The Brilliant Boy Billionaire - 83. A Fireside Chat

The funeral was held on Saturday, and it was certainly well-attended, as might be expected for one of the richest people in the world. The Vice President-elect and his husband were even in attendance. Jitendra had been an agnostic, just as I was, and so one might have expected the service to be a cross between ecumenical and secular. Because his children were raised in the Jewish faith of their mother and Jews consider cremation to be a kind of desecration of the dead, cremation wasn’t permitted, nor was burial on the Jewish Sabbath, for that matter. However, Jitendra’s will specified that he be cremated and his ashes scattered in space. There was a provision in the will for funds to do so, but Jeff Barlow had arranged for Jitendra’s urn to be carried on the next available mission at no cost. The funeral service was to be a hybrid, officiated by a liberal rabbi in a crematorium in which the body, casket and all, would enter the cremation chamber immediately after a Jewish funeral ceremony. To me, it seemed like the worst of both religions, Hinduism and Judaism, but I’d try to reserve judgment until after the funeral service was finished.

I’d never been inside a crematorium before, let alone attended a funeral in one. In America, most cremations took place separately from the funeral, or stated more correctly, there was a memorial service at a funeral home, and the cremation took place separately at a crematorium with or without the family present according to their preferences. However, many people from India had a traditional cremation in which the cremation was part of the funeral. Had Jitendra opted for a traditional Hindu funeral, his body would have been placed on a funeral pyre, and in some states, the family would light the fire, with the body then moving directly into the cremation chamber. Most states, however, required the body to be placed in a casket, although for a cremation, it could be as simple as a cardboard box. Some funeral homes actually rented wooden caskets with a cardboard insert that slid into the cremation chamber. Jitendra’s body was in a real wooden casket that was open for the funeral ceremony itself, and his casket would be reduced to ashes, along with his body, during the cremation.

I might have been Jitendra’s closest friend, but I had no idea of what his life had been like before he came to America, nor did I have any idea what his family had put him through. Other than his attorney, no one did. The service seemed to go on and on, and finally it was time to give my eulogy.

Ladies, gentlemen, and other guests, I did not know Jitendra Moorthy before he was an executive at Applazon. Few of us did. He grew up the son of a proud family in the city of Madurai, one of the southernmost cities in India. From what I know about it, Madurai reminds me a lot of Cincinnati, where I spent the earliest years of my life. Located in India’s subtropical zone, a mere ten degrees north of the equator, Madurai is in a heavily agricultural region not particularly known for its wealth or educational standards. It does share one thing in common with New York, however. It, too, is the city that never sleeps, known for its nightlife.

Born the fifth of seven children to parents who worked as civil engineers for the state, Jitendra’s prospects for a better life seemed pretty bleak. He had the darker skin that befitted his Tamil heritage, making advancement in Indian society difficult. He didn’t speak Hindi as they do in the north, nor did he speak his native Tamil lest he be considered uneducated. He grew up speaking English at home and in school, where he excelled in math and science. He graduated high school with the highest score on his exams in the city and, as a result, won a scholarship to attend university in the United States. He was accepted into California Technical Institute, one of the most prestigious schools in the world, and graduated first in his class with a degree in computer science. He went on to get his Ph.D. there as well.

It was while working on his dissertation that he met Rebecca Silver, an astrophysics major at Cal Tech. They fell madly in love and were married just after they graduated. Jitendra was hired by a little-known startup called Applazon, which was building an online superstore at a time when few knew much about the internet. He literally transformed the internet into a retail mecca by creating an online experience upon which the e-commerce people could build an empire.

Rebecca took a faculty position at the University of Washington and gave birth to two amazing children, but then tragedy struck when she was diagnosed with stage-4 ovarian cancer and passed away in less than a year. Jitendra found himself with a high-powered job and two young children to raise. Of course, the children know only about life in America. They knew nothing about Jitendra’s life growing up in India, particularly that, as a young boy, he’d been promised a young girl in marriage and that he was estranged from his family for marrying someone else.

I first met Jitendra shortly after the birth of his son, William. I was only thirteen years old at the time but using a fake identity to pass myself off as a sixteen-year-old boy with a GED. I’d escaped from an abusive situation and merely wanted a job to help me get on my feet. Rather than being hired as a stock boy as I’d expected, however, the need for a data-center technician was critical, and when I proved capable of passing the certification exam, I was hired on the spot. Immediately, I recognized how inefficient the hardware was at the time, so I took it upon myself to design a better data server, and that was how I came to the attention of Jitendra Moorthy.

