Chick Flick Page 11

  “The technology is cutting-edge,” he said. “I have people inside the industry and I can acquire these things before the general public sees them.”

  Since Lenny seemed to be genuinely intrigued by cutting-edge technology, Joel tried to tell him that we might be selling our technology soon.

  “You can get a first look before it’s sold,” he said. “And maybe get in on a piece of the action.

  Lenny was intrigued enough to hear more, so he took us into his studio, where he had reproduced his photographs into posters of different sizes. I began explaining the application, and then he picked up one poster of a chicken. He said he had taken it on one of his trips to the poor farms in Africa, where they had nothing but a few chickens. He thought to himself that he had seen thousands of chickens in his life so why would he need a picture of this one? But something had made him take it.

  “Now I know why,” he said. “It’s for you. A gift. You should hang it on a wall wherever you continue your project.”

  While he said the chicken photo was a gift, he wanted to sell us another to cover the cost of his framing. We agreed, and Lenny thrust two more framed posters into Todd’s hand as he showed us to the door and asked us for $400.

  Surprisingly, we were the ones who were writing the check at the end of this meeting.

  “I will call a friend of mine, who works with entrepreneurs, like yourselves, to bring about their ideas into products. He will be happy to meet with you, and I, too, will think about what you’ve said.”

  “He’s a great salesman,” said Todd once we were back in the car.

  I was beginning to feel stretched thin. I had meetings to go over the patent work and every few days, I received e-mails I needed to jump on for Nikola at RICPCom. Joel, meanwhile, wanted us to conduct a meeting every two weeks to go over the details of our progress with his investors. Todd thought we should meet more often at the Flying Cow to discuss business strategy. And Roseword’s partner, Samuel Cole, was e-mailing me every so often to ask for an update on how things were going. I could not refuse any e-mail inquiry or meeting request that came my way.

  Between attending all these meetings and talking about the work that I should be doing, how could I be expected to actually get that work done? On top of that, I had the newsman more and more frequently on my mind. Not just his handsome face, but also the news that he had let slip about the potential merger. What could it mean for us if the injection company merged with a huge pharmaceutical player? I thought I should talk about it with Todd, but wondered if that would betray William’s trust. I felt like I needed to ask his permission.

  To my relief, Todd was helpful in other ways, too; he was handling the talks with NavoLogic for now so I did not have to report to them, as I did to Nikola. I was still a little disappointed that they could not make us an offer of some sort, but with all that was up in the air right now, it came as a bit of a relief anyway.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what I would do if they made us an offer, Todd,” I said. “I’m not ready to sell. I still have work to do.”

  Todd had a far-off look in his eyes.

  “And we can’t take the chance that they may buy it just to bury it,” he said, something clicking deep inside his mind.

  “Do you really think they would do that?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Especially if they’re progressing with the heartbeat method, they would want to bury the competition. I have no idea how far they’ve come with it; they won’t even mention it.”

  “Well, if they talk about buying in the future, we would need to see that the project proceeds under certain contract constraints,” I said. He nodded approvingly.

  “If they do make us an offer, at this stage, I think we are talking 5 to $10 million. However, if you find the chicken genome sequence you’re looking for, then we could be worth a whole lot more.”

  “Definitely, because we could sell that as a trade secret and that would make it almost impossible to reproduce and copy, even when the patent on our method expires.”

  “What are you waiting for, kiddo?” he said, smiling. “Get a move on!”

  He was trying to lighten the mood, but suddenly, I felt heavier than ever. It was dawning on me how much pressure was on me, how if I didn’t get the sequence and they bought us to bury us first, I’d never forgive myself. Tears started to well up in my eyes; I tried to hide this from Todd, but he saw them just before they started to fall.

  “Scarlet,” he said softly, as reassuring as I imagined he was with his children, “it’ll be all right. We won’t do anything you don’t feel comfortable doing. Remember, you still own the majority of the shares.”

  I sniffled. “I’m suddenly so happy about that fact,” I said, trying to smile.

  I thought for a moment.

  “Would you consider moving to France and continuing the project there?”

  Todd laughed. “Are you nuts?! We aren’t all free spirits like you, Scarlet. I’ve got kids in school.”

  He watched my face and could tell that I wasn’t kidding.

  “On the one hand, I would just like to continue working where I do now, but on the other, if they form a research group where everybody is working on poultry-related ideas, it would be a productive environment for me to work in, not to mention the resources I would probably have,” I said.

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves, kiddo. Let’s think about the pros and cons when and if we get an offer,” he said.

  As I tried to stop my mind from spinning a million miles ahead, something crept into a dark corner of my consciousness: the one person I’d miss terribly if I moved away. My news guy. Well, I thought, he is hardly my news guy. I didn’t even have his phone number. For all I knew, he could be a married man.

  To experience a change of pace, I decided that I would call Bob, the Apartment King, to get a tour of the available warehouses in town, and he was happy to oblige me. Maybe, just maybe, we would need to expand a little, I thought. I had always loved real estate, particularly open spaces—so much potential! It was a real treat.

