A New World Begins

The rat catcher’s plans…

Nat:Morning Craig, how’s life over that side of the pond?

Craig: Bloody hell, Nat, what you doing online so early? I’m only just getting up to go swimming. Not even dressed yet. What time is it there? About half midnight or something?

Nat: Yup, I’ve just crept out to the kitchen area at the end of the corridor so I didn’t wake anyone up. I wanted to call you.

Craig: Stalker!

Nat: You going to report me?

Craig:Nah, I’ll put you on a contract though. Make it official. Regular hours. Specified appointments. Maybe even a pension plan. But no sneaking up on me at dark o’clock.

Nat: That sounds good. Union rates?

Craig: Okay, but don’t push for extra holidays. You have to be on call 24/7.

Nat: It’s a deal. So long as I get extra pay for creeping into your bedroom when you are undressed. Let’s call it danger money.

Craig: You’d bloody need it if my mom caught you!

Nat: You make her sound like a tyrant.

Craig: Why do you think dad goes off to war so often? He prefers a quiet life…

Nat: I’d love to meet your mom, Craig. I want to come over to England. Meet all your family.

Craig: I wish you could, Nat. Or that I could come back to America. I’m saving as much as I can. I have a passport so it’s just a case of getting the money together for a ticket. And persuading dad to let me back. Or maybe not even that. Maybe I could get through Departures here with no questions asked. I look old enough, I’m sure I could slip through. Perhaps this summer. I get forty quid a week from my job at the garage after school, and I might even be able to get a Saturday job and earn extra money there.

Nat: If you did get here, I’d hide you down in the boat house. You could live on our river boat. Catch fish in the river for us. There might even be rats in the boat house you could catch and cook.

Craig:You really make a boy feel wanted, Nat. Do you reckon I could get a Green Card as a chef and pest controller?

Nat: I’d get dad to sponsor you. He owes me a favour. He’s jumped nearly a dozen points in the polls for his handling of the Weather Emergency. People are comparing his handling of the situation very favourably with the debacle a few years ago when the Governor was late to act. It helped of course that people are saying “even his son and schoolfriends got off their asses and pitched in.”

Craig: I heard about that. Will emailed me on Tuesday about the software he’s written to do ‘line of sight’ assessments. Wanted me to double check the underlying maths for him again. He also said how you and Shane and Travis delivered a baby and arranged a helicopter for a hospital flight. Dad even saw it on tv. He sent me a link to a news clip about it where you got interviewed.

Nat: Yes, the guys really pulled off an amazing feat. We had a dinner tonight in the Commandant’s private dining room. The TV lady was there, and General Carstairs, one of the College’s Governors. He actually promoted Shane, Travis, Will and Noah right there. Made them Privates First Class. We didn’t really deliver a baby though. That was just the tv news hyping things up.

Craig: Privates First Class? What the freekin’ ‘eck is that?

Nat:PFC? You don’t know what a Private First Class is? It’s the rank between Private and Corporal. You must have that rank in your army.

Craig: We bloody don’t! Every private here is first class, no such thing as second-class privates. Not in Her Majesty’s army or marines. We have Lance Corporals though. That’s between Private and Corporal. God’s Own Rank, that is a Lance Corporal.

Nat: I’m guessing that is what you are then?

Craig: Of course! But I’ve got my Junior Leader’s cadre coming up soon. After passing that I’ll be made a full Corporal.

Nat: Will God get promoted to Corporal too?

Craig: Only if he’s good enough. We don’t carry slackers in the marines.

Nat: I’m not sure God is a slacker…

Craig: And on the seventh day He rested…. Point proven?

Nat: You’re mad.

Craig: I know. You said before. Several times…

Nat: Craig…

Craig: Yes?

Nat: It doesn’t matter. I was just going to ask you something.

Craig: I like talking Nat. I miss you. What did you want to know?

Nat: Go to your swimming, Craig. I miss you too.

Craig: Natty…

Nat: Yes?

Craig: I love you…

* * *

“Are you actually alive and listening to me, Craig? Or just off in your dream world again?”

“Sorry, Manders, of course I’m listening to you. You were saying?”

“I was saying that it’s a good thing that most of the lions that have been preying on people hereabouts have been rounded up or you’d have been toast this morning. You never saw that one following you back from swimming did you?”

“Huh?”

“Exactly. You haven’t listened to a word I’ve been saying. What’s he done now?”

“Who? What? Mandy, what are you jabbering on about?”

“I’m guessing your American friend. The foxy boy. The one you claim is just a friend but don’t seem able to get off your mind. What’s he done or said now?”

“Nothing Mandy. And you mean Nat. His name’s Nat. Short for Nathan.”

“Yes, sure. When you are this docile on your way to school in a morning it’s because you spoke to him last night. Or because you didn’t get to speak to him last night. Either way, whenever you’re away in fairy land, it’s because of him.”

