The sedan stopped in front of the Shell Villa at Point Dume estate. Simon showed no intention of getting out right away. Instead he turned to Sarah beside him and said, "I will have someone drive you home."
Sarah Michelle Gellar froze for a second. Her eyes toward Simon carried a mix of confusion and disappointment.
Simon gave a brief instruction to the driver in the front seat. Seeing the girl's expression quickly turn pitiful, he reached out and gently pinched her small chin, smiling. "It is not convenient tonight. When there is time, I will take you to Europe for a trip."
Sarah still did not quite understand, but she caught Simon's hand before he could withdraw it, held it, and tilted her face up. "Then, Simon, it is a promise."
Simon nodded with a smile. "Of course."
The driver opened the door from outside. Seeing that Simon was about to step out, the girl leaned her small body closer. "But Simon, how do I contact you?"
"I will contact you."
After speaking, Simon got out of the car, gave the driver one more instruction, and walked toward the villa.
Sarah Michelle Gellar very much wanted to gather the courage to run after him, but before she could move the driver had already closed the door. She could only sit back down and watch through the window as Simon headed toward the Shell Villa that so often appeared on newspaper and magazine pages.
The driver in front politely asked a question, pulling Sarah out of her daze.
The girl answered quickly. Once the car started and the man was no longer in sight, she gazed with a touch of yearning at the estate that could only be glimpsed in the night.
Simon knew very well that countless eyes were always watching him. This was California, and Sarah Michelle Gellar was only fifteen. Even if the girl herself was willing, there was no guarantee someone would not use it against him later and stir up trouble.
He already had no shortage of women around him. There was no need to plant such a ticking time bomb.
Actually he had simply been too busy lately. Otherwise tonight he could have done as before and flown the girl to another state. American state laws differed. In places such as Utah or Washington, girls could marry at twelve.
A, B, and D were on the East Coast looking after Janet. At Dume Point lately it was the doll-faced Zoe Parks and the generously endowed Isabel Dunn taking care of Simon's daily needs.
Simon entered the villa and Isabel came forward to greet him.
After the greeting she took his suit jacket, folded it, and held it against her chest. Isabel said, "Boss, Alice is back."
Although she still held the position of housekeeper for the Westeros family, because of matters concerning the Amazon online mall Alice Ferguson had been spending most of her free time in San Francisco lately.
Zoe and Isabel had recently been assigned to DumePoint estate to look after Simon's daily life. This was actually the housekeeper's tacitly approved way of training her successors.
The Westeros household's maid team in North America alone already numbered more than thirty.
After several rounds of adjustments, however, many of the women had been stationed permanently in cities where Simon owned property. The ones who could still stay close to Simon and Janet remained the original small group.
Simon glanced at the way Isabel seemed to be deliberately pressing his suit jacket against her chest and smiled as he asked, "Where is she?"
Under Simon's gaze Isabel straightened her waist slightly, yet her expression remained completely unaware. She pointed in one direction. "In the living room over there."
The Shell Villa had a dedicated activity area for the maids. Their bedrooms were generally on the second floor, while the first floor contained their own kitchen, dressing room, gym, living room, and other private spaces.
Of course this treatment was reserved only for A, B, C, D, the housekeeper, and the few women allowed to stay close to Simon and Janet. Most of the others, even in Los Angeles, could only live outside the estate.
Today was already April 9. Some of Ygritte Company's operating data for the first quarter of 1992 should have come out by now.
Thinking of this, Simon walked straight toward the living room on the east side of the villa hall that Isabel had indicated.
Isabel saw Simon's movement, paused for a second, then quickly followed.
In the past Simon had rarely taken the initiative to visit their rooms.
The moment he reached the living-room doorway he heard a light, coquettish laugh.
Looking inside, Alice Ferguson sat on the sofa holding a laptop. Zoe Parks nestled beside her, one arm around the housekeeper's waist, chin resting on her shoulder, smiling softly as she murmured something.
A doll-faced girl clinging like a little bird to a cool, short-haired beauty.
The scene was… very beautiful.
Except.
Simon could not help feeling as if his wall had been climbed.
These are the little vases I work hard every day to earn money and support!
Isabel Dunn followed behind Simon. She also heard Zoe's soft laugh. Carefully peering past him into the living room and then observing her boss's reaction, she felt a faint trace of schadenfreude.
