For a few moments, nobody moved or talked. The silence was so overbearing that I nearly expected cannonballs rolling through the room.

Boss man’s face turned a nice shade of red, and anger glowed in his eyes. The way he looked at Walter, it was obvious where the majority of that anger was directed to.

Then, with a sigh, he turned his attention back to me.

“I can assure you, the quality of our personnel is more than adequate. But sometimes people simply have a bad day. I am sure that it will not happen again.”

The last sentence was again directed toward ratface, who gulped visibly, but boss man continued:

“And let's not kid ourselves, of course, he is reading everybody's mind. That is what we hired him for. In negotiations, one does not waive such an obvious advantage, just to not be rude.”

Then a small, not particularly pleasant smile showed around his lips.

“I would have thought that a group that expects to do business does know that little fact. I have to say, I am a little disappointed.”

I leaned back for a bit before I tried to retort, just to be beaten to it by Michael:

“Of course, we know that. But it is customary to keep such an advantage close to the chest. It simply doesn’t do for some hireling to blurt it out, you know. That is bad form.”

The smile faltered a little, and the eyes took on a cold, calculating look.

“Yes, I have to give you that. Especially when the verbal vomit in question confirms that the advantage in question is quite handily negated. That bears the question, how did you do that?”

Michael stapled his fingers in front of him.

“I am sure that Walter over there will inform you anyway, so there is no harm in disclosing that you are not the only ones with a psionic on the payroll.”

Good work here. He did not mention the mind blocker at all and insinuated that it was Darren who kept Walter away from our thoughts. Boss man obviously understood it that way at least.

“It seems we will have to send our psionic personnel to some advanced training.”

Walter on the other hand scrunched up his face.

“Now wait a minute here. There is no way that Darry over there knows something I don’t. I’ve beaten this asshole since we were kids. And I’ve never even heard of a psionic shielding other people. No, something’s not right.”

“Is that so?” Boss man did not seem particularly convinced, but he asked Michael anyway:

“Does that mean that you have something else that, let’s say protects your thoughts from psionics?”

“I can’t comment on the quality of your psionic, though judging by his behavior right now, I would think he is not quite the smartest tool in the shed. But I can say that I have full faith in Darren over there. Of course, it helped that he had quite some time working with one of the smartest humans alive. It is always surprising what working with a bonafide genius can do to someone's proficiency.”

Uh oh, he was getting way too close to the truth now. Not to mention that I was not very happy about him outing me as one of the smartest humans alive. But what’s done is done.

Naturally, boss man and one of his lackeys quickly looked at me, when Michael said that, but fortunately the rest of them did not seem to realize that he spoke about me.

It was good that Michael then changed the topic:

“As entertaining as I think this verbal fencing is though, we are here for other reasons. So, how about we get started with our meeting?”

Boss man raised an eyebrow, and leaned back in his chair, waiting a few seconds before he answered:

“Fine, let’s get this over with. We know why you are here, so no need to rehash that. Here is what we want from you. We want the processor designs.”

Wait, what? How did they know about the new processors? And even if we gave them to them, they would not be able to make them, without the NADA. And the NADA did not work without the Q-link. If they knew about the Q-link, why would they ask for the processors?

It simply did not make any sense. It seemed that Michael was sharing my confusion, as he asked boss man:

“What processor designs?”

Even I could hear the honest confusion in his voice. Boss man on the other hand was not in the slightest deterred:

“Oh come on. You can’t expect to brag about them in the Abyss and nobody learns about it. We know that Seraphim has new processor designs, and we want them.”

It took me a moment what he was talking about. But finally, the penny dropped.

“Oh… ooh. I think I know what you mean, but why?”

Now he looked at me with some disdain.

“Please, don’t underestimate our intelligence. Don’t you think a new processor design that gives people around 30% more performance is something that evades us?”

I recoiled when he gave us the number.

“30%? Where did you get 30%?”