  Bob drove us around little streets in town and walked us through the local market area. He pointed at one building, and then another, and announced he had apartments in both. I asked him how he remembered it all and he said that he’d bought almost all of them himself; he remembered where his hard-earned money had gone.

  We arrived at an area with factories, saloons, auto dealerships, and garages. Bob took me into some of the factories. Unfortunately, a lot of them were empty spaces, as either the factories had moved out of the city to get cheaper rates or had shut down because everything now was imported from the Far East. He said that the rent was not too bad around there, and that he could get us a good deal if I found something I liked.

  He explained that that area was slowly turning into a creative corridor for artists of all kinds. The artists had realized they could rent out old warehouses and turn them into a place where they could create their art and live, loft-style, at the same time. Customers could visit easily, and the workshops were centrally located.

  “Is the deal only for artists?”

  “Kind of,” Bob explained. “There’s a special government subsidy for them in the area.”

  My face started to fall; I was getting so excited about these spaces.

  “But,” he said, “now that I think of it . . . aren’t you a kind of artist? You work with biological materials. You play around with them to create a product. Sounds like an artist to me.”

  “Yes, but the product has nothing to do with aesthetics.”

  “But it represents a moral issue! Art tries to convey a moral message. My point is that if you could get an artist permit, I could rent it out to you on the cheap,” said Bob, trying to be helpful.

  “I guess it’s worth a try,” I said.

  We walked through the alleyways, peeking into different workshops. We walked into one space which had beautiful pottery in various stages of completion lining the floor and
shelves. It was a large, open space with little stools, a ceramic bowl placed on each one. The colors that dominated were black, brown and Skobeloff green, giving the space a calm, natural vibe. Bob introduced me to the owner, Tao.

  “How are you enjoying being here, Tao?” I asked.

  “It’s pretty good,” he said. “Business is slowly picking up, more and more people are starting to become aware of this place, and they come to look and shop.”

  Tao showed us his public space as well as his room in the back, where he worked on private projects out of the public eye. He said that he could help explain the process of getting the artist permit, if I wanted. I was all too eager to hear about it, and he asked me what I would be working on.

  “If I got a place like this, I would probably bring over a few chickens so I could have eggs every morning, and I would install an incubator,” I said. “I think it would fit in well in an artist colony, to have a few chickens running around. What do you think?”

  Tao laughed. “At least then we’re sure to get fresh eggs every day. It would certainly add to the unique atmosphere of this place.”

  As we walked around the space, I saw a captivating sculpture coming up from the floor. Tao caught my inquisitive gaze.

  “That’s my crushed man,” he offered.

  “What?”

  “I had started to make a sculpture of a man out of clay, but after I had finished, it slipped through my fingers and dropped to the ground. Half of him flattened; the other half was fine. I thought I’d leave him here like this.”

  “I will take him!” I said, “Maybe I can take him home and, with a lot of patience and care, make him whole again.”

  “I wouldn’t try too hard,” he said. We continued with the tour and I saw very beautiful and extraordinary ceramics; Tao had good hands.

  He took us into his neighbor Tammy’s rug shop. Tammy was a thin, red-haired girl who hand-tufted rugs by pulling yarn through holes in a primary backing, eventually creating, in this case, decorative wall hangings. Tammy worked with a painter across the street to make rugs from his paintings, adding the yarn tufts in accordance with the painter’s colors. If you wanted the original painting, you could go over to the painter’s shop across the street and buy it.

  Listening to the artists talk about their process, I felt a familiar itch in my hands. That feeling of needing to go back to the lab and pipette. I loved working with my hands; and the rhythmic motion would relax my mind and send me to a better place. I would put tubes in front of me and pipette, just putting ten microliters of this or that into each tube, depending on the experiment. I could understand the feeling of sitting and weaving all day, it was heaven—or at the very least, occupational therapy.

  After leaving Tammy, Bob took me to the final warehouse space, and like Goldilocks, I felt that this one was just right. If I could only rent it, I would put my lab bench right here, I thought. We could make room for Joel’s equipment over there. The back room could be used for the incubator. We could get a lab-grade injection machine from RICPCom so that I could use it to practice extracting samples from eggs. We could then grow them into chickens right here, as no one would be disturbed by it, with all the grass in the back.

  There was another small room, which I could use as an office and a couple of rooms upstairs. We could paint it the way we wanted and decorate it with the local artwork from the shops in the courtyard!

  I felt dizzy with possibility. With everything in place, and with some new machinery, I could do things so much faster and we would have that prototype running in no time. I would run that machine day and night to do all my testing. As it stood now, I needed to drive to the facility to use it and I would take all my tubes there in the car, on ice, to get there. If I could just have everything in one place, the ideal working space, what a dream come true it would be! In a way, I already felt very much like an artist, at least in my soul and in my dreams.

  After I parted ways with Bob, my spirits felt so lifted and I was hopeful that maybe one day I would be able to rent a space like the ones I saw that day.

