Talia #2
“Oh my gosh, I would love to do that! I mean, thank you, of course, I’d be happy to.”
“Wonderful. Well, that’s all from me. Keep up the great work.”
Erin grinned as she picked up her laptop. “Would you like me to get you a Tylenol—no, wait… Scratch that. Too submissive?” She looked to Talia for guidance. “Or is it good to be nice?”
Talia wondered if she’d given the wrong piece of advice. She didn’t want to break the part of Erin that made her a fundamentally good person. Maybe she ought to rewind again.
But she didn’t think she could do it so soon without feeling more ill. Using the watch at Aquarobics and twice in such quick succession here on the roof (plus the cumulative rewinds overall) seemed to be taking a toll.
“I’ll be okay, Erin. But I appreciate you offering.”
Staying put in the present for the rest of the day grounded Talia again. By midafternoon, she felt steady enough to check the stock markets, which had closed in New York, to see if there was anything she could invest in for her parents.
Last year, as part of their “graduation” from the Ideal Life app and becoming more responsible adults, Vera and Dave had hired an attorney to help them write a will.
During that process, they’d also given Talia power of attorney to handle their money.
She had opened a brokerage account for them and helped them invest their savings, which wasn’t a lot, but they were only in their early sixties and still had time.
Today, there were no big surprises like when BiomeLabs’ share price quintupled overnight, but there were some mid-cap nontech companies that had done well.
Talia noted the exact time of each one’s lowest price earlier in the day, then rewound very, very slowly to before those moments.
She bought each stock at the dip for her parents.
If they continued to rise tomorrow, great. If not, she could come back and sell them for a small profit, then take the proceeds and invest in something else.
Talia felt a twinge of guilt.
But it was for a good cause—her parents! And every little bit would help.
If Sam were here, he wouldn’t let Talia accept the rationalization so easily.
But he wasn’t here, and she’d already done it.
And really, if Sam had his way all the time, Talia never would’ve dove so deep into the tech world because of his post–Nowhere Cat reticence, and she wouldn’t have Ideal Life, and so maybe he wasn’t the best with advice!
Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: I’m sensing agitation, reflected by higher beta activity and diminished alpha rhythms in your brain activity—
“Dismiss!” Talia shouted, aware that this probably made her alpha and beta bands even more irregular, but sometimes Queen Elizabeth was such a pest.
When Talia got back to present time, a wall of exhaustion hit her. She could hardly think; it was like her brain was lost in a thick, pea soup fog.
The sun dappled through the trees, and a warm breeze made their leaves’ shadows dance hypnotically. Maybe I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes. There was no one on the roof right now, since lunch had been a while ago.
But then the elevator dinged and the doors opened, and Ideal Life’s chief privacy officer, Sara Trankjaer, stepped out. “Hey, Talia, I heard you were up here. Do you have a few minutes?”
For a moment, Talia’s breath hitched as she thought Sara had figured out that Talia had gone into the back-end system and deactivated the account of Rebecca Lawrence—the would-be Tinder murderer.
Talia wouldn’t be able to explain that she was preventing a death, so how would she explain what she’d done?
In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a big deal, but it was still a breach of privacy protocols and something that should have been logged…
“I wanted to go over some of the due diligence requests from Omni,” Sara said.
Oh. That’s a lot easier. Thank goodness.
“Of course,” Talia said, gesturing at the chair across from her to invite Sara to sit. “What’s up?”
“Well, I’m not sure if this is concerning, but I wanted to flag it for you. Omni is asking for detailed information about the medical and behavioral health histories that our customers have provided and how they granted those permissions.”
“Okay, that should be fine,” Talia said. “We only collect information our users self-reported voluntarily. They’re not official medical records, so our lawyers said there shouldn’t be any HIPAA issues.”
“Agreed,” Sara said. “But the curious thing is that Omni’s legal team is doing an analysis of the assignability of that user data.
Put another way, it seems like they’re poking around to see if they’ll be able to use Ideal Life’s customer information for something broader than what we use it for, which is only to let the app make suggestions to the user themself. ”
Talia shook her head. “They didn’t say anything about that when I was on their campus the other day. It’s not in any of the road maps. And our privacy policy is clear; the information our customers volunteer can only be used to help them.”
Sara chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Okay, well… I just wanted to bring it up.”
“I’m glad you did. Ideal Life’s integrity is important to me. Our customers trust us, and that’s not negotiable.”
As Sara returned back downstairs, though, Talia’s stomach turned, and this time it wasn’t because of the watch.
Because what if Sara was onto something? What if this was one of those acquisitions where a Big Tech company buys a startup, guts it for code or data, and then tosses the rest aside?
Or something even less scrupulous?
Talia stood and walked to the edge of the roof.
From here, she could see over the top of Palo Alto.
Out of view but to the south was Omni’s campus.
She replayed in her mind that last version of the meeting she’d had there, and what everyone, including their CEO, Jack Zimmer, had said. Nothing jumped out at her.
“Innocent till proven guilty,” Talia said in Omni headquarters’ direction.
She lived and worked in Silicon Valley, so she knew Big Tech were not the pure villains that some media liked to portray them as.
That was too reductive. Some companies certainly wielded too much power.
But others did good things, like investing in research that had no guarantee of profits but that might change the world, like when a Google team won the Nobel Prize for their work in genetics.
A smaller company never could have spent that much money on research unrelated to their core business.
But being in Silicon Valley also meant Talia was not naive. Idealistic, yes, in that she wanted to improve lives. But not naive.
She’d been keeping one eye on Omni before, but now she’d watch them with both.