The not-so-pleasant smile graced his face again.

“Well, the rumors talk about anything from 20 to 300% to be fair. But we know that rumors very often get completely out of hand, and we’ve gone with the lower end.”

I shook my head in answer:

“Well, your rumors are completely off. Firstly, I managed to get not even 3% of performance gain. Secondly, the designs are very unstable. And thirdly, I abandoned the development in March. I could give them to you, but for what?”

Now he frowned. “3%? That is… hard to believe. And for what? To take over the CPU market again of course.”

I sighed.

“It is hard to believe that I only managed to get a single-digit percent of improvement over a technology that has been considered at the end-point for roughly 100 years? Get real, to get even 3% is nothing short of a miracle. Not that I got a full 3%. The most powerful design I had, managed 2.916%. And it only crashed every four or five minutes.

The most stable design, which in my simulations only crashed three or four times a day, only got 2.13%.

And if you think even a stable design with a full 3% performance gain would be enough to take over the CPU market you are deluding yourself.

Think about it, a Cirrium 8K, the most powerful processor currently available, costs about $50 if you have a chip fabber. If not, you can get one everywhere for around $100.

If you add another $50 for the license, you won’t get many customers, if any. The people who could use the additional 3% are the people who don’t pay licensing fees. You literally can’t make money with 3% more power.”

He leaned forward a bit, looking directly at me.

“So you won’t have anything against giving us the completed designs?”

I rolled my eyes at that.

“There are no completed designs. I’ve given up on it. Yes, I could put another 1000 hours into making it work. But for what?”

That broke through his cool, and he snarled:

“For what? Do you imbecile not have any understanding of what you have here? The first breakthrough in computer science in a century. Of course, it is valuable.”

I shook my head again and looked down at the table while doing it.

“So you have not even begun to consider what the Seeberger equation means for computer design? The very moment that somebody has a breakthrough with quantum entanglement, all the work I’ve put into the processors will be obsolete. There is simply no point in putting in the effort, or the money, to develop a new processor line when at any time in the next months somebody makes a processor that is 100 times more powerful. That’s why I stopped developing it.”

I felt Michael's hand on my shoulder, and he continued:

“Not to mention that we don’t want to give you something that we consider valuable to us. Let’s be honest here, you never had the intention of negotiating fairly. You are here to get what you can get, and then turn around and fuck us over anyway.”

Boss man leaned back again and stapled his hands.

“If you think that, why are you here? Are you looking for punishment?”

The always irreverent Michael answered with some amusement:

“No, we just think we have something that, while mostly worthless to us, is valuable enough for you that you will do almost anything to get it.”

He made a short pause before he continued:

“Don’t get me wrong, I know why Ralcon wants us dead and gone. You fight for your survival. And I assume in your personal case that is literal.

Ralcon has not quite the reputation of being a benevolent top dog after all. You’ve managed to leverage the almost total dominance of one market to influence laws and regulations so that they serve you, and more often than not, hurt or even destroy other, smaller corporations.

And now you see that one market dominance dwindling. I think the outcome when you can no longer put the same pressure on the puppets in Philly will be somewhat uncomfortable.

You can expect that the majority of the managers of Ralcon will either have to run to some third-world country and wither there or be outright lynched here.”

He demonstratively took a sip from his coffee.

“Hm, that is quite good coffee, you should order some. To get back to the topic, you see the writing on the wall. Envision is slowly but surely failing. And you, correctly as I have to concede, see the availability of safe and cheap jacks as something that will accelerate the decline even more.

But where you are wrong is the idea that you can stop it. The only thing giving Envision a market share of nearly 80% right now, from the 96% only five years ago, is the fact that K-DOS is not yet ready.

K-DOS is what is killing Envision. You’ve successfully managed to marginalize Linux and Sigma. Mentor was never even intended to replace Envision. K-VOS, Odysseus, and Sandman are extremely niche products with niche numbers, and yes, they completely dominate the commercial matrix jockey market, but they barely even work in office functionality, even with somebody trying to adapt them to that use.

