Featured image by DarkmoonArt_de from Pixabay

That was how it all started. Being rich and chasing trends Lindsey had one of the sleep therapy machines to help take the edge off all that partying. Gina even got the software to run on a small used 7 inch tablet computer she bought online. Bobby had done good work. He got everything to fit in a regular thumb drive enclosure. Bobby put a new battery in the tablet for her. One which supported wireless charging and hopefully would be compatible with the wireless charger Lindsey used for her phone. After that, Gina slipped the tablet into Lindsey’s back pack at school. It recorded Lindsey’s dreams and uploaded them to a cloud account. Gina downloaded them and played them back in her own mind.

It took another week of living Lindsey’s dreams to find what she needed. Something she could blackmail Lindsey with. Something really bad her parents wouldn’t forgive. If it became public her life of wealth and privilege would be over. Possibly even prison time would result. Two more days to find the physical evidence. One day to confront her. Two more days for Lindsey to cave. After all, Gina didn’t want money. She wanted to be left alone and a favor for her brother.

Bobby got a very special present on his 13th birthday and it was the best 30 seconds of is life! After that Lindsey gave Gina a wide berth. Not a difficult or obvious thing since their paths had no reason to cross other than passing in the same hallway. Bobby, well, he wanted to keep doing that until he died.

As a graduation present Gina asked her parents permission to market a “for entertainment purposes only” idiot phone app which used their existing sensors and the software she had written to help people who weren’t yet ready to see a doctor about their sleep problem. After some hand wringing and talking with lawyers they helped her set up a company and she loaded the app in the usual stores for a $20 price tag. Users still had to buy those little skull sensors made by her parent’s company, but they didn’t have to go to a doctor and the skull sensors didn’t cost that much.

What Gina didn’t tell anyone about was the dream recording or the cloud accounts she created for the app to upload to. Oh, she told them about the public cloud account and Web site where app users could store and view the same wave data her parent’s device stored. The dreams were filed by user and Gina chose to consume the dreams of her most interesting and influential customers.

Bobby had written a few game apps and built a few other things which Gina happily marketed for him. By the time Bobby graduated high school Gina had made him a millionaire. Gina had also had him design updated skull pads which could communicate via ordinary bluetooth to a new version of her app. She had them manufactured by an off-shore company and they sold well online.

He was living the dream. He played all day in a lab which had anything he wanted and he chased women relentlessly. Once he finished something he turned it over to Gina and she made him money. She made him money in other ways too. She told Bobby what stocks to buy, short and sell and when to do it. She also told him never to make big waves with his trades. How his sister managed to consistently time the stock market was a mystery to Bobby and one of the few mysteries he cared not to solve.

While Bobby may have believed he was the golden egg factory, Gina was the reason everything worked. She was a problem solver. She had her developers working on idiot phone apps at a furious pace. The legitimate side of her business was doing well. The illegitimate side was doing fabulous.

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