Chapter 6 : Overnight Code

Chapter 6: Chapter 6 : Overnight Code

The lights were still on in the Office of Student Affairs. Brenda set a page on Sterling’s desk, fresh off the printer and still warm.

"Ethan Cole. From Ohio. Media and Communications freshman, Carver Hall 314. Decent grades in high school, no disciplinary record of any kind." She pushed up her glasses. "Checked in at ten this morning."

Sterling glanced at the clock on the wall. 6:20. The kid had moved into his dorm, and less than four hours later he’d turned the whole Welcome Week lawn into his own stage.

Two knocks, and Hendricks leaned in the doorway, hat tucked under his arm.

"It’s over. A girl won. Nobody got hurt, nobody started anything. They were better behaved leaving than they were showing up."

"Good." Sterling made a note on the page.

Hendricks turned to go, then stopped. "Oh, and the kid’s camera died right at the end. Didn’t get any of it." He paused. "He just stood there laughing."

Sterling’s pen stopped. "Laughing?"

"Seemed pretty happy about it." Hendricks put his hat on and left.

Sterling tapped the name on the page with his pen. He didn’t care about a game. Games ended. What he cared about was the tape. A cash game, a campus cop for a referee, the school mascot right there in the shot. If the parents saw that, or the board, or the local paper—

"Brenda. If that video turns up anywhere, I want to be the first to know."

Brenda looked up from her computer. "Turns up where?"

Sterling opened his mouth, then shut it. He didn’t know either.

?

The crowd broke up slower than it had come together. A few guys were still reenacting Mac’s leap off the stage. People huddled over each other’s phones. Kevin stood at the edge of the stage hugging an empty cash box while three Student Government upperclassmen took turns slapping him on the back.

Noah was still holding the dead Handycam and staring at the grass like he was sitting with it at a wake. Then his head came up.

"Wait. The Student Government girl! The one with the camera. She was filming the whole time!" He was already up on his toes, scanning the crowd. "We get a copy from her and—"

"She wasn’t filming."

"I saw her."

"You saw the start," Ethan said. "The second the game started, she put it back in her bag. It’s not on the Welcome Week schedule. She was shooting the band and the pizza and the T-shirt toss. Not a cash game nobody signed off on."

Noah’s shoulders sank. "...You were watching that too?"

"I get bored easily. I watch everything." Ethan was already looking past him, at the front of the crowd.

From the moment he saw the Handycam was down to its last bar, he’d been looking for a way out. If one camera couldn’t make it to the ending, he’d need other eyes.

So he’d started watching the phones in the crowd. Who kept filming, where they were standing, whether anybody was in their way. The flip phones in the back were shooting over dozens of heads, and all they’d get was a smear of moving color.

Up front, only two spots had a clean look at the stage.

The first was a guy in a red ball cap, head down, thumbing through a Nokia N73.

Ethan walked over. "You get the ending?"

The guy looked up, recognized him, and broke into a grin. "Dude, I got all of it. From when the big guy started crossing his legs to when he jumped." He turned the screen around. "Check it."

The screen was barely two inches across, and the picture was grainy and kept stuttering. But you could see it. Mac’s hand coming off the pelican. Mac jumping off the stage. Maya lifting her hand and shaking it out. Hendricks’s arm going up. The audio was another story. Five hundred people screaming had turned into one long roar, and you couldn’t make out a single word.

Ethan watched it through and handed the phone back. "Fifty bucks. I’ll buy it."

The guy blinked. "You want to buy... a phone video?"

"I need it exclusive. I take a copy, and yours gets deleted."

"Fifty? Cash?"

"Cash. Walk back to my dorm with me and it’s yours."

His eyes lit up. In 2006, fifty bucks was two weeks of pizza for a freshman. "Deal."

The second spot was on the other corner of the stage. A girl who was obviously no freshman. High ponytail, a few streaks of copper red at the ends, sunglasses pushed up on top of her head, big silver hoops. Gray hoodie unzipped over a white cami, a shine of lip gloss. She stood with her weight cocked on one hip, easy and loose, a girl who’d clearly walked this lawn plenty of times before.

She had a slider camera phone in her hand. Ethan asked her the same thing. She pulled up her clip. Lower angle, and it caught Maya’s face right as she let go.

"Fifty," he said. "Same deal."

She looked him up and down, in no hurry. "Keep your money. You’re cute," she said, like it was obvious. "And that thing you pulled up there was pretty slick. It’s yours." She popped the tiny memory card out of the phone and dropped it into his palm. "Bring it back tomorrow. Brennan Hall, second floor."

Ethan laughed despite himself and turned the card over in his fingers. "Then I’d better wear something nicer tomorrow."

