In addition, the promissory note specified that the debt must be repaid by whatever legal tender or property the lender deems fit, meaning we will now detail exactly how and by when you will repay the substantial debt you owe.
A headache squeezed Tristan’s temples as he reread the letter, just as it had the several dozen previous times he’d pored over the contents of the envelope, or maybe the ache in his skull was from the plane’s engines growling on the tail of the Gulfstream G280 somewhere behind him.
Or maybe his headache was because the next paragraph didn’t make any sense.
He’d read it over and over again, unsure why anyone would want what the letter insisted he give them.
It would cost a hell of a lot of money, but it wasn’t worth much.
The letter was signed Mary Varvara Bell, a name that Tristan didn’t recognize except for the surname. Tristan wanted to ask Logan Bell about her, but he didn’t want to tell Logan about the letter.
The other piece of paper that had been included in the envelope was a photocopy of the notarized promissory note Tristan had signed when he was twenty-two years old, back when he’d owned in total a laptop computer, a ten-year-old sedan, and one ratty black backpack.
The letter didn’t need to reiterate what would happen if he failed. The penalty was right there in the photocopied promissory note with his scrawled signature on the bottom.
If Tristan didn’t deliver what they asked for, everything he owned would be forfeited to White Holdings, Inc.
Everything.
Six years before, he’d laughed when Logan’s grandfather had written “everything Tristan F. King owned” as collateral for a few million dollars of seed money. He’d been ready to sign away a decade of future earnings and his firstborn child to get the cash he’d needed.
But now, Tristan owned not only a live-aboard yacht and a coveted membership in the Monaco Yacht Club, but he’d also created several unique intellectual properties.
His artificial intelligence program wasn’t the kind of strong AI that might take over the world and make Terminators.
Instead, Tristan’s algorithm was adept at proverbially catching falling knives in the stock market sense of that term.
Even as Tristan read the extortionate letter on his private plane high above the glimmering gray water of the Atlantic Ocean, his creation was vacuuming up stocks that were on the move, buying lower and selling higher, shorting stocks that were falling, and trading options in both directions whilst it purchased and sold the equities.
His algo swooped for profit like a flock of seagulls when it was raining french fries.
That was why he lived in Monaco. The principality was the first country in the world to install a true 5G network, not just a souped-up 4G with a trademarked brand name of 5G, when other countries were hemming and hawing.
The AI, his masterpiece after a double-major of computer science and business/finance at UC Berkeley, had taken him five years to perfect, and it was gleaning millions for him every day. Tristan would be a billionaire in less than two years.
If he could keep it.
If he lost control of the algo, not only would they own it, but Tristan would be contractually prohibited from rewriting it from memory and rereleasing his own version upon the world. Parts of the AI’s strategy were patented, and the computer code itself was copyrighted. Neither he nor anyone else could copy-paste the code and make their own stock-trading AI.
Lawyers would eat them for lunch.
Tristan had two months to come up with the nonsensical list of commodities the letter demanded and turn them over to White Holdings, Inc., or else he would lose control of everything he’d worked for since he’d walked away from an Iowa farm with nothing but the clothes on his back and a charity plane ticket to Switzerland when he was thirteen years old.
But this list was impossible. If Tristan sold everything he owned, including that overpriced computer bag on the end of the table, bartered away the yacht club membership, and ate ramen three times a day as his AI gathered millions of pennies and dimes during the interim, he might come up with ten percent of the cash he needed.
If he did all that and sold the AI to the nefarious financial company DarkNight, he might come up with half of what he’d need. DarkNight would examine it for five minutes and make him an offer that, in any other circumstance, would be more than enough to live out the rest of his life, if he wanted to give DarkNight the ability to finish taking over the world.
From the Wi-Fi in his plane, Tristan logged onto three stock market discussion forums simultaneously and checked the current values and gossip about the various commodities on the list.
Nothing unusual. Nothing incriminating.
He could just give up. He could hand over his boat and the AI to White Holdings and walk away with nothing for having spent the last five years of his life grinding and polishing his creation.
His chest hurt like his ribs were bending and pushing on his heart.
He’d been sitting in a dang gaming chair for five years coding that beautiful AI, which he loved like it was his dog or his best Pokémon, with only occasional gym or jogging breaks.
He might be having a heart attack.
