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Synopsis

Succession meets Bad Blood in this sharp-toothed satire of Silicon Valley and the 1 percent - The black-sheep son of an industrial tycoon starts working for a tech pioneer who's running a biomedical startup selling nothing less than immortality, only to uncover the horrifying truth at the heart of her sublime promises.

"Exceptional, horrifically hilarious, and deeply original." --Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

Chuck Gross would like nothing more than to prune himself from his family tree. He's already clipped his name, turning Charles Grossheart, Jr.--son of a billionaire labor exploiter, weapons manufacturer, and climate change denier--into ordinary good-guy Chuck, the "self-made" proprietor of an up-and-coming punk label. But when Daddy threatens to cut him off, Chuck is forced to get a "real job"--and conveniently, an old college friend has just swept back into his life with the perfect opportunity.

Famed Harvard dropout and biotech darling Olivia Watts says she is on the verge of totally reinventing the field of medicine, but when Chuck signs on, he soon discovers that things at the vast Kenosis campus are not quite how they appear. Secret labs, vanished employees, and mutated test subjects seem to be as impossible as they are sinister. Is Olivia simply a scammer, or does her technology threaten to usher humanity toward a far bloodier fate? Moreover, does Chuck--who has never accomplished anything without the aid of Daddy's money--stand a chance of stopping her? Daniel Hornsby hilariously skewers the insatiable hungers of the ultrarich in a novel that no one will be able to resist sinking their teeth into.

Excerpt

1

I'm an American, so I always assumed I'd be famous. When it was clear I was no Thurston Moore or David Byrne, I figured I could at least be a crusty hybrid between Malcolm McLaren and David Geffen. And so, in an unlikely move for this black sheep in a family of twenty-four-karat fleeces, I became an entrepreneur and started my own small record label.

I ran Obnoxious Records with my girlfriend, whose album had come out as our third official release. Louise, and the rest of Obnoxious, had no clue about my devious parentage. When I moved to San Narciso, I lopped the heart off my infamous surname, synonymous as it is with money and evil, and went from Charles Grossheart to Chuck Gross. With the help of this punk pseudonym, I was able to keep things pretty separate, and figured my notorious bloodline would easily remain discrete from my true passion, my real life.

But it turned out I lacked my dad's capitalist knack and had to subsidize the label with the money his money made. I'll admit, I lied to Louise a little about our finances. She was under the impression that we had the support of an eccentric tech millionaire (not a sinister libertarian billionaire / chairman and CEO of a vast multinational private corporation), but that we also more or less lived in the black. In fact, we'd lived out our entire run plunged deeply into the red, kept afloat only by paternal subsidy.

Obnoxious was my baby, but it was a bastard my parents wouldn't recognize. For me to keep receiving his funds, my father annoyingly required some conventional employment, and my noisy vanity project didn't count. For about three years I managed to fake him out, but eventually he called my bluff. With a single phone call from his wealth manager, Renata, I was cut off.

You have to understand, I had the Buddha's boyhood, spared any hint of suffering (save for the psychic cuts and scrapes inflicted by a self-obsessed father and a Teutonic nanny, along with the mild realization of my scarcity of talent), so I had no immune system with which to fight the little particles of woe that would inevitably find their way inside me. I hung up with Renata, packed a bowl, and prepared myself for a dark fortnight of the soul. I bought one of those seasonal affective disorder lamps, and it was May.

I was determined to keep Obnoxious alive, but I was in desperate need of cash. I owed several audio engineers and one producer a lot of money, and a band was due an installment of their advance. Thanks to a handful of well-received releases, we were just about to rise from boutique status, slowly gaining a national reputation among people who care about these kinds of things. But now that Renata had sniffed out my employment status, all my plans would implode: I'd be penniless until I could find a job that met Dad's criteria. Cutting me off was a codependent ploy. For a year or so I'd been laying the groundwork to someday really and truly break away from my famously evil family, and I think he or Renata might've caught wind of my vague plan. This way he could snip the cords of the puny safety net I was fashioning for myself before it was strong enough to catch me.

