AX: action   VO: voice-over MS: (music)

EPISODE I

Black Ship, Samurai 

AX: Sits down. Glasses clink. Ice clinks. Drink pours. A sigh.

VO: I saw 200,000 orange bicycles stacked on top of each other behind a parking lot in Shanghai. I was supposed to meet my hotel roommate—for the Nafuki IPO business conference I was at—but I stood looking. I was captivated. It was an incredibly humid day—steamy, even. It felt like a fat fog just sat over this little orange sea of bikes. It was as if there was a building of metal and rubber that just got knocked over, but the wrecking crew didn’t clean it up. The rubble shone bright in front of the towering buildings behind it. An absentminded sunflower field. An apocalyptic palace.

AX: Repositions in seat. Leans in. Clears throat. 

VO: It was 2019. I think my first thought was that this was some unique, contemporary public art, probably under some lionized banner like Fosun or Yuz, but there weren’t any of those little cards with the artists’ names on them. It was also around the same time that a mysterious string of wildfires burned down bike graveyards all over China. A weird connection. So I looked it up and found myself reading about an encumbering story that happened in Boston’s Theater District, and then I found this online community on a website called “The Bottle” that’s totally focused on uncovering the truth about what happened there. And I sat on this curb on South Tibet Road and read threads on threads about a polemic war story that would end up taking over my life for two years. The cover image for this website was a very enticing pair of cufflinks. I guess I shall start from there.

MS: (Theme Song: “The Lunar Hotel”)

VO: Spare all the elitist verses: identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, conformity . . . . This is a simple story of turbulent relationships, of friendships that flashed like a strike of thunder. This is a story of bikers, a tale of building empires, and a model of “burning bright and burning quick.” Three friends worked together to create the world’s biggest unicorn. It’s a Safdie anxiety piece. And yet, one day when they all looked back, they had forgotten why they were on this remote, far-flung, snow-capped mountain.

AX: Looks for a specific piece of paper.

VO: Now . . . I got it here somewhere.

AX: Settles on a page. 

VO: Yes, yeah. So. Ahem. This is a true story. True. I’d like to say I’m being respectful by changing all of the names, but really I’m at the mercy of censorship. I don’t have anyone’s blessing, but all the people I barked up to tell me this story, unanimously, wanted the story to be told. But, they also wanted to keep their anonymous, precious, normal life. Life is full of evasions and ambiguities, I think. A narrator’s dilemma. 

VO: So I come to you with real people, real dates, real stories, just different names. This re-telling is proof that you should never throw money at a recipe riddled with deviation, betrayal, and social climbing. In this case, when the snow settles, 100 million people are gonna be owed $9.99 apiece. I’m talking big. Don’t worry about the math on that—it’s a lot.

MS: (“The Lunar Hotel” Closes)

VO: Z-O was a national sensation in 2014, if you remember it. An “ultrahit.” A supernova. People fell in love with it, and they forgot about it. Uber, Netflix, DoorDash, Z-O—just another part of life. It was at the head of the pack, and then it burned down to the ground—literally. Call it market fluctuation, changing times, anything you want. There’s something that red-blooded capitalists and my green-thumb grandma have in common: when something stops growing, they’re scared. They need to find what went wrong. But in the curious case of Z-O, they didn’t even have time to find that piece. Trust me, urban capitalistorians tried. 

VO: So what happened in Boston?

AX: Rummages through notebook paper. Runs fingers along paper.

VO: Let’s meet Mari. After seeing a goofy gold flyer while riding the T one day, Mari found herself sitting in a weirdly lit room at Harvard Medical School, waiting for her brain to be scanned. $200 bucks could come from anywhere as far as she was concerned. A tall, chubby, kinda gloomy guy with a burly goatee and a man bun walked in, ready to ask questions off of his clipboard. 

VO: She didn’t think much of the encounter until he handed her a flyer calling for bike donations. Which begged the question: who scans people’s brains as a front for trying to get used bikes? Strange.

VO: But it was strange in a way that Mari wanted to investigate. It was not like she tried to be sneaky, but she couldn’t resist. She told him she did have a bike for him and that she’d ride it to his dorm and drop it off that Saturday. Obviously, that did not happen. But, every other week for the next two months, the two of them would sit in that same brain scan room for an hour, scanning. That’s the way this fateful encounter bubbled up purely by chance. That’s how Shep became Mari’s only friend in Boston at the time.

AX: Rummages through notebook paper. Runs fingers along paper. One more time.

VO: Hmm. Why do I do this to myself?

AX: More vigorous flipping.

VO: Yes. So. Boston University has student elections every year, and their student government election is famous for breeding future business tycoons and local government big-wigs. I mean it is only college student government, nothing too dramatic, but the predictive effects just often work out. Not everyone can get nominated—every year’s contenders all come from wealth and big name families. So you’d understand the surprise from the student body in 2014 when the top two contenders were both no-name Chinese guys. Kai Lin was a first-year student from a small town in China, actually the first ever from his town to go to school in the U.S. People were surprised by him because everyone was under the impression that he was quiet, muscular, unintentionally funny, and so transformable that he was almost like a collection of cliché personal traits. And his campaign strategy was bold. He had a bike-sharing business that everyone on campus became addicted to. He persuaded all his friends, professors, and even strangers to donate their dusty old bikes hidden deep in their garages and put the—what—127 bikes he got?—all over campus. And that was the always-craved humble beginning of Z-O.

VO: Basically, how it works is you download an app, you put down a refundable deposit of $10, and then you’re ready to rent a bike. You find one in your area and type the number in. Then, it charges $0.25 per mile. The first bikes had little coin baskets. And yes, once they got half full, they would weigh the bikes down significantly—and sound funny. Don’t worry. They fixed it later on. And yes, it was a shabby app that Kai had built. Here’s the thing, Boston is a small town in a lot of ways. Community is everything. I’ve been spat on at a Red Sox game, but there’s a certain connection you find and learn to treasure. And, somehow, Z-O bikes struck a chord with people. The subway is smelly. Uber is expensive. Why not let Z-O take you that extra mile?

AX: Rummages through more paper. Flaps an image.

VO: Z-O got popular pretty quickly, spreading to almost every university in Boston, and as a cherry on top for his campaign, Kai donated all the revenue to charity, an organization called “Artists Without A Cause.” That’s what we call good PR.

AX: Puts notebook down. Leans back. Takes a sip.

VO: What about his opponent? Wes Liang was all you can think of when you think about a charming American-born Chinese kid. Everything he did screamed “F.R.A.T.” and “class.” A little bit. You know, big-framed glasses and bleached blonde hair like a K-Pop star, full tattoo sleeves on both forearms. He was wrapping up his economics degree and getting ready to enroll in an MBA program. He’d been around the block—the talk of the town in a different way. Wes wanted to win the election, too. But he took a different route than Kai. He was a schmoozer. For example, he bought a bunch of tickets to a Justin Bieber concert for the election committee members. The entire front row at the TD Garden.

MS: (Spacey Bieber-esque Instrumental Cover)

VO: And . . . wealth won out. Would you believe it? An original idea for a community-building bike-sharing service was great, but Bieber tickets were much more realistic. Democracy in action. It was a great place to stop, but the story didn’t end here. The next day, Kai received this thick, dark green, and golden-lined invitation to a dinner party at the Colonial Theater right by the Boston Common—the crown jewel of all Boston theaters, famous for its iconic sky-blue, swan-feather-textured wallpaper. This invitation went the whole nine. I guess Wes was a gracious and tasteful winner. 

MS: (The Unpublished “Op. 35, No. 15” from Sergei Rachmaninoff)

VO: When the dinner ended, there was an underground art trading after party. The theme was “Orange.” 

VO: It was almost like every big name in Boston, like the head of “The Boston Globe” and Natalie Portman, wanted their presence felt on the scene. Kai was stunned by all the glittery dresses and tightly-wound bowties—a couple even had a diamond on them, I think, judging from the pictures that got leaked. Oh, and that thirty-foot-long red carpet with not a single camera flash. It didn’t make sense, but Kai made sure he introduced himself to everyone. Yes, even Nat.  

AX: Plays a recording.

Unnamed Guest: Where’re you from?

Kai: China. Shandong Province.

Unnamed Guest: Is that, like, a city? In . . . .  Educate me.

Kai: It’s a northern province.

Unnamed Guest: Say that one more time.

Kai: A northern province?

Unnamed Guest: Mongol.

Kai: Close.

Unnamed Guest: Oh! . . . Rad.

AX: Clip ends.

VO: And that was kind of how every conversation went for him that night. That’s what the thread says. And there was this picture that really said it all. Kai did not fit in at this place, of course. I don’t know if they even had seats because Colonial was under renovation at the time. They probably had to duck on the second floor on account of the cords all dangling from the ceiling. When the auction started, Kai stood on the balcony with Wes, dressed in a full black suit. The most fashionably dressed he’d ever been, but still painfully stubborn. Might as well have stamped “I didn’t get the memo” on his forehead. But an orange scarf saved the day. 

VO: And I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that Kai and Wes were long-time enemies, but this was in fact their first outing together after the death of their common friend, Shep Zhao. That Shep, Mari’s friend. Remember? One thing I noticed from the picture was—Wes was looking at the stage, while Kai was staring right into the audience seats. They were quiet. Very different from the past few election weeks. 

AX: Rumbling crowd murmurs, warped.

VO: I suppose I should mention that, what most people didn’t realize was . . . Mari was also there. She was an Assistant Coordinator, whatever that really means. It was her first real art gig since moving to Boston—paid under the table, of course. Damn did it sting to sit under the patriarchal umbrella that was art-world-money. But damn did it get her closer to the water source. The Bottle says she wanted to be a digital artist, which would be pretty advanced for her time. Her close friends mentioned that Mari, though always looking very confident, had secretly believed that she wasn’t talented enough to succeed as an artist. So, Assistant Art Coordinator was probably the closest she could get. She thought.

VO: After the dinner party, Kai really thought he would not see Wes for a while. It had already been two months, and the only time Wes and Kai actually saw each other after Shep passed was during student election formalities. But the next day, Wes had a small gift for Kai, delivered right to his door. It was a pair of rough, coarse, orange antique cuff-links. They were from last night’s auction brochure. Kai didn’t even have a suit to wear with these cufflinks. He thought he’d never have a reason to wear something this decent.

MS: (Theme Song Variations: “Variation #4”)

VO: Kai did come from money, old but dying money. His family was behind a nation-wide famous bike brand in China—Phoenix. When people talked about bikes in the old times, Phoenix was a precious, shared memory. The word “phoenix” used to mean a bike when it came out of people’s mouths. In fact, a Phoenix bike was one of the “Big Four Things,” along with a sewing machine, a wristwatch (generally from the Shanghai Watch Company), and a radio receiver. Can you imagine? All that so a man could marry his wife in the 70s. 

VO: Shep had been in Kai’s life for as long as Kai could remember. They practically grew up together. Shep’s parents both worked for Phoenix. The two of them played in the same bike factory every day—that is, until Shep’s parents were laid off when the Phoenix brand started tanking. 

VO: By the turn of the century, Phoenix bikes stopped being a national craze. The younger generation's values and needs in bikes had shifted. Phoenix started to lose blood. In 2001, the Phoenix lost almost $28 million, which would be over $300 million in 2021. In the 21st century, Phoenix has never risen from the ashes—not once. But it didn’t go bankrupt—it hung in there, as a historical, soon-to-be-forgotten cultural symbol. 

VO: However, being a cultural symbol came with a price. Sure, Kai’s family lost some money, but so many of the Phoenix workers were left out of the picture—they became pebbles on the cruel beach of economic reform, Shep’s family included. After that, Shep’s parents had to move to the outskirts of Beijing. It was well before the internet explosion, so Kai and Shep lost connection. The years went by, and by the time high school rolled around, Kai ended up in Minnesota, while Shep remained in Beijing. They both excelled at school, just on different sides of the world. Until they both received an acceptance letter from BU. Funny how things worked. 

AX: Bike sounds: bell, pedals.

VO: At its early stage of expansion, Z-O spread to three more campuses outside Boston University: Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern. If you happened to be in those schools in 2014, you’d remember the first generation of Z-O bikes on the street. They had an elegant design: sleek handlebars, curved seats, shiny spokes, exactly like the old Phoenix bikes that Chinese people used to ride around. In a way, it was its vintage, nostalgic look that captivated Bean Town’s heart. As a matter of fact, those first 2,000 bikes were straight out of Kai’s dad’s factory. They got packed up and sent by ship, across a million miles over the ocean, and arrived in Boston Harbor. Kai didn’t mind the cost—he knew this was only a sprinkle of money compared to what he and Shep wanted to build. He asked his dad to do one thing before sending the bikes, though—paint them blue. It was something Kai and Shep had argued about a lot before, and somehow they landed on that color.

VO: Early Z-O was a business idea that Shep and Kai came up with together. They always joked about how their entire childhood was stuffed with bikes. When they reconnected in college, there was a weird re-ignition that happened. They took a Saturday in September to go bike shopping, a little freshman first semester move—but it turned into more of a bike-criticism masterclass. To them, this system of walking into a store and buying a shitty bike and then having to store it in a dorm the size of a mailbox was less than ideal. And, so, well . . . you see the spark here. 

VO: They started planning meetings for the rest of the month to create this brand new organization where students could just share bikes on campus. It was like they were seven-year-olds again, drawing up blueprints for their inevitable entrepreneurship that they weren’t even aware of. But maybe the organization was one step too far for Shep because after a week or so, he picked up a new interest in museums. Who from? Well, he and Mari also signed up for this oil painting class in Dorchester, which the two of them had to bike almost an hour to get to. Shep was in exploration mode, funneling all the effort he had into this new artistic side. So much for those blueprints.

AX: Boat horn.

VO: Months later, when Kai (and some friends he commissioned to come with) were picking up the cargo around Boston Harbor, there was so much foot traffic that they had to wait hours to get to the bikes. It was winter time in Boston. It was freezing cold. Can’t exactly put my finger on it (overwhelmed, maybe?), but Kai almost fainted, like a dropping fly in front of that enormous black ship idling by the harbor. And it was also only weeks after Shep’s body had been shipped back to China. His parents weren’t able to come. One of the people with Kai rang up Mari, who was there faster than you’d ever imagine. Had a cannoli in her hand. 

VO: At the same time that year, there was a large-scale art heist investigation in Boston, and that was what the flurry of people at the harbor was for. The only reason Kai knew about the art heist was, months earlier, Shep had given him this whole spiel about a beautiful painting in some museum that Kai never heard of. But the name was sharp: “Yellow Knight in Paradise.” So when Kai stood at the harbor waiting to pick these bikes up and heard everyone clamoring about the painting that was stolen, the title clicked. But to Kai, sitting up and regathering, he thought to himself: screw this Knight. He started to miss Shep. 

MS: (“Xylophone Thought Bubble” Layered with Seagull Screeches)

VO: Ever since the Isabella Stewart Gardner got taken for seventeen pieces in 1990, everybody south of the Charles River thought they could grappling-hook their way into one of Boston’s many museums and walk out with sunglasses on and a Pollock under their arm. But it kind of never worked like that. For twenty years, all the art heist cases were open and shut as quickly as they could be. I’m telling you this so you understand the context. You need a glimpse into the landscape that businesses and art fiends alike were existing under the same Boston sky. 

VO: But, in 2014, the Museum of Fine Arts lost two huge oil paintings from the Renaissance. This was a tone shift—drastically different from any case in the past decade. There were a string of art crimes identified by the FBI to be committed by the same group. But those were vases and small pieces of royal jewelry. This MFA rip was much flashier. And get this: not even a week later, the living-room-wall-sized oil paintings from 600 years ago were up for auction in Tokyo. It was like this new generation of burglars suddenly had some real guts, some taste, even. 

MS: (“Don’t Shoot the Piano”)

AX: Airport noises.

VO: Kai stayed in Boston that summer. He was supposed to go to his hometown with Shep. They were both going to be workflow managers, screws in Kai’s dad’s gigantic bike factory. They planned this together. They even bought the tickets together. They thought just like their dads, they could learn something from working in the trenches. It was Wes that encouraged Kai to stay after they both had their farewells with Shep's coffin at Logan Airport. Oh, what a summer in Boston can do.

VO: That night at the Colonial Theater really blew Kai’s mind. There were fifty pieces for sale, all from China. Early 18th Century Chinese Lacquered Two-Door Cabinets. An ewer, priced at around a million dollars. Yes, a million dollars. What’s an ewer? I have no idea. It almost seemed like a themed auction: China, 1700. Yes, and orange. When Kai opened the brochure, he couldn’t recognize the name of a single thing. He couldn’t afford any of it either. All he could feel was that those pictures were like faces that he was supposed to know, but soon began to putrefy, blister, and bleach. Horror. But Wes was different. He only glanced at the pictures and knew whether it was appropriately valued or not. He even pointed out one of the paintings from Bada Shanren that could potentially be fake. What did he know? But he acted like all these things were just excavated from his backyard. Wes was in his element—an element, according to The Bottle, that he never had before. 

VO: After that night, many things changed. Kai started to grow this sense of admiration for Wes. Everything Wes. Things that Wes wore, places Wes would go. Kai worshiped the ground he walked on. He never thought of it this way, but it seemed that Wes had moved on by living larger. They never went to a fancy restaurant or shopped for fancy clothes. The thing they did the most was hit up museums around the city—just to look at and talk about the art. But when Kai was sitting in the food court of the MFA, eating a $12 sandwich, he felt like Wes’s name might as well be next to a canvas one wall over. And they used to be the same kind of people.

AX: Chalkboard wheels. Chalk sounds.

VO: This is what I like to call a scoreboard moment—our first. Kai was so wrapped up in this summer of art that you might almost forget that his bike business was really taking off. Z-O had covered the full Boston area, even bleeding into the suburbs, and in the city, there was a cluster of Z-O bikes on every other corner. The crazy thing was, Kai had no budget to hire more executives. He had to be there himself. 

VO: Wes was there, too. They actually got back and forth from the museums by bike. They just viewed the business differently. Though Wes drove his car less and less, and less, he didn’t have a title with the team. He didn’t show any interest in having a title, either. Kai listened to what he had to say, and Wes knew that. 

