Ideal Life

1. Talia

Talia

You deserve a better life—your Ideal Life.

Talia Morgan’s heart was racing, but she smiled at the motto above the receptionist’s desk. Ever since she was fifteen, she’d known she wanted to find a way to make people’s daily lives better, and now, twenty years later, she was on the cusp of truly achieving that.

“Almost ready,” Talia said, but she nearly snorted at herself.

She didn’t look like a CEO of one of the country’s hottest startups.

She was just a generic thirty-five-year-old woman: generic brown hair in a practical ponytail, generically average body of someone who didn’t exercise as much as she should.

And she was still dressed for work—that is, the Silicon Valley uniform of T-shirt and jeans with a company-logoed hoodie (in this case, Ideal Life’s purple star).

But no matter. The great thing about a place like Palo Alto was they cared more about your brains and work ethic than how you looked. Talia started to turn to go back to her office. “I just, uh, need to swap out my hoodie for my blazer—”

“Already got you covered.” Erin handed over the navy jacket Talia kept on a hanger behind her office door. There was a joke that you could tell who the boss of a tech company was because they dressed like everyone else, except they threw a blazer over their T-shirt.

“I grabbed your heels, too,” Erin said.

“You’re always a step ahead,” Talia said as she slipped out of her hoodie and into the blazer, kicked off her sneakers, and stepped into the pumps.

“I learned from the best,” Erin said, grinning.

Talia laughed. But it was true that she’d taken Erin under her wing.

Silicon Valley was still largely a boys’ club, and tech women had to stick together.

Talia had learned the hard way not only how to work harder and ideate better than the male engineers, but also how to get credit for her brilliance.

It’s why she was no longer a worker bee behind the scenes and instead was the founder and CEO of a startup about to be acquired by tech behemoth OmnisZcience.

(Which everyone just called Omni, partially because nobody could remember how to spell it with the extraneous Z in the middle.)

Her phone rang. It had to be Sam. He was the only person she knew who didn’t preschedule calls or just text.

Talia picked up. “Are you here?” she asked.

“Wow,” Sam said. “No preamble, no hello, straight to business.” There was an undercurrent of teasing in his voice, though.

This is how Talia and Sam had always been, ever since they became best friends at Stanford during their freshman year.

He was the easygoing beta to her idealistic, mile-a-minute alpha.

“Samuel Jason Chang, please,” Talia said. “I can’t take banter right now. I’m all nerves. Are you downstairs or are you not here yet?”

“Hey,” he said softly. “It’s okay. I got you. I’m here.”

Talia exhaled. “Okay. I’ll send Erin to let you in.” The building was typical of downtown Palo Alto, where shops and restaurants lived on the first floor, while offices populated the higher ones. You needed a company badge to get access to Ideal Life on floors two through four.

A couple minutes later, the elevator doors opened, and Sam stepped out alone; Erin had gone on to the restaurant.

He wore a tuxedo jacket he’d found at a thrift store and altered so the edges were stylishly roughened up, paired with a black T-shirt and black jeans.

Unlike Talia, who had no sense of style, Sam had an effortless young-professor aesthetic—complete with slightly tousled black hair—that he seemed to just roll out of bed with.

It probably had to do with being around books all day; he owned a bookshop half an hour away on the coast.

“Congratulations,” Sam said, drawing Talia into a hug. He was several inches taller than her, even when she wore heels, and his arms enveloped her completely.

“Thank you,” she said, allowing herself a moment to close her eyes and sink into the familiar comfort of him. “I’m happy—really happy—but also nervous. Is that weird?”

“No,” Sam said. “Omni is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, and they’re buying your company. For a hundred million dollars. Of course you’re happy and nervous at the same time.”

“I think I’m also anxious because we didn’t actually get the acquisition papers signed this morning.

There was some small appendix that the lawyers needed from their colleagues in France that didn’t come in on time.

Supposedly, though, the document will be done tomorrow morning, and we’ll sign everything then.

But we decided to go ahead with the celebration dinner because we’d already booked out the whole restaurant downstairs.

