Marta and the Demons Page 4

like naming a kid,’ I said. ‘You have to think about bullies. You think “Cody” is safe, but will he be known as Mr Cod?’

  Carly was into this. ‘You have to use your imagination to channel an incredibly flexible bully,’ she agreed. ‘A bully with a broad knowledge-base and a team of researchers behind her. A bully who got to be a bully by disrupting the bullying incumbents. That’s your bully.’

  ‘Plus circumstances change. You go for a name like Angelique. Fine, but one day she squirts her Odwalla smoothie down her front – are her classmates going to focus on ‘Angel’ . . . or go with “Angel-leaky”!’

  ‘Although,’ Carly frowned. ‘Do companies get bullied? Not so much.’

  ‘Jizz-possession,’ I tested. ‘“Hey! Nice, um, nice operating cash flow, Dis-spazz-ession!” The bullies are being sarcastic.’

  ‘They hate your operating cash flow.’

  I was feeling weirdly close to Carly for the first time in forever. ‘Or something about “dis pussy,”’ I hazarded.

  ‘Ew, Myeong.’

  ‘Oh my god, why would you say ew? – anyway, I more meant you have to think about what your name shortens to on the stock exchange. Like if you call your company “Richard” and on the stock exchange it’s “DICK” . . .’

  Carly laughed. ‘Myeong, you won’t be on the stock exchange!’

  ‘I might be,’ I bristled. ‘I might be on the stock exchange already. You don’t know what I do. I do a lot of stuff you don’t know about.’

  ‘LSE:DISS,’ said Carly primly.

  I was puzzled. ‘London School of –’

  ‘London Stock Exchange,’ Carly sighed. ‘But this is a private company, my love. It’s a tiny little noodle. How many people will download it? Like ten? You can have all the shares you want, but I doubt you’ll be getting them publicly traded.’

  I was too excited to care. ‘London Stock Exchange: diss! Like we’re dissing the whole stock exchange! Like we’re in the system . . . but against the system!’

  Carly turned up Spotify. She caught my eye. ‘This is my jam.’

  ‘This is an ad, Carly.’

  ‘I like this one. This ad is my jam.’

   

  §

   

  I did it properly.

  ‘We might end up holding a lot of money,’ I mused. ‘And we’d have a good idea when people will need it back. So in the meanwhile, we could invest some of it. Any profit could go to charity.’

  ‘For now it could go to you,’ Carly pointed out.

  ‘I guess,’ I said. I felt icky. ‘While I’m unemployed.’

  ‘And be real darling,’ said Carly. ‘Nobody expects you to work for free. Skim an admin fee from the deposits of people who don’t make their targets. Work out what a fair percentage is.’

  ‘Dispossession helps you give . . . 110%!’ I joked.

  I am a dork.

  I set up a proper company, “Dispossession Ltd,” registered at Company’s House. I split the £20 registration fee with Carly – you can pay by PayPal! – and downloaded a model Articles of Association Word doc.

  I read all 11,550 words, just so I knew exactly what I didn’t have the slightest clue I was getting myself into.

  If that sentence was confusing, try reading the 11,550 word Articles of Association Word doc.

  I sneakily taught myself stuff I could easily just have asked Carly. Pride, I guess. There was this government web site that made it pretty easy. Capital expenditure versus revenue expenditure, yadda yadda.

  Easy, but not exactly fun.

  ‘We could totally gamify setting up a company,’ I thought out loud.

  ‘I hate you,’ said Carly, in the same tone of voice she used to say, I love you.

  I stabbed one finger at Carly, one finger in the air behind me, like a badass matador or something. ‘Babe. We need to bring . . . Marta on board.’

   

  §

   

  Before she was in HR, Marta was in Marketing. And besides, Marta was good luck. And she was charismatic and forceful. Also, she was really grateful we’d helped her escape from the demons, and she had a bit more free time now that she wasn’t constantly getting chased screaming everywhere by them. And she was cute and I missed her.

  I didn’t say any of that out loud. Especially not the last bit.

  ‘Cool,’ said Carly.

  I blinked, lowered my finger. ‘That’s it? No big argument?’

  Carly shrugged. ‘Marta’s smart.’

  Secretly, I thought Marta was kind of alluringly batty and might destroy the whole company. At this stage, destroying the company was part of the fascination for me.

  This “limited liability” thing – Dispossession’s finances were separate from our personal finances!

  Not that I had any “personal finances,” exactly.

