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The private room had emptied of senior pupils, and the round table that had held a tense dinner two hours earlier now held only two people, a teapot, and the soft afterglow of business successfully transacted.
Yvette Caldwell, still without her shoes, set her teacup down and looked across the table at her new employer.
"Are you serious about Maha?"
"Senior Sister?"
"The corporate war declaration. If your real grievance was Garrison Pike personally, there are easier ways to handle that. We don't actually need to take on a global energy conglomerate over a drunk man's evening."
Ethan considered the question carefully.
"I'm a novice at running a business, but I understand the basic shape of the field. The global energy market is a finite pie. There is only so much demand, and the supply side is dominated by a small number of major players who have spent decades carving up territory and consolidating relationships."
"That's true."
"If I'm building a serious energy company, my growth has to come at someone's expense. Eventually, that someone will be the largest player in the segment. Maha is the largest player. The collision is inevitable. The question is timing, not whether."
He shrugged.
"Tonight was a chance to choose the timing on my terms. I have a hostile witness who will personally carry the declaration back to the Maha board. The story will get out in a controlled way. Our investors will know I have a public commitment to dominate the market, which makes raising additional capital easier. Maha's investors will start asking nervous questions, which makes their next year of fundraising harder. Picking this fight tonight, while we're still small, costs us nothing. Picking it three years from now, when we're already a substantial competitor, would have cost us our first-mover advantage."
Yvette listened in silence.
She had, two hours earlier, been prepared to spend the evening cleaning up someone else's mess. She was now sitting across from a teenager who was casually explaining to her the strategic logic of inviting global commercial warfare. The explanation was, to her professional ear, correct in every meaningful respect.
She raised her teacup again, sipped, and gave a small nod.
"All right. We'll plan the campaign properly tomorrow. I'll have to brief myself on Maha's exposure points and their political vulnerabilities. There are several lines of attack."
"I figured you'd know exactly where to push."
"I do."
She smiled.
"Also, Junior Brother, one detail."
"Senior Sister?"
"You told Lily Snow you'd be expecting an email from her tonight. I assume that means you gave her my phone number too, since you wanted me involved in the hiring process."
Ethan blinked.
"I did, yes."
"How did you have my phone number?"
There was a brief, slightly tense silence.
Ethan rubbed his nose with one finger and produced his most innocent smile.
Yvette looked at him for several seconds. Then she sighed in the particular way that suggested she had decided not to pursue this line of inquiry, at least not tonight.
In Ethan's defense, in a world where J.A.R.V.I.S. could extract a phone number from any unsecured commercial database in under two seconds, Yvette's contact information had been retrieved before she had finished pouring her first toast for Hargrove downstairs. The information warfare disparity between his side of the table and hers was, at this point, comically lopsided.
She would learn this eventually.
Tonight was, perhaps, not the night to lay the asymmetry out in detail.
Across the planet, in the corner office on the top floor of a sleek glass tower overlooking the Aurelian Republic's largest tech corridor, the board of Obsidian Devices was watching a video.
The video was thirty-seven minutes long. It had been captured by an attentive Hartwell University freshman at the lecture earlier that afternoon, uploaded to the public video-sharing platforms within ninety minutes of the lecture's conclusion, and pulled by Obsidian's intelligence team about forty minutes after that. By the time the board was assembled in the executive conference room, the video had been transcribed, time-stamped, technically annotated, and analyzed by three separate research teams.
The room was silent.
On the projection screen, Ethan Mercer was walking across the lecture-hall stage, gesturing toward a holographic atom that was rotating in real, observable, three-dimensional space at the center of a roomful of undergraduates.
The video paused.
Bennett Carter, the Chairman of the Board of Obsidian Devices, leaned forward in his chair, folded his hands, and addressed the room.
"Gentlemen. Ladies."
He had a deep, even voice that he had spent thirty years cultivating for moments exactly like this one. The voice did not tremble. The voice did not betray fear. The voice simply established that the speaker had been doing this work for a long time and had every intention of continuing to do it for as long as the speaker chose.
"What we have just watched is a working demonstration of complete holographic projection technology. Glasses-free. Multi-angle. Physically interactive with the surrounding environment. Combined with an apparently fully-conversational artificial intelligence that interacts naturally with human audiences and conducts pedagogical instruction."
He paused.
"If this Ethan Mercer extends his work into consumer software, operating systems, or personal-device hardware, what does our defense posture look like?"
The silence held.
After a long moment, one of the senior board members, a man named Helmsley who had been with the firm for twenty-eight years, slammed an open hand against the conference table.
"I refuse to believe it."
"Helmsley."
