Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) by Lori Cook Read Free Book Online

another
beer.
    “Strange Tech. Remember the name? He floats his company in a couple
mouths,” Jason said, as he waited for his glass to arrive, then held it up as
he spoke. “Strange Tech goes public in exactly eight weeks. And that bastard
becomes a billionaire over night.”
    With that he tilted the bottle and poured its contents down his
throat.
     
    They agreed to speak later, when Jason got home. By that time he was
drunker, but his speech was only partially slurred. Clearly, he had reached
that plateau of drunken lucidity, the place you get to when drinking to excess
is a daily occurrence.
    Indeed, he now spoke with surprising elegance. It sounded as if
everything he told her had been running through his mind for weeks, hatred and
regret balled up so tight inside him that he might explode at any moment. His
wife must have seen it coming, escaping the family home and taking the kids
with her before he blew.
    For about a quarter of an hour his narrative went on, taking them
both right back to the Marriot on Times Square, and to a whole bunch of
stuff that had happened back then that Carol had no idea about.
    The reason why a recent Brown graduate with no money was staying at
the Marriot was that he had been invited there by Alex Strange. Jason
was one of several young programmers who were pitching their ideas to the
current wunderkind of the tech industry and his new company, Strange Tech.
    Carol remembered Jason taking about Strange with the hushed tones of
religious reverence. The guy had also been staying at the Marriot . She
remembered the name, and also seeing him in the lobby once. Alex Strange: very tall
and slim with short, white hair. It looked dyed, but apparently it was natural.
    Strange wasn’t much older than Jason, but his foothold in the tech
business was already assured. Strange Tech produced the kind of programs that
end users never see. The tech behind the tech is how his business was
described. And now, ten years later, the business was about to go public.
    “Streaming, you remember?” Jason said, waving an arm about as if to
explain himself.
    Gradually she was remembering. Back at Brown, Jason had been working
on the kind of code that made data streaming better and faster. She remembered
him talking about priority-divining and stream-rationalization and protocols of
one kind and another. It hadn’t much sense back then.
    But now, with on-line video and everything else coming down at you
from the cloud, it made perfect sense that Strange Tech had achieved such
market prominence. The credit crisis was behind them, tech was getting sexy
once more, and the cloud was the future. Alex Strange had reached the high point
of his career, and he was about to cash in, big time.
    “Your stuff, Jason?” she said, cutting him off before he veered too
far down the road of nostalgia. “What happened, exactly?”
    Jason stopped, looked into the glass in his hand, which was empty.
He had never really mentioned any of this to Carol before in their e-mails, ten
years of putting a brave face on it. But not anymore. He was way gone, and it
was all coming out tonight.
    “He stole it.”
    She shook her head in confusion.
    “How can you just steal someone else’s programs?”
    He laughed, as if the question was too stupid to answer. But she was
curious. Just how did someone steal a computer program, so precise and exact,
each line of code having been written carefully by the author, as recognizable
as a line of poetry.
    “The ideas, he took the ideas. Strange was never much of a coder.
Never claimed to be. He used to get people to pitch him new ideas, small stuff,
but innovative, anything with a new approach. He’d look at the code, copy it,
extract the core ideas, and pay someone to replicate it.”
    “But that’s easy to prove, isn’t it?”
    “Yep. But he took his time, more than a year in my case. You
remember? He offered me a job over on the West Coast, pretty well paid. Deep in
the contract there was