  I made my way to the pub, hoping to see William. There he was, waiting in a booth with a slice of warm pie. He warmed my heart.

  “Did you mention you were in touch with RICPCom when you talked to the NavoLogic guys?” he asked as I sat down, ready to dig in.

  “Good evening to you too,” I said. “You know, I love your beautiful eyes, I just have to mention it real quick.”

  He smiled and looked down.

  “Back to the topic at hand. Yes, we did. We wanted to get their reaction.”

  “And what was it?” he asked tensely.

  I had been so happy just a moment ago, but now something was clearly going on that was bigger than my earlier excursion through the artist colony.

  “They didn’t seem surprised. Maybe they expected they wouldn’t be the first ones we approached,” I said. “And, you know, Todd pointed out that they may want to buy us just to bury us.”

  “Someone may be interested in burying it, but I am not sure it is them,” he said, his voice lowering to a gravelly whisper.

  “What do you mean by that?” I was surprised, and I’d lost any semblance of an appetite. I set down my fork, a perfect bite of pie still on its tines.

  “I’m not sure. I need to investigate it further,” he said. “But what I do know is that you may have caused a stir in the poultry world. Influential people are not so interested in seeing your solution come to fruition.”

  My blood ran cold. I opened my mouth to speak, then thought better of it. I should let William do the talking.

  “You know the story of David and Goliath?” he asked.

  I nodded, then gulped. I was so looking forward to share my good day with William, and suddenly I felt sad. The ups and downs of research were something I was used to. One day, you’re up and things are going well; the next day, you’re down and your spirits fall. You are at the whims of your research; it was much like being under a spell.

  This was the first time I experienced feeling the ups and downs of the business world. I could only hope William was mistaken, but he seldom was.

  “OK,” I said, rubbing my eye hard. “Sorry, now I just know I have something in my eye. I am sure it’s an eyelash; can you check? Just to be sure?” I leaned in toward him.

  “Nope, all clear,” he said reassuringly after checking, holding back a laugh.

  “What? It can be very dangerous, seriously, eyelashes getting caught in your eye.” I cried out.

  “Yes, Scar, I don’t doubt it, sweetheart,” he said, trying to maintain a serious face for me.

  Oh-em-gee, I thought. He just called me ‘sweetheart.’ My heart skipped a beat.

  What William had said bothered me more than I wanted to admit. It rang in my ears as I was falling asleep, and it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up the next day. I had expected we might face some resistance, but I was genuinely surprised to think that it would come to threats.

  I decided I had to meet Caroline and Nikola at RICPCom, thinking perhaps that I could get their reassurance face-to-face. Todd agreed, especially since we hadn’t gotten anywhere with NavoLogic. Todd set up the meeting at a hotel and we were scheduled to fly there in two days. Then, I received a strange call from Cole, Roseword’s partner.

  Cole and I sat down to a meeting at a coffee shop close to his office. I was surprised he’d called and asked to meet me alone, but I couldn’t have refused. Of course, my curiosity had gotten the better of me.

  “Hi, my dear. How are you? It is nice to meet with you again,” Cole said.

  I was immediately turned off; he talked as though he was twenty years older than me, when he was probably a couple of years younger. He was arrogant, with a false sense of accomplishment, I reasoned.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Spells today, even though I don’t tend to interfere in Roseword’s private business and in our investment firm, as you know, we mainly focus on disruptive innovations.
Mostly in cleantech, of course, although we’re in other sectors as well.”

  “Yes, I know all that, I am interested to know why you called me here today,” I said, trying to cut him off as his very first words still rang in my ear. How could any one person be so annoying?

  He continued, ignoring my urgency: “I must emphasize to you the importance of Roseword and his accomplishments. I don’t know if you have read about him, but he has achieved great things in his career.”

  I had no idea where this was leading, and raised my eyebrows accordingly.

  “So you can understand that we do not want to do anything that would tarnish his reputation—one which has taken him years of schooling and working to achieve,” he continued.

  “And?”

  “You are not a fool, Scarlet, we have serious venture capital backers and other companies that we work with who require Roseword’s full attention. We are working on building an empire. Many people depend on him and yet, all he’s focusing on these days is your petty chick problem. I don’t know what kind of web you have spun him into, but I will have you know, there are people who will go to great lengths to put an end to Spells,” he said sternly.

  “Honestly, Cole, I do not spin webs around men,” I said, with a roll of my eyes that I could not contain. “I believe Roseword is a grown man who makes his own decisions and can fend for himself. Beyond that, this is just business, and I resent you implying anything more. Here I was, foolishly thinking you wanted to meet me to offer more help to Spells. But instead, you’re here to threaten me?! You are not half the man Roseword is.”

  I was spitting fire at the gall of this man. I don’t know why I always fall into the trap of thinking the best of people.

  “Scarlet, I am here to warn you that there are things beyond your knowledge or your control at play,” he said. “You started this thing and therefore, you must end it. You are a talented young woman and I will find you a job in another firm, I know. You will be well compensated and taken care of; don’t worry.”