He camped in Yosemite National Park, then Sequoia, and hiked through Death Valley. He read at night. And he thought long and hard about his next move. Each day, the solution became clearer. If he couldn’t save himself, he would save others. That was a goal he could get excited about. That was worth living for. Before, his idea of setting up a nonprofit or focusing on child welfare had been the right idea—but on the wrong scale. He wanted to do something big. He wanted to change the world—to help create a world where no one grew up the way he had.

He set up shop on Sand Hill Road. Rents there had once been the most expensive in the world. Now the former offices of a dozen recently closed venture capital firms sat empty. They were all decorated lavishly. Desmond negotiated as hard as he had with the pawnbroker for the bike so many years ago. He moved in the following week and began making calls, putting the word out that he had a new investment firm with a new focus. Thanks to the soaring stock market, he had eighty million dollars to spend. Capital was in short supply in the Valley. His inbox filled. The phone rang off the hook. But nothing was quite what he was looking for.

He named his firm Icarus Capital. In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the craftsman who built the Labyrinth. In order to escape the island of Crete, Daedalus created wings of feathers and wax for his son. He warned Icarus: If you fly too high, the sun will melt your wings. If you fly too low, the sea’s dampness will weigh you down. The story rang true to Desmond. The market’s exuberance and implosion were in league with the allegory of Icarus, but so was life. People who flew too high—who lived beyond their means and ability—were bound for failure. As were those who never took a chance.

Despite his belief that his emotional growth had plateaued indefinitely, Desmond interviewed several psychotherapists. One suggested he talk to a firm that was developing a novel therapy. It was experimental, he said, but worth checking out. The company was called Rapture Therapeutics.

Desmond was stunned when he heard the name. He still remembered it from SciNet; it was one of the three mysterious companies that had been funded by Citium Holdings and Invisible Sun Securities.

A week later, he sat in Rapture’s office in San Francisco. The company’s chief scientist held up a pill.

“This is a fifty-milligram antidepressant. You and I could both take the same fifty-milligram pill, and you might have four times the physiological reaction that I do. What’s the difference? It’s the way your body metabolizes the drug. How it processes it. For doctors, and for patients, that’s a problem.”

“What’s the solution?”