I did not even manage a single week before I caved in and began to examine the Seeberger equation regarding gravity manipulation. That was shorter than I hoped I would resist, but a couple of days longer than I had expected.

The math itself was going well. I was halfway sure I had already identified what variables I had to isolate. The moment that happened, I would only be a month or so away from solving the equation towards gravity.

If, and that was a big if, my experience with quantum entanglement was a good indicator. If not it could go from somewhere above a month to a couple of years. I had to keep my expectations in check.

Unlike with QE, Seeberger had not provided the roadmap to solve the equation. In retrospect, I am pretty sure that he was very close to getting Q-links up and running but ultimately died before he got it done.

As it was, I at once loved and hated the equation. I loved the challenge, and the possibility to understand how the universe worked. I hated the dang headache the equation still gave me every single time. The tedium of trying to understand how what term influenced the description of reality in which way.

Nonetheless, after two weeks of working with the math, at low compression, as I did not want to be idle without anything to figure out, I was making progress.

Surprisingly, much of my time was spent sitting in cyberspace and seemingly doing nothing, interspersed by some scrolling around the equation, writing out my results, and then doing nothing again. In reality, my brain was working at full power, just trying to manipulate the monster.

I have to confess, I had been a bit anti-social during that time. I still did cook on my days, and eat with the others, and of course, I had my evenings and nights with Ben.

 Otherwise, I barely talked with people. I even tried to avoid my Tuesday meeting with Michael, at least the first time. He managed to pull Warden to his side and together they annoyed me to the point where I just threw up my hands and had the meeting.

As a concession to my immersion into the grav-coil problem, we did not hold the meeting in real-time in the physical meeting room, but instead at 30:1 in VR. I had to agree that I could spare four whole minutes a week for the corporation I mostly owned.

The big topic was, naturally, the release of our jacks. The rest of the cyberware too, of course, but the jacks were the main seller right now. And the impact, let me formulate it this way, Michael was already in the process of building another block-sized manufactory. At least in the beginning we would have to resort to bots doing most of the work.

Seriously, I really should try to get an educational VI up and running. But… another tangent to take me away from my math… whelp, it couldn’t be helped.

Maybe I could simply ask Apollo for help.

On other fronts, it was a bit disturbing that Ralcon had yet to make a move. It was already 2½ weeks since we made the offer. They should be falling over themselves to get the source code of Envision VR.

Sure, if they would have to buy it, I could understand that they would try to reverse-engineer it. But get real. The ‘price’ they would ‘pay’ for it was a promise not to mess with us. And with Envision VR, messing with us would be against their own best interests.

I was reconsidering our options. It would be a major setback if we had to move the production to somewhere else.

Not only had we invested quite a bit of money into the real estate, not to mention the factories themselves. Or the S&P Excelsior. But that was only money. I knew where I could get more.

No, the real problem was that one of the goals of Enki was to employ the masses in queens. And that would be hard to do if we had to relocate to the CAS, the EU, or the Commonwealth.

So, when Michael opened the Tuesday meeting by telling me that Ralcon had requested the follow-up meeting for Thursday, I was relieved. At first.

That changed when he told me that my presence was explicitly wanted.

For a moment I was not quite sure I had heard him correctly.

“You are saying that they want me to be there?”

This was one of the occasions where I wanted to wipe Michael's stupid grin from his face.

His cheerful: “Yup. They insisted on that.” Did nothing to make me feel more forgiving.

My answer was accordingly: “They have to live without. I don’t have the time, or the patience, for that.” And yes, I was grumpy. I had things to do, secrets to figure out, physics to understand, and math to unravel. Who were those guys demanding that I would be there? No thank you.

Despite my words, Michael’s grin stayed on his face.

“You know you will come in the end. So why don’t you spare all of us the posturing and weedling and just say yes from the beginning? And time, if it was really a time thing, you would use 120:1 compression to figure out the math of that thing you are doing. One day at most and you’re done. You don’t do that because it is your hobby. You can interrupt it at any time.”

I growled at his words, rolling my eyes.

“I am busy figuring out this math. That is hard enough. Any distraction, and who knows how much insight I lose. How much it will set me back?”

“Who of us is the one with the ‘perfect’ memory? It will be as if you never stopped a second for you.”

Now Michael frowned for a bit and crossed his arms. Did he not understand that this was exactly why he was the CEO? All that wheeling and dealing was… torture for me.

“Do you have any idea how inspiration works? You can’t just take a break, do something else and come back to it as if nothing had happened.”

This time, it was Michael who rolled his eyes.

“Seriously? V, you are a genius, but even here, in VR, unless you use your Seraphim-avatar, you just can’t lie. You know that you can go back to it at any time. So why bother with lying here?”

