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October 3, 1988, 9:00 AM (CST), The Vault, Bhairav Tower, Austin
David Hirsch stepped out of the private elevator and into the Vault.
The Managing Director of Goldman Sachs M&A had flown down from New York on a red-eye flight. He looked immaculate in a charcoal suit, but there was a tightness around his eyes. He was a man used to hunting distressed telecom assets and executing hostile debt takeovers. He was not used to being summoned to Texas without a target already painted.
"Rudra," Hirsch said, setting his slim leather briefcase on one of the leather sofas. "I canceled a board meeting with RJR Nabisco to be here. Your father's message said it was an infrastructural emergency. But your fiber network is stable, and the Japanese chip yields are at record highs. What's the crisis?"
"The crisis, David, is that we have built the greatest highway system in the history of the world, and there are no cars on it," I said, turning away from the panoramic window.
I gestured to the sleek Dell Turbo PC sitting on my obsidian desk.
"Sit," I commanded.
Hirsch walked over, looking at the screen with mild skepticism. He expected to see lines of green MS-DOS code or a dry financial spreadsheet.
Instead, he saw a sleek, metallic-grey window. Inside the window was a full-color, high-resolution rendering of the Goldman Sachs corporate logo, floating above a cleanly formatted, bold headline that read: Q3 M&A Market Analysis. Below it were two paragraphs of text with several words highlighted in blue.
Hirsch stopped dead. He leaned closer to the monitor. In 1988, formatting text and rendering a color image simultaneously on a PC required clunky, slow desktop publishing software.
"What software is this?" Hirsch asked, his eyes darting across the crisp typography. "Is this a local file? A presentation deck?"
"It is a document hosted on a server two floors below us," I said, standing beside him. "It was transmitted over the Bhairav network and rendered locally by a new piece of client-side software we call the Navigator. It uses a markup language to assemble the page instantly. Click the blue text, David."
Hirsch reached for the mouse. He hovered the cursor over the blue words [Black Monday Aftermath]. The cursor turned into a pointing hand. He clicked.
Instantly—without a loading bar, without the screen going black—the page vanished and was replaced by a massive, formatted table of the Dow Jones historical data, complete with a red line graph.
Hirsch actually jumped back from the desk.
"My god," Hirsch whispered. "The latency... there is no latency. It just appeared."
"It's called a hyperlink," I explained, letting the awe wash over him. "We have created a graphical overlay for the entire Bhairav fiber-optic network. It is a digital universe. I call it Indrajaal. The Web."
Hirsch was a shark, but he was a highly intelligent one. He stared at the screen, his mind furiously spinning through the monetization possibilities of a visual, instant data network.
"This isn't just for banks moving ledgers anymore," Hirsch said, looking up at me, the realization hitting him like a physical blow. "This is a broadcast medium. It's television, the newspaper, and the telegraph combined into a single screen."
"Exactly," I said, walking around the desk. "But right now, the only things on the Web are server diagnostics and test pages Vik built. If I am going to charge consumers and corporations a monthly subscription to access Indrajaal, I have to give them a reason to log on. I need content."
Hirsch slipped immediately into his M&A persona. He walked over to his briefcase and pulled out a legal pad and a gold Montblanc pen.
"Alright," Hirsch said, ready to wage war. "Who are we buying? Time Inc.? The New York Times? Condé Nast? We have a billion in liquid capital. We can execute a hostile takeover of a legacy publishing house by Thanksgiving."
"No," I said sharply.
Hirsch frowned, his pen hovering over the pad. "No? Rudra, if you want content, you have to buy the people who make it."
"I am not buying a newspaper company, David," I said, walking over to the glass wall. I picked up a dry-erase marker and drew three large, distinct pyramids on the glass. "Newspapers have printing presses. They have massive physical distribution fleets. They have powerful, entrenched labor unions. If I buy the New York Times, I inherit billions of dollars in physical liabilities and 19th-century overhead."
I tapped the glass with the marker.
