“Of course not,” Kettlewell snapped. He shouldn’t be talking to this man, but the question drove him bonkers. He’d invented litigation investment. “Those big old companies have two common characteristics: they’ve accumulated more assets than they know what to do with, and they’ve got poisonous, monopolistic cultures that reward executives who break the law to help the company turn a buck. None of that’s changed, and so long as that’s all true, there will be little companies with legit gripes against big companies that can be used as investment vehicles for unlocking all that dead Fortune 100 capital and putting it to work.”
“But aren’t Fortune 100 companies investing in litigation funds?”
Kettlewell suppressed a nasty laugh. “Yeah, so what?”
“Well, if this is about destroying Fortune 100 companies—”
“It’s about wringing positive social value out of the courts and out of investment. The way it used to work, there were only two possible outcomes when a big company did something rotten: either they’d get away scot-free or they’d make some lawyers very, very rich. Litigation funds fix that. They socialize the cost of bringing big companies to heel, and they free up the capital that these big companies have accumulated.”
“But when a big company invests in destroying another big company—”
“Sometimes you get a forest where a few trees end up winning, they form a canopy that keeps all the sunlight from reaching the floor. Now, this is stable for forests, but stability is the last thing you want in a market. Just look at what happens when one of those big trees falls over: whoosh! A million kinds of life are spawned on the floor, fighting for the light that tree had hogged for itself. In a market, when you topple a company that’s come to complacently control some part of the ecosystem, you free up that niche for new innovators.”
“And why is that better than stability? Don’t the workers at these companies deserve the security that comes from their employers’ survival?”
“Oh come on, Freddy. Stop beating that drum. If you’re an employee and you want to get a good deal out of an employer, you’re better off if you’ve got fifty companies you could work for than just one.”
“So you’re saying that if you destroy Disney with your lawsuit, the fifty thousand people who work at Walt Disney World will be able to, what, work for those little rides like your friends have built?”
“They’ll find lots of work, Freddy. If we make it possible for anyone to open an innovative little ride without worrying about getting clobbered by a big old monopolist. You like big corporations so much?”
“Yes, but it’s not little innovative startups that invest in these funds, is it?”
“It’s they who benefit once the fund takes up their cause.”
“And how’s that working out for the ride people you’re meant to be helping out? They rejected you, didn’t they?”
Kettlewell really hated Freddy, he realized. Not just a little—he had a deep and genuine loathing. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. You don’t like little companies. You don’t like big companies. You don’t like workers’ co-ops. What do you want us to do, Freddy? You want us to just curl up under a rock and die? You sit there and make up your funny names for things; you make your snarky little commentaries, but how much good have you done for the world, you complaining, sniping little troll?”
The line got very quiet. “Can I quote you?”
“You certainly can,” Kettlewell huffed. In for a penny, in for a pound. “You can print that, and you can kiss my ass.”
“Thank you, Mr Kettlewell,” Freddy said. “I’ll certainly take the suggestion under advisement.”
Kettlewell stood in his home office and stared at the four walls. Upstairs, Pascal was crying. He did that a lot lately. Kettlewell breathed deeply and tried to chill out.
Someone was knocking at his door, though. He answered it tentatively. The kid he found there was well-scrubbed, black, in his twenties, and smiling amiably.
“Landon Kettlewell?”
“Who’s suing me?” Kettlewell could spot a process server a mile away.
The guy shrugged and made a little you-got-me smile. “Couldn’t say, sir,” he said, and handed Kettlewell the envelope, holding it so that the header was clearly visible to the camera set into the lapel of his shirt.
“You want me to sign something?” Kettlewell said.
“It’s all right, sir,” the kid said and pointed at the camera. “It’s all caught on video.”
“Oh, right,” Kettlewell said. “Want a cup of water? Coffee?”
“I expect you’re going to be too busy to entertain, sir,” the kid said, and ticked a little salute off his forehead. “But you seem like a nice guy. Good luck with it all.”
Kettlewell watched him go, then closed the door and walked back to his office, opening the envelope and scanning it. No surprises there—the shareholders in the investment syndicate that had backed Lester and Perry were suing him for making false representations about his ability to speak for them.
Tjan called him a minute later.
“They got you too, huh?” Kettlewell said.
“Just left. Wish I could say it was unexpected.”
“Wish I could say I blamed them,” Kettlewell said.
“Hey, you should see what the ride’s been doing this week since Florida went down,” Tjan said. “It’s totally mutated. I think it’s mostly coming from the Midwest, though those Brazilians seem to keep on logging in somehow too.”
“How many rides are there in South America, anyways?”
“Brazilians of them!” Tjan said with a mirthless chuckle. “Impossible to say. They’ve got some kind of variant on the protocol that lets a bunch of them share one network address. I think some of them aren’t even physical rides, just virtual flythroughs. Some are directly linked, some do a kind of mash-up between their current norms and other rides’ current norms. It’s pretty weird.”
Kettlewell paced. “Well, at least someone’s having a good time.”
“They’re going to nail us to the wall,” Tjan said. “Both of us. Probably the individual ride-operators, too. They’re out for blood.”
“It’s not like they even lost much money.”
“They didn’t need to—they feel like they lost the money they might have won from Disney.”
“But that was twenty years away, and highly speculative.”
Tjan sighed heavily on the other end of the phone. “Landon, you’re a very, very good finance person. The best I’ve ever met, but you really need to understand that even the most speculative investor is mostly speculating about how he’s going to spend all the money you’re about to make him. If investors didn’t count their chickens before they hatched, you’d never raise a cent.”
“Yeah,” Kettlewell said. He knew it, but he couldn’t soak it in. He’d won and lost so many fortunes—his own and others’—that he’d learned to take it all in stride. Not everyone else was so sanguine.
“So what do we do about it? I don’t much want to lose everything.”
“You could always go back to Russia,” Kettlewell said, suddenly feeling short-tempered. Why did he always have to come up with the plan? “Sorry. You know what the lawyers are going to tell us.”
“Yeah. Sue Perry and Lester.”
“And we told Lester we wouldn’t do that. It was probably a mistake to do this at all, you know.”
“No, don’t say that. The idea was a really good one. You might have saved their asses if they’d played along.”
“And if I’d kept the lawyers on a shorter leash.”
They both sat in glum silence.
“How about if we defend ourselves by producing evidence that they reneged on a deal we’d made in good faith. Then the bastards can sue Perry and Lester and we’ll still be keeping our promise.”
Kettlewell tried to picture Perry in a courtroom. He’d never been the most even-keeled dude and since he’d been shot and had his arm broken and been gassed, he was almost pathological.