Chapter 7: A good dinner night
The first bottle of champagne disappeared with startling speed. The models, it turned out, could hold their liquor and their conversation. Felicia, after her third glass, had decided the Old Fashioned was a better tool for her purposes and was now using it to gesture emphatically as she held court.
"So, Kitty," she began, her voice a conspiratorial purr that cut through the low hum of the restaurant. "Susan here says you're building a 'digital soul.' That's very poetic. But what does it actually *do*? Can it make me rich?"
Kitty, who was two sips into her own Old Fashioned and starting to loosen up, laughed. "Not directly. It's a predictive engine, but not for stocks. We're teaching it to understand and replicate creative decision-making. Think of an AI that can direct a music video or design a fashion line based on a single sentence."
Mary Jane's eyes lit up. "So it *could* make me rich."
"Potentially," Susan interjected, her tone more measured. "But the real application is in filtering out the noise. It could analyze a thousand scripts and tell you which one has a compelling narrative structure, or listen to a hundred demos and find the one with a hit chorus. It's a tool for finding the signal in the static."
Across the table, the finance team was a silent, observing bloc. They hadn't touched the champagne, preferring water with lemon. Nila watched the exchange with the cool focus of a predator, her expression unreadable. It was Do-hee, the quiet one, who finally broke their silence.
"A tool is only valuable if its return on investment can be quantified," she said, her voice soft but sharp. "How do you measure the value of a 'compelling narrative structure' in a way that satisfies our shareholders?"
The question landed like a lead weight. The creative buzz at the table died for a moment.
"That's the million-dollar question, isn't it?" I said, stepping into the breach. "Sometimes you have to make an investment based on vision, not just a spreadsheet."
"A philosophy that has bankrupted many companies," Nila countered smoothly, not missing a beat. "Vision without data is just a daydream."
"And data without vision is just a spreadsheet," Felicia shot back from across the table, taking a slow sip of her drink. "Boring, and ultimately, useless."
I watched the sparks fly. This was it. This was the collision I had wanted, the friction that would either forge them into a team or shatter them into a dozen warring factions. I had my money on the former.
"Alright, let's table the hostile takeover of the R&D department for a moment," I said, raising my glass. "We're here to celebrate. Let's talk about something else. How about the most insane thing you've ever seen in your previous jobs?"
That was all it took. The dam broke.
Gwen Stacy leaned forward. "I once shot a campaign for a watch that was supposed to be 'extreme.' They had me hanging off the side of a skyscraper in Dubai. The safety harness was held together with what looked like zip ties. The photographer's only direction was 'Look like you're having fun!'"
"I can top that," Jessica Drew, the cameragirl, said with a grimace. "I was embedded with a 'reality' TV show. The entire thing was scripted. They'd stage fights and then tell us in the edit bay to make it look 'spontaneous.' I have footage of the producer feeding lines to the 'star' through a hidden earpiece. It was all fake."
Susan sighed, swirling the ice in her glass. "My last boss wanted me to design an algorithm to identify 'at-risk' employees based on their social media and email patterns. The goal was to fire them before they could quit. I told him it was unethical, a privacy nightmare, and technically stupid. He called me 'not a team player.'"
A heavy silence fell over the table. The stories were a stark reminder of the world they had all escaped.
It was Joo-hee, from the finance team, who broke it. "At my old firm, we were instructed to manipulate quarterly earnings reports. Just… shift a few decimal points here, reclassify a loss there. Nothing illegal, technically. Just enough to make the numbers look better so the executives could cash in their bonuses." She looked down at her hands. "It felt like being a professional liar."
I looked around the table. The boisterous models were quiet. The analytical engineers looked somber. Even the unflappable finance team seemed to carry a weight on their shoulders. They were all refugees from a world that had tried to break them in one way or another.
"Well," I said, my voice cutting through the shared memory. "You're not there anymore. Here, we don't use zip ties for safety harnesses. We don't fake reality. We don't build spyware, and we don't cook books." I looked each of them in the eye. "We build things that are real. We make things that matter. And we make a shitload of money doing it the right way. A toast."
I raised my glass. This time, they all joined in, even the finance team. The clinking of glasses was louder this time, more meaningful.
"To us," Felicia said, a new fire in her eyes.
"To doing it the right way," Susan added.
"To a very profitable future," Nila said, a rare, genuine smile gracing her lips.
We drank. And for the first time, it didn't feel like a boss and his new employees. It felt like the beginning of a crew. A very expensive, very dangerous, and very promising crew.