Street Dreams

Speculative fiction: Part IV of IV of the Detem Cycle: More than one way to run a business

“Am I paying you to browse the Internet?”

I heard it even with the earphones on. No, that’s not what Magnus was paying me for. Nor what I was doing.

“I don’t accept the premise of your question,” I said.

Magnus laughed harder than it deserved. The phrase was a favorite of the quasi-fascist he’d supported for governor, so it was guaranteed to get a particular reaction. Not quite a positive reaction. More of a distracting reaction. The laugh was loud, but not pleasant. It was one of two things I hated about Magnus. The other was that he paid me too much. That kept me in a job I was pretty much tired of.

“What are you doing?” he asked as I took off the headphones.

“Two things worth browsing the internet for,” I said. “One is a county supervisor who wants to ban ID. The other is a paper about reverse engineering the Detem process. It looks hopeful, from what I can see.”

“Where is it published?” Magnus asked.

“It’s not yet,” I said. “It’s been submitted to a psychology journal.”

“How are you seeing it?” he asked.

“You’re not paying me just to browse the internet, Mag,” I said.

That got another laugh, no more pleasant than the first. I could generally find things that other couldn’t, but it wasn’t clear if that’s what I was being paid for. But then nothing about my job duties was clear. If we had been to a law firm, or a federal contractor, or some other entity that charged by the 10th of an hour, then I could have charted how much of the firm's time was taken up maintaining the core money-making operation and how much we spent interpreting or applying Magnus’s wild ideas. Of course I'd spent time on my own wild ideas as well but they'd be Magnus's at the end of the day. Intellectual property. My intellect, his property.

“Print me a copy of it,” he said. “What about that other thing? Why are we worried about a county supervisor?”

“Because if the delegate from down there runs for state Senate, the supervisor’s probably going to run for the delegate seat.”

“Any idea how sincere he is about ID?”

“She. It's hard to tell. The one thing she keeps saying is loose dreaming instead of induced dreaming. That would make it LD instead of ID. The reporter that wrote about it corrected it, but you can still hear it on the recordings.”

“So she doesn't really know what she wants to ban?”

“Pretty much. she's got the idea it has something to do with sex. You know how those people are.”

That earned me a sneer. Magnus really did know how those people were. That's part of why he gave them a lot of money. Not that he was against sex so far as I know, but because some of those Bible thumpers were so worried about sex that made them more pliable on other matters. Like, for instance, semi-stolen computer simulations that manipulated people’s minds in the name of recreation.

“Send me her contact information,” Magnus said.

I knew the call he was going to make. I’d made the mistake of being in the room for one. I hadn’t planned it, but the call came back while I was in his office. Mag probably thought he was being subtle. He mentioned the caller’s opponent in the next election, segued into how much he’d given to the caller’s campaign, then mentioned a piece of legislation that would affect induced dreaming in some peripheral way. He’d left the phone laying on his desk with the speaker on. I didn’t know if he had forgotten I was in the room or if he was trying to impress me.

The caller said something about the parents group supporting the bill. Magnus responded, “I don’t know what they’ll do if it passes, but I know what I’ll do.”

“What’s that?” the caller said. I recognized that Magnus had practically invited him to ask and he had. It made him more a participant. That was important if anybody was listening to the call. Magnus wasn’t necessarily paranoid; he just assumed somebody was listening. An object lesson from the era of the Detem.

“I’ll scorch the damned earth,” Magnus said. “That’s what I’ll do.”

I think Magnus would have maintained that he was only speaking in general terms. Because in his mind he was not threatening an elected official and tying the threat to a campaign donation. In the world he was. The world we lived in. But those of us who worked for Magnus got used to working in a different world than we lived in. I made it a point after that to avoid his office when he was threatening legislators on speakerphone. Overly cautious perhaps, but I didn't like the idea of being caught between a non-disclosure agreement and a federal bribery prosecution. Call me indecisive.

I had some idea what would happen with the paper that I had found as well. Magnus would read it too quickly, overestimating his speed reading skills as he did many of his abilities, before deciding that the paper was worthless or that it was threatening our business. I already knew that the truth fell somewhere in the middle, but then you could often say that about his potential reactions

The paper’s focus was about what was DETected and EMitted by the Detem – or Coll-Sen, or Sensitor, depending on who was using them. Programs had been written and machines had been built to process that information, whatever it was. But that was the catch. What it was. The signal? The information? The only concrete description for legal and medical purposes was what it wasn’t. The feds had worked with the Dream Lab before it folded, and with a classified project in Texas, to come up with a definition, which more or less said it wouldn’t kill or harm somebody and, if it did, they didn’t know how.