“Because I don’t want to go there. There is nothing that I am needed there. And I can’t stand those corporate slimeballs. Last time, I had to take a shower for an hour just to get the revolting feeling off my skin.”

His snort was not quite the answer I had expected.

“You think you are the only one? Yeah, you are a bit more sensitive to those assholes. But I don’t know anybody who enjoys their presence. But I have to remind you, we need to have their goodwill. That means unless there is a real reason that you can’t be there, and I am talking about you being in a coma as an example here, if they want you to be there, you will be there.

I will go to dad and have him drag you there if I have to. In that manner, are you accepting your fate, or do I have to take drastic steps?”

He was right of course. We did need at least their tacit approval, if not cooperation. But it was so… I just could not understand what they wanted from me. Yes, it was my inventions that made Enki a possibility. But it was Michael who steered the company. He made the decisions. On that level of business, I was unnecessary.

“But why? They don’t need me to negotiate. I am not even the figurehead of Enki. At most I am the tinkerer that makes the toys.”

His heavy sigh told me that his patience was running out.

“I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t care. They told me that you were to be there. I am sure they have a reason but they have not deigned to tell me that reason. And until Enki is established way more than it is now, when Ralcon says they want you there, you will be there.”

I buried my face in my palms. I so did not want to waste hours of my life watching people posture and negotiate. But I knew that Michael was right here. We needed Ralcon to be at least neutral. For that, they needed the Envision VR program. And if they wanted me to be there…

“Fine! I’ll be there.” I snarled. I know, it was unfair to be angry at Michael, but he was there, and he brought the unwelcome news, so he was it.

The rest of the meeting was the same good news. We were sourcing bots en masse to ramp up production. The second plant was basically shooting out of the ground with the amount of money Michael was pouring into it.

And we could not keep the jacks on the shelves. The average shelf time for the basic jack was a bit over six hours. It was a bit better for the higher-level jacks. A low-jack remained on the shelves for an average of 16 hours, a mid for 23 hours, and a high for 33 hours. We only made the ultra-jack on demand, so no shelf time here.

It was a similar story with the other cyberware. In all honesty, we would need another chip fabber soon, as we barely were able with the processor demand. We only made the cranial board on demand, but the HUD was nearly as often requested as the basic jack. Luckily, we had over-dimensioned the basic fabrication of Neuronect by a couple of orders of magnitude.

But in summary, we were not able to keep up with demand in any way. In a way, a good problem to have. For a short time, until frustration set in with the potential customers. The big problem I saw was sustained demand. We only had so many humans to sell cyberware to. Yes, the number of humans was still something the human mind simply could not grasp, but it was a finite one.

It would be a fool's errand to ramp up production to instantly satisfy the demand. It would cost in the region of 1000 times as much for us to build the facilities to do so, only for the demand to vanish in a couple of days.

Not that upgrading our capabilities right now would pose a danger in that regard. Let’s be honest, our target demographics were around 400 million people. For now, without the concerted push of the big corps to ‘provide’ service, aka selling stuff, to the poorer parts of humanity. Then we could expect a customer base of nearly a billion people. Right now we were producing a bit over 2000 jacks per day.

With the planned upgrades of our production capacity, in the end, we would get to around 100000 jacks a day. That sounds like much, but again, with that number, it would take us 10000 days, or more than 27 years just to satisfy the initial demand. That did nothing for upgrades or new customers.

At that, we were considering temporarily boosting our jack production to 1 million a day for a year or a year and a half by diverting the capacities to the jacks for the cost of other cyberware.

Then we would have satisfied the initial demand and the first of the follow-on of sponsored jacks and could slow down to 10 or maybe 100k a day without problems. But that was a question for the business types. I was pretty sure that in two years, we would have quite a diverse product lineup and the jacks would make a comparatively small part of our business.

Just the other cyberware would outpace it. All the other toys I already did have ready, and that Michael knew about would make the cyberware market look small.

To summarize the meeting, we would increase our capacity for the moment but revisit the decision monthly.

That left me to get back to my math. Yeah sure, as if I could concentrate enough on the math to get anywhere. I could not get the meeting with Ralcon out of my head. Two days of fretting about why they wanted me to be there.

Needless to say, I spent the next one and a half days killing time. Making music, exercising, relaxing, you know it. Don’t get me wrong, I tried to work on the Seeberger equation, but as I already said, it was going nowhere.

Dang, I hated that.

It did not help that I was not sleeping well during that time, and was, well, let’s say I was a bit cranky when Michael came to fly to the same hotel we had met Ralcon the last time.