"You’d better," she said, without looking back.

She walked off. Noah watched her go with his mouth hanging open, then turned to Ethan.

"Dude. We moved in on the same day."

He was still processing when something else hit him. "Wait. There were like twenty, thirty phones filming out here. You got two. What about everybody else? Any one of them puts it online tonight, and your ending’s—"

Ethan was about to answer when his eyes went past Noah’s shoulder.

Maya was heading off the lawn. Alone, canvas bag over one shoulder, almost to the sidewalk.

"I’ll explain later." He pushed the memory card into Noah’s hand. "Take him back to the room. Money’s in the envelope in my left desk drawer. Copy first, then delete."

"I’m the camera guy, not your errand boy!"

"Errand boy pays better!" Ethan called back, already jogging. "Put it on my tab!"

He caught up with her under the first streetlight on the sidewalk.

"Maya."

She stopped and turned around, not surprised at all.

"You free tonight? I’ve got something to talk to you about. Very official. There may be coffee."

She looked at him for two seconds. "If this is about getting the money back, no."

"It’s not about the money. It’s business."

"Business." She repeated the word like she was checking it for bugs.

"Nine o’clock. Library steps." He thought about it. "Coffee’s on me."

"You can still afford coffee?"

"Barely. Most of my net worth went into your pocket this afternoon."

The corner of Maya’s mouth moved. She turned and left. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no.

?

Ethan got to the library steps five minutes early and sat down with a spiral notebook open on his knee and two coffees next to him.

An hour earlier, Noah had texted him in all caps: GOT BOTH. DELETED HIS. U OWE ME ANOTHER 20.

Maya came up the steps right on the hour. She was still in the pale T-shirt from the afternoon, with an old flannel shirt thrown over it and the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Her hair was still tucked behind one ear. She sat down next to him, one person’s width away, picked up one of the coffees, and checked the lid.

"So," she said. "What’s the business."

Ethan turned the notebook toward her. There was one line on the first page.

WhoWonTheGrand.com

"As soon as it’s cut, today goes up on YouTube," he said. "No ending. It stops the second the battery died. The last frame is one line of text. Who won the grand? Go guess at this website."

"Guessing is free. Out of everybody who gets it right, we draw one name. A hundred bucks. Guessing closes Friday at midnight. Saturday, the ending goes up."

Maya said nothing. She took a sip of coffee.

"I need somebody to build it, and fast. You’re Computer Science."

"I’m a Computer Science freshman. Classes haven’t even started."

"You build anything in high school?"

She paused. "The robotics team’s site. A grades database. A scheduling program for the bakery I worked at."

"That’s enough."

"I’ll decide what’s enough." She set the cup down. "Also, you’re missing something. Five hundred people watched me win today. Your secret won’t make it to breakfast."

"It doesn’t need to be a secret," Ethan said. "It just needs to be a question."

He drew four boxes in the notebook and connected them with arrows. Watch the video. Want to know who won. Go to the site and guess. When you’re done, the site tells you: send this link to a friend and you get a second entry.

"So you send it. Your friend watches the video, wants to know who won..." His pen ran from the last box back up to the first and closed it into a loop.

From a person’s width away she couldn’t read it, so Maya slid over and leaned in to look at the boxes. A strand of hair slipped loose from behind her ear, a few inches from his shoulder. Ethan caught the smell of her shampoo, faint and clean, like green apple. He pulled his attention back to the tip of the pen.

The loop he’d just drawn would one day be required reading for every marketer alive. Viral coefficient. Some people called it the K-factor. Put simply, how many new users does each user bring in?

The math was simple, too. K equals the number of invites each person sends, times the share of people who actually take one. Get K above one, and growth goes exponential.

Hotmail was the textbook case. In ’96, they tacked one line onto the bottom of every email anyone sent: Get your free email at Hotmail. Every time a user wrote a letter, they ran an ad for free. A year and a half later, Hotmail had twelve million users.

"And those five hundred people? They’ll talk."

"Let them. Five hundred people are going to tell it five hundred ways. Somebody’ll swear the big guy won. Somebody’ll say it was rigged. Somebody’ll say the couple came back. People online can’t tell who’s telling the truth, so they’ll just want to know more." He tapped the loop. "Besides, anybody can add a line to a rumor."

Maya’s finger followed the loop around, once, then a second time.

"The drawing needs an email address," she said.

"Right."

"So by the end, you’re sitting on thousands of emails."

Ethan didn’t say anything. She’d caught it.

"You’re not running a contest," she said. "You’re building a list."

"It’s both."

She picked her coffee back up but didn’t drink. "When the battery died, Noah looked like somebody shot his dog. You were laughing."

"Because it was the best ending."

"You let it die on purpose."