MS: (Ambient Museum Restaurant Jazz)

VO: Timing is everything. So, looking at this enigmatic, one-hundred-foot-high glass hall at the Museum of Fine Arts, with sunlight and green plants filling the space, Kai took a big sip of water out of his plastic cup and sparked a thought with Wes.

AX: Museum murmurs.

VO: Wes pulled off a party on a starry summer night in 2014, reportedly paid a price close to the Takashi Murakami show three years later, even grander and more extravagant than Kai had in mind. Wes rented long red drapes to hang along the windows—indicating: a classy, private event. Kai showed up just in time to see a ten-foot-tall, fake waterfall getting wheeled in from the back doors. And to top it all off, there were IMAX laser projection mapping projectors all around that displayed some very famous Raphael on the ceiling. Wes really aimed for an Ancient Rome feeling in that hall. 

VO: But it was a fundraiser, and none of the few Z-O employees or Kai’s friends were invited. There were fifty people in that gigantic hall. It almost seemed sparse, empty, but with a certain kind of grace to it. If you were looking through those glass windows from the outside, you wouldn’t think that Wes and Kai got their first million dollars of investment money that night.  

VO: There was a pretty special guest there. His name is Wendell Kowalski. I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. Wendell was a little anchovy in the big pond of the Kennedy family in South Boston—no, not the “Kennedy” Kennedy. This was an Irish crime syndicate. But at the time, he was only loosely connected to the family. I mean, Kowalski ain’t very Irish.

VO: On that night at the MFA, Wendell sensed the opportunity in the glass hall. But he didn’t say that. He just stood very close to Wes all the time—it seemed like they’d known each other for a long time. Weird, but it’ll make more sense as I talk. While Kai, the founder, was in the spotlight, Wendell was very observant. He looked at how Wes looked at Kai in the crowd, and he immediately knew who would be taking a lead on the team tomorrow. 

VO: At the end of the night, the event recorder documented an interesting, yet subtle interaction. 

AX: Clip plays.

Wes: This is Mr. Kowalski. From the Kennedy Management Group.

Kai: Kennedy?

Wendell: In the South End. 

Kai: Oh. Yes!

Wes: We were just talking about Z-O and . . . . How well that’s going. 

Kai: Oh, yeah.

*Silence.

Kai: (nervous laugh) You know, originally, I thought I was just gonna do a bike tour company. You know, in the mountains. 

AX: Clip ends.

VO: Wes had to terminate that awkward conversation. He had to. He put his hand on Kai’s shoulder and asked him to grab a couple glasses of wine. And he cleaned it up. He ran through the whole story of Z-O like it was a pitch. From the start to the finish, Wendell hadn’t shown a single facial expression. It was like Kai had already blown his one shot (a shot he didn’t realize he even had). Pouring the drink, Kai looked back at Wes and Wendell talking, probably about thirty feet away. The fountain roared in his ear, and he wondered what Wes would say to him, how he would pitch a business, every movement, smile—everything. He wondered.

MS: (“The Doves Go to Afternoon Tea”) 

VO: The next time Wes and Kai met for lunch was a month later, at the Whitney. They were in New York. The moment was still. Dust floating in a sun ray kind of still. It was almost like they were waiting for something to happen. There was a third chair at the table, but it was empty. Somebody already left the table (you could tell by the half-eaten baguette on the plate). 

VO: It was probably around 2:30 in the afternoon when everyone started heading upstairs. Wes and Kai followed without a word. Through the glass, you could see everyone on the street looking up in the same direction. 

VO: If you were on Whitney's balcony that afternoon, you would have seen a big-ass blue bike balloon floating down the end of the High Line. It was worth the price of admission. Almost like a float slipped away from the Macy’s Parade, even though it was June. Well, actually, if this were in the Macy’s Parade, it would not have fit down Fifth Avenue. This thing was huge. It cast shadows halfway over the Hudson. The wheels spun in the wind. Naturally, this kind of stunt would be the opening of Z-O’s New York headquarters. Stop questioning my timeline. The power of capital.

AX: Taps a mic.

Mari: Thank you to our CEO, Kai Lin. Thank you to the head of finance, Wes Liang. A big thanks to Kennedy Management. And thank you to the 300 thousand people riding Z-O bikes. You’ve all made us . . . . You’re the reason we’re here, in New York today. (pauses) We’re one piece short, of course. This is a dream that I always had with my best friend, Shep. Countless minutes of our lives shared gushing over his vision for helping everyone, and all those late night talks with Shep culminated to this. Right here. I can still remember that first day . . . . That first bike. From the beginning, (pauses) we knew: we wanted to help you, all of you, get through that last mile.

VO: This was Mari’s under-celebrated inauguration. Her first time at the forefront of this rising empire. Even to me, this was a day that will always be remembered kindly in the legend of Z-O.

MS: (Outro: “Mt. Alleviate”) 

AX: Abruptly stops music.

VO: Hm. Wait. I forgot something.

MS: (Outro Continues)

EPISODE II

From Z-O

MS: (“Thinking About It”) 

AX: Clip plays.

Shep: (whistles) 

Mari: What song is that?

*Silence.

Shep: What color is the best kind of glass?

Mari: Like a . . . like a Leviathan’s bone.

Shep: I drop you off in Suriname. You have—

Mari: Where? 

Shep: Suriname. You have 1,000—

Mari: (sneezes) Erm. How do you spell that? 

Shep: —You have 1,000 bikes to give away for free. What’s your plan?

Mari: . . . Underprivileged kids. 

Shep: If I gave you $200,000,000 to spend in three days, what would you—wait, no. If I gave you $300,000,000 to spend in two days, what would you buy? And don’t tell me why.

Mari: Have you ever heard of “ERA?”

Shep: In baseball?

Mari: No. Brought to Congress in 1923. Passed in ’71, “Equal Rights Act.” Never actually acknowledged, though. 

Shep: What do you mean?

Mari: Is my $300,000,000 the same as your $300,000,000?

Shep: It can be. 

AX: Clip ends.

VO: Mari hated Shep. In every way possible. They just weren’t the same kind of people at all. While Wes and Kai spent their time puttering around student elections and Shep in dusty old museums, Mari was already a superstar in Manhattan. She skipped all that schooling, dyed her hair silver, and started curating art for galleries in New York City. All-you-can-eat sushi for lunch every day. Except payday—omakase. And she did it all by the time she was twenty. Her mom got her into art at a young age. Paint-by-numbers type of thing. 

VO: After her mom passed away, Mari moved to Boston. When she got there, she somehow decided to save up for college. Mari’s dreams never really fit in the galleries. Based on my observation, she kind of hated being a curator. It took the art out of the art. It contradicted what they call “existence.” But, it was all she knew. I feel like there’s something funny about that—your skills to survive being concentrated in art curation. So, before long, she made a transition, from galleries to private collections. I guess that's where the money was in the art world.

AX: Train whizzes by.

MS: (Theme Song Variations: “Variation #1”)

VO: If you don’t feel like you know Mari yet, I just want you to keep in mind that she’s a tall girl and acts like it. She never fit right in the fancy dresses or beautiful gowns, she couldn’t sit in the front row, but damn, she owned it. She made sure you could hear her—in her jeans—from the back. A new city was nothing for her. It took a minute, but Mari found her way in the Boston art scene. In fact, it was the art scene that had the problem. It was nothing like she expected. She wasn’t working in private auction houses as she had fancied. Instead, she constantly found herself at these auctions dubbed “double-bed black boxes” at W Hotels, where private auctions were hosted in double-bed rooms sealed with black drapes, smelled like pears and cigarettes. The pieces that were getting auctioned weren’t anything exciting either.

VO: Boston’s art trading market was under some dark clouds. On December 20th, 2013, Geoff Wislowski was found tied up in the personal art room at his home. Several of his paintings were stolen, including one painting called “Magnolia 9047” from an emerging artist called Guimi Lo. All of the private collectors were terrified and kind of confused. Why would someone steal the $3,000 “Magnolia” along with a $40 million Andy Simberg “Caramel Angel.” Anyway, in the following weeks, they scaled every bit of the handlings way down, so that they wouldn’t be the next one who got shopped. Another way of saying, Mari really picked the worst moment to enter the industry.

MS: (Thinking Type Track)

VO: Court documents are public knowledge. Cross check with any police report, and you’d know that, on the opposite end, New York’s auction market was getting hot around this time. In a rare interview with Mari, she once recounted that a lot of stolen art was coming into the city. Some of it came from out of suitcases stuffed into Peter Pan buses. There were some bigger ones shipped in big box trucks with people in the back to keep an eye on them. And the biggest ones had to be loaded onto cargo ships and shuffled out through Chelsea Piers with teams of muscle standing by at all times. I mean, bodies dropped for that shit. I hope you have an idea of the underground art market now. 

VO: There was one big problem with all of this, though. If ten paintings a week are getting moved out of Boston, eventually, the pool is going to be drained. I mean, think about what happens in the New York renter’s market when transplants come in and take up all the apartments. Thing is, you can always build a new building. You can’t go back to the 1500s and ask Da Vinci to squeeze out one more “Mona Lisa.” I don’t know why I said it like that.

VO: So these mobsters were at each other’s throats. Everyone got caught in the crossfires—literally. If you lived in Boston at the time, you’d remember. People were getting killed on different ends of the business. On November 9th, 2013, there was a shootout by the Aquarium. Three police officers were murdered and found strung up to the chains by the water. Not to make any light of that, but a bullet actually went through the window and shattered the octopus tank. Buddy made it back to the ocean, they think. On the morning of Thanksgiving, rival crews got into a gunfight in the streets of Malden. There was a damn Turkey Trot going on. A couple Berklee students who lived in the neighborhood were shot. They survived and told the whole story. It made national news and scared Boston shitless. 

VO: The nail in the coffin for this whole ordeal was when Geoff Wislowski was murdered. It was February 9th, 2014—exactly two months from the day he was robbed and found tied up in his gallery. Some Prudential Center security guard was on her way to smoke a butt during a night shift break and saw Wislowski’s body bleeding out on the footbridge. I’ll spare most of the details, but he was bruised head to toe—a black and blue body. Maybe he had probed too much about his lost “Angel.” 

VO: It may feel over-dramatized when you put all the crimes over six months together, but Boston did kind of look like Gotham City at this point. 

MS: (“One, Two, Be Free” Instrumental)

VO: I learned a little more about why Mari started working for Z-O. Maybe it was just that the market was down. It was the business side of art that she hated being a part of. So what drew her to the business side of business? Nobody else in The Bottle spoke up about it. It was a blip. And yet, if you sift enough, you’ll know two things. 1) Kai Lin wasn’t a great public speaker. Dreadful, actually. And 2) he somehow managed to singlehandedly pitch the exact pitch Mari needed to hear for her to sign on. Hit her right in the heart strings. There’s a Chinese word for this. I don’t know what it translates to. But basically, someone is so bad at something that for one moment the stars may align, and . . . they make it work. A dog so ugly that it manages to be cute for the right couple looking to rescue. You get it. And yet, there's no way anyone would ever be able to hear that speech again. It’s a pity.

VO: A lot of people think Mari went missing in 2018, since she legitimately disappeared from public news and any castigation. But, actually, she just took $100.5 million dollars of Z-O money and ran to Hong Kong. I’m way ahead of myself here, but she kind of became this behind-the-scenes sponsor for a brand new museum. She was low-key—probably one of the only people in recorded history to put money into a museum and not want a hall named after them. The museum is called “The Reservoir Foundation.” It’s smaller than you’d think, but it’s . . . . How do I say this? Glowing. It’s made from pure white marble. Cold to the touch. It’s still running today. You should check it out if you’re ever in Hong Kong. I say, she just always wanted to get back to the art side of the world.

AX: Deep breath. Raspberry. Some ice clangs. Takes a sip. Barely finishes the sip before—

VO: But, I’ll tell you what. Shep died on March 3rd, 2014. Mari joined Z-O exactly two months later. You couldn’t deny those two things were related. It tells you all you need to know. And I get it, I’ve been talking to you for how many minutes now? I feel like I’m—

AX: Flips through notebook.

VO: —I feel like you know about this incident. Cuz it was quite a headline when it happened. But you don’t really know about this incident. The details. I feel like we gotta talk about that train to Albany that didn’t leave. 

MS: (Dull Transition)

VO: The people of New England knew about that shooting at South Station as a sort of domestic terror thing that was salvaged by heroic actions. In early 2014, the newly-founded Boston non-profit Artists Without A Cause started pairing with correctional facilities around the Northeast. They gave access to arts for inmates who suffered from addiction, poverty, and mental illness, whether they were still in the system or not. 

VO: The week of March 3rd that year, Mari, who had been in the org for a little while now, finally convinced Shep to take up her invitation to join. But, he didn’t want to show up alone. So, he brought his buddies Kai and Wes with him. Wes and Shep were actually very well acquainted around this time—roommates on campus. The four spent a few days really getting to know each other, getting ready for a trip to Albany—following Wes around the city, Mari into restaurants, and Kai into all the candy shops. Did I never tell you how strong that sweet tooth was in Kai’s mouth?

VO: Without sounding too much like a goofy news reporter here, basically what happened was a couple shots rang out right at the newsstand below the departure board. Two people dropped. The crowd stood still for longer than you might think. Confused. Then, someone bolted—and everyone followed suit. Look at this:

AX: Clip plays. Sound from a video of people yelling. A bunch of commotion.

VO: That person, right there, wearing an orange hoodie—you see it? It’s surprising, I know, but that was Shep Zhao. Look at him. He spotted the gunman quick. The shooter was coming from the platform. You can see Shep. See his mouth? Telling the other three to rush people toward the CVS. How instinctual is that? 

VO: This takes a turn, though. Don’t have video for that, but of course, the gunman noticed him, this guy who’s yelling the loudest. It must have been that the shooter was by the platforms—but they were never in the video. And like that, shots started firing in Shep’s direction. Another quick thought from Shep, and he started running zig-zag, which seems like it would be the best possible way. Right?

VO: And everyone was in the CVS, waiting it out. Kai and Wes peeking out from the end of an aisle. The patience stopped at Mari. She was scrambling around the aisles, frantically looking up and down each shelf, pushing and pulling products, just looking for something to help.

VO: If you’ve ever been through a shooting, you’d know it’s marvelously brave to stand up, to even open your eyes. And she was tearing apart a drug store looking for something that could help. But that something wasn’t there. Toothpaste doesn’t help much in this situation, you see.

VO: And the gunman got away. Shep was shot twice in the back, straight through. Three of his friends watched this—he died right there at the station, his own hands covering the holes in his back.

AX: Video stops.

VO: Right after Shep’s parents received his body in China (what a heartbreaking moment), Mari joined Z-O as the Chief Communications Officer. There’s a reason I spent so much time talking about her here—I mean, there’s straight proof that she served a key role during this tough period of time. 

AX: Dusts chalkboard erasers.

VO: Check the scoreboard. I don’t want to make it seem like Z-O expanded so smoothly without any effort. What’s missing from the public news was that a few weeks into April 2014, Kai passed out at a local bike factory. He was only twenty-one years old, but he had been on some new meds and got to the point that he was intentionally overworking himself. He hit the gym for three hours every night, but still fattened up like a balloon. He never talked about it, but did he have to? And Wes, who did secure the Kennedys’ first investment, had taken on an internship at some bank in Boston. He filled his schedule with coffee chats. For a second, it looked like this blueprint for the bike empire was falling apart, gone with one of the souls who started the dream in the first place. 

MS: (Marimba Transition)

VO: This was a dark, but also formative year for Z-O. With one of the founders dead and two others distracted by health problems and lack of confidence, Mari had to spend so much time just to get people to refocus on Z-O. That breakout color change from blue to orange was her big picture move. It’s not a typical orange. Let me throw out a couple buzzwords left by some reviewers: “holiness”, “perfection”, “grace.” I don’t know exactly how this is a different orange. Show me a tangelo and a grapefruit, and I can’t tell the difference. But please: believe me when I say this is not regular orange. I’ve actually read that economists think the change of color was key to Z-O’s success since it set the foundation for Z-O’s medialization. 

VO: Alone, Mari made sure that all the parking lots near any news station or investment banking building were packed with a sea of this orange. And as they expanded, it looked impressive. When you checked out all the urbanites’ Instagram posts or any picture that was taken in a major U.S. city (now they were in 26 of ’em), that specific orange would always show up in the corner. It would eventually get to the point that if you looked at a satellite image, it was like these cities were all wearing orange polka-dots.

VO: Mari didn’t do this gradually. She did it in one night. It was almost like her remorse, that sorrow that she sort of just bagged up, was poured into creating this gigantic orange unicorn. Imagine one day you wake up, and the blue you always knew on your corner is gone, and it’s been replaced with orange. Those bikes on your corner are different now, but they still sport a big old Z-O on the side. Where did the blue bikes go? Nobody knows. It’s like all the bikes disappeared from the face of Earth in one night. Maybe they tied a cinder block to each one and dropped it in the Charles River. Or, they crushed them and turned them into street lamps. But as far as I know, nobody questioned it. 

MS: (“Wing of Light”)

VO: I want to take your back to that first, orange moment. 

VO: A week before Thanksgiving in 2014, Boston got hit with its first snow of the season. Everyone was planning their dinners, students were getting ready to leave the city, and the Z-O teams were preparing to wrap up for a break. In the middle of the day, Mari dragged everyone outside for a meeting in the snow. They grumbled down the elevator and out the revolving door and all the way into the financial district sidewalks. And then they all stopped and stared as one hundred very-unique-orange bikes, one after the other, peddled through the snowy street, past the Old State House. They were self driving. Self driving bikes, bright orange, with snow around them, slithering through the streets of Downtown Boston. Please imagine that for me. 

VO: What the employees didn’t see that every other Bostonian saw was that the line of one hundred bikes started in the Boston Common, coming out of a gigantic white pipe, whale-size, sorta like from “Mario,” I guess. Just white. 

VO: Later that day, that famous photo was taken. Wes, Mari, and Kai stood right on top of the Gazebo, overlooking the band playing. It was a breath of fresh, almost-winter air for the trio, and ultimately for the company as well. The big posters that hung on the trees punched out: “Meet Z-O, 2.0.”

