and then we’re going to build the world’s first soul exchange. And take a sliver of miracle on each and every sale.”
“That’s…” Morgan trailed off. Evil? Insane? “Probably not going to work.”
“Oh, it’s going to work. You know that hot Latina chick from Ravenfell? Rihanna?”
“Renata.”
“Whatever. She ran the numbers. Those Ravenfell folks have dealt with these demon assholes before and made them their bitches. No offense.”
“I don’t see how that would not be offensive,” Luke started. Morgan stomped his foot.
Brad waved his hand. “Yeah, yeah, sorry, I’ll make a donation to the anti-demon defamation league or something, send me the link. Anyway, point is, she thinks it’s airtight.”
He chugged the last of the energy drink and tossed the container overhand like a basketball, for it to land next to the wastebasket. He ignored it rather than cleaning up his own mess. “So. Carrots and sticks, right? We don’t have to stay with the stick. Carrots are good, great for eyesight and all that. You’re right in on the ground floor, as long as you toe the line. We’re going to revolutionize the soul industry and still sell the must-have present under the tree. Win-win.”
“Who’s winning?” She asked, sick to her stomach.
“Well, us. Obviously.” He chuckled. “I can’t wait to see GreenField match this pivot.”
“What do you mean?” she grasped at the least important part of this nightmare.
“We’ve got their demon running scared,” Brad said, smiling. “Can’t you tell? They follow every change we make but they won’t see the important part until it’s too late. We’re gonna take them down.”
He rubbed his hands together. “God, I love to win.”
23
How did you stop a catastrophe when the enemy controlled the person you most needed to help you?
“Where are the scissors?” They’d been sitting right on the table, and now they weren’t. Morgan had to cut the last two shipping labels apart. The smart thing to do would have been to have all the brochures shipped straight from the printers to the advance warehouse, since she’d had to destroy the original, now-obsolete order and replace them with a slapped-together overnight print job. But Brad didn’t want to risk anyone finding out about the latest pivot. Never mind that the union guys at the Javits Center surely had better things to do than open and read a bunch of boxes of brochures from a random tech company. Brad had insisted everything be stored in the office. Now it all had to be hand-carried this afternoon, according to the convention center’s arcane rules, which meant that she’d had to swap every label by hand.
She kept coming back to the mundane problems because every attempt to think about the magical ones left her in despair.
“I packed them so you’d have them at the show,” Vijaysaid slowly, looking pleased with his own cleverness. Also a little stoned. He’d stopped bothering to even pretend he cared now that they were apparently a consumer appliances company. She was pretty sure she’d caught the tail end of an interview in the phone room the day before. She wasn’t sure why Brad hadn’t laid off the developers yet, although it was possible he hadn’t remembered he had developers. Josh and Justin seemed to be tiptoeing around the office lately in an effort not to catch his attention. Yet the daily agile stand-up meeting continued to happen, a zombie sprint towards goals that no one had removed.
“Vijay,” she said, trying to sound more patient than she felt. “I still need the scissors.”
“Oh.” He blinked. “Sorry.”
“Vijay,” she continued. “If the scissors are in the taped-up box, how are we going to get the box open?”
“Oh.” He blinked again. “Huh.”
She resisted the urge to rub her eyes. “Vijay, can you please work on getting the scissors back out of the box?”
He shrugged. He probably literally didn’t have anything more productive to do at the moment. “OK.”
She turned to go and he caught her sleeve.
