Forever Yours
9
Start-Up
“WHAT HAS GOT into you?” Chastity demanded. “You’ve been squirrelly all week with text messages and voicemail at all hours. Have you even slept this week?”
“Not much,” Henry said. “Um… Not at all last night. I had to put my girlfriend on a bus for Cleveland this morning, so we didn’t want to waste the night.”
“Girlfriend? Is that what this is all about? Don’t tell me you’re getting serious about a girl before you’re even nineteen! I mean, I understand Luke and Isobel. They spend most of their time trying to convince themselves they aren’t madly in love, but they are.”
“Oh, it’s not quite like that. I mean, it’s good, but neither Carol nor I have time for much of a relationship other than getting together to screw about once every other weekend. She’s pre-med and I’m…”
“Obsessed,” Chastity said. “What’s with insisting that Luke and Isobel get here by noon?”
“That’s when Don Harvey will be here,” Henry said. “My patent attorney. I went in to finalize the patent filing on the new system Monday and he gave me some good news. But I want him here to tell you all about it so we can all be on the same page when it comes time for a decision.”
“Now you’ve got me antsy. You might need to take me someplace and settle me down. You know how to do it so well.”
“I’m sure you’ll be fine until after the meeting at least,” Henry laughed.
“Does that mean you might settle me down later?” she asked.
“Mmm… Maybe.”
“Okay, it’s a quarter till noon. I see a red Corvette entering the parking lot,” Chastity said.
“I see Don’s Lincoln just behind them.”
It took a few minutes for everyone to get parked and gather at the door of the golf club. Henry introduced everyone to Don Harvey and they got seated for the casual lunch served at the club. They ordered and then Henry took a deep breath and calmed himself to get things started.
“Okay, you’ve all noticed I’ve been a little hyper this week. That’s because of the news Don gave me on Monday when I went in to finish the application for the fourth patent. That’s for the system and method being tested with our testers now. You know we’ve all been running it from a command line and there’s not much of an application built on the system, but that will change in the next few months. But Don had big news. Don?”
“Congratulations to Henry and by extension to all of you. The first two patents have issued. I expect the third will follow by Christmas. That’s on top of the two copyrights for the initial software,” Don said.
“All right!” Luke exclaimed. “We only have pop, but here’s a toast to the first successes of our—meaning Henry’s—big business endeavor.”
Everyone raised a glass of something and congratulated Henry.
“That’s not all,” Henry said. “It seems Don has been fielding offers for us.”
“Somebody wants to buy us?” Isobel asked. “Don’t you mean offers for you, Henry?”
“It could be interpreted that way, but I choose not to. I’m writing code, guys. I’m not thinking business. Don has been keeping me from going off half-cocked. Don, if you can speak around that BLT, better fill them in on the offer,” Henry said.
“Thanks for giving me a few minutes to get at least one wedge of this sandwich down. You know, all the other places in town have decided they need to add something to a perfectly good idea. They want to add avocado or put it on rye bread, or—God forbid—pour some kind of sauce or cheese on it. This BLT is just what it’s supposed to be: bacon, lettuce, and tomato on white toast with a smear of mayo. But that’s not the offer you’re asking about.”
They laughed but waited expectantly while Don wiped his hands.
“A large computer security software company has seen the patent and the copyright on the first piece of software. They’ve decided it would make a good addition to their suite of tools and would like to make it a part of their offering. Of course, their opening bid was to acquire all rights to the patent and the copyrighted application for a ridiculously small sum. Not enough to get the company you are planning started.
“I’ve been teasing them along with alternate ideas, but have carefully left out any details of where the development is going. They’ll figure that out soon enough, though, when they see the new filing. So right now, their offer is for the first patent and application that was based on it. But you don’t have to sell outright. I believe they would accept a deal to buy the app and development rights to it and license the patent it’s built on.”
“Are you going to do it, Henry?” Chastity asked.
“Are we going to do it? I am not cutting my support team out of our first deal. If we do it, we all profit from it.”
“Yeah, but you invented it. The most we can say we did was some testing,” Luke said.
“What are the numbers?” Isobel asked. She’d apparently accepted that they were joint owners without hesitating.