So no threat here either. God knows how many independent VR operating systems you managed to squash over the years, but I guess they are legion. But you can’t squash K-DOS. Kawamoto is more powerful than Ralcon, it has better Cyberzombies, better tech, and more money.

The only thing keeping Envision even in the race by now is that K-DOS is barely functional.”

“You think that? Why negotiate with us at all then?”

“For now you are in a position to hurt us. Yes, we could relocate. The patents in question are filed in Europe, Nowhere, and Confy. You won’t get them. But that would mean abandoning our investment already made. We will, if you force us, but we would prefer not to.

We could also simply wait for you to fail. As I said, it is just a matter of time. I am sure Kawamoto would actually enthusiastically support us. But we have the technology now, and we don’t think it would be good to wait that long.”

It was pretty clear that boss man was less than enthused with what Michael had to say, and he snarled:

“Are you finished?”

Michael answered cheerfully: “Shortly. Just a tiny bit more. The thing is, nearly every business is salivating at the thought of a functional VR-capable OS with the corresponding office suite. The ability to get 24 hours of work out of eight hours paid is just too tempting. And yes, the availability of a safe and affordable jack will make that prospect even more appealing, but it is unlikely to accelerate the development of K-DOS significantly.

What I am saying though is that you simply can’t stop the propagation of VR. It is a done deal, and the sooner you accept that, the better for you. Somebody will bring a fully functioning VR-capable OS to market sooner or later. And honestly, for us others, it is completely irrelevant if that somebody is Kawamoto or Ralcon. Not so for you, I think.”

He stood up.

“But to come back to our negotiation… as I said, we think we have something that you not just want, but need. Luckily for us, it is also something that will change your stance on virtual reality.”

He gestured towards Kate, who placed the case with the office computer on the table, and opened it up so that the computer was visible.

Boss man was apparently not very thrilled about it, with his depreciating expression.

“A computer. Oh wow. How novel. Newsflash, regardless of what you may think about us, I can assure you that we know what computers are and how to use them.”

Michael smiled while he answered:

“Very funny. But you will learn soon enough. Viv, if you would explain please?”

I took a deep breath and began:

“In a way, you are right. That is mostly a basic office computer. Cirrium 1d, integrated graphics and sound, 8 TB ram, 10 EB crystal, mostly stock Envision Pro 48, the same with E-Office Pro 48. You know, the usual stuff.”

I turned the garbage can around so they could see the backside, with all the interfaces.

“Only three differences. The first is that we, well I, put in any and every single legacy interface that we could find.”

I was interrupted by one of the lackeys, who was exclaiming:

“Fuck. A couple of those can’t be fitted to current tech. How did you do that?”

I rolled my eyes at that but answered anyway:

“Build an adapter of course.” As usual, I left out the “Duh” but instead continued with the description.

“The second difference is the holostorage system. It is designed in a way that the crystal can’t be removed. And that a certain part of the crystal is encrypted and can’t be read. Should you try to get into that section of the crystal or remove it, a small vial of dissolver nanobots will be released to destroy the crystal.”

That made all of them frown, and boss man mused: “A bit paranoid, aren’t you?”

I smiled at him.

“Considering Ralcon’s track record, I would say it is not paranoid enough. But it will have to do. The third difference though is what the modifications of the controller are protecting. And incidentally what we are offering you.”

I waited a few seconds for effect and had just taken the breath to continue, when another of the lackeys abruptly leaned forward and slapped the table with both hands, startling me and the others in the process.

His voice was hoarse when he addressed me directly:

“My information says this can’t be done.”

It took me a moment to understand what he was talking about, but then I smiled again.

“It wasn’t easy, but obviously it can be done.”

