It wouldn't be fair to say that all hell was let loose; rather the opposite. 
As the man walked slowly and steadily towards the front of the room, there was absolute silence. Not a cough, not a rustle, just the sound of nearly a hundred people collectively holding their breath.
And you could smell the fear. Or maybe that's not actually true – the bloke might have brought his pet gorillas but he was hardly about to start beating people up – but that's how it felt at that moment. Certainly, Steve and I just stood there, failed to react at all, watching his progress while sweat began to trickle down the small of my back. And, when he reached out for the single mike, Steve just gave it to him, without a word.
Not that he needed to bother – it wasn't that big a room and no-one was making a sound – but it was a bloody effective gesture. Simply by taking a trivial and unnecessary piece of kit from us, he took the room, too.
Not that he was in any hurry to exploit his advantage, pausing for long enough to make eye contact with – or stare at, at any rate – every single person in the audience. And then he tapped the microphone like some newbie karaoke singer and ... began.
"I think you all know me," he said, impassively, "as I certainly know all of you."
He paused for effect, clearly not anticipating – or receiving – and sort of response. And then he went on.
"I know you because at various times and," he grinned, suddenly serpentine, "in various guises, I have offered virtually all of you substantial financial and similar assistance. Not because I thought you were nice people and certainly not out of altruism.
"No. Because, despite appearances, you, collectively, have some very interesting technology. Technology which none of you, frankly, have a hope in hell of bringing to market. This, it seems to me, is not a problem. Well, not a problem for me, because I understand business and I know how to take the sort of stuff you're faffing around with and make it work.
"Not, I should make clear, in any sort of technical sense – I can buy people to do that shit – but in the sense of 'making it work' that means 'making it make money'. For me, obviously – I'm really not an altruist – but siome of which might even have trickled down to some of you.
"The operative term being, of course, might have."
He paused to glare at everyone again – well, not Steve and me, we were cowering behind him – and I found myself wishing, absurdly, for a pin. Just so I could drop it. And – you know – see.
Not that Simon had finished.
Oh, no.
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Quite a lot later, and without any sort of premeditation, we all ended up in a pub. Well, not all of us – strangely the people we'd been paying such attention to earlier chose to go elsewhere, quite possibly with Simon. Not that I cared at that point – the revelation that a couple of our largely shared funders had been Simon's tools almost from the start was only one of the bombshells the wanker had dropped – but ... well, I'm human, you know? I wanted to walk away, I wanted to hide, but I felt ... I don't know, call it a responsibility.
We might be paddleless up that famous creek but somehow the 'we' bit seemed important. And so I stayed, huddled in a corner with my peers and – however briefly – co-conspirators. All of us huddled in the corner of a pub. Even if there were enough of us to take over most of the bar ... we still huddled. People were, you could see, shell shocked, none more so than Steve and, I suspect ... me. Frankly, I was on autopilot at the time, trying hard to keep up with the minimal conversations stuttering and failing around me; contributing, if memory serves me well, in monosyllables if at all.
It was Maggie, I think, who kept the show even vaguely on the road. I have quite vivid memories – how reliable I couldn't say – of various people succumbing to tears, someone clenching a pint glass so hard that it shattered in his hand, someone else literally banging their head on a table. And, in each of these images, there was Maggie. Giving a hug, patting a hand, finding a bandage – the guy with the glass – from god knew where. And because she was there, people stayed. God knows, we had little enough to talk about, our corporate futures having been rather brutally removed and it being – by unspoken agreement – too early for post mortems.
Although they arrived soon enough, possibly after only a couple of drinks – there being amateur drinkers present. And, needless to say, Steve and I got the brunt of it. If we hadn't organised our idiot meeting, none of this would have happened. If the two of us hadn't tried to kick back, we'd never have been trampled. Or gouged. Or a variety of other metaphors, of which fucked was only the most prevalent.
That everyone had come voluntarily, that we'd almost reached an agreement which, it had seemed, offered an apparently Simon-free way forward ... well, I didn't even bother to point it out, recognising the futility of the argument in the current atmosphere. So I just let the carping and the criticism wash over me, feeling a certain vague sympathy for Steve – who was no more at fault, I felt, than me – but otherwise finding it hard to engage with any of it. Even Maggie – who , I remember, tried to include me in her ministrations at one point – got short shrift.
It was, I knew, over. Let it pass. Find some energy from somewhere – anywhere – and do something else. Fuck it, really: I'd tried, so had a lot of other people. It hadn't worked. C'est la fucking vie.
And then Ruth's name came up and suddenly apathetic disengagement was no longer an option. Who had told Simon our plans? Who had facilitated his little deus ex machina act to finish off the afternoon? Who was to blame?
Well, me, obviously. No matter that we knew – or I thought I knew – that a number of 'us' had been in friendly contact with our local Mephistopheles throughout. No matter, either, that Simon had made it bloody clear that his coup de theatre was strictly for show, that we'd all been shafted months if not years before.
There comes a point when people just need someone to blame; someone, in olden days, to duck in the pond or burn on the pyre, and, well, this time it was me. And there was a logic to that, in a strange and perverse way: Tim and I had come closer to taking Simon's shilling than anyone else, whilst I, of course, had this mysterious relationship with his beautiful but bloody dangerous daughter. That it was possible that Simon dealt with us more overtly than the others because our tech might actually have been the best in the bunch did not seem politic to point out. Nor did I have a hope in hell of explaining the nature of that 'relationship' with Ruth – at least, not until someone explained it me, first.
So I stayed, pretty much, quiet, not being remotely drunk enough to react aggressively – not even verbally aggresively – and sort of took it all on the chin.
Maybe it did some good, at least for some people. Me, I was quite happy when Maggie decided it was time for us to go. That she brought Sean, Tim and Steve along was fine by me. At that point, I didn't give a fuck.
Everything was OK by me ...
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We ended up, the five of us, in another pub, one with decent beer and a dearth of our fellow technologists. Despite which, at least on arrival, consuming as much of said beer as possible in the shortest time available was not my immediate priority. Rather, my subconscious appeared insistent on hanging on to at least the dregs of my humanity, so that I worried about Sean – who looked confused, as well he might – and Maggie, who was clearly upset, and Steve, who was looking bemused and, strangely, on his own.
Which was odd, given that he'd had a couple of his FlexNBalls colleagues with him earlier. I felt I ought to ask him about this and, eventually, he emerged from his stupor for long enough to give me a response of sorts: They'd stayed on at the previous venue, where, if he was right, they were even now reciting incantations damning his – all of our – immortal souls to ... well, wherever immortal souls really don't want to be.
Being on that illuminating cusp between sadly sober and outrageously drunk, I sensibly looked to Maggie for some sort of guidance on the theology involved in this but – uniquely – Tim had upped his game for a second and was actually talking to the woman. Sean, though of, presumably, similar up-bringing, didn't seem all that viable source of enlightenment and Steve ... well, it was Steve's question in the first place and, anyway, when I turned back he appeared to be unconscious in a pool of beer.
Still, though, the thought kept nagging away at the back of my mind. Not the question of the nature of hell or whatever – I'd leave that to the credulous and gullible – but rather something about the source and the importance of that to our current circumstances.
It was only when Sean came staggering back from the bar with another round that the neurons made some sort of decent connection and I realised what I needed to do, should, in fact, have done hours before. Take it back to the source, of course. It was obvious, when you came to think of it.
So I stood up, leaving the latest pint untouched, and made my way out of the bar and, indeed, the pub entirely, repeating the word 'source' like some minimalist mantra while I fumbled for my phone and found a signal in a corner of the car park.
And then I called Ruth.