Misspent Youth

2. BEYOND AVARICE

HAVING A FAMOUS FATHER is a difficult concept for any child to understand. After all, he is just your father, nothing else, nothing exceptional. Tim was almost ten before he finally grasped that his dad was a little different from everyone else’s dad; that people were interested in the old man, what he was doing, what he said, and most important, what he was thinking about. And not just the villagers in Empingham, where they lived, but people on a lot of sites in the datasphere. In fact, when Tim, age nine, typed JEFF BAKER into a findbot, he was rather surprised when it came back listing two hundred and thirty-eight thousand primary references.

According to the first eight entries, all university libraries, Jeff Baker had designed the molecular structure of solid state crystal memories, the ultimate electronic storage mechanism. It was the single most important component around which the entire datasphere now revolved. All human information was stored in the one specific type of lattice that his dad had worked out. His dad. The man who wouldn’t let him have a puppy, and who was hopeless at playing football with him. His dad! The datasphere had to be kidding—like magic, Tim told himself sourly.

But the datasphere didn’t lie. His dad was truly famous. Not that fame was of much practical use in this case. Fame usually came hand in hand with fabulous wealth. The Bakers were very comfortably off, living in a sprawling manor on the edge of the village, with acres and acres of grounds; and Tim went to the nearby Oakham School for a private education; and his grandma was well taken care of in her nursing home. But it wasn’t an own-your-private-Caribbean-island style of wealth.

It could have been, Tim read with growing dismay. That was the bigger part of Jeff Baker’s fame. He could have had a fortune that rivaled that of Bill Gates or Eleanor Pickard. Memory crystals were universal. Without them the entire world would crash to a halt; there would be no information economy—no economy at all, in fact. The tiniest royalty percentage would have given him an income of billions of euros a year from the uncountable numbers of crystals that were grown to feed the voracious global electronics industry.

Instead, in an act of benevolence and philanthropy essentially without parallel, Jeff Baker had refused to patent the crystal structure. Instead he published it on his Web site, and told anyone who was interested to go right ahead and make the crystals. The server crashed for ten days straight due to the millions of attempted hits from across the planet.

Jeff Baker, Tim realized as he read his own family history, didn’t have fame so much as respect. A billion datahead nerds regarded his dad as more important than God. Very nice, but what actual use was it? Tim would have much preferred him to be a cable star. At least that way they would have gotten a constant stream of invitations to glamorous showbiz parties, and he could have mixed with celebrities. That would have done wonders for his kudos at school.

“Is it true?” Tim asked that suppertime. “Did you invent the datasphere?”

“Not really,” Jeff said with a gentle smile. “But my crystal idea certainly helped it to grow up from being the Internet.”

“Why didn’t you make money from it?”

“I did. I’ve got a whole load of nonexecutive directorships. And my consultancy work pays for your schooling, as well as your mother’s clothes. Just.”

Sue Baker narrowed her eyes to give him a cautionary look over the table.

“It said in the sphere you could have been the richest man in the world,” Tim said.

“Trust me on this, Tim, being the richest man in the world isn’t necessarily a good thing.”

“But… you didn’t get anything out of it. I don’t understand.”

“I got peace of mind. And I got you.” His smile became one of admiration. “You’re more important than money.”

“Thanks. I just don’t think it’s fair, that’s all,” Tim protested. “The whole world depends on your idea. You should be rewarded.”

WHICH IS WHAT DID HAPPEN, but not until eight years later.