Although it was the triumvirate of Moorthy, Cooper and Jenkins that met with me, it wasn’t until later that I learned that it was Jitendra Moorthy’s idea to give me the role of chief design engineer on the team responsible for bringing my design to fruition. Plenty of executives would have stolen the design from a child who had no legal standing. Jitendra recognized my potential and my worth beyond that one design, and rather than exploit my false identity, he decided to get to the bottom of a story that didn’t make sense. It was he who uncovered that I’d been raised by a pedophile who’d kidnapped me. It was he who pursued and ultimately found my birth parents. And it was Jitendra Moorthy who pushed me to complete my education and to utilize my work at Applazon to get my Ph.D.

Sadly, fate interrupted the path of my career. There was a tragic explosion that claimed the life of several colleagues, including the father of my boyfriend at the time. Then there was the pandemic of 2020 that resulted in my being sent all over the world to install desperately needed data servers. Jitendra objected to my being used in that way, but he was overruled in the matter – and for good reason. It might have seemed callous to send a fourteen-year-old boy alone into strange lands to do an adult’s job, but it was the right decision. I had the knowledge and the skills to do it, and I was the least at risk of being harmed by the virus.

The experience was invaluable, and I wouldn’t be the man I am today had it not been for my travels. I wouldn’t have built a network of contacts and friends that spans the globe. I wouldn’t have become proficient in more than a dozen languages. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pursue the next-generation server design that led to my interest in super­conducting ceramics. Without that, I wouldn’t have had the curiosity to explore the underlying physics that led Enrique Gonzalez, Nithya Ramamurthy and me to discover the remarkable properties of ceramic carbon silicates, without which it’s doubtful humanity would have broken its dependence on fossil fuels and started to reverse the course of climate change.

After two years as a globetrotter, I was finally pulled back to the lab by Jitendra, where I could put my skills to better use. He also encouraged me to pursue love. For that gift, I am the most grateful of all. However, the story of Jitendra Moorthy’s life doesn’t end there. When the feared breakup of Big Tech became a reality, he chose not to go down with a sinking ship. Rather than shedding tears over the loss of what was, as so many did, he accepted the new reality. He left it to others to pick up the pieces of what was left of our technology infrastructure and, instead, focused his genius on developing a third-party platform that allowed companies to cobble together a presence in the cloud from several providers rather than just one. The result was something far more robust than what even Applazon had offered. He became the savior of the internet and the father of modern cloud computing. For that, we all owe Jitendra a great deal.

However, far more important was that through it all, Jitendra Moorthy remained a devoted father, providing his kids a loving, caring, nurturing environment that will live on through his children’s children one day. His children and those of us he helped along the way – that is truly the greatest legacy of Jitendra Moorthy. Let us celebrate his extraordinary life.

After I sat back down, the rabbi resumed the service, recited some verse in Hebrew as well as some traditional prayers, and then the coffin containing Jitendra’s body was closed and slid as if by magic into a door at the front of the room which then closed behind it. As beautiful as the ceremony was, I couldn’t help but think how much the sliding of the coffin into the cremation chamber reminded me of the ovens I’d seen while visiting Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Cremation wasn’t traditional in Judaism, and although I could see the ecologic advantages of it, in practice it made me cringe.

We headed back to Jitendra’s house for the reception.

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“Dr. Jeffries, do you think I could have a little of your time?” the Vice President-elect asked as he approached me and shook my hand. “And you, as well, Dr. Gonzalez.” He shook my husband’s hand.

“Mr. Vice President-elect, for you, we’ll make the time,” Henry replied. We were both at the reception that followed Jitendra’s funeral. Since it was a rainy, late-fall day in Seattle, a giant tent had been erected on Jitendra’s sprawling mountaintop property, and battery-powered space heaters kept the cold and damp at bay.

“Should we go to someplace private?” I asked.

“Since this is for your ears only, that would be best,” he replied. Now I was intrigued. I led the Vice President-elect inside and into the library in the front of the house. It was an inviting environment and perfect for a private conversation. A Secret Service agent followed us inside and then waited outside the door.

“This is really nice,” the Vice President-elect commented as he took a seat across from Henry and me, and then he asked. “Is that a real fire in the fireplace?”

