Chương 17: The Two Sites (04/02/1980)

DATE: Wednesday, April 02, 1980 LOCATION: Vista, California | The Law Offices of John E. Patterson LOCAL TIME: 03: 42 PM PST The conference room was quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioner. John Patterson sat at the head of the long table, legal pad ready. Uncle Bob Yauney leaned against the wall, arms crossed. I sat on a booster seat at the far end, crayon in hand. Bob spoke first.

"You really want us to do both?" I nodded and drew a simple map of the coast on the legal pad. Two clear circles.

"Torrey Pines Mesa," I said quietly, tapping the first one.

"Buy the scrubland next to the Salk Institute. Clean rooms. High security. No windows. That's where we build the mind. Merkle and Chaum on cryptography. Wozniak on hardware when he crashes his plane next year. Rick Briggs on the program language. Panini Sanskrit." Patterson's pen stopped. He stared. I moved the crayon down the coast.

"The Sand Castle. 1900 Spindrift Drive. Buy it as a corporate retreat. Underneath it, we dig deep. Reinforced with Roman concrete and basalt fiber. Soundproof. Twenty thousand square feet. The dojo. The archive. A grotto. The lower foundation anchored straight into the bedrock." Bob exhaled slowly.

"And while we're building all that… we still ship the patch to IBM?"

"Yes. Microsoft becomes the loud face. Gates gets the glory and the headaches. We stay in the shadows and own the royalties." Patterson leaned back, processing, the tip of his pen tapping the table.

"You're talking about building two massive, classified facilities while we're still pretending to be a small holding company. Do you have any idea the zoning nightmares involved with the Coastal Commission? Drilling twenty thousand square feet into the Spindrift cliffside is going to cost millions in excavation alone before we even pour a foundation. I don't understand how we mask that kind of capital expenditure—" Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

I snapped my gaze to Patterson, cutting him off.

"It doesn't matter if you understand. Use Coastal Equities to broker the real estate contracts. And then hire the team for Project Sutra to work out of the Torrey Mesa site." I yawned heavily and started rubbing my eyes, bitterly annoyed at how quickly my young body was forcing me to shut down. The adrenaline of the pitch faded, replaced by a sudden, crushing lethargy. I slumped forward, resting my cheek against the cool mahogany of the conference table. The crayon rolled out of my small, slack fingers.

Within seconds, the rhythmic breathing of a deep sleep took over. The room fell into a heavy silence, save for the soft sound of my breathing. Patterson set his pen down slowly. He looked at the sleeping four-year-old in the booster seat, then up at Bob.

"Bob," Patterson said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.

"I've structured blind trusts for politicians and offshore shelters for very dangerous people. But this? We are talking about committing tens of millions of dollars to excavate a cliffside and buy up Torrey Pines real estate... on the exact orders of a toddler who just fell asleep in the middle of a sentence." Bob didn't smile. He pushed himself off the wall, reached into his suit jacket, and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He tossed it onto the table in front of the lawyer. Patterson frowned, picking it up.

"What is this?"

"A biopsy report," Bob said softly.

"From Dr. Stein at Scripps Clinic. For my son, Jason." Patterson scanned the medical jargon, not fully understanding it.

"Bob, I'm sorry, but what does this have to do with—""A week ago, Chad told me to take him in," Bob interrupted, his voice thick with a raw, anchored emotion.

"Said Jason was going to get sick, and the doctors would dismiss it as colic. He told me to demand an ileitis panel." Bob swallowed hard, staring at the sleeping boy.

"It's Crohn's disease, John. The inflammation was just starting to crest in his terminal ileum." Patterson stopped looking at the paper.

"Stein told me," Bob continued, his voice trembling slightly before he locked it down, "that if we had waited for the severe symptoms to present, it would have scarred the bowel lining permanently. Jason would have been looking at surgical resections for the rest of his life. But because we caught it at the absolute baseline... he's on a diet protocol and anti-inflammatories. There's going to be zero long-term damage. He gets to live a normal life."

Bob placed his hands flat on the table, leaning in toward Patterson. The hesitation was completely gone from his eyes, replaced by the terrifying conviction of a father who had just been handed a miracle.

"I don't know what he is, John," Bob whispered.

"I don't know how he knows about IBM, or Roman concrete, or my son's intestines. But whatever he is... we are going to build exactly what he asked for." Patterson looked from the medical report, to the crayon-drawn map of the coast, and finally to the boy sleeping peacefully on the mahogany table. He picked up his pen.

"I'll start drafting the LLCs for Torrey Pines," Patterson said quietly.