“I’m concerned about this,” someone at the table said. “LayerCake is already causing us problems and we’re only running it at about fifty percent of its true capability. Not to mention the fact that we’ve set it to lean toward the positive, right?”

“Correct,” Mandrake said. “It’s obviously still in beta and until we have enough data on individual Merge users to tailor the system to their particular values, we have Javier running essentially a light version.”

“And when we do turn the thing on full-guns? Is this something people really want or is the system going to be providing us a little too much information for our own good? And that’s leaving aside our legal vulnerability.”

Dresner nodded thoughtfully, but it was really just for show. In truth, the public system was running at a far smaller fraction of its actual capability than the board knew—probably closer to twenty percent. Thanks to the brilliant former hacker Javier de Galdiano, LayerCake’s heavily firewalled core had almost limitless access to social networking sites, financial information, websites visited, and products purchased—among a host of other critical data points. De Galdiano considered it nothing more than a control—something to compare the results of their public system to in order to create an algorithm that could mimic the less ethical—indeed illegal—central system. In reality, it was the foundation for everything Dresner had spent so many years planning.

“I think this is something we’re just going to have to allow to unfold,” Dresner said. “We’re about to begin a new marketing campaign revolving around people who have been harmed by misinformation on the Internet—people who have been confused with others with the same name, victims of identity theft, people who have been unfairly attacked through social media and other means. The message is that the information is already out there and that LayerCake will make it much more difficult to game or misuse. Let’s not forget that we’re only three months into this. Considering the revolutionary nature of the technology, it’s going surprisingly smoothly.”

Mandrake nodded his agreement. “We’ve had an extremely positive reaction from the focus groups who’ve seen the ads. I think the momentum is with us and it’s just going to get more powerful. Now let’s move on to finance, where the news gets even better. The surprise retirement of some of our debt yesterday has driven our stock prices up past four hundred dollars a share for the first time.”