Carl enjoyed his moment. The presentation had been perfect and he was extremely pleased with his performance. He deliberately ignored Isabella, who was sitting in her little corner, mulling. As much as he adored her, he wasn’t going to let her ruin his victory. And what was her problem anyway? He could not understand why the girl who had taken three days to talk him into this adventure decided to turn her back on the very day her idea had actually proven profitable.

—

After they had fled from the sushi restaurant, Carl and Isabella decided to opt out of lunch in restaurants altogether. Instead, they would meet in the park.
Having understood the possibilities of predictive analysis, he had quizzed her further about her so-called magnets. While queuing for their milkshakes, she had started lecturing him on what she apparently called her Magnet Cluster Algorithm. Or something like that.

“The principle behind it is insanely simple, Carl. All people using social media have friends. Some people have the uncommon ability to attract more friends, followers, or whatever you want to call them, than average” she explained. “And some have an uncanny ability to attract armies of friends. I call them magnets.”

“Okay…” Carl responded, slightly uncertain.

“You can plot the connections between these ‘friends’ on a graph. I did that, and one of the more fascinating observations is that people who do attract armies of friends tend to cluster together. They are usually not directly connected, but they are very close to each other.”

“And you know this how?”

“Most of it is common knowledge. But I also quit my job and started quantifying social media users.”

Carl tried to get his head around this.

“I then corrected the graph for big celebrities, as they are rare and from a population analysis point of view not too interesting,” she carried on.

He had no idea what she was talking about.

“If you take out the celebrities, the same pattern still emerges, which means that an individual doesn’t need to be a celebrity in order to have a massive amount of friends.”
She was unstoppable again. Carl grinned. He had to admit that he actually enjoyed listening to her. So far, he didn’t understand her point, but she spoke with passion, and Carl loved passion. She might as well try to explain string theory; as long as she had this fire in her eyes, she could tell him anything and he would listen.

“So, I hypothesized that if normal people can attract so many friends, it must be something in their behavior that allows for that ability. And if this were true, it should be quantifiable.”

It was their turn. Carl ordered two raspberry flavored milkshakes and handed one over to Isabella.

“Thanks,” she placed hee lips on the straw sticking out of the paper cup and pulled a refreshing shot.
“I then spent around half a year interacting with such people,” she carried on. “Online of course. To see if I could find out what their secret was.”
“I recorded everything, and from that data, I identified around ten types of highly popular social media users.”

They sat down on a bench overlooking the skate park.

“The next step then was to duplicate their character traits and behaviors. I already had an alter ego on Facebook, but I created around fifty others, and used them on all sorts of social media. Just to find out which one would be most successful in which environment.”

“The results were thrilling. Not only were most of my profiles very successful in building up friend lists, I also noticed that the more I interacted with my ‘friends’, the more new friend requests I got.”
She looked at him. “Being active as fifty different people is completely unsustainable,” she declared, stressing the ‘fifty’ in such a way it suggested that being active as, say, forty-nine different people would be the most normal thing in the world.
“I had to drop most of them, and for the remaining ones, I automated the basic tasks, like posting status updates, accepting friend requests and post the occasional random act of kindness on someone’s profile. It’s not too hard to implement that.”

“I wouldn’t know how to do that,” interjected Carl, amused by her casualness.

She ignored his remark. “What is far more challenging is first to find new friends – preferably friends who lead to more friends – and secondly, to automate true conversation.”
She finished her milkshake.

“I have cracked the first problem. The trick is to find people who are connected to another magnet and befriend them. Find enough of those, and the direction of befriending reverses: friends of this other magnet start to befriend you. Looking at the graph I just told you about, this would mean surfing the space in between the clusters. This is the Magnet Cluster Algorithm.”

“But automating true conversation is a totally different game, really. Even if it’s just commenting. Get it wrong, and people know it’s not real. Like this idiotic travel agency I told you about last time.”
“Yet, getting it right would truly speed up things,” she added “because engaging in conversation is very time-consuming for a human being.”

She evidently spoke from experience.