All that became less relevant when a private investigation found out that the main metal in the Detem was deteriorating and irreplaceable. The paper on that wasn’t published until well after the authors had shorted the relevant stocks, and after Magnus found out he could get the Dream Lab’s raw files through a Freedom of Information request.

My second read of the paper was interrupted by a text from the reception area. “Problem client,” meant someone there needed help from a senior employee backed by security. A boss and a bouncer. The bouncer, Juan, was already sitting in a guest chair reading a magazine when I got there. He probably wouldn’t have to do anything, but he boosted confidence for me and for the receptionist.

Rita was behind her desk and a yuppie in a polo was standing in front of it. I stood so that Juan was visible behind me before I asked if I could help with anything.

“Yeah, you can. I ordered a session here a month ago, and now you’re telling me I can’t get it. I paid for it and I want to get it now,” he said. There was no particular air of command to him; rather, he spoke like someone accustomed to succeeding at verbal bullying. We got maybe two or three of them every month. That’s why there was a protocol in place for dealing with them.

“That’s odd,” I said, although it wasn’t. “We only need a credit card number and a signed acceptance form in advance.” I kept Rita in my peripheral vision. She nodded at “credit card,” shook her head at “acceptance form.”

“I told her I’d sign it,” he said.

“We require it to be signed 24 hours in advance,” I said. “It’s company policy.”

“Look I said I'd go ahead and sign it. It's not like I'm going to sue you or anything. I mean, you've got two or three witnesses here who heard me saying I'm not going to sue.”

Mentioned the legal action. Strike one.

“I’m afraid it's a strict company policy. If you're staying at the resort you can take a copy with you and return with the signed copy tomorrow. We need to make sure our clients have had time to fully absorb what's in the form.”

“So what are you saying that I'm not smart enough to understand it from reading it right now?”

Belligerent attitude. Strike two.

“The reasons don't matter, sir. As I said, it's a strict company policy and as I said you can take a copy of it with you right now.”

“Or what? The goon over there is going to throw me out?”

Name calling. Strike three.

“I don't think that's going to become necessary, sir. I think it's best if you just go ahead and leave without the form. We’d prefer not to do business with you right now.”

Somewhere in there Juan took a cue. I heard him stand up and assumed he had taken a step closer. The yuppie who never became a customer looked across my shoulder, muttered something that may have been intimidating in a different milieu, and stormed out the door.

“You want me to go with him and read the form to him,” Juan asked.

“No need,” I said, turning so that I was facing him and Rita. “You know Magnus did suggest that once. Read them the form, make them nod or verbally approve each section, and record the whole thing. We’d have to hire somebody to conduct the interview, but we could add the person's salary to the cost of the session.”

“Unless Magnus decided to have you do it so he could pocket the surcharge.”

“I hope you haven't suggested that to him,” I said.

We all shared a chuckle and then went back to work. The acceptance form was generally one of two ways we might have a problem client. The other was somebody having a bad dream and wanting their money back, which was one of the reasons for the acceptance form. We told them what might happen and asked them to initial the relevant paragraphs. The paragraphs were numbered and there might be an instruction in paragraph 4 saying if you agree with this provision please initial beside paragraph 2. It was a way to make sure they read the form. I had once suggested putting in a provision on page 3 of the four-page form saying that we would shoot anybody who claimed to have a bad dream. This would be followed by a sentence saying that it was only inserted to see if they had read that far. But Magnus was afraid of getting sued by somebody we didn't shoot. He could be too literal at times.

I had read somewhere that musicians did something similar with the riders to their performance contracts. One band supposedly demanded a bowl of M&M's in their green room, but with all the blue ones picked out. The idea was that if the promoter did not complain about the candy color, then the promoter had not read that particular paragraph. Another story told of a diva who insisted that no one look her in the eye prior to her performance. That one may have been a real requirement.

The point of the acceptance form was that induced dreaming played back through a Detem helmet information that had been recorded during experiments in the Dream Lab over a few years. At some point a court had said that the recordings, impressions as they were called at the dream lab, constituted medical records. By then we had copied them, renamed them, and removed all identifying information. We agreed to destroy the originals as if that made any difference to the copies.