Three days after Renata's devastating call, I was baking my face with antidepressant rays and stress-buying old 45s on eBay when Olivia called me out of the blue and asked if I'd be free to meet for lunch. It was the first I'd heard from her in years. We'd been close in college, and the two of us had planned to move from Boston to San Narciso together after graduation--she to get her PhD in biosomething, me to start my label in the city's flourishing punk and garage scene. She wound up moving here sooner than expected, taking a cue from Bill Gates's playbook and dropping out to birth her company, and it was understood that I'd follow her once I finished school. Instead, I backed out at the last minute and moved to Brooklyn. I came to San Narciso three years later, once the boom was really going and all my bridges in that borough were crispy, but I was too ashamed to reach out and spent four years avoiding her as my embarrassment racked up compound interest.

Why had I flaked? At the time, my excuse both to Olivia and myself was my then girlfriend, a bassist in a second-rate Flatbush dream pop band. But deep down I knew that relationship wasn't going anywhere. I think it was Olivia's purpose, her righteous mission, that ultimately kept me from making the move. Sure, I had my own aspirations, but these were daydreams next to Olivia's saintly visions. I'll set my automatic cynicism aside for a moment and say that I considered her a friend, one of the closest I've had. While I was accustomed to depressing my parents, I couldn't stand the idea of disappointing Olivia. When I moved West, I told myself I'd get back in touch at some point, but couldn't bring myself to compose an email or dial her number. Rather than let it grow into something knotted and tangled, I preferred to clip our friendship into a tidy, stunted bonsai.

Minutes after we booked it, I thought about weaseling out of our reunion. I didn't think I'd be able to sit through a report of her successes while my life dissolved. But even I could see the opportunity here: she had a company, and I needed a job.

So a few days later I found myself in the back of an Uber, riding off to one of the popular basement bar/restaurants that had popped up in recent months.

I had some sense of Olivia's achievements and growing fame, but no clue about the particulars. She'd founded a start-up, it was successful. That, and her place at the top of a Wired list of up-and-coming women in tech, were all I'd allowed to trickle into my consciousness. Every now and then one of those determined alumni emails would find its way into my inbox, and I'd glimpse Olivia's noble, fuzzy dome, but I couldn't bring myself to read it before deleting. A couple months back I caught her face staring at me from the cover of one of the big tech rags at the newsstand near Obnoxious. I smothered her with a copy of a National Geographic featuring a satellite photo of the Pacific's Texas-size mass of plastic waste on its cover--an image more comforting than the sight of a friend whose accomplishments had so greatly outstripped mine. Despite my scant knowledge, I did occasionally brag about her to my dad and my brother, wielding the same two or three facts to give them the sense our friendship lived in the present tense.

Now that we were reuniting, I needed to give the impression that I'd kept tabs on her triumphs, and even with my fluent bullshit, I knew I'd have to do some homework. I put this off until I was on the way to lunch. While my Uber driver delivered a long, unfunny monologue about his struggle to break into the San Narciso comedy scene, I shoved all the Oliviana I could find into my brain, skimming the major articles and profiles, scrubbing my way through a TED Talk and videos of women-in-tech panels. They all hit the same two or three biographical notes in Olivia Watts's epic life: her struggle with cancer as a teen, her venerable dropout status, and her relationship with mentor / early investor / popular capitalist pig Ralph Langenburger. There were a lot of near-identical photos of her holding something resembling a black hummingbird egg up to her eye. From what I gathered, her company, Kenosis, had something to do with a kind of implant that could tell you when you were sick. One profile expanded on the usual, obvious cliché used to describe my old friend, calling her "Steve Jobs, but with a heart," and more than a few sites had her listed among America's most promising young technocrats. By the time I arrived, I wasn't sure I knew much more about what her company actually did, but walking down the stairs to the bar, I knew I'd be able to at least cite the publications that had featured her and sidestep any obvious traps she might set for me, should she want to litigate my shittiness as a friend.

The bar was a perfect re-creation of some bachelor uncle's basement in the 1970s, milking the latest SN trends in decor. As the last ten years went by, the eighties and nineties had relented somewhat in their chokehold on nostalgia, making room for the corduroy, leather, punk seventies. I crossed the shag carpet to the red-vinyl booth where Olivia sat waiting.