Laughing, I replied, “If it were, it would be in violation of a half-dozen local ordinances, let alone state and federal mandates.”

“But it looks so real, I could swear those are real wood logs burning, crackling as the fire consumes them. Not even the old gas fireplaces were that realistic. I’ve seen electric fireplaces that look like they produce real flames, but it’s easy to see how they fake it on closer inspection. Those look like real flames. Is it a holographic projection or something?”

Laughing, I replied, “There are perhaps a dozen patents behind those flames. I’m sure you’ll see more of them when the price comes down. Every now and then, Henry and I get tired of saving the planet, so we tackle esoteric problems for fun.”

As the demand for natural gas collapsed with the widespread adoption of Peltier-based heat pumps for heating and cooling, and with our wind turbines for the generation of electricity, the cost of maintaining pipelines for niche use in cooking and for decoration became prohibitive. Couple that with the danger of having any open flames in fire country, the pipelines were shut down completely in the West and were being phased out in the rest of the country.

For cooking, there already were excellent alternatives using induction cooktops, convection ovens and microwaves, so the transition away from gas in the kitchen was fairly painless. Of course, it didn’t hurt that super­conducting ceramics made all of those significantly more efficient. Modern cooktops, with induction and focused infrared, allowed chefs to do things they never could’ve with gas. Not too many missed working over an open flame nor the harrowing moments of hoping the fire extinguisher was fully charged. Even at the crematorium, Dr. Moorthy’s body was reduced to ashes using flash oxidation.

“It’s interesting you mentioned holographic projection,” Henry chimed in, “because we experimented with holographic flames, but even with the brightest lasers, the illusion collapsed in anything but a dark room. Decorative, electric simulations of flames, as you commented, were pathetic. Most of them relied on fluttering membranes and creative lighting to create an illusion. Instead, I used computational mathematic simulations to explore what happens in real flames.”

“Humans have been fascinated by fire for millennia,” I added, “ever since we learned how to create and control it. Many a poet has written of flames as if they were living things, yet they’re nothing more than the light emitted by superheated gases, resulting from combustion of flammable materials – a simple oxidation-reduction reaction. We can mimic the intense, bright colors of a flame with lasers, but without the associated superheated gases, there is no flame.”

“But the aurora produces a similar effect across the sky without any heat,” Henry continued. “There, it’s the bombardment of gases in the upper atmosphere with charged particles from the solar wind, funneled by the earth’s magnetic field; that gave us the idea for how to simulate flames using the same principles.”

“From our experimentation in the development of super­conducting motors, we already knew how to produce intense magnetic fields and to use the Peltier effect to induce airflow, so we used a combination of the intense colored light from stimulated emissions, induced airflow and bombardment of air molecules with charged particles, focused by intense magnetic fields,” I added.

“I used a random-fractal algorithm to add a realistic flicker, augmented by the realistic sound of crackling. However, if you go outside, you’ll see that there’s no chimney,” Henry concluded.

“I’m very impressed,” the Vice President-elect said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear we’re sitting by a real wood fire in a conventional fireplace, surrounded by a library of leather-bound volumes. Please tell me that they’re not fake, too.”

Laughing, I replied, “That depends on how you define ‘fake’. My husband and I decided against a formal library in our apartment in New York, but then the guy who installed our home theater suggested we install built-in bookcases all along the walls to help deaden the sound that would otherwise echo between the rigid, plaster-on-concrete walls. They were as much for the acoustics, actually, and the added thickness allowed for the installation of much better speakers than could otherwise fit within the confines of the existing walls. Henry and I have both read extensively, but in the age of electronic media, the only reason for a collection of leather-bound books like this is to show off your wealth. No one could ever accuse us of ignorance, so a library for show just didn’t fit with our ethos. Thus, we found ourselves with a large library and no books of our own with which to fill it.

“The installer recommended we check out estate sales and to check with public libraries, which often have to dispose of their older books. What we didn’t realize at the time was that there’s a hell of a lot of competition for rare first editions, and there are more than a few book collectors who buy entire estates with the hope of coming across a rare find. I thought I could beat them at their own game by writing my own search engine to catalog potential estates based on demographics likely to yield a superior book collection, but I was not the first to do so and with a real day job, I was unable to jump on the estate sales quickly enough when the owners died. It was Henry who came up with a unique solution.”

