The next morning. Mountain View, California.
The red Cadillac convertible swept south along Highway 101, turning into a nondescript residential pocket. There were no manicured lawns like in Beverly Hills; only rows of aging bungalows with peeling paint and dusty station wagons parked in driveways.
The car stopped at 2400 Charleston Road.
"Is this it?" Emi double-checked her notes. "Saionji-san, it looks like an ordinary house. And... not a very well-kept one." The grass was overgrown, and the mailbox was choked with uncollected flyers.
"Geniuses usually don't have time to mow the lawn," Satsuki said, stepping out in seven-centimeter heels. In her white sleeveless dress and wide-brimmed hat, she looked like she had just stepped off a Parisian runway.
As she approached the door, a heated argument erupted from within—screams, roars, and the unmistakable sound of something heavy hitting the floor.
"Get out! Tell those vampires at Sequoia Capital if they try to sell my company, I'll smash every server we have!" a woman screamed.
"Should we... come back later?" Emi whispered, shrinking behind Satsuki.
"Now is perfect," Satsuki smirked. "This is the smell of a startup: anxiety, rage, and a drying cash flow."
Fujita Tsuyoshi stepped forward and pushed the door open. It wasn't locked. A wave of ozone, old coffee grounds, unwashed laundry, and a pungent scent of cat urine washed over them.
"Who the hell are you?!"
In the center of a living room overflowing with trash and cables stood a blonde woman in an oversized T-shirt, clutching a circuit board like a weapon. Sandy Lerner. Opposite her, a man sat on a sofa with his head in his hands: Len Bosack.
"If you're lawyers from Sequoia, get out!" Sandy roared.
"We're lost tourists," Satsuki replied, elegantly covering her nose with a silk handkerchief. "I heard there was a very special... 'cat' here?"
"A cat?" Sandy blinked.
Suddenly, Emi cried out, pointing to the floor. A tangled mass of black data cables coiled like snakes around Satsuki's feet, stretching from the living room into the darkness of the bedrooms.
"Don't step on those! That's our core asset!" Bosack shouted, jumping up.
Satsuki looked down at the mess. "This is the hundred-million-dollar cable?" she whispered in Japanese. Then, looking at the couple: "I am Saionji. From Tokyo. I'm here to bring you 'ammunition'—enough to kick out the vampires who want to sell your company."
Sandy's expression shifted, but Bosack was already back at his keyboard. "Whatever! Just don't touch the wires! Dammit, another packet dropped! What's wrong with the Gateway at Stanford?!"
Emi stood frozen. The filth was a nightmare for her OCD. But then, she heard it: the high-speed whirring of fans, the rhythmic clicking of hard drives, the scream of electronic signals. To her, it was the call of a mechanical god.
She bypassed the pizza boxes and soda cans, walking toward a machine in the corner that lacked a cover. It looked like a Frankenstein's monster of green boards and flashing lights.
"Hey! Stay away from that!" Bosack yelled. "It's a prototype! It's hot!"
Emi didn't stop. She squatted down, her expensive Chanel skirt dragging in the dust. She stared at the Multi-protocol Router. She saw the LAN interfaces on the left and the WAN on the right.
"TCP/IP..." Emi muttered. She hovered her fingers over a scorching chip. "Here... Bottleneck?"
Bosack stopped typing. He turned to look at the "dirty" Japanese girl in surprise. "What did you say?"
"Data Flow... too fast here, slow there," Emi gestured, struggling with her English. "Buffer... too small?"
Bosack stood up abruptly and knelt beside her, ignoring the cat hair on the floor. "You can tell? Just by looking?"
"Heat," Emi pointed. "Logic stuck. Need... bypass?" She pulled a pen and drew a messy circuit sketch on a scrap of paper—a design for a Bypass Capacitor.
"Holy shit..." Bosack snatched the paper. "Sandy! Look at this! This kid... she speaks the language of hardware!"
Sandy walked over, her hostility fading into a sense of kinship. This girl wasn't an investor; she was a geek. One of them.
"Is she your engineer?" Sandy asked Satsuki.
Satsuki, still perfectly elegant amidst the junk, smiled. "Something like that." She patted Emi's shoulder. "Is the box interesting?"
"Interesting!" Emi's eyes sparkled. "Saionji-san, it's a universal translator for computers! They've written the protocols into the hardware! It can make the whole world talk!"
Bosack was ecstatic. "Exactly! A universal translator! Those damn suits just want to sell boxes; they have no idea this changes the world!" He looked at Satsuki with newfound respect.
"Now that we've established we know our stuff," Satsuki pointed to the sofa, "can we sit down and talk about how to keep this world-changing box alive?"
Sandy kicked away an empty soda can and cleared a space. "Sit. If you have ammunition and you actually understand the tech... I'll listen to what you rich kids from Tokyo have to say."
In that chaotic garage, the ground zero of the internet, money and technology finally shook hands.