Serves you right for always acting completely unmoved toward us!
Hmph.
Still, to avoid the situation becoming too awkward, Isabel deliberately gave a light cough as a reminder.
The living room was brightly lit while the corridor had only yellow wall lamps, so the housekeeper and the girl had not noticed Simon's arrival at first.
Hearing the sound, both women looked over at the same time.
Seeing it was Simon, doll-faced Zoe Parks reacted first. She jumped off the sofa like a startled kitten and stood up. Her eyes darted left and right in panic before she forced herself to calm down and greet him. "Good evening, boss."
The housekeeper, however, remained perfectly composed. She stood up, returned the greeting, and then promptly sent the guilty-looking Zoe off to prepare coffee for Simon.
Watching the doll-faced girl run out of the room, Simon entered the living room, sat on the single sofa beside the housekeeper, crossed his legs, and studied the cool beauty in front of him without speaking. He looked exactly like a wicked boss waiting for her to confess on her own.
Isabel actually very much wanted to come in and watch the show.
But seeing Simon's expression, after taking only a few steps into the doorway she quietly retreated again.
The housekeeper sat back down on the sofa, picked up the laptop with perfect composure once more, typed a few keys, then handed the computer to Simon. "Boss, the basic revenue data for the online mall's first quarter has been preliminarily tallied. Would you like to look at it?"
Simon took the laptop the housekeeper offered and placed it on his knees. Looking at the file on the screen, he said, "Not going to explain anything?"
The housekeeper's tone remained calm. "Boss, you never said office romance was forbidden."
Simon frowned slightly as if trying hard to recall, then said, "All right. It seems… I indeed never said that."
Seeing that Simon's attention was fully on the laptop screen, the housekeeper quickly and carefully studied the young man's expression. Only then did she relax.
Her boss clearly did not actually mind these things.
After working for Simon for so long, Alice could roughly tell when this seemingly always cloud-and-wind-light young man was truly angry.
Yet she suddenly realized that in all this time the number of times this cold-natured man had gotten angry could not even fill one hand.
It was as if there were simply not many things in the world worth his attention.
Indeed. At twenty-four years old he had already reached a peak that most people in the world might never touch in hundred of lifetimes. When everything one wanted came too easily, it naturally became hard to care.
She could not help wondering, what if it were her?
After the thought arose, the housekeeper suddenly realized that perhaps her earlier idea had not been accurate.
It was not that he possessed too much and therefore did not care.
More likely, the man was simply like this by nature.
Geniuses were often lonely and cold.
The man in front of her could not even be described with the simple word "genius."
He was completely a miracle.
A miracle that easily stirred a strong desire to get to the bottom of things: exactly what kind of person was he, how had he achieved everything he had now, and where would his limits lie in the future?
"You know, Alice? When a woman develops a strong curiosity toward a man, she often falls in love with him without realizing it."
A voice suddenly sounded beside her ear. The housekeeper snapped back to awareness and realized with a start that she had been staring at her boss for who knew how long.
Two cups of hot coffee sat on the coffee table in front of her.
Obviously Zoe had already brought the coffee in and quietly left again.
Somewhat flustered, she withdrew her gaze and reflexively retorted, "I will not fall in love with you."
The moment the words left her mouth she regretted them.
That sentence was practically the standard response of a soap-opera heroine who said one thing but meant another.
Simon smiled and continued flipping through the financial report data on the laptop.
The Amazon online mall had opened on January 23 at the beginning of the year. The first quarter had in fact run for only about seventy days.
After the explosive first-day orders caused by users' novelty-seeking and the widespread promotional marketing, the online mall's subsequent sales had quickly declined.
Compared with the astonishing 1.32 million book orders on opening day, the mall's average daily orders after stabilizing had settled between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand.
Such a sharp drop in sales figures had actually been expected.
In Simon's memory, shopping carnivals like Double Eleven often saw single-day orders more than ten times higher than normal days.
The Amazon online mall's opening day, under the Westeros system's all-out marketing, had essentially been a small-scale shopping carnival.
The subsequent sharp contraction in orders was the normal state in the early stages of e-commerce development.
Even so, across the entire first quarter the Amazon online mall had accumulated 5.03 million orders, sold 6.19 million books, and generated 135.71 million dollars in revenue.
In Simon's memory the original Amazon had been founded in 1995 and had only reached 600 million dollars in annual revenue three years later in 1998.