Carl removed the cap from his milkshake and peeked inside. He thought about what Isabella had just said. The implications of it. He looked up and noticed she stared in the direction of the skateboarding youth around twenty meters further down the boulevard. All of a sudden she seemed vulnerable and lonely. He couldn’t decide if what he just heard was more than slightly frightening or plainly insane. Probably the latter. Whichever is was, he was intrigued by her dedication.

“So…” he finally broke the silence, “Hang on…you took a sabbatical, and instead of packing your things and sod off to Asia or Australia or wherever it is where people on sabbaticals go, you locked yourself in a room and led an online life for a full year?”

“Little over a year. Yes” she replied. She didn’t look him in the eye. He noticed a hint of regret in her voice. Or was it anger?

“A little over a year. Fair enough. But don’t you have…” he swallowed his tongue. “Never mind. It’s none of my business.”

“A life?” she said after a while. “That’s what you wanted to say, no?” She looked him straight in the eye now. Defiantly.

“Well…ehm…I guess. Look, don’t take it the wrong way please. I didn’t mean it that way. I was just wondering. I mean, how old are you? You should be out there!”

“Look, Carl,” she cut him off, deliberately stressing his name, “I’m not Vera and I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just say that I spent a year testing a theory. What matters is that I developed something of interest to you.” She resumed observing the skateboarders.

He knew then there was a history that Isabella didn’t want to share and that she knew he wanted to know more. He refrained from pushing her further but from then on, Testing a Theory became his official euphemism referring to Isabella’s padlocked personal life.

“Are you? Interested, I mean?” she finally asked.

“Why me?”

“I need you to convince investors. I can’t.”

“Have you tried?”

“Actually, yes. But I seem to have the unfortunate ability to bore everyone to death.”

Carl shifted and opened his mouth to say something.

“Don’t worry, Carl. I know I’m not a salesperson. It’s OK.”

“You’re selling your idea to me now and you seem to be succeeding,” he tried to console her.

“Yes, but you know me, and you like hanging out with me. I know I’m a bit awkward, but you like that. Vera told me. And let’s face it: it is taking me already forever to explain the idea. This is officially the worst sales pitch ever,” she smiled at her own self-criticism. “There is no way I can convince an investor. Let alone more.”

When she had first landed her idea with him, he was skeptical. He sensed she was going somewhere with these elaborate no-sushi lunch meetings. Knowing her, he was sure her calculus added up and her year of testing her theory most likely backed it up, but he hadn’t heard anything groundbreaking yet. He realized he still was skeptical.

“Many advertising firms,” he replied, “pay social media users to tell their tons of friends how fantastic this or that product is. It’s common practice now. I’m not sure what you’re telling me is in any way different from what is going on at the moment already.”

“I haven’t finished yet,” she smiled. “I want to show you something.”

She took his arm and led him straight into the skate park. Carl wasn’t even surprised anymore. Somehow he wished she would the rest of the week explaining him what she wanted; he was highly amused.

The skater boys didn’t seem to care; they continued doing their stunts as if the two of them weren’t even there. Isabella spread her arms and turned around. “What do you see?” She seemed very upbeat all of a sudden. She smiled and looked at him hopefully.

He saw skaters, obviously. He hoped they would not run him over. The skate park consisted of a collection of concrete obstacles arranged around an empty swimming pool-like hole in the ground. He now saw what Isabella had been staring at during their conversation on the bench. It hadn’t been the skaters at all: the curvy swimming pool and concrete obstacles were all covered in graffiti. Layers and layers of it. Colorful, artful, ugly, beautiful, sketchy, elaborate.

That moment, he connected with her. He knew where she was going with this, and this kind of lateral thinking appealed to him. It made him think of his guerrilla marketing days, years ago.

“Forgive the irreverence of an old salesman,” he began. “I know these scribbles are supposed to mean something, but I can’t make any sense of it.”

“Exactly my point!” she had replied.

—

When the board meeting broke up for a technical break, as Isabella had asked for, everyone streamed out and sauntered along the glass-paned office aisle back to the coffee corner or to the garden for a quick cigarette. Isabella cornered her CEO just outside the Boardroom.

She dragged him aside by the elbow and whispered hoarsely into his ear, “You’ve gone off the rails, Carl.” Then, she snapped, “I need to know who messed with Anna and exactly how far they went.”