Ultimately, they split duties up simply. The trio of scientists gathered around the Prism, safe in its tiny test tube, and began planning how to safely get it out. A terrarium was produced from the detritus of Em's garage, and Em scrubbed it down while Dyson and Hawk stood heads together, a pane of glass and a cutter between them. From what Alex could hear, they were planning how best to make a clean box using rubber gloves and commercial grade acrylic cement.

Alex let the scientists do the incomprehensible things. His wife would have the other two well in hand. He turned his attention to the human element: Edgar Studdard.

A quick computer search gave Alex the more useless basics. Birthplace: Idaho panhandle—he winced, as the last trip he and Hawk made through that part of the world ended with someone calling Hawk an N-word-with-hard-R, largely because they were not allowed to shoot her—where he stayed until his parents sent him to Standford, for business. He graduated solidly middle of pack, both in his class and among his own siblings. When you number a brain surgeon, a nuclear physicist and a Poet Laureate among your close family, a simple Masters in business isn't very impressive.

Now, that fact wasn't bloodless. It was the first step towards a picture Alex wanted to build. Not who Studdard was according to his wiki article and his bio in Forbes, but who he was as a person. Who was the sort of man who could so knowingly end the world? Clearly it was someone who had been overshadowed his entire life.

He turned to Facebook. Studdard did not have one. Kaiser Willheim did. And Willheim dutifully tagged his friend in each photograph they shared, as he did each employee, and half of the general public he posed with. In every photo Kaiser was the man Alex had met—a charming chameleon who lied not just with his voice but his entire person, quite the impressive feat—and each individual looked thrilled to be there...save for Studdard.

Sour would describe the man thus depicted. He had white hair, and a lot of it, in the thick perfection created by hair plugs. His face was lined like old leather, despite being paler than the flesh of an apple. The cigarillo that was his constant companion was something of an explanation, though in ten years of photographs, Alex never once saw it lit. Ex-smoker, he thought. Willing to give up the smoke, but not the oral fixation. That was another useful thing to see. It could be a desperation, or a grasp at poisoned comfort, but Alex didn't think so. Alex thought it was the grasping clutch of a miser, paring each penny to the rind because Studdard could not stand to let go. The cigarillos and occasional cigar were both luxury brands, pricy hand-rolled numbers that mostly live in humidors. They were a display of status, and a thing of habit. Every ex-smoker remembers their ritual well, like an atheist recalling catechism, a husband remembering an adulterous wife. Studdard looked like the sort of man who would cling to habits as he clung to gold, for the simply reason that change first requires one to admit that they were wrong.

The clothes were another thing. They were the sort of dude-ranch western wear that put Alex's teeth on edge...but it was not an affectation. Kaiser, dressed in flannel, that had been pure show. Studdard did not ever appear as anything less than a cowboy, as imagined by a northerner. He had little metal clips on the corners of his collar, a string-tie carefully nestled above the topmost button of his shirt. He wore cowboy boots unviolated by scuff or wrinkle, a patent-leather shine that gave a come-hither to every particle of dirt for the next square mile. A rich man who wants to be a cowboy is nothing to be ashamed of...unless that rich man is unable to temper his dreams of horses and native raids to the cool reality of working men and darker undertones of genocide. This cowboy garb was too bloodless to be real; it was all about Studdard's ideas, his ambitions, and his pride.

He was also a family man. There was one photo, nearly a decade old, where Studdard and Kaiser posed with his whole family. There was a wife, Naomi, attractive in a bottle-blond and Botox sort of way. She looked kind, loving, but there was a steel to her that made it through this picture. It was a thing of stiff spines, and the biblical idea of long-suffering. There were two daughters, the older already showing signs of going butch—a quick search on her showed she was married to a woman, and was quite vocally critical of her entire family, save for her younger sister, Amelie.

Amelie Studdard was visibly ill. She was small, with sunken eyes, her family’s radiant red hair gone lank and lusterless. She was in a wheelchair, and she looked up at the camera with Pollyana’s eyes. Hope.

She’d died six weeks ago. The obituary said amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. She’d made it to eighteen. The photo Alex had found proved to be of her sixteenth birthday, which no one had expected her to reach.

Alex was half convinced that Edgar absolutely was the mastermind behind all of this. He fit the mold too well for it to be just Kaiser’s attempt at misdirection. But he was entirely convinced the man had loved his daughter.

He took a moment to talk to Henry Dyson, while Hawk and Em ran a diamond-tipped cutter across the aquarium glass. Despite saying his nickname was "Beria", Dyson's account of Studdard was positive, nearly reverential. And yet the hatred and fear of the man bled through Dyson's words like arterial spray. It was like watching someone recite their catechism, in a way. Studdard's kindness was a prayer learned by rote, the list of his notions of Charity (it took a while for Dyson to work through it all; the man never met a cancer cause he couldn't support) an Advent, his kindness a list of apostles hastily learned and just as swiftly forgotten. But the reality, the true theology of this interpersonal relationship, came through in Dyson's reactions. A grimace here, a shudder of fear, a tightening of eye and fist. Gods are born in liminal space, the places between word and deed and thought. The fear of this corporate deity lurked through every sentence.

