Axon, Inc. [SAMPLE]

4: I Won't Let You

The early Seattle summer dawn woke up Walden where he lay on the couch, sweaty, smelly, aching, and pretty disgusted with himself. He really was getting too old to be indulging in this kind of drunken self-pity. He staggered to the bathroom and got to work on his body, hydrating and washing and scrubbing until he was almost a respectable human being again. Other than a throbbing headache. Maybe all he needed was coffee.

The cab dropped him at the Starbucks at Pine street just after ten. Logan wasn't there yet, and he hadn't called. He'd better show up, or Walden would hunt him down. He needed to know more about this technology.

This Starbucks was one of the new automated ones. He ordered a mocha and watched idly as the machine poured and mixed the ingredients, topping it with a Mandelbrot-shaped foam pattern.

And he needed to know more about Paula. He still desperately needed to talk to her. Was Logan right? Did Walden love her? No, surely not. Not anymore. Yes, of course, in a way, while they were going out, but... that had ended. Because of Walden's own issues. And they'd both moved on.

At least, she had moved on. Definitely moved on. She and Max had been going out, what, two, three years now? Probably getting serious.

But had he moved on?

He angrily forced himself back to the present. Nothing to be done about that now. He'd messed up his family, messed up with Paula, and messed up with work, and now...

Now he was chasing another hare-brained scheme of Logan's. In the bright morning sunlight, the device didn't seem so amazing. People could already type, they could already do speech-to-text. What was the business model? What was the market? The handicapped? That would be fine, but it would be easiest to just sell the patent to an accessibility company, not do another startup. It didn't sound like Logan's kind of project anyway - he tended to prefer riskier ventures, with more technical challenges and more potential for... Chaos. Social upheaval.

So what was his angle?

Walden sat and sipped his mocha, mulling it over in his pounding head, and not getting anywhere.

Logan was ten minutes late. He dashed in, looking disheveled and harried, and sat down next to Walden without ordering anything.

"Sorry," he said. "I was up late working on the prototype. I want to show it to some investors in a few weeks, and it needs some more work. It tends to freeze up after twenty minutes of continuous --"

"I'm afraid I don't really care," said Walden. Logan looked stricken, and Walden shook his head. "I'm sorry, I've got a terrible headache. Look. I admit, it's an impressive party trick. But what's the business model? How are you going to make money?"

Logan looked confused. "How will this not make money?" he asked. "You can type with your brain!"

"Sure," said Walden. "Great. But I can already type with my fingers. Or my voice, if I have to. So what?"

"But that's just the beginning," said Logan. "You can control the whole device with your mind. Anything you can do with your fingers or a voice command, you can do by just thinking about it. Send emails from the shower, or play Scrabble, or text someone, or play music, or..."

"Exactly, but no one needs to do all that from the shower, you see? For most people, doing stuff with their hands and voice is fine. What I'm saying is that it needs to go beyond what you can do already. Something new. You see? Otherwise there's no value added."

"All right," said Logan. "Like what?"

"Like," said Walden, and paused. Something in his mind clicked.