VO: Let’s wheel out the scoreboard, shall we? 

AX: Scoreboard.

VO: A lot happened in 2014. Chalk a couple up in the loss column: a few bikes missing, a traffic accident or two, and down a founding member. But, check this out: after conquering the entirety of New England and New York, now Z-O had at least a quiet presence in almost every major city in the U.S. Portland. Detroit. Can’t beat a scenic bike ride past rows of boarded-up houses, right? And hey, Phoenix entered Phoenix, too!

MS: (“Antiphon of Johannesburg”)

VO: On Christmas Eve of 2014, Kai, Mari, and Wes sat down on the 71st floor of the CitySpire building. The three had just placed the deposit down to rent an office space in Midtown Manhattan. They had nothing but gigantic glass windows, high white walls, and the enchanting night views of the whole city—and even New Jersey, for whatever that’s worth. Mari brought her little tape recorder to document these early good times with her friends. They popped open nine bottles of wine, a Lalique champagne even, just to have a taste of each, and there were twenty-eight glasses on the floor. They used a different glass for every kind of wine. It was weird, but kind of beautiful, in a way. Mari thought so. She said she would forever treasure these twenty-eight glasses. These glasses were going into the MOMA. 4th Floor. “Early 21st Century Entrepreneur Life Stories” collection.

AX: Clip plays.

Wes: Okay, pals, gimme one word.

Kai: Which one do you want? 

Wes: One word—each—that describes your feeling right now. 

Mari: One word? 

Wes: That’s two words. 

Kai: Okay, two words—

Mari: Off. No, on. No, wait . . . . Off.

Kai: Hmm. You sound like a light switch.

Wes: Any minute now, Boss Man. 

Kai: Displaced. Real.

Wes: Incredibly dramatic, but okay.

Mari: I’m okay with being displaced up here. 

Wes: You know what I feel? (pauses) Empty. Incompatible.

Kai: I’m dramatic?

Wes: No, like, literally. Look around, my Lord. 

Mari: Yeah, bland. Might finally have the space to get those bikes out of Suriname.

Kai: Argh. I’ve stared at these bikes for so long that I almost can’t even recognize them anymore. Two wheels. Some metal. Blue. Orange.

Mari: That a haiku?

Kai: Sometimes they just blend, and it’s (Joker tone) chaos. 

Wes: (sighs, pats legs) Welp! Let’s go downstairs and get you one. Let’s stare at it. You’ll recognize it.

AX: Clip ends. 

VO: The recording didn’t end there. A lot of the community thinks it did, but I’ve looked The Bottle up and down, left and right. I have to say, they missed some important stuff there. So trust my expertise here. Yes, they really did go downstairs and bring a bike up. It was an awkward lift, but up against the backdrop of a foggy, Christmas Eve night in a dimly lit, empty office building. It’s got a bit of a Wes Anderson charm to it. 

VO: And the conversation continued in the elevator, with three friends and a bike. 

AX: “The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou” elevator dings.

VO: I need to remind you of the theme for this story. None of this ends with a happy little bow on top, and we’re probably at the point where you’re wondering how the art crime and bike business worlds intertwine. So here we go. This, uh, may be our very first clue.

AX: Clip plays.

*Muffled.

Wes: You guys gotta send me a picture of where you hang the bike.

Kai: We’re going to hang it?

Mari: You’re not gonna help?

Wes: I gotta be in Boston in the morning.

Kai: Back to Boston?

Wes: Yeah.

Kai: Oh, that guy got back to you?

Wes: Yeah, he’s got a name. 

*Silence.

Kai: Well, what’s the name? 

Wes: Osborne. 

Kai: No, not your colleague.

Wes: Oh, the guy. He’s dead, actually. 

*Silence. 

Wes: So where you gonna put the bike?

AX: Clip ends. 

VO: I know this sounds like it comes from nowhere, but if you just keep listening to my story here, and-and-and piece together the timeline, and find out where this conversation happened in the chaotic time jump, this recording is solid proof that Wes had his own little sinister project brewing. And for any of you lawyers and PIs out there listening to this, I’m requiring myself to say: this is theorized. Please do not come to my door about this. Again. Again.

VO: For a little context, this was the moment Wes really drifted away from Z-O. From that day on, he was barely there for the enormous Z-O PR events. He was always “scheduled for this” or “penciled in for that.” If you ever did spot him at an event, it was usually because Mari managed to force him there, and as much as he was able to continue pulling in money for the team, it was the brand-building PR that really took over for Z-O. Their main focus at the time was putting a face to the name, and it was almost like Wes didn’t want to be the face to any name. His eyes read that he had bigger things to do, like Z-O was just one of his little projects.

MS: (Any Weezer Song)

VO: However, by the time the “30 under 30” conference at the Convention Center commenced in late summer 2015, in a little twist, Wes almost became the face of Z-O. It was a sudden interest, an out-of-left-field power move, if I’m honest. 

AX: Convention crowd.

VO: Here’s the plan for the day: Kai is going to meet Wes at the Convention Center, since he has an investor meeting that might bubble up $10 million for Z-O. We’ll err on the side of “might” for that one. Kai leaves on time and takes an Uber from lunch to the “30 under 30.” All goes smoothly. Except, the Uber driver peels off onto the highway and drives Kai all the way to Dorchester. He steals Kai’s everything, including the expensive cuff links that Wes gave him as a present. 

VO: I found an interview—or some article that Kai did with the “Boston Herald,” two years after the Uber heist, right around the time when Z-O was at the brink of destruction. He mentioned that he was actually roughed up by the driver and lost his cuff links to the river because of that. He mentioned how Wes was pissed off at him for missing the speech, and he thanked Wes up and down for being a good friend, a friend who supported him, and even somehow miraculously retrieved the cuff links.

VO: That story turned out differently when Mandy Arthur invited Kai on her show on WGBH the day after the “30 under 30.”

MS: (WGBH Radio Intro)

AX: Clip plays. 

Mandy: I’m Mandy Arthur. Welcome to “Breaking Boston” on WGBH. Today, we’re joined by one of Boston’s “30 under 30” superstars, Kai Lin, co-founder of Z-O, the bike-sharing company that’s breathing new life into the streets of cities everywhere. You see their orange bikes all over, and now you finally get to hear from the mastermind himself. Kai, how are you?

Kai: Good, thanks.

Mandy: You were invited to the “30 under 30.” Not just invited, but featured. As the CEO of Z-O, could you tell us about this amazing company?

Kai: Yeah, so Z-O is a dockless bike-sharing platform that lets you rent a bike that’s nearby and, um, ride it to your destination. When you’re done, you put the kickstand down and end the ride. Simple as that.

Mandy: Right. So, tell me: which Boston neighborhood gave you this brilliant idea, this concept of Z-O?

Kai: Well, um—I studied at Boston University, and one night I had a date on campus. It was freezing cold and walking was taking forever, so I thought “I could use a bike right now.” 

Mandy: That’s beautiful. But, and our listeners might not know this, we have actually met before. 

Kai: Right, we did. At the—

Mandy: The MFA, yeah. It was your first fundraiser, and you told me you started it as a way to gain some favor for your student election. 

Kai: I mean, it didn’t hurt that cause either. 

Mandy: Okay, so where did that story change? 

Kai: I’m not sure it changed. 

Mandy: Okay, okay. We’ll leave it there, but . . . I did want to talk about the “30 under 30.” You and your co-founder, Wes Liang, were both featured. That’s such a big achievement. 

Kai: Thank you. 

Mandy: I have to say, I was a bit surprised that you weren’t up there with Wes, giving a speech where it all started—here in Boston. He definitely blew the crowd away with that speech. Where’s your voice in all this? It’s not just him at the front of Z-O, right? 

Kai: Unfortunately, I did have to defer to my co-founder, Wes Liang, yeah—for the speech. I ran into some trouble before the event. 

Mandy: Trouble?

Kai: Well, you get it. You run a news show. The mobs in Boston are a little out of hand. They’re the worst, really.

Mandy: Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Is everything okay? What happened?

Kai: Um. I hopped in a taxi—an Uber. I was running a little late to the conference, looking at my notecards in the back. When I looked up, we were in Dorchester. The car peeled off, and . . . . I mean, I was robbed. Pretty simple but—I guess what I’m saying is someone has to stop these people. You know? In the end, I’m glad I got one thing back—something that means a lot to me. But the next person might not be so lucky. I hate being in the same city as these kinds of people. 

Mandy: Hmm. But you know, Boston is a city of communities, and there are a lot of reasons—historical reasons, even—that made the Mobs. You know . . . income inequality, immigrant dynamics. In a way there’s a glass ceiling. 

Kai: I don’t know if I would defend them that way. 

Mandy: I’m not sure if that’s a defense. (passive-aggressively) Boston is complicated.

Kai: I never really got my inspirations from Boston.

AX: Clip ends. 

MS: (“The Durian Escapade”)

VO: I don’t want you to think the first time I told this story was to you. I’ve been on this wave for a while now, and I think we need to talk about October 24th, 2015. It was a beautiful autumn day in Boston. The global campaign was all in place. You’d think the three founding figures would get some good rest that day or take a brief walk on the Commonwealth Ave. But all three of them were getting together in South Boston that Saturday morning for brunch. There was a big plan to interview locals on the street about their experience with Z-O bikes, what it meant for their commutes, how they loved riding around the neighborhood—the whole nine.

VO: Mari had it all mapped out—in her brain and on paper. This would be the new front page of the website, an identity move to bolster that online presence. But what would you know? The two men trying so hard to be the face of the company . . . didn’t even show up. 

VO: After the fact, Kai texted Mari, said he had to go pick up cargo from the harbor. How does that make sense, though? At this point, they had a full team to go take care of that. Kai didn’t need to show his face. No. What actually happened, and call it speculation, was that Kai had to go to the police station to pick up Wes. Wes was in for questioning. They picked him up with a skeleton crew of Kennedy family affiliates at a Back Bay tea shop. How regal of them? 

MS: (Transition)

VO: I know, I know. I’m demanding a lot of mental attention and emotional fortitude from you. It’s a lot. I don’t blame you for being tired. So, I think it's a good idea to end here today. I’m gonna take a shower in a minute and be alone with my thoughts. So, I’m sharing with you one specific clip as an epilogue to this episode. You want proof of all the wild tales I’ve spun? Here’s a little proof. See, when you google Z-O, there’s this famous clip that’ll pop up. It’s that street interview with Southie locals. You’ll see how Mari was the only one there. She played her part well enough.

AX: Clip plays.

Mari: Show me the app! How many rides?

Z-O User #1: 573! I’m a lifetimer, baby!!! Whoo!!! Z-O!!!

Mari: You take Z-O to work?

Z-O User #2: Every day. Every single day. We love Z-O. D Street loves—nah, Southies love Z-O!!!

Mari: Tell me . . . what would you do if I gave you free rides for a year?

Z-O User #3: I’d—oh my gosh. Um. I love it. I’d ride to Canada. And back. Z-O changed my life.

AX: Clip ends. 

MS: (Outro)

EPISODE III

Cock That Soda Gun

MS: (“All Things to All Men x Gravity” Fusion)  

VO: So many people think Wes Liang died via gravity after jumping off the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. No matter what I tell them. He had a funeral, sure. But I could throw a funeral, too. 

VO: Kai Lin did not even show up to Wes Liang’s funeral. Didn’t even send flowers. The funeral happened in a small church in Seattle. The plane ticket cost $300 dollars. Kai couldn’t afford it . . . sort of. I’ll get to that. But even if he could, would he have gone? There were rumors around, people talking about how it was Kai who murdered Wes. Kai simply couldn’t put himself into that chaotic scene again.

VO: Wes’s death made it to the national newspaper headlines in both China and the U.S. Excuse me for being overdramatic, but the truth can be pretty damn dramatic sometimes. It was a horrendous death scene. Horrible. Angry. Almost like he made a statement with it. There were witnesses—and this is rough—who corroborated that Wes lit himself on fire on a rainy night and fell from the Tower right into the water below. I’m not one to speak ill on someone’s grave, but you can’t expect me to believe that was what happened.

AX: Rainy night, crowd murmur.

VO: Kai was the one in charge of escorting the body from the hospital to the airport and then shipping it back to the States. Apparently that was enough service for him, considering he wasn’t at the funeral. Again, I don’t speak ill on someone’s grave, but Kai’s grave here is figurative. I mean, hey—maybe Wes’s, too.

VO: Some paparazzi did grab a picture of Mari at Wes’s funeral. I was convinced that she wasn’t involved in the funeral planning. You could tell. Wes had a gray coffin. Tiny, I’d call it. The flowers were wrong. It was a miserable funeral with no taste. The service didn’t fall in line with his well-known fortune. Especially, in the public eye, he did better than the other two.

MS: (“Adagio in B Minor, K. 540”) 

VO: Okay. So. What is going on? Wes died. Kai didn’t show up. Mari did. How did we get to this point Z? What are the points B through Y? I understand it’s complicated, but stay with me. Here are some confirmed facts. I’m just here to piece them together and discuss the mainstream theories. Context is everything, and narrative structure matters.

MS: (Game Show Music) 

VO: Fact #1: Wes and Mari had sparks. I’d call this a rumor, because it sure sounds like one, but it’s a fact. They had sparks. Enough sparks to light the ticking bomb rolling around behind him. This was in the brief time that Wes was appointed as interim Co-President of Z-O, and he was that desperate to turn something into a profit. And, here we have them, kissing in front of a camera in the lobby of the Four Seasons Boston. They went to dinner afterwards, just the two of them—something they did pretty frequently. Was that business? Friendship? Probably. But they shared a room key at the Four Seasons. I promise this is all proven. Check my citation list. And word from Wes’s BU schoolmates was that Wes never committed to a—or the—romantic relationship. The press never heard about “dates” or “flings,” but they had sparks. “"The Lovers” by René Magritte. That’s the best way to put it. But the sparks never became a flame for a reason.

VO: Fact #2: Kai and Wes were not “friendly” anymore, but they remained close even though there was a lot of friction, like the “30 under 30” speech. Passionate and volatile. They really always were. I’m talking about witnesses back in the day at BU testifying that Kai and Wes both came in late to their mid-term exam, Kai with blood on his face. Security came in and asked what was going on. Kai was blatant, saying “we got into a fight with each other.” “Who won?” the professor teased. Kai was never even trying to hide it, but it’s a hard thing to decode because they were close. Back then, they started going out together more and more often, usually after midnight, even when the snow was heavy. There was always a black Mercedes that picked them up. At one point, Kai’s roommates thought that Wes had a personal driver. The outer workings always changed when they grew as business partners—a Mercedes turned into a jet, for example—but the inner workings were changing in a more subtle way. 

VO: Fact #3: Mari only stayed with Z-O because of Kai. This is a theory from The Bottle community. After Mari’s trip to China, she stayed there for almost three more months before returning to Manhattan. She didn’t even speak Mandarin, remember? She started to grow her roots there, a little. I mean, she was the type of person that could fit in anywhere, be anything that you’d need her to be. Malleability at its finest. And she enjoyed the fact that the local people found her ecstatic, kindergarten-level Chinese adorable. But, she stayed there for Kai.

VO: Behind the scenes, during Z-O’s China expansion, Mari did at least four crisis analysis presentations in front of the board, which created the rift between herself and the rest of the company, especially Wes. When everyone thinks their team has been a bunch of good boys this year, they don’t want to hear about black coal waiting for them in their stockings. Since she’s the first to grasp a full sonic scan of the iceberg, she bought herself a chance to leave first in the story—for a nice sum, too—before the fog horn blew. But she stayed, for a much too elongated time. For Kai, The Bottle thinks. 

MS: (Game Show Music Closes) 

VO: I’m going to be checking my notes for the stats here, so bear with me. I want to make sure I cover this whole ascension with care. Z-O was doing great in the U.S., but really? That was nothing. Remember, 91% of households in the U.S. have access to a car (according to some elitist websites), right? And, like, a third of the people in the world live in just two countries, and they bike. 

AX: Horns honking.

VO: Z-O opened its door to China thanks to a strategic investment from Ambler worth $50 million. Ambler is the Chinese equivalent of Uber. And Z-O’s number of app downloads increased by a million a day starting in October of 2016. Their downloads rose from 2.59 million to 10 million during China’s Golden Week. Z-O bikes poured into first-tier megacities like Beijing and Shanghai. It really found where it could shine in China. Every night, there was train after train quietly bringing gunky factory air into the suburban areas of those cities, dropping off bikes and tip-toeing out before the towns ever noticed. And then gigantic trucks would scoop up all the bikes and bring them to different locations in the metropolises. Quiet and schemed out. They did it all before the Golden Week. I believe at one point, Z-O occupied almost 50% of the trucks in Shanghai, to the point that all other delivery services had to wait and hold their business. Z-O paid those trucks double the rates.

VO: Mari and Wes took a trip to China six months prior so they could prepare for all this to happen. They had two rooms at the Beijing Hyatt for the entirety of that six months, but according to the hotel staff, half of the days, they weren’t even there. 

AX: Hotel lobby desk phone chatter.

VO: Nobody was under more pressure than Wes. He was so successful in getting rounds and rounds of investments in the U.S., but it wasn’t clear how. And nobody really questioned his ways. When money came in droves, asking questions wasn’t a top priority. Look at it this way: he was merely twenty-three when he secured the angel round and Z-O’s A round from Wendell and two other real estate development tycoons in Boston. And his approach seemed to be more . . . personal, which, of course, would mean he didn’t actually go to investment banks for pitches, like in the movies. 

VO: And now Z-O found itself in China, where Wes had no connections. He actually had to be introduced to a Vice President at Ambler by one of his BU alum friends. It was funny that his first reaction to building that connection was not a big “thank you,” but instead, a complaint—it was not the President. 

VO: At the moment, Ambler was China’s largest online ride-hailing platform after they monumentally devoured Uber China. The ride-hailing war seemed exactly like all other internet company business wars—five thousand players were in the game at the peak, but only two companies were competing for the crown at the end. And eventually, there could only be one king. That’s sort of an invisible rule in the industry, but a rule nonetheless. You know how that goes. A lot of money gets poured into everyone fighting for the spot, but only one or two will ever be successful. And that money doesn’t come back. Speaking of that one and two, a company called RedRide started to just barely squeak into the top ten of those contenders. And remember, the tables turn fast sometimes.

