Chapter One

Photo, swipe. Photo, swipe. Photo, swipe. 

Ping. A text from Darius appeared on Enzo's screen. Flip switch to vibrate. Tap on message.  

Darius: Hey. What are you up to? 

Enzo: Swiping, of course. 

Darius: LOL of course. Did you hear about the new app for dating sites?  

Enzo: No and WTF? 

Darius: It’s called Firemachine. It automatically swipes right on every profile in your queue. You get thousands of right swipes at once and then just look at your matches as they come up.  

Enzo: Why would I want to say yes to everyone? 

Darius: The app’s algorithms are better at picking women for you anyway.  

Enzo: True. 

Darius: This just makes it less work. You don’t have to go through all the wasted time of reading everything about people.  

Enzo: Genius. Downloading now. 

Darius: Anyway, I didn’t text to help you get laid. Are you free for a meeting this week? I have a client who needs your help. Wants you to write a paper or something.  

Enzo: I’m in Santa Barbara at a conference. Speaking tomorrow.  

Darius: So you’re on Tinder. 

Enzo: Bored. 

Darius: Let’s talk on the phone mid week. 

Enzo: Cool. 

Enzo switched back to Tinder. 

Photo, swipe. Photo, swipe. Photo, swipe.  

Window pops up: “It's a match!!!!! Send her a message! Or keep swiping.” 

Photo, swipe. Photo, swipe. Photo, swipe. 

A vibration and a text from Ximena drops down. Tap on message. 

Ximena: Hey are you up?  

Enzo: Yes.  

Ximena: This pool party is kinda nuts. 

Enzo: I was down there. Not feeling it.  

Ximena: Come down and hang out with me. Consider it a rescue.  

Enzo: KK coming down.

Enzo took a deep breath, exhaled, and got out of bed. He slipped on the white linen shirt that was hanging from a chair in the corner. He added a pair of indigo jeans and off-white suede loafers. He ran a comb through his thick brown hair. Most people at the event would be dressed casually, painfully so. Enzo was an Italian man which meant shorts were for the beach and flip flops were for the shower.

The digital clock on the nightstand read 12:45 a.m. No one used clocks anymore; that’s what a mobile phone is for.

The Apple Watch on his wrist vibrated: “Text from Ximena.” 

Ximena: When are you coming? People are messed up here. Need you.  

Enzo: Coming, had to put some clothes on.  

Ximena: Rápido!  

Ximena was down by the bar at the far end of the pool. It was day two of the annual “Tech Eats World’s Lunch” conference, held at the Mission Inn Hotel in Santa Barbara. TEWL was the most rarefied of tech conferences. Davos was for blowhards. TEWL was where the future was ideated.

(Both of those contentions are debatable.)

Santa Barbara County, about ninety minutes north of Hollywood and home to the prehistoric President Ronald Reagan’s western White House ranch—had always seeped old money. In all of California’s history, it was always the same song: Make a fortune. Get a palace in Santa Barbara. Die. 

But, those old fortunes of coastal California—the extraordinary wealth of oil barons, entertainment moguls, pop singers, almond emperors and railroad kings—were nothing but latte money to the crowd at the bar at the TEWL conference. These folks were drowning in money, in all its 21st century incarnations: equity, warrants, venture capital and something called crypto currency that everyone talked about, but no one seemed to really understand. 

The scene thirty feet above the pool was hard to avoid. The DJ set was being played by someone dressed as a neon robot. The robot stood on a platform suspended over the deep end of the pool by a crane. A green and neon yellow humanoid spinning two turntables with a microphone. A substantial summer moon hung in the sky.  

“This will get me more likes than anything I’ve ever posted!” one twenty-something man said as he snapped a photo on his iPhone. His friend stood next to him, silently mugging for her camera (she did duck lips) with the robot DJ in the background. She contemplated which filter to add to her post, eventually going with the popular face-slimming puppy filter. They both wore matching unicorn onesies.  

Enzo was tempted to take a photo of the neon robot DJ, too. He put the phone away and kept walking. 

California coastal nights aren’t warm, especially in the early summer. The conference organizers had brought in 25 sunlamps, and it felt like late summer in the desert rather than the coast. About 100 people in bathing suits and bikinis sucked down mezcal and gyrated to Drake and Rick Ross.

The bar where Ximena stood was just beyond the sunlamps, the temperature was a natural nocturnal chilliness. She wore a long hippie dress with a red-paisley pattern and strappy sandals. She stood next to a slender guy in his late twenties, wearing skinny jeans and Nike Air Yeezy 2 SP Red Octobers that cost $15,000 on Ebay. There was an article about them last week on the Valley’s digital bible, Tech Crunch. Of course, he had them. 

