January 14, 1986, Rudra's Bedroom, Mercer Hall

  The Texas winter was grey, wet, and smelled of woodsmoke. Outside, the oil economy was collapsing. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude had touched twenty dollars a barrel and was looking for the floor. The "For Sale" signs were popping up on lawns in River Oaks and Highland Park like mushrooms after rain.

  Inside my room, however, the economy was booming.

  I sat at my desk, surrounded by stacks of dot-matrix printouts. The green-bar paper flowed onto the floor like a waterfall.

  "We have a problem," Robert said. He was pacing. He did that a lot lately.

  "We have revenue," I countered, highlighting a line on the spreadsheet. "Dell shipped four thousand units in December. The royalty check is for thirty-two thousand dollars. That covers the interest on the house and leaves enough for your country club dues."

  "I'm not talking about the house," Robert snapped. He stopped pacing and leaned over my desk. "I'm talking about the SEC. Judge Reynolds wasn't joking. I got a call from a 'friend' at the Dallas field office. They are opening a formal inquiry into the Plaza Accord trades."

  I stopped highlighting.

  "Specifics?"

  "They are flagging accounts that had 'anomalous prescience' regarding the G5 announcement," Robert said, wiping his glasses. "They think it was a leak. They think someone in the Treasury Department talked. And they are looking at Bhairav Holdings because we went from zero to leverage-heavy shorting the dollar three days before the announcement."

  I leaned back in my chair.

  The Securities and Exchange Commission. In my old life, they were a nuisance—a cost of doing business. In 1985, they were less sophisticated, but they had teeth. If they found out a sixteen-year-old boy made the trade based on future knowledge, I would be in a federal prison. Or worse, a government lab.

  "They want to see our research," Robert said. "They want to know why we made the trade. If we can't show them a thesis—a reason other than 'my son is a time traveler'—they will freeze the assets."

  I closed my eyes. I needed a paper trail. I needed a narrative.

  "Dad," I said calmly. "Do we still have the old typewriter? The IBM Selectric?"

  "In the attic, maybe. Why?"

  "Go get it," I said. "And get me some paper. Old paper. Something with a 1984 watermark if you can find it."

  "Rudra, you can't forge documents for the SEC."

  "I'm not forging," I said, standing up. "I'm... reconstructing the memory. I'm going to write a macroeconomic thesis dated January 1985. I'm going to predict the trade deficit crisis, the manufacturing lag, and the inevitable political pressure on Reagan to devalue the dollar. I'm going to cite public speeches by James Baker and articles from The Economist."

  I tapped my temple.

  "I have the data in my head. I just need to put it on paper and make it look like I wrote it a year ago."

  "That's obstruction of justice," Robert whispered.

  "It's survival," I said. "Do you want to explain to the Feds that your teenage son is a psychic? Or do you want to show them a brilliant, eccentric analysis that proves we were just smarter than the market?"

  Robert stared at me. He looked at the window where the rain lashed against the glass. He looked at the family photos on the wall.

  "The typewriter is in the storage closet," he said. "I'll get the dust off it."

  January 15, 1986 (Makar Sankranti), 1 Dell Way, Round Rock

  While Robert was sweating over the legal defense, I went to the warehouse.

  The atmosphere was frenetic. The loading bay doors were open, letting in the damp chill, but the workers didn't seem to notice. They were moving boxes of the "Turbo PC"—the clone that was eating IBM's lunch.

  I found Vik in the server cage. He wasn't coding. He was arguing with two other guys—young, scruffy, and looking terrified.

  "No!" Vik shouted. "You can't use a bubble sort for the directory listing! It's O(n squared)! It's too slow! Use a quicksort!"

  He saw me and stopped. He looked ragged. Dark circles under his eyes, hair unwashed.

  "Bhai," Vik exhaled. "Tell these guys. They're writing code like they're paid by the hour."

  "Who are they?" I asked, looking at the two terrified programmers.

  "New hires," Vik said. "Steve and... uh... Other Steve. We needed hands. The new version of LogicPro has to support the new hard drive controllers."

  I looked at the "Steves." They looked like standard UT undergrads—smart, but soft. They didn't have the hunger.

  "Take a break, Vik," I said. "Walk with me."

  We walked out to the loading dock. I handed him a small steel tiffin carrier I had brought from the house.

  "What's this?" Vik asked, opening the lid.

