Page 25 of Ideal Life

George, Henry, and Lena shook their heads.

“Then I’ll let you get to it—” Talia started to say.

“Wait!” Erin jumped up from her seat. “I had another idea I wanted to share.”

“Oh. Yeah, of course. The floor is yours.”

Erin touched her Omni 3Ds again, where her Ideal Life Friend was likely sending her a nudge of encouragement. Then she turned to George and said, “Mind if I use the screen?”

He disconnected his presentation, and Erin projected hers on the wall.

The first slide was a photo of Temple Dots, Ideal Life’s wireless brain monitor stickers. They were currently transparent and nearly invisible on the skin; customers wore them on their temples, as the name suggested. Temple Dots mapped brain activity and correlated it with each person’s individual history to help Ideal Life identify neural pathway patterns and make suggestions for better behavior and choices. They also kept track of other health indicators, like heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and sleep patterns.

“Obviously the tech is incredible,” Erin said. “But like Lena was saying, our current biggest demographic is millennials, especially on the older end of that spectrum. And I know Ideal Life does do some Gen Z outreach, but I was thinking, what about doing more? We want to be our best selves, too, and I think it’s a market that Ideal Life can expand.

“But to get to us, you first have to appeal to something other than the dry tech pitch that works on the Wall Street Journal and New York Times crowd. That’s not where our attention is. Which leads me to this.”

She flipped to the next slide. There were more Temple Dots, but instead of looking like boring transparent Band-Aids, they were colorful—primary colors, fluorescents, and pastels.

“Gen Z—and Gen A—exists in an age of personalization. We started with stickers and filters on our apps, then custom emojis. We want to personalize our water bottles, our laptops, everything. Ideal Life already allows us to design our own Friend avatars. So why don’t we do that for Temple Dots, too?”

Talia leaned forward on the conference room table. “Tell me more.”

Erin moved to the next slide. There, the Temple Dots grew even more varied, featuring floral designs, art deco, psychedelic swirls, and more. “Think nail art but of the high-tech variety. Customers can choose from predesigned Temple Dots or design their own.”

Lena was nodding furiously. “Yes! And this will likely lead to an increase in sales, too. Currently, customers keep Temple Dots on for two to four weeks before they have to switch to a new pair, because the adhesive we use is top-notch medical grade and lasts forever. But if they had the option to change it up to match their mood, their outfit, or whatever…”

“I love it,” Talia said. “Although I like it not because it’s good for sales, but because it adds to the joy in people’s everyday lives.”

“So do you want us to run some numbers on cost, timeline, et cetera?” Henry asked.

“Yes,” Talia said. “Let’s do it.”

Elated, Erin bounced in her seat and flushed bright red.

As usual, Talia’s day was packed with meetings, but she never forgot that Sam was playing in a tournament today. Whenever she had a few minutes free, she tuned in to the live stream of the Cleveland Gold Poker Invitational to see how he was doing. First prize was half a million dollars, and each time she checked, Sam was still in. That wasn’t a surprise—you don’t go pro unless you’re really good—but even though there was a lot of game theory involved, poker was also part luck.

And everyone in that tournament was a professional.

Midafternoon, Talia ate a late lunch at her desk while she watched Sam play a hand. He had bags under his eyes—strange, since he was one of those rare, annoying people who could sleep anywhere, even on a red-eye flight. Hadn’t he slept on the plane?

The other players at his table looked a lot better rested. There was an older gentleman in a suit and a Rolex. A guy around Sam’s age who was sporting a bushy black beard. Two other men who were forgettable in appearance. And then there was Louise Enger from the Bay Area, a stocky woman who smiled little and looked like she could be an FBI agent or a spy. Definitely not someone to take lightly.

As the dealer dealt, the live stream showed what cards each player received. (She knew it was actually on a thirty-minute delay—the live stream would show all the players’ cards for the viewers, so it fed out half an hour after the fact to prevent cheating, like someone outside the tournament communicating information to the competitors.)

Talia groaned when she saw Sam’s hand, especially compared to the others.

“It’s okay, though,” she said aloud. “He knows what to do.”

He folded immediately. Talia exhaled.

The trick to being successful at poker at the professional level was to know when to fold. Amateur players thought the game was about card counting or bluffing. But the best players folded around 80 percent more often than others. And Sam was no fool.

Talia couldn’t watch the next hand, though, because she had several more meetings to attend. She’d known that Omni signing the acquisition agreement was only the beginning of the process, like lowering the walls of a dam, but she hadn’t known how much of a flood would come barreling through. Omni’s massive team of lawyers now had free rein to request anything and everything for due diligence, and half of the Ideal Life team’s time was suddenly spent chasing down what they needed.

A lot of it needed to be funneled through Talia, too. This startup had been her baby for years, and like Libby seeding new coral reef nurseries, Talia had had her hand in every aspect of Ideal Life. So this afternoon she first had a meeting with the developer team about getting source code and AI weights into the encrypted tech escrow, where it would be secure from outside eyes but where Omni’s team could parse through what they needed.

Then she had a meeting with the contracts team to go through assignment clauses in their agreements with third-party vendors to see what could be transferred to Omni and what would need to be canceled, and if there were any penalties.