"I refuse to believe that one teenager, with no industry foundation, no existing intellectual property portfolio in our space, no consumer brand, no established distribution channels, can credibly threaten Obsidian's market position. We have a billion active users globally. The brand loyalty alone..."
"Brand loyalty is a function of product superiority," Carter said mildly. "It is durable only as long as no competitor offers a meaningfully better product. Mercer just demonstrated, on a public university stage, that he has miniaturized real holographic projection to the form factor of a wristwatch. If he can put that into a watch, he can put it into a phone. If he can put it into a phone, our entire current display technology becomes obsolete within a single product cycle."
He paused.
"As for the artificial intelligence, I want everyone in this room to consider the comparison honestly. Our current voice assistant cannot reliably answer the question 'what is the weather tomorrow' without parsing errors. Mercer's J.A.R.V.I.S. was, on this footage, conducting a fluid pedagogical exchange with an undergraduate physics class. Do not, please, let me hear about brand loyalty in a comparison with that."
Helmsley's face flushed red. He did not respond.
Carter rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers.
He had been chairman of Obsidian for twelve years. He had presided over the firm's transition from a regional supplier to the most valuable consumer electronics company on the planet. He had, during that twelve-year period, faced exactly two competitors he had genuinely worried about. Both of them had eventually folded under Obsidian's market pressure.
He was, looking at the paused video of the holographic atom on the screen, beginning to fear that the teenager in the well-cut blazer might prove to be the third such competitor, and the first one Obsidian could not buy or out-execute.
He turned his attention to the senior officer to his right.
"Cooper."
"Sir."
"The five projection units that produced the demonstration in that lecture hall are currently installed in a classroom at Hartwell University. I want the detailed engineering parameters of those units, and I want them within forty-eight hours. Whatever it costs. I will authorize you to pull our top research technicians from every regional office on the planet to support your team."
"Understood, Mr. Carter."
"I want to see working prototypes of this technology in our own labs within one month."
"Yes, sir."
Cooper stood up, gathered his briefing materials, and left the conference room at the brisk professional walk of a man who had been given an impossible assignment and intended to attempt it anyway. Carter watched him go with the slight, approving expression of an executive who had hired competent subordinates and was reaping the benefits.
He turned to another board member, a heavier-set man with sharp eyes who handled the firm's project acquisition portfolio.
"Rodney."
"Sir."
"You're going to the Republic of Valoria. Personally. I want you to make contact with Ethan Mercer, secure a private meeting, and open negotiations for the acquisition of the holographic projection patent and the J.A.R.V.I.S. system."
Rodney's eyes narrowed. He produced a small, careful pad and a pen.
"Authorization parameters, sir?"
A small silence.
Carter looked at the screen. He looked at the table. He looked back at the screen.
"Five billion Aurelian dollars cash. Plus five percent equity in Obsidian Devices."
The conference room registered an audible reaction.
Five billion in cash was an unusually large acquisition figure even by Obsidian's standards. Five percent equity in the company, at current valuation, brought the total package value to over forty billion. That was, in practical terms, the cost of a major mid-cap company.
For two technologies.
From a teenager.
But nobody at the table voiced an objection.
They had all just watched the video. They had all done their own internal math. The acquisition cost was, by any rational analysis, low.
If Carter had said twenty billion plus twenty percent, no one in the room would have flinched either.
Rodney nodded, made a careful note, and closed his pad.
"I'll have my team on a transport this evening. I'll initiate contact through the Aurelian embassy in Valoria within seventy-two hours."
He paused.
"Sir, one consideration. Mercer has reportedly become close to senior Valorian government figures. If our offer is interpreted as a foreign acquisition of a strategic asset, the Chancellor's office may intervene."
"Then we will not interpret it that way. Structure the offer as a private licensing arrangement with optionality. We will give Mercer the cash, take the technology rights, and let him retain notional ownership of his firm. The political optics will be cleaner."
"Understood, sir."
Rodney left. The remaining board members exchanged glances.
Carter turned his attention back to the screen. The holographic atom continued to rotate in soft blue light above the empty lecture hall.
He was a long-tenured chairman of one of the most successful firms in the world. He had spent his career being the man other people feared.
For the first time in twelve years, he was, very quietly, the one who was afraid.
A similar scene was, at approximately the same hour, playing out in the executive offices of the Sentinel Group, the Aurelian Republic's second-largest consumer electronics manufacturer and Obsidian's primary rival.
A similar scene was, at slightly later in the night, playing out in the boardroom of a defense contractor based in the Meridian Commonwealth.
A similar scene was, at slightly earlier in the morning, playing out in three different secure conference rooms in three different foreign capitals.
In total, that night, approximately sixty senior executives, intelligence officers, and defense analysts on four continents were watching the same Hartwell University lecture video and arriving at variations of the same conclusion.