  The smell of jaggery, ghee, and rice wafted out. Sakkarai Pongal. Sweet rice.

  "Happy Sankranti," I said. "Or Pongal. Whatever your family calls it."

  Vik stared at the food. His face softened. For a second, the exhausted CTO vanished, replaced by a homesick kid.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  "Sankranti," he whispered. "My mom used to make Til-gud laddoos."

  He took a bite with his fingers, ignoring the lack of a spoon. He closed his eyes.

  "Man," he said. "That hits the spot. Your mom made this?"

  "Yeah," I said. "She knows you're not eating."

  Vik ate in silence for a moment, watching the trucks pull away.

  "I'm drowning, Rudra," he said quietly. "The code is getting too big. I can't keep it all in my head anymore. And these new guys... they don't get it. They treat it like homework. I need... I need killers."

  "I know," I said. "Scale breaks everything. It's the first rule of growth."

  I looked at the warehouse. We were shipping hardware. We were shipping software. But we were bottlenecked by talent.

  "Stop hiring from the job fair," I said. "Stop looking for grades."

  "Then where do I look?"

  "Look for the visas," I said.

  Vik looked at me, confused.

  "Go to the grad student lounge," I said. "Look for the guys who are terrified of getting sent back home. Look for the guys from IIT, from Tsinghua, from Tehran. The ones who are working three jobs to pay tuition. They don't want a job, Vik. They want a lifeline. They will outwork the 'Steves' ten to one because they have no safety net."

  Vik nodded slowly. "The Hungry."

  "Exactly," I said. "Build me a Foreign Legion. I'll handle the immigration lawyers. You just get me the brains."

  "You're exploiting them," Vik said, but there was no judgment in his voice, only recognition.

  "I'm giving them a shot," I corrected. "In ten years, they'll be millionaires. But right now, I need them to code like their lives depend on it. Because ours do."

  January 20, 1986, The Study, Mercer Hall

  The "Paper Tiger" was ready.

  On the desk sat a fifty-page dossier. It was typed on the IBM Selectric, giving it that authentic, slightly uneven keystroke. The paper was yellowed (Robert had baked it in the oven on low heat for ten minutes). It was dated "February 14, 1985."

  Title: The Inevitability of Currency Correction: A Macro-Thesis on the G5 Summit.

  It was a masterpiece of retroactive analysis. I had cited trade deficits, manufacturing outputs, and political rhetoric. I had "predicted" the exact pressure points that would lead to the Plaza Accord. It looked like the work of a brilliant, obsessive financial analyst.

  "It's perfect," Robert said, reading it. "It's too perfect. A sixteen-year-old wrote this?"

  "A sixteen-year-old prodigy who spends his summers reading Federal Reserve minutes," I said. "That's the narrative, Dad. I'm Rain Man with a Bloomberg terminal."

  The doorbell rang.

  Robert froze. "That's them. The SEC investigators. They called this morning."

  "Relax," I said, smoothing my blazer. "We have the truth. Or at least, the version of it they can understand."

  Two men in cheap suits walked into the study. They looked like accountants who wished they were FBI agents.

  "Mr. Mercer," the lead agent said, flashing a badge. "I'm Agent Miller. This is Agent Kowalski."

  "Gentlemen," Robert said, his voice steady. "Please, sit. Can I offer you coffee?"

  "We're fine," Miller said, sitting down and staring at me. "This is the... trader?"

  "This is my son, Rudra," Robert said. "The beneficiary of the trust."

  "You're a kid," Miller said flatly.

  "I'm a student of the market," I said, looking him in the eye.

  "Right," Miller scoffed. "Look, let's cut to the chase. You shorted the dollar with fifty-to-one leverage three days before the biggest currency intervention in history. You made... what? Two million?"

  "Three million, realized," I corrected. "Plus the carry."

  "Nobody gets that lucky," Miller said. "Who gave you the tip? Was it someone at the Treasury? A friend of your grandfather's?"

  I reached for the dossier. I slid it across the desk.

  "No one gave me a tip, Agent Miller," I said. "The market was screaming. You just weren't listening."

  Miller looked at the dossier. He opened it. He saw the dates. He saw the charts (hand-drawn in ink). He saw the paragraphs analyzing the Japanese export surplus.

  He read a page. Then another. His eyebrows went up.

  "This is..." Miller muttered. "This is dense."

