It takes me two minutes to figure out how to adjust the seat and mirrors from their previous position—chosen to accommodate Blake’s long legs. There are no levers, nothing manual. Everything slides whisper-smooth into place at the touch of a button.
That leads me to the second problem: I don’t know how to turn the car on, and I’m not about to go back and ask him. There’s no key, no ignition—it’s an electric car; what would there be to ignite? There’s not even a big button labeled “power.”
I finally get out my phone in desperation and send a text.
Blake, how do you turn your car on?
The answer takes a few moments. Are you sitting in the car? Do you have the electronic fob?
Yes. And yes.
Then it’s on. So long as the display behind the steering wheel is on, the car is on. It’s just that the engine doesn’t make any noise.
Maria casts me an inquisitive look as I start down the street. That’s the way everything is for him. It happens automatically, without his even having to press a button. Hell, I’m feeling too much for him already, and all the encouragement he’s ever given me is to…offer me paperwork.
“Everything okay?”
My hands are still shaking. “Fine,” I say. “Awesome. Better than okay. Couldn’t be any better.”
“That bad, huh?”
“He knows I like him,” I say, gripping the wheel as hard as I can.
“Oh,” Maria says. For a moment, neither of us says anything. I pull onto the main road, but the traffic just heightens my unease.
I can’t get over this car. It’s everything I would have expected Blake to have. It’s so silent that the only noise I hear is tires against asphalt. I scarcely have to press the—it can’t be called the gas, can it, if the car is electric?—accelerator and it responds, as silent and as forceful as a ninja. The speedometer jumps.
Forty-five thousand dollars seemed like an impossible amount two weeks ago. Now, I’m realizing that it’s nothing. One side-swipe from a passing car could do that much in damage.
Suddenly this whole thing freaks me out. I’m afraid to look up the value of his house, but I suspect the number is firmly in the millions. This car. The electronics he handed me. A prototype, which, if stolen, could cost his dad’s company millions in falling stock prices. Billions even.
Adam Reynolds was right. Fernanda was my ticket on to the merry-go-round. I’m in a position where I can do real damage.
I feel like I’ve been outfitted with boxing gloves and ordered to juggle three Fabergé eggs across the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m going to break something. Everything.
A passing car honks.
“Tina,” Maria says. “You’re going fifteen in a thirty-five zone.”
“I know,” I choke out. “But—if I crash…”
She looks over at me. “A car like this is not made to go fifteen. Are you sure you’re okay? Did he do something to you? Because I don’t care who he is or what he’s paying you, if—”
“No, it’s nothing like that.” I pull into a parking lot and stop. “It’s just…”
My heart is beating hard. I don’t know what to say.
“This isn’t safe,” I finally manage. “Not him. Not this car. Not the prototypes or the NDA or anything along those lines. It’s not safe, and I’m afraid I’m going to fuck it all up.”
She doesn’t say anything. Instead, she reaches over and takes my hand. My fingers feel cold in hers. But she holds on anyway, sending me warmth.
“Honey,” Maria says finally, “there’s only one thing to do when you find yourself behind the wheel of a car like this.”
“What?”
I know we’re not just talking about the car. My voice shakes, but Maria doesn’t say anything about that. She just squeezes my hand.
“You floor it. Because you know what? Blake has good insurance. We’re both on it, remember? We signed the forms.”
I laugh uneasily. But I don’t move.
“Do you want me to drive?”
“Yes.” I let out a breath. “Could you?”
We trade places. She adjusts the seat smoothly, and then, when she pulls out of the parking lot, she floors it.
7:09 PM
Hey Blake. I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.
I don’t think you’re going to crash and burn.
7:11 PM
no?
7:11 PM
No.
I’m actually more worried that I will.
I have no experience with any of this.
How do you do anything?
The stakes are so high.
It’s paralyzing.
What if I completely fuck everything up?
7:12 PM
You won’t.
7:13 PM
You can’t know that.
7:14 PM
Yes I can
b/c if you get stuck, you’ll ask me
and we’ll figure it out like reasonable people.
7:15 PM
Still no good.
That way I’ll spend more time around you.
I’m trying not to like you.
7:15 PM
Honest question
Does it suck to know failure is inevitable?
7:16 PM
God. You’re so conceited.
7:17 PM
I guess that’s not surprising.
Or entirely unwarranted.
I’m going through the Fernanda materials.
You’re right. You do work hard. And she’s brilliant.
7:17 PM
Why yes
I was something of a genius with her
Thank you for noticing
7:18 PM
Argh. That just made it worse, didn’t it?
I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.
Stupid sense of fairness.
7:19 PM
Wrong.
We just traded
so now it’s your turn to be a genius.
7:20 PM
Here’s a hint
I knew you could be one the day you told me I was full of shit.
Not many people notice that
7:21 PM
Stop it. I’m trying not to like you
Remember?
7:22 PM
Not working out so well for you, is it?
7:22 PM
Jerk.
7:23 PM
That’s English for yes?
7:23 PM
Pretty much.
7:25 PM
Thought so.
9.
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 na
me. 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.
“Cute,” he says, “but can you see Dad and me doing that? It has to be a true construction.”
Those are the words I see over and over, in every launch script over the last ten years: True construction. The Blake and Adam show may be scripted, but it’s also something real. It has to be something that could happen, something, perhaps, that even did happen. It’s fake, but it’s based on good source material. The launches chronicle their growing relationship from father and son to friends. They’re sweet. They’re endearing. They’re authentic. And—I remind myself—they’re putting all of this on display for the purpose of selling more products, which is completely fucked up.
There’s only one launch I can find in the entire twenty-year period that isn’t completely scripted. It happened a year ago, when one of the key presenters passed away two nights before. Without any explanation that I can find, Blake and Adam axed the entire goofy script they’d put together.