  But the point is, Dispossession could borrow oodles of money and if we went bust, I wouldn’t have to pay it back! Not even the part I paid myself as a salary! The goose that borrows the golden egg, meets legal requirements, and declares bankruptcy. 

  Repeat whenever required. Don’t be late to the party. This party is in. Sane.

  ‘Could you in theory,’ I asked Carly, ‘borrow money, and just literally, like, like, like, gamble it and get rich or go bust?’

  Carly raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe one brilliant business idea at a time, babe.’

  ‘There is probably some law or clause or something, isn’t there? That’s it, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I? Or people would do it.’

  ‘There is definitely an “or something.”’

  ‘“I, the undersigned, hereby promise not to just bet it all on racehorses or whatever.”’

  ‘That’s it, that’s exactly it,’ said Carly. ‘Then the next statute is, “Unless I want to go to prison or whatever.”’

   

  §

   

  We also recruited my friend Li Shu, a true developer and programmer (I’m a dabbler), plus Carly’s friend Narnia – I think basically on the basis that Narnia was up for it, was really good at Young Enterprise when Narnia and Carly were at school together, and was also said to be unfulfilled, because at school she’d always wanted to be an actor and/or ballet dancer.

  So no doubt this would scratch that itch.

  Ta-da!

  Meet my squad!

  Between them they knew some coding, some law, some accountancy, some marketing and some HR. But I was the one with the vision. For instance, I had the vision to issue 103 shares.

  I thought 103 was a funny number, because you always hear about how someone gets 51% control of a company, and that’s like a really big deal. So imagine one day Lex Luthor strides into my gold-encrusted board room, and he’s all like, ‘Aha, Myeong, I have the fifty-first share! The company is mine!’

  And then I raise my eyebrow and say, ‘Or at least, 49.514% of it is yours, Lex!’ And I produce these two secret shares . . .

  Like I say, courage, but also vision. Turns out you can’t make shares legally secret. But we still referred to those two shares as ‘the shares of which we shall not speak.’

  It was fun to make a company. It was a bit like selecting and equipping a party to crawl a dungeon. Anyway, here’s my brilliant ownership structure:

   

  WIZARD CLASS: Our friend Marta (marketing and HR): 15 shares

  ROGUE CLASS: My friend Li Shu (development): 15 shares

  CLERIC CLASS: Carly’s friend Narnia (marketing and admin): 15 shares

  MOM CLASS: Carly’s mom: 1 share

  Plus random townspeople who don’t do anything except opine and emote (‘Beware! Capitalism is full of demons!’):

  Our friend Tim Button: 1 share

  Our friend Helen True: 1 share

  Our friend Alex Beal: 1 share

  Zoe from Carly’s office: 1 share just to say thank-you for defeating the demons

  Which left:

   

  Me and Carly: 52 share
s

  Okay, ‘proper company’ is a minor embellishment. I spent lots of time working on the Dispossession app with Li Shu – and the app soon turned into way, way more than an app – and maybe not so much time on the business plan.

  What could go wrong?

   

  §

   

  I strode up and down beside my park bench, talking on my hands-free.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ the maker of a teach-yourself-jujitsu app was saying. ‘Why would people risk their money at zero interest? Why would they lock themselves in?’

  My heartbeat increased. Be careful, Myeong. Do not get on the wrong side of the person who can program people to program themselves to be ninjas.

  Also do not say “ninja,” which is certainly the wrong word and will definitely enrage this ninja.

  Also, cultural appropriation.

  ‘Good question. People do behave that way,’ I said smoothly. ‘People promise themselves little rewards. People make swearing jars. People push a box of chocolates away across a tabletop, so they won’t be tempted. Why,’ I laughed delightedly, ‘I once knew someone with a special app for switching off their internet for an hour each day!’

  ‘What if their circumstances change?’ said the maker of the teach-yourself-jujitsu app.

  ‘They will lock themselves in because their circumstances might change. It’s a way of saying, come hell or high water, I am going to learn that language. Or pass that driving theory test, or quit smoking, or be more productive, or learn these special moves your product conveys.’

  ‘Between you and me,’ said the maker of the teach-yourself-jujitsu app, ‘I’m not sure anyone’s ever learned any jujitsu from my app. But it has helped some people to develop an interest in jujitsu.’

  ‘I know, right?’ I laughed. ‘A teach-yourself-jujitsu app! My God!’

  ‘Yes,’ said the maker of the teach-yourself-jujitsu app, a bit frostily.

  ‘Your competitors will be