0.15 Reincarnation  (Page 9/12)

Furness also grew increasingly bitter about what he viewed as a broken promise to grant him founder’s equity in the company equal to that of the members of the founding group. “It was a handshake deal,” he told me. When the stock never materialized—particularly after the company went public and the shares would have made Furness a millionaire—he was convinced he had been robbed. The more he pondered the slight, the more valuable the shares grew in his mind and the more outraged he felt. “So here I am,” he said one day, “after all this time, and I’m going to come out with zero shares . And I see all these clowns that are on the board of directors—where do all these guys come from? I mean, I see another one of my babies going to the dogs.”

Furness’ feelings about the stock were complicated. On the one hand, his religiosity drove him to be indifferent to material wealth—and, in truth, he cared little for it, his mind taken up almost entirely by hopes and dreams. On the other hand, he had put more into Microvision than had all sorts of investors who were granted substantial shares of stock for their financial investment but who had put no work into the invention or the company. He felt on principle that he should be rewarded for his ingenuity, his labors, his faith, and his generosity. It was as if someone had sneaked into his head and stolen his life’s work, and with each passing day the situation seemed to eat away at him even more.

For a long time, I could not figure out why I was so thoroughly enchanted by Furness. I parlayed his charm and importance in the technology world into another book contract and followed him around for months, recording his every word, writing down his every move. I watched as countless brilliant students came to the HIT lab from around the world to study under him. I watched representatives of the leading American and Japanese software and hardware companies come regularly to the lab to see what was happening there. I watched him struggle to establish a new settlement on the fringe of the computing world, his struggle as much against his own dreaminess and idealism as against the hardships imposed on him by the frontier. And as students lured by his dream came to his lab, then went on to build their own personal fortunes out of what they found there while he remained locked in his struggle with exterior and interior demons, I watched him give in alternately to joy over what was taking form around him, in the hands of his followers, and dismay over how little he was profiting from it personally.

I finally decoded his enchantment—of me, at any rate—when I followed him to the Boeing Museum of Flight one day to watch him pitch a typically ambitious project proposal. The museum, a lavish institution on the Boeing grounds, underwritten in large part by Boeing family members, had been talking with the HIT lab for months about building a relatively simple kiosk about space flight. Typically, Furness turned the idea into a multimillion-dollar extravaganza, stretching the limits of computer technology. He proposed that the museum build a “Starfleet Academy,” in which visitors wearing VR headsets would sit at flight controls in a mockup of the flight deck of the starship Enterprise and navigate through a virtual outer space. Visitors would have this experience in groups, all of them networked on a system that would render the surrounding universe in “real time” while allowing the crew members to communicate with one another and with a “ground control” back on virtual Earth.