Author Description

In just three years, CEO Robbie Case has grown<br>Core Communications, a data technology company,<br>from 30 people to over 5,000. Now a $20 billion<br>company made legendary by its sudden success,<br>Core is based on a technology no other company<br>can come close to copying, a revolutionary<br>breakthrough known as “drawing blood from a<br>mainframe.” And Robbie, its 35-year-old CEO, is<br>acclaimed worldwide for his vision, leadership and<br>wealth.<br>Except that all of it is based on a lie. The technology<br>doesn’t work, the finances are built on a Ponzi<br>scheme of stock sales and shell corporations, and<br>Robbie is struggling to keep the company alive,<br>to protect the friends who work for him and all<br>that they’ve built. Each day, Robbie tries to push<br>the catastrophe back a little further, while his<br>employees believe that they are all moving closer<br>to “grace,” the day their stock options vest, when<br>they will be made rich for their faith and loyalty and<br>hard work. The details of the lie are all keyed into<br>a shadowy interface that Robbie calls Shimmer, an<br>omniscient mainframe that hides itself, calculates<br>its own collapse, threatens to outsmart its creator<br>and to reveal the corporation’s illegal, fragile<br>underpinnings.<br><br>Shimmer is the story of a high-tech crusade nearing<br>its end. The shell game Robbie has created is finally<br>running out of room.