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  Taylor's timesharing had much more in common with the massive distributed computing model of the SETI@home project. In 1999, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley developed a distributed-computing program that included a downloadable screensaver. When downloaded, the screensaver linked thousands of unused computers to analyze radio telescope signals from the Arecibo radio telescope, searching for signs of intelligent life in background static.

  "Timesharing" linked Taylor's mental processing capabilities with the minds of people around him.

  As far back as he could remember, he'd felt some aspect of this ability. He always felt smarter and more productive around other people, although never to the extent he achieved now. He remembered exactly when his ability step-changed. A few years ago, returning from a seminar in Texas, he experienced the first real taste of clarity. It followed a couple days off work following his return. He'd caught something on the plane and felt terrible.

  He felt better over the weekend and fine on Monday. At first, he didn't notice anything different. He'd worked for Berc then, one of dozens of business analysts. He helped the developers compile business requirements documentation during brainstorming sessions with the company's clients. He had a good mix of business and technical skills with enough technical understanding of software development that he could communicate technical information to business people and vice versa.

  That Monday, Berc was meeting with a startup software company. Berc often "reviewed" new software products and classified them by market position and cost, provided the startup subscribed to Berc's research services. Both client and consultant understood that it was essentially an advertising model with a pretense of objectivity, but it was an effective way to sell new software.

  The startup team included two business and three technical people. On Berc's side, there were an equal number of developers, an application architect and the customer liaison, in addition to Taylor.

  Normally, Taylor said almost nothing in these sessions. The discussions were highly technical, with each of the technical folks vying for superior caste by challenging the other's concepts or understanding of related design methodologies.

  Once the discussion started, Taylor keyed into it in a new way. He understood in a way he'd never experienced before. When the startup's lead developer described the approach they'd taken, Taylor understood, in a detailed way, exactly what he meant. More than that, as the description spread out in his mind, he clearly saw the layout of the data that would feed into the system from the startup's business partners and envisioned how those systems pulled data components from their own customer data. He held the entire value chain in his mind at once, simultaneously seeing both detail and scope. While they talked about data that supported their application's function, Taylor's mind mapped out source data from upstream and planned possible business ventures using the data produced by the startup and the startup's clients. It was unlike any experience Taylor had ever felt or even conceived possible.

  It was clarity. Every detail in his mind was clear. He knew why they'd designed the software the way they had even though they'd not even alluded to it in the discussion. He projected from their design that they'd missed most of the business opportunities he saw for their product. They were too-narrowly focused on their primary deliverable. Taylor saw what they missed. It was exhilarating to feel such a solid understanding of things yet-to-occur. Things he knew wouldn't occur unless he shared his insights.

  He realized that he'd said something, and that everyone was staring at him.

  He took a deep breath and plunged in, telling them about all the opportunities they'd missed. In his excitement, he started too many steps away from their own conclusions. When he saw they weren't following his logic, he backed up and talked through connections until he saw a few of them nodding.

  Moving to the whiteboard, he diagrammed the opportunities he saw and made scribbled notes and plans that were three steps beyond deliverables they'd considered. Taylor smiled thinking that they looked like a table of bobble-heads as one-by-one they caught on.

  Then he recommended changes to their approach. Changes would require major rework now, but align better with more downstream opportunities. He looked back from the board and saw his ideas slowly gel for each of them.

  But Taylor's own team from Berc didn't get it. Where the startup's developers had spent months discussing the application's design requirements and business opportunities, the consultants had no frame of reference to connect with Taylor's ideas.

  Taylor's boss was not pleased. "Mr. Taylor, if you would please join me outside for a moment, I think we should leave the technical discussion to the technical people."

  Outside, his boss was furious. After several minutes he let Taylor know that this recent behavior seemed to fit into a pattern that had apparently been disappointing for some time. Taylor reeled, and realized he was a lot closer to losing his job than anyone had communicated to him before.

  At which point, the conference room door opened. The startup's lead architect asked, "Could Mr. Taylor rejoin us? The developers would like to ask him some questions and pick his brain."

  For a moment, neither responded. Taylor grinned meanly at his boss and said, "Of course, I would be glad to."

  Two years later, the startup's Initial Public Offering was the third largest of the year. Every startup employee in the meeting that day became a millionaire.

  15

  Taylor didn't quit immediately.

  Over the next several weeks, he learned more about his new talent.

  The consulting business was an ideal test environment, supplying opportunities to discuss widely-ranging industries and areas of specialized research with plenty of experts. After just a few moments, the background knowledge, conclusions and theories for each person became his own, as if he'd spent his entire life studying healthcare devices, circuit design, refining, dozens of diverse manufacturing systems, government, anything. Each time, experts came in haughty and confident that they knew everything, and left realizing they'd only scratched the surface. They were invariably excited and anxious to get back to begin work on the new ideas Taylor showed them.