There were still lawsuits floating through the courts. But the judges and the attorneys and, if it ever came to that, the juries were hampered by the lack of understanding of Detems. Developed as a better microphone, the Detems had been repurposed as noise blockers, as recorders of dream impressions, and as God only knows what by the classified projects. By the time the law began to catch up with all that might be possible with the devices, they had all begun failing as recorders. One result of the failure was that no more dreams were being recorded. One result of the court ruling calling them medical records was that our firm, Induced Dreaming, had the only legal copies of the impressions, that we knew of, from the Dream Lab.

Bottom line, people with more money than sense could come to Highspring County, stay at the over-priced resort, and pay us thousands of dollars to playback an impression through a Detem helmet that gave them what many still thought of as a custom dream. We didn't really give them a custom dream. We gave them a playback from a category of dreams based on what the impressions had created for other people. At some point we could be reasonably certain that a particular impression could cause an intense sexual dream in more than 80% of clients. That was the most expensive impression. The one that would cause a sexual dream in 60% of clients only cost 3/4 what the first one did. The only one the cost less than a week in Vegas could give you a pleasant dream 1/4 of the time if you were one of the lucky ones. It was guesswork with the rest. We knew they might have a nightmare but wouldn't say what it would be. In the early days every time a client had a nightmare, we added another paragraph to the next customer’s acceptance form.

I spent the rest of the afternoon rereading the research paper I had found. When I told Magnus it looked hopeful I meant that if the research could be trusted — their ability, not their honesty — then it might give us a better idea of the process involved in recording what happened in a person's brain and playing it back into another’s. We could continue making money with induced dreaming for a long time, but we could make more if we could figure out a way to record new dreams. The failing devices continued to be effective enough to emit information that could be used to induce dreams, but nowhere were they powerful enough to make any new recordings.

The three most common names, Detems, Sensitors, and Coll-Sens, paled beside the number of names given to what it was they measured. The most common name was the dispersals. The signal, the information, the impression, the data — all words that could be used to describe something else. Dispersal was a noun in reference to a process, but dispersals to describe individual things, regardless of whether anyone knew what those things were, was unique to the study of Detems. This particular researcher had found a few more clues about what actually went on inside the devices. Physically reverse engineering one of them had proven impossible because the unique metal inside them, the so-called Holy Gold, deteriorated even more quickly when exposed to the air, but only if the Detem had been used. So far I had not found any research that involved taking one apart in vacuum or from an unused source. As they became more scarce in the market and the price of them went up, the cost of that research became more and more prohibitive.

Magnus burst into my office as I was rereading the paper. Or he would have burst in if the door had been closed.

“Have you read this?” he said, waving a sheaf of papers. I wanted to tell him that I could hardly read something ten feet away moving next to his ears, but that seemed counterproductive.

“I’m rereading it now,” I said, wondering what he’d found in it.

“What the hell are Street Dreams?” he yelled.

I hadn’t gotten to that part yet.

—

“Nobody really knows how it works,” said one proprietor.

I may have missed it the first time through because the paper didn't say proprietor of what. The citation in the footnote was “interview with Colin Thompson of street dreams in Richmond, Va.” The website I found was a bit more commercial then Induced Dreams. Ours was mostly a logo and the contact form with the logo being the only thing even remotely flashy. A giant N with the number 2 superimposed on it twice, once with the diamond symbol next to it once with the club. N-deuce. It was a bad pun but a good logo. The website for street dreams looked more like one for a massage parlor or a hardware store. Among photos of smiling people with their heads on pillows, it promised custom-made dreams.

I'm not sure if I would have found it if I had gone looking for it. Street Dreams sounded more like a shop for NASCAR enthusiasts. That's because I was thinking of street legal, and the principle was the same. You could drive to a resort in the Allegheny mountains, or have your helicopter or Learjet take you to the private airstrip, and then drive a few miles to the Induced Dreams complex. You could set up an appointment and sign the forms at least 24 hours in advance, or you could just walk in off the street in Richmond and lay your money down. Street legal meant you didn't need an oval track and the fire team and a pit crew. You just needed a straight stretch of road and your own wrenches. Street Dreams didn't seem to offer the controlled environment that we did. We were offering safety and curated impression files. Street Dreams appeared to be offering variety and excitement.