“Anders,” she said, looking away from the man and turning her face to me. “This is my boyfriend, Vincenzo.” 

(Enzo was not her boyfriend.) 

Anders, a very midwestern white man, smiled but he didn’t make eye contact. Something seemed off about him.  

“You are enjoying the conference so far?” Enzo asked.  

Long pause. Anders looked about furtively. 

“YES!” he half-yelled. 

“Anders was the first product developer at Facebook,” Ximena interjected.  

This seemed to bring Anders back to earth.  

“I created all the features that the Russians used to corrupt elections!” he said with a laugh and a vapid glint in his eye.  

Enzo gave Ximena the 😒.

"I’m kidding! Facebook isn’t responsible for the demise of our democracy,” he interrupted.  

Awkward silence. 

“Man, everyone really hates Facebook now,” he said, not to anyone in particular.  

“Don’t mind Anders, Enzo. He’s on mushrooms,” Ximena said, ending the few seconds of silence. “Half the party is microdosing.” 

“Yes, we need to legalize these things. They make us smarter,” Anders was now into conversational mode. “I came up with the idea for my new company sitting in my Zen Garden at my house in San Francisco while microdosing acid.” 

(This is not an aberrant conversation in the Bay Area.)  

“What’s the new idea?” Enzo asked, politely.  

“OK. I was sitting there and drinking a great cup of coffee. I have a 1950 Gaggia Internazionale and it makes the best coffee on earth, I mean it is Italian,” he said slowly. “I'm thinking about coffee and how do I get this perfect cup of coffee to the rest of the world. We need to democratize coffee, I thought to myself.” 

“It needs to happen,” Ximena interjected. 

(It does not need to happen.) 

“Yes, it does, right? I don’t care about money, just giving a gift of perfect coffee to the world,” he said. 

(He cares a lot about money. Probably coffee too.) 

"I just want to enrich people’s lives. So, I hired the top food chemist from Stanford. This guy knows the field. He consults with everyone: KFC, Chili’s, the Cheesecake Factory,” he boasted. 

“Ever been to any of those places?” I asked.  

“Never. It doesn’t fit in with my intermittent fasting protocol. Anyway, this guy analyzed my perfect Gaggia Internazionale cup of coffee down to the molecule. There is a certain level of oxidation that happens with this machine that gives it the unique flavor,” he said. 

Behind him on the barstool was a Prada fanny pack. He reached in and pulled out a canister with a blue label taped to its side.  

“Here it is. The perfect cup of coffee. Brought to you by Coffee Disruption,” he said proudly.  

Anders was tripping. And admiring his decision to “disrupt coffee.” 

A chubby guy in a unicorn onesie stumbled into the triumvirate.  

“You guys met my bitch, Anders?!?!” he exclaimed. The man was about fifty and had a thick ABC (American Born Chinese) California accent. He was slurring his words and swaying. “I just gave this guy $3 million for his coffee start-up,” he said, slapping Anders on his chest before stopping and looking at Ximena.  

“Look at this beautiful, exotic woman,” he said, trying to focus, vodka soda in hand. “Are you Indian?” 

“I’m Latina. You should calm down, stop drinking, and talk to Anders,” she said, mildly irked.  

The unicorn VC turned back to Anders and started saying something about hockey stick growth curves and returns. It was the perfect opportunity for Enzo and Ximena to get away from the circle jerk. Enzo gently clasped Ximena’s arm and guided her to another corner of the patio.  

Just across from them was a couch with a six-pack of lithe women arrayed around a slight, Asian man wearing black jeans and a hoodie, his bare feet propped up on the wicker coffee table. There was another large Black man, who vaguely seemed like the famous running back from the Seattle Seahawks. Beside him on the couch was a preternaturally large white man with an impressively full beard. He sported a gold sequined blazer with a gold lamé hood, black jeans, and gleaming metallic gold Air Jordans. His sheer size and scintillation made him the focal point of the party, the yin to the yang of the robot DJ in the sky. Both the shoeless man and the human gold disco ball smoked cigarettes.  

(Who the hell smokes cigarettes anymore?) 

“Get me another drink, Enzo,” Ximena commanded playfully. 

“Am I still your manservant?” he said, as he turned to the bar and ordered a mezcal and soda, two limes. He turned back to her. “Jesus, this is the bar scene from Star Wars. What the hell is going on here? Why are we here? Couldn’t we just have a drink in your room? I’m sure you have the most baller suite at this hotel,” he said. 