MS: (“Puff” By Naiwen Yang)

VO: At the time of Wes’s funeral, everyone was really busy trying to get a story straight. Have you ever been to a funeral where none of the attendees actually believed there was a person in the closed casket? No? Okay. You’d like to think that people came to pay their respects, but respect, there wasn’t much of. It was more like a live game of “Clue.” And it wasn’t just that day in Seattle. There was an internet frenzy that gave birth to communities like The Bottle. I gotta say though—quite a pity—when I joined them, the group had already quieted down.

MS: (“Puff” Closes)

VO: After Wes’s death, there were phone tapings leaked online, majority of which were conference call recordings from internal. 

VO: Uh, here’s April 4th, 2016 . . . .

AX: Clip plays.

Mari: Get to the point! 

Wes: I’m getting there! We have two options. Here’s Two-Three Tea, it’s from my hometown. It's delicious. And I know I’m partial, but the nostalgia goggles are warranted here. 

Mari: And the other option?

Wes: Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong. It’s . . . expensive. And good. Like, really good. 

Kai: I don’t know . . . . I burned my tongue on that once.

Mari: Let’s conquer some fears, Kai, okay? 

AX: Clip ends. 

VO: April 6th, 2016. 

AX: Clip plays.

Kai: Doing business here is very different from doing it in the States. I’m sure you all heard about the whole Starbucks backlash. As a foreign company, do not even think about entering the Forbidden City. The strategy to win here is clear: localize. Okay? And the strategy to localize, lesson 101: stay close with the Party.

Mari: “The” Party? 

Wes: (facetiously) My people. My country.

AX: Clip ends.

MS: (Transition)

VO: He was a really funny guy. ​But in this China period, he was sometimes alienated. Sometimes, his skills just didn’t match the job description. There was one recording, though, that really caught the public eye. It was a conference with Ambler on May 10th, 2016. The first fifty-five minutes sounded like a boring, regular business meeting, about billion dollar deals, RedRide just opened in Sydney, Momo won in Prague . . . . But when the meeting was adjourned and the door closed, you could hear Wes and Kai stayed for a private conversation. There was a long period of silence. And then Wes started whispering, which was indistinct, aside from a couple words that slipped through like “stalemate” and “chimney.” And then, it sounded like Wes dragged his chair toward Kai. What followed was another brief moment of silence and a big bang. Wes then . . . . Well, Wes lost his mind. 

AX: Chair moves. Big bang.

VO: Wes yelled at Kai, as if there wasn’t a group of Ambler big-wigs outside sipping some post-meeting tea. I think they ended up going with Two-Three Tea. Anyway. Keep this date in mind for me, okay? May 10th, 2016. It’s my birthday! Kai sat and took it, but that wasn’t the end of the argument for him. It was a berating over Kai’s Type-A leadership and the lack of self-awareness he had running Z-O. After a minute, someone stood up, a chair knocked over, and the two of them locked arms and shoved around the conference room. Those Ambler peeps just desperately sipped their tea a few feet away . . . pretending like nothing was happening. Östlund-level awwwkward. 

VO: And then it sounded like the world’s heaviest bowling ball crashed into the conference table from the floor above. There was an art installation in there, a bunch of old soda cans shaped like a beautiful bike, and the alarm suddenly went off. LOUD. But the alarm wasn’t like “ehh ehh ehh.” It said “DON’T MOVE ME!” I wish I was making this up. By the way, it would be very naïve of you to think that this is just a dramatic rift between Kai and Wes. Look at the scene. You shall see: Kai didn’t give a shit about Ambler. 

VO: The door swung open, and two guys from the security team came in and broke it up. The tape cut right there.

AX: Tape rewinds.

VO: Wait, did I make it clear that the whole dropping in a ball of fire from the TV Tower thing was an urban legend to the Nth degree? Z-O remained silent on Wes’s death, even after a leaked police report. It was soon after Wes’s death, but there seems to be a theme here. In every moment of tragedy in Z-O’s story, there was no time to heal and, apparently, no time to waste for everyone that wasn’t involved. I suppose empathy didn’t have a place in all this.

MS: (“Coffee House Order #1”)

VO: Back at the time during that rapid ascension, around early 2016, Mari was sent to China to get a deep sense of the roots they were planting in the supply chain. But more importantly, it was Kai who sent her. Mari knew about all the drama going on. She knew about Kai’s plan to exclude Wes from any power role. But she never told Kai what she knew about Wes. During that long period of the Cold War, she was scared. Kai and Wes were out of office at the same time. She knew that whatever was going on was big, and the only thing she could actually do was . . . her job . . . and do it well. Maybe at one moment, she secretly believed that, if she did her job well and the company went IPO, no matter who’s leading, everything from the past would go away. 

VO: There's this town known as the Lemma Town. It was in Shandong province, where Kai and Shep were from. It was clear on this trip that Z-O was certainly winning. However, what Mari really saw on her trip to Lemma Town was that the end of the bike war was approaching. The people of the town hinged their entire industry on Z-O and Z-O alone. It wasn’t always like that. There have been hundreds of bike companies that relied on this small town in the past, but with the explosion of Z-O, Lemma Town’s workers leaned all in. 

AX: Machines whir. Conveyor belts move.

VO: Mari spotted things. First, an extreme decline in production quality. Actually, more of a cease in production and a shift toward “recycling.” With every other company falling to the wayside, Lemma Town took old, non-Z-O bikes and re-branded them Z-O. Mari watched as 600 Bonk bikes were toppled from a pile and repainted into the Z-O orange. So, she had to ask, secretly. The factory owner told her that it was Fushida who placed an order of 400,000 bikes for Bonk, so three more production lines were opened, and over 100 new workers were hired to catch up with the orders. But, Fushida went bankrupt after Bonk’s ephemeral life span of one year. 90,000 bikes were produced, but Fushida couldn’t possibly pay the bills. They said, to cancel the debt, just keep the bikes. 

VO: Believe it or not, this was a common occurrence. By common, I mean like 500 companies, more or less. You’d think this town was protecting themselves from invaders with the walls of bikes around the outskirts. Just peek at the barren mountain with over a million bikes covering the slope like a metal flood. But nobody in these towns panicked because companies like Z-O and RedRide were Superman and Wonder Woman, cape and all, coming to the rescue. And just like that, all the thirty-dollar bikes being mass-produced at the speed of fifteen seconds per bike landed in almost every city in China. 

VO: A secret, unspoken production streamline also emerged in the town. According to the report, there were over 400 workers who were hired to break down bikes from the wasteland. Evil, but people are the cheapest production cost. It’s how civilization progresses, apparently. And these people formed an unconventional assembly line in the field, blasting pop music to avoid the screeching sounds of metal on metal, shaping bike after bike. Nothing went to waste. Thousands of bikes were broken down and sold as locks, spokes, and pedals. If a bike with a lock was $100, the lock itself is $50. So it’s a very profitable business. And those parts ended up on the winning bikes. Parasites?

VO: On the other side, Mari mentioned another big factor in Z-O’s hemorrhage: not playing by the rules, a.k.a. managing corruption from inside out. In fact, local maintenance managers outsourced a majority of their maintenance work to providers like Cloudy Bird or Dumont, which cost 30% to 50% more than just managing the bikes yourself. I mean it’s a harsh job, you know, carrying bikes like livestock all the way across the city, but it’s essential, so that every bike can be in place in the morning when the early birds wake up. And yet, humanity is forgivably lazy . . . . So yeah, they outsourced. I guess it is more fun to produce, but not manage—the eternal problem with patriarchy.

AX: File cabinet opens. File slips in. File cabinet shuts loudly. 

VO: That risk analysis report didn’t surface immediately. Probably because it was . . . lengthy. For Mari’s whole time working there, the rope was burning from both ends, and she poured things into that report—some things she didn’t even realize she was cognizant of. The report was made up of over 87 extensive excel sheets and 972 Bain-level slides. Charts and location photographs. However, it was clear that the board was not concerned with how to handle this mess. Mari’s report was opened by the board almost two months after it came in. There were different issues at hand at the time. While the Z-O sea of orange submerged Mainland China cities, the board seemed quiet, and busy. If we knew then what we know now, maybe that would make more sense.

MS: (“Miyoshi”)

AX: TV static, clinking glasses, cupboards.

VO: Ask the search warrant lady for Wes’s apartment in the Seaport District. Wes’s apartment looked like a museum. No 25-year-old lives in a place like this. All black everything. The entire penthouse floor to himself. A full open space with abstract art hanging on the wall, some of it crooked, even. It felt extra empty, considering the only person that lived here was gone for good. 

VO: And Wes didn’t live here with Z-O money. He lived here when he was at BU. Have we told you about Wes’s family? Basically, it went like this: Wes’s mom was a “kitcheneer”—that’s a word I just invented. She was an interior designer for luxury homes in New England, but specialized in kitchens. Her big focus was making kitchen cabinets look extravagant. His dad was a truck driver, gone-a-lot type. 

VO: It’s kind of surprising that Wes could afford a luxury apartment like this for so long. His parents were wealthy. No doubt about it. But they weren’t top dollar, not penthouse-in-Seaport rich. So that begs the question—I will be very direct: when exactly did Wes decide to turn his crusade for justice into a quiet knock on the door to the underworld? How deeply was he really involved? 

VO: The proof’s on the wall . . . literally. There sat some of the earliest stolen art pieces in this whole Boston heist debacle, hung up with three command strips. A Modigliani. A Georgia O’Keeffe. The “Piják absintu” by Viktor Oliva. Blood probably spilled for these things, and he just threw them on his wall like they were posters in a college dorm. Am I saying he stole these arts? No. That’s an outlandish accusation. But, that does say something about this already-effed-up timeline. What am I getting at?

VO: In contrast to his luxurious pad, you had Wes’s extra empty walk-in closet. The scene looked sparse. He only had, like, four suits and a stack of t-shirts. He had a special jewelry drawer specifically for his watches, but it was nearly empty. According to Kai, Wes only wore that one good Rolex. You’ve seen it. 

AX: Watch ticks.

VO: But let me be extra clear here: that doesn’t prove that Wes was involved at the time. He could have purchased those paintings underground, or someone could have given them to him as gifts. Maybe the apartment wasn’t even his. It was the testimony from Sandy Trewell, one of the old-heads in the art swipe game, that confirmed Wes might have run with these tough guys to some extent. Sandy had been arrested and tried years before and spent “a little” time inside. But you know how people say a Monet can be a get-out-of-jail-free-card? Well, case in point.

VO: Most people believe Sandy was a little salty at how adept Wes was at this art trade. He probably tried to keep his mouth shut, but as we’ve all known: Southie’s finest have a hard time doing that. 

AX: Tape rewinds. Clip plays. 

Sandy: I don’t know the fuckin’ guy’s name, but if you’re asking if there was an Asian face nearby? I’d tell you yes. The dude had a good eye.

Interviewer: Did he answer to someone?

Sandy: Worked with the crew outta Back Bay, if you can believe it. The Gerritsons, or something. 

Interviewer: The Gerritsons?

Sandy: I don’t know shit about them, but I talked to the guy a couple times. He rolled up to the garage in Dorchester once, beaten to a friggin’ pulp. Had just been with the Gerritsons, he said. He—

Interviewer: And that happened when?

Sandy: I don’t know, March 2015? 

Interviewer: Do you know who beat him?

Sandy: Not a clue. Dude had a crazy streak, though. First day I met him, he almost killed a guy with a soda gun, swear on my mother. And by “almost,” I mean like right there. We were teasing him, hazing sorta, for being new. You couldn’t really tell who’s intimidating who or whatever. People knew that he’s a BU guy. We hadn’t been around someone like that.

Sandy: It simmered down. We went to a bar, it all seemed cool. But some jock-type got all flustered cuz he thought Yang was looking at him funny, or his girl or something. I don’t remember. Jock guy starts a fight, we all pounce—there’s like seven of us. And we got a boss with us. (laughs) We pin the dude on the bar and our boss—and I ain’t naming names—takes a long look at Lang. It’s quiet as hell in there. All the sudden, one blink, and Lang’s got the jock guy’s hair pulled back behind the bar, and he’s shoving a soda gun down his throat. He just lets the hose run. We look around like “what the hell,” and we’re laughing. Then like forty seconds go by, and the dude’s purple. Not cuz there’s Pepsi all over his face. Wasn’t funny anymore. Finally, I grab Yang and yank him over the bar. We let go of the beefy jock, and he throws up everywhere. Everywhere. We run out. I had to drive our guys out of the neighborhood fast as hell. Our boy was scared shitless. 

Interviewer: This was Wes Liang?

Sandy: I told ya, I don’t remember the friggin’ guy’s name.

AX: Clip ends. 

VO: There was a murder in Boston on September 10th, 2016. That was also pinned on Wes. Wow. Now, it wasn’t like they found some peacefully-laid body by the river and DNA samples of Wes’s beard hair at the scene. This was way, way sharper of an evening. Right after dinner time, a tall, lanky guy walked from the back door of the Cutler Majestic to a nearby CVS on Essex St with his hand tightly gripping his own neck, so as not to spill too much blood. Pedestrians stopped. People didn’t move. The Theater District stood still as this man with his throat slit made the one block trek toward the closest drugstore to find some gauze. 

AX: Street murmurs. Downtown Boston noise.

VO: Someone yelled out and asked if they should call an ambulance, but the guy just waved his hand. Medical bills be damned. A few seconds later, he dipped down the alley and collapsed. It’s safe to assume that everyone thought that some homeless people got into a knife fight, and they just didn’t know what to do. But it wouldn’t take the greatest detective to follow a trail of blood leading to the backstage door of the Cutler Majestic. And, would you believe it? Wes and Kai happened to be at the Cutler that night, just sitting in the whiskey lounge, waiting for the show to start.

VO: Boston PD took Wes in. It was later found out that the lanky guy belonged to one of the Italian families in the North End. But there wasn’t a single drop of blood on Wes’s outfit or shoes. He was quietly released. Kai picked him up.

VO: There were always rumblings that Kai and Wes appeared closer to each other after that incident. They started to go to restaurants again, and almost a month later, to China, again. All of this brought up a lot of different conspiracy theories about Kai and his possible involvement in that case. He might know about Wes’s dirty money very early on—he might even have pushed him to do it.

VO: However, there’s a thread on The Bottle that I always find myself leaning toward. The theory goes that Kai and Wes actually attempted to spark another honeymoon phase right before Z-O entered China, the summer of 2016. We know for sure that Kai invited Wes to his dad’s. His dad was dying—cancer. I don’t know the details. But the move didn’t work. They flew over on the first day of August, and when they were there, Kai and Wes shared a room at Kai’s dad’s place.

VO: This messy timeline. Let’s try to clear it up, a little. Wes and Kai were at each other's throats in early 2016. A bit of an alienation and power struggle thing. Wes’s modes of doing business just didn’t fit with the current state of the company. That was the first crack in the rock. Those battles simmered into the Cold War between them that lasted through the summer, until Kai made a gesture to Wes and invited him to his dad’s. But it didn’t work out—they both wanted different things. Right before Z-O’s drastic China expansion, one of them proposed a trip back to Boston, an eerie move. That murder happened on the 10th of September, and then . . . the real honeymoon phase started. And, you see, the thing that really cements this for me is that that lanky guy that died up against the back door of a CVS was Lottie Sleschinger. The same Sleschinger whose MAC-11 was recovered—with prints—from South Station’s Platform #6.

AX: Gun unloads. Bullets trickle out.

VO: I don’t know how I should see this intimacy between Kai and Wes. Maybe the success in China covered everything from the past. You know, if there’s enough cake, nobody needs to bite each other. Or, they just talked each other out of bitterness. The ice between them simply melted.

MS: (“A Midsummer Rainshower”)

VO: Later that fall, right around the end of September, there was that second China trip. The whole team packed their bags and prepped for a really busy week. The biggest thing on the docket: a huge satellite was getting launched into space, right off the desert in Qinghai. It had a bright orange Z-O logo etched onto the side. The satellite was supposed to help Z-O and its users locate where the bikes are. 

VO: In fact, the satellite launch was a PR crisis cover-up proposed by Mari. Z-O at the time was going through a harsh shake in China, and it fell on Mari’s shoulders. The state of foreign policy practically rested in her hands. Kai and Wes were both distracted, so, reluctantly, Mari was, for all intents and purposes, the leader that kept Z-O going.

VO: Even though Z-O completely dominated the Chinese market with an unbelievable 78% market share, without professional local management teams in place and because people haven’t seen a business like this before, Z-O’s dockless bikes were constantly vandalized and stolen. One of the most infamous incidents was when a guy recorded himself throwing up onto a Z-O bike after coming out of a hot pot place. Bamboo shoots and napa cabbage still intact. There were also young influencers on social media attracting a large audience with broadcasts of dumping hundreds of Z-O bikes into rivers and reservoirs. 

VO: But these were just individual cases. The reason why Z-O left a generally negative impression among the public was that there was little coordination and management, and it actually cost more to relocate a bike than to throw in a new bike. Z-O bikes flooded China’s streets. They took up entire sidewalks even when they were stacked up. Sometimes they even spilled into the bicycle lanes and car lanes. 

VO: What would they have done without Mari yanking up her overalls and calling shots? And still, Kai’s ever-present ego took hold. The Bottle had it that Kai, at times, thought Mari was overstepping. A bit of a tear in the fabric here. Now, Mari had to pull off a juggling act. Keeping the business afloat with no added drama, and keeping Kai happy . . . with no added drama. She pulled off extravagant shows to please him, shit that made him feel like king, like a satellite launch, for example. She could have walked away, but . . . to grovel like that? Ladies in the world. I feel for Mari. She just couldn’t say no, and she trusted too much. Ammonia and bleach. 

MS: (“Love Buzz” by Nirvana)

VO: So, Mari wasn’t at the satellite launch herself. She ended up being whisked away from Kai and Wes, back in Beijing, to the location where excavators dragged 300 bikes out of the Yongding River. She then went to conduct interviews with workers at the bike factory in Lemma Town because news started to get out: China did not welcome Z-O. Z-O ruined China’s streets. China was not ready for communism. Stuff. 

