Should have, would have, could have. It was all pointless, this speculation—throwing good time after bad. And Pocketz was still on top, by a big margin, a huge margin. The job now was to stay there.
So, though he hadn’t been lying to Marta when he told her that his breakup with Sonya had been the catalyst for this trip beyond the wall, there was another reason he was now swinging his ass over a bare spot in the ground, trying to convince his bowels to move. Wes had given in to his board on their oldest, most chewed-up bone of contention: Pocketz Corporate Collaborations. The trick for pulling off this new venture, they’d decided, was to start slow and start smart: whatever product they came up with had to have an emotional appeal, so that Wes’s investment in it would feel more like an event, epic in scale, than a crass opportunity. But it also had to have the potential to make a pile of money. “We’re not talking prosthetic legs for orphans,” his COO, Sandy, had said. “More like—pharmaceuticals. But that’s risky because it’s so regulated, and there are liability issues out the wazoo.”
“National defense? Weapons?” suggested his CSO, Cedric.
“God no,” Wes said. “Can you imagine how that would play with Sai’s crowd?”
“But he has the right idea,” Sandy said. “Weapons, no. We don’t want this getting torn apart by factions. We don’t want that to be the headline. But people want to feel safe. Everyone wants to feel safe.”
“Clean energy,” Wes said. “What’s that solar micromotor company called? I saw them profiled on Sunday Salon.”
Sandy shook her head. “I don’t think that flies either, Wes. It’s political and it’s boring. People see that technology as basically here already. They take it for granted.”
“But it’s not here,” Wes said. “Not in any form that people can afford to use yet.”
“That’s the problem. We need something that the average Pocketz user can purchase. A grand idea with some kind of concrete form you can actually own. They want to be able to take a picture of it and post it to their feeds. You can’t post a picture of a solar micromotor.”
And then, like that, Wes knew. This was the way his brain had always worked, and it was a superb gift, one he tried to never take for granted.
“Protection from ticks,” he said firmly. He knew from the spark in Sandy’s eye that he had nailed it, and he continued, getting excited. “Sprays. Microsuits. Detectors. That sort of stuff. We present it as an investment in freedom. But we make sure the trends feed recirculates some of those old stories about the tick population growing, the projections that our Wall will be infiltrated by such and such a year. None of those products are regulated, right?”
“Nope,” Cedric said. “Government doesn’t touch ’em.”
“Ticks have no faction,” Sandy mused. “I mean, not that I know of. There’s probably some group of ticks’ rights nut-fuckers out there.” She laughed—three bars—then grew pensive. “I guess we might get thrown into the Wall debate, though, and that’s a PR loser, any way you slice it.”
The Wall debate, the goddamn endless Wall debate. Build it bigger, expand the TerraVibra perimeter? Tear it down? And just as the conversation would seem to be dying out for a while, another Wall tax hike would get shoved through Congress, and the whole cycle would start again.
“But a suit—that’s about individual choice,” Wes said. “Wear it outside the Wall, if you want to travel. If you ever need it inside, God forbid, you’ve got it. I really think this might be insulated from the other debates. Or even bolstered by them.”
Sandy nodded. “You may be right there. And the usefulness of all these gadgets is hard to gauge, from what I understand.”
“That’s a good thing,” Cedric said, noticing the look of worry that appeared on Wes’s face.
“Definitely a good thing,” Sandy agreed. “I think it’s brilliant, Wes. It makes a statement. It communicates an interest in the greater good. It hits on big ideas without making big promises. I say we do studies on the major forces in the market, put out some feelers, draw up profiles, and make an approach.”
Wes, feeling like he’d ceded some essential part of himself—and dear God, there was a relief in that—had patted the conference table and stood. “Do it, then. Keep me updated.”
The report had been ready in a matter of days. There were three sizable, suitable companies specializing in mass-market tick-protection products. The biggest, Circutex, had all of the Atlantic Zone government contracts, as well as contracts with the other North American zones and several international ones, and a handful of lucrative out-of-zone corporate contracts, including the beef supplier for Burger Blitz. They specialized in industrial microsuits—spacesuits, Wes thought, looking at a sample his staff had brought him. They wouldn’t photograph well at all. The next company, Field and Shaughnessy, had a product called NO-BITE, available in cream and spray forms, that touted a 95 percent effectiveness rate against miner ticks and other invasive insect species. It had been around for a long time, nearly sixteen years, and though Wes suspected the company wouldn’t mind a splashy new corporate partner to bring new attention to an old standard, he just didn’t see the opportunity in that for Pocketz. That was an easy pass.
The last possibility—a somewhat mysterious umbrella corporation called Perrone Inc.—was the most interesting to Wes. Its owner, David Perrone, seemed to have a lot of capital, and his investments through Perrone Inc. were all over the place, literally and metaphorically: a chain of quick-lube shops, with locations both in Atlantic Zone and Gulf; a few outer-zone factories; an upscale Salon and Spa in Raleigh; and maybe some Wall fortifications subcontracting, though Sandy admitted that the dotted lines on those were harder to trace. Perrone himself had gone over the last three years from having, astoundingly, almost no significant digital footprint—there were Pocketz accounts in his wife’s and sons’ names, an expired Mi Familia account, a few other weirdly vague, random hits in the feeds—to quietly emerging online and in life, forming a picture of a cautious family man with powerful ties to some of the heaviest hitters among conservative zone leadership. “I think this is a person,” Sandy told Wes, “who is primed for some kind of a positive, public coming out.”