  "It's a thesis," I said. "I've been tracking the volatility of the Yen since 1984. The divergence between the German Mark and the Dollar was unsustainable. The Plaza meeting was the only logical political outcome to prevent a trade war. I didn't know the date, but I knew the quarter. I took a position based on probability."

  Miller looked at Kowalski. Kowalski shrugged. They were looking for a smoking gun—a phone record, a wire transfer to a Cayman account. Instead, they got a PhD thesis on macroeconomics typed on a typewriter.

  "You wrote this?" Miller asked, skeptical. "Last year?"

  "Check the ink," I said. "Check the paper. I wrote it during Spring Break."

  Miller closed the folder. He looked at me with a mixture of suspicion and grudging respect. He couldn't prove it was fake. It was physically real. And the logic inside it was sound.

  "We're going to need to take this," Miller said. "And we're going to audit the rest of your trades."

  "Be my guest," I said. "You'll find I also bought land in Round Rock before the bond issue. I like to do my homework."

  Miller stood up. "Don't leave the state, kid."

  "I have a chemistry test on Friday," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

  They left.

  Robert collapsed into his chair. He poured a drink, his hands shaking.

  "We did it," he whispered. "They bought it."

  "They didn't buy it," I said. "But they can't disprove it. That's all that matters. Reasonable doubt."

  I looked at the empty spot on the desk where the dossier had been.

  "Now," I said. "We need to get the money out of the country."

  "What?" Robert choked on his drink.

  "Not illegally," I said. "Invested. The SEC will be watching domestic accounts. But if Bhairav Holdings invests in international technology... say, a joint venture in Asia... it becomes much harder to track."

  "Asia?"

  "I need chips, Dad," I said, walking to the globe. "And I can't build them here. Labor is too expensive. Regulations are too tight."

  I spun the globe to Taiwan.

  "I need to go to Taipei."

  January 28, 1986, Redmond, Washington

  The office smelled of stale pizza and unwashed genius.

  Bill Gates sat on the floor, rocking back and forth, staring at a whiteboard. The IPO was set for March. The roadshow was starting soon.

  "IBM is pushing back on the OS/2 licensing," Steve Ballmer shouted, pacing the room. "They want to own the code."

  "Let them have the code," Gates muttered, not looking up. "We own the standard. DOS is the water they swim in."

  "What about the clones?" Ballmer asked. "Compaq? The new guys?"

  "They'll pay the tax," Gates said, a ruthless smile flickering. "Every PC sold pays us. It's the Microsoft Tax."

  A secretary poked her head in. "Bill, there's a weird report from the sales team in Texas. A clone maker called Dell. They're bundling some utility software that's bypassing our file system."

  Gates stopped rocking. "Bypassing DOS?"

  "It's an optimization tool. LogicPro. It's taking over the memory management before DOS loads."

  Gates stood up. His eyes narrowed behind his glasses.

  "Nobody touches the memory," Gates said softly. "That's our lawn."

  "What do you want to do?"

  "Buy them," Gates said. "Or bury them. Find out who owns it."

  January 30, 1986, Mercer Hall

  I was packing my bag. A school bag, but inside was a passport and a letter of credit from the bank.

  Priya was at the stove. It was late.

  "You are going," she stated. It wasn't a question.

  "Just for a week," I said. "Spring Break is coming up. I told the school I'm doing a cultural exchange."

  "To Taiwan?" she asked, turning around. "We have no family in Taiwan."

  "I'm building a family," I said. "A silicon family."

  She wiped her hands on her apron. She walked over to me. She didn't look angry. She looked resigned.

  "You are eating the world, Rudra," she said softly. "Piece by piece. First the grandfather's land. Then the bank. Now you want the ocean."

  "I'm securing our future, Maa."

  "You are feeding a ghost," she said. "The hungry ghost inside you. It is never full."

  She reached up and adjusted my collar.

  "Be careful," she whispered. "The world is bigger than Texas. And the demons out there... they don't play by Robert's rules."

  "I know," I said. "I'm counting on it."

  I kissed her cheek. It was cold.

  I walked out to the waiting car. Vik was in the passenger seat. He had his passport. He looked terrified.

  "Ready to go international, CTO?" I asked.

  Vik gripped his backpack. "I don't speak Chinese, Rudra."

  "Money speaks Chinese," I said, putting the car in gear. "Money speaks everything."

  We drove into the night, leaving the crumbling oil empire behind, heading toward the rising sun of the semiconductor age.