“We didn’t need a library of leather-bound, rare first editions,” Henry went on to explain. “We merely needed a library of bound volumes to serve as acoustic insulation, but they had to look nice enough to complement our apartment. What we didn’t want was something like this: expensive-looking but never-opened leather-bound books that do more to showcase one’s wealth than one’s literary knowledge. The reality was that J.J. and I do most of our reading online and on our e-book readers—”

“There’s something tactile about holding an elegant hardcover book,” the Vice President-elect interrupted. “The smell of the glue that binds the pages, the crispness of the printed page and the tactile feel of turning page after page are something an e-book reader can’t duplicate.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, “but I can carry an entire library of books with me wherever I go on an e-book reader. If you ever see me reading hardbound volumes like these, it’ll be because I’ve retired or because the ceramics have degraded and my wind turbines quit working.”

“Could that actually happen?” the Vice President-elect asked.

“Oh, it will happen,” I replied. “It’s just a matter of when. The cyanide-silicate bond is unstable, and over time, the layer of iron will oxidize to a ferrous cyanate, which lacks super­conductive properties. It’s a slow process, but the effects will be noticeable within a half-century in warmer climates. The newer carbon silicates are much more robust and should last for centuries, but we still have a supply of the older cyanosilicates that must be used up, and those are going to the Third World. Ironically, those are in climates where degradation’s likely to be faster. Oxidation of the aluminum shell will become a problem, too, which is why we developed a method of applying a ceramic-foam shell in place of traditional anodization. The older discs will have to be replaced in fifty to a hundred years, depending on temperature, humidity and salinity. We’ll need to build factories to recycle the components.”

“We should be taking that into account when we talk about the cost of the technology,” the Vice President-elect stated.

“The cost of manufacturing the new carbon-silicate discs is less than a third that of the original cyanosilicates, so the annualized cost is actually less than when we first proposed the wind-based energy economy.”

“Interesting. So, if you decided against having books in your library, what did you use?” the Vice President-elect asked.

“What we realized when it came to furnishing our new library,” Henry continued, “was that we needed elegant-looking hardcover volumes, but not necessarily leather-bound books. Still, they needed to be colorful so as to complement the décor but not so colorful as to be distracting. Ideally, the content should be something one doesn’t usually find in an e-book or a typical library. It was as I was sitting in the conference room in the math department at NYU, however, that I realized the answer was all around me, quite literally.”

“Most scientific journals are electronic,” I clarified. “Most professional societies don’t even publish a physical journal anymore. By publishing the journals themselves electronically, professional societies, universities and libraries can avoid the cost of the publishers as middlemen, eliminating more than ninety percent of the cost of publishing physical volumes. The professional societies banded together with university libraries and established consortia, making all their journals available at no cost to the members of the consortia, who all paid dues. A lot of the publishers went out of business, and an entire industry vanished overnight.

“The same thing happened with textbooks, too. If you weren’t already aware, today’s textbooks are crowdsourced. They’re written by groups of teachers, usually in return for plum teaching assignments, and made available to students and teachers alike at no charge. The tablets they read them on are so cheap that our foundation can afford to give every kid in America a new one every year. It’s a rounding error in our budget and a simple way to introduce kids to the concept of philanthropy at a young age.”

“I didn’t realize that,” the Vice President-elect said.

“So, in the conference room were hundreds of bound volumes representing some of the more obscure mathematics literature from the late 1800s until the early Twenty First Century, when printed-paper publication ceased,” Henry continued. “I spoke with the dean about purchasing the entire collection from the department, but he was adamant that they were of historic significance, and he wasn’t willing to part with them at any price.”

“So, we did some calling around to a number of private universities,” I went on. “The public universities got rid of their collections years ago, as they had a need for the space. The physics department at Butler University in Indianapolis, however, was quite happy to let us have their entire collection of bound journals on solid-state physics in return for a sizable donation. The donation was tax-deductible, too. So now we have a vintage collection of scientific literature, chronicling everything from the invention of the transistor to the most advanced integrated circuits, not to mention the discovery of the cyanosilicates that became the basis of our work.”

Then. realizing we’d probably told far more than was of interest to the incoming Vice President, I added, “Sorry to go on and on about it, but it does make our library unique.”

“Someday, it may actually be worth something,” the Vice President-elect observed. “Rumor has it that you’re going to be taking in Dr. Moorthy’s children to live with you.”