There was nothing written to fill the space, just a short interchange between Blake and his dad. Blake deleted the idea that had come before. He added two lines in its place.
Announce moment of silence.
Stage direction: don’t cry.
His father, in turn, deleted the second line with a comment of his own. Irrelevant. I don’t cry.
Blake added the line back in. That’s for me, asshole.
It takes me three days to understand what Blake has asked me to do. He was right; I can manage most of the launch. There’s an entire team that is involved with the script. They’ve been doing this as long as Blake has, and they’ve already sent in suggestions that I will only have to modify.
Blake doesn’t need me to write a product launch, not really. He needs a true construction. He wants me to write the next chapter in his relationship with his father, the man he loves so much that it hurts.
And I don’t have the truth.
I don’t like being taken by surprise. I especially don’t like discovering that I’ve landed in the middle of a morass.
After a few moments’ contemplation, I head south to meet Blake after work.
I had the responsibility of finding Blake a suitable job—and trust me, that wasn’t as easy as it might seem. His name is recognizable enough that he’d draw notice almost everywhere. His resumé is glowing—so glowing that for an entry-level job, it’s practically radioactive. Imagine applying for a job in fast food with Vice President of Interfaces, Cyclone Systems as your last position.
Luckily, I know someone who owes my mom a favor.
It’s ten at night when I open the doors to the restaurant where he’s working.
“Closed!” sings out Mr. Zhen from the back as I slip inside. The walls are paneled in faux-rosewood scenes that are supposed to give off an indeterminately Chinese vibe. At least they would if I didn’t know that the chop in the corner translates to something like “Turgid Mutton.”
“We’re closed,” Mr. Zhen insists, bustling through the kitchen door. But he stops when he sees me and a smile spreads over his face. He takes off his hairnet, revealing approximately three strands of hair.
“Tina!” He switches to Mandarin. “I’m glad you came. Nice boy you sent to me. I’m really happy.”
“He’s going to work out?” I have to admit I’m a little surprised. Not that I thought Blake would be unwilling to work; he’s too competitive to not try his best. I just kind of assumed he would suck at manual labor.
Mr. Zhen waves a hand. “A little slow, but he’ll speed up. We just have to break in his soft hands.” He laughs. “But I see why you sent him my way. It’s nice to have someone back there who speaks Mandarin for a change. My last dishwasher was Mexican and we could never talk about anything.”
Blake speaks Mandarin? This is news to me. I smile tightly. “I thought you’d like that,” I say instead.
The kitchen door opens and Blake comes out. He’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. It must be humid back there, because the shirt clings. Just a little. He’s not built like a wrestler—he’s far too thin for that—but there’s nothing on him but muscle. His tattoo is visible, rippling on the skin of his arm. I swallow.
“Thank you, Mr. Zhen,” he says in passable Mandarin. Son of a bitch. “I…” He pauses, thinking. “Now bowls clean. Tomorrow I more fast.”
His vocabulary sucks. His grammar is terrible. Blake Reynolds speaks white-boy Mandarin. But he actually speaks it.
At that point, Blake looks over and sees me. He blinks, and then very slowly, he smiles.
He holds up his hands. “No bowls!” he says.
“I thought I’d give you a ride home,” I say in English.
He switches naturally. “Ah. You’re a goddess.” He smiles at me. “I thought you were just here to taunt me.”
“Why taunt you as you walk past when I can taunt you the entire way home?”
“Good point.” But he grins at me and puts on his coat. Which is good. I didn’t want to look at Blake’s biceps anyway.
He follows me to the car parked just outside, starts to go to the driver’s side, and then shakes his head ruefully, circling back to the
passenger side.
He slides in and leans back against the seat.
“Tired?” My tone is not entirely innocent.
In response, he groans. “Last year, I ran a fifty-mile race in the mountains of Spain. It was cold and raining. Someone died of hypothermia. I fractured my tibia.” He shuts his eyes. “That was worse than this. Marginally.”
It’s a good thing he’s shut his eyes. This way, he won’t notice that I’m only going twenty-five miles an hour.
“So,” I say. “You speak Mandarin.”
“My dad took me to China for three months when we were working out some manufacturing details. I forced myself to do some crash-course learning, enough to be polite. It smoothes things over when my father—um.” He stretches and rolls his neck. “Speaking of impressing people. You’ve been holding out on me.”
I pull out—slowly—onto the main thoroughfare. “I’ve been holding out on you? You have to be kidding me.”
“Yeah. You give that whole our-lives-are-equal-value speech, and then you don’t tell me that your mother is some kind of badass.”
“My mom?”
“Mr. Zhen told me all about her. What is she, some kind of super-lawyer?”
I don’t want to get into this with him. I hate trying to explain Falun Gong to Westerners. Sometimes, I wish my parents had been caught up in something comprehensible, like tax reform or Tiananmen Square. I’ve tried telling people before, and it rarely goes well.
Falun Gong is a system of exercises, something like Tai Chi or Qi Gong. It’s illegal to practice it in China, so illegal that the Chinese government runs reeducation camps to forcibly brainwash practitioners.
No, it’s not a freedom of speech issue. No, it’s not a religion, not like you understand it. It’s never going to make sense to you, which is why immigration judges don’t always get it. It’s like free exercise of…exercise, and my mother spends all her spare time beating her head against that wall.
“Come on,” Blake says. “You can tell me.”
I sigh. “She’s not a super-lawyer. She’s not even a lawyer. She quit school when she was sixteen.”
He frowns at this, sitting up straight. “Huh. From what Mr. Zhen told me, I imagined her sitting in a tiny law office in Southern California, striking fear into the hearts of xenophobes everywhere.”