The Words

Billions

In a single day, a Monday, a few weeks following my thirty-fifth birthday, I became a billionaire several times over, and by the end of the week, our stock price had tripled. Bob was also a multi-billionaire. Telepathic Collaboration, Inc. went public, initially raising over ten billion dollars. Then, somehow, through the magic of finance and my little brother's genius, I discovered that my net worth had grown to more than ten billion dollars. I asked my brother to explain the math, but his rambling dissertation far exceeded my attention span. I only knew that I was richer than I had any way of comprehending. It was too stunningly, numbingly, surreal to possibly be real.

We also had dozens of insanely rich, deliriously happy, celebratory multi-millionaires in our employ and a parking lot filled with expensive new cars within the month. I didn't know that much about cars, but it was easy enough to tell which were the go fast, luxury, or what my wife referred to as 'little dick' cars – the massive pickup trucks and SUVs. Then there were the environmentally friendly, weird, and quirky. And finally, there were the dull and practical, often the perfectly serviceable vehicle they'd driven since discovering that their commute was no longer an elevator ride to and from the mansion's basement. For no reason other than to satisfy my curiosity, I spent several days observing who arrived and departed in which vehicles. I found myself continually surprisedly mistaken in my assumptions.

My little brother was the other instant billionaire of our venture. He'd been with the company a comparatively short time, while others, who had been with us from the beginning, hadn't become near as wealthy. And some were bound to feel we'd gone about it unfairly. No one had an issue with either Bob or me becoming insanely rich. But there were grumblings about how wealthy my brother became in such a short period, considering that he hadn't contributed anything, at least not technically or creatively. He wasn't one of our superstar geniuses who rose higher in less time than most because of what they had contributed. The few who were bold enough to raise the issue with me directly, I asked, "Aren't you now wealthier than you'd ever dreamed?" And I pointed out, "If it weren't for my brother's maximizing the perceived value of our stock, none of us would be near as wealthy as we are. A substantially creative contribution, would you not agree?"

My brother had hounded me to provide interviews, attend photo shoots, and be a guest on as many podcasts as possible. I had wardrobe people to dress me, hairstylists, and image consultants. I threatened to kill my little brother multiple times long before the date of our IPO arrived. But he told me to grow the fuck up and get rich like a man. I did remind him that I could still kick the shit out of him, and the parking lot wasn't that far away. He might consider treading more softly.

He didn't, I somehow still managed to resist kicking the shit out of him, and we all became disgustingly rich, as he'd predicted. I had to swallow my pride and thank the smirking little asshole. But I insisted that he should thank me too. Which he did, acknowledging that all the credit should be mine. He could never have managed what he did with anyone else.

One of the biggest challenges we faced following our IPO was retaining our newly wealthy young geniuses. There was nothing we could do in many cases, nothing we could offer. Every one of them, who'd come to work in the basement of our mansion, was worth upward of ten million dollars; every one of them. A handful of our superstars were worth an order of magnitude more. None would ever need to work again, and the choice was between a sunny beach, anywhere in the world, and working sixty to one hundred hours a week. And a significant number had reached the finish line, were burnt out, and wandered off to be burnt out in paradise. Although some of our young multi-millionaires, with an entrepreneurial bent or just more gas left in their tanks, wanted to take their money and start new companies of their own. For whatever reasons that drive such people, a few wanted to be far wealthier than they already were, while others had ideas that they'd been anxious to explore. So long as they weren't looking to be in direct competition, my brother suggested we assist them in pursuing these dreams by partnering with them and financially benefiting ourselves at the same time. My brother, of course, was among those desiring to be more wealthy than he already was. We already had resources that would take them years to develop, so our offer was very enticing. Fortunately, there was also a handful of our best and brightest who'd never joined us for the money. Being rich was no more to them than big numbers in a spreadsheet. They wanted what they already had; the opportunity to continue creating the coolest, craziest technological innovations humankind had ever known.

One of the consequences of our success, which in hindsight I should have anticipated, was the onslaught of beautiful, ambitious women who suddenly found our nerdy, painfully shy young men irresistible. Less the case, but the same was true for a few of our unattached young women. Men, or women in a few instances, attentive and too movie-star handsome or beautiful to be ignored, noticed them for the first time in their lives. I knew that a few of our shy young men lost their virginity to models they'd seen on magazine covers or porn stars whose videos had fueled their masturbatory fantasies for years.

Unable to believe their good fortune, they came to my office to thank me and maybe brag a bit. "Can you believe who I slept with last night? Can you? Me?" I told them I knew exactly how they felt, but none believed me. They'd seen my wife. Yeah, exactly my point.

None of the young women came to brag. Some were too suspicious by nature to fall into such traps. Others were too lost in their haze of lust and love to return to work, let alone come to my office to brag. A few of them married these men of their dreams, and one the woman, as had more than a few of our young men. Unlike my own experience, most of these dream men and women proceeded to take the money of our newly rich employees and make their lives a living hell.

One of our distraught young employees shot himself when his centerfold wife walked out the door with half his fortune. It wasn't enough for her to take his money. She'd needed to mock and belittle him beforehand until he fell into a blackness he couldn't endure. Then, since they weren't yet divorced, she inherited the rest of his wealth, called a cleaning company that handled such things as murders and suicides, and moved back into the house as soon as they'd completed their grisly task.

When I heard the story, I told my wife, "I wish he'd at least shot her first."

"Aren't you rich enough now to have her disappear?" she asked. Not surprisingly, as with most of our conversations, this took place in bed, and I immediately lost the erection she'd been guiding toward its intended destination. And I looked down at her in shocked silence until she smiled and told me, "Sorry. I was joking. It is tragic and not funny at all, except the look on your face was priceless." She pointed to my limp penis and apologized again. "Sorry. Let me fix that." One of the more memorable acts of contrition I'd yet experienced.

My wife was happy for my success but still frustrated that, rich as we were, it still wasn't rich enough to buy her the freedom to focus solely on her research, on the thing that was the whole point of it all. We discussed this at length. We had more than enough money to finance her starting her own company. We could even hire away the best of her current colleagues. But she couldn't keep the data from the research she'd done for the past ten years. She couldn't bring her work in progress. She would need to start from the beginning again.

She wouldn't be forty forever. I'd be fortunate if she would be fifty forever at the rate she'd been progressing. She worried that forever might never happen if she didn't see some breakthroughs soon. And then they wouldn't be her breakthroughs. She might not be allowed to use them for our benefit.

I tried to encourage her. She'd made more progress than she gave herself credit. She had five-year-old mice, the products of genetic modification.

"Yes, but they still grew old and died, so far."

"But haven't you identified genes that mice shared with humans which appeared to impact aging? Haven't you discovered several more from human testing that identify the propensity for Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia?"

"Having a longer life, just to have a lengthier decline in quality, isn't my goal."

"Since you've successfully manipulated those genes impacting longevity in mice, couldn't you, in theory, perform similar procedures that will allow people to live significantly longer and healthier, too?"

"Theoretically. But those would require years of testing and approval, and living one-hundred-and-fifty years, then still aging, and dying, is not my goal. And I've concluded that manipulating a few genes will never allow people to live a thousand years or more. Theoretically, I can potentially slow the process significantly, but DNA will eventually become too damaged to continue replicating healthy cells, resulting in eventual aging and death. But I've begun exploring something called Telomeres."

She tried to remain stoic while explaining what those were, but I could hear the tenor of excitement in her voice every time she repeated the word, "Telomeres." But the fact remained, none of this was technically or legally her own. The results of the work she'd done were her employer's intellectual property.