“I believe that we’ll be able to pull in seven figures when we’re done. Not high seven, but more than a million,” Don said. “Their real interest is in the patented method and system. They want the application and development rights so we—or Henry—doesn’t keep developing that line. In our conversations, Henry has said he considered that a test for making something that worked, not something that he’d keep improving. The other apps and patents stand alone. I think we can license the patent for a long-term royalty without a second thought, but these guys seem interested enough that we could license this one patent with non-exclusive rights for a one-time license fee that would give you enough to get your business started.”
“Holy cow! Henry, why are you even considering sharing this with us?” Chastity insisted. “You could fund the startup costs and own the entire corporation.”
“Guys, I started developing this shit when I was a freshman in high school. It was the three of you who listened, brainstormed, and even tested my initial attempts. Even when the results weren’t pleasing. We are the only ones who ever tested the app before we’d turned eighteen. That means our puny non-disclosures we signed were never enforceable. Not like the one we’re using now. What I’m proposing is that I sell the patent and copyright outright to our LLC. Our little preliminary company can then license and sell them to this manufacturer. That money will be paid to the LLC and used to fund our startup. It gives us all equal shares as founders.”
“How many thousand do you want for them?” Isobel asked. She’d been typing on her cell phone during the entire meal and her salad was still untouched.
“I have to show that it’s a real purchase, so how about twenty each for the patent and copyright?” Henry asked.
“So, forty thousand from a company that has a total of not quite four in the bank?” Isobel scoffed.
“No, no, no! Twenty dollars each. That’s only $40 total, okay?” Henry said.
“You’re kidding,” Chastity whispered. Henry shook his head.
“I’m dead serious. You guys need to have a significant vested interest in this company and this is the best way I can think of to get it.”
The discussion and questions continued through the rest of the meal and eventually Isobel got around to eating her salad. Don also had to tell them what he would get out of the sale for negotiating the whole deal. He was asking for only five percent. It didn’t sound like much until he quoted $75,000 as his expected take.
“I’m really horny now,” Chastity said as they walked to Henry’s car. “I doubt Isobel and Luke will even say hello to their families until tomorrow. If you’d expressed the least interest, we’d have been invited to join them. Can you imagine? Isobel and me with our legs parted and you and Luke switching back and forth between us?”
“No matter how erotic that image may seem, I don’t want to be in any room where Luke is balling either of you. It’s just not my thing,” Henry laughed as he brushed her lips with his.
“Um… So, is it okay for you to come up to my apartment for a while? I mean with your girlfriend and all?” Chastity said.
“Ever heard of a hall pass?” Henry asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a limited permission to fuck one other person during a particular span of time. It’s pretty much what Avril had last summer when she slept with me and then went back to her boyfriend. You are my hall pass for the weekend.”
“Wow! What did you have to trade for that?”
“Carol has a favorite cousin who will be joining her family for Thanksgiving. Seems they’ve had at least one encounter before. She wants to try her new-found skills on this girl. She thinks she’s learned a lot since the last time they were together.”
“A girl?”
“Yeah. Who knows? She might come back a confirmed lesbian. She sure likes it when I go down on her.”
“So do I.”
“Just a little more. Oh, goddess! I’m… Ohhh!” Chastity moaned as Henry licked her to fulfillment. “No! Yes! More! I’m coming again!”
Henry was determined to give her the best he had. He’d learned a lot from his fairly regular, though infrequent, times with Carol. When Chastity began to come down, Henry lay beside her and planted little kisses on the side of her head and face. Chastity’s hand circled his penis.
“Yeah. Give me just a minute so I can fully appreciate what’s coming,” she moaned as she stroked.
Henry reached to the bedside table and grabbed a condom. When he was ready to roll it on, Chastity took over.
“Yeah. You’ve got another partner. Better take precautions,” she said. She put a leg over Henry and looked down at him as he held his cock in position for her to settle onto.
“How about you? Don’t you have another partner?”
“Yeah. A couple. Or three. I go in to a special clinic in town to get tested every two weeks. It’s recommended for sexually active women. I insist they use condoms, too.”
“Wow! With so many options, why choose me tonight?” Henry asked.
“So many reasons. You made me horny, so why take that to anyone else?”
“How did I make you horny? We sat in a business meeting all through lunch.”