"I didn’t."

He took a sip of coffee. "I just didn’t cry about it."

Maya didn’t say anything. She just looked at him. She clearly didn’t buy it, and Ethan didn’t try to sell her.

Her fingers tapped twice on her knee, like she was running something in her head. "The loop works," she said. "If anybody clicks on it in the first place."

"They will."

Maya let that one go. She set her cup down on the step. "I’ll build the site. This once."

She reached over, took his pen, and drew a rectangle in the empty space beside the loop with a little triangle in the middle. A play button.

"But don’t just put the video on YouTube. Put a copy on the site, in a Flash player I write."

"Why?"

"YouTube only tells you how many people clicked." Under the rectangle she drew a line that started high on the left and slid downhill to the right. "Mine can log the exact second each person closes it. Then you know where you’re losing them."

Ethan went very still.

An audience retention curve. YouTube wouldn’t put anything like it in creators’ hands for another couple of years, and once it did, it would become the first thing the whole industry checked every morning. In the age of big data, he’d spent millions just trying to understand that line. And an eighteen-year-old had just sketched it on the library steps with a ballpoint pen, like it was nothing.

He’d come back with twenty years of answers in his head and figured nobody in 2006 could keep up. But some people didn’t need the answers. They just worked them out.

"What?" Maya said.

"Nothing. Just thinking I should’ve bought you the large."

She handed the pen back. "So what do I get?"

"I can’t pay you right now," Ethan said. "But I can give you a piece. This thing’s going to get big, and you’d be in it from day one."

Maya gave him that problem-set look again. No nod. No headshake.

"Here’s how I see it," she said. "One, when you get down to it, it’s a few college kids touching a plywood pelican. No stars, no story. Any school with a mascot could shoot the same thing."

"Two, even if your viral coefficient works, it only works where people know these kids. At SCU, everybody’ll pass it around, because that’s their classmates up there. Off campus, who cares who Mac is? Your K drops under one the second it leaves the school. Start this small and the loop doesn’t get many turns."

"And say it does take off anyway. A million views. So what? YouTube doesn’t pay the people who upload a cent. What do you do with a million views? Go to Hollywood? Get famous?" She shook her head. "I don’t see where I fit in that."

Ethan let her finish.

Every point was right. For 2006, every single one was right. Even a genius was boxed in by her own time. She could see the curve, but not what stood behind it: a business that, ten-odd years from now, would hold the attention of the entire planet. Nobody could see it. Not yet.

Then he smiled.

It didn’t happen all at once. The left corner of his mouth went up first, slowly, like he was confirming something to himself, and only after that did it reach his eyes. His eyes didn’t soften. They sharpened, and settled on her face, unhurried, not looking away.

Maya faltered.

She’d seen him smile before. On stage this afternoon, for the camera and three hundred people, that one had been for an audience. When the battery died, he’d laughed like he was in on a joke nobody else got. This was neither. It wasn’t a bitter smile, and nobody had said anything funny.

It took her a second to find the words for it. It was the look of someone who’d just heard every hard question on the test, and realized he’d already solved them all.

"You’re right about all of it," he said. "For today, every word."

"But I’m not talking to you about today."

He leaned back on the steps, looked out at the line of streetlights running along the far side of the quad, then back at her.

"In a few years, everybody’s going to have a screen in their pocket. Something a kid shoots in his dorm room is going to pull more viewers than a network show. Brands are going to line up to pay a nineteen-year-old for five seconds at the start of his video. TV, newspapers, ad agencies, the whole industry is going to move online. And when it does, somebody has to be standing in the middle of it."

"I want you to see that future. Not hear me talk about it. See it."

"Starting with this one." He held up his phone, the time glowing on the little screen. "Twenty-four hours from right now, this video is on YouTube’s Most Viewed Today page. Out of everything everybody in the country uploaded, the page for what the most people watched that day. People who’ve never heard of Mac are going to send it to friends who’ve never heard of Mac."

"Then you decide if you’re in."

He held out his hand.

Maya looked at the hand and didn’t move right away. Her reasons were all still there. He hadn’t knocked down a single one. No numbers, no proof, just starting now. Normally, this was where she’d say, I’ll think about it.

By the time she noticed, her hand was already in his.

His palm was warm and his grip was steady. When she let go, it was a second later than she’d meant to.

Maya stood, dropped her empty cup in the trash can at the bottom of the steps, and slung her canvas bag over her shoulder. "The CS lab’s open all night." She went two steps without turning around. "Register the domain yourself. I don’t spend other people’s money."

Ethan watched her cut across the lawn toward the few lit windows of the computer science building. He pulled out his phone and flipped it open. 9:21 p.m.

Twenty-four hours, starting now.