  Taylor learned the more specialized the group was, the easier it was to focus their/his thoughts, allowing more detailed mental maps projecting further upstream and downstream. Groups of people with more generalized backgrounds limited his projection scope.

  Even in these situations however, his own processing power was orders of magnitude greater. At times, he'd tune out the discussion around him and make his own plans using the processing power of those around him without them being even slightly aware. There seemed to be no reduction of their own capabilities during the process and no visible sign anything was happening.

  Distance proved to be a limiting factor. Over a few sessions, he learned that the connections could only be sustained over relatively short distances – close to twenty feet.

  Each additional person added to the processing power at his disposal and their understanding of the world became his own. He couldn't see their memories, but he had their understanding and their knowledge. Taylor thought of it in the same way a person imagining the smell of a Magnolia anticipates the fragrance from memory without any idea where they first cataloged the smell. They couldn't possibly recall the first time they'd smelled the flower, but readily anticipated it from memory. He knew everything they knew without awareness of when and how they'd learned it.

  He also learned timesharing didn't last. As soon as his connection to the others was broken, usually by distance and sometimes by his own choice, he lost clarity and even the understanding of the ideas he'd shared moments before. One minute he fully understood the most complex theories and the next he had only the vaguest idea what he'd been thinking about.

  There seemed to be too little available space in his own mind to archive the resources he marshalled during timesharing. All the clarity fell like dew to the ground without the network connectio
n to sustain it.

  So he made checklists and took extensive notes. During the timesharing sessions, he wrote step-by-step instructions to himself. His "smarter" self devised long-range strategies for building a business, for acquiring wealth, and for manipulating other people. He scribbled detailed instructions he could follow even without understanding their full scope outside of the sessions. He hadn't yet conceived the glove he now used, so he relied on pen and pad.

  He learned the instructions had to be very specific. Once he lost the connection, he couldn't understand why he'd wanted to do something. So he relied heavily on the checklists. Gradually, he stopped second-guessing his smarter self. If the checklist told him to do something, he knew his smarter version had figured out that it would be good for him.

  One day, after meeting with a team of entrepreneurial advisors during a session at Berc, he'd come out of the conference room, and picked up a soda and sat down in his office to read his checklist. It said…

  "1. Quit job - TODAY."

  He'd started "Timeshare Counsel, Inc." using all the money he'd accumulated in his retirement fund. He'd picked the right clients at every step, starting with a small client whose father was retired military because his checklist indicated they had defense contract connections.

  When he needed a skillset for his own business strategies or marketing, he'd go to a conference and sit in on sessions with dozens of experts. Pages scribbled from his pen as he tried to keep pace with the flow of thoughts and ideas. Afterward he was always exhilarated. Rather than leaving him tired, the experience made him feel as if he were taking on the world, and winning. He'd stop by someplace expensive on the way home and eat dinner alone thumbing through the notes. He read them as if they'd been written by someone else. The notes were interesting, but he couldn't always follow their logic.

  It always worked. As long as he followed the checklists, everything worked out well. The security of knowing in advance that everything you were doing would work was addictive. He withdraw from situations that weren't detailed in the checklists, feeling uncomfortable with routine chores and awkward in hallway conversations. He was especially awkward with women until he'd found a relationship therapy group that met twice a month.

  The group was led by a psychologist with two assisting interns. At first, he'd gone to the therapy group alone. He'd told the others that his girlfriend wouldn't come. There were a couple other singles at the session, a man and a woman, so it wasn't that unusual. Of course, Taylor was the only one who brought a notepad. Watching him sitting alone taking copious notes, some of the others decided a psychologist was probably not required to understand his problem with women. One young couple found him especially amusing. They'd glance toward him when his head was bent over the notepad and wisecrack to each other, hiding their grins behind coughs or quickly looking down into a brochure. He didn't care that he was their entertainment. The whole time they twittered and mocked him, he was using both of their minds to make his life better. They'll be back here in two weeks, still trying to figure each other out, and I'll be using what I'm learning here to get women to do whatever I want.

  Which he did. Like an actor studying his lines, Taylor reviewed and rehearsed from the therapy session notes, until he was able to present himself as someone who cared about other people, felt compassion toward need, who preferred listening to speaking and who was interested in a woman's opinions. It wasn't easy at first. He pretended to be the exact opposite of the way he actually felt. But it was worth the effort. Like fishing, it required patience. Some sensed his insincerity and darted away, but he became an increasingly proficient angler.

  Occasionally, he'd entangle himself with a woman he couldn't free himself from. He tried to avoid women he met professionally. Clients or members of organizations that he volunteered with to worm his way into business opportunities couldn't just be told to get lost or not called, so he avoided them. There'd only been a couple that were just too exciting to resist. After a few weeks, he was ready to move on, but was trapped by a need to keep a professional relationship with them. For these situations, he returned to the couple's therapy group for more insight.

