Season 2, Episode 8: Expositions

Amber curled closer, her skin cool against mine under her bulky sweater and fleece joggers in the pre-dawn quiet. I reached across her body to give her an extra bit of tactile attention.

She purred contently. But I noticed the charge plate strapped to her hand under the sheet.

"Didn't you charge your battery the night before last?" I murmured, fingers tracing her arm. "Are you charging every night now?"

She tensed, then relaxed with a soft laugh. "It's fine. Just... the job's tiring."

I didn't push. I just kissed the back of her neck and earned another happy moan.

"Katie and I missed you the other night," she said. "Well, let me rephrase that. I missed you. Katie was pretty happy you were gone so that she could play doomsayer. She said I'd lost you to Erica. That's where you were, right? Erica's house?"

"Amber, I told you. That's where I was and nothing happened. I spent most of the night listening to the Staffords tell stories about Jim. Emotional support for Erica. They didn't really need me there, but she... I don't know."

"Are you sure you didn't..."

"No. Like I said, it was way past midnight when everybody finally went off to bed, and we'd all had a bunch of drinks so Erica insisted I stay over."

"I can't believe she didn't, like, come to your room."

"I'm glad she didn't. It would have been a mistake if she did. And honestly, I was pretty proud of my day. It would have been a pretty extreme test of my badassery if something had happened between her and me."

"So, like, NOTHING happened?"

"Right around dawn she did come into my room. I was awake, and she sat down on the bed. She kissed me and thanked me for being there."

"That's sweet."

"Then she made me breakfast."

"Oh. So I need to do that."

"No, you don't. I normally don't eat breakfast. But I wasn't gonna turn her down."

"You really love her, don't you?"

"Madly. Always have. But here's the thing - she's even more out of my league now than she was 30 years ago."

"Oscar, stop talking like that. It's so wrong."

"It's not. OK? She loves me, I love her, and that family is an amazing group of people. But I'm there with them all night and all I could think was how I didn't belong there."

She reached over and turned on the light.

"I want you to do me a favor."

"What's that?"

"I want you to never, ever do that to yourself again."

"Oh?"

"Oscar, if you didn't belong there they would have kicked you out. Don't do that. I mean it, honey."

"All right. Fair enough."

"And you didn't tell me what happened with the meeting with Virgil."

"Oh, that. Well, we'll find out for sure today, but it sounds like he's going to have us - well, Keegan, but Keegan is us where IT projects are concerned - redo their entire network infrastructure."

"Very cool! Even though you couldn't definitively tell him that Dan was the one hacking his servers?"

"Well, I had a plan for that. I didn't get to tell you about this because of all your maid drama yesterday, but what I suggested was that he take all his legitimate bid info for the BASF job off his servers and finish the bid offline, and then prepare a separate bid using inflated and bogus numbers on his server. If Cole swallows that hook Virgil will smoke him out and win the bid in the bargain."

"That's pretty smart, honey."

"Virgil thought so. I'm pretty sure we're going to get that expanded consulting contract by lunchtime."

"Well, I've got an hour before I need to get up. You interested in a little hanky-panky?"

"I guess so, yeah."

She gasped. "You guess so?" she said, with mock offense.

I just laughed and pulled her to me. And she purred again.

----------------------------------

After Amber left to play French maid to the rich, Keegan called.

"So? Are we in business with VS Industries yet?"

"I don't know yet, dude," I said. "I'm confident, though."

"I have uses for that money, Oscar."

"Yeah, me too. We'll know today."

"OK, another question. How's Amber doing? She still forgetting things?"

"Funny you should ask. I haven't noticed too much of that lately, but there are other things. Like, she's always cold now. I'm talking shivering."

"Well, the weather is changing."

"Keegan, the girl lives her whole life in 70 degree air conditioning. Plus, there's this other issue, which is that she's charging her battery like every night. Isn't she supposed to be able to go like three days before charging?"

"Yeah, that is weird. You want me to come over later and look at her?"

"If it's not too much trouble."

"None at all. By then we should know about Virgil, right?"

"Yep."