"Charles! Holy shit!" She got up and gave me a bony hug. She looked a lot like she had in college, or more like an actor playing her younger self, with a budget for makeup and wardrobe. She wore what I came to learn was her signature as Kenosis CEO: an old, oversize denim jacket, Doc Martens, and a concert tee (Was it the Slits? Did I get her that one?), all giving her the look of a Berlin DJ on vacation in Tennessee. And of course there was her famous head, shorn in solidarity with her fellow cancer survivors. Both in college and, as my hasty research revealed, now, Olivia always cantilevered her geeky ambition with occasional outdated references both visual and verbal to hip-hop and punk. This scuzzy layer to her aesthetic had been dialed up some since we parted, and I would have attributed this to my influence, had we not lost touch for so long.

We exchanged the usual pleasantries. I lightly bragged on my label, which she already seemed to know a lot about, and she told me about her work. I did a decent job, I think, conveying the sense that I'd kept up on Olivia trivia and stored a box of Kenosis press clippings under my bed.

"I feel like an asshole, but I'm still full from breakfast," she said when the waitress came by. "I did this panel thing and pigged out on their spread. Please, eat something, but I think I'm going to make it a liquid lunch, if that's okay?"

As we caught up, I wolfed down a Cuban sandwich and made my way through the major drink taxa: a gin cocktail, piss beer, white wine, whiskey, lapping Olivia once or twice. All the meaningful eye contact made me thirsty, and I needed to wash down my pride if I was going to ask her for a job. She kept ordering bourbons on the rocks she hardly sipped from, asking for another when the melted ice turned the glass pale. She'd never been much of a drinker, and my guess is she picked up this move to show she could hold her own in a land of bros.

"It must be hard, being born into a family like yours," she said when our conversation began to lose steam. "No one really knows what that's like, on that level, except for the kids of presidents or kings. You should be very proud of yourself, for making something all on your own."

"Thanks, Olivia. That means a lot." Despite the emotional armor I'd spent years forging in cynical fire, I was touched by this nod.

"Look, I really did want to chop it up with you, but there's something else I want to discuss." I braced myself for admonishment, but it never came. "Things at the company are going really, really well. We're about to make a big announcement that will mark an inflection point in our life cycle--I'll tell you more about that later. Money is pouring in, and R and D is solving problems that don't even exist yet. I'm not saying we don't have the best team, we absolutely do, but as I face some new challenges, I've been rethinking my staffing strategy. We've had a couple people, a creative consultant and our adviser on ethics, who just couldn't cut it. They were too soft for this industry, I hate to say, and had to go. But the two of them made some good points on the way out. To be perfectly honest, I don't want it to start some exodus or have it look like rats fleeing the ship. More than any of this, I want to get back to the ethos I had when I dreamed this whole thing up." She put her hand on mine. Having been touched infrequently as a child, I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. "I was never more creative than during the halcyon days of our friendship. You were the perfect sounding board, pretty much biologically incapable of sugarcoating. I'm sure that's still true. And with all the cool fucking shit you're doing at Obnoxious, you've proven my hunch about you."

She was blowing enough smoke up my ass to give me rectal cancer--not to make light of what she'd been through. You know what I'm getting at.

"I want to offer you a job, as creative consultant. I need someone to keep me level. Don't worry, the workload won't be too daunting. You'll still be able to run your label, I promise. I mostly just want you there to help me replicate the vibe we had when I got the idea years ago. It would technically be creative consultant and special adviser on ethics." She tore off pieces of her napkin and set them in a pile by the ketchup. Were these swings between geeky tics and self-possession intentional? Part of the pressure of running a company? Was she nervous to see me? "I know I'm asking a lot. I already owe you so much. I wouldn't be here without you. I still believe that."

She was referring to some advice I'd given her in college. More on that later.

"You give me too much credit there. You were going to do what you were going to do. No one was ever able to change your mind." I was overjoyed I didn't have to humble myself before her.

"See, there, this pushback. That's exactly what I'm talking about. I need that. I know you won't be just another yes-man."

I wouldn't. I never said yes, if I could help it. Unless it was to free mind-altering substances, or sex, though even in those areas I could still be picky. And of course I wouldn't say no to her now.

"I feel like I'm a little out of my depth here, but if you think I can do it, I'll do it. Count me in."

Copyright © 2023 by Daniel Hornsby

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