ERIC BARNES
SHIMMER PAPERBACK
In just three years, CEO Robbie Case has grown Core Communications, a data technology company, from 30 people to over 5,000. Now a $20 billion company made legendary by its sudden success, Core is based on a technology no other company can come close to copying, a revolutionary breakthrough known as “drawing blood from a mainframe.” And Robbie, its 35-year-old CEO, is acclaimed worldwide for his vision, leadership and wealth. Except that all of it is based on a lie. The technology doesn’t work, the finances are built on a Ponzi scheme of stock sales and shell corporations, and Robbie is struggling to keep the company alive, to protect the friends who work for him and all that they’ve built. Each day, Robbie tries to push the catastrophe back a little further, while his employees believe that they are all moving closer to “grace,” the day their stock options vest, when they will be made rich for their faith and loyalty and hard work. The details of the lie are all keyed into a shadowy interface that Robbie calls Shimmer, an omniscient mainframe that hides itself, calculates its own collapse, threatens to outsmart its creator and to reveal the corporation’s illegal, fragile underpinnings. Shimmer is the story of a high-tech crusade nearing its end. The shell game Robbie has created is finally running out of room. And Robbie is the only one who knows or who has a chance to make things right. Or is he?
$14.95 US/$17.95 C | Fiction Paperback | 6x9 | 288 pages
July 2010
ISBN: 978-1-936071-59-3 | Carton Quantity: 24
At some point it would become clear that I was not well. The people who would see it first, they saw it and had no reason to care. The people who should have seen it next, they were in no state to notice. Yet somewhere, at some point, I would see it myself. Probably I could have seen it all along. But then, back then, I was not seeing anything very clearly at all. I was Robbie Case, the thirty-five-year-old CEO and largest single shareholder of Core Communications, a new world company that had, in just thirty-six months, become the de facto highway for the nation’s critical financial information. Twothirds of U.S. mortgage lenders, half of the insurance companies and three-quarters of the nation’s pensionprocessing centers passed information over the Core network. Aerospace, automotive, defense industries—all used our network to transfer their most important information. Maybe, looking back, it was our offhand arrogance that I regret most. We were not techies. We employed no geeks. Instead we were the work-obsessed. Work has meaning. The money is secondary. Being here I find a kind of personal joy. At least that’s what it felt like at Core. Because by the year 2007, Core had turned the tediously complex, the horribly mundane, the deathly boring into something so technically cutting-edge and so financially lucrative that potential new employees had to enter a lottery to be considered for a job. And investors and banks undercut each other in the most inappropriate ways for a chance to place ever larger amounts of money with Core. “We could announce the creation of electricity,” Whitley had once said to me, “and the investors would line up to hand us their cash.”
Eric Barnes is the publisher of the Daily News in Memphis and of The Memphis News. He was formerly COO of a communications corporation, a reporter and editor. He grew up in Washington and Alaska, working construction and in the fisheries, and has an MFA from Columbia University. This is his first novel. Author photo by Brad Johnson.