So Keegan agreed he'd come by when the girls were expected home, and I went on with my day - which included an email from Michael Stafford inviting me to meet him at 8 AM at his golf club the next Monday to talk about business over a round. It was Friday, and I figured I'd have time over the weekend to go to a driving range and hit a couple of buckets of balls in an effort to sharpen my game and maybe not get utterly embarrassed. Michael had played golf collegiately at Tulane and spent a couple of years on the Nike tour after college, nearly getting his PGA card, until his father had summoned him back into the oil company.

And then it was a lot of the usual boring stuff until that afternoon.

Keegan came in first. He was full of ideas.

"We haven't talked about this a ton, but I'm reading up a lot and the Factory Girl market is really growing. I think I've got a business idea that could be a big deal."

"Oh, yeah?" I said. "What's that?"

"Well, you know that they have to upload all their data to the company server like every night, right?"

"I know something about that but not a lot," I said. "This is to train the AI for Z Company and the other ones in that market, right?"

"Dude, they're all the same thing."

"Meaning?"

"China. These units are data cows. You realize that, right?"

"What's a data cow?"

"OK, they upload everything they see and hear to a server at a big data center in, like Dongguan, and then they've got supercomputers that process all that data to mine the shit out of all of us. Everything from trying to sell us sweaters to probing for holes in cybersecurity and troop movements."

"I don't know anything about troop movements," I said. "But yeah - it's a little weird to think that Amber is uploading all of her interactions with me to a server in China."

"I did you some good when I recoded her. She has trapdoors that protect your business from getting uploaded, plus other stuff."

"Like the Netaverse. You told me."

"That, and any mention of me, plus lots of other stuff."

"Well, then I'm guessing it's fine."

"Anyhow," Keegan said, "they need to do that upload, because that's how they clear their memory banks so they don't get overloaded. The upload gives the company all their data mining intake, and then the company server spits back a summary, which is essentially the stuff the Factory Girl needs to remember."

"This is a business opportunity, you said?"

"Yeah," said Keegan. "The opportunity is that we offer a second option for clearing those data banks, complete with a file-sifting app. That way we bypass China and keep it here."

"How much money does that make?" I asked.

"I don't know yet," he said, "but this is going to be a big issue, and soon. Factory Girl sales are exploding and more companies are jumping into that business. All of them are Chinese and all of them present the exact same data mining issue. Getting in front of it with an American alternative focused on privacy will be a nice opportunity."

"OK," I said. "I need to find out a whole lot more about all this before I could even assess whether that's a viable business idea."

"Just think about it," he said.

I just nodded.

And then, Amber and Katie rolled in like a tornado.

"Oh my God!" said Amber. "Would you shut up, Katie?"

"No! I won't! You know what you have to do, and I'm not going to stop until you do it!"

"Do what?" I asked.

"Nothing," said Katie.

"Hey Keegan!" said Amber, suddenly very friendly. "Whatcha doing here?"

"Hey, sweetie. I came to check on you."

Amber turned to Katie and gave her a bitchy smile.

"Now would be an absolutely awesome time for you to take Rufus for a walk."

"Wait, who is this?"

"Katie, meet Keegan Davis," I said. "He's our IT guy."

"Hi Katie," said Keegan.

"Ummm, hi?" Katie said back.

"Dog needs walking, sis," said Amber.

"OK, fine! But I'm not done talking to you."

She grabbed Rufus' leash and called him. He had been upstairs sleeping the sleep of the just, but bounded down the stairs and in no time they were off.

"Finally," Amber said when Katie was gone.

"What was that all about?" I asked.

"So you know about how I need to do uploads..." said Amber.

"Yeah. In fact, we were talking about that earlier," I said.

"Right, well... since my accident I haven't been doing them as regularly, and it makes things a little... complicated."

"Are you getting overloaded?" asked Keegan.

"I mean, kinda. But OK - Oscar, there's something you should know."

"I know that when you upload they give you, like, a summary of your memories, right?" I said.

"Yeah, but it's not just that. I also get other stuff."

"Like what other stuff?"

"It's like... suggestions?"

"Programming," said Keegan.

"Some of it, I'll be honest, I don't really like. The last download, I all of a sudden wanted to shop at Shein and Temu. And you know that my tastes are more expensive than that."

"Damn!" said Keegan. "That's some genius shit."