Chastity started rocking back and forth with Henry buried deep in her. Henry was ramping up pretty quickly now that he had skin in the game, but Chastity was getting there just as fast.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “A business meeting in which you basically gave each of us a quarter of a million dollars. I’m not quite as motivated by money as Isobel is, but the idea of getting a quarter of a million dollars from you definitely got my juices flowing.”
“And I loved tasting every drop,” Henry laughed.
The juices flowing this time moved them both closer and they focused on their impending climaxes. When they hit, they crashed over them in waves leaving both spent and panting.
“Yeah. We can start all over again in a few minutes,” Chastity gasped. “I wonder if there is any aphrodisiac as potent as money.”
“None of us will actually see any of that money, you know. Not for years, more than likely. It should get us through the startup phase as long as we’re careful. And let’s not forget there will be taxes,” he said.
“Will we have to come up with the money for taxes on what goes to the LLC?” she asked.
“Not exactly. One of the advantages of having the LLC is that it can deduct each of our share of taxes and pay them on our behalf. It just means that out of whatever we end up making on the deal, almost a third will go to taxes of one sort or another. And, we’ll have to hire a good tax consultant to figure it out. I trust Isobel with managing the money, but until she has a few more classes under her belt, I don’t think she’s ready to do corporate or partnership taxes.”
“Still, if Don gets the deal he thinks he can, we’ll end up with nearly a million in the bank.”
“That’s another thing we need to deal with. I don’t know if an individual bank should hold a million in deposits for us. There’s something about a limit on deposit insurance. We might need to diversify in some way. That is something I’m more than willing to let Luke and Isobel handle. It makes my head hurt.”
“I think you got my juices flowing again. Henry, I don’t know what makes you so generous with us, but I’ll give you anything you want if I can.”
“I know the limitations of that,” he said, kissing her closed lips. He rolled on another condom and slid into her depths.
“Yeah. You know, even discounting all the other stuff, this has its own rewards. Move in me, lover. Take your time and build us up to a good one.”
They did take their time, shifting positions, slowing down or speeding up when necessary, and generally enjoying playing with each other. When the explosion came, both were ready and held each other in the afterglow.
For a few minutes. Then, Chastity was up and headed for a shower. Henry undressed and waited for her to emerge before he left. When she left the bathroom, all she was wearing was a towel wrapped around her head. Henry knelt and started at her feet, kissing his way up her body until he reached her lips.
“I still worship you, my goddess,” he said.
“I feel it in my bones—as well as other places. Go home now. I know your parents are waiting to have you.”
“They always have me. What about yours? You never say anything about your parents.”
“Yeah… well… I left home when I was seventeen. I was taken in by a nice older couple who sheltered me until I was out of high school. They aren’t really interested in me coming back these days.”
“Chas, do you need someplace to go for Thanksgiving? You know you’re welcome at my house!”
“No, Henry. I’m having Thanksgiving with Isobel and her family. Her mother still thinks there’s hope for turning me into a Catholic. I like to lead her on a little.”
“Okay. Let me know if you need anything, Chastity. I can’t anticipate everything.”
“You always take care of me, Henry. Of all of us.”
Henry made sure to take care of her on Friday as well. It was Chastity’s nineteenth birthday and he wanted to make sure she fully enjoyed the day. He made arrangements at the club for her to enjoy a spa morning and then took her to a late lunch at the Tower revolving restaurant.
“Why are you doing all of this for me?”
“Because I want you to know how important you are to me and to our company and our friendship. You know Luke and Isobel helped pay for the spa day. They care about you, too. Chas, I know we aren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, but we have a very important relationship. It extends far beyond just being business partners.”
“As long as you remember that part about not being boyfriend and girlfriend, we’ll be fine. And remember, I’m your personnel department. When you’re actually ready for a serious relationship, I’ll find the perfect girl. Don’t try to hire someone without me!”
“Oh, it will be years. I’m not even looking for prospects. I barely have time to breathe with everything that’s going on,” Henry said. They watched the view of the city as the restaurant slowly revolved at the top of the building. Eventually, Henry paid the bill and they left.
“I suppose you’d like sex now,” she said when they reached his car. Henry looked a little puzzled.
“Chas, this is your day. You don’t have to do anything to please me. I’ve been guessing what would make you happy today. Do you want to have sex?” he asked.