“The rumor is true,” I replied. “First, however, we have to deal with Jitendra’s family to ensure the kids can’t be taken away from us.”

“The family’s in India, aren’t they?” the Vice President-elect asked.

“Yes,” I answered, “and they already have applied for emergency visas to come to the U.S. to repatriate the children.”

“How can they repatriate them when they’re American citizens?” he asked.

“Because the Indian government considers the children of an Indian citizen to be Indian as well and will grant Indian passports accordingly,” Henry explained.

“But Dr. Moorthy was a U.S. citizen, wasn’t he?” the Vice President-elect asked.

“He became a citizen decades ago, but he came here on a student visa, and India still considers him to have Indian citizenship,” I replied. “It’s a common issue. Even if CPS got involved, they’re powerless once the children have left the country. Most of the time, the kids don’t even know their rights. If they’re lucky, they’ll have a court-appointed advocate, but that only happens if CPS realizes there’s a problem.”

“That isn’t right,” the Vice President-elect agreed. “There ought to be a way to stop the kids from boarding any flights out of the country.”

“The problem is that they’d be traveling on Indian passports,” Henry interjected, “so even if their identities were in the system, no one would think to question their travel under Indian names. Anyway, Jitendra’s family isn’t even interested in the kids nor their welfare. Their sole intent is to force them into arranged marriages so as to get control of Jitendra’s entire fortune.”

“Isn’t William gay?” the Vice President-elect asked.

“Yes, and the family doesn’t approve,” Henry answered. “They expect William to carry on the family name and bloodline, regardless of his sexual orientation.”

“That’s horrible,” the Vice President-elect responded. “That’s just plain barbaric. Isn’t there something you can do to fight it?”

“We’ve hired one of the top law firms in the country to represent our interests and those of Jitendra’s children. Already, we stopped the family from getting an emergency injunction to freeze Dr. Moorthy’s assets based on the threat that they had a more recent copy of his will. We filed a countersuit to prevent them from getting anywhere near the kids, and we got temporary custody over the children and their trusts, but that only holds if the children remain in America. Unfortunately, we expect that the family will be back with a forgery of the will. It’ll probably be flawless, too.”

“Couldn’t you reach a compromise with the family?” the Vice President-elect asked. “Wouldn’t it be worth it to give them as much as half the assets in return for their dropping their bid for the children?”

“It’s not that simple,” I explained as I described how Jitendra had divided the family’s portion of the Pegasus stock, such that the only way the family could get control of the children’s shares would be to kidnap them and take them to India. I explained our plans for Pegasus to acquire Gannet, Boeing and New Horizons through a series of stock-swaps with Jeff Barlow and Andy Jenkins, who would become the chairman of the board and the CEO, once the merger was complete.

“The CFO, who’s the acting CEO, is a close friend of the family and her son is Trina’s boyfriend. Negotiations for the mergers can proceed, even if the family ties up Dr. Moorthy’s assets. However, we can’t vote the children’s shares if the family kidnaps them and takes them to India. The only way to prevent that is to get them to sign away their custody rights in the Indian courts.”

“The Indian government has no interest in being seen as condoning the kidnapping of American citizens,” the Vice President-elect replied, “and they aren’t going to want to get in the middle of something like that, especially when they’re vying with every other nation to get on the good side of the incoming administration. We can probably get them to pressure the family into agreeing to a reasonable settlement. At the least, we can get them to revoke the passports.”

“That would be fantastic if you can pull it off,” I replied. “By the way, I didn’t get a chance to say so earlier, but congratulations to you and Amy on winning the election. I think the two of you will make an outstanding team.”

“And the same goes for me,” Henry added.

“We were the only sane choice,” the Vice President-elect replied, and I had to agree. “We’re not out of the woods yet when it comes to saving our democracy. Our administration’s top priority will be constitutional reform.”

“The problem is that any constitutional amendment requires approval of three-quarters of all the states,” I pointed out, “which is an impossibly high bar. Of course, you could have a constitutional convention, but that would open it up to all the special interests, and you’d still need a supermajority for approval.”