Again it was galling for me to see Michael’s two bodyguards in their cheap suits. Seriously, did neither of them realize that they now represented Enki? An up-and-coming corporation?

As soon as we had sat down in the Merc, I sighed heavily.

“You have to do something about Conall and Ruben. The way they dress is simply not acceptable.”

Michael’s look was more curious than anything else.

“The way they dress? Do I have to remind you that you spent most of your time in some very comfortable overalls? What makes you think that you have the position to criticize them?”

While he was not completely wrong, I think he missed the point.

“Usually, as, when I am alone and doing work in cyberspace you mean? Not when I am out and representing our corporation?”

I saw understanding in his eyes, and he gave my attire a once-over. I had, again, made myself a decent dark power suit, again from nanotubes. Michael was wearing one of the suits I had made for him from nanotubes as well. As were Justin and Ryan.

We had decided that there was no need for Darren and Kate this time. Melissa, Rafael, the accountant, who I by that time knew as Louvell Douglas, all of them were in stylish quality clothes for a business meeting.

Conall and Ruben on the other hand… cheap polyester suits clearly straight from the rack, ill-fitting, and you did not need to be very observant to see the bulges under their arms. They compounded that by using cheap plastic sunglasses.

Contrast that with Justin and Ryan. Both had navy blue nanotube suits, with the texture seemingly wool. I had first used the auto-tailor that came with the fortress but had long since bought a premium one from the web. They too wore sunglasses, as did we all, but theirs were flexible platinum frames with synthetic diamond instead of glass.

All in all, they gave the impression of money, of class, while Ruben and Conall gave the impression of being low-class gangsters. Yes, I know that that was what the two actually were, but we had to give the impression of status.

When we arrived at the hotel, the contrast between Michael’s bodyguards and mine was staggering, and Michael was the face of Enki. He needed the spiffy guards much more than I did.

Still, we arrived at the same meeting room, and again, were there first. The Ralcon delegation had changed quite a bit.

Sure, boss man Dan and Phil were here again, as well as Haggerton. Simpson was not with them, and their security detail was quite a bit smaller as well. I was happy that they left Walt wherever he was.

But that did not make their group much smaller. They had some other people with them. One of them seemed to be in a snit.

I would have guessed his age at mid-50s, and he wore a clearly very expensive suit in the newest style. Patterned with silver pinstripes on black, in an asymmetrical cut, without any lapels, but a matching west, his whole getup screamed “look at me, I am trying to be important”. To me, it just suggested that he was a wannabe.

The other two new people, a man around I would guess 30, and a woman in her mid-20s were so clearly nerds that I was pretty sure they were there to provide technical explanations.

Dan saw us sitting, gave a side glance to Mr. Important, and sighed.

“So we meet again.” He took the same center seat that he had taken last time, while Phil again sat to his right. Instead of Haggerton, the seat directly to his left was taken by Mr. Important.

When all of their delegation, except the guards, of course, had sat down, Dan continued:

“Let me introduce Dr. Symmonds here. He is the CIO of Ralcon, and he insisted to meet with you in person.” That, he said in a very tired tone, while he pointed ad Mr. Important.

Symmonds gestured dismissively to cut Dan off and, in a very annoyed tone, spoke into the room:

“I can talk for myself, Elos. Now, who of you is the swindler that had the idea of selling us a faked VR system?”

Oh boy, it seemed that Symmonds had a bone to pick.

With some effort, I kept myself from firing back from both barrels, and so it was Michael that answered:

“What makes you think that we are selling you a fake VR system?”

Symmonds huffed and placed his hands on the table, rather forcefully.

“Because it can’t be done. If it can’t be done, then you are trying to scam us.”

I rolled my eyes.

“You, little girl, that is no laughing matter. I don’t understand why those retards brought a child to this discussion, but if you can’t take this seriously, get out.”

I sighed, and looked directly at him:

“I am here because you specifically asked for me to be here. To be honest, I have better things to do than to sit here and watch the negotiators negotiate, but you asked, so here I am. And obviously, you are wrong about the impossibility of giving Envision VR capabilities.”

Symmonds looked at me, then at Dan, probably Elos, then back to me, before he lit into Dan.

“That is a joke, right? You want me to believe that this little girl was the one that managed to con you? You know what, Elos, I will see you demoted.”

I cleared my throat, and when Symmonds returned his attention to me, I addressed him directly:

“Mr. Symmonds…” only to be interrupted by the pompous gasbag: “That is doctor Symmonds, you imbecile. I did not spend eight years getting my Ph.D. just for some little child whore from the street to call me Mr.”

I waited for a moment and began smiling at him before I continued:

“Well, Mr. Symmonds, as I was trying to say, just because you could not find a solution to making Envision VR capable does not mean that it is impossible. And just a small application of logic, or intelligence, would have told you that there is no way that what we gave you doesn’t work.”

