4. Sam #2
“Know how to play? No.” Sam laughed. “But of course Talia did, and she was charming enough that she convinced the other guys around the table to let me, her, and Libby be a team so that Talia could teach us. I think the guys said yes partially because they thought Talia would be an easy mark—she was a psychology major, she smiled a lot, and she was a girl. Yeah, I know, I know—don’t get me started on that last one.
“They told us the stakes and dealt us in. And before they knew it, she’d cleaned them all out and no one quite knew what hit them.
That’s Talia, running into the pigeons and scaring them all.
But she kept showing up to every physics poker night after that, and I tagged along.
Libby, too, if she was around. And soon enough, they all fell a little bit in love with her because she was clearly brilliant but didn’t make them feel stupid for having underestimated her.
And through serendipity—or more accurately, Talia’s relentless will—I learned how to play poker. ”
“Damn, that woman is my hero,” Erin said.
Mine, too, Sam thought, but he didn’t say it aloud because Erin already knew.
“Don’t put Talia on a pedestal, though,” he said. “She’d be the first to tell you that she’s not perfect.”
“Hard to believe.”
Sam kept his smile to himself. He wasn’t going to divulge Talia’s weaknesses to her starry-eyed intern.
But he knew very well how her idealism could be so big that it consumed her.
Talia’s hopes and dreams of a better future sometimes drove her too hard—she would go an entire day without eating if she was deep inside a project, she rarely had time for friends, and she was hardly ever even at her apartment, spending all her time at the office instead.
“So if Talia’s your best friend,” Erin asked, finally pulling her sushi roll in front of her, “why aren’t you wearing Omni 3Ds like everyone else here?
” She tapped on her own glasses. “It seems, like, de rigueur at an Omni / Ideal Life celebration. Or are you one of those people who prefers Ideal Life on your phone?”
“I… don’t use Ideal Life.”
“What? No way.” Erin’s chopsticks stopped halfway to her mouth. “How are you going to make Talia fall in love with you if you don’t even use her tech?”
“You are relentless.”
“Did I run into the pigeons again? Sorry! But seriously, you don’t use Ideal Life?”
Sam shook his head. “I have a complicated relationship with technology.”
It wasn’t always that way. Talia’s idealism had rubbed off on him in college, but it lost its luster too soon after that.
Straight out of school, Sam was hired to work for Nowhere Cat, a quantum computing startup (the name was a reference to Schrodinger’s cat, a popular way of explaining the confusing here-but-not-here theory behind quantum physics).
Sam had been thrilled to get to work at Nowhere Cat, which at the time had just announced the development of a quantum computing chip that could create topological qubits—a shocking advance in technology that was at least two decades ahead of anyone else.
And there were more exciting developments in the pipeline.
Unfortunately, that all came crashing down six months after Sam started work, when a whistleblower revealed that Nowhere Cat’s management were lying.
There was no breakthrough in topological qubits or in anything else.
It was all just smoke and mirrors—masked in technical jargon—to get more investors in the hopes that someday, with enough money, they’d actually be able to discover what they’d already claimed to have done.
Disillusioned, Sam stumbled out of Nowhere Cat’s offices with no desire to work at a tech startup again. He holed up in his apartment and buried himself in novels and books on various philosophies.
It was Talia who finally barged in and pulled him back into the world again.
She coaxed him out of his paralyzed state of disappointment by taking him to his favorite place in the Bay Area, the misty cliffs of Pacifica.
They would just sit there quietly on a bench together—him reading, her working on her PhD research on her laptop.
Then one day, he saw the old lighthouse on the cliff’s edge was for sale, and an idea blossomed.
“What if I could turn that into a bookstore?” he asked Talia.
“Bookstores are notoriously hard businesses to turn a profit,” Talia said. “But…”
“But what?”
“You could supplement by playing on the professional poker circuit.”
They smiled at the same time. It was perfect.
And that’s how Sam ended up as the owner of a bookstore in the middle of nowhere.
His 11:11 wish freshman year had been for a friend who could last a lifetime. And today more than ever, Sam felt the potency of 11:11.
“Oh my god!” Erin’s phone had dinged loudly and she now had an article up on the screen. “Your Gossipy Tech BFF has already posted about tonight’s party here!” She leaned over to show Sam.
Your Gossipy Tech BFF was like Lady Whistledown’s Society Papers from Bridgerton, except about the people and companies in Silicon Valley (so a little less sexy). No one knew who wrote Your Gossipy Tech BFF, but apparently, they’d been here at Sugiyama tonight or at least had an informant who had.
Badass Ideal Life CEO Talia Morgan Showing STEM Girls Everywhere How to Get the Boys to Bow at Your Feet