“I was only thinking, Mandy. About how I might get back over to America again. Just for a holiday. Maybe at Easter. That’s the next school holiday. Not that long to wait. I’ll probably have earned enough money for a ticket by then.”

“What’s wrong with your mom and dad buying you a ticket? They probably would if you asked. There are some good bargains to be had buying online.”

“Yes, I know, I’ve been keeping an eye on the ticket prices. But if I ask mom and dad I’ll get grilled to death on why I want to go to America and it also gives them the option of saying ‘no’. So it’s best if I can get my own ticket and just go.”

“Not one of your smartest ideas, Brat. In fact, have you ever actually had a smart idea? How do you propose to get through the security at the airport?”

“I’ve got my own passport. Just walk through. They don’t check closely on the way out of the country. I look old enough. I could just join the queue with another family, even chat with them. Then when I get to the front, just go to a different check out desk than them and make it look like I’ve jumped to a shorter queue.”

“Doubt that would work, mastermind. Anyhow, how do you plan to get to the airport? Just saunter out of the house with a suitcase and tell your mom you’re off to a cadet training weekend? Get a bus all the way to Heathrow? Maybe I should suggest to your mom that she thinks of getting one of those microchip implants stuck in you like they do to cats and dogs these days…”

* * *

Will looked up from his desk as the dorm door opened and Nat strolled in. Unusually, instead of wandering over to his own bed space, he came and sat down on Will’s bed.

“Where is everyone, Will? I thought you’d all be here.”

Will glanced across from his laptop, then shoved it aside and turned to face Nathan. “Shane and Noah are giving Kyle a hand moving his kit back to his room, you’ve only just missed them. I guess they may be gone for half an hour or so. They are sure to stay for a coffee. Travis is over at the gym. He did actually finish his worksheets before going.”

“Yes, I’m sure he did. He’s pretty good at biology and sciences. I wasn’t checking up on him. Just curious where people were.”

“You’ve just missed Craig, too. I saw him online when I started up my laptop so I pinged a few messages to him. He’s been checking that math for me again now I altered the code to look at radio wave propagation instead of just optical line of sight. And he’s had his dad look at the programme too. Says his dad was impressed and that I ought to wrap the code in a one time executable and then he’ll get some of the military guys to evaluate it. He actually thinks it’s something that they might buy. Says it would save them loads of time compared with doing the process manually.”

Nat looked up, suddenly interested. “Saleable? To the military?”

“Probably to the telecoms companies too, he said. Help them site their cell towers more efficiently. Actually, I think he might be right. I can write a wrapper easily enough to hide the underlying code so they can’t reverse engineer an evaluation copy and cut me out of the loop. Who knows, maybe the next MicroSoft starts right here on my desk,” laughed Will.

“You can do that? Write an executive rap or whatever it was?” asked Nat.

Will grinned. “Of course I can. And stick with your golf, Nat, coding isn’t your forte. ‘Executive rap’ my ass…”

“We could set up a company, Will. You can do the coding and I’ll look after start-up finance and provide the business know-how. We’ll be partners, fifty-fifty.”

Will chuckled. “I can do it on my own, Nat. Writing the code is easy.”

“Yes, but I can provide the money to start things up. We’ll need an office, you’ll need computers, that sort of stuff.”

“I can get the money from pop if I need it, Nat. In fact, I’ve probably got enough of my own already. I don’t need much in the way of additional computing to write this code, and why bother with an office? I can work from my desk here, or the IT classroom, just as well. ‘Lean Enterprise’ they call it in the economics text books. Besides, when would I actually get to go and use an office? It’d just be wasted investment. A vanity shopfront.”

“Well, okay, maybe we can get by with a serviced office, perhaps run out of one of my dad’s companies. Just an address and someone answering phones for us. We can’t do that when we’re in classes. And I can provide access to markets and look after the legal stuff.”

“Still not worth fifty per cent Nat. Okay, you might be useful at the business side of things, doing that would bore me anyway. But I have market access through Craig’s dad. Eighty-twenty in my favour sounds a better deal. And all the legal bills come out of your twenty per cent stake until we go profitable.”

Nat screwed his face up. “That’s a tougher deal even than I got with Noah. No way can we do it eighty-twenty, Will.”

Will smiled and turned back to his laptop. “Fair enough Nat, I’ll just have to let pop look after the business side of things for me. Keep the money in the family.”

There was silence, punctuated by the clicking of Will’s keyboard as he waited for Nat’s next counter-offer. He didn’t have to wait for long.

“How about seventy-thirty? I don’t think you realise how much effort goes into setting up a company, the importance of having good lawyers and accountants, knowing the right people, having market presence. Even my name alone will open some doors for us.”