VO: While Mari was doing her best to salvage brand image, Kai and Wes had a more symbolic approach to polishing the faces of Z-O. They planned a bike trip into the mountains near the launch spot—the same mountains that Kai did his first ever bike trip with his first ever cycling club in middle school. A lot of thought went into this trip, including Kai’s great return to the gym. Reporters came. Social media buzzed about it. They made sure it was a public note that the two head honchos of Z-O were as buddy-buddy as ever, going on a big trek into the mountains on some prototype bikes. It was a new look on the first generation of Phoenix bikes. Limited edition. Two made. They went through a lot to make sure that relationship worked. 

AX: Bike bell dings.

VO: Or maybe the buddy-buddy outlook didn’t last, though. There sat the Z-O satellite, awaiting its impending orbit in the bright stars, only to be accompanied by one-third of the Z-O faces. Kai led the launch himself. Wes left early, one day before the launch. News caught that he was sitting comfortably in a rooftop restaurant with the head of Ambler. But a business dinner could always wait. 

VO: Oh, shit. This page stuck to the back of the bike lock thing. Uhhhhhh—

AX: Unsticks paper slowly.

VO: Damn. So around this same time, RedRide—I think I mentioned RedRide before, right? If not, basically it was a competitor. One that came out of nowhere. A little Michael Jordan, Game 6 action, riding a lead late into the game, and then all the sudden you’re down by 4. Ruthless. That was RedRide.

VO: I’m going to skip the whole rise of RedRide because that might as well be a whole ’nother podcast. I’m talking poisonings, a stomatopoda flu outbreak, and even something involving James Cameron—just . . . . Let’s cut to the chase. 

VO: We’re looking at a rookie sensation here. You could feel the tension on the street as much as you could in the top floor corner office. The Cold War was alive and well in Z-O’s bones. Any competitor shows up? Cold War. At the Boao Forum for Asia, Kai famously ignored the hand that Leilei, the even younger founder of RedRide, reached out . . . . The tension was high. Sort of for no reason. Just a statement. I mean, the media probably over-interpreted that handshake incident over and over again. But thanks to this mentality, fights broke out everywhere in the city between local crews in different colored shirts representing their own brands. Tribal era.

MS: (Outro)

VO: While all the financing people were going crazy on funding different sides of the Cold War parties, there was a courtroom recording that made its way around the corners of the internet at the end of 2017. It was a famous case that still exists in China’s LSAT test. An unsupervised nine-year-old boy had been killed by a truck while riding a Z-O bike to school. The parents sued Z-O for manslaughter. There wasn’t a lock on the bike.

VO: Now, I think this is interesting: if you read lips, that video is a gold mine. Wes, sitting very, very far away from Kai, walked toward him at the end of the trial. Plain as day, he said to Kai, “Olive branch?”

MS: (Outro Fades)

VO: Kinda puts Wes’s fake death in a weird light, doesn't it?

EPISODE IV

The Jellyfish Pendulum

AX: An auction clip from the Sotheby’s.

VO: I got a joke for you. (clears throat) There’s an old man in a grocery store. He’s making a ruckus in the vegetable aisle, so much so that security picks him up and throws him, literally throws him, out onto the curb. It’s a hard fall. A Good Samaritan walks by and notices. They take off their jacket and place it under the old man’s head. They ask, “Are you comfortable?” The old man says, “Eh. I make a living.” 

VO: Wes pushed Wendell to pay $1.1 million for a painting the size of a postage stamp. These three ego balloons sitting at an auction, driving up prices for each other just to piss each other off. Oh, male animal instincts.

VO: I just heard about this thing called “cold open.” Am I doing it right?

MS: (Theme Song Variations: “Variation Venus”)

VO: Allegedly, Wes knew something was coming way before his death. I mean he didn’t prophesy his future like “I will die from eating an unwashed grape one day, out on the laps of the ocean waves.” But he knew something was coming, so he started recording everything. Majority of the audio clips were not found within The Bottle, but from a sealed archive at the Boston PD. Thanks to Boston Foundation and the Cleveland Asian American Community Center’s support to this podcast development project. 

MS: (Theme Song Swells)  

VO: A big gray van tore through the snowy streets of Lynn, Massachusetts. There was a fight behind the wheel. It swerved back and forth under the street lights, barely missing parked cars on the street. I can’t blame the driver. It’s hard to stay straight with your brother trying to kill the passenger from the back seat. The rear window broke. A crowbar was swinging around. To be clear, the three guys in the van started the drive as a team. 

AX: Van tires screech. The car slides.

VO: Wes tried to lose weight the winter before the whole death legend. It’s not like he just wanted to have a flat tummy when the day came. He would go down to the gym on the tenth floor, have a seat in the sauna after his workout, grab a cup of tea, and head upstairs before bed. It was a routine. But on a snowy day in November, people saw him come upstairs with two men dripping blood all over the lobby. Wes tried to wipe up the floor on the way up to the penthouse. The carpet on the elevator floor was red anyway, fortunately.

VO: On November 22nd, 2017, Carter Kennedy, the acting boss of the Kennedy family, was found killed. Blunt force trauma to the dome. Rolled up in a blood-soaked rug and tied with fraying bungee cords, he was found stuck between two rocks right off the beach in Nahant. 

VO: And yes, those two brothers did it. Killed him with a crowbar. And yes, those two brothers were the same bloody stragglers that Wes took the responsibility of mopping up after after his workout. As soon as they got upstairs, all three of them hopped in the shower and rinsed off. It was a big shower. 

AX: Shower kicks on.

AX: Clip plays. 

Mikey: This is such a grand opening. We broke the ceiling, bro. 

Wes: Run through it again. Tell me again.

Mitchie: Your apartment is huge dude. Like seriously you got 3.5 bathrooms? Do you actually live alone?

Mikey: Shut up. (to Wes) We had a little agency, pal. Thought you’d appreciate that. 

Mitchie: I love all these air plants. Look at them. How much they run you?

Wes: Like $200 bucks. Mikey, what the fuck? 

Mikey: You have a soft spot for that old bastard?

Wes: Maybe. But either way.

Mitchie: Guess who drove the car.

Wes: Mikey, shut this guy up. 

Mikey: Mitchie, shut up.

Mitchie: Nah. Guess who drove the car. 

*Silence.

AX: Clip ends. 

MS: (“Uptown Funk”)

VO: Z-O just entered Vienna, placing 2,000 bikes at the Heldenplatz. This was the 49th country that Z-O broke into. In the meantime, Z-O China had more than 32 million DAUs, which is twenty-four times as many as the last fall season. I’m no business man, but I know when numbers are bigger. 

VO: Kai invited The Black Eyed Peas to Conrad Beijing. He was hosting the Z-O China get-together attended by 3,000 employees. He opened his ten-minute speech by quoting “Top Gun” in English. “Welcome. Gentlemen, you are the top one percent of all naval aviators. The elite. The best of the best.” Then he danced to “I Got a Feeling” with the real Black Eyed Peas.

VO: Z-O was so rich at the time. Funny fact, after the “Double 11,” which is China’s Black Friday, Z-O reportedly sold nearly 150 million annual subscription gift cards, becoming the ninth biggest tech company in China after conglomerates like Alibaba and Tencent. I believe at that time, Z-O’s size was even bigger than Ambler, and they were right there to secure their next investment funding round of $286 million. All the conglomerates were there to make a bid. The pool of conglomies hovering at the top of those lists had practices that wouldn’t surprise you. Always hungry for the next big thing, everyone wanted a piece of the bike-sharing industry. And yet, just like Apple, AT&T, Viacom, you name it, only one could get a bite of Z-O—if Z-O was willing to kneel, of course. The rest had to find their own dinner, or start a recipe from scratch.

VO: At that get-together, Kai brought ten gigantic bags of cash onto the stage, with three gigantic fans. He placed bricks of money all around. Then, he flipped on the switch. He was really trying to pull off a full Oprah here. Later, a drunk employee went on the stage, grabbed the mic, and recited the whole soliloquy from “Hamnet.” After this person was pulled off stage by hotel security, Kai patted his shoulder and gave him a brand new Jeep Wrangler, right there, on the spot. When I said “full Oprah,” I meant full Oprah. 

AX: Oprah: “You get a car.”

VO: Following all this money flaunting and finance frenzy, Z-O moved again. This was their fourth move in two years in China. They moved into the most expensive office building in Beijing. The building where companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and Ambler were born—it’s called the “Building of Ideality.” Z-O did it different. They put a gigantic bike on the top of the Building. Over the top, yes. But I think it’s fair to say that . . . they peaked.

AX: Sips drink.

VO: I don’t have a drinking problem. Ignore that . . . . In August, a month before Kai was literally pissing money into the wind, Mari was staving off the Texas heat in Dallas, trying to reason with their City Council about the new bike taxes in the metro area. There was no doubt that Z-O’s presence in Dallas was a new opportunity for local tourism—it brought people closer to the community, the shop owners, and the city itself. And that’s what Mari hinged her arguments on. But it also couldn’t be debated that there were piles of orange metal building up in alleys and parking lots around the city. 

VO: And it wasn’t just Dallas. Z-O was a virus spreading in urban areas around the United States. Outside a mall in Minneapolis, there was a tower of stacked Z-O bikes in the parking lot. This wasn’t just a stack of bikes you’d find in a big family garage. It was twenty-seven feet high, taller than most suburban homes. It was a bike fungus that grew by itself. On a particularly windy day, it toppled over and totaled a car.

VO: The Dallas City Council proposed that companies with bikes in the area would have to pay a fee of $21 per bike. They also established new rules that would require operators, paid for by Z-O, to collect bikes after complaints were made within a certain time limit. I think it was 72 hours. In the meantime, Seattle approved a new set of bike-sharing taxes, which prompted Z-O to leave because the fees were the highest in the country, and if that wasn’t enough, cities like Boise banned Z-O from even operating within their limits. 

AX: Coins jangle out of a piggy bank.

VO: Z-O sent hundreds of bikes to the Dallas Recycling Center. Then they exited Seattle, donating over 8,000 bikes to three non-profits along the way. Don’t get me wrong. They tried to appeal these new bans and taxes left, right, up, and down. But they failed. In The Bottle, some internal gossip leaked out that they had to take their best lawyers off any other case and drop them into this storm. Then you account for the language barriers, differences in jurisdictions . . . . They were bleeding. I’m sure you hear me say that and think: “Wow, how can they recover from this?” And you’re right. They didn’t. In fact, these retreats were never reflected on business reports. They came across as a natural loss. Obsolete, basically. The number of new bike productions and placements were still skyrocketing—they were entering ten, twenty, thirty more cities every month across the whole world. On paper. 

VO: So, it looked like they were expanding, but they were actually leveling off. They continued to pull out of cities all over the U.S., but they were supplementing those pulled bikes into new cities and countries across the globe. Z-O just couldn’t care less about the U.S. market right now. They found their real heart in developing countries where people were more used to riding bikes and craving for bike-sharing services like Z-O. Investors loved that.

VO: By October 2017, this bike-sharing giant with origins in Fenway-Kenmore, Massachusetts was evaluated to be worth more than $50 billion. It was a unicorn—one of the most valuable unicorns in the whole world. But, on November 11th, 2017, after a shocking announcement was made during a board conference call, the U.S. branch of Z-O was severed completely from the Z-O brand. 10,000 people in a working group chat . . . . All of a sudden, they were dismissed. Can’t imagine the notification hell that put them through. The U.S. Z-O was renamed “Neo Ride” and started exploring its new path to become a health and lifestyle brand. Mari carried out a three-month campaign helping Neo Ride transition. Their app came with workout plans, and their bikes were recolored strawberry. Neo Ride downsized to operate only in the New England area, running a total number of 100 thousand bikes. I’ve never liked pinks and creams. I’ve never cared for wishy-washy people, either. So that’s that.

VO: Fun fact though, there was even a UNDP joint scholarship that was established by Neo to support environmental research projects—Neo planned to donate its income on the 17th of each month to celebrate the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Hm.

MS: (High School Pep Band Abruptly Stops)

VO: Wes met up with Wendell at an antique watch shop in Bay Village. They usually met for dinner around this time every year to catch up and so Wendell could give Wes money. But for the past two years, Wendell didn’t hand out a check. So, now, it’s really just a sit-down of good faith. Wes was fine with that. But Wendell was looking to swing the pendulum a bit further in the opposite direction.

VO: Wes had a watch with a diamond crown that had been broken for a few days now, so they took it to the shop on Columbus Ave. Little do people know, Hi-tech surveillance cameras actually can pick up audio. 

AX: Clip plays. Grandfather clock dings. 

Wendell: Christmas wishes?

Wes: Securing lasting peace in Africa.

Wendell: Hm. (taps on a glass display case) How about . . . ?

Wes: I’m fine with this one—

Wendell: Really? Attached to it?

Wes: Why? We’ve agreed.

Wendell: Maybe this could be my personal gift. 

Wes: Then I’d have to get you something, too. (laughs) Isn’t that how Christmas works?

Wendell: Well.

*Silence.

Wes: Are Mikey and Mitchie on your wishlist, Wendell? 

Wendell: They could be. Just under that new RedRide bike—you see that? Only thirty pounds. Like riding a feather through the breeze. 

Wes: Hmm. Where’s my Christmas spirit?

AX: Clip ends. 

VO: On Christmas Eve, Wes tagged along with Wendell to a dinner at a beautiful home in Nantucket. The home belonged to a real estate tycoon in New England whose name never surfaced. It was pretty exclusive, not out of the ordinary for Wes and Wendell, except this time Wendell was acting a little different. Wendell was young—a little older than Wes, but barely. He didn’t look young at all, though. He was tall and intimidating, with a massive bone structure and a weirdly-imposing physique, chewed taro-flavored tobacco like it was nobody’s business and wore a suit that could fit a bear—any picture you see of this guy, he was swimming in that suit. And today, I guess, was his day to really embrace the coronation as the Kennedys’ King.

VO: After dessert, the tycoon wanted to show his guests around the house, into various “Clue”-mansion-type rooms. All through the house tour, Wes was ready to flex his art knowledge, partly to prove to the new boss what he knew. The tycoon had been hyping up his gallery, and Wes was on his toes. When they finally reached the gallery, Wes looked up to see a twenty-foot great white shark hanging from the ceiling. 

VO: The crème de la crème of this tycoon’s house was his taxidermy garden—a room full of dead creatures stuffed with . . . whatever people stuff them with. There wasn’t a single painting to be seen. Wes knew about Picasso’s blue-period “Nightclub Singer,” not a stupid fox this guy killed three years ago. He was out of his element, out of his comfort zone now. But to his surprise, after a while, Wendell asked for some privacy between himself and Wes—he was essentially kicking the tycoon out of his own haven of stuffed animals. Oh, but the hi-tech camera.

AX: Clip plays.

Wendell: So, family time.

Wes: With a dead fish above our heads?

Wendell: Just re-bonding!

Wes: Is this supposed to be a stepfather-stepson situation?

Wendell: I’m only twenty-seven, brother.

*Silence.

Wendell: I just want to know if you . . . . I don’t know . . . if you have anything to say to me first?

*Silence.

Wendell: Okay . . . . I didn’t have anything to do with Carter. 

Wes: Would Mikey and Mitchie say the same?

Wendell: I don’t think they will say anything, my man. 

AX: Clip stops. 

VO: This situation was angering Wes. He had a temper. No secret there. Especially, after he’s been quite a boss himself for some years now, how would he look at his inferior position in this family? He leaned against marbled walls and felt the cool veins of the stone against his back. He was backed into a room of glaring, dead eyes all around him. 

AX: Clip continues. 

Wendell: If you can make friends with Carter Kennedy, it shouldn’t be that hard with me. What’s the problem with me?

Wes: You need a friend? 

Wendell: Maybe. What’s wrong with wanting a new friend?

Wes: We’re from different worlds, Wendall. Never been more obvious than right now. I might have had a deal, but it was with Carter. Because he was . . . lighthearted. 

Wendell: I’m happy to stop you right there. We are from the same world. That’s why I like to give you lil’ nudges. A little support. The kinda shit I didn’t get.

Wes: You helped. Yeah, you helped. But that doesn’t put us in the same world.

Wendell: . . . We are from the same world, no? 

*Silence.

Wendell: We don’t need art coming off the walls anymore.

AX: Clip stops. 

VO: In this video, Wendell fidgeted and paced around the room. It wasn’t nerves so much as it was a pattern of thinking. He actually took a wrong step and knocked over a toucan. The beak came right off the stuffed bird. The two of them looked at the floor. 

AX: Clip continues.

*Silence.

Wes: Are you kidding—

Wendell: You are paying for this.

AX: Clip stops. 

VO: Wendell scooped up the beak and the bird and sat on the floor—criss-cross applesauce. He went to work. Wes watched. 

AX: Clip continues. Fiddles with toucan. Keys jingle.

Wendell: See . . . Mikey and Mitchie can’t fix shit. They grew up working at a garage, believe it or not. You’re not stupid. When a RICO case rears its head, there’s a bite to the bark.

Wes: That is the furthest thing from my problem. 

*Silence.

Wendell: I told myself I wasn’t gonna do it, but I’m gonna get a little philosophical here. I had a dream the other night, right before a crowbar met Carter’s brain. And in this dream, we all lived in this big, happy town. Once a year, there was a festival. It was on the one day in the year that it rained. Every year, the same day, rain—predictable as ever. And everyone in the town gathered together and built a big wooden cross. We dragged it up a hill, a tall one that overlooked the town. Once it’s up there, we waited. We knew that someone had to come forward and volunteer, you know, for the sake of the town. That was the agreement. A little bit of suffering for a lot of . . . prosperity. Sunshine and good feelings all year, except for the day it rained . . . when we had to crucify one of our own so we could all enjoy the lives we get to live.

*Silence.

Wendell: Story #2! A big bad, NEW-to-the-game Mob Boss dug a deeeeeep hole to scare little Bike Boy. Bike Boy had two options. Lay down like a sacrificial lamb. Or, give big bad Mob Boss a new lamb. Don’t matter if Bike Boy clones one, breeds one, 3D prints one . . . . I don’t know . . . . A little “mirroring” effect. There’s a great leap forward happening. And all this movement needs is some participation.