“Not really,” she sighed. “I mean, we just had sex Wednesday. We shouldn’t get in the habit.”
“What would you like to do?”
“Can we go see the new Hunger Games movie?”
“Sure! Sounds like fun.”
There was rain, but the tees at the driving range were sheltered. Henry and Luke set up next to each other Saturday afternoon. The temperature hadn’t reached 40º and both guys were hampered in their driving by the heavy sweatshirts they wore.
“Are your lousy drives the result of too much clothing on or is your game falling to pieces?” Luke asked.
“Yeah. A little of both,” Henry admitted. “We took a break starting in mid-October and only our top five went to the championships down in Florida. Obviously, I wasn’t one of them. In a way, I was thankful.”
“Why? I expected you to be in the lead for a varsity position.”
“Not likely as a freshman. And high school gave me an inflated opinion of my skills. Some of the guys on the team are near professional level. The thing is, I couldn’t have afforded the time. I was busy getting our server set up and that last patent filed. This is going to be a big one, Luke. Don is holding it until the deal with Mc… you know… is closed. We don’t want them to see this one and try to get it rolled into what they’re buying.”
“I’ve used the command line and the stats generated on my computer show a twenty percent improvement in performance. Every application I use is running faster. But that’s pretty much what the app we’re selling did. Will we have to let them have the new stuff anyway?”
“No. The new app accomplishes a similar result, but its processes are completely unrelated to the first app. It doesn’t share any code, so it can’t be considered a derivative. The big difference is that I managed to harness an artificial narrow intelligence to it. Through the use of prediction algorithms instead of general AI, it’s able to learn and store the behaviors and preferences of the user. That means that the longer the app resides on your computer, the more efficient your computer should be. It’s not a one-and-done operation.”
“All I got out of that was that I should be impressed. What else should we be able to expect from the patent that makes it more valuable than the others?”
Henry finally got a good drive off that dropped around the 200-yard marker. They both stopped to celebrate that for a second. Then he shanked his next drive.
“The big thing about this is pattern recognition,” Henry said. “It sees the pattern of what you do on your computer and when it sets about optimizing, it does so for the way you use your computer. That pattern recognition can be done on a much smaller scale than what happens with general AI. It can actually run on just the information that’s on your computer. But it’s expandable. It could be installed on a network. Let’s say you want everything directly connected to your computer to run better and faster. We’ll be able to tell it how many degrees of separation should be used for optimization. Every computer connected to your computer? Every computer connected to those? And so on. It could run on just the network server and optimize every computer in the company.”
“That could be huge! We’ll have this running in our company?”
“Mostly, we already do. It’s a little less automated. You’ve already installed the run line on your computer. But if you uninstalled it, the copy running on our company server would automatically work on any device we connected to it. So, when you connect to the new server, your computer would automatically be optimized.”
“That sounds a little big brotherish.”
“It could be. In reality, the company would need to make an ethical decision regarding how much control it should have over employee computers. If it’s a company-owned computer on the company network, the company could just have it running as default. But ethically, each employee should know and understand that it is running. And maybe they should have either the opportunity to opt in or opt out of the hosted optimization. I think that’s a matter of corporate policy, not the software developer. On the other hand, the company probably has no right to run the app on an employee’s personal computer just because he connected to the network.”
“Gotcha. It means that we need policies in place for our company that are clear and well-understood by our employees. We need to tell them what information is being collected and how it is used with an opt-out that is easy. I’m going to have a lot of other stuff to do besides just getting the corporation papers filed. Chastity and I will need to work on policies and procedures before we ever launch. Like you, I won’t be having time for any extracurricular activities next term.”
“I’m going to try to stay on the golf team when the spring season starts,” Henry said. “But I might never see varsity. I just want to stay close enough that Carol and I can make the most of our non-class time.”
“I’d like to meet her sometime. I know Izzy and Chas would be interested. Any chance of a get together over Christmas break?”
“We haven’t got a concrete plan yet. You know, she might not want to get sucked into our little world. She’s pre-med. She’s dating me because only idiots date doctors.” Henry paused and then snorted. “When she said that, it meant that she didn’t want to date anyone in her program. What does it say about me?”
“Well, my friend, we’re all idiots when it comes to women.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
