Shimmer by Eric Barnes Page B

Core was only about today’s sales. From the beginning Trevor was sure I would figure out how to support the commitments he made every day, each sale adding pressure to the shadow system I was frantically attempting to build, each sale sinking us further into our fraud, lies and secrets. But Trevor had never worried about the collapse. Not only because he was soon worth half a billion dollars but also because Trevor found easy justifications for what we were doing.
    â€œCore works today,” Trevor would say to me. “If it crashes tomorrow, we’ll cash our last checks, drop our bankruptcy papers at the courthouse and move back to beautiful California.”
    Early on I’d found myself repeating Trevor’s logic. I’d told myself it was an end no different—to the outside world at least—than the unintended failures of so many tech companies.
    Except that we were lying. And we’d been lying from the very beginning. Except that we were violating untold laws and regulationsjust to stay afloat. Except that when Core collapsed, Trevor and I would go to jail if someone managed to figure out what we’d been doing.
    And except that, for me, the commitments I was making to people every day—to clients, investors, the board and, especially, to the new employees I had asked to join what soon became a high-tech crusade—all that ultimately outweighed Trevor’s prearranged justifications for the collapse. These people were giving their time. They were leveraging their futures. And they were doing it all for Core Communications.
    And so the only exit possible was to keep building the company. To try to outrun the collapse.
    That, at least, is what I told myself each morning. Each night.
    Make it work.
    Once Shimmer had been completed and I was able to rely on it to manage the growth of the systems, I realized that as long as sales continued to explode, as long as cash from investors continued to pour in, it would not be a lack of money that ultimately caused our collapse. What would bring about the end was the very size of the system I was building. The shadow network would collapse at the exact moment when the amount of information passed by our growing number of clients finally and very suddenly outstripped the capacity of the network. And when that moment came, the system would simply stop working. The shadow network, Shimmer, the real operations—all of it would suddenly go dead.
    That is what Shimmer told me.
    The only thing it couldn’t tell me was when the collapse would happen.
    Again and again throughout those first years, Shimmer showed me ways to extend the company’s life. I’d stare at Shimmer, watching on my screen as Shimmer ran through scenarios, possibilities, options, answers. And each time I’d see it, in the images and notions and numbers of Shimmer, I’d see another way to keep the company alive a little longer.
    It had been three years. Three impossibly long years of anxious, exhausting work by thousands of people.
    And when it did collapse, I would be rich. Because every dollar I spent building up the shadow network, every shell company I established, every outside asset I purchased, all of this meant I was moving my money away from the collapse of the company. Moving it to safety. Hundreds of millions already were safe.
    None of this had been set up by Trevor. None of this had been his thought or suggestion. From that first moment on the airplane when he’d told me the truth about his lie, from then on, Trevor—the evil cousin who’d haunted me since we’d been children and who I wanted, more than anything, to blame all of this on—from then on Trevor had been completely uninvolved in making the Blue Boxes work or in creating a shadow network to support us.
    From that moment on, all of it had come from me.

It’s in the morning that he sees it. Having been here all night. In the dark of a test center on eleven, he