Guignol rocked his head from side to side. “You think they’d go for it?”

Sammy dropped his voice to a whisper and turned away from the rest of the room to confound any lip-readers. “I think they’ve offered to do that.”

Guignol cut his eyes over to Hackelberg and Sammy nodded, imperceptibly.

Guignol moved away, leaving Sammy to eat a Mickey head built from chunks of salmon and hamachi. Guignol moved among the committee, talking to a few members. Sammy recognized the behavior—consolidating power. Hard to remember that this was the guy he’d played savage, high-stakes games of putt-putt golf with.

The meeting reconvened. No one looked at Sammy. They all looked at Hackelberg.

“What about trying to settle the suit?” Guignol said.

Hackelberg flushed. “I don’t know if that’s possible—”

“What about if we offer to settle in exchange for dropping the suit we’ve just filed?”

Hackelberg’s hands squeezed the side of the table. “I don’t think that that would be a wise course of action. This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for—the chance to crack them wide open and see what’s going on inside. Discover just what they’ve taken from us and how. Out them for all their bad acts.”

Guignol nodded. “OK, that’s true. Now, as I understand it, every DiaB we shipped with this Banks person’s code on it is a separate act of infringement. We shipped a million of them. What’s the potential liability per unit?”

“Courts usually award—”

Guignol knocked quietly on the table. “What’s the potential liability—what’s the size of the bill a court could hand down, if a jury was involved? If, say, this became part of someone’s litigation portfolio.”

Hackelberg looked away. “It’s up to five hundred thousand per separate act of infringement.”

Guignol nodded. “So, we’re looking at a ceiling on the liability at $500 billion, then?”

“Technically, yes. But—”

“I propose that we offer a settlement, quid-pro-quo with this Banks person. We drop our suit if he indemnifies us from damages for his.”

“Seconded,” said someone at the table. Things were picking up steam. Sammy bit the inside of his cheek to keep his smile in check.

“Wait,” Hackelberg said. “Gentlemen and lady, please. While it’s true that damages can technically run to $500,000 per infringement, that simply isn’t done. Not to entities like this firm. Listen, we wrote that law so we could sue people who took from us. It won’t be used against us. We will face, at worst, a few hundred dollars per act of infringement. Still a sizable sum of money, but in the final analysis—”

“Thank you,” Guignol said. “All in favor of offering a settlement?”

It was unanimous—except for Hackelberg.

Sammy got his rematch with Hackelberg when the quarterly financials came out. It was all that black ink, making him giddy.

“I don’t want to be disrespectful,” he said, knowing that in Hackelberg’s books, there could be nothing more disrespectful than challenging him. “But we need to confront some business realities here.”

Hackelberg’s office was nothing like Sammy had expected—not a southern gentleman’s study lined with hunting trophies and framed ancestral photos. It was as spare as the office of a temp, almost empty save for a highly functional desk, built-in bookcases lined with law-books, and a straight-backed chair. It was ascetic, severe, and it was more intimidating than any dark-wood den could hope to be.

Hackelberg’s heavy eyelids drooped a little, the corners of his eyes going down with them. It was like staring down a gator. Sammy resisted the urge to look away.

“The numbers don’t lie. DiaB is making us a fortune, and most of it’s coming from the platform, not the goop and not the increased visitor numbers. We’re making money because other people are figuring out ways to use our stuff. It’s our fastest-growing revenue source and if it continues, we’re going to end up being a DiaB company with a side-business in theme-parks.

“That’s the good news. The bad news is that these characters in the ghost mall have us in their crosshairs. They’re prying us open faster than we can lock ourselves down. But here’s another way of looking at it: every time they add another feature to the DiaB, they make owning a DiaB more attractive, which makes it easier for us to sell access to the platform to advertisers.”

Hackelberg held up his hands. “Samuel, I think I’ve heard enough. Your job is to figure out new businesses for us to diversify into. My job is to contain our liability and protect our brand and investors. It sounds a lot to me like you’re saying that you want me to leave off doing my job so that you can do yours.”

Sammy squirmed. “No, that’s not it at all. We both want to protect the business. I’m not saying that you need to give these guys a free ride. What I’m saying is, suing these guys is not good for our business. It costs us money, goodwill—it distracts us from doing our jobs.”

Hackelberg leaned back and looked coolly into Sammy’s eyes. “What are you proposing as an alternative, then?”

The idea had come to Sammy in the shower one morning, as he mentally calculated the size of his coming quarterly bonus. A great idea. Out of the box thinking. The right answer to the question that no one had thought to ask. It had seemed so perfect then. Now, though—

“I think we should buy them out.”

Hackelberg’s thin, mirthless grin made his balls shrivel up.

Sammy held up his hands. “Here, look at this. I drew up some figures. What they’re earning. What we earn from them. Growth estimates over the next five quarters. It’s not just some random idea I had in the shower. This makes sense.” He passed over a sheaf of papers, replete with pie-charts.

Hackelberg set it down in the center of his desk, perfectly square to the corners. He flipped through the first five pages, then squared the stack up again.

“You’ve done a lot of work here, Samuel. I can really see that.”

He got up from his straight-backed chair, lifted Sammy’s papers between his thumb and forefinger, and crossed to the wall. There was a shredder there, its maw a wide rectangle, the kind of thing that you can stick entire hardcover books (or hard drives) into. Calmly, Hackelberg fed Sammy’s paper into the shredder, fastidiously holding the paper-clipped corner between thumb and forefinger, then dropping the corner in once the rest had been digested.

“I won’t ask you for your computer,” he said, settling back into his chair. “But I expect that you will back up your other data and then send the hard-drive to IT to be permanently erased. I don’t want any record of this, period. I want this done by the end of business today.”

Sammy’s mouth hung open. He shut it. Then he opened it again.

Abruptly, Hackelberg stood, knocking his chair to the ground behind him.

“Not one word, do you understand me? Not one solitary word, you goddamned idiot! We’re in the middle of being sued by these people. I know you know this, since it’s your fault that it’s happening. I know that you know that the stakes are the entire company. Now, say a jury were to discover that we were considering buying these assholes out? Say a jury were to decide that our litigation was a base stratagem to lower the asking price for their, their company—” The word dripped with sarcasm—“what do you suppose would happen? If you had the sense of a five year old, you’d have known better than to do this. Good Christ, Page, I should have security escort you to the gate.

“Turn on your heel and go weep in the corridor. Don’t stand in my office for one more second. Get your computer to IT by 2PM. I will check. That goes for anyone you worked with on this, anyone who has a copy of this information. Now, leave.” Sammy stood rooted in place. “LEAVE, you ridiculous little dog’s-pizzle, get out of my sight!”