Page 70 of Ideal Life

This couldn’t be happening.

Surely she was wrong.

But if she wasn’t…

Talia couldn’t rewind to before she signed the acquisition documents, because the watch only went back as far as twenty-four hours. And she couldn’t just walk away from the deal. The termination clause imposed a $1 million termination penalty if it was Ideal Life’s fault that the deal didn’t go through.

Section 8.3 (B) In the event this agreement is terminated by Ideal Life (by choice or through material breach), then Ideal Life shall pay OmnisZcience a termination fee of One Million US Dollars ($1,000,000) (“Ideal Life Termination Fee”) by wire transfer of immediately available funds within two (2) business days after such termination.

That was $1 million they didn’t have to spare; they had only six months of operating funds left in their bank account. And Talia herself had meager savings, even counting the small amount of BiomeLabs stock she’d recently bought. The Omni acquisition was supposed to swoop Ideal Life up just before they ran out of money.

Ironically, the original, unchanged version of the past—when the French document had been late, the merger signing had been delayed, and Omni had canceled the deal—would have gotten Talia out of the acquisition without a million-dollar penalty.

But then she would have had the Tinder murder on her conscience.

Was it ever possible to use the watch to make changes that would guarantee a better outcome?

The elevator doors dinged, and Eleanor Davies, CEO of Biome-Labs, stepped onto the roof.

“You look like you could use one of these,” she said in her crisp British accent as she held out a box of cigarettes.

Talia almost said yes out of the habit of listening to Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth; apparently, she had subconsciously accepted that British accents came with authority.

“Is it that obvious I’m stressed?” she asked while declining Eleanor’s offer.

“A CEO knows what it looks like when another one is having a meltdown.” Eleanor tapped out a cigarette for herself. “Sorry, I know this is a nasty habit, but it’s my one vice I can’t shake.” She lit it and took a long drag. Then she looked around the roof as if making sure there was no one else near them. Only a couple of BiomeLabs employees sat on the other side of the garden, working together on their computers.

“So,” she said, “you want to tell me what’s going on?”

Talia hesitated. She hadn’t had enough time to decide whether her worst-case Omni-CerebraLink scenario was plausible. Even though, in her gut, she was pretty sure she knew.

“Can I ask you a question instead?” Talia said.

Eleanor waved her cigarette in the air, its smoke leaving a zigzagging trail behind. “Sure.”

“Why did you hold out for an IPO? BiomeLabs didn’t go public until last year, and there were multiple offers from bigger companies to buy you before that. From what I’ve heard, your company nearly went bankrupt three times in the last decade. So how come you didn’t accept any of those earlier offers to save you?”

Eleanor took another long drag from her cigarette, then let out a long plume of smoke over the view of downtown Palo Alto. “For better or for worse, I have an enormous ego. Women generally aren’t allowed to say things like that, let alone act on it. But I wanted to run BiomeLabs my way, or no way. If I had let someone else acquire us—especially when we were financially on our knees—I would have had to accept whatever terms they offered.

“It wasn’t about money; they offered plenty of that. It was about vision. This is my company. My dream. I couldn’t stomach the idea that someone else would scoop it up and digest all my hard work into something different from what I wanted, or worse, dismantle BiomeLabs for parts and then junk the rest.

“Which meant I had only one option each time my company came to the cliff’s edge—I had to be the one to save it.”

Talia leaned against the railing. “And you did. All three times.”

“I did. Not without cost. I mean, look at me—I’m a chain-smoking forty-year-old who looks like she’s in her sixties, but I’m still here. At the helm of the company I started with five hundred dollars in a garage off Page Mill Road, now worth bloody well more than if I’d sold it years ago.” She smirked. “Like I said, enormous ego.”

She turned to look at Talia. “But there isn’t only one path, you know. What was right for BiomeLabs might not be what’s right for Ideal Life. Are you getting cold feet about Omni?”

Talia looked down at her shoes, as if they’d actually tell her the temperature of how she was feeling. “I don’t know.”

“Your Gossipy Tech BFF?” Eleanor asked.

“You read it, too?” Talia forgot her feet and looked at Eleanor now.

“They somehow scoop the other outlets fifty percent of the time,” Eleanor said. “I have a notification set to alert me whenever a new piece is published. Anyway, yes, I saw the article that Omni is in serious talks to acquire CerebraLink. And yes, if I were you, I would also be rethinking what they meant to do with Ideal Life’s technology, in light of this new information.”

“Then I’m not crazy.”