Page 107 of Kane
“Wonderful!” She opens the flap of her purse, a vintage Chanel clutch, and withdraws a cell phone, hitting a speed dial and putting it to her ear. “Xavier, darling, hi. Well, you were right, I should have brought security. I sort of got mobbed. No, it’s okay now, a kind gentleman named Kane stepped up to help me out. He and his girlfriend Anjalee are going to join us for lunch. Could you have Ricardo add two to our reservation? You’ll like them, baby, I promise. Kane actually kind of reminds me of Baxter, a little bit. Oh! They’re here already? Wonderful, the more the merrier, right? Oh stop, you’ll be fine. It’ll be me, you, Bax, Eva, Kane, and Anjalee…Xavier, love of my life, you’ve been up to your eyeballs with this release for weeks, now it’s time to have some fun.” She listens. “That’s my man. We’ll be there soon. I love you. Yeah, bye.”
I frown. “I would not want to be intruding on a family affair, Miss Harlow.”
She waves my objection away. “I invited you, therefore it’s by definition not an intrusion. I had no idea Bax and Eva were in town, so now we’re having a nice big lunch with family and new friends.”
I eye her, and the handful of shopping bags, and then her outfit—a sleek, fashionable, knee-length skirt in pale blue, tailored white button-down, thick brown leather belt with a glittery silver buckle, and ankle high fawn booties. It’s an outfit that can go from shopping and brunch to a fancy lunch.
“I do not know if I am attired for a dinner affair,” I say, looking down at my jeans and T-shirt
Harlow snorts. “We’re not that type of people, honey. Come as you are.” She smiles at me. “Killer boots, by the way.”
A trio of men in black suits and mirrored sunglasses meets us at the entrance of the Bellagio. They’re huge, but Kane outsizes them all, easily. They flank us, the third surging ahead, head scanning side to side in a robotic motion, plowing a path through the crowded lobby to the elevators. Harlow swipes a card across the reader, and we ride up to a penthouse suite. It’s enormous, fabulous, luxury—the kind of place Pappa would insist upon.
Harlow breezes in. “Don’t mind the opulence—the studio sprang for the penthouse for us. If it’d been up to Xavier and me, we’d have gotten an AirBnB. But when the studio insists, you accept.” She tosses her bags onto a table behind a long white leather couch, upon which a man is seated, a laptop open on his thighs, a phone pinched between shoulder and ear as he types rapidly. He hears Harlow, twists, smiles distractedly at her, holds up a finger.
“No, no, listen, I know what the overhead is, and Ido not careabout the profit margin, Carl, I just don’t.” His voice is animated, irritated. “I told you how it is going to work and I want you to make it happen. It’s my company, they’re my bots. There’s a reason I’ve not gone public with the shares—because I insist on control, for this reason. I’m not going to jack up the prices. I don’t give one single solitary shit about the profits. I’ve got enough money that I’ll never have to think about my profits,ever. You’ve each made a fortune off ofmybots andmysoftware, and Iwill notbe swayed by greed. I want these bots in the hands of kids. I want the programming to be open-source, and I want the marketing package to use the applications designed by kids. Not programmers, not our people, not me—the real-world users. Fine, put me over to Yoshiro, then.” A pause, and then he continues speaking…in fluent, rapid Japanese.
He closes the laptop and tosses it carelessly onto the coffee table, standing up. He’s very tall, lean, with longish black hair swept back and messy, wearing thick-rimmed black glasses. He wears a white T-shirt, showing geometric design tattoos on his forearms—there’s a black corduroy blazer on the table, discarded. He listens, coming around to pull Harlow into his chest, hugging her one-armed, his hand going low, just above her buttocks, kissing her lightly before rattling off more rapid-fire Japanese.
Then, in English. “Okay, I’m on conference? Carl, Yoshiro, Ludo, everyone, listen. I know my decision on this is not going to be popular. But let me repeat myself—I…do…not…care. Three hundred and fifty dollars US, no international markup. Open-source. This is what it is—openis in the damned named, after all. Don’t agree, get a job at a different company. You all know who I am and what I stand for, so this should not be a surprise and I am very displeased at the resistance I am feeling from my own inner circle. That said, I have a new project I’m nearly ready to show you. And because I am not giving you sway over the parameters of the OpenBot project, I’m going to give this next one to you. I’ll let you play with it, and give you guys full control over pricing and marketing, everything. I’m not quite ready to pitch it yet, but I’ll give you a hint: remember the modular micro-bot concept we knocked around last year, the advanced version of the OpenBot? Well, I’ve been working on it, and I think what I’ve got for you will make this release look like a tea party. That’s all I’ve got for you guys at this time. Very well. Goodbye.”
He stabs the “end call” button with his thumb, shoves the phone in the back pocket of his jeans, and rakes his hands through his hair. “I dislike playing at CEO very intensely, Low,” he says. “Have I disclosed this to you, recently?” His tone is abruptly different, less conversational and more…formal. Almost stilted.
She pats his chest. “I know you do, baby. But it’s the ugly necessity of doing what you love doing.”
He groans, rakes his hands through his hair again. “The board is a pack of vultures ruled by avarice. Remind me why I must play the game their way? It is maddening at best.”
“Because you run a multibillion-dollar company, honey.” She touches his face, petting his jaw soothingly, her voice low, soft. “At that scale, you simply cannot go it alone. You need a corporate structure.”
“I wish to create robots. That is all. I could not care less about profit margins and marketing campaigns. I care about the bots. And I care about the children who play with them.” He shakes his head. “It is finished, for now.” He sighs. “The effort of faking normalcy has exhausted me, I fear.”
Harlow kisses his jaw. “You’re not faking normalcy, honey.”
“If I speak in the manner which is normal for me, they become uncomfortable. To keep them comfortable, I have to fake a neurotypical speech pattern. It is exhausting and makes me feel like a fraud.”
Harlow just kisses his jaw again, and I look at Kane—he smiles at me, and we just wait. “Honey. We have guests. Can you come greet them?”
He lets out a breath and turns to us. “Greetings.” He blinks twice, rapidly. “I mean, hello. I am Xavier Badd.”
Kane sticks out his paw. “Pleased to meet you, Xavier. I’m Kane, and this is my girl, Anjalee.” He claps Xavier on the shoulder. “I dunno exactly what a neurotypical speech pattern is, but don’t go faking nothin’ on our account. I prefer folks to just be who they are.”
Xavier looks at Kane for an uncomfortably long time. “I am on the autism spectrum, which means social interactions are frequently troublesome for me. You’ve caught me at a time when I have expended the vast majority of my mental energy, so I am unsure if I will have the wherewithal to curb my tics and tells.”
Kane just shrugs. “No worries. We’re all just people, you know?”
Xavier eyes me, then his wife. “My wife is quite famous. In the minds of most, she is something rather more thanjust people.”
“Well, fame just means a lot of folks know who she is. Don’t mean much to me.” He steps back to me. “I’m a combat veteran, Xavier. When you’ve seen people’s insides become their outsides, shit like fame stops being impressive.”
Xavier nods. “Ah, yes. My elder brother Zane has spoken of this. He is a Navy SEAL. Or, rather he was, he has been retired for quite a few years, now.”
Kane grins. “Army Ranger, myself, but two of my best buds are retired Marine Recons.”
“Indeed?” Xavier frowns thoughtfully. “I wonder if they know each other. From what Zane has told me, the Special Forces teams are a rather small world.”
“Seems possible, if not likely.”
Silence, then, not quite comfortable, but neither is it exactly awkward. Harlow breaks it. “Darling, would you care to show them what you released today?”