Boss man growled, and turned to the lackey, snarling:

“Damn it, Phil, I thought we had an agreement that I do the talking. So would you please keep out of it?”

The lackey, Phil I guess, was strangely unperturbed by the rebuke, and instead very firmly talked back:

“I am surprised you haven’t figured it out yet, Dan, but this is important. So important in fact, that if I think you might shoot this deal down I will have to call my grandfather.”

That in turn made boss man turn to Phil and look shocked at him.

“What the… do you seriously think these clowns have anything that could be important enough for that? And what the fuck is it with you threatening to go tattle to your grandpa about it? You’ve not done anything like that before.”

Phil chuckled softly.

“Think Dan, think! All that talk about VR-capable OS, and it is irrelevant who brings it to market. That is what they are offering us. Somehow they made Envision VR-capable.”

That made Dan snort.

“Get real, Phil. We’ve tried for quite some years to get Envision to do VR. It can’t be done. It just doesn’t work.”

I raised my hand.

“Excuse me, but you are wrong. It can be done. Admittedly, it would have been much easier to do if you would remove the legacy support, or if you had cleaned up the big ball of mud that you call operating system, but it can be done, and I’ve done it. This garbage can in front of you runs Envision in VR.

I’ve tested it with every piece of legacy hard- and software I could find, and it worked fine. If there is some obscure piece of legacy equipment that does not work with it, I think we can simply build a literal virtual machine that emulates a non-modified Envision. Or they can simply use it without VR. It isn’t as if the old control schema is no longer working. I’ve had it tested by several people who use Envision in their daily life as well, and at least one of them had all but given up on Envision because it doesn’t do VR, and she is exalted about it.”

I smiled softly:

“Of course, you don’t have to trust my word about it.”

I took a diadem out of my briefcase and placed it beside the computer.

“We have electricity, so just test it.”

Boss man looked at me with unbridled suspicion, so that I just shrugged.

“Hey, it is your decision. You can take the computer with you and test it at your local HQ.”

Michael snorted then:

“Come on, get real. What reason would we have to fuck you over? Think about it, if we fucked you over that would have mostly the same effect as if we never had the meeting or if we did not come to an agreement. In either of those cases, Ralcon will do anything to scuttle our business.

We don’t want that, and let’s be honest, what do you have to lose? It either works, and it changes everything, or it doesn’t and all you’ve lost is a bit of time.”

After a few moments of tension rising silence, Phile shrugged:

“Oh fuck it. I’ll test it and get it over with. You know he is right, don’t you, Dan? If this thing works, we need to do everything we can to get it. It will save Ralcon.”

Dan growled again, but then shrugged.

“Fine, but not you, Phil. Haggerton will do it.”

That startled lackey #2, who now looked at boss man in apparent shock.

“I’ll do what? Phil wants to test it, why don’t you let him do it?”

“Because you are expendable. Phil is not. Now get that damn headset and test this fucking computer!”

Grumbling the lackey, who I guess was named Haggerton plugged in the computer, followed by the diadem, which he put on his head, before switching the garbage can on.

After a few minutes, he opened his eyes again, and took off the diadem, looking at it in astonishment.

“Fuck me, that thing works. It really works. How long was I in there?”

Phil looked at his com and answered:

“Roughly three minutes.”

Haggerton chuckled:

“Because for me it was more a bit over ten minutes. Shit man, that thing really works.”

Dan looked at him suspiciously.

“How is the control? And does Office work as well?”

Haggerton shrugged.

“The controls, well, the first minute or so, I was using the virtual keyboard, but then it simply did what I wanted it to do. Oh and yes, Office works fine. More than fine. Every function, every mode that I tried, I just had to think of writing it, or using the function, and the system did that.

It was… shit, why didn’t we do this. 50 years ago, or more?”

Boss man rubbed his chin, before turning back to Michael.

“Well, it seems as if it’s working. But if you give this to us, don’t you think you will piss off Kawamoto? You are right, they are bigger and badder than Ralcon.”

