19

Several days pass, and you struggle just to keep up with the pressures of your job. As a bonus to your already substantial salary, MetaHuman loans you a company-owned apartment in downtown Seattle, near the MetaHuman Incorporated tower. It's a gorgeous, spacious, high-ceilinged home with a view overlooking Washington Park. Yet you spend so little time there that you've barely had a chance to move even your essential possessions from your former home, much further out of the city.

Nor have you yet had a chance to speak with your former colleagues in MetaHuman's marketing department, to learn their feelings about your unexpected promotion. To date, your job has always been made much easier by the fact that MetaHuman has developed some truly remarkable products, its Enhancements. Even so, you have always tried to sell those products with a degree of…well, some might call it poetry; others, exaggeration.

You wonder if, as unqualified as you are for your new position as CEO, you can present yourself with a similar degree of…poetry.

One morning Winston calls up to your office. "We need to talk about our research department. Can you come down to see me?"

"MetaHuman's research department is essentially its lifeblood," says Winston several minutes later, once you are seated in his plush office and his assistant has given you a hot beverage. "Our core business is the development of products to enhance the human body and its capabilities. Enhancements, we call them. Now, as I've mentioned before, the current legal brouhaha swirling around MetaHuman has resulted in an order to totally shut down all existing Enhancement research. We're forbidden even from using any previously developed technologies to create new Enhancements. We're starting out from zero. We have a couple of dozen smaller, noncore products—pharmaceutical supplies, and so on—that are not bound by the same restrictions and allow us to meet our operational overhead. But just barely. Right now, MetaHuman is bleeding."

"And so it falls on me to rebuild our line of Enhancements from nothing," you say.

Winston nods. "First, I want you to think about recruiting a new head of research. I've taken the liberty of speaking with Mr. Leach to clear your agenda for this afternoon, and of setting up interviews with the top three people on the shortlist I've prepared for you."