Beyond the banking hurdles, the Housekeeper's two business proposals still had to clear all kinds of other challenges.
Simon's stance hadn't changed: ideas are cheap; turning them into reality is what counts.
Still, after almost a full day of meetings, both of the plans were locked in.
They would piggy-back along with Ygritte Company, using the IE browser platform and email user base for traction.
The Housekeeper would head the online software store team, officially an Ygritte project manager but in reality she would be reporting straight to Simon, while still running his private estates. Thanks to his Wall Street banking stint and his familiarity with the finance world, Jeff Bezos would personally build the online payment system.
America Online and Bell Atlantic had already pledged whatever support the two projects needed.
If online payments went live and users switched to digital bills, both America Online and Bell Atlantic would save a fortune in operating costs.
By the time the meeting wrapped, the payment tool and the software store had names.
No one over-thought it: Y-Pay and Y-Store. The 'Y' standing for Ygritte.
They would stay overnight in San Francisco. After work Simon sent the Housekeeper back to the Woodside villa to start dinner, then took his ever-present Female Assistant, Jeff Bezos, Tim Berners-Lee, Carol Bartz and the rest to another office block near Ygritte HQ.
Ygritte kept expanding, but unless it turned profitable or filed for an IPO, Simon had no intention of building a flagship campus.
Headquarters space was so tight that Ygritte's teams were now dotted across Silicon Valley like confetti.
The cloud-computing initiative approved last year occupied this plain white two-storey building.
Inside, the temperature felt noticeably warmer, as if there was central heating, thanks to dozens of computers running non-stop.
Simon waved the ground-floor cubicle staff back to their screens and led his group upstairs.
On the second floor the server hum grew louder; makeshift cubicles faced a blinking rack of machines against the far wall.
Cloud lead engineer Ralph Goodell's cubicle sat right beside that rack.
Jeff Bezos had poached Ralph Goodell from IBM; he was an MIT grad, former VP of R&D for Unix server systems. Among IBM's dozens of VPs, Goodell still required legal wrangling and a $2.5 million salary to pry loose.
The $2.5 million base was several times what Jeff Bezos, Carol Bartz or Tim Berners-Lee drew.
Naturally, Goodell's equity package was nowhere near as rich.
He hit the ground running, writing core cloud code and hand-picking a thirty-odd-member team interviewed across the country.
The cloud computing plan carried a code-name: Housewife.
During his pre-hire call Goodell had asked Simon what, exactly, "cloud computing" should look like, as no one had yet fully put it into words.
Simon, no techie, offered a metaphor: Ygritte's current data-centre worked like a clumsy newly-wed housewife who spent an hour washing, an hour cooking, an hour cleaning, wasting idle minutes between each chore.
Existing servers handled user log-ins, storage, word-processing in rigid sequence; if no job waited, cycles sat idle, creating feast or famine imbalances.
He wanted the clumsy bride trained into an efficient housewife who could wash, cook and clean in parallel; to pool every server into one elastic, time-sharing fabric.
The chat christened the project; seeing the potential, Goodell jumped ship from IBM.
They found the rumpled, thick-spectacled white forty-something glued to his monitor; two nearby engineers spotted Simon and started to speak but he silenced them.
Five quiet minutes later the screen flashed: 73%.
"Fuck!"
Before Simon could react, Ralph Goodell spat the expletive.
Tim Berners-Lee murmured, "Fault-tolerance test".
Simon nodded, recalling the brief: once thousands of processors merged, parts would fail hourly; the fault-tolerance layer would detect and reroute tasks automatically, one of cloud's killer edges.
Traditional centres could crash entire services while engineers scrambled; cloud would shrug off a few dead nodes.
Goodell surfaced, noticed his visitors, apologised and led them to a neighbouring conference room.
Ralph Goodale personally walked Simon through every aspect of the cloud-computing project's progress, adding that if Simon wanted a perfect system they might have to wait until next year; he'd recently come up with so many good ideas that he needed more development time.
Simon neither promised nor pressed him for instant results; he simply told Ralph Goodale to do his best.
Cloud computing needs sufficient scale to deliver economies of scale, so with only a few million users Ygritte's need for a cloud system wasn't urgent. Once the portal's businesses were fully fleshed out and total U.S. world wide web subscribers hit the tens of millions, the technology's high-efficiency, low-cost advantages would shine.
That point was still a year or two away, and as such, Simon wasn't in a hurry.
Over the next two years Ygritte would keep expanding its data centres as required; the extra compute power wouldn't go to waste. Once the cloud project was done, the surplus resources could fuel still more initiatives.
