This trip had taken him to London and the smaller city of Sandwich, England, where he’d been working on increasing the size of Shine Industries.
In a world where virtual goods seemed to be prized and non-tangible investments were coveted, Shine Industries stillmadethings.
Things to create the digital world, butthings, nevertheless.
But Micah had been gone for a month, and San Francisco was cooler in the early fall than when he left.
He stopped at the front desk of his building when he walked in, and the concierge handed him his mail. They’d sorted out the junk mail for him and he paid most of his bills electronically, so all that was left was a wedding invitation from an old Le Rosey friend and one odd-looking envelope with just his name written on the heavy, creamy stationary.
It didn’t even have his address on it. A courier must’ve dropped it off.
Micah waited until he’d gotten back into his penthouse apartment and ordered some dinner to be delivered before sliding a knife under the envelope’s flap to slice it open.
When he read it, his hands opened, and it dropped to the floor.
66
Stockholders
Tristan
Ayear later, Colleen Frost stood in front of GameShack’s annual shareholders’ meeting.
Tristan sat behind her on the dais with the board of directors, watching her. Tristan had arrived a few minutes after the rest of them because he’d stopped in the lobby of the conference center to pick up a caffè breve for himself and an oversweetened caramel macchiato with extra whipped cream, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, for Colleen.
He’d had them writePrincesson the cup.
And then picked it up, to the utter consternation of an older man with a face full of frown lines.
Even though Tristan King still owned a majority stake in GameShack, there were other shareholders. That meant that according to SEC regulations, they needed to hold an annual meeting.
Other than Tristan, Anjali, and Jian, many of the other stockholders were investors from the Sherwood Forest forum, including many of the moderators whom Colleen had gotten to know over the years.
The after-party was going to be spectacular. Colleen had been giggly before the seminar had started, meeting and greeting so many of her friends that she knew from moderating Sherwood Forest, although of course, she’d had to stop moderating and even posting there when she had gotten the job of CEO. Anything she said in public could be considered insider trading, so she’d retreated to group chats with her moderator buddies and other friends.
They’d also planned to go out with Anjali and Jian for supper as an after-after-party to celebrate Anjali and Jian’s six-month wedding anniversary that weekend.
Colleen’s speech was short but illuminating, according to the media. Mostly, it involved a series of jagged but upward-trending charts, showing revenue crossing over into profitability and the steadily increasing net worth of the company.
Before the stockholders meeting, there had been a few smear pieces in the media once it became known that CEO Colleen Frost was thegirlfriendof GameShack’s majority owner. Many of them used the wordnepotism.
Tristan had quietly sicced the Anonymity Plus program on those articles, and they’d fallen to the bottom of the sea of online media and drowned.
He’d had to make some amendments to his Anonymity Plus privacy program that he’d coded for Colleen because GameShack did need publicity for its CEO. Major news outlets and official GameShack press releases were now exempt from the maws of Tristan’s malicious worm.
After her speech and the revelation of GameShack’s meteoric recovery, the reporters agreed that Tristan King had made a brilliant move by installing a business prodigy as CEO and locking down Colleen Frost as the rising star of GameShack.
Those articles, Tristan subtly elevated by turning the A-Plus worm back on itself. Those pieces floated to the tops of news feeds and social media and seemed to be everywhere.
But Tristan hadn’t locked her down yet. They’d been living together on his yacht in Monaco and traveling the world together for a year. They weretogethersocially, but that wasn’t the same as what the reporters were insinuating.
Tristan and Colleen had talked about marriage in general terms whilst snuggling. They’d discussed the places they would visit over the next five decades of their lives together as they dined in the most exclusive restaurants in the world. They’d even toyed with eloping as they’d walked along the Strip in Las Vegas, but Colleen had demurred, saying that she wanted her friends and community and found family around them when they tied the proverbial knot.
But you know, maybe pretty soon.
As soon as GameShack had properly turned around, in the very first quarter that they turned a net profit, she’d start planning a celebration of some sort, an unspecified event that involved a church and a party afterward.
On the charts she was presenting to the stockholders and press, the red income lines broke through the green profitability boundary and turned happy black.
