Trade Me (Cyclone #1)

TINA

The work I’m doing for Blake doesn’t take me less time than my job in the library; it takes more. Blake’s time estimates were based on his own abilities. But he drew from a storehouse of knowledge that I will never have. If I want to do a creditable job—and I won’t give him the satisfaction of doing anything less—I need to get my feet under me, and do it quickly.

I watch Cyclone launches while I’m brushing my teeth, walking to school, even taking a five-minute break from homework.

The launches are lavish affairs, scripted to the hilt, practiced as much as possible. Alternates are chosen in case of accidents. Blake had his assistant pull out the last twenty launch scripts for me, and it turns out the scripts are a source of far more than just a description of what is supposed to happen. They’re all stored in a proprietary Cyclone format, one that contains prior versions, comments, stage directions—just about everything you can imagine.

Online, there are Cyclone launch groupies, and they’ve made my work easy by breaking the launch into parts. There’s the financials stage, where Adam talks through what Cyclone has accomplished in the last year or so. There’s the refresh stage, where he—or a product engineer—introduces new versions of old products. And then—sometimes, not always—there’s the new product stage.

At some point in this affair, there’s what the groupies call “the Adam and Blake show.” Internal Cyclone documents have adopted the same name. At some point, father and son both end up on the stage, interacting with whatever new toy they have, showing off its features. The more elaborate the gadget, the crazier the script.

During the launch of the Tempest smartphone, Adam was interrupted in the middle of his initial presentation. His phone rang loudly in the middle of a discussion of cloud storage. He looked around and slowly pulled out the as-yet-unannounced phone.

“Yes?” he said shortly, looking around the audience. “This isn’t a good time. I’m kind of busy.”

The audience laughed good-naturedly in response.

Adam’s features changed as he listened. “Where’s Blake? He has detention? This isn’t a good time for that. He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

Louder laughter erupted.

“Well,” Adam said, “yes, I can understand where you’re coming from, Mr. Whitesend. I’m not trying to argue that my son should have special treatment. Wait. Yes. I am trying to argue that. Can’t he do this next week? He’ll stay twice as long.”

A deeper frown.

“Oh, you already offered that as an option and he said no?” Adam rubbed his forehead. “I see.” He hung up and slid the phone back in his pocket.

“Hey, Adam,” someone yelled from the audience. “What was that?”

“You’ll see,” he responded.

But the best part was when he got to the Tempest reveal. As Adam started showing off the smartphone features, Blake started texting.

It was one of the funniest things in a launch ever—Blake sending pictures of his teacher, taken with perfect comic timing. He sent a video near the end of the teacher in charge of detention looking up, frowning, and starting down the aisle.

Finally, a single text appeared on Adam’s screen.

This is Mr. Whitesend. What is this thing?

Everyone online initially assumed it had to be staged. But the other students at Blake’s high school insisted that it had really happened—that he had gotten detention, that he’d argued. Two students had even been in detention with him as it all happened, and they swore it really went down that way. The internet is still arguing, eight years later, over whether it was real or not.

I have access to the scripts, and I get to find out the truth. Yes, it was scripted. All of it. Both the principal and Mr. Whitesend were in on it, with signed releases and everything. Mr. Whitesend apparently got paid a mountain of money in exchange for looking like the bad guy.

There are years of launches, hours of Blake and Adam shows. And once I start diving into the edited scripts, I only get more confused.

“We’re selling family,” Adam wrote in an earlier comment as he crossed off someone else’s suggestion. “We make people want to be part of the Cyclone family. This doesn’t do that.”

But when someone else suggested a truly heartwarming scenario three years ago, Blake nixed it.