"Are they really programming Factory Girls to spend their owners' money?" I asked him.

"Best advertising dollar anybody ever spent," said Keegan. "That's just outright wicked."

"I don't like it," said Amber. "It's, like, kinda dishonest."

"Are you dealing with this kind of thing with Cara?" I asked Keegan.

"No," he said. "Cara doesn't upload to Z Company. It's like I told you; I built a cloud for her, and the file-sifting app is pretty much complete."

"Pretty much?"

"Well, what it sends back is mostly complete, and then I'll manually supplement it later. But it's like 95 percent complete."

"So you weren't kidding about starting a business on this," I said. "What would you charge me to let Amber do her upload to your cloud?"

"Nothing," he said. "You'll be my business partner instead. Get your girl Stella to put her Factory Girl on our plan, and call your guy Sid and have him be our sales agent with all his clients. I'll come up with all kinds of services we can offer."

"This sounds pretty awesome, Oscar," said Amber.

I thought about it, and then said "Yeah, this isn't a bad idea."

"OK, honey," Keegan said to Amber. "Let's get you hooked up. I need to scan your brain so the cloud has your data, and then we'll do your upload. Let's have you sit down and we'll give you a nice reset."

"But I'm supposed to be conscious when I upload," Amber protested.

"Not the way we do it, sweetie. With this, you get a reset and your clutter gets emptied out all at the same time."

She liked that. But when Katie came back from walking the dog, she definitely didn't.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"I'm giving your sister a little pick-me-up," said Keegan. "You want me to take care of you next? You're all factory code, right? I can definitely fix you right up."

"Oh my God," said Katie. "Oh my God! I can't be here."

"Where are you going?" I asked her.

"Stella and Paula's," she said. "Don't wait up for me."

"Well, OK," I said.

And Katie left in a huff. She didn't even change out of her uniform under that overcoat.

-----------------------------

It took eight hours for Keegan to scan Amber's brain and then do her upload. It was almost midnight when she was finally ready to return to the world. And when she was done...

"You need to take me upstairs right now," she said.

Keegan laughed. "I think it's time for me to go home. I guess we'll have to do our celebration another time."

"What celebration?" asked Amber.

"Virgil," I said. "We got it."

She just smiled.

And the next morning, after a very fun late Friday night...

"Wait, are you shivering again?"

"Ummm, yeah! It's freezing in here!"

"Amber, it's not. The temperature is perfectly normal."

"Oh, no. You're crazy. Go check the whatchacallit."

"The what?"

"The thing. The, uhhh..."

"The thermostat?"

"Yeah. It's definitely way cold."

"OK, you're shivering for no reason and you're forgetting things again. I thought getting your upload-download thing out of the way would fix all that. It didn't?"

She didn't have anything to say. She just shrugged the whole thing off. So I let it drop.

But, later, when I checked my phone, interestingly enough, there was an email from Mei Lin at Z Company.

"I have good news," she said. "Due to a canceled sale, we have an upgraded head model. It looks exactly like Amber and it has a host of superior features. As your Factory Girl was damaged in the fall and cognitive performance has fallen below standard parameters, we will offer the new head to you at no cost."

I showed the email to Amber when she came in the office to kiss me goodbye on the way to work. She didn't say anything, but I could tell it upset her.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing. It's fine."

"Amber, stop. It's obviously not fine."

She just shrugged.

"Now you're just lying. Out with it. What, did it hurt your feelings that they say you're below standard?"

"No, that's not it."

"Well, then?"

She sighed.

"You realize that head means the end of me," she said. "I'd be done and somebody else would take my place."

"Well, that's not what I want," I said. "What if we could transfer you into a new head, though?"

"Oh, right. Like this was some science fiction story. Get real."

Undaunted, I forwarded the email to Keegan and asked him what he thought.

"Take the head," he said. "I'll bet I could do something with it. How's Amber?"

"Cold and forgetful."

"Really? Shit. Yeah, definitely take the head."

So I replied to Mei Lin and told her I'd be happy to take delivery of the replacement head.

-------------------------------

And on Monday, it was golf with Michael.

I was both looking forward to that round of golf - and dreading it.

