Date Published: 11-16-2019
Silicon Valley Tech meets The Cocaine Trade.
Can you program yourself into a winner?
In the San Francisco Bay Area, tech innovation is King, and money is God.
Vik Singh watched his immigrant parents work their fingers to the bone chasing the American Dream. But standing at his father's funeral, he realizes one thing - hustling will get you nowhere. All you need to get rich is one big idea.
And when he meets Los, a small-time drug lord with visions of grandeur, Vik makes a plan worthy of Jobs and Zuckerberg:
Design a drug sale app.
After all, market disruption is everything.
From his comfortable cottage in Lake Tahoe, Vik writes the code that builds a cocaine empire. When his app attracts an infamous drug cartel leader, it seems like a natural expansion move. And for a while, life is Swiss bank accounts, luxe coke parties, and falling in love with Remi, a beautiful and ballsy woman with secrets of her own.
Then he discovers he is being watched.
The DEA is closing in, the cartel is getting suspicious, and he can trust no one. As things heat up, Vik discovers the real price of easy money.
And that price could be his life.
If you're a fan of Breaking Bad, Mr. Robot, and Dark Mirror, this is the book for you. Get your copy right now!
Excerpt:
I know now that there was a young Hispanic man on the hillside above the cottage, watching
through binoculars as Vik, a young Indian man, oblivious, did pushups on his Persian rug. I
know about the man on the hillside because Los told me when I was his hostage. I know about
the Persian rug because Vik told me how he always tapped out his reps with his nose against
one of the trees in the rug’s pattern. The tree had an extra leaf compared to the other trees,
and this was an intentional flaw: we Persians know that weavers cannot create perfection,
only God can. Vik told me he did not know whether there was a God, only that there was a
Steve Wozniak, who’d designed every circuit and authored every line of code in the original
Apple II computer, and to this day not a single bug found in any of it. But what if perfection
isn’t divine? What if bugs are?
We might know that, Vik and I.
The cottage sat at the terminal switchback of a mountain road above Incline Village. I’d
like to think that there was a moment during which both young men—the one on the hillside,
the one in the cottage—despite their separate vantages—paused together in mutual awe of
the aquamarine wonder far below, a lake two-thousand millennia in the making, a small alpine
sea. Lake Tahoe.
Vik tapped out a text—1PM still good?—then set his phone down, knowing better than
to expect the gratification of an instant reply. He had big plans for us that day, but I had gone
out the night before, and though at 29 I was still too young for bona fide hangovers, Vik figured
(correctly) that I would be sleeping one off. He sometimes joined me and my friends on our
nights out. No longer in his invincible twenties, he played the part of The Older Guy, invariably
ducking out before the wee hours. A few times that doomed summer he’d offered to take me
home, but I am not the type to leave before everything that is going to happen, does. I have
to be the last kid out of the pool.
However. By late August we had twice found ourselves alone together—once in a hot,
dark hallway at a party, once in a moonlit parking lot—and had done the things single people
do. We had kissed each other frenetically and lay hands upon each other and confided
secrets, only to downplay the significance of such things when the sun came up. Or, I had. Vik
would send me a heartfelt text, and I’d send back a picture I took of a squirrel eating a Cheeto.
Electronic conversation plays to our mutual strengths. We can craft a message, shoot
it out, get a reply, interpret it. Think. Craft another. It gives us breathing room. Face to face,
we can take each other’s breath away. Especially in those days.
The saving grace of my forced estrangement from Vik has been the time and distance
it’s given me to write with him, and about him. To codify his story. I have hundreds of pages
of his letters. By now he’s divulged to me most of the dots; here is my attempt, then, to connect
them. Any bugs are mine.
Vik used to do sit-ups, too, on that Persian rug. Pull-ups from the wood cross-beam
overhead. The rug, the beam, they are no longer. But there may always be a man on the
hillside.
We know that.
The cottage was really a single-bedroom guest house. It had been built in haste by the prior
owner to establish legal residence in the tax haven of Nevada while he fussed over plans for
an accompanying mega-mansion to be built adjacent. However, soon after ground was broken
on the main house, the SEC caught up with the man. He went to prison for illegal junk-bond
trading. The property hit the market in early May, priced for rapid liquidation. Vik swooped in.
He’d been living there ever since. He never minded the half-finished eyesore to his
west, with its 15-foot, concrete retaining wall and exposed foundation. Trees had been cut
down to make room for the house; a copse of 12-inch support beams stood in their place,
supporting nothing. The foundation collected rainwater. Pallets of lumber lay warping in the
Sierra sun. Bouquets of multicolored wires bloomed here and there from exposed conduit like
wildflowers after a forest fire.