” She grimaced. “I hope we’re not tempting fate. ”

The thing was, startups like Talia’s company skated on thin ice.

So often, they were six months away from going under, even the ones with great technology and reputations.

They needed either constant infusions of cash from venture capital investors, or to catch the eye of a bigger company with deep pockets that could acquire them.

That was certainly the case for Ideal Life, and Omni’s desire to buy them came just as Ideal Life’s bank accounts were getting low on funds.

Sam released Talia from the hug, but he smiled. “The French document issue sounds like a minor delay, and everything will be fine. Omni wouldn’t be sending their execs to the party tonight if the acquisition wasn’t already a done deal.”

“Yeah…” Talia said, beginning to pace Ideal Life’s reception area, her heels clacking unevenly on the floor.

She was more accustomed to sneakers, and she didn’t quite feel like herself when she had to adjust her gait like this.

“It’s just… we really need this deal to happen.

And the acquisition contract is only the first step.

After we sign tomorrow, Omni will get to send their teams of lawyers and investment bankers and software engineers to sift through all of Ideal Life’s stuff—contracts, source code, everything—and if they find anything during due diligence that they don’t like, they can walk away.

It’s like selling a house, where the buyer signs a contract but is free to bail if they discover that you have termites or asbestos. ”

“Does Ideal Life have termites or asbestos?”

“No, but—”

Sam took her by the shoulders and looked straight into her eyes. “Then it will be fine. More than fine. So let’s go downstairs to this fancy-ass restaurant and shovel fifty-dollar sushi rolls into our mouths, okay?”

That broke Talia out of her spiraling, and she laughed. “We can’t eat like the animals we really are, and you know it. I have to look professional. The Omni execs and Ideal Life’s venture capital investors will be there, and some journalists, too.”

“What a shame,” Sam said. “I was looking forward to eating sushi with my hands.” He smiled as he offered his arm to Talia. “Regardless, shall we?”

She took a deep breath, then pushed the elevator button before slipping her hand into the crook of his elbow.

“Thanks again for being my ‘date,’ even though you have to hop on a flight in a few hours. I really appreciate you taking a red-eye to your poker competition, just so you could be here tonight.”

He said something quietly that she couldn’t quite make out because the elevator dinged and the doors opened, and then it was forgotten as they stepped inside.

Ideal Life was Talia’s brainchild. She’d conceived it in the fourth year of her neuroscience PhD at Stanford.

She was supposed to have been working on her dissertation, but one afternoon while at lunch with Sam, the conversation had drifted to Talia’s memories of her mom and dad, who—to be frank—had been terrible parents.

They were the kind of people who had partied hard when they were young, but then they didn’t outgrow it even after they’d had kids.

Vera and Dave had gone out with their friends almost every single night, and Talia had been the one to make sure that groceries were bought and that the laundry got done and that her little sister, Libby, understood her homework and went to bed at a reasonable hour.

If only their parents had had some kind of scaffolding around their lives to gently intervene whenever they got a call from a friend to come out for “just one drink.” If only there had been something to nudge them to ignore the FOMO and stay home with their little girls instead.

Because when they had been present, they had showered Talia and Libby with love.

If only they’d had some guidance to teach them to prioritize.

That memory was how Ideal Life was born.

Talia’s concept was this: Using a combination of brain activity readings and customers’ personal histories and habits, Ideal Life’s AI created personalized profiles of what behaviors each customer was likely to act on in the future.

Ideal Life would then help them optimize their positive lives by heading off their negative tendencies.

For example, if a former alcoholic’s friends invited her to a bar, Ideal Life would gently suggest that she offer to meet up with them earlier for dinner at a restaurant instead.

Or if someone had previously suffered a heart attack and needed to be on a heart-healthy diet but had a penchant for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Ideal Life could help redirect them when their cravings began to steer them toward the drive-through.

These recommendations showed up in whatever form the customer preferred—they could be notifications on phones or a voice inside earbuds or a customized avatar “Friend” that popped up on Omni 3Ds, augmented reality lenses that looked like regular plastic-framed glasses.