AX: Clip stops. 

VO: To tell you the truth, the toucan looked like shit. But it was passable for the time being, so the two of them stood back up and perched it on the end table it fell from. Wendell continued to fidget with it. 

AX: Clip continues.

Wendell: So guess what my big takeaway is.

*Silence.

AX: Clip ends. 

MS: (Transition)

VO: It was not a coincidence that Wes left the U.S. for China the next day. He never came back. I don’t know what deal he landed with the Kennedys, but I could take a wild guess. They wanted a major share of Z-O, or a buyout—a big buyout I suppose—according to The Bottle, that number was certainly over ten digits. 

AX: Outlook email does not send.

VO: Kai single-handedly blocked off eleven major investors who were associated with Ambler, and three senior executives from Ambler who were on the board took an indefinitely long leave without any notice. It looked like a small fracture on the surface, but deep down it was personal. 

VO: Kai didn’t get along with Ambler’s negotiator, Charlie Fu. In Fu’s eyes, Kai was just this proud prince who came from an elite school and a rich family, and when he was at the negotiation table, he, with his old-fashioned ideals, was too high and mighty to listen. In Fu’s words, Kai was willing to lose out on $1.5 billion and the future of Z-O just to make sure he and his core team were at the helm. And Kai wanted more than just being the “Head of International.” He wanted to hear the word “Chairman.” That’s a big ask. 

VO: When I say single-handedly, I mean Kai took it upon himself to go to the IT office and one-by-one deleted the Ambler higher-ups’ emails from everything. The way it broke down, these Ambler officials were blocked off from financial data, emails, IQ newsletters, and basically any other insight that would let you know what Z-O was doing and when. It was petty, but it all came to a head after a Tuesday board meeting in a building across the street. After lunch, everyone was on their way back . . . but they couldn’t get into the building. Their IDs didn’t work. And I’ll tell you what: billionaires don’t like losing access to anything. 

AX: Buzz. System: “Access denied.”

VO: I have to give Ambler this—if anyone were to ever acquire Z-O, Ambler, a company who is dedicated to changing how Chinese people move, would be the most ideal candidate. We don’t know if the Ambler block was a power play from Kai to Wes or Kai to the board—I guess probably a little of both. Wes brought in all the investors. In a way, Kai despised Wes’s choice to bring in Fu, the Ambler team lead. But, deep down, Kai had long since left the reflection of Wes that influenced him so heavily. Now? Kai was alone in the cockpit (by design) and was tearing himself away from the old clichés he had been collecting—the muscles and the sweet tooth. He saw Z-O in a way that was much more obsessive and self-defining, in my opinion. Kai was self-sabotaging by way of insomnia. Keeping himself up at night so as not to miss a beat, like he was stabbing himself in the brain with an ice pick. He caught a nap here and there and had eye drops on hand, but this shit wore heavy on him. No wonder his temper flared on a whim. Again, all by design. But a poor one at that. 

VO: By shafting the entire board, Kai was shafting the guy who put them there—his partner from the beginning. He was making his statement clear. What was the statement? It was something that was never explicitly said. But it was felt. 

AX: Chalkboard writing.

VO: Here’s what you need to know about Z-O in September 2017. It was a moving train. A barreling locomotive going at the highest speed it can, topping out, and the brake just so happened to be stuck. To illustrate what I mean, I want you to picture enormous tombs of bicycles. Like God reached down his hand and meticulously placed bike on top of bike, in neat, orderly graveyards. 

VO: Shanghai is a lot like, say, New York. Every inch of land is worth a pretty penny. Now, right by the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, there were 40,000 bicycles that had already taken their last breath. Excavators came through with backhoes and dug out deep holes to fit all of them—special burial grounds. And, the graveyards were spreading to second- and third-tier cities as well, where, I guess, the land was worth just a little less.

VO: Let me be clear: when I say Z-O was a barreling train, I don’t mean they were seeing great organic growth. They had already had that phase of their life. What I mean is that they were a machine that simply had not been geared to stop. The system that was put in place just cycled through itself over and over, as thousands of bikes ended up dead in Shanghai ditches, São Paulo marshes, and Copenhagen aqueducts. Don’t take it from me. I spoke with someone, a contracted worker at one of the Guangzhou warehouses at the time. She bucked up for her first day on the job, only to stumble into a warehouse full of 5,000 broken bikes, and three other workers sat on the floor, just passing the hours. 

AX: Warehouse chatter.

VO: New bikes made their way onto streets, just as old ones made their way off. In China’s coastline cities you could see higher and higher influx, while over 36,000 bikes were whisked onto the beach by sea waves in just one summer. Bike jellyfish. Do you get the picture now?

VO: Z-O’s business model was mysterious, and they never intended for any data transparency, either. Kai, after bringing the company to the top spot in the bike-sharing war, had quite a different take on the business than any other person in the room now. In his own words, according to various recordings of him arguing with Fu, Z-O was never meant to be a bike-rental company. 

AX: Clip plays.

Kai: Bikes are not the business.

AX: Clip ends. 

VO: You’ve probably already heard about this, you know, that Uber and Z-O are different. Uber doesn’t own any cars—the textbook definition of “sharing economy,” and Z-O, branded “bike-sharing,” is actually heavy on assets. But what I’m talking about here is that in Kai’s calculations, Z-O was supposed to give people almost-free rides and benefit from just the ad revenue and licensing deals alone. He was building a two-dimensional empire—an image for the future. Kai thought “green,” “environmentally-friendly,” “community-driven.” He never came to terms with what his actual futuristic visions were, nor what his financial prediction models could be. And as successful as Z-O had become, they were failing to find their footing in this way. For every one thousand bikes brought into those mega cities, four hundred found themselves broken or tossed to the bottom of a river. (Footnote: producing Z-O bikes cost 50% less than RedRide bikes. You ever buy Choco-Cookie-Os instead of Oreos? There's a reason why Z-O thought that was a great deal. They were pouring money into brand building and were always behind on management and operation costs. Maybe there were blinders here, but to Kai, somehow, that was a winning recipe.)

VO: In their partnership, Wes had always been in the power position. But the day when the Ambler execs lost their access to the Building of Ideality, Kai basically scooted Wes out of the power seat and, in turn, made himself nice and cozy. He was ready to make decisions on his own, if he had to—if that’s what it took to run the company as he always wanted to.

MS: (André 3000 Flute Transition)

VO: The timing was horrible. This break-up came at a moment where a merge proposal brought up by RedRide sat on the table. The bike-sharing market in Mainland China was saturated. 30 million bikes, 200 cities. Over-and-over saturated. In December 2017, the number of shared bikes in Shanghai was 1.78 million, which was three times more than what the city actually needed. Z-O plus RedRide took over 95% of the entire market, and neither of the companies were profiting because they were still at each other’s throats, burning cash to seek expansion and edge the other out. Anyone that found themselves in the middle of this woke up every morning with compounding anxiety: what was going to happen? And it got worse with every passing hour: what was going to happen that day that would change everything? 

VO: Meanwhile, the government was catching up. New regulations finally came out in China that demanded bike-sharing companies place at least five maintenance crews per one thousand bikes. Another big maintenance payout from Z-O’s pot of gold. Also, every single bike put on the street more than three years ago had to retire immediately, which means by 2020, 10 million bikes from all over China were going to be kicking the bucket. That’s two and a half aircraft carriers worth of decomposing metal cluttering the earth. Do bikes go to heaven?

VO: Rounds and rounds of investors came and went through the Z-O doors to see Kai, trying to lay out the situation for him. After all, the only way for the two gigantic unicorns to profit was to eventually merge. This went on for weeks, and then, in September, Kai left China to go back to the States.

VO: Wes knew he had to convince Kai to take the proposal. He was pushing it harder than anyone in this world. The offer was on the table. By signing it, Ambler would broker the $20 billion deal in a month, and all board members could walk away with at least $200 million each and a seat in the board room probably for the rest of their lives.

VO: So, you see, creating a deal wasn’t the difficult part. It was convincing Kai, the Logan Roy of Z-O, to take the deal. 

AX: Ten seconds of silence. 

VO: Can I guess what you’re thinking? You haven’t heard me talk about Shep in like forty minutes or something. I know. But, if there’s anything that’s true about this . . . . This. It’s Shep, the respect for him, and the impact his dozen and half years on the planet left for this whole story. In telling this to you all, I have to constantly ask myself what Shep would think, how he’d feel. To me, it’s always better to be the underdog that never wins than the front-runner who wins everything. I wonder what he would think. I remember that fundraiser that was thrown for his parents to buy tickets to fly to Boston. Sometimes, in a world like this, emotional things feel small. So you’re wondering why I haven’t talked about him. Yes, he’s an important piece—the most. But it’s a little too real to touch, too real for this story that’s getting . . . even out of my hands.

MS: (Somber Transition)

VO: Ahem. There was a brief period of truce, after which both Kai and Wes went missing for two weeks, after which, rumor has it that an assassination game had begun. But Wes and Kai met once, in Beijing, during those two weeks, in a hutong where a boutique bike repair shop sat tucked into the brick wall. The date is March 3rd.

AX: Clip plays.

Kai: Two options?

Wes: Two options.

Kai: For me?

Wes: Did you look over the term sheet? Tell me—

Kai: That’s not an option.

Wes: Well, see . . . no. That was one option. 

Kai: Your option, you mean.

Wes: Do you know the other option, Kai?

Kai: You sound like Joker. I always wanted to say that.

*Silence.

Kai: Do you even know your way around a bike?

AX: Clip stops. 

VO: The dewy air in that shop was suffocating. Like something was haunting the conversation. Wes stood and watched Kai swiftly break down a bike, bolt by bolt, until it became a completely disassembled pile of pieces. They spoke with a wink in their eye.

AX: Clip continues.

Kai: Can’t touch a bike without thinking of Boston—how weird is that. (pauses) We just wanted to build something, you know? Right? You remember that? 

Wes: But you wanted to build Noah’s Ark. Okay? We constructed the Walls of Babylon.

*Silence.

Kai: You’re not happy with that?

Wes: I didn’t have anything on the table. We borrowed some bricks from the devil. 

Kai: Wes, I watched you walk to the devil and take a sippy cup out of his hand, night after night after night. You were practically disco dancing with him.

Wes: We made two different versions of the same thing. We always do.

*Silence.

Kai: Are you going to make me have to hide?

*Silence.

Kai: You don’t always have to be around when Babylon falls. 

AX: Clip ends. 

MS: (“Ten Thousand Years” from Les 7 Doigts)

EPISODE V

One Hundred Years of Noise

MS: (“Despair, Hangover & Ecstasy” by The Dø)

VO: Watching a heavy, monstrous, two-dimensional orange bike come off the Central Art Tower must have been a weird sight for thousands of Beijingers to see at 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. If you looked up at the right angle, it might have felt a bit like a postmodern eclipse. No pun intended, but that was a dark day for Z-O. They announced they were moving, again—moving to a slightly shorter tower, not so “Ideality,” more cost-efficient, more realistic. This was merely three weeks after Wes Liang announced his departure from his CFO seat at Z-O. 

VO: Wes called the press himself for the announcement on his jump from Z-O to RedRide. Well, maybe it wasn’t a “jump.” It was more like a strained split from ledge to ledge, toes curled and all. Walked up to the podium and didn’t even address the crowd. Not a “hi,” not a “thank you,” just the most ambitious speech you’ve ever heard. Almost like he started on page two of his notes. 

AX: Clip plays. 

Wes: I’m not just a founder of an industry-leading brand—I’m a founder of the industry. We started this last year with a full game, over one thousand players. Now, we look at the stage and see dynasties built. With 70 million monthly active users in China alone, we, RedRide, own 52.5% of the market share. And today, we’re announcing that we’re collaborating with one of the most successful conglomerates in the world: Alibaba. We hope we make your lives better—with a Chinese footprint all across the globe. 

AX: Clip ends. Blueprints roll out. Land on table.

VO: You have to grasp the key, key word in this three-hour long product launch. Not the new generation of lockless smart bikes, not their growth numbers, but the word “collaborate.” By using that word, Wes sounded as nice as he could, with flowers in the hand out front and an executioner’s hood behind his back. He was in RedRide’s penthouse office for only three days, but he acted like he had helped build the company. And before we knew it, RedRide was sold.

VO: RedRide being sold to Alibaba was a game-changing moment. This was kinda already foreshadowed thanks to an event a month prior: RedRide entered the Alipay Wallet, a PayPal-like service provided by Alibaba, one of the dominant payment apps in China. At this point, the bike war had become a seesaw battle. Really, whoever stays in the game longer will survive. This is how it worked in the internet economy: just pour in money and time it right so you outrun the competitors. A handshake between RedRide and Alibaba meant a waterfall of cash for a sharing business that was doomed to die like the rest, just later than the rest. So when Kai Lin, the Proud Prince, cut ties with Ambler, that was a death wish—a dried-up waterfall. 

VO: I have to say, I don’t understand where that confidence came from. Since the separation with Ambler turned out to be more personal than business, why did Kai make that choice? Did he have an insight once again? I wouldn’t be totally surprised, considering Kai did have his finger on the pulse in a way that every other character in this epic lacked. 

MS: (Upright Bass Transition)

VO: I have my own intel as well. In 2017, a few weeks before Wes’s shocking RedRide speech, Wendell Kowalski brought two of his closest team members to Shanghai and lived in the Peace Hotel. He took the time away from Boston to meet with Kai—to propose a deal, of sorts. You see, the Kennedy family was moving away from the sketchy art business. Wendell, now settled into his gig as the head of the family, decided that the art business was not sustainable. He explored options like hospitality, streaming, and Nu Skin, naturally. He just wanted to get the Kennedy wealth out of art and into something a bit more liquid. 

VO: Wendell and Kai met at the Great Theater of China. They were weirdly at a play called “Mosquito Palace.” It’s some French play adapted from a novel from a guy named Orhan Pamuk, performed in French with subtitles. The two of them sat on the second floor of the theater, somewhere in the right wing where no audience was seated, and they talked.

AX: Clip plays. Ambient orchestra music in background.

Kai: I feel like Siegfried.

Wendell: The dragon slayer?

Kai: No. The pug on the red velvet chair!

*Silence.

Kai: Wanna trade names?

Wendell: . . . Wendell Lin sounds like a verb. “Oh nothing. I’m just Wendellin’.” (pauses) I once ran into this guy named Joseph Kim. Like, what? (laughs) And Kai Kowalski. Ooo, Kai Kowalski. Red carpet-y. And alliterating.

Kai: Wouldn’t really do us much good, though, would it?

Wendell: Still would have this predicament in front of us. 

Kai: What does it feel like?

Wendell: Stressful. 

Kai: Stabbing someone with a knife? (pauses) Maybe it would help if you actually liked art. 

Wendell: Nah. Actually, I think that would make it harder.

*Silence.

Wendell: So you tell me, what does it feel like?

Kai: Too soon to tell. 

Wendell: Optimistic. I like it. What’s your plan?

*Silence.

Kai: Steer the ship.

Wendell: (snaps) See, that? That’s why I look up to you. You see this family. It’s something else. We started in the same class, you and me. Like—well, not school or nothing. We were workers. Our parents were workers, who didn’t make it, and now I’m working with the Kennedy name. But, all I got is a gun in hand and still no chips on the table. I look at you. You have plenty of chips. A surplus of chips. Me? Robbing museums in the dark, still blue-collar crime. With chips at the ready . . . and the chips are at the ready, yes? It’s time to move into an office building, to change this collar color.

Kai: The dog’s dilemma.

Wendell: Buddy, I have to be honest. I don’t know where your head is at. I can’t get a read. I usually know, but not right now. (pauses) You’d sell to Ambler?

AX: Clip stops. 

VO: Kai shrugged. He probably meant he’d rather die than sell.

AX: Clip continues.

Wendell: Ah, the day you ride a bike to see God. 

*Silence.

Wendell: So this leaves us . . . where?

AX: Clip stops. 

VO: After they talked through way too much of the play, they finally reached the end. And God, something really weird happened there. A witness saw Kai stand up and stretch, and at the peak of the stretch, he lunged a little invisible knife into Wendell’s chest. Ear to ear smirk. Maybe it was the leftover warmth from the audience spilling out of the theater, but in that dark, narrow aisle between rows of empty seats, it was nothing but depth between the two.

AX: Clip continues. 

Kai: I’ll slip you a price.

AX: Clip ends. 

VO: He said. Hmm.

MS: (Theme Song Variations: “Variation #27”)

VO: Mari orchestrated Kai’s final chance to sell. The opportunity was in front of his face. On March 16th, 2018, Ambler heads were supposed to walk through the door, thanks to a formal invite from Mari herself. For three years now, Mari was the gas in the engine that just quietly burned and made everything go. 27,000 invitation cards, 36 reams of paper per month on her office supplies bill, and I think her Outlook inbox count just showed an infinity symbol. And she put on her boots and made it work until it didn’t work anymore. She wanted Kai to make this sale—it’s the only thing that could come close to a saving grace, and if anyone was going to convince Kai, it was her.

VO: There was an appropriately modest lunch meeting set up at The Peninsula Hotel Shanghai. Mari tricked Kai into coming a little early so she could grab his ear. She arranged to have the entire banquet floor cleared out. Purged. She knew it could be a sensitive meeting . . . . A billion-dollar meeting . . . . Maybe the last meeting. And nobody, not on her watch, could be around to witness the success or failure of this meeting. 

VO: At 12:40 p.m., Kai walked in, thinking he was fashionably late, when in reality he was twenty minutes early. Mari intercepted him in the middle of the banquet hall and pulled him over to the big glass windows to chat. It was quiet and so far away from everyone. If you looked from the street, you could read everything you needed to know just one floor up. 

AX: Clip plays. 

Kai: Is this the Feast at Swan Goose Gate?

MarI: No, it is not. 

Kai: Okay, so it’s The Empty City Stratagem. Am I onto something? 