The discussion stayed lively until night had completely fallen and everyone finally left the office building.
Since it was already dinner time, Simon simply invited the group to a nearby restaurant.
A little after nine, Simon finally returned to the Woodside hillside villa with his Female Assistant.
Inside the living room the Housekeeper was sitting on the sofa reading some papers. Seeing the two of them, she stood and asked, "Boss, should I prepare dinner again?"
Only then did Simon remember telling the Housekeeper to come back early and get dinner ready before they'd left Ygritte HQ.
"No need. Have you eaten?"
The Housekeeper nodded, her expression unchanged.
Simon felt no embarrassment. Taking off his trench coat, he saw both the Female Assistant and the Housekeeper instinctively step forward. Smiling, he handed the coat to the Housekeeper and asked Jennifer, "Want to take a shower?"
"Sure".
The Female Assistant nodded and headed upstairs.
Simon sat down on the living-room sofa and glanced at the paper the Housekeeper had been reading, an essay on data encryption.
Alice Ferguson helped Simon hang up his clothes, then sat on the adjacent single-seat sofa.
Simon skimmed the paper patiently, understanding only about half; he had no intention of studying it seriously. Casually he asked, "Where are Zoe and the others?"
"They've turned in", the Housekeeper replied, glancing at the papers her boss was holding. "I think user-account security is going to be a huge challenge for us".
Simon smiled. "How do you propose we solve it?"
"I think Ygritte should set up a dedicated network-data-security tech team as soon as possible".
"We seem to have that department already".
"Only eleven people. I checked their résumés, they're all average, not one real computer-security expert. That's far from enough".
"Find time to talk to Jeff about it. You know Ygritte's juggling too many projects right now, so things slip through the cracks", Simon said. "Besides, with security you can only do your best, no system is unbreakable. The key isn't technical."
The Housekeeper asked curiously, "Then what is it?"
Simon lifted his eyes from the papers, sized her up, patted the sofa beside him and said, "Come, sit next to me".
The Housekeeper hesitated, then rose and sat down beside him.
She couldn't help straightening her back, body visibly stiff.
Simon inhaled the pleasant scent of the woman next to him, quite content. He made no untoward move, simply relaxed against the sofa and answered, "The key is people".
Having grown used to her boss's occasional teasing and seeing he clearly wasn't going to act, the Housekeeper soon relaxed and asked, "What do you mean?"
"I just said any system can be breached. What matters is how we respond. Say a hacker steals a hundred dollars from one of our user accounts, what do we do?"
"Call the police".
"Of course we call them", Simon laughed, "but do you think the cops will go all-out for a hundred bucks?"
This time the Housekeeper said nothing, only looked at Simon and waited for him to continue.
"Even if the police wanted to help, they couldn't; these things are unavoidable, so we handle them ourselves". Simon narrowed his eyes slightly. "Forget a hundred, even if someone dares to steal one single dollar from an Ygritte user account, as long as we spare no expense to catch him and throw him in jail, word will spread. Knowing they'll be caught for even a buck will scare off most hackers".
The Housekeeper could picture the thief doing time, not for the dollar, but for any of a dozen charges like malware or system sabotage.
But how would they find the guy?
Noticing Alice's puzzled look, Simon couldn't help lifting her delicate chin with a finger and teasing, "Looks like you're a proper good girl. Forget it, just focus on your job".
For ordinary people, once the police drop the case there's nowhere left to turn.
For Simon, the solution was simple.
In this world there's a profession called private investigator. Bounty hunters exist too. Real-world bounty hunters, and online ones who'll do anything for money.
In fact, Simon suddenly realized he could use this very pretext to build an intelligence network exclusive to the Westeros System, both physical and digital.
At that thought Simon's mind was already sketching out the plan.
Poaching talent from the FBI, CIA, or overseas agencies like MI6 to set up a detective firm sounded like a good idea.
Well, many small, scattered mini-firms, it would be less conspicuous that way. Properly controlled, they could form a complete intelligence web.
Maybe he should recruit some top-tier hackers as well.
Among hackers, some chase tech and freedom, but others chase hard cash, which was exactly what Simon could offer.
As the Westeros System kept expanding, such a private intel network could solve countless problems.
Why had America's first FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, been all-powerful? Because he'd built and run the Bureau's intelligence network for decades.
Hoover outlasted eight presidents; no one in power dared remove him. Only his death ended an era.
Afterward, though the U.S. government imposed limits on intelligence chiefs, every new powerbroker tried to sink hands into those networks, hungry for the same clout Hoover had wielded.