Magnus was back in the office an hour later.

“You see how the ripping us off?” he said.

“I see they're doing the same things we are,” I said.

“Exactly,” Magnus said. “There's no way they could be doing what they claim they're doing on their website unless they were using our technology.”

It wasn't really our technology. But it was difficult to explain something like that to Magnus. Some people pick up a pen and think they invented writing. Some people hit two notes and think they’re the first person to sing. It wasn't as if we didn't do anything new with the company. Induced Dreaming was just one facet of it. Magnus had got his start with an assembly line file-sorting process for categorizing paper files. He had done well selling it to people who were required to keep paper files for a particular time but had limited storage space. He had other ideas like that that translated into a cash flow. We had two buildings that I knew of besides the ID complex. But ID was where the real money came from.

Much of it went out to accountants, lawyers, and politicians. That's an exaggeration but only a slight one. Magnus had filed suit against the company somewhere out West that he claimed was copying his file process. He backed off when that company was bought by one of the larger tech firms. Instead of going after a company with that many lawyers, he turned toward his own customers. He manipulated rental prices and software licenses such that it made more sense for most of them to stick with him for just one more contract term, and then maybe one more after that. He had a nose for business practices that was strong enough to let him exaggerate his tech skills. For the tech skills, he had me and a couple of programmer analysts working for me.

I was getting ready to leave for the day when Magnus stopped me again.

“Did you look at some of the logos?” he asked.

“I was more concerned with the tech,” I said. “What was it about the logos?”

“They have a service they called the crapshoot,” Magnus said. “And their logo for it is a joker.”

“Comics and dice? We could sue them for mixed metaphors.”

“Comics? No, not that Joker. The card. Like the deuce card in our logo.”

“It seems thin for a lawsuit,” I suggested.

“We'll start there,” Magnus said? “And then we'll see how they like having to defend everything they do.”

“I guess it's worth trying,” I said. “If we can get a process server to go into that part of town.”

“You know that area?” Magnus said.

“I grew up around there,” I said. “I go back there for holidays sometimes.”

“Go back there now,” Magnus said. “See what you could find out about them.”

“I’m not clear how I would go about doing that,” I said.

“Tell them we're thinking about buying them,” Magnus said.

That was how I wound up back in that part of Virginia. There’d been no great reason to leave but it was that kind of place. There was also no great reason to come back after college. Some parts of it I barely recognized, rural areas that were now bedroom communities, shopping malls where yesterday's anchor stores were today's vape shops. One of those shopping malls had an old department store converted into the Street Dreams operation. The place hadn't exactly gentrified but it had recovered enough from the 2028 Proud Boy riots that police patrolled the place again — patrols as opposed to the military operations they had run there for a couple of years.

I sat down with Colin Thompson in the coffee house near their headquarters. He knew where I was from and he was probably savvy enough, or cagey enough, or just plain smart enough to have guessed why I was there. He had greeted me with some combination of amusement and curiosity.

“So what does Milton want for me?” he asked after a few minutes of small talk.

“Milton?” I said.

“Your boss,” he said. “Milton Andrew Graham.” He apparently took my bafflement as a question. “Yeah, first year of college, he told everybody his nickname was MAG. He said somebody always called him the that because of his initials. I guess he eventually made it official and added numb for numb-nuts or something.”

“It's Magnus, not Magnum,” I said.

“I guess either one would worked,” Thompson said.

“I didn't know you went to college with him,” I said.

“We went there at the same time,” he said. “We didn't really travel in the same circles. The Business School, the BS we called it, was on the same side of campus as science and tech but not always the same world.”

“I guess it's a different kind of success,” I said. I was talking to fill space while I tried to figure out how the new information changed my approach.

“Well it sounds like we're a lot leaner operation than ID,” Thompson said. “From what I've heard, Milton spends a whole lot of money on lawyers and politicians. And sending you out here.”

It sounded like a question, or at least an opening.

“Induced thrives on exclusivity to a certain extent,” I said.

“That's one way of phrasing it,” he said. “Do I take it your boss is interested in buying more exclusivity?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Have you thought about anything along those lines?”

“I can't imagine anybody wanting to buy Street Dreams or anything else in this business. How much longer do you guys plan to be in it?”

“We still have a pretty good market,” I said.