  He asked these "clingers" to come with him to the session, claiming he wanted to build deeper relationships with them. While the others looked for ways to strengthen their bond to each other, Taylor used his timesharing connection to probe his partner's doubts. He uncovered the aspects of his behavior which caused them concern and over the next week he reinforced their fears. It didn't take many demonstrations to solidify a preexisting doubt. They soon broke off the relationship. He pretended to be hurt and confused by their decision so they'd feel guilty. After the first time, he swore off dating anyone he knew professionally. He smiled to himself at the thought that he was constantly out of step with everyone else. The other couples were there to stay together and he was there to blow up his relationship. Everyone around him tried unsuccessfully to connect with others and for him it was easy. He had an ability to connect deeper than they could imagine, solely for his own objectives.

  16

  Taylor gradually drew away from situations not addressed by the checklists. The checklists were the plans his smarter self made. As long as he followed the checklists everything worked out great. If a situation was addressed by one of the checklists, he felt calm and confident, knowing that everything would go according to plan. The only times he felt confused and uncertain were the situations in-between. The big blocks of his daily activities were covered. The moments or small activities glued between weren't. Those moments frustrated him and he avoided them whenever possible. Following directions from the checklists felt like flowing downstream. Everything was going to work out. Anything not on the list made him anxious - like walking too close to the edge of a cliff, dangerous and risky.

  It was challenging at first to explain his constant note-taking. He tried to throw it off as a technique he used to augment a poor memory, explaining that writing helped him remember. He didn't care all that much what anyone else thought anyway. There wasn't anything they could do if someone wanted to take notes. The real problem with note-taking was that he couldn't keep pace with the open hydrant of timeshared ideas. His hand would be painfully stiff after a session and he'd still miss more than half the ideas.

  He timeshared with some innovative computer tablet designers looking for a solution. He was leading a discussion at the whiteboard projecting the most likely future market directions straight out of the mind of one of the clients. He was phoning it in, relying mostly on what the clients own research suggested – they were almost right, close enough. He was running idea paths through their networked thoughts to see if there was anything else interesting, when he noticed one engineer's pet project. The engineer was working on a next-generation input device – a wearable keyboard. Each letter was communicated wirelessly by the positioning of the user's fingers in relation to each other. The prototype the engineer developed followed the finger position of a normal keyboard, to minimize the learning curve. Taylor dismissed this approach immediately. He disengaged his focus from the whiteboard session without any noticeable change. He was easily able to continue leading the discussion and interacting with their questions while he pulled the information on the prototype input device over to another mental workbench. He heard his own voice like a television playing in the background while he worked.

  The engineer's main design limitation, the user's learning curve, wasn't a problem for him. He'd only be taking notes during timesharing sessions, when he had the network of multiple minds – so he could easily manage very complex command movements. He wasn't limited by any existing keyboard metaphor. He wasn't limited to letters. He could design swipes and combinations to communicate elaborate instructions and macro commands. Standing at the whiteboard, with the engineers taking down market projection calculations he aggregated from their minds, he designed the command glove he used in the meeting with Hack.

  Taylor abandoned the two-glove model he
'd picked from the engineer's mind. He wanted everything to be managed by one hand so he could attract less attention. Taking frantic notes tended to dampen conversation and openness and there were times when people became suspicious of his scribbling. If he could avoid their notice, that saved unnecessary explanation. The command glove's first layer was a keyboard with the right side "U-I-O-P" keys at the lowest level and the left side "Q-W-E-R-T-Y" a level higher. Extending his fingers reached the top keys and pulling them back selected the lower keys from a traditional keyboard. The fingertips would transmit tactile feedback through tiny electrical pads. He thought his mind would learn to translate the tiny impacts to give him a sense of the keyboard under his fingers. Within ten minutes, he had a keyboard design in mind that he felt would work. He knew he could easily learn to use it. He thought the command glove resembled a conductor's movements, or a puppeteer's movements. He smiled at the thought of himself as both puppet and puppeteer with the command glove providing instructions from his smarter self to his normal self. With his back to the engineers, his smile was unnoticed.

  Realizing he'd only used two depth layers of hand movement for his command glove design, he added other functions with his wrist pulled back further and layers with his fingers further forward. The initial keyboard layer became a zero layer, with six more layers "up" as his wrist pulled back and eight more layers as he bent his wrist forward. One layer contained a series of communication commands that he could use to send commands to his staff.

  He used the tactile responses for return communications, with tiny finger impacts sending messages back from his staff or other reading systems through the letters. The smaller impact was for the right side letters and the slightly heavier impact was for the traditionally-placed left side. The impact location placed the key. The whole system built upon the physical finger-memory that is unnoticed in the blur of interaction with a keyboard. For Taylor's hyper-awareness, nothing was unnoticed. He could register the keyboard as easily as any blind person read braille and never lose a step in concentration. He had so much excess capacity, he could afford to focus on any number of activities.