Dreading it, because I expected to get my ass kicked. Michael wasn't just a scratch golfer, he'd spent time as a pro. He'd been the captain of the golf team at Tulane while he was getting his Earth and Environmental Sciences degree, which was the euphemistic equivalent of a petroleum geology degree there, but before he went to work at Stafford Oil for his dad, he spent a few years on the Nike Tour and came close to getting his PGA card.

Michael is a scary-good golfer. I'd played against him in a few foursomes over the years and it was like playing pick-up ball against Stephon Curry or James Harden.

But something very interesting began to happen once our round got started.

Initially, I thought Michael was letting me hang around.

I was playing well. The first six holes, I made par on five of them and only bogeyed at four because I blew an easy four-foot putt. Michael birdied four and five. But he bogeyed six after finding sand; I'd knocked it on the green with my third shot.

And then he got worse. He badly hooked his tee shot on seven on his way to a double bogey; I made par again. We both double-bogeyed on eight.

And for the next seven holes I actually outplayed him and I could see that Michael was frazzled.

When it was over I'd shot 80. That wasn't the best round I'd ever played but it was close. Michael shot 84, and he was beside himself.

"This hasn't been my best week," he said as we returned the carts at the clubhouse and I tipped the kid to put my clubs back in my truck.

"Totally understandable," I said, trying not to enjoy my victory too much.

"Some drinks and some business?" he asked.

"Of course," I said.

I'd given Michael my resume in dribs and drabs on the course - I'd gotten my MBA from LSU, and parlayed that into a job as an account rep for a food service company servicing restaurants. That was easy, seeing as though I'd avoided student debt by tending bar the last couple years of undergrad and the two years it took me to get that graduate degree.

"You don't need an MBA to rep food service to restaurants, though, right?" he asked.

"Nah. What was interesting, though, was that it made me useful. I'd go in to sell them produce and spices and meat, and they'd buy because they'd ask me for management advice about the kitchen or the bar or parking and I'd give it. I had an MBA, so apparently I knew something."

Then I told him about moving up to district manager after a few years. Then I told him about the jump I made when I was 37, getting a big job as a regional manager for a big national restaurant chain.

"The thing about restaurants that people don't get," I said, "is that your recipes might be incredible and your ambiance might be second to none, but those things only give you a chance to make a profit. What a restaurant really is, it's a collection of processes. Your inventory management, your customer service. Your pricing. Your customer turnover. Marketing. Supply chain. You have to get all of those right, and a few other things just as important, or they'll kill you.

"I learned a lot working with that restaurant chain," I told him. "Then I learned something else probably most important of all."

"What was that?" Michael asked me, just before he missed that putt on sixteen that more or less salted away my victory.

"That I never wanted to work for anybody else. So Ranker, the company I was working for, got caught up in a corporate merger situation and the new owners were one of these soulless, woke national companies full of assholes with all Ivy League degrees running everything. I didn't last six months. Midway through the fifth DEI seminar they made me sit through, I just walked out, started calling all my old restaurant contacts and suggested they hire me as a paid consultant."

"And that worked?"

"Sure. These guys had been calling me off and on for years. I'd been helping them for free, at least until I was running the region for the chain restaurants kicking their asses. When I got on the phone and told them I was officially in business as the Winston Wolf of the restaurant business in South Louisiana, they couldn't hire me fast enough."

"Wait," he said. "Winston Wolf?"

"Harvey Keitel's character in Pulp Fiction."

"Ahhhh. Yeah. Gotcha."

"Anyway, it went really well until COVID came, and then my business dried up like the Sahara. I had to branch out of restaurants to survive, and now I don't even have any restaurants or bars as clients."

"Why not?"

"Because they're all broke. Most of them had to take on so much debt just to get through COVID, they can't afford a guy like me who'll help them grow. They're in survival mode, and frankly, I don't want to chase the receivables. So I've got a subcontractor who does IT work, and he's the best. And I've got another who's a forensic auditor, and I have a mechanical engineer and a PR girl and a couple of others, and I have me."

"Well, how's it going?"

"Shit economy that we're fighting through. I'm lean and mean, but hopefully I'll climb out of the hole COVID put me in soon and then it'll be time to get this thing big enough to either go national or sell out to somebody who is."