Mari: Kai, you need to—

Kai: Before you finish: It’s so weird to talk about this in English. They just sounded so much fancier—

Mari: Ambler is going to make a final offer. $720 million.

Kai: Did you take a cab here? 

Mari: Just took my time. 

Kai: Do you still fill out the progress reports or is that an assistant’s job nowadays?

AX: Clip stops. 

VO: There’s a grand piano on the second floor. Only the 7 p.m. jazz band was allowed to use it. You could see Kai sit down. He tuned it a little.

AX: Clip continues. 

Mari: Still me. (long beat) Who ever thought I’d start to care about bikes? You weren’t there with me in those small towns—you would have seen dozens of your home towns. Phoenix is pretty now. The factory was renovated—glassy, chrome. I don’t know if you knew. (beat) There are these masters that just, I don’t know, fix a bike in ten seconds. I put it on a progress report once, actually. But one day I had one of these gurus run into me, he was saying he was leaving the town, in Mandarin, though, so I thought maybe he was on a visit. I couldn’t quite get what he was saying, and then, he gave me a hug . . . . And a month later, I found out he left the bike town. He moved to Beijing. He decided to become a delivery guy. He said that he would make twice as much a month. Practically erased that craftsmanship from his brain to . . . urbanize. And . . . I have a piece of me in this. All this. I probably shouldn't feel shameful for saying that. But I do. 

Kai: So we’re not paying them enough.

Mari: No, sometimes, Kai, there are things that are just . . . not forgivable.

AX: Clip ends. 

VO: Kai left The Peninsula without a word. He probably just stepped outside for a smoke and then dipped. Never came back. According to the hotel staff, Mari soon texted the Ambler higher-ups to let them know that Kai had to “reschedule.” So no one actually showed up at The Peninsula that day. The second floor was empty for lunch and was only reoccupied when dinner came.

MS: (Freeform Jazz)

VO: Leaving behind the Building of Ideality means leaving behind its heavily-armed and overly-eager security team. I say this for a few reasons. I need to let you know how tense this moment in time was, and I mean for everyone in their own personal timeline. There are tens of billions of dollars at stake. People murder for that kind of money. I’d murder for much less.

VO: On March 18th, 2018, a fire broke in the ReGubl Elephant Building. This was the fourth building that Z-O moved into after they left Ideality. Rumor has it that Kai did it to claim insurance money. Ugh, cliché. Artie Bucco is crying at the sound of that. Apparently, Kai was that desperate, though, at least according to the financial documents that were leaked later. But you know, I always have my theories, and my theory is that RedRide middle management probably had no problem making their way into the Elephant Building with a matchbook in their pocket. In my opinion, the fire was an indication of a missile crisis. From the police announcement, the fire started on the seventeenth floor, and that was where Z-O’s central servers were located.     

VO: So yeah, stuff burned. But things also just disappeared. The biggest standout on the missing lists were boxes of paper. Not blank, the paper had shit on it, and by “shit,” I mean all of Z-O’s 2016 and 2017 master financial reports from every quarter—that’s eight if you do the math. These were full-blown espionage Cold War activities. And for everyone involved, the big question was: who’s pressing the big red button first?

AX: Button presses. Sound launches.    

MS: (“Deux Coeurs” By Marcin Masecki)

VO: Second week after the fire, news broke that Z-O’s monthly active users dropped to 27 million, a 27% decline from the last financial quarter. Third party consulting companies started to receive anonymous reports regarding deeply-analyzed flaws in Z-O’s business model. The rumor that Z-O could never profit, which previously only existed in the enclosed circle of business tycoons, now caught nationwide public attention.

VO: Lo and behold, another meeting with the Kennedy family happened at the Park Hyatt, a building known as the “Bottle Opener,” interestingly. China is a magical place, I know. For context, in just the five weeks between their first meeting and this one, things had significantly changed for both parties. Kai’s financial reports were practically library-accessible, and they scared the shit out of everyone. But a quarter of Wendell’s crew and capital had been mowed down in an art deal gone wrong just a few days prior. 

VO: It went like this: in an effort to dish out all the remaining pieces in the Kennedy collection—you know, as a part of the move from bottom dweller to putting “corporate criminal” on his LinkedIn page—Wendell was taking any deal he could. Can’t exactly list a Léger on Facebook Marketplace. Liquifying ancient art pieces seemed like quick work, but it turned south very fast. 

AX: Hospital sounds.

VO: Wendell brought forty people with him to Mass General Hospital on April 10th, 2018 to meet with a fine arts crew from Belgium. He was having a real jet-setter moment. Back and forth. And with guns across the borders everyday? Across China’s Customs? Word, Wendell. Word. These two parties hadn’t had much correspondence before, but from what the Kennedys understood, these Belgians were well-mannered. Yet the patients at MGH would beg to differ. They heard what they could only assume was the sound of machine guns spraying out in the operating room on the ground floor. 

VO: And with that, Wendell went home with an elevated heart rate, his tail between his legs, eight pieces less than he showed up with (including a priceless Chagall), and twelve crew members dead. It appeared that the auction location was leaked to who-knows-who in Boston, which caused concern that this was a hijack. It was a big hit, too. Judging from the photos of the dozen dead bodies, Wendell made sure to bring his finest, most muscular crew, and the best hitman of the Kennedy family, Clarence McGrady, got shot straight through the windpipe. He was too busy holding an obscure Caravaggio. Can’t say I didn’t do my research here. If there’s any silver lining, at least they were only one floor up from the morgue. Which, I know, sounds pretty apathetic from me but . . . . 

AX: “The Darjeeling Limited” elevator dings.

VO: So here we are, in the Park Hyatt, with Kai and Wendell splitting hairs once again. Long story short, one wasn’t worth as much as when they started, and the other couldn’t pay as much as when they started. So I guess they were back at the table again—starting from scratch. “Palace” tickets wasted.

VO: I got a twist here for you, though. Surprisingly, Wendell was coming straight from a meeting with Wes Liang the day before.

AX: Timer starts. It ticks.

VO: Wes still owed the mob “a favor.” It used to be assumed that would be to help push Z-O to either take in the Kennedys as a significant shareholder, or force Z-O to sell and pay the family back in cash. Cuz you know, devil’s bricks. For some time now, Wes had been a silent decision maker for the family, unwillingly, but swimmingly. The Kennedys were constantly reaching out, showing up to his apartment, knocking on the door like the runt of the neighborhood begging to play after school everyday. They’d drag him down to a bar around the corner and have him throw darts at a dart board covered in polaroid photos of . . . . Well, to be frank, they were photos of people that probably wouldn’t be alive come morning. Hmm. Showtime and HBO are foaming at the mouth for that beefy tagline.

VO: But something changed, and the new proposition here is: Wendell needed to acquire Z-O U.S.—you know, Neo? Remember that? But he smelled blood in the water and, using that age-old mafioso intuition, sensed an opportunity to devour the entirety of Z-O. That is, if the market value kept tanking.

VO: Reportedly, the Kennedy family had around $180 million in cash after the unsuccessful art auction, and they were holding a potential $350 million more in assets. So if they could get Z-O China’s price tag slashed, they actually had a chance to devour the entire thing. Imagine that headline: “Becoming King of Chinese Bike Dynasty: A Boston Mob Story.” As for the notoriously complicated logistics for foreign capitals to own a Chinese company, the Kennedys already had their ways. But why would you even focus on that right now? 

MS: (“Wicked Game”)

VO: The meeting between Wendell and Wes was actually found out by the two private investigators that Kai hired to stalk Wes. Let’s just say I have some primary sources from one of these guys. Wendell proposed a detailed plan, involving Wes, that could slash Z-O’s value in half. In exchange, Wes, after dethroning Kai, would be re-handed the reins to rule a Kennedy-backed Z-O. 

VO: I’ll be upfront with you. Even though Wes thought he might have had a fresh start and a brand new opportunity to rise again in China, he miserably found out that he was still in the cave. No matter who it was, Wendell, Kai, or some nosey journalist that blew Wes’s criminal clouds all the way from Boston to Shanghai, Wes was again in a precarious situation where after only three intense board meetings, with loud, implacable arguments and the like, he was pulled from the RedRide investor e-meeting only a month and a half after that ambitious product launch. So short-lived. Even made his fake death look more like a suicide. Remember this guy’s favorite analogy about cards? He had again lost all his cards on the table. Wait, it was chips I think.

AX: Poker chips sliding across table. Cards shuffle.

VO: It almost looked ridiculous from an outsider’s perspective—that a BU star student would get his hands and name stained by blood behind the Majestic only to avenge a friend that died young, and he would submerge himself into a world that he fancied but didn’t fully understand, for getting a check that didn’t belong to him. It felt like that impulsive violence was the biggest reason why Wes was losing everything right now. I have dug The Bottle group inside out, but later in the story I could never find a trace of Shep being mentioned. It’s almost like none of the followers of the events or the protagonists felt it was necessary to attribute all this current chaos back to that lightning that was long gone. 

VO: (pauses) I think he needed to do it. Going into the cleft in the rock of the world.

VO: (pauses) But you think you’re smart, listening to all this and putting together your little thoughts. I know you do. But you’re going too fast. You don’t see what’s right here. You remember the three hikers in that snow-capped mountain, who were startled by that foghorn? As a long-time observer, or, someone who had experienced similar situations in relationships, what I see is, again, a shared moment of intimacy. In spite of all those struggles, betrayals, and lies between them, they supported each other through those dark periods of time. They knew each other the best. The beautiful, the ugly. Maybe they even shared that echoing resentment towards their common, lost origin. 

VO: So with that, I have to share my theory of why Wes couldn’t have killed himself. 

VO: According to my sources, Wes and Kai found themselves in Shanghai PSA’s dark tower of “Heartbeat.” I’ll spare all the details, but it’s essentially a pitch dark tower with staircases that take you to the top while a swinging light bulb hangs in the air switching on and off in beat to the sound of a thousand people’s hearts. (beat) For various reasons, I can’t play any recordings from this. Believe me, I gots ’em. But I can’t play them. So here are some key points. Imagine I have a chalkboard. Front and center. 

AX: Crumples paper. Tosses away. Chalkboard wheels out. Sip of drink. Glass to table.

VO: Bullet point. Kai offered to help Wes. He gave him a plain-as-day path to rejoin him in Z-O. Kai would help pay his debt, even. All he had to do was come clean and cut ties with the Kennedys and any other mob strings he was attached to. Kai really sounded like a brother. It’s a familiar moment, isn’t it? It’s a re-re-re-kindling. A tandem bike moment. Wes felt that in his heart. Didn’t make any promises to Kai, but his intentions were clear. They talked about their dreams for the future, together or apart, and where they saw themselves in the next ten years, majorly career-wise. It’s really beautiful if you think about it. Dark tower. Heartbeats. 

VO: Bullet point. For most of the three hours, they were sitting in dark silence. But many, many minutes into the conversation, Wes started to unload all the baggage he’d been holding behind his eyes. He told the story of his relationship with Boston, and he told the tale, from Government Center, to Kenmore, to Hynes Convention Center, to Copley, Arlington, and eventually, the Majestic. If I had to guess, probably enough to make a RICO case. 

VO: I have to mention a sub-bullet point. After the conversation in the dark tower, Kai invited Mari over. We can deduce that Kai was about to make some use of this secret recording. Well, I don’t know if he actually had the recording in his hand, or if it’s him that recorded the conversation, but the recording did exist at this point. Kai was about to make his final offer to the family. I don’t think Mari ever got to know about the murder that Wes committed or this recording, but Kai gave Mari a choice. If she’s sailing this ship with Kai, then they can sail together. If she doesn’t want to go through with these new developments, no hard feelings. 

AX: Car whizzes past.

VO: I don’t know if I’m being obvious enough. I’ll leave that to the devices of your own imagination. What I can tell you, though, is that one month later, Neo was no longer a subsidiary of Z-O. 

MS: (Yoga-Inspired, Peaceful Woodwind)

VO: Can you think back for me? On what you pictured when I mentioned the flowers at Wes’s funeral? And the look on Mari’s face when she saw his coffin. After Wes’s death, Mari took all her Z-O money, holdings, assets and left. No trace. Almost like she overstayed her welcome. Nobody told her, I guess. I’ve heard that she blindly agreed to board the new Z-O ship that Kai promised her. But I guess in light of the events that followed, she couldn’t take anymore of this game, this orange dynasty she had built. 

VO: So that was that. Some intel I've wanted to share for years, but that’s it. At the end, there was no bloodbath at dawn, no night chase through the snow. No swords. Didn't sound too climactic after all. A genre failure if you will. Kai’s partners were no longer in the picture. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla on his back has seemingly jumped off. Now he just had to deal with the $8 billion dollar unicorn dying in front of his face.         

VO: Newly infused with the blood from his beloved Wendell (by “blood,” I mean “money,” of course), Kai put together a speech for all the Z-O employees. He stood in front of 1,200 of them and famously quoted the Oscar-winning film “The Darkest Hour.” He was comparing Z-O at this moment to Great Britain being attacked by Nazi Germany. He claimed that Z-O would remain independent and climb its way out. This was the Darkest Hour. You could see the excitement in his eyes.

AX: Big Ben chimes.

VO: He then came out with a new idea called “Project Victory,” set to turn Z-O a profit in one hundred days. The way Kai viewed it: when Z-O’s sheer revenue turned $1, the project would be deemed a success. He announced a series of corporate decisions to help Z-O make money, the two major parts being B2B and blockchains, namely including showing ads on the app and other weird shit. For the ads printed on the body of the bike, the pricing was $10 per bike per month, and for the ones on the handlebars (that you’d need to more frequently stare at when riding), the pricing was $15 per bike per month. To do all of this, they would need a huge marketing team backing them, which they did not have. What they did have, though? A new logo. It was a “V.” It was also stolen from Churchill. 

VO: Z-O decided to cancel all of its deposit-free programming and adjusted fare rates. So, the charging model was different, and all the hidden fees seemed to pile up. Think of it like a taxi model. There was an initial charge, a per minute charge, a per mile charge, a traffic surcharge, a maintenance waiver charge, and some donation to a thing called “Bike Benefits,” which could only have logically been a fake charity set up for tax evasion.

VO: In the meantime, to continue the company’s growth, Z-O launched a new round of price subsidies, which allowed users to buy an annual card for 50% off and invite their friends to sign up as well, which would come with a $50 bonus. They are literally “milking the cow,” or milking the bike for all that juicy oil it's gonna give ya. Oh, and don’t forget about having to watch a ten-second ad for just about everything you do in the app. Call that a three-ad structure. That’s haunting. 

AX: A perfect spot to insert a REAL ad. If any interest.

VO: Guess what? In three months, the ads went from ten seconds to sixty—like all those crossword games on your phone. Pretty much takes the efficiency out of riding a bike, in addition to the chaos on the street caused by Z-O shrinking local maintenance crew size by 60% for its unaffordable monthly cost as high as $40 million.

VO: The refund period extended drastically. It went from 1-5 business days to 7-28 days. That’s not even to mention the PP Money scandal. Yeah, I just said PP Money. I’ll give you a second to laugh, but you also need to realize that this was an infamous trick. Basically, if you loaded money onto your Z-O card, just like you would for Uber or Starbucks, you were never going to see that as hard cash ever again. By “refunding it,” and yes I’m using air quotes, you were just putting that money into an investment account that grew interest if you kept the money in the account. And that’s a big “if.” Really, it was a non-existent “if.” It all boiled down to peer-to-peer lending, big business type shit, that really took advantage of everyday people. 

VO: For those that didn’t fall for the silly PP Money trick, they had some more shit up their sleeve. They essentially replaced the big red refund button on the Z-O app with a button that said “Reverse Funds.” When you clicked that, you were brought to a page that confusingly told you that you just switched from your basic membership to a non-refundable yearly membership. That deposit you put down that you were promised back? Gone. Turned into another useless subscription in your Rolodex of useless subscriptions. 

VO: And have I mentioned that later Z-O bikes were impossible to ride? Every time you ride was like going to a gym session. The pedals just kept going around. I could not get anywhere.

VO: Did Z-O get licensed to do that? Nope. It was just that the internet economy market in China back then was truly the Wild West. By doing this, Z-O was showing their cards. They were losing it.

MS: (Yoga-Inspired, Peaceful Woodwind Ends)

VO: Let me give you a picture here. At this Darkest Hour, Z-O’s number of MAUs in China was 18 million. That’s a lot of people that were about to be disappointed. But I have to give them this stereotypical stuff—Chinese people are SO ENDURING. Nobody actually sued Z-O for anything. Reverse Karens.

VO: The media was absolutely killing Z-O and much of the image they had worked to cultivate. Of course, if Mari had been there, she might have concocted a scheme to get them back in the good graces of cameras and tabloids, but they were left out to dry, and nobody was pulling punches. 

AX: Cameras snap. Paper mill runs. Computer mouses click.

VO: There was a key indicator that investors looked at in bike-sharing companies’ financial reports. It’s called “Rate of Retirement,” which was a rate only recently added in the industry in order to indicate the health of bike circulation. The lower quality the bikes were, the higher the RoR, or “roar,” and the sooner the products would be outdated. Z-O failed to include that number for two consecutive financial quarters, claiming that they hadn’t calculated the rural totals yet—you know, farmers riding bikes. The media called them out on it, and Kai was in a tough situation. And we all know how Kai got in tough situations. 

VO: Now I regret that I started this story with the stupid BU student election. I would have attracted more ears by elaborating on this: in summer 2018, there were mysterious wild fires that burned down bike graveyards all over China. I'll also save all the conspiracy theories, like aliens, or some weird wild moose rampage or whatever that one guy said. At this point of the story, let's just say Kai called in some favors. 

AX: Moose runs through a forest.

VO: Since their major investors were shut out anyway, did anyone really need to see these financial reports? No, not really. Which is why it’s still insane to me that Kai commissioned several different acts of arson throughout the country, two of which were located at some of the biggest, run-down Z-O recycling factories, even one in Taiwan—political statement? Probably not, but I stir the pot. This string of fires was to play up a serial pyro, just to disguise the fact that he really only wanted to burn down the two factories. Why? Well, a bike graveyard was a metaphysical black hole. No discerning between who’s whose. And if thousands of bikes simply disappeared, then that RoR that looked so lugubrious on financial reports automatically didn’t look so bad anymore. 

