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Transference.”
    I looked at Fiona to see if she understood a single thing Brent said. Her mouth was agape and her eyes were a bit on the heavy-lidded side, which made me think she was about to curl up next to Brent to take a nap. I felt about the same way.
    “What is Kineoptic Transference?” I said.
    “It’s nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t exist. It’s just this theoretical way of using the electricity found in wind to move data. It could probably only work on Mars.”
    “Where did you learn of it?” I asked.
    “I made it up,” he said.
    I had a bad feeling about this, because what he said about bandwidth was absolutely true. Twenty-five years ago, it didn’t even exist, but today, with the world constantly wired (or, more accurately, wireless) and every day seeing an increased demand and a withering amount of supply. In America, it was managed by the conglomerates—the AT&Ts, the Verizons, the Sprints of the world—which means it is a managed resource and an untapped wealth because of the monopolization by the large telecommunications companies. If you want bandwidth, you need to deal with those who have created the infrastructure.
    In a country like Russia, where the outlying former Soviet regions are still years behind the curve, so far back that the curve is still just a straight line, that demand for bandwidth is a gold rush for those with money to build—or influence the building of—the infrastructure. And the people with the most money in Russia often have ties to or are directly involved with organized crime.
    Which was not a good thing if it meant what I feared.
    I got up and grabbed one of Brent’s laptops. “Pull up your site,” I said.
    He tapped it in and handed the laptop back to me. There, in vivid color, and including video, photos and graphs, I leaned all about the burgeoning field of Kin-eoptic Transference. I learned that the company was founded by Dr. Chester Palmetto, who, with a large grant from the Pinnacle Institute (which also had a linked Web site touting its desire to fund “the 22nd century in the 21st”), had embarked on a prototype of the Kin-eoptic Transference device to “high success” and that mass production was possible within the next five years, provided further research-and-development funds were secured.
    There was a photo of Dr. Palmetto standing in front of an array of wind turbines in the California desert and the caption beneath it said: “Dr. Palmetto expects the deserts of the world, both the arid and the frozen, with their potential for wind harvestation and lack of architectural impediment to be ground zero for a new technological boom.” Other photos showed Dr. Palmetto in Paris, Dubai, New York and what appeared to be Antarctica.
    There were other photos of scientists, various vice presidents and CFOs, men and women working diligently in front of computer screens and outdoors.
    “Who are all of these people in the pictures?” I asked.
    “Just photos I found online of people,” he said. “I doctored them up to suit my needs. I’m pretty much a master at Photoshop.”
    “What about Dr. Palmetto?” Fiona asked. “You have dozens of photos of him.”
    “Oh, no,” Brent said. “That’s my grandfather. He’s dead, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. Plus, he always wore a lab coat on account of being a pharmacist, so it was easy to make him look right. Pretty cool, huh? What do you think of the name—pretty cool, too, huh?”
    “Chester Palmetto?” Fiona said. “Sounds like an English cigarette.”
    “It’s the name of my dog and the street I grew up on,” Brent said proudly. “If you combine the two, it’s supposed to be a badass name for porn. I think it makes for a cool-sounding scientist, too.”
    Fiona regarded Brent with something near disdain. “When do you study?” she asked.
    “You know, it’s not about studying. You can totally game a lot of the classes if you’re smart.”
    “And you’re smart?” she said.
    He