“The first goal will be to get a constitutional amendment approved that opens the ratification process to referendum,” the Vice President-elect explained. We think a 60% majority of the popular vote should be a sufficiently high bar to reach, and it should get enough support to force the individual statehouses to ratify it. With that, we can abolish the electoral college entirely, place sensible limits on the second amendment, ban participation by political parties that promote fascism—”

“The red states will turn your amendment into a wedge issue. You might have to settle for a simple majority in three-quarters of all states or maybe a two-thirds supermajority of the popular vote.”

“Extremism has no place in politics,” the Vice President-elect countered. “At the least, we need to standardize elections and ban candidates in advance who refuse to accept the results of their elections. We’ll mandate that primaries for national office be open, regardless of party affiliation, and that winner-take-all contests be eliminated in favor of rank-choice voting. Those measures alone should force political parties of all stripes back toward the center and to some semblance of sanity.”

“I agree completely with those ideas,” I replied. “We can’t involve our foundation, of course, but Henry and I will support them. I think the American people will, too. It all hinges on getting that provision for amendment by referendum. Just don’t let it turn into what they have in California, where anyone can get a referendum on the ballot by signature.”

Shaking his head, the Vice President-elect replied, “No way. You’ll still need measures to be passed by supermajorities in both houses of Congress, just as with any amendment today. They don’t need the President’s signature, nor are they subject to veto, but under the proposed referendum procedure, they’d be put before the voters in the next even-year election cycle or could be passed by three-quarters of all state legislatures at any time. We believe such a measure will gain enough popular support to make it almost impossible for the state legislatures to shoot it down.”

“Oh, they’ll find a way to make it unpopular,” Henry interjected. “They’ll almost certainly call it a socialist plot hatched by Democrats to subvert the Constitution.”

“Not if we enlist the support of rightwing groups,” the Vice President-elect explained. “Imagine ads targeted at abortion foes, claiming that twenty-five blue states are preventing passage of the Life Begins at Conception amendment. We’ll use extremism against the very people who form the radical right’s base.”

“But aren’t you concerned that those extremists might actually succeed in getting something like that passed by referendum?” I suggested. “You might want to have a built-in reality check; perhaps a veto by a majority of state legislatures.”

“That’s a good suggestion, Dr. Jeffries.… So, I take it you’re going to be taking Dr. Moorthy’s kids back to New York once you have guardianship?” the Vice President-elect asked.

“We’re planning to buy the penthouse in our building, and we’ll remodel it to make it our space. In the meantime, we’ll fix up the office in our home as a temporary bedroom for Trina, and we’ll add an extra bed in Randy’s and Terrence’s room for William.”

“Would you consider buying a bigger place in Washington?” the Vice President-elect asked. “Maybe an elegant house in Georgetown, for example?”

“A single-family house isn’t really our style, but why would we move to Washington when our lives are in New York?” I asked.

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” the Vice President-elect promised, “but first, I’d like to discuss your research on economic planning, Dr. Jeffries. I have it on good faith that there’s an excellent chance you’ll be next year’s recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for outstanding contributions to the field by an American economist under the age of forty. A number of the past recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize. If I’m not mistaken, that would make you the first person in history to earn three Nobels.”

“Where in the world did you hear that?” I asked incredulously. “I’m not even eligible; I’m not an economist.”

“I have my sources,” the Vice President-elect replied, “but like you, I’m not at liberty to divulge them, and I have it on good faith that the AEA would make an exception in your case. You already have two Ph.D. degrees – one in computer science from Nebraska and one in machine learning and artificial intelligence from Columbia, as well as an M.B.A. from NYU. Any one of your books is worthy of a Ph.D. dissertation, and I have it on good faith that a number of the top schools would jump at the chance to let you defend it and to have the privilege of awarding you a Ph.D. in economics. And speaking of being under forty, I understand happy-birthday wishes are in order.”

“My hubby is turning thirty next Sunday,” Henry confirmed. With all that was going on, I hadn’t thought much about my thirtieth birthday coming up.

Taking out his smartphone as it made the distinctive buzz of a phone on vibrate, the Vice President-elect looked at the screen, then back up at us and said, “Sorry, but I’m going to have to take this. Please sit tight and I’ll be right back. As he exited the library to a place that was apparently more private, he lifted the phone to his ear and said, “Hello Amy…” and then he was gone.

“Well, that was interesting,” Henry commented.

“Not that I have any more idea about what he wants from us,” I added.

“Any thought about what it might be?”

“Not a clue,” I replied. “I guess we’ll just have to wait until he returns to find out.”