“Writing good code isn’t exactly easy, Nat. Minimising bugs. Making sure there is no loose code to be exploited. That’s got be a hallmark of any software we bring to market. Security. There’s far too much lax coding out there. And bloatware. Anything we do has to be lean, efficient and secure. No blue screens of death and buffer over-runs. No exploits. That’s worth a premium price. Trust me, the future is in secure code.”

“Seventy-thirty, Will,” Nathan teased again, sensing there was no longer an outright rejection. His instincts told him he was beginning to make progress.

“Seventy-five and twenty-five might be more like it, as a starting point to work from,” said Will, conceding just a little. “But then we have to factor in other things. Like I may not have all the IP in this. The original idea came from Craig, remember. He showed us how to work out lines of sight on stereo photos.”

“But you automated it, Will. Took something that already existed and was well understood, at least in some circles, and made it easier. Craig doesn’t own the original idea.”

Will thought for a moment. “Maybe you’re right,” he conceded. “The original idea wasn’t Craig’s but he brought it to us. And he did more than that. He did some work on checking the math. And he got his dad to look at the end result. So I reckon we owe him something.”

Nat thought. “We could give him a payment. Kind of like a ‘finder’s fee.’ Recognise that he had a hand in things. Say maybe a payment of $1,000. Right up front, not based on earnings or profit or anything. Just a nice payment up front, no risk, not conditional on us being successful.”

Will thought for a moment. “That’s okay in principle, Nat. But this could be worth a fair amount of money if it succeeds. I’m talking about a real software company, not just exploiting this one idea. I can do other stuff too. Giving Craig just $1,000 seems a bit mean.”

“Technically, Will, we don’t have to give him anything. And if I’m the business lead in our company, I have to put the interests of the company, and you, first. Minimise outgoings, maximise profits. Represent your best interests, just like I represent Noah’s best interests.”

“But I thought you liked Craig, Nat.”

“I do, but business is business.”

“Some of the best businesses are founded by friends, Nat. They work well because they know each other well, understand how to combine talents and counter-act weaknesses. Form partnerships based on trust. We’ve been doing some case studies on them in Economics class. Microsoft started out as a group of friends. So did Apple. Hewlett-Packard. Ben and Jerry’s. Mattell. Harley Davidson…”

Nat thought. “So, you’re saying we should give him a bigger payment. I think I can work with that…”

“No,” said Will. “I’m thinking we can give him a stake in the company.” Seeing Nat looking undecided, Will pressed the case.

“Not a big stake, obviously. There might even be a complication in him being a shareholder and not American or living here and all that stuff, but that’s what my head of business and legals would have to look into. Unless it’s beyond you…”

“No, I can cover that off, no problem…” said Nathan. “And I can see that Craig might bring something to the table that neither of us can. He always seems to be full of ideas. Plus, he has a way of going about things pretty directly. And we could class ourselves as an international company right from the get go. A European presence from day one.”

“So,” smiled Will, “Shall we work on a basis of setting up a company with me as President and Chief Technical Officer, owning 70% of the stock, you as VP of Business and Legals with 25% of the stock, and all start up costs coming from your share, and Craig having 5% of the stock. We can think of a title for him later. Obviously, we’ll have to get all our parents to look into it and agree the detail, but if we can agree that as a basis as friends, it’s a starting point.”

* * *

“Take your shoes off if they’re wet, Craig. Before you come through the kitchen, preferably, not much point afterwards is there?”

“Sorry mum.”

“You’re late home tonight. Late at school, or did you stay on at the garage for longer again?”

“They asked me if I could do some extra time at the garage. They’re busy right now, so they are working longer hours, so that means there is more tidying up to be done. I get paid for it.”

“I should hope so. But don’t let your school work suffer if you’re doing more time at the garage. They might put you back down a year into your proper class if you don’t show that you are keeping up with the higher level.”

“I’m managing fine mom. Dinner smells good. Can I have extra chips with mine? I’m starving after all that extra work. And I’ve got boxing later. I don’t need a lift, I can run all the way there. It’s fitness training tonight anyway.”

“You missed a couple of calls whilst you were out. One from your dad – he say’s he’ll call you back later. Something about some software he needs to discuss with you, and also about the plans for Easter. You haven’t forgotten he’s coming back and we’re going to go and spend a week up in Yorkshire with your gran and grandad? Dad’s flight has changed: he’s not coming in to Brize Norton on the monthly troop carrier, he’s having to get a civil flight over. That means we’ll have to go to Heathrow or Gatwick to pick him up.”

“Oh, that’s different. Useful though.”

“Useful? What’s that meant to mean? It’s hours further away.”

Oh, nothing, I was just thinking…”

“And there was another call. A Mister Allardyce? From the shooting syndicate? He wanted to speak to your dad at first, he’d forgotten he was abroad, but then he said he’d like to talk to you. Try and call him back before you go out to boxing, his number is on the pad by the phone.”