Date Published: 11-16-2019
Silicon Valley Tech meets The Cocaine Trade.
Can you program yourself into a winner?
In the San Francisco Bay Area, tech innovation is King, and money is God.
Vik Singh watched his immigrant parents work their fingers to the bone chasing the American Dream. But standing at his father's funeral, he realizes one thing - hustling will get you nowhere. All you need to get rich is one big idea.
And when he meets Los, a small-time drug lord with visions of grandeur, Vik makes a plan worthy of Jobs and Zuckerberg:
Design a drug sale app.
After all, market disruption is everything.
From his comfortable cottage in Lake Tahoe, Vik writes the code that builds a cocaine empire. When his app attracts an infamous drug cartel leader, it seems like a natural expansion move. And for a while, life is Swiss bank accounts, luxe coke parties, and falling in love with Remi, a beautiful and ballsy woman with secrets of her own.
Then he discovers he is being watched.
The DEA is closing in, the cartel is getting suspicious, and he can trust no one. As things heat up, Vik discovers the real price of easy money.
And that price could be his life.
If you're a fan of Breaking Bad, Mr. Robot, and Dark Mirror, this is the book for you. Get your copy right now!
I know now that there was a young
Hispanic man on the hillside above the cottage, watching through binoculars as
Vik, a young Indian man, oblivious, did pushups on his Persian rug. I know
about the man on the hillside because Los told me when I was his hostage. I
know about the Persian rug because Vik told me how he always tapped out his
reps with his nose against one of the trees in the rug’s pattern. The tree had
an extra leaf compared to the other trees, and this was an intentional flaw: we
Persians know that weavers cannot create perfection, only God can. Vik told me
he did not know whether there was a God, only that there was a Steve Wozniak,
who’d designed every circuit and authored every line of code in the original
Apple II computer, and to this day not a single bug found in any of it. But
what if perfection isn’t divine? What if bugs are?
We might know that, Vik and I.
The cottage sat at the terminal
switchback of a mountain road above Incline Vil age. I’d like to think that
there was a moment during which both young men—the one on the hillside, the one
in the cottage—despite their separate vantages—paused together in mutual awe of
the aquamarine wonder far below, a lake two-thousand millennia in the making, a
small alpine sea. Lake Tahoe.
Vik tapped out a text— 1PM
still good? —then set his phone down, knowing better than to expect the
gratification of an instant reply. He had big plans for us that day, but I had
gone out the night before, and though at 29 I was still too young for bona fide
hangovers, Vik figured (correctly) that I would be sleeping one off. He
sometimes joined me and my friends on our nights out. No longer in his
invincible twenties, he played the part of The Older Guy, invariably ducking
out before the wee hours. A few times that doomed summer he’d offered to take
me home, but I am not the type to leave before everything that is going to
happen, does. I have to be the last kid out of the pool.
However. By late August we had twice
found ourselves alone together—once in a hot, dark hallway at a party, once in
a moonlit parking lot—and had done the things single people do. We had kissed
each other frenetically and lay hands upon each other and confided secrets,
only to downplay the significance of such things when the sun came up. Or, I
had. Vik would send me a heartfelt text, and I’d send back a picture I took of
a squirrel eating a Cheeto.
Electronic conversation plays to our
mutual strengths. We can craft a message, shoot it out, get a reply, interpret
it. Think. Craft another. It gives us breathing room. Face to face, we can take
each other’s breath away. Especially in those days.
The saving grace of my forced
estrangement from Vik has been the time and distance it’s given me to write
with him, and about him. To codify his story. I have hundreds of pages of his
letters. By now he’s divulged to me most of the dots; here is my attempt, then,
to connect them. Any bugs are mine.
Vik used to do sit-ups, too, on that
Persian rug. Pull-ups from the wood cross-beam overhead. The rug, the beam,
they are no longer. But there may always be a man on the hillside.
We know that.
The cottage was really a single-bedroom
guest house. It had been built in haste by the prior owner to establish legal
residence in the tax haven of Nevada while he fussed over plans for an
accompanying mega-mansion to be built adjacent. However, soon after ground was
broken on the main house, the SEC caught up with the man. He went to prison for
illegal junk-bond trading. The property hit the market in early May, priced for
rapid liquidation. Vik swooped in.
He’d been living there ever since. He
never minded the half-finished eyesore to his west, with its 15-foot, concrete
retaining wall and exposed foundation. Trees had been cut down to make room for
the house; a copse of 12-inch support beams stood in their place, supporting
nothing. The foundation collected rainwater. Pallets of lumber lay warping in
the Sierra sun. Bouquets of multicolored wires bloomed here and there from
exposed conduit like wildflowers after a forest fire.