"I don't want the printing presses," I said, my voice dropping to a cold, analytical cadence. "I only want the data. I want the zeroes and ones. We are going to execute a licensing war, not a corporate buyout."
I turned to the first pyramid. I wrote the words TIER 1: THE ADDICTION at the top.
"We do not start with consumer entertainment," I explained, drawing from the playbook of the early 2000s internet boom. "Consumers are fickle. We start with the enterprise sector. The people who must have data to survive. We target high-value, real-time financial information."
"You want to target Dow Jones Telerate and Reuters," Hirsch realized, his eyes widening.
"Yes," I nodded. "Right now, stockbrokers and bankers pay thousands of dollars a month for clunky, slow, text-only terminal feeds. I want to approach the primary financial wire services. But we don't buy the company. We offer them a massive, upfront cash sum for the exclusive digital syndication rights to their data streams."
"They won't sell exclusivity," Hirsch argued. "They license their feeds to everyone."
"They will," I countered, a dark smile touching my lips. "Because you are going to leverage the Black Monday hangover. The financial sector is still bleeding, David. Print subscriptions for financial journals are down. Ad revenue is in the gutter. You go to the legacy financial wires, and you offer them a completely new, zero-overhead revenue stream. You tell them we will distribute their data on our proprietary network. But the fine print must state that they cannot distribute that same data on any other PC-based graphical interface for the next ten years."
"We monopolize the financial news," Hirsch whispered, writing furiously on his pad. "If a trader wants real-time stock charts and visual data, they have to buy a Dell PC and subscribe to Indrajaal."
"Exactly," I said, moving to the second pyramid. I wrote TIER 2: THE DAILY HABIT.
"Once we have the corporations hooked, we move to the general public," I continued. "We need daily, sticky content. News, weather, and sports. But again, we do not buy the newspapers."
"We buy the syndicates," Hirsch said, catching on.
"We target the Associated Press and United Press International," I confirmed. "The backbone wires that feed every local newspaper in the country. We pay them for the right to host their raw feeds directly on Indrajaal. We bypass the local editors. We bypass the printing press. We deliver the morning news to the user's screen five hours before the physical paper hits their driveway."
I moved to the third, bottom pyramid. I wrote TIER 3: THE WALLED GARDEN ARCHIVE.
"Only after we secure financial data and real-time news do we approach consumer magazines and encyclopedias," I said. "We digitize reference materials. We create a digital library that makes physical encyclopedias obsolete. We make Indrajaal the absolute, undeniable center of human knowledge."
Hirsch stopped writing. He looked at the three pyramids on the glass. He was a master of corporate restructuring, but he was looking at the restructuring of human attention.
"You are separating the information from the physical medium," Hirsch said, awe creeping into his voice. "You are turning information into pure light, and forcing everyone to pay your toll to see it."
"Information wants to be free, David," I murmured, echoing the famous hacker mantra of my old timeline. "But the infrastructure required to deliver it is wildly expensive. And I own the infrastructure."
I put the cap back on the dry-erase marker.
"I need you to assemble a dedicated strike team in New York," I ordered. "Do not use the standard M&A guys. Get me intellectual property lawyers. Get me men who understand copyright and syndication law. We are going to lock up the digital rights of the 20th century before the media barons even realize what the word 'digital' means."
Hirsch stood up. He snapped his briefcase shut. The hesitation he had felt upon arriving in Austin was entirely gone, replaced by the ruthless, blood-in-the-water hunger of the 'Scalpel.'
"Who is our first target?" Hirsch asked.
"The Financial Global Wire," I said, naming the largest, oldest institutional data provider on Wall Street. "They have the deepest archives and the fastest market reporters. They are the gold standard."
"Their board is composed entirely of old-money traditionalists," Hirsch warned. "They think computers are glorified calculators. They won't understand what Indrajaal is."
"They don't have to understand the technology, David," I said, staring at the glowing screen of the Navigator on my desk. "They just have to understand the size of the check. Go to New York. Starve them out if you have to. But bring me their data."
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