Symmonds half rose from his chair when Michael continued:

“Think about it doctor. What is it that we want? What does Enki need from Ralcon? We need you to not interfere with us. And let’s be honest, the contract will be just a nice piece of plasfilm. We are not naïve enough to believe that it would stop Ralcon in any way from squashing us. So, please tell me, what would we gain by giving you a false product?

If we assume, just for sake of the discussion, that we managed to pull one over you, and you find out it does not work, what do you think will happen to us? Right now, Ralcon doesn’t want to have our product on the market. That is the only reason why you would spend resources to stop us.

If we scammed you, it would be a matter of keeping your face. Instead of just a business decision, it would be imperative for you to destroy us. So, do you really think that we are stupid enough to mess with Ralcon?”

That took Symmonds wind out of his sails. For a moment. Unfortunately, his silence did not last very long:

“What do I know what degenerates like you think they can get away with? I just want to know how you managed to con our people.”

I snorted, and his glare landed on me again.

“What’s so funny, girl?”

“Well, Mr. Symmonds…” again, he interrupted me: “For the last time, it is doctor Symmonds. Are you too stupid to understand this difference?”

I tilted my head, while I looked him in the eye. “So, doctor? I assume you mean a Ph.D. right? Where did you buy it from?”

“Yes, a Ph.D. in computer science. I got it from the University of Pennsylvania.” My low opinion of his mental acuity was proven right there and then. He did not even realize the dig at his academic pedigree.

“A Ph.D. in computer science. How… nice.”

He scoffed.

“What does a little girl like you know about a Ph.D. in comp-sci? Grow up and we can talk.”

I smiled as sweetly as I managed at him.

“Oh, I know a little bit about getting a Ph.D. in computer science. I have one after all. Along with a Ph.D. in nano-engineering. After that, I did not bother jumping through the hoops to get other pretty plasfilms to hang on my wall.”

He looked at me with an open mouth for a few seconds before he sneered at me:

“You? A doctor in computer science? You expect me to believe that?”

I leaned back in my chair.

“Well, for starters, you could look up my doctoral thesis. It is publicly available. As is yours. Which is the reason why I keep calling you Mister. The moment your name was said I looked it up. And I read it while you were ranting about how Envision VR could not be done. I have to say, I am not impressed.”

He visibly recoiled, but then his expression hardened.

“You want me to believe that not only have you read the 45 pages of my thesis in less than a minute, and understood it enough that you think you can criticize it?”

I sighed, rolled my eyes again, and then lifted an eyebrow.

“You are aware of the product Enki is selling, right? I mean, have you ever thought about what it means to have an implanted com feeding directly into a jack? And I have to correct you, all that banter took roughly two minutes. More than half an hour for me in VR. And it isn’t as if your thesis was hard to understand, you know.

I mean, ‘you’ made the observation of lacking data security and how it negatively impacts society. 37 of your 45 pages are simply everyday examples of that, two pages are references, and one page is the intro, leaving five pages for ‘your’ conclusion. And my critique is, you essentially made your thesis that water is wet.

We as a society have known since the late 20^th century that inadequate data security is ‘bad’” I actually used air quotes for the bad here.

“Your ‘findings’ are that all the hundreds of thousands of studies done for the last 200 years were all correct. And the worst part? I found the exact same doctoral thesis more than 20 times, from universities and colleges all over the US. Some predating ‘yours’ by several years.”

I leaned forward and propped my chin on my hands.

“That was what I meant with where you bought your Ph.D. as any halfway competent mentor would have thrown you out of the program. Of course, I know how that here in the USA, the more important the student is, the easier it is for them to get their degree. You must be from a really important family.”

He just kept opening and closing his mouth, completely speechless. The girl nerd piped up in his place:

“And… if I may ask, what was your thesis then?” It was hard to hear her, as faintly as she talked.

“A good question. My thesis was ‘Advanced integration of non-VR systems into a VR environment’.”

That brought a “fuck” from the boy nerd, and when all the attention was directed at him, he turned red but stammered:

“That was what, three years ago? Four? We thought the author might help us bring Envision into the modern age. But Dr. Symmonds decided that was just gibberish.”

Phil groaned and facepalmed, while Dan pressed his lips together. I just shrugged.

“I probably would not have helped you anyway. I was… let’s say I was a bit against big corporations at that point. Hence my going to the dark web.”

“But… you could have done it?”

“Maybe. I’ve grown over the last few years, and have now several tools that I lacked then. Even if I had tried it, it would likely have taken around a year to do what I do now in a week.”