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October 14, 1988, 10:00 AM (EST)
Financial Global Wire (FGW) Headquarters, Lower Manhattan
The boardroom of the Financial Global Wire smelled of expensive cigar smoke, lemon polish, and a century of unbroken institutional arrogance.
For eighty years, FGW had been the undisputed king of financial information. They had reporters in every market, on every trading floor, and inside every central bank. If a butterfly flapped its wings in Tokyo and affected the price of yen, FGW transmitted that data to Wall Street before the wind even reached the coast.
Richard DuPont, the CEO and Chairman of FGW, was a man carved from old East Coast money. He wore a three-piece tweed suit and looked at David Hirsch as if the Goldman Sachs executive had just tracked mud onto a priceless antique rug.
"I took this meeting, David, out of respect for your firm's handling of the Black Monday fallout," DuPont said, leaning back in his leather chair. He gestured dismissively to the contract Hirsch had laid on the mahogany table. "But this proposal is absurd. FGW does not grant 'exclusive syndication rights.' We are a wire service. We sell our raw data feeds to everyone—brokerages, newspapers, television stations. Exclusivity violates our core business model."
Hirsch sat perfectly still. He didn't touch his briefcase. He didn't adjust his tie.
"You sell your data to everyone, Richard," Hirsch corrected smoothly, "because historically, everyone had different mediums. The newspaper printed it. The television anchor read it. But the medium is consolidating. My client is building a unified visual interface for the personal computer. We want the exclusive rights to display your data on that specific medium."
"Personal computers," DuPont scoffed, rolling his eyes. "You mean those beige boxes the accountants use to run spreadsheets? David, our clients use dedicated FGW terminals. They pay us two thousand dollars a month for a green-screen box that sits on their desk and does nothing but stream our text. Nobody is going to cancel a dedicated terminal to read a stock ticker on a clunky, slow PC."
"If they are so clunky and slow," Hirsch countered, a dangerous, razor-thin smile touching his lips, "then why are you hesitant to take the twenty million dollars in cash I am offering you for the exclusive rights to them?"
DuPont paused. Twenty million dollars was not a negligible sum. In the lingering, depressed economy following the '87 crash, FGW's print subscriptions had dropped significantly. Ad revenue was bleeding. Twenty million in pure, liquid cash for the rights to a medium DuPont considered a toy was a wildly tempting proposition.
"We syndicate," DuPont stubbornly repeated. "If Dow Jones Telerate or Reuters wants to build a PC application, we have to be able to sell them the data too."
"If you sell to them, my client withdraws the twenty million," Hirsch said, leaning forward. "And my client withdraws something else."
Hirsch opened his leather folder and pulled out a map. It was the same map of the United States he had looked at in the library of Mercer Hall—the map of the Bhairav network.
"FGW is a data company, Richard," Hirsch said, his voice dropping into the cold, clinical cadence of an executioner. "You generate the information. But how does that information physically travel from your servers in New York to a broker's terminal in Chicago?"
DuPont frowned. "We lease T1 lines from the regional telecommunication carriers. Midwest Continental, mostly."
"Midwest Continental went bankrupt last October," Hirsch reminded him softly. "Goldman Sachs brokered the sale of their physical infrastructure to a private holding company."
Hirsch tapped the map.
"My client is that holding company. My client owns the copper. My client owns the fiber. My client owns the switches in Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta."
The temperature in the boardroom seemed to plummet. DuPont's arrogance faltered, replaced by a sudden, creeping realization.
"I had my analysts review your transit contracts, Richard," Hirsch continued, mercilessly closing the trap. "Your lease agreements with the regional carriers expire on November 1st. If you refuse to sign over the exclusive PC graphical rights today, my client will be forced to renegotiate your transit tariffs for the upcoming decade. And given the high volume of your data... I suspect your transmission costs are about to increase by roughly four hundred percent."
DuPont stared at Hirsch. The color drained completely from his face.