“Don’t be a fuck,” she replied. “It's not my fault. I don’t even make my own reservations. I wanted to see you. You know you can't come up to my room, so this is where we have to be.” 

The physical attraction between them was a law of nature—like gravity or magnetism. But they hadn’t really touched each other in years. 

They moved on.  

“What is going on over there with that crew?” Enzo said, looking in the direction of the barefoot guy lounging on the couch. 

“That’s Tony Zapato. He owns the largest online footwear company in the world. Grew up in Taiwan. He never wears any shoes, even though he sells more of them every day than all the factories in Italy combined,” Ximena explained. 

And his friend that looked like a cross between the white Hulk, a timpani, and a gold disco ball? 

“Shawn Amery. He's a professional hockey player. Started a small venture fund that Theodore and the rest of the Rocket Mafia backed. It was mostly to get to hang out with a pro hockey player. And what's a few million to Rocket Mafia? Nothing,” she continued. 

Ximena’s husband was one of the founders of Rocket Payments, a company that took financial systems online in the first internet boom at the turn of the last century. They started just as the internet was taking off and quickly became the way that all online commerce on earth was conducted.  

Every transaction that happens on an app, a website, an e-commerce company, they get a little piece. Rocket Payments was the first “unicorn” in Silicon Valley history. In two years, the company went from inception to a billion dollar valuation. When a startup hits unicorn status, it has a billion-dollar valuation: the dollar figure that investors assign to a company as they decide how much to invest.  

Hence, the unicorn onesies at the “Tech Eats World's Lunch” after-party. 

The Rocket Payments founders went on to create their own investment firms and had funded many of the next generation of billion-dollar companies. They were nicknamed the “Rocket Mafia”. 

“How much longer are we staying here?” Enzo asked.  

“Why, you want to get back to the dating apps?” she replied. 

“It's better than this shit, don’t you think?” he asked.

“Maybe. Depends on what you have in mind,” she said.  

Ximena knew that she possessed an ability to effortlessly flirt. She understood that Enzo could never, would never, resist it.    

They walked back out to the steamy pool area where the sunlamps had now reached full potential. It was oasis-level hot. They passed two women in g-string bikinis and a chiseled man wearing a Speedo and a skipper’s hat snorting lines of cocaine off the end table next to their lounge chairs.  

Ximena explained that the sunlamps were from a spin-off of a solar-powered battery company that had pitched themselves as the solution to ending global vitamin D deficiencies. They then realized that the rechargeable lamps were a great solution for growing cannabis in the northern hemisphere's drab winters and pivoted to being a business-to-business supply company for the exploding weed industry.  

The Rocket Mafia had, of course, backed them with $50 million in financing on that pivot alone. No real sales to speak of yet. Everyone wanted in on the new cannabis industry that California had created with a referendum making it legal ten years ago. What really got the Mafia excited about the product was the bevy of data-sucking environmental sensors that were embedded in the product. The investors figured they could sell that climate data to the government for billions of dollars a year. And, unlike humans, plants and air don't give a shit about privacy. 

“They’re never going to make a dime in profit,” Ximena said. 

They walked along a path of polished inlaid stones. The grass looked like it had been manicured by an actual manicurist with tweezers and buff pads. Their bodies were as close to being in contact as possible without touching. They had rehearsed this dance far too many times.  

Ximena’s long brown hair and almond eyes were enchanting. Over the years, they had perfected a long, slow pace, savoring these trips back to her doorstep. Their walks were an alternative physics lesson. Time wasn't linear; it was malleable and ductile. Seconds, like gold bars, could be stretched into threads that went on for eternity.  

They took the elevator to the fourth floor and floated up to her suite.  

“Jesus, Ximena. Is the whole floor yours?” he asked. 

She didn’t answer. They were at her door now. There were actually four doors at the entrance.  

“Are you going to go on the apps tonight?” she asked again. “I’d prefer that you didn’t.” 

“Probably not,” he said. 

“I can’t tell you what to do, I know.” she added, exhaling.  

“Well, you could have me in. That would end this discussion, and everyone would be happy. Except maybe the girl I matched with before I came down to meet you,” he said, joking, not at all joking. 

“Don’t tell me anything else,” she said, turning toward the door. She stopped and turned back to Enzo. “Will you meet me for breakfast before your speech tomorrow?” 

“Promise me we’ll be alone?” he asked. 

“Yes,” she said, holding him with her eyes, not breaking contact until closing the door behind her.