Michael chuckled again.

“No, not really. From everything we learned, Kawamoto doesn’t want to develop a VR-capable OS with a matching office suite. They do it because you don’t. They need it, and couldn’t get it, so they tried it for themselves. Not that they put many resources into it or were very successful in it, mind you.”

Lackey #3, the one who was so excited about the interfaces, intervened now:

“What did you mean earlier about a big ball of mud?”

Sorry, has he never even looked into the source code of their own most important product?

I looked at him for a few moments, before shaking my head.

“The source code of Envision is… well frankly, it’s a mess. Some parts of it are so bad that I am surprised it is working at all.”

That made Dan look at me rather sharply:

“The source code? Where the hell did you get the source code of Envision?”

I couldn’t help it, I rolled my eyes over this, very, stupid question.

“The Abyss of course. Don’t act as if you don’t know that the source code of Envision 42 is available there.”

He narrowed his eyes even further.

“And that gives you the right to simply abscond with our property?”

And we were in eye-rolling mode again.

“First, do you think that is something that Ralcon wouldn’t have done? I can only guess how often your ‘esteemed’ company has done something like that. That is what nearly 40% of the shadow wars are about, as you pretty well know.

Second, would you prefer that in five years, when Kawamoto manages to make an adequate OS, Ralcon goes belly up? Get real.

Your outrage is even more ludicrous when you consider that a significant portion of Envision goes back to Windows 40. You haven’t updated much of your most important product for close to 150 years. Do you honestly think that there is even a tiny bit of Envision that is not known to virtually everybody who has an iota of understanding of the computer industry?

Seriously, the only reason why there is no clone on the market is that Ralcon is a triple-A with enough troops to flatten anybody who dares to do that. Should you, at any point lose that status, there will be a dozen Envision clones on the market in no time. So spare me your fake indignation and accept that it worked out to your advantage this time.”

Yes, I was a bit incensed about his resentment, mostly because I was fully aware of how hardcore Ralcon played the game. They, along with Panacea, were the most vicious of the triple-As when it came to the shadow wars. Buying the source code of some competitor's proprietary software in the black market was most likely a weekly, if not even daily occurrence at Ralcon.

It seemed as if Dan was working himself up to lit into me, but Phil put a hand on his shoulder.

“Let it be. This is business as usual, and we don’t get offended when other corps do something like this. And in this case, it worked to our advantage.”

Dan slowly shook his head, but then snorted a “Fine!”

That should have ended the whole topic, but #3 couldn’t let it go.

“But what do you mean about the source code? How is it bad?”

Seriously? Did he want a detailed explanation?

“Ok, I’ll try to be brief. First, roughly 15% of it consists of spaghetti code. Code so convoluted and irrational that it is extremely hard to read, and who knows what time bombs are ticking in there.

Then about a third of your classes are… well if you look at them in isolation, they look fine, but as soon as you put two or more of those classes together, as they are designed to do, it will become overly complex, wasteful, and error-prone. That is called ravioli code.

And lastly, your data structures and dependencies are so intricate that trying to correct one of the problems in one class will drag a whole rat tail of changes with it through the majority of the rest of the classes. A phenomenon that is called lasagna code.

All in all, I would say around 40 -50% of the Envision source code is just bad. And bad in a manner that makes code maintenance and modernization all but impossible.

I also estimate that it’s costing you 20 to 30% in performance, along with making the whole OS roughly 25% bigger than it needs to be.

That by the way is probably the reason why everybody says it is impossible to give VR to Envision.”

#3 leaned further forward.

“And what would you do about it?”

I had to snort.

“You are aware that I am not an employee of Ralcon, are you? So, I would do nothing about it. I don’t use Envision, I don’t care about it, and it doesn’t concern me if it is cleaned up or not.”

“But if you were responsible for cleaning it up, how would you do it?”