Still waiting on my reply to his text,
Vik stood in the kitchen, tamping espresso grounds into a dense brown puck so
as to leave the water no path of least resistance. He pulled a shot.
The espresso machine was industrial
grade. The manufacturer’s vice-president had been Vik’s roommate at Caltech.
Years later, over lunch, the man had casually mentioned a temperature overshoot
issue plaguing their product’s boiler. Vik had scribbled down three lines of
code for a low-pass filter that could smooth out the boiler’s thermocouple
signal—three lines subsequently included on every machine the company produced.
Months later, a delivery man wheeled a dol y up to Vik’s doorstep and held up a
clipboard for signature. Vik cut into the cardboard and liberated a gleaming,
aluminum marvel. He’d never much cared about espresso before. Now he wondered
if he could even think without it.
He stood leaning against the counter,
gnawing his lip, staring out at the lake without really seeing it. An urgency
building. In the corner of the room was a semicircular workstation with a
27-inch iMac workstation and beside it a MacBook Pro laptop. Both monitors
blank, the processors hibernating. The file basket piled with unopened mail
addressed to the junk bond trader, which Vik had been gradually repurposing as
scratch paper.
If he didn’t start soon, the vaporous
ideas in his head would swirl off, unable to nucleate.
He rubbed his whiskered face. He’d once
been the type to grind away late into the night. Since coming to the lake, he
did his best work in the morning.
He crossed the room, tapped the
keyboards, sat down, logged in. Back straight.
Navigating menus, opening files,
repositioning and resizing terminals. His posture deteriorating. Hunching
toward the screen, counting with his finger the arguments nestled inside a set
of parentheses: 1 argument, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6— ah, that’s the
problem. Typing in the missing seventh.
Coding.
To the young man with his binoculars,
watching a magnified, trembling, silent-movie version of Vik, time expanded:
the next three and a half hours felt like a day. As they would to anyone from
his POV. Very little seemed to be happening. There was a man in a cottage,
staring at a computer, cracking his knuckles, looking occasionally at the ceiling.
To Vik, though, time imploded. He’d
fallen under another of his self-induced spells.
Thinking, typing, compiling, running.
Erroring out. Scrolling back. Oblivious to the world beyond the one he was
writing, line by line—the world he’d created, and controlled. Lines of text
spooling past in a blur, slowing to a halt.
When he’d first started coding, he’d worn
headphones pumping EDM to stay in a trance.
He didn’t need them anymore. He moved
through his program function by function, watching the variables change. Rarely
touching the mouse, relying instead upon keyboard shortcuts to auto-complete
filenames, to search backward, to place the cursor at the ends and beginnings
of lines.
He rubs a hand across his face, smells
the coffee on his breath, the rug on his palm.
Repositions his cursor, kills a bug with
a single keystroke. Recompiles, reruns. Feels a fleeting jolt of satisfaction.
Seeks another.
Patches of sunlight on the floor compress
toward the windows.
At some point he got thirsty. Realized
his wrists ached. His back was tight. He knew he ought to go outside and walk
around, but sensed he was on the verge of a small breakthrough.
There was just one more variation he
wanted to test out…
Half an hour later he was still at the
computer. The only sounds in the room the soft rat-tat-tat of the keyboard, the
occasional sniff, the compulsive jiggling of a foot against the desk.
Finally, he went back through the new
work and tidied up. Saved a working snapshot of the code to the hard drive and
went to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice. Drank it in gulps, looking out
the window at the lake. Seeing it this time.
He unhooked a frying pan from a rack and
set it on the stove over a blue flame. The remaining block of butter in the
refrigerator door was thicker than he needed but too thin to divide, so he
peeled away the wax paper and dropped the whole thing in the pan. Broke in a
pair of eggs, put a slice of bread in the toaster. The eggs crackled and
sputtered. He leaned both hands against the counter and hung his head. It is
difficult for him to escape the confines of a problem space. He flipped the
eggs and lay slices of cheese over them and when the cheese had melted he
spilled the crackling, steaming contents of the pan out over the toast.
So much to think through.
Coarse ground pepper, coarse ground salt.
Variables, functions. A girl.
He went out on the deck and ate standing
up, without a fork, licking yolk from his fingers.
When he was done he went around to the
storage closet located just off the front deck. Inside was a full-suspension
mountain bike and an unplumbed water heater tank filled with cash. The bike
dangled on a hook in the dark like a curing carcass. He lifted it off.
The young man in the forest shot off a
text: Listos.
About the Author
Contact Links
Purchase Link
No comments:
Post a Comment