Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5)
Now we’re just haggling over the price.
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
This month, I’m serializing the first chapter of my next novel, Picks and Shovels, a standalone Martin Hench novel that drops on Feb 17:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
The book is up for presale on a Kickstarter that features the whole series as print books (with the option of personalized inscriptions), DRM-free ebooks, and a DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
It’s a story of how the first seeds of enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley, just as the first PCs were being born.
Here’s part one:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing
Part two:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#computing-freedom
Part three:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-rich/#a-lighter-shade-of-mauve
Part four:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#discovering-e-discovery
And now, onto part five!
“You gentlemen must have customers who do accounting,” I said. “They know your systems. They know accounts. Why not use someone you already have a relationship with? Someone from the family, as you put it?” I loved solving puzzles; it was what made me both a programmer and an accountant. I had flipped into puzzle-solving mode, and was looking for loose ends where I could begin the untangling process.
The three men looked at each other, then away. This wasn’t a question they wanted to answer.
“When it comes to our customers,” the rabbi said, “we want them to feel . . . safe. We don’t want them to think that the business is being distracted by foolish disputes.”
“We don’t want them to be tempted to take sides,” Father Marek said, and I thought he was being a lot more honest than the rabbi. I could imagine that plenty of people would choose three young, pious women over these three old, feuding, rich clerics.
I could tell that the bishop and the rabbi both resented Father Marek’s answer and were barely keeping themselves from telling him so because they both knew it would make the situation even worse. That was okay. I had the lay of the land.
“I think I understand.” They shifted, looked at each other, at me. They were worried. They thought I might say no. They didn’t have a plan B. “It certainly presents a fascinating technical challenge. My only concern is that it sounds very time-consuming and I have a lot of work right now, honestly. Some days, I feel it’s more than I can handle.” I enjoyed watching that land, seeing their incipient panic. These three weren’t so tough. After all, they’d been made fools of by three cloistered, sheltered young women around my age.
“The job is well-compensated,” Bishop Clarke said. He smiled. All those teeth. “After all, the alternative is a costly, drawn-out lawsuit, and even if we win, all it will accomplish is a shutdown of CF. If you can help us bring them into the Fidelity Computing family, we’ll not only save the lawyer bills, we’ll all make more money. We’re prepared to pay to make that happen.”
“I normally bill my freelance work at twenty-five dollars an hour.” It was a breathtaking sum and I’d had to practice saying it into a mirror so I wouldn’t look ashamed when I named it. I watched them freeze up and do some mental math, contemplating how long it would take to review the documents on ten boxes’ worth of floppy disks.
Bishop Clarke’s smile strained wider, looking like it might be hurting his face. “That’s a very reasonable rate, but we had something else in mind — we thought we might align all of our incentives by offering you a share of the bounty of a successful outcome.”
I regretted coming. What a waste of time. I was only twenty-one years old, but I knew better than to sign up for a commission. Who did they think I was, one of the rubes they got to sell printer paper for them in return for a dollar on every box sold? I almost walked out. I didn’t, though. I had to hear this.
“Could you explain how that would work?”
“You get twenty-five percent,” Father Marek said, staring hard at me. “A quarter of their projected annual revenue, based on the figures you pull out of those files.” He nodded minutely at the tower of floppy disks, not taking his eyes off mine. “Our sales are already down a thousand dollars a month. You figure out how much they’re making every month, figure out how much they’re growing every month, multiply it by twelve, and then divide it by four, and send us an invoice.”
“No matter how much it comes to?”
“No matter how much it comes to,” he said. “Like you said, it’s a lot of work.”
I mulled this over. There was a catch. What was it? I got a hunch.
“No matter what the outcome?” I asked.
They looked at each other. “No,” Rabbi Finkel said. “No, the deal is for a portion of a satisfactory outcome. If your work makes us money, then you make money.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
The rabbi smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find the information we’re looking for,” he said. “We know they’ve broken the law and we know the evidence will be in all those files.”
“But if I can’t find it, or if it’s not enough to convince them to settle and sell?”
“You get nothing,” Father Marek snapped. “Nothing. We win, you win. We lose, you lose.”
I decided I liked him the best of the three. He wasn’t trying to hide who he was or what the situation was. He made it clear he didn’t think much of me, but at least he thought enough of me to give it to me straight. I got the impression that Bishop Clarke would knife me in the heart without losing that amazing smile, and that Rabbi Finkel would murmur reassurances as he gave it a twist. Not Father Marek. He’d give me an honest snarl as he did it.
I had been ready to do it a minute before. Now I was ready to walk. My short time in the Bay Area had made it clear that I wasn’t going to get stock options in the next Apple Inc. just because I kept their books, nor was I going to be able to command giant amounts of money just for showing up and creating the foundations of some hot company’s big product, like Art.
But if there’s one thing I’d learned from accounting, it was that companies didn’t pay you if they didn’t have to.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen — Reverend Sirs — but I think this won’t work out. There’s just too many ways this could go wrong. I could do my job perfectly, put hundreds of hours of work into it, and you could fail to accomplish your merger due to factors beyond my control.”
Their faces turned to stone. They glared at me. The rabbi opened his mouth to say something, but Father Marek silenced him with a pointed throat-clearing. Bishop Clarke turned on his smile. Father Marek gathered up his notepad and put his pen in his breast pocket and slowly climbed to his feet. He was taller — far taller than I’d guessed. He had legs like a cricket’s, they just kept unfolding. I had to force myself not to flinch as he shifted toward me.
“Marty,” the bishop said, “I completely understand, really I do. But there’s no need to give up hope. We’re reasonable people. Perhaps you would like to make a counteroffer?”
I nearly left. But for a moment there, I’d felt close to the dream of Silicon Valley — the riches, the fame, the power to change so many lives. “What about . . .” The rabbi and the bishop leaned forward. Father Marek perched on his long legs and folded his arms. “What about my hourly rate, or twenty-five percent of whatever I make for you, whichever is greatest?”
“What about whatever is least?” the bishop fired back. His smile never wavered.
Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#mister-25-percent
