He followed Liz into Married in Malibu, waving bye to Kate. He began to think through the kind of technical considerations that would be required when trying to broadcast a wedding over the Internet. Bandwidth would be a big part of it, and they needed to get enough servers involved to handle the demand. Then there would be issues of frame rate, pixilation… His mind began to work overtime.
They went up to Liz’s office and placed the call. A day or two ago, this meeting would have felt like something out of a fantasy. Now, he was actually going to talk with Zach Jarrs himself. He had to concentrate.
Soon, Zach Jarrs appeared on the screen, and both the video and audio were pretty flawless. He was in his forties now, but he still had a youthful look about him. In fact, he looked as if he’d only recently left college. A slight thinning of his hair told the truth, and that hair was artfully out of place, as though he hadn’t thought about it in a while. He immediately smiled at Liz and Nate.
“Hi, you must be Liz,” he said. “I’m Zach. It’s good to speak with you face-to-face… well, more or less. And you must be Nathan Waterson.”
He’d obviously looked at Married in Malibu’s website. Nate found himself wondering how much else he knew about them. Probably nothing. Zach Jarrs was too busy to concern himself with that kind of thing.
“Nate’s here to help with the technical details of the wedding arrangements,” Liz said, gesturing to Nate in a way that reminded him of a game show host unveiling a prize.
That brought another smile. “That’s good to hear. As you can imagine, Yuriko and I are looking forward to making this a very special day for us, for our families, and for the people around the world who have helped to make my technologies so successful.”
“With that in mind,” Liz said, “the more you can tell us about what you need, the better we’ll be able to make sure we can provide it for you.”
“Well, some of this is Yuriko’s department,” Zach said. “I’m sorry she can’t be here for this call, but she has a TV appearance. I know she’s looking forward to chatting with you. But, basically, we’re looking for a real fusion of styles for the wedding. A meeting of our worlds and our cultures, but without anything feeling forced or out of place. We want it to feel as natural as it was when I finally asked her to marry me.”
“When you finally asked her?” Nate asked.
That brought a nod from the businessman, although Nate was aware of Liz’s slight frown.
“That’s right,” Zach said. “I never thought I would fall in love. I guess I always assumed that I was just going to be this solitary guy, stuck behind a computer. Or maybe I never imagined I could find someone like Yuriko.” Just the way he said his fiancée’s name made his love feel tangible through the screen. “The crazy thing is that we tried to fight it for so long. Finally, we realized that it was simply meant to be.”
“So,” Liz said, obviously trying to bring the conversation back to wedding details, and probably very aware that her next meeting was coming up, “how can we help you to make things the way you want them to be?”
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” Zach said, “and Yuriko is my best friend as well as my fiancée. We want our wedding to reflect both of us—small and private for our friends and family, but big and open so that the world can see how much we love one another.”
This explained the reasoning behind their desire to broadcast the wedding. Nate should have been concentrating on the complexities of bringing that about, but instead there was one question that wouldn’t leave him alone. It nagged at the back of his skull, until he knew he had to ask.
“Why did you both fight it?” he asked.
This time, Liz’s look was unambiguous. It was a look that said she wanted to know what the heck he was doing and whether he was actually trying to lose them an important client. But Nate needed to know. He couldn’t let this conversation pass without getting an answer.
Zach laughed. “I like people who ask difficult questions. I believe most innovation comes from asking the right questions. If I tell you more about us, then you’ll see where we’re coming from for this wedding.”
Liz clearly looked relieved, and Nate was grateful for that. He didn’t want to ruin things here at Married in Malibu. He just needed to understand. Was he messing things up with Tamara by putting their friendship first?
“Yuriko and I met while I was over in Japan doing some work with their tech companies. We’d both had problems in previous relationships. She’d had one relationship with a guy her parents thought would be perfect for her, but it ended up breaking down. I’d had… Well, let’s just say I was never the most successful guy when it came to women. And our families don’t exactly have the best histories when it comes to staying together.”
“It sounds difficult,” Nate said. It also sounded familiar. It mirrored so much of his own life and his family’s. What was the point in making yourself miserable by remaining in a relationship that was destined to fail?
“It was difficult,” Zach said. “The easy thing was to keep my head down and get on with my work. But I kept running into Yuriko. And when love hit me, it was as if a whole new version of me had just finished downloading. Like, I’d just been full of bugs and workarounds before, and then suddenly I was running the way I should. Everything was just right. I couldn’t act as though nothing had changed. All those reasons I had for not getting involved just melted away like obsolete registry entries.”
Nate got that. He glanced at Liz. She looked as though she’d understood only about half of it, and he knew her well enough to see she was worried about the time.
“Do you mind if I leave you in Nate’s hands for a little while?” she asked. “I have to check on a couple of things.”
“Sure,” Zach said. “It sounds like he gets where I’m coming from.” When Liz left, he smiled. “It’s good that you ask so many questions, Nate. When Yuriko mentioned Married in Malibu, I was worried that you’d all just be yes people, scared of throwing your ideas into the mix. But it feels like you get where I’m coming from, which is going to be important, given how closely we’ll have to work on the broadcast side of things.”
Then Zach began to explain some of what he wanted. The essence of it was simple: His company was going to release a patch to every device its software ran on. On the day of the wedding, that patch was going to give people the option to watch the wedding live.
“Initially, I wanted it to pop up on their screens,” Zach said, “but Yuriko correctly pointed out that people might start suing.”
That was probably true.
“So the hard part is making the broadcast compatible,” Nate said. “We could use an existing streaming site and embed a link, but if you want to do it more directly, well… we’d need a lot of server capacity.”
“Trust me,” Zach said, “if there’s one thing I have, it’s server capacity.”