He looked a little surprised at that, but I wasn't exactly sure why. “What about your outfit? How much longer, I mean?” It was my way of pretending I understood the relevance of asking how long.

“I guess until the Plowshare Thread wears out,” he said.

“That took me a second,” I said. “I’ve mostly heard it referred to as Holy Gold.”

“Either way,” he said. “it's a half-life this year and a quarter the next, isn’t it?”

“We're not really using the recording part of it,” I said. “The emitting is all you need to induce dreams. Unless you're doing it some other way.”

“We're doing it the same way you are,” he said. “But without claiming we're the only ones who thought of it. The Dream Lab should have been selling those files years ago. If we'd had to buy them for what they're worth, we never could have started Street Dreams.”

“How did you start it?” I asked.

This was where he might tell me to go away, maybe not quite that politely.

“Somebody knew somebody at the lab,” he said, punctuating it with a shrug. “But I was talking about the emitters. Have y'all found some way to amplify them?”

“We haven't had to yet,” I said, still a little bit uncertain about what he was talking about.

“Well, tell Milton if he figures that out we might buy his company, but we're not ready to go in the other direction. I don't know how long the paperwork takes on something like that, but either way the Detems might be completely dead.”

“Well, like I already said, we aren’t using it for recording,” I said.

“You guys don't have any musicians on the staff do you?”

“We play recorded music to people while we're inducing dreams but we don't have any live musicians,” I said.

He sipped his coffee and stared at me. After a few seconds it became disconcerting enough that I shrugged by way of asking him what was up.

“I don't guess there's any business harm in telling you this,” he said. “You’ll find out soon enough. But as far as input and output from Detems, the output is going to start failing too. The people I've talked to said could start in about a year or two.”

That was one of the holes in everything we did at ID. We had lawyers on staff and we had people classifying the dream impression files, but we tended to think of the Detems as settled science.

“Why musicians?” I asked.

“That's who they were made for first,” he said. “They were originally some kind of super microphone that made the music sound better to the musicians themselves. All that other stuff, the Dream Lab, what that guy's doing in Hollywood, the government stuff, that all came later. And a lot of stuff happened before anybody found out that the Holy Gold, the Plowshare Thread, was deteriorating and nobody was making any more of it.”

I kind of knew I should be saying something in return but now it was my turn to sip my coffee and stare. I was ready for business negotiation, and there might still be one, but I was too caught up in the implications of what Thompson had just told me.

“Think about what might have happened if it had gone the other way?” I said.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.

I wasn't quite sure yet myself. What he said had hit me hard. The business that we did in a resort town and that he did from a storefront might be gone soon. And if it turned into a courtroom spitting match between Induced Dreaming and Street Dreams, there might not be enough money to pay the attorneys by the time the dust settled.

“You said that musicians developed the Detem?”

“Yeah, that's where they started.”

“So some guy who plays guitar for a living decides he needs to hear something better, when he's the only one that can hear it anyway. Is that a good guess?”

“That's one way of looking at it,” Thompson said.

“But these industries and these projects grew out of it,” I said. “And because there was this one component in it that we didn't understand, it's all starting to disappear within a few years.”

“That's the story so far,” he said, maybe wondering where I was going with this.

“Suppose it had gone the other way,” I said, trying to clarify my earlier thought. “Suppose somebody, some creative type, had come up with something to make his life easier. A painter with a new brush or a sculptor with homemade marble. And it worked really well for him and other people found some great use for it, but nobody knew what it really did, how it worked. But suppose whatever it was didn't get weaker, didn't wear out, but kept getting better or stronger at doing something that none of us understood to begin with.”

Thompson shrugged. “Wouldn't be the first time,” he said. “So what do you think your boss is going to do?” he said. “I mean based on his history, he's not going to put the time and money into research is he?”

“His history?”

“One of the guys working with me used to be partners with Milton,” he said. “The company wasn't doing well at first and Milton offered to buy him out. Said he was tired of hearing the guy complain. The money was good and I guess you know as well as anybody that Milton’s not that easy to work for, so the guy sold his shares and left. It turned out that Milton had already sold the first big File Line contract. Milton didn't lie to him and you didn't really rip him off. He just didn't give him all the relevant information.”

“I guess somebody like Milton would tell you that was just good business practice,” I said.

“I couldn't tell you very much about good business practices,” Thompson said. “I just know that there are people who will go to the vape shop next door and then come over to my place and pay me a few hundred dollars to transmit a dream impression into their brain.”