Still waiting on my reply to his text, Vik stood in the kitchen, tamping espresso grounds
into a dense brown puck so as to leave the water no path of least resistance. He pulled a shot.
The espresso machine was industrial grade. The manufacturer’s vice-president had been
Vik’s roommate at Caltech. Years later, over lunch, the man had casually mentioned a
temperature overshoot issue plaguing their product’s boiler. Vik had scribbled down three lines
of code for a low-pass filter that could smooth out the boiler’s thermocouple signal—three lines
subsequently included on every machine the company produced. Months later, a delivery man
wheeled a dolly up to Vik’s doorstep and held up a clipboard for signature. Vik cut into the
cardboard and liberated a gleaming, aluminum marvel. He’d never much cared about
espresso before. Now he wondered if he could even think without it.
He stood leaning against the counter, gnawing his lip, staring out at the lake without
really seeing it. An urgency building. In the corner of the room was a semicircular workstation
with a 27-inch iMac workstation and beside it a MacBook Pro laptop. Both monitors blank, the
processors hibernating. The file basket piled with unopened mail addressed to the junk bond
trader, which Vik had been gradually repurposing as scratch paper.
If he didn’t start soon, the vaporous ideas in his head would swirl off, unable to nucleate.
He rubbed his whiskered face. He’d once been the type to grind away late into the night. Since
coming to the lake, he did his best work in the morning.
He crossed the room, tapped the keyboards, sat down, logged in. Back straight.
Navigating menus, opening files, repositioning and resizing terminals. His posture
deteriorating. Hunching toward the screen, counting with his finger the arguments nestled
inside a set of parentheses: 1 argument, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6—ah, that’s the problem. Typing in the
missing seventh.
Coding.
To the young man with his binoculars, watching a magnified, trembling, silent-movie
version of Vik, time expanded: the next three and a half hours felt like a day. As they would to
anyone from his POV. Very little seemed to be happening. There was a man in a cottage,
staring at a computer, cracking his knuckles, looking occasionally at the ceiling.
To Vik, though, time imploded. He’d fallen under another of his self-induced spells.
Thinking, typing, compiling, running. Erroring out. Scrolling back. Oblivious to the world
beyond the one he was writing, line by line—the world he’d created, and controlled. Lines of
text spooling past in a blur, slowing to a halt.
I know exactly the feeling.
When he’d first started coding, he’d worn headphones pumping EDM to stay in a trance.
He didn’t need them anymore. He moved through his program function by function, watching
the variables change. Rarely touching the mouse, relying instead upon keyboard shortcuts to
auto-complete filenames, to search backward, to place the cursor at the ends and beginnings
of lines.
He rubs a hand across his face, smells the coffee on his breath, the rug on his palm.
Repositions his cursor, kills a bug with a single keystroke. Recompiles, reruns. Feels a fleeting
jolt of satisfaction. Seeks another.
Patches of sunlight on the floor compress toward the windows.
At some point he got thirsty. Realized his wrists ached. His back was tight. He knew he
ought to go outside and walk around, but sensed he was on the verge of a small breakthrough.
There was just one more variation he wanted to test out…
Half an hour later he was still at the computer. The only sounds in the room the soft rattat-tat of the keyboard, the occasional sniff, the compulsive jiggling of a foot against the desk.
Finally, he went back through the new work and tidied up. Saved a working snapshot of the
code to the hard drive and went to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice. Drank it in gulps,
looking out the window at the lake. Seeing it this time.
He unhooked a frying pan from a rack and set it on the stove over a blue flame. The
remaining block of butter in the refrigerator door was thicker than he needed but too thin to
divide, so he peeled away the wax paper and dropped the whole thing in the pan. Broke in a
pair of eggs, put a slice of bread in the toaster. The eggs crackled and sputtered. He leaned
both hands against the counter and hung his head. It is difficult for him to escape the confines
of a problem space. He flipped the eggs and lay slices of cheese over them and when the
cheese had melted he spilled the crackling, steaming contents of the pan out over the toast.
So much to think through.
Coarse ground pepper, coarse ground salt.
Variables, functions. A girl.
He went out on the deck and ate standing up, without a fork, licking yolk from his fingers.
When he was done he went around to the storage closet located just off the front deck. Inside
was a full-suspension mountain bike and an unplumbed water heater tank filled with cash. The
bike dangled on a hook in the dark like a curing carcass. He lifted it off.
The young man in the forest shot off a text: Listos.
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