San Francisco.
Palo Alto, the city in the southern Bay Area where tech firms cluster.
A month after arriving in the U.S. and backed by Silicon Valley's abundant tech talent and Westeros Company funding, Tim Berners-Lee had already put together the basic framework of Ygritte Company.
Ygritte Company's headquarters occupied a three-storey white building on Thurman Street, east of Stanford University.
Back from Europe, Simon had stayed in close phone contact with Tim Berners-Lee. With a free day today, he flew to San Francisco to check on the tech company that sat at the heart of his plans.
Tim Berners-Lee personally welcomed Simon to Ygritte Company's HQ; the two stepped into the lobby and, without thinking, stopped at the same moment.
The lobby was a wide rectangle, not especially large.
Besides the reception desk, the most eye-catching feature was the phrase spelled out in multi-coloured letters on the wall behind it: "You know nothing!".
Simon gazed at it appreciatively. Noticing Tim Berners-Lee beside him about to speak, he quickly cut him off: "Tim, don't say a word, there's no way you could guess what that line really means".
Tim Berners-Lee gave a slight nod but still said, "I just feel it carries a warning: no matter how hard we try, our understanding of the world remains shallow".
Simon almost laughed, decided not to bully the honest man, patted his shoulder and said, "Exactly. So let's head inside".
Tim Berners-Lee sensed something odd in Simon's expression but didn't press.
They reached the first-floor office area. While introducing the newly hired staff, Tim outlined what he had accomplished in the past month.
"I've completed the basic technical framework for the world wide web and filed patent applications in the major North American and European countries. Simon, this is Michael Levy, he runs the first-floor team, refining standards like HTML and HTTP".
"Internet" was a broad concept that only took shape in the nineties.
The world wide web, however, was Tim Berners-Lee's brainchild, the WWW technology. It formed the bedrock of the internet; years later most webpages ordinary people visited would start with www, proof enough of its importance.
After talking with the first-floor crew, the two went upstairs.
The small three-storey building wasn't large; even with Tim Berners-Lee included, Ygritte Company currently had only thirty-nine employees, so it still felt half-empty. Lee planned to expand headcount to a hundred within months, splitting into teams for browser software, web-design tools, and basic protocol development.
Simon hadn't imposed a strict schedule on Ygritte Company, but according to Lee's roadmap, in just six months they would finish their two core products: a consumer-facing browser and a web-design package for developers.
Software development, in truth, isn't as lofty as laymen imagine.
Back in Europe, Lee had already cobbled together a primitive browser in his spare time, but users had to set connection parameters themselves, impossible for ordinary people, and it lacked later familiar features like "home", "download", or "bookmarks".
Ygritte's next goal was a "foolproof" graphical browser. When Simon and Lee met in Geneva, Simon sketched out the design of a mature graphical browser from memory.
They toured the teams on all three floors, then Lee led Simon into his office and eagerly showed off a rudimentary website he'd just built, using his earlier work. The site only displayed basic info on Ygritte's newly hired staff, but Simon could tell it was almost certainly the world's first site to use HTTP and HTML.
Simon had plenty on his plate; after only a morning in Palo Alto and lunch with several key Ygritte employees, he flew back to Los Angeles.
Daenerys Entertainment's Falcon jet landed at a private airstrip in the Valley.
Reaching the nearby Warner Bros. Studios, Simon had just stepped out of his car in the car-park and was heading for post-production when a white sedan pulled in.
Spotting the woman at the wheel, Simon considered pretending he hadn't seen her, hesitated, then stopped. The white car slid into a space and Rene Russo stepped out in a black broad-shouldered dress, turning to look at him.
Seeing the man hadn't walked off, Rene Russo closed the door, grabbed her brown shoulder-bag and walked over.
Yet as she reached him she wavered, unsure whether to shake hands or hug, smiled and said, "Afternoon, Simon".
Simon nodded, turned and walked out of the car-park.
Rene Russo followed naturally, a little resentful of the man's inexplicable coolness but not daring to show it.
After a moment's silence Simon asked, "What are you here for?"
"'Goodfellas' read-through, in the exec building".
"Oh right".
Simon answered, remembering.
Martin Scorsese's new picture 'Goodfellas' was financed by Warner, which was why Simon could slip Rene Russo into the cast so easily. Warner had balked at Scorsese casting Ray Liotta opposite De Niro and Joe Pesci, feeling Liotta's fame was too slight.
As 'Goodfellas' female lead, Rene Russo would never have landed the part without Simon's recommendation, she had only one previous film credit.
Robert De Niro was still tied up promoting 'The Sixth Sense', so 'Goodfellas' wouldn't start shooting until July. Today, though, was already 21 June, it was time for formal rehearsals.
They'd exited the car at the north-lot, and on a weekday the studio was crowded.