I slumped and sighed.

“Seriously, it is not my problem. I don’t want to think about it. The time I needed to read the source code was bad enough. I am happy that I could move around it and don’t have to think about that monstrosity again.”

“But…”

“Stop it! Read my lips! It! Is! Not! My! Problem! If your underpaid code monkeys can’t do it, then you maybe should get better-paid ones. Or if that doesn’t help, why don’t you create a fricking VI to clean up the code. But don’t come to me to do it! I don’t want to touch that mess ever again, do I make myself clear?”

When #3 still showed signs of trying to pester me, boss man intervened with a bellowed:

“Simpson, shut it! That is not the point of this meeting.”

Simpson slumped back sulking and grumbled something too softly to understand.

Dan on the other hand gestured towards the apparent leader of their guard detail.

“Jenkins, get a platoon here and get that computer to the HQ. Do it quickly, quietly and most of all, keep the thing safe. I hope I don’t have to make it clear that your very life depends on it getting to the HQ in working order, or do I?”

“Of course sir. It will only take a moment.” After he said that, he began talking softly into his com-headset.

Dan on the other hand turned back to Michael.

“So, now what?”

Michael shrugged.

“Now you test the VR on that thing to hell and back, and if you think it is an appropriate offering, you call us and we hash out how to proceed from there. We are pretty sure you will like it, and it will make your objections to our business vanish as if with magic.”

Almost as if against his will, Dan nodded slowly.

“Yes, I think you are right. If it really works as you say, well, we won’t have any big opinion on VR anymore.”

Michael snorted at that.

“Au contraire. Think about it, if you have a working VR-capable Envision, then it will be a big advantage for you if jacks become widely available. I mean, if one office drone is four times as valuable with a diadem, don’t you think the corporations will be even more for an upgrade if the same drone with a $600-jack now becomes 15 to 20 times more valuable?”

Dan narrowed his eyes again.

“Well, maybe jacks become so valuable that we will enter the business ourselves. And we compete again.”

Michael shrugged.

“Then we will sell you the neuronect to do it. Yes, we get a bit more if we make the jacks, but we get nearly as much profit by just selling the neuronect. And as I said, you won’t be able to get the patent for the CRS-free neuronect either way.”

We were interrupted by the door opening and a whole bushed of uniformed armed people came into the room. Jenkins gestured towards the computer but I held up my hand.

“You should shut it down properly first.”

Haggerton twitched, then sighed and set up the headset again, only for the computer to go dormant a few seconds later. Michael turned to Kate:

“Would you give them the case please, Kate?”

Kate’s canine features showed some amusement over the whole situation, but she remained professional and placed the case back on the table, shoving it to the corp-soldiers.

A short time later, the Ralcon-men walked out, one carrying the case, while the rest were all around him with the weapons at the ready.

Michael cleared his throat.

“I think that concludes today's session I think. As soon as you’ve come to a decision, call me and we will meet again.”

Dan nodded slowly.

“Yes, I think that might be the best course of action. But one question, what if the VR thing is mostly working fine, but we find problems?”

I shook my head.

“Then you call him and I will contact you about the problems and then I eliminate the problems. But just to make it clear, I am only responsible until you officially take possession of the program. Everything after that is your problem.”

Dan nodded again.

“Ok, I think we can come to an agreement in that regard. So, I think we will meet again in the future.”

As he said that, he stood up from the table, followed by his lackeys, and they moved out of the room as well.

Michael turned to me.

“Well, it seems you were right. The way they reacted when you told them your name, it is clear that they intended to vanish us. So, thank you.”

I took a deep breath.

“You are welcome. I am just happy that it worked out. That here was the most dangerous part since Falconer came for a visit.”

We took the time to drink the rest of our coffee, come on, you don’t think we wasted it, do you? The amount of money this hotel took for it was outrageous.

After that, we moved to the roof garage to fly back home.