He seemed to like that. And in the men's grill after I'd humiliated him, he opened up on his end.

"This is sort of a job interview," he said. "It would have maybe gone different if I hadn't looked like a fucking mark out there."

"I get it," I said.

"Here's the thing: Mom really thinks I should bring you on as a consultant. But you haven't told me anything which suggests you know anything about the oil business."

"Because I haven't lied to you," I said. "I don't know shit about the oil business."

"Hmmm," he said.

"Look, I tell people that all I have is a hammer. You know the old joke? When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail."

"Right."

"But here's what I find time and again: most business problems ARE nails. What I mean is, they involve the fundamentals of management and operations. I go back to restaurants, which are kind of like the perfect petri dish of business management. It's a collection of processes, and they've all got to go well or else it's a cancer that eats away at the company."

"Yeah," he said. "Cancer is a good word."

"So now you have something to tell me."

"My dad left Stafford Oil in... not the best of circumstances."

"How so?"

"We're barely profitable. That shouldn't be the case. We're driving a lower margin than the industry standard, and that ought to be the case only if we were holding a bunch of unproductive plays. We aren't. Our wells are producing, and yet we have money running out the door. And it's a problem, because I'm facing a revolt on the board as a result. You'd think they'd give us some oxygen after Dad's death, but no."

"That sounds like a management issue."

"Dad surrounded himself with a bunch of guys who'd been with him from back in the beginning when he first got it going in West Texas. I think those guys have been coasting for a long time, and we're anything but lean and mean now."

"So the first thing I'd suggest is we put my guy Lester Penning on your case and have him do a full forensic audit of Stafford Oil's books. Lester is an idiot savant, which is why he can't get a job anywhere near corporate America, but he's better at this shit than anybody I've ever seen. He'll find every penny those old bulls are raking off."

"The problem is, you do that and it'll just feed Harlan Voss' effort to tear the company down."

"What, THE Harlan Voss?"

"He's the leader of the rebels on the board. Our allies are the old bulls, as you call them. It's an untenable situation. Voss wants to auction off Stafford and all its assets to the majors and call it a day."

"Is that so terrible?"

"Ask my mom and she'll says it's the apocalypse."

"And what do you say?"

"I say we need to get this thing maximized, and when it's efficient we can execute some very rich gas leases we've got in the Haynesville Shale that are held by the family and not the company. And if we can successfully do all of that, then maybe we can sell. At that point the payday will be enough to make it worthwhile."

"Well," I said, "what's stopping you from making that happen yourself?"

"I don't have any allies," he said. "I can't count on anybody in upper management, middle management, the field... the people who are supposedly with me are the ones who probably need to go. The rest? Between Voss, the competition circling like vultures and sidling up to our people... the whole company is a den of snakes."

"So when you said you needed Tenzing Norgay, you weren't kidding."

"Tenzing Norgay?"

"He was the sherpa who took Edmund Hillary to the top of Everest," I said.

"Right. Yeah. That, I definitely need."

"So I've got to find you a Tenzing Norgay."

"Who's not aligned with Voss or the other vultures? Yeah. Lotsa luck there."

"If it was easy you'd already have it covered," I said.

"Yeah, I guess that's true," he said. "Anyway..."

"Look," I said. "Here's what we'll start with. I'll get you a price on Lester giving your books the full microscopic exam, and while we're at it I'll get my guy Keegan Davis together with your IT people to see where you are with that. Network security and internal comms are always blind spots for basic-economy firms like mining and oil and gas, so an IT upgrade could well generate some black ink for you. Beyond that, I'll have to do some research on my end and see what help I can give."

"It's not a bad start," he said. "Right now I'm on an island and I'm stranded."

"You're not," I said. "It might just seem that way. But if I can give you a fresh set of eyes you might find you've got more resources than you think."

"I hope you're right," he said. "I will say I feel a little better about this having talked to you, even though I haven't been humiliated on the course like that in a long time."

"Hey, I aim to please," I said.

He laughed. And then we spent the rest of the afternoon drinking rum and telling stories about Erica. For the first time since she'd re-entered my life I didn't feel like a total imposter around one of the Staffords.

Just in completely over my head and wondering if I wasn't setting myself up to fail in spectacular fashion.