Page 1 of Bought

Chapter One

“I have an appointment with Ethan Keller.”

“Are you sure?”

I can hear the sneer before I look up from my phone to see a beautiful young woman looking at me like I’m barely sentient trash.

She’s sitting beneath a red down-light that makes her look like the bouncer in a vampire movie, though she’s dressed like a puritanical stripper. Enough sex on display for everyone to appreciate how hot she is, but a high collar and long sleeves that make her still seem professional.

The poised receptionist gives me an icy once-over and given our surroundings, I can’t blame her. I’m not exactly dressed for this.

I’m wearing a faded red hooded sweatshirt, covering the t-shirt that has a rip in it. I have jeans on too. Not the sleek super tight-fitting jeans women like this receptionist might wear on a Saturday brunch, but ones with enough room in them to fit things in the pockets. Most important, I have my battered workhorse of a laptop tucked under one arm.

Okay, I don’t look my best. But I’ve been working fourteen-hour days for the past week and frankly, we’re all lucky I had time to take a shower at the company gym and put my hair into a ponytail. I made an effort, dammit.

“Very sure,” I say.

“Let me check with Mr. Keller.”

It’s pretty obvious that the only meeting taking place right now is the one with me. It’s ten o’clock at night. I’m surprised the secretary is still even here. Hope she’s getting some decent overtime.

“Okay, well, I have the email right here…”

I attempt to show her the calendar app on my phone, but she recoils from it and disappears through a door that is set into the wall in a seamless “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond” sort of way.

That leaves me standing there, bringing down the tone of the place.

It’s a long way up to the top of Vipyr HQ. And it’s a long way down too. I wander over and look out a highly polished window, down into the city below. Lights dance and flow with the pulse of life. Up here, I feel strangely removed from it all. It’s almost like whatever is out there can’t touch you here.

It’s hard to believe that all of this exists because of a relatively small piece of patented code. The least talked about, most installed piece of software globally. It’s embedded in the back end of thousands of other apps, helps them to communicate data to servers more efficiently than anything else.

“Mr. Keller will see you,” the secretary says from behind me. Her tone hasn’t changed much. She’s still acting as if she’s doing me a favor just by looking at me. Funny how the rich and famous seem to pay underlings to make other people feel like scum. It’s like they don’t know we mostly do it to ourselves for free. Everything about this place is designed to make people who don’t belong here feel inadequate. It’s working.

I don’t get to go through the sweet secret door. I have go through the glass doors marked with the V for Vipyr. It’s heavier than it looks and it threatens to swing back and catch me on the ass on my way through. This place is full of hostiles. Even the doors don’t like me.

“Goddamn,” I swear under my breath. The hall beyond is not long, but there are three doors in it. One at the very end, one on the left, the other on the right. There’s no indication of which one I should go to. Ethan Keller’s door doesn’t have anything so pedestrian as a name plate on it. I guess I’m just supposed to rely on the sensation of being on hallowed ground to know where I am.

I start with the door on the right and tap on it. There’s no answer.

“Uhm, Mr. Keller?”

“Over here,” a voice chuckles behind me.

I turn around to see the man himself standing in a now open doorway. The left. Of course he was on the left. The devil always takes the left hand path, and if the devil were to incarnate as a tech CEO, he would look like Ethan Keller, I’m sure of it.

“People do that all the time,” he says, his wickedly handsome face warped with amusement at my expense.

“Maybe you should try labeling the door then.”

“Maybe,” he says in the sort of tone that strongly implies he has no intention of doing that whatsoever. “Come on in.”

His office is bigger and more nicely decorated than any place I’ve ever lived in. It has the square footage of multiple apartments. It’s big enough to get lost in, and decorated with so many wonders of technology it’s hard to process them all. I’m sure some of them are as yet unseen prototypes. There’s something that looks like a VR headset, but it’s attached to a full body suit. I get a little closer to it, wondering how it works. Is Vipyr going into VR? Full body VR? That would be incredible.

He clears his throat again, reminding me that he’s there. Oh. Right.

I turn my attention back to the man himself and look at him. Really look at him. What I’m about to say is likely going to piss him off. I hope he doesn’t shoot the messenger.

There is no doubt that Ethan Keller is one of the great minds of his generation. He is thirty-three years old, with a thick head full of dark hair. He has piercing blue eyes, the kind that seem to be analyzing everything with ruthless intelligence. As he looks at me, I feel like I’m being taken apart.

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