Monday, 7:00 AM. The Four Seasons Penthouse.
The silence of extreme wealth is different from the silence of poverty.
In my old campus apartment, the silence was always broken by the rattling of the cheap radiator, the sirens wailing down on 4th Street, or the heavy footsteps of the guy living above me. It was a noisy, intrusive kind of quiet that constantly reminded you of exactly where you were in the world.
The silence in the penthouse suite of the Four Seasons was absolute. It was a vacuum, engineered by acoustic glass and thick, sound-absorbing carpets. It was the kind of silence that cost five thousand dollars a night.
I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows, a cup of black coffee in my hand, looking out over the city. The Vanguard tower loomed in the distance, its glass facade catching the early morning light. I owned it. I owned the board, I owned the CEO, and I owned the illegal, world-shaping AI humming in its basement.