“Our experience has been that people being stoned or drunk tends to interfere with the quality of the way the dream impression is interpreted,” I said.

“Different audience,” he said. “Some of these folks don't care if they're getting a wet dream or a nightmare. We're selling punk. Your money's in classical. But it's all going away in a couple years. We're not putting our money in lawyers or politicians I'm not really much into research. We're putting it in the bank. We don't know what's next, but we know what's not.”

I had driven a rental to Richmond, but Milton had found me a ride back on a jet owned by one of his repeat customers. I had some time to think on the plane. Mostly I thought about remembering to call him Magnus instead of Milton when I got back. But even more I thought about the crazed uncertainty of everything we were working on. I wondered what Magnus would think about what Thompson had told me. Would he figure out a way to make money off of it? I tried to think what I would do in his position. If it were just a business. If we were not selling dreams, but just a service. If we knew that what we did with the technology depended on technology that wouldn’t be working anymore. The dream impression files were valuable because the technology had failed and nobody could make any more. In a couple more years nobody could do anything with them.

“So did you learn anything while you were wasting my money in Richmond?” Magnus asked me the next morning. I suppose if he had tried a different opening, I might have taken the conversation in a different direction.

“I was doing the math, the arithmetic really, about that woman who wants to ban induced dreaming. By the time they get that signed into law it's going to be almost two years from now. You think you should get somebody up there to put a grandfather clause in it? An exemption if you've been in business a little longer like we have or maybe banning it just in the larger cities?”

“That might work,” he said. “Do you think that's the best route?”

“For you yes. You kind of like it up here don't you?”

“You mean Highspring County? I think everybody does?” Magnus said.

“I don't know, Magnus. Until I went down there, I'd forgotten what it was like being in a city. Not just visiting once in a while, but being there. I almost think it's time for me to think about looking for something in one of the bigger towns.”

I knew which way his conception of loyalty would go. Loyalty was to him and his company, and the money he could pay. Loyalty was not necessarily something he showed toward the people working for him. I was counting on that.

“I hope you've read your contract,” he said with brutal smugness. “If you leave the company I can buy back the stock that was part of your signing bonus”.

“Then how is it my stock?” I asked.

“It's not if you leave,” he said. “Read the contract. Stock is for people who stick it out. Think about what that stock is going to be worth in a couple more years. Induced Dreaming can only go up. But if that's what you want, I'll buy it and then I’ll have the benefits.”

“I guess I'm leaning that way, Magnus. I mean, even if the stock goes back to the company, it's appreciated quite a bit during the time I've been here. That's a pretty good benefit in itself and I want you to know I'm grateful for it.”

“If leaving is how you show you're grateful, then that's up to you. But you're right about my next move. I'll see what we can do in the court and in the General Assembly. And I think we ought to make one more try to settle things more simply. Call that guy you talked to. You know what number to throw out. And tell him that's our final offer.”

It took a couple of days, but I was fine with that. Thompson was on some kind of business vacation in the Outer Banks and I guess he felt like things were stable enough that he could leave his phone turned off or only answer it when he wanted to. By the time he got back to me, the paperwork was finished to sell my stock back to Milton. To Magnus. The stock had not been worthless at the outset but it had been worth little enough that it was in his best interest to give me that as a benefit instead of paying me better. Selling it back to the company meant I had about four years salary in the bank. The arithmetic told me the Magnus would know in about two years which one of us had turned a profit.

I thought a lot while preparing to leave the company about the different kinds of information people relied on. Magnus, who was rapidly becoming Milton in my mind, knew the resorts and the lawyers and the business world, but he didn't know the street. The other company had been in business for more than a year before we heard about it. But they seemed to know what was going on in our shop every day.

“I hear you're moving on,” Thompson said to me when he got back to me.

“That's the plan,” I said. “But your old college chum wanted to make one more offer before deciding whether to pick a fight with you.”

“What's the number?” he asked

I named the figure and heard him chuckle. I knew it was probably what his company would make in six months.

“Let me know when you start looking for your next job,” he said. “There's no telling what might be next. There might be some money in cleaning up the damage when the Detems quit working altogether.”

“It's worth thinking about,” I said. “In the meantime, is there any polite answer I can give to my boss about his offer to buy your company?”

“Sure. Tell him he's dreaming.”