Rene Russo stayed close to Simon the whole way, listening as nearly every passer-by greeted him and watching his bodyguard fend off several men and women who tried to approach. A strange pride welled up inside her; as the ornament on his arm she could feel the envy of every girl who walked past.
After all, this was Simon Westeros.
In recent weeks, while almost everyone expected Daenerys Entertainment's 'The Bodyguard' to flop, its soundtrack had sold more than a million copies for two straight weeks. At the box office, the film had dropped only eleven percent in its third weekend; in two and a half weeks the cumulative gross had already passed $56 million.
Because the weekly drops stayed in the low teens, Rene Russo remembered that Monday's Hollywood Reporter had upped its North-American estimate for the bodyguard to $120 million.
By contrast, 'Ghostbusters II' had opened to nearly twice the bodyguard's first-week gross, yet its second weekend tumbled fifty-five percent. That steep curve left The Hollywood Reporter predicting a final domestic haul of just $100 million for 'Ghostbusters II'.
One paragraph about 'The Bodyguard' had stuck in Rene Russo's mind.
Lawrence Kasdan, who had written Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars, finished 'The Bodyguard's script in the seventies and had been rejected more than sixty times since; virtually every studio in Hollywood had written the project off.
Yet once the script landed with Simon Westeros, and while people still dismissed the picture even after it opened, 'The Bodyguard' unexpectedly turned its soundtrack into a phenomenon and posted week-after-week holds that outstripped everyone's wildest guesses.
The Reporter's critic, almost in awe, declared that most of the miracle belonged to Simon Westeros: the young man seemed born with a gift for making the impossible happen.
And now she could walk beside him while other women watched with envy.
He might treat her coldly, but she knew that simply being seen at his side would smooth her path in Hollywood once word got out.
Hollywood, after all, is deeply superstitious about authority.
Goodfellas carried a $25 million budget, hardly low by Hollywood standards. Word was that Warner would never have green-lit the project without De Niro on board, even with Martin Scorsese directing. Now, thanks to Simon Westeros's interest, the whole studio seemed to breathe easier about the picture.
In recent meetings both Scorsese and producer Irwin Winkler had casually asked her what Simon thought of the script. A woman without roots in the business, she had so far escaped the usual indignities visited on unknown actresses; everyone simply assumed she was Simon Westeros's mistress.
At first she had feared the label would diminish her, but she soon realized most people merely envied her.
Gossip also told her that, compared with many Hollywood power players, the wunderkind beside her lived a remarkably restrained private life; only a handful of women had ever gotten close. She understood how lucky she was.
Lucky?
Perhaps. She had not been reborn a naïf; faced with a shortcut that could ease her career, she would not refuse. Thirty-five years had burned away any girlish idealism, and she knew how rare such openings were in this town.
Only… few people realized that, in all these months, she and he had met exactly twice.
Well, counting today, three times.
The studio's administrative wing stood in the south-east corner; the post-production building lay just ahead.
Watching him drift toward its entrance, she swallowed a fresh pang of resentment and forced herself to ask, "Simon, um… dinner tonight?"
He paused, studied her a moment, then shook his head. "I'm beat. Another time".
She watched him disappear inside, a sudden sting of tears threatening.
She forced it back.
People nearby were watching; she would not break down, especially not over a man so much younger.
Pathetic.
She drew a steady breath, smiled at a curious couple, slipped her bag over her shoulder and walked calmly toward the administration building.
The afternoon passed in distracted busyness.
Evening came; Simon left the lot without running into Rene Russo. Scorsese had dropped by the editing suite that afternoon to say hello.
At the Daenerys Entertainment branch in Burbank, the Female Assistant was waiting with the day's brief.
Columbia Pictures had dated 'Sex, lies, and videotape' for 7 July; now Universal announced that Cannes Palme d'Or winner 'Cinema Paradiso' would open on 28 July.
Much had already changed.
'Sex, lies, and videotape' had not taken the Palme, and Columbia's campaign struck Simon as less effective than Miramax's in the original timeline; the film's fate was anyone's guess. As for 'Cinema Paradiso', a late-July slot felt like a miscalculation.
The original North-American release had been re-cut; Simon doubted Universal could finish a careful re-edit in only two months. If they ran the two-and-a-half-hour version, the results were anyone's bet.
In the original history Miramax had also positioned the film for awards season, leveraging Oscar chatter to boost grosses; Universal clearly had not thought that far ahead.
The thoughts flickered and vanished.
At quitting time he left Burbank, the car flowing into Los Angeles traffic.
He remembered Janette's parting words in Melbourne: girls love surprises.
Besides, he had been away long enough; it was time to see her again.
Without hesitation, without even going home, he told Neil Bennett in the front seat to book a flight; he would leave for Australia that night.