Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel

Chapter 21

Doug was back in Seattle. It was pouring rain, but this didn't comfort him the way it usually did. Life had been particularly difficult for the last three years. His life's work, System Inc., had completely collapsed after some overzealous cops dragged it through the mud. And in the security technology space, reputation was everything. He had to stand by and watch as his assets were torn apart and sold off to overeager competitors like fine cuts of meat from a butcher.

They'd tried to drag Doug down along with his company. They tried to claim he was responsible for all sorts of crimes. Heinous crimes. After three long years and the best legal defense money could buy, Doug walked out with only a misdemeanor tax evasion charge. He had to pay over a million dollars in fines and complete a hundred hours of community service. The community service was easily the worse of the two punishments.

Doug always knew time was more valuable than money. Money could be replenished. Time couldn't. But he wasn't about to let the last three years be a complete waste.

It was a setback, of course. And they had arrested his closest friends and associates. They'd taken away his business and most of his money. But they couldn't set back his mind.

In fact, the whole fiasco only served to inspire him.

Doug realized that he had gotten too complacent at System Inc. Blackmailing influential people by building the security applications they depended on had made him soft. It was too easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel. And Doug believed that nothing easy was worth doing. The hardest things in life were always the most rewarding. He had lost track of that. But life had a way of reminding him.

He stared at the Seattle rain through his apartment window.

The collapse of System, Inc. had been life sending him a message. And he had learned long ago that life's messages never came in straight lines, but rather in the form of puzzles. Still, it hadn't taken Doug long to determine the meaning of this mystery.

He hadn't been thinking big enough. The culmination of his life's work up until that point had been to eliminate the government. He had seen government as a crutch that humans no longer needed, but liked having around for purely sentimental reasons. The problem was it had grown so big that nobody was willing to tear it down.

Doug thought about Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who, in the nineteenth century, tore down and rebuilt Paris. Before Haussmann, Paris had been a filthy rat's nest of shit-covered streets. So he did what was needed, even though it wasn't the most popular course of action.

The historian Réné Héron de Villefosse once said: "The old ship of Paris was torpedoed by Baron Haussmann and sunk during his reign. It was perhaps the greatest crime of the megalomaniac prefect, and also his biggest mistake. His work caused more damage than a hundred bombings."

Without Haussmann's brutal destruction, Paris wouldn't have been ready to become the cultural epicenter of the world just a few years later. It brought health back to Paris after countless years of typhus and cholera. "It was the gutting of Paris," Haussmann wrote years later, reminiscing. And it wasn't without its sacrifices. Haussmann had had to demolish his own childhood home in the process.

Destroying the government had been too shortsighted. It wouldn't be enough to remove the roots of the weeds of humanity. Aim for a McDonald's and you'll hit a 7-Eleven. Aim for the stars and you'll hit the moon.

He wouldn't make the same mistake again.

He thought about the office he'd had, back when he was running System. It had been a modern masterpiece. He wondered what had happened to his toy train set. The one he had purchased while planning his first large-scale terrorist attack. Terrorist. That was a word he liked. It didn't have the same ring as megalomaniac, but it still made him smile.

His phone rang, and he picked it up.

"Doug," said Thor. "Can you come back? We're having some trouble with Taye."

"Really?"

Doug was happy to help, though he'd never admit it.

"Yes. We don't hire a lot of people with your, well, skill set."

Doug smiled.

"I'll be right there."