VO: I mean, to be fair, Kai was never indicted, but you’d be hard pressed not to agree with me here. He was the arsonist. Or, maybe Wendell was carrying around candles, making wishes in the cake-like snow. Who knows? That winter quarter of 2018, Z-O brought that RoR number back to their financial report. It was still fairly ugly, but nothing fatal, I guess.

MS: (Clarinet Transition)

VO: Do you see where we’re going with this? Z-O was on its deathbed. I am not trying to inspire hope in you. They did not make it. At this point, they didn’t have one foot in the grave. They had nine toes in the grave. They were hanging on by that left pinkie. 

VO: So let’s talk about the left pinkie. Around the same time, a death list of sharing economy companies started to circulate on the internet. Lawsuits loomed the industry. Monkey Man Bikes were gone. Ting Ting Bikes. Deer Bikes. Cool Kids Bikes. And you started to see basketball factories suing basketball-sharing companies, umbrella factories suing Unibrella, battery makers suing portable charger producers who sued some knockoff charging station brand who violated Pikachu’s copyright. You still with me? 

VO: Interestingly, after the Darkest Hour speech and the “V” logo change, Kai stepped down from the company’s legal representative slot. Some guy called Zhenjiang Chen took over. And a couple of weeks later, Kai’s dad sued Z-O on behalf of Phoenix Bikes, for a settlement of $68 million, which hasn’t been paid to this day. I’m not sure if they’re still having those family Lunar New Year dinners. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, Kai’s dad survived cancer. Praise the Buddha.

AX: Door creaks open. Footsteps on staircase.

VO: How many stairs down to hell are there? It feels like everything I tell you is just one more step down. And believe me, we’re making our way there. Even though he left the position, Kai still kept his promise. He sent out an all-staff email promising he would be responsible for every penny owed and every rider that had ever touched a Z-O bike. Pretty embarrassing that five hours after that email, he was issued a Restriction of Consumption Order, which basically meant he could only travel by train and purchase meals up to $30 apiece. Dude was blacklisted by every industry and establishment in the country. Couldn’t even have a legit credit card.

VO: In one week’s time, every single employee of Z-O was kicked out of their office space. I don’t even remember which one it was—it was like their fifth move. And every employee must have been anticipating this because, well, their moving boxes were damn near empty. Funny thing, though—every one of them carried out a big stuffed Garfield with plates of fake lasagna that had Z-O inscribed on it.

VO: I should explain that. It was a big PR packaging campaign that Mari had left behind. Because of the color coordination, it seemed right that Garfield and Z-O did a limited release of 10,000 bikes for a fun new way to get into headlines. Didn’t work, but the Z-O office sure was flooded with this stuff. 

AX: Garfield yawns.

VO: Here’s the kicker: people almost got hit by the computers that Kai threw out of the eighteenth floor window, out of anger. Silly move if he was responsible for every penny Z-O owed. Right? Could have put them on Taobao or something. On the bright side, I’m pretty sure Elena Ferrante pre-stole this idea and wrote “My Brilliant Friend.”

MS: (“As Long As I Can Hold My Breath” by Harold Budd)

VO: Wait. I forgot to update you. All this happened at the same time of the whole “Wes died” thing. Yeah, the jumping-off-or-not-jumping-off-the-tower thing. You know the deal. Well, he actually was gone. The computers reminded me. And to be fair to the underworld, I should tell you how he really died. Rumor has it that Kai killed him anyway, in West Africa of all places. Wes was trying to start a photovoltaics business there. He was walking long distance every day, starting from scratch, like digging a well. Don’t ask me to elaborate. The truth is Wes had heart disease and didn’t know it. Last breath at twenty-six. He died in New Hampshire. Didn’t leave a word behind. I tend to lean into the flair, though. You know me.

VO: But that does give some interesting context, maybe, into why Kai was so distant in the whole funeral process. I don’t know. This was too twisted. What I do know is once the faux casket was good and buried, Mr. Kai Lin tried to put up his one last fight. 

MS: (“Lurk” by The Neighborhood)

AX: Sound of throwing paper around.

VO: Docked bikes. Kai put all the money into this, basically solely to fight against the spiking local maintenance cost that vehemently burned cash like a small-town stay-at-home dad with a sports betting problem. It wasn’t so much of an investment as it was a blind venture into something that seemed familiar. Kind of hard to jumpstart a new business when the government said you couldn’t even buy more than two Sweetgreen salads at a time. So he mortgaged 4,447,572 bikes in Shanghai and Guangzhou in exchange for $500 million dollars from an investment firm under CIC. And for the second mortgage, he was planning to pawn the rest of his bikes for an amount of $1.266 billion dollars.

VO: I will give him this: it did go smoothly for that first month. Seven different cities in China took on the new Z-O docked bikes, none of which were first-tier megacities. But it was working out, slowly, but surely. 

VO: Then mother nature had the final say. There was a pilgrimage of sorts where Z-O bikes were being transported from cities like Shanghai and Beijing all the way to the western parts of the country. Huge storms took over that winter. I can really picture this dirty, aircraft carrier of a truck bringing hundreds of bikes toward the plateau of Lhasa—not sure where this location choice came from, but stick with me—and this truck was just being covered in a blanket of thick, high-altitude snow. I’m talking about real snow. Snow that would make a Tibetan monk put a beanie on. 

VO: All this to say, a lot of the bikes didn’t make it. Getting caught in days and days of blizzards wasn’t ideal for cheaply-produced aluminum bikes with shitty tires and such. And this was true for most of the bike pilgrimages. A bit of a diaspora, if you will.

VO: At least some survived. For the ones left in the graveyards and the ones left in the snow of Shanghai and Beijing, 30% of them broke down and will never see pavements again. 

AX: Bike tossed onto pile of bikes.

VO: Kai stared out his windows—somehow still in a penthouse, mind you—and he saw the scattered snow falling night after night. What was he really going to do? Couldn’t argue with the universe. So he just watched. And that fuzzy TV of a sky laughed in his face every night. Did he end up salvaging one bike just like the night of CitySpire?

VO: You see, this was the death of a unicorn. But for him, he might have just lost his first job. The paint on the bikes, that revolutionary orange, will completely fade in five years, and then all you have are these rusty heaps of dull silver that will remain on the surface of this planet for the next hundred years, stacked not so neatly in these little graveyards, waiting and praying to decompose, return to the sand, like that old TV that finally decides to turn itself off, full of blurry noise, dot by dot by dot by dot by dot by dot.

AX: Staticky TV.

MS: (“Take My Leave of You” Quietly Layered)

VO: I’m willing to bet—I mean really bet—that there’s gonna be art projects, called stuff like “Hunting Z-O,” that focus on collecting old, rotten Z-O bikes from all around the planet and turning them into weird sculptures that we’re all supposed to look at and get right away. Seriously, how much you wanna put down on that?

VO: In the first couple years following Z-O’s bankruptcy, users could still register to use the bikes. The registration fee went up to $50 dollars, with which you could almost buy your own cheap bike in China. Old users that didn’t ask for a refund could still ride the bikes, too. That sketchy refund button in the app turned from orange to gray, and the customer support number never answered—didn’t even ring. No one had figured out if it was because nobody was sitting at the other end of the line, or if there were just too many calls to handle. 

VO: Since Kai’s departure, there had been 16 million people waiting in line to get that hearty deposit returned. The first year, Z-O managed to refund 3,500 people every day. If they had kept that momentum going, it would have just taken twelve and a half years to pay all their users back. But that number soon dropped to 500 a day, then 30, and then a constantly-fluctuating single-digit number. Z-O-refund-related topics would surface on Weibo (China’s Twitter) from time to time. There was a little swirling rumor (my favorite kind) that a select few people got their money back once in a while. Maybe they just kept listening to the vast silence of that hotline for a year and one day someone really picked up. These people shared their stories of waiting, and they were practically worshiped by other users. Took the form of a very weird cult.

MS: (“Take My Leave of You” Secretly Fades into “Miner at the Dial-A-View”)

VO: I want to take a look at 2019 for a minute. There were some new posts from Chinese users that started to appear on The Bottle—across all walls. They were saying their WeChat Wallet had been automatically paying for Z-O’s ghost annual subscription—Z-O had long hid the “disconnect your credit card” option on the app, and just about every other clickable button was disabled, too. The refund progress bar was hidden—it was a mess. For those who were hopeless to get their deposit back, Z-O also launched a discount store where all users could choose to “upgrade” their deposits into “orange coins.” With these coins, you could buy things like dental floss or mangosteens at a discount. I don’t have a joke about how creative this was. In the meantime, users who chose to upgrade would be able to ride Z-O bikes permanently without a deposit—if you could find one, successfully unlock it, and watch a few ads. In 2019, Z-O also said it would expand this strategy to third- and fourth-tier cities across the country. Including Lhasa.

VO: In 2020, a court order froze a Z-O subsidiary known as Beeklo, along with bank deposits of $300,000, and seized all of their assets. Z-O’s official website went blank. That was, in many people’s minds, the end of it.

MS: (“Miner at the Dial-A-View” Fades)

VO: I can still remember the seven generations of Z-O bikes: the curvy bar design of the first bikes, the straight and sharp design of 2.0, the new colors coming out on full display in 3rd and 4th—it goes on. The utterly graceful 70Bike limited edition triple-handlebar look. Incredibly dysfunctional, but looked neat. But honestly, except for people like me, or maybe some urban historians, that knowledge isn’t worth a cent anymore. Some of you are probably thinking, “Why the hell does this guy care so much about this?” 

VO: Let’s just say I have a special connection to the story, or to some of the key characters in the story. I mean, look—you ever been a fish out of water? 

AX: Splash.

VO: I met Mari at . . . . Actually, I’m not going to mention where it was. I respect her newfound privacy. She still likes artists that paint in strong, bold colors. Primary colors. We briefly talked about what she’s been working on lately and her take on Z-O’s downfall. She has a way of layering on that always-maintained decency, but there were things she was not willing to mention. Like Shep. Even in passing. Instead, she told me that Z-O will always be a generation’s memory, and if you deal with that memory kindly, people will remember it differently than they should. The commuters, the urbanites, any fish that needed to get through that last mile. 

VO: I can’t say I necessarily got her blessing to do this, but there are pieces to this that fit kind of wonky. Tucked in Mari’s Hong Kong desk sits a yellowing piece of paperwork, a 1040A, an income tax return, with Shep’s name on it. You see now why this is a story that had to be told. And it's not like I did it a disservice. I talked about this memory with care. To this day, there are still over 10 million Z-O bikes in circulation. According to a former local manager of the company, half of them will be broken, stolen, or sent to the graveyards in almost a year, which is probably about the time you’ll be hearing this. And then in two years, all of that beautifully ripe citrus will be withered and gone.

AX: Wind whistles. Trees rustle. Notebook slams on desk.

VO: I got one more financial report to tell you about. According to “TMT,” RedRide also had a pretty hefty headache about how to recycle retired bikes. Retired people tried to find their stride in a new phase of life—it’s a little harder with inanimate objects. RedRide had their plans—depending on different generations of bike designs, some body parts could be turned into chairs, some baskets could become iron pots, tires could be part of earphones, etc. Up until December 2018, over 100 thousand RedRide bikes were successfully recycled in Beijing and Guangzhou. 30 thousand in Hefei. But would that ever be enough?

VO: RedRide still hasn’t seen its “Victory” stage. They owe their suppliers a quarter of a billion dollars, owe their management companies half a billion, many of their transportation companies, including East Gorge, who took Z-O to Lhasa, another couple million. Their annual maintenance cost is over $400 million. The CEO of RedRide Leilei stepped down and handed her throne to one of the former Vice Presidents of Alibaba, and RedRide announced its massive layoff plan to let go 70% of its core employees, especially in the departments of accounting, business development, security, and marketing. So who actually won? Now, RedRide completely shifts to pulling back spends and generating revenue in some more innovative ways. For example, they just launched electric vehicle rentals.

VO: And that, my friends, is what we call a common theme. These businesses were spark plugs, lightning in a bottle. But they moved too quickly for the public to even catch up. And so, like the lion grabs an oasis-drinking zebra by its neck when it isn’t looking, so too does a giant conglomerate absorb the last remaining tanks of gas from unicorns that once spiked the industry with their genius.  

VO: No matter how personal my take on this story is, I have to be objective. This all boils down to a crazy influx of money bloating a student business project into a big fat ball of hot air that moved too quickly. The bike war is only the tip of the iceberg. These wars are everywhere. I’m alluding to a grander picture here. Investment banking teams the size of the colonial British Army. Constant financial growth. Conglomerates becoming warlords. 

AX: Notifications fly into phone from famous apps. 

VO: But the pendulum swings, doesn’t it? Kai had a kid last month. A baby girl. And he started a new business. It’s a new day, maybe. If this were “Game of Thrones,” that baby’d be, like—I don’t know, me? How do they do twists in that show? 

VO: There’s a thing called “déjà disparu,” a term Abbas uses to describe post-colonial Hong Kong. Think about it this way: the feeling of what is new and unique about something is always already gone. You’re just left in the dust with clichés and memories of things that never existed in the first place. Something moves so fast that you never experience it anyway. You’re out of sync. Like watching a stimulating movie where the soundtrack is always behind. Sound familiar? 

VO: You don’t read that in business textbooks. Before a publisher can remove Z-O from Tsinghua’s “Organizational Behavior” textbook, Z-O is already gone. The same goes for China’s “Under-40” Rich List. By the time it was out, Kai was still the eighth on the chart, worth $935 million, and this is the guy that has a government-issued lunch restriction. 

MS: (“Suburban Home” by Descendents)

VO: I should finish this story responsibly, right? You need to care about the destiny of our side characters, and I don’t mean the production crews in the bike factories—although, I guess you should care about their lives too, right? Z-O’s fall was bigger than just a business spectacle and how it affected bike-riders . . . . It had a cultural impact. It created new pathways for living life in many instances. Old factory workers sometimes struck up nomadic existences, wandering the country and pulling bikes out of the graveyards to rebuild, restore, and resell them. Maybe that’s worthy of an oral history project in a couple decades. I’m seriously considering that. 

VO: But call me lazy, or a bad journalist all you want, but I’m not even a journalist or historian, so . . . . I like my story two-dimensional. What I do know, naturally, is spicier stuff, like Mandy Arthur leaving GBH not too long ago. She’s doing a cooking show on Vimeo, or something. Neo is actually working. It has transformed into a widely-known preppy little salad brand that . . . that I can’t actually tell you the real name of. And yes, it’s still mostly a front for a large criminal outfit. Hence why I can’t talk about it. Moving on. 

VO: While everyone rides off into their own unique sunset here, there’s something that’s constantly forgotten—something I started this whole story with. We have very solemn graveyards of decaying orange bikes as far as the eye can see. It’s not exclusive to one city or even one country. You should visit them sometime. Maybe that’s kind of beautiful—that it’s this shared global memory. Something that only time can really take from us. 

MS: (Theme Song Variations: “Variation #2”)

VO: A small cargo boat with 900 bikes, still mostly in order, 30 by 30 all in a row, was sent out by Z-O to the National University of Singapore, in a hope to open up the bustling Southeast Asian market. They’re sent probably four years ago by the time this hits your ears—right before Z-O’s deep descent into bankruptcy. And that boat came back—bikeless. Don’t think it ever popped up on a financial report. Nobody notices a lit match in a burning forest. Imagine how lonely those bikes are, floating aimlessly across the South Pacific, dumped on a ghost boat by the crew that gave up on them, knowing the Singaporean government wouldn’t accept them at the coastline. The hot ocean sun does wonders on an old bike like that, just like some Himalayan blizzard snow. Salt of the earth, tree of life, new pieces of this puzzling planet. Come to think of it, that’ll probably be the last bit of noise cast from this one-hundred-year-long odyssey. 

MS: (Outro: “Mí” by Hongyu Chen Crescendo)

*Cut.

VO: That kinda drags. 

MS: (Outro Continues, Swells, Plays, Fades)

VO: Thank you for listening to “In Tandem with Tangelo.” Saved you a lot of time listening to the credits rolling. Just everything me. (pauses) Stay tuned for a second season of my show, which still remains in development. Happy to take a donation or two if you're generous enough. A premiere date has not yet been determined. The story will be a standalone. The current project code is “TUSK.” It’s, again, a piece of nonfiction, centering around a cinema extremist group and its bloody, diasporic desires. I’m considering selling this anthology under an overarching title called “Chinese Crime Stories,” but it’s not like that’ll make any money. So . . . .

VO: Anyway. Here’s a scientist in Michigan from the October 10th, 2020 North America IELTS listening test Part VI. Her lecture clip inspired the entire project. 

A Scientist in Michigan: I study the lives of mammoths and mastodons, mainly by looking at their tusk features and variations. Here, I have a sectioned tusk of a modern African elephant. This is where the pulp cavity is located. The pulp tissue has cells which produce layers and add to the tusk in this general direction. Meanwhile, the tusk is erupting from the tusk socket. Here, we’re going to look at the surface. Each of these layers represents one year—year one on the outside through year six. Here, years two through nine. And further on, down toward the base of the tusk, we get even later years of life. However, there are also some very, very fine layers, and those represent days in the animal’s life: day, day, day, and so forth. These variations in thickness reflect basically the conditions of growth. Typically, the days or weeks are thicker during the growing seasons—spring, summer, fall. They’re thinner during the season of greatest nutritional stress—the winter. One interesting fact we can learn from tusk records is the history of fights. Now they wouldn’t jab or roundhouse the way a human boxer would, but instead, they throw their head and thrust their tusks toward an opponent. The movement is a downward force that drives the growing edge into the back of its socket and damages the developing cells. The result is a series of pits in the tusks, ones we can measure and record. Knowledge of modern elephants is certainly helpful in coming into a better understanding of mastodons and mammoths. We can look at modern elephants and at least start out by imagining: “Hmm, maybe some aspects of the lives of mammoths and mastodons are similar.” And the thing that’s most important for a paleontologist such as myself to do is to look at the fossil evidence and evaluate whether mastodons and mammoths showed the same patterns that modern elephants do.

Published July 23, 2022