Saturday, November 12, 2005

Agents

David remembers the hardest lesson he had to learn about generosity. He remembers Leonard, the kid genius with the mind and the manners of a machine. It's started innocently enough.He was at the helm - his pet term for his office desk. It's a modest office in the corner of his four bedroom home - one of the first things he bought with his lottery money. In front of him is a bank of three flat-screen LCD monitors. This is where he keeps track of the people he's trying to help. He'd been looking for a new prospect, something bigger, something bold and ambitious. He really wanted to turn someone's world inside out in the best way possible, but he's not sure how or with whom. And so he scrolls down the list of pending candidates.

At first, he would find his subjects himself. He would peruse various venture capital message boards or attend invention conventions and trade shows - anywhere he could think to find untapped talent, he'd be there. He always had his finger in the wind, but what he wanted was to go after people under the radar - people who had a great idea or a great talent but for reasons financial or psychological, felt that they didn't have what it took to get to the next level.

With this in mind, he went about assembling a team of researchers - people in various fields who were in a position to keep their ear to the ground, people who would beat the grass trying to ferret out undiscovered talent. These people would attend small, community art shows in search of potential genius. They worked in publishing houses and flagged authors who showed promise. He had former patent and intellectual property lawyers who made note of novel, potentially breakthrough ideas. He'd managed to assemble quite a menagerie of agents, all signed on to the task, all passionate about what they did.

He called them all together for a meeting. He wanted to get their input on his grand new pursuit and they caught the vision like a baby catches cold, like a forest catches fire. They put their feelers out, scoured their area of expertise. They were exhaustive about their search, but subtle at the same time - they didn't want it to get out that the anonymous benefactor (who was quickly going from rumor to myth, legend) was on the prowl for a new needy genius.

Every other week they'd meet in David's conference room and pass potential candidates around. The air in those meetings was delicious, electric, even volatile at times. They knew the person they chose would be granted resources beyond his or her wildest dreams. The world would open up to them and nothing would be out of reach. They were in the business of launching unknown talent into the stratosphere.

They went about the hard work of whittling down the choices. There was the man from Iowa who was had some novel ideas about a hybrid form of ethanol which had the potential to render our dependance on fossil fuels irrelevant. He had synthesized small supplies of his new fuel (code named bethanol, after his girlfriend) but it was unrefined and would clog intake valves and fuel pumps. The hope was that with the correct filtering process, the energy yield could potentially be comparable to that of gasoline. And then there was the problem of production. Lacking proper resources, the process was as much art as science and it took months to synthesize just a liter of the stuff.

There was the woman in the planes of Nebraska who'd created a brave new instrument, part bowed string, part resonating brass. The sounds was striking, part cello, part French horn. Her prototype was fragile, clumsy, awkward to play. Currently it was a single stringed instrument but she had ideas for a multi-stringed version in mind. Parts would have to be machined and the brass would have to be drawn and hammered to specific specifications. More than that, she needed a composer who could wrap this strangely beautiful new sound around compositions that would test its limits and explore its round, handsome, burnished voice.

There was the clock maker who wanted to resurrect the bell tower design. In his mind, the modern world revolved around time and as such, timepieces should be the centerpiece of any town square. Clocks should be celebrated and as such, he had designs that completely exploded the ubiquitous round face, minute and hour hand design. His clocks were marvels of function packed into entirely new forms. Though unfamiliar, they were easy to understand. Blocks, colors, contours were the new symbols of time, but this was not merely some abstraction that required one to relearn the language of time. Rather, it's central design motif was seen as a kind of map of the fourth dimension. He got the idea from Einstein who recognized that time could be seen as a spatial as well as a temporal quantity. The designs were simple, but their large scale was integral to it's success.

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