A young man in a charcoal blazer was about to redefine several global industries.
Nobody was sleeping well.
Early the next morning, in his hotel suite in the capital, Ethan was woken by his phone vibrating insistently on the nightstand.
The number was Graves.
He groaned, rubbed his face, and accepted the call.
"Kid. Funds have transferred. Check your account."
Ethan, who had been operating on five hours of sleep, blinked into the early gray light coming through the curtains.
"The state allocation?"
"The state allocation. The capital injection authorized through Director Holt's office. I've been told to inform you that your bank card permissions have been upgraded to handle the new balance, so be careful when you actually try to spend any of it. The receiving institution flagged the deposit three times before they accepted it was real."
Ethan, now reasonably awake, opened his banking application.
The most recent transaction confirmation, time-stamped at six in the morning, displayed a credit line of:
20,000,000,000.00 marks.
Twenty billion.
The number had so many zeros that Ethan, for a brief moment, suspected the application of a rendering bug.
He stared at the screen. He counted the zeros. He counted them again to make sure.
The application was not malfunctioning.
Twenty billion marks. Wired into his personal corporate account by the Valorian Treasury, against the state's fifteen percent equity in New Future Technology Energy Co., Ltd.
Ethan, who had grown up in a household where Frank and Linda counted change for the laundry machine, sat up in bed and made a sound that was somewhere between a wheeze and a small involuntary laugh.
"Director. Twenty billion."
"Twenty billion."
"That's a lot of marks."
"Kid. The state has given you every possible advantage on this project. Funding. Political cover. Counterintelligence support. Land allocations. If you cannot deliver on the seabed reactor program after we have given you this much help, I will personally..."
Graves trailed off.
The threat he had been about to deliver did not arrive. He had remembered, midway through the sentence, that the recipient was a serum-enhanced teenager who had personally defeated trained Aurelian intelligence operatives in their own headquarters, and the practical viability of threatening him with physical violence was approximately zero.
"...I will be very disappointed," Graves finished, somewhat lamely.
Ethan grinned.
"Director, in three months at the most, I will have all ten reactors deployed and online. The Eastern Sea power grid will be fed entirely from my company's facilities by the end of the calendar year. You'll get your money's worth."
"I'd better."
"Oh, and Director."
"Yes?"
"Don't forget to reimburse my taxi fare from my last trip to your office."
A long pause.
"...Get off my line, kid."
The call disconnected.
Ethan laid back in bed for a moment, staring at the ceiling, savoring the absurd warmth of having an unspendable amount of money in his bank account at age eighteen.
Then he sat back up, swung his legs over the side, and started getting dressed.
He had a CEO to meet for breakfast.
By eight in the morning, Ethan was back at Yvette Caldwell's restaurant.
The front-of-house staff, who had spent the previous evening politely refusing to direct a strange young man to the proprietress's office, now bowed deeply when he walked through the door. The dining room was nearly empty at this hour. Yvette herself was seated at a corner table with a small breakfast spread, dressed casually in slacks and a cream sweater, working her way through a stack of documents she had clearly been reviewing for several hours.
She looked up when Ethan approached.
She raised an eyebrow at his expression.
"Big Boss Mercer. What put that grin on your face?"
Ethan, who had been making a small effort to look composed, dropped the effort entirely.
He sat down across from her, pulled out his phone, and turned the screen toward her.
She glanced at the screen.
Her eyebrows climbed approximately three centimeters higher than the resting position they had occupied for the previous decade of her life.
"...Mercer."
"I know."
"Mercer, that is twenty billion."
"I know."
"Is that twenty billion marks?"
"It is."
"In a corporate account you control?"
"It is."
She set the phone down very carefully on the table, the way one sets down a piece of delicate equipment one has been entrusted to handle without breaking.
She picked up her teacup. She took a long, slow sip. She set the cup back down.
"All right. We need to have a very different conversation than the one I had planned for this morning."
She gestured at the empty chair beside her.
"Sit. Eat. We have approximately a thousand things to discuss, and we should probably get through the first hundred of them before lunch."
Ethan sat down, accepted a plate of breakfast, and grinned across the table at his new CEO.
The grin was, in fairness, still very wide.
Yvette gave it a small, dry look.
"Mercer. You're so happy your back molars are showing."
"Senior Sister, this is the largest amount of money I have ever personally controlled, by a margin of approximately twenty billion marks. I am going to grin until I get used to it."
"That's going to take a while."
"Probably."
She rolled her eyes, picked up her own fork, and they began to eat.
Outside, the morning sunlight slanted across the restaurant's front windows. Inside, two young people who had agreed, the night before, to take the world apart, began the practical work of actually doing it.