The current new version of Amazon had achieved 135 million dollars in sales in its very first quarter of operation. With continued growth in the following quarters, breaking 600 million dollars for the full year would be no problem at all.
In the early nineties the annual book sales volume in the American market stood at around 500 million copies.
According to the first-quarter sales data, in only one year the Amazon online mall's market share in the book sector was on track to exceed five percent. Such growth speed had already put the entire physical-book retail industry on high alert.
On the other hand, the astonishing sales performance achieved by the Amazon online mall actually seemed perfectly logical.
Unlike the original Amazon that Jeff Bezos had started from scratch, the current Amazon online mall, relying on Ygritte Company, had possessed massive traffic import from the very first day. It had access to a huge consumer base of tens of millions of users across the entire World Wide Web platform. Moreover these were high-end consumers with the best economic conditions and highest education levels in America, people who therefore possessed reading habits and frequently bought books.
In addition to the enormous high-quality user base, the brand-new Amazon mall also possessed the increasingly complete Ypay online payment system. This was another point the original Amazon could never have matched.
Even in platform capacity, the original Amazon, starting from zero, had been forced to expand step by step, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of users.
This version of the Amazon online mall had been able to support simultaneous access by five million users from the moment it opened.
Moreover, thanks to the implementation of cloud-computing technology, Amazon had been able to handle five million simultaneous users during the explosive opening day while, after user traffic dropped, flexibly scaling server resources back down to the appropriate level, thereby greatly reducing costs.
To technology companies in the industry that had glimpsed the implications, this kind of technology was simply breathtaking.
Computing resources had always been an indispensable yet extremely expensive cost for information-type high-tech enterprises.
If the Amazon online mall had not used cloud-computing technology, the massive server costs alone would have become a heavy burden for the mall. Expanding server equipment to handle traffic peaks would also have caused enormous waste of computing resources during slow periods.
On the logistics side, Simon had also drawn on his impression of the Blockbuster model and many other pieces of information, using his foresight advantage to establish a close cooperation relationship with the United States Postal Service, America's largest logistics network, thereby ensuring users' online shopping experience to the greatest possible degree.
All in all, the success of the Amazon online mall should actually be considered the result of Ygritte Company's years of heavy investment finally paying off in a thick accumulation yielding a sudden release.
One must remember that in the 1991 fiscal year alone Ygritte Company's total operating revenue from YWS services, online advertising, Ystore, and IE browser sales had reached 491 million dollars. In the industry this had also been regarded as no small achievement.
Yet on the other hand, behind Egret Company's nearly 500 million dollars in annual revenue stood a staggering net loss of 387 million dollars.
In American business history, very few capital groups had dared to throw hundreds of millions of dollars every year into an industry whose prospects remained completely unclear. One must remember that the entry threshold for the 1991 Forbes 400 richest Americans had been only a little over 300 million dollars.
Moreover, the 387-million-dollar loss did not simply mean Ygritte Company had burned 387 million dollars in 1991. The nearly 500 million dollars in revenue had basically all been reinvested into Ygritte's talent hiring, technology research and development, promotional marketing, data-center construction, and every other aspect.
Many technology companies that were now household names, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and so on, had started with only hundreds of thousands or a few million dollars in financing and then grown step by step.
Under Simon's completely cost-ignoring investment, Ygritte had undergone a super-high-growth leapfrog development.
Moreover, unlike the original timeline's early internet era of a hundred flowers blooming, precisely because of Simon's all-out investment, the current World Wide Web, even while always waving the flag of openness and sharing, was something anyone could see was a network platform basically monopolized by Ygritte Company.
Over the past few years the Westeros system had, through uniting with a large group of technology companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, and America Online, directly created an entirely new high-tech industry by smashing money in without restraint.
After reading the materials, Simon casually glanced at the time in the bottom-right corner of the laptop screen. It was already close to eleven o'clock at night.
He glanced sideways. The housekeeper remained sitting perfectly upright.
The corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. Simon set the laptop aside, stood up, walked in front of the housekeeper, and spoke amid the woman's flustered gaze that carried a trace of some other meaning. "I suddenly feel like making you fulfill your original promise."
After speaking, like a bandit, Simon stepped forward, directly hoisted the stiff-bodied woman onto his shoulder, turned, and walked out of the living room.