As dysfunctional as my weekends are, this is my Monday morning.
I drag myself out of bed at 6.
Showered and dressed by 6:30.
Driver has a double shot of espresso and breakfast waiting for me in the car at 6:40.
Going into the city, I read the news and the memos Arlen's written up for me.
Make it into the office by 7:30.
Make small talk with Arlen, Kai or whoever crosses my path on the way in the door, shoot off one-line responses to emails that need my immediate attention.
8:00. I'm in the Pepper Town conference room for an R&D strategy meeting. We named all our conference rooms after cities that the cyborgs destroyed. Not the major ones, like Moscow, Chicago or Kuala Lumpur, but the small places that were never marked on a globe.
I chose the name for this room. It's got a view of the bay. Gohan used to train me on the cliffs. Sometimes we'd go for a swim after we were done.
I catch up with my executive team for a few minutes. They're a capable bunch. Some started here under my grandfather's leadership. The Chief Science Officer, Marcel Hersh, worked with him on the second generation of capsule technology and led the team that quadrupled storage capacity on standard capsules. He's almost seventy now, and still trains for marathons.
Frieda Cohen, the Chief Medical Officer, joined two years ago after Soren Kjellberg retired. It's a role we established during my mom's personal crusade to engineer a cure for Goku's heart virus. Soren was her mentor during that whole endeavor, and he and his students took on the brunt of the work near the end, freeing her up so she could work on the time machine. Not that they knew that. To this day, he still believes that the antidote was for me, to guard against some hereditary disease my father might have passed on to me. In any case, healthcare has continued to be a huge area of growth for us, and Frieda has brought new ideas to the table.
There's Penelope Bristol, the COO. She was Mom's right hand, kept everything running while Mom spent months at a time focusing on "special projects." A lot of the younger executives including me look up to her as a sort of parent figure. She has a keen mind for strategy and a fierce protectiveness over our people. In the wave of government takeovers that took place globally once the devastation started, she was one of the key voices who convinced my mom not to sell any part of Capsule Corp to a state-owned enterprise. If there were anyone I'd trust with the reins, it'd be her. Unfortunately, she's made it clear that she's not interested in being CEO.
Hiro Takata is our EVP of Public Policy. The government wasn't very happy with Mom's decision. Bringing Hiro on board was a conciliatory move, so she would "take the public interest into consideration" at the executive level. Hiro is a pain in the ass. When he first started out he was primarily there to pressure Capsule Corp into doing what the government wanted. A lot of weapons development that was completely pointless, because nothing ever worked against the cyborgs. Over the years we've hammered out a more collegial relationship, and have won a fair number of big contracts through him. Basically he's made himself a very valuable pain in the ass.
The main thing we're discussing today is what to do since several countries just canceled their contracts with us. Some of them were very lucrative contracts. All of them were with non-democratic regimes that haven't been too excited about my involvement in politics. I might have gone a little overboard with the Kambar negotiation, and at the press conference afterward.
It's an unusual situation. As far as public figures go, I'm a pretty unique case. I guess you could call me a real life Bruce Wayne. I lead the most powerful corporation in the world and I fight global villainy on the side. Except my Batman persona is no secret. The grainy cellphone footage of me taking out the cyborgs is still the most played video on the Internet, and there have been four bestselling biographies written about me. I'm due for a fifth this year, and I'm dreading it. The writer wants to make it a book of leadership advice or some crap like that.
It's been a delicate balance so far, always in danger of tipping too far to one side. At some point when the world's stable, I have to give up one role or the other, or both. That was the plan when I started, anyway. Now it looks like it'll take at least two more decades. Every night I feel like I can't last two more days.
No one in this room knows that.
I get straight to the point about the problem before us. We did a ton of very specialized tech development for these contracts, and now we've been left hanging. We have little bargaining power to make the governments pay what they owe us on time, or at all, for backing out early.
We have several options. Try to get the clients back. That's Hiro's territory. I personally can't do anything without contradicting President Matsuzawa's mandate for me. Or, we could look for other clients, public or private, who might be interested in these very specific applications of capsule tech. Doubtful, since a lot of it is in nuclear energy and almost everyone's steering clear of that. The work we did for one contract on antimalarial medicine might be transferable, but it's minor compared to everything else. Or, we could just eat the loss and redirect the divisions involved to other projects. We'd have to figure out what to redirect them to. Most likely there'll be layoffs. I really don't want that to happen.
The meeting is as efficient as it can be, given Hiro's presence. I decide in the end that I'll give him two weeks to win back what he can, and I'll stay out of any diplomatic engagements while he's at it. Frieda will tap into her network about the antimalarial solution. Marcel and Penelope will figure out a backup plan for where to place our people in case Hiro can't save our asses.
The rest of the morning I answer emails, start preparing remarks for a conference next week, meet with the executive team of a nanotechnology company we just bought, and call President Matsuzawa to complain that my work as a government-leashed Batman is costing Bruce Wayne business. His aide dutifully writes down my message and promises that the President will call back within the day.
This is a fairly average Monday. I'm doing fine, treading water. I'm not hyperventilating. I don't feel like my brain's leaking out my ears. Just have to power through the rest of the day and then it can leak as much as it wants when I get home.
It's lunchtime.
I'm about to head to the dining floor when Arlen stops me at the elevator, looking a bit concerned.
"Trunks, Dr. Kjellberg's expecting you. Seaside Market, one o'clock. I sent you a note on the change this morning."
I forgot Soren was visiting. We'd scheduled this a long time ago.
This absolutely makes my day. I smile more genuinely than usual, and Arlen stops looking worried and smiles tentatively back.
"That's right. Slipped my mind. I'll get there. Thanks." I'm already moving away from the elevator and back to my office, to the window.
"Watch out for the window cleaner!" Arlen calls after me as I break into a jog.
It's an old joke between us, the fact that I almost kicked a window cleaner in the face the first time I dropped down from my 35th floor office without looking. I acknowledge the warning with a wave and he laughs.
I make the drop without incident. The restaurant's a few blocks away and it takes less than a minute to cover the distance.
Soren is waiting for me when I arrive. Still wearing his fisherman's hat, a worn sweater vest and old jeans. He's leaning on a cane, which is new. His handshake is as firm as ever.
"Hello, Trunks," he says in his gravelly voice, and I laugh at the way my name sounds in his accent, lingering on the "s." It's been way too long since I caught up with this man. For the first time in a long time, I'm feeling happy.