"That is extortion," DuPont whispered, his voice shaking with outrage. "That is a violation of the common carrier laws. The FCC will crucify you!"
"The FCC," Hirsch said smoothly, "currently views my client as a vital strategic partner who rescued the American telecom grid from foreign insolvency. A four-hundred-percent tariff increase isn't extortion, Richard. It's simply the free market adjusting to the cost of maintaining high-speed infrastructure."
Hirsch pushed the contract an inch closer to the CEO.
"You have two choices," Hirsch said, summarizing the brutal math. "You can take twenty million dollars today, and your transit fees remain exactly the same for the next ten years. All you give up is a digital graphical right you don't even believe in. Or, you can refuse, and your operational costs quadruple on Monday morning, wiping out your profit margin for the rest of the century."
DuPont looked at the map. He looked at the contract. He was a newspaperman, a baron of the 20th century. He was entirely unprepared for the 21st-century warfare of vertical integration. The hardware, the network, and the content—Bhairav Holdings was squeezing them all into a single, inescapable fist.
DuPont reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his pen.
"Whoever your client is," DuPont said bitterly, signing his name across the bottom line, "they are going to strangle this industry."
"They aren't going to strangle it, Richard," Hirsch said, sliding the contract back into his folder and snapping it shut. "They are just going to put it on a leash."
October 18, 1988, 8:00 PM (CST), The Vault, Bhairav Tower, Austin
The Skunkworks had moved to the top floors of Bhairav Tower, but the chaotic, manic energy remained unchanged.
Vik Malhotra stood beside my obsidian desk, typing furiously into the Dell Turbo PC.
"The legal department in New York just sent the encryption keys," Vik said, his eyes glued to the monitor. "We have tapped directly into the primary FGW data feed. The server downstairs is pulling the raw text."
"Run it through the parser," I ordered, standing behind him.
"I've mapped their data strings to the Bhairav Markup Language," Vik explained, his fingers flying across the keyboard. "When FGW transmits a stock ticker symbol, the server automatically wraps it in a bold tag and a color tag. When they transmit a price increase, it renders green. A decrease renders red. It's compiling the page dynamically, every second."
"Show me."
Vik hit the Enter key.
The metallic-grey window of the Indrajaal Navigator flashed. A fraction of a second later, the screen was no longer empty.
It was alive.
At the top of the screen was a sleek, graphical banner reading Bhairav Financial. Below it, the screen was divided into neat, perfectly formatted columns. And the columns were moving.
It wasn't a static page of text. It was a flowing, real-time river of data. Ticker symbols flashed green and red. Breaking news headlines appeared dynamically at the bottom of the screen, instantly formatted into readable, hyperlink-enabled text.
I watched the screen. In my previous life, I had paid Bloomberg fifty thousand dollars a year per terminal for exactly this kind of interface. It was the absolute lifeblood of global finance. And now, I owned it.
"Latency?" I asked.
"Zero point four seconds," Vik grinned, turning to look at me. "Because the data is traveling over our fiber network and being rendered locally by our silicon... it is actually displaying on our screen half a second faster than it is displaying on FGW's own proprietary terminals in New York."
I felt the familiar, heavy weight of the Lakshmi coin in my pocket.
We hadn't just built a browser. We had built the ultimate "Killer App." If a Texas banker wanted to see the market faster than his competitors in New York, he had no choice. He had to log onto the Web.
"We have the addiction," I said softly, watching the green numbers tick upward. "Now we need the daily habit."
"We're going after the newspapers?" Vik asked, catching on to the tiered strategy I had outlined for David Hirsch.
"We're going after the syndicates," I confirmed. "The Associated Press. Reuters. We are going to aggregate the morning news and deliver it to our users before the physical paper even hits the printing presses. We are going to make Indrajaal the front page of the world."
I placed a hand on Vik's shoulder.
"Call Robert," I said. "Tell him to prepare a demonstration for the Texas Banking Consortium. It's time to show them what they've been paying for."
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