So, Alex thought. A hard man, a cold one. Someone commonly compared to one of the greater mass murderers in human history. Someone who, none-the-less, loved his family very much. There's the actor. Where's the play?

Now the facts he had abandoned mattered, and he had a context to frame them in. Though he still would not have the meat. Born this date, childhood framed so, education a thing of edifices: private school, prep school, Harvard. As pedigrees go, it was hard to beat this one. But did his mother comfort him when he wept as a boy, or did a father rough handle him and hiss "be a man" as tears went undried? Was there praise for good grades, improvement, growth? Or was there only criticism? Did "not enough" run behind this man's life like live wires? But still, times and dates and cold facts gave him hints of Studdard's inner life.

Studdard was Sixty-Seven. He'd watched the 60s, with Woodstock and flower power, pass him by. The seventies were prep-school (An expensive prep-school, the annual salary of both parents. An act of love, maybe. More likely a reach for pride. Harvard Educated would be whispered at cocktail parties) and then Harvard's hallowed gates opened wide and Studdard plunged into business, with a minor in mathematics.

No art, Alex thought. Few sciences. Art is the signature of the soul, according to Chesterton, and science is art drawn into reality. Studdard had ignored both. Alex couldn't be sure, having never met the man, but between Dyson's testimony about "Beria", Alex suspected that Studdard had walked into the world as a celibate priest unblemished by the sins of creativity and curiosity. His first choices in businesses reflected this. Bog standard construction, producing brutalist buildings without the grace that redeemed the hard lines. The hand behind them did not know anything else. When he'd gotten a solid nest-egg, as the 80s dawned and the cocaine flowed, he'd met Kaiser Willheim for the first time.

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Kaiser was his precise opposite, and Alex indulged in that exploration too. There was no doubt here, the man was loved. His parents—wealthy and hemorrhaging money to charities, to Greenpeace, to the last remnants of Hippy culture as the neon leggings took over—had given him whatever he wanted. But they couldn't buy him the success he wanted. Their money was inherited. They bought him three medical businesses and each one cratered, the parts of great inventions lying fallow on foreclosed tables.

Kaiser had the creativity Studdard lacked, the curiosity he ignored, the radiance to the brutalism, and all the business sense of algae. He was a nerdy, small guy who only beefed up and vanished his bald spots when he met the beefier, manlier Studdard. He thought up big ideas, but forgot to even hire a logistics man. They met because Studdard was looking for medical tech, and Kaiser had the tech, but no investors.

It was a match. Made in heaven, made in hell, it didn't matter. Studdard and Kaiser clung to each other like glue. And for a decade—white hot with brilliance, reasonably balanced, meteoric in rise—the two men worked to make billions. And make it they did. Medical technology, AI and computers, even a movie studio with two blockbuster hits before they sold it off for stupid profit.

And then a shift. Studdard began his own business venture, a software packet for children struggling to read. It made, as most things Studdard did, a hideous amount of money, but it was notable for two reasons. The first was that all profits (as the boxes advertised in large print) would go to the Bittermoss School of Learning Technology, which seemed to suddenly spring from Studdard's brow as his charity of choice. The second was that Kaiser, for once, was not attached to the project. At all.

Alex read back through the multiple shell companies he'd discovered at this point, trying to find another such deviation. There was none. Since their first meeting together, Studdard and Kaiser had been lock-step, raking in money and putting out products that dazzled whatever industry they'd chosen to invade today. And then, Bittermoss School, and the Studdard Method of Phonics. This was followed by investments in mobility aids—which quickly became the best in the market—and text-to-speech technology that gave a natural voice to the otherwise silent. No attachment from Kaiser whatsoever.

It was, he read, roughly the time that Amelie was diagnosed with ALS.

Suddenly the two men were at opposite ends of the business spectrum, both still doing just as well. Which was interesting in itself. Alex rather thought it meant that Kaiser, far from being the ideas man these articles proclaimed him to be, was simply a facilitator. He found people who had parts of something—a chemical formula, a machine joint, a program with interesting capabilities—and brought those ideas together with a sweeping charisma, a good-old-boy bonhomie. And Studdard, after a decade of cooperation, had learned how to do the same from the master. But why break with Kaiser? Why now? Was it purely because of Amelie?

It took nearly an hour to track this down, while Alex listened to Hawk and Dyson discuss complicated quarantine protocols and queen ant foundations, but he found the signs of the breakup. The first was an article Kaiser put out, six weeks before Studdard began his adventures in aids for the disabled. In Alex's humble opinion, Kaiser’s essay was an appeal to eugenics dressed up as social concerns. It wasn't blatant, but a few people had picked up on the ickier parts of Kaiser's logic and pointed out that his recommendations regarding defects detected in-utero weren't all that far removed from the thoughts of Karl Brandt.

As for Studdard…it really did look like he made the split for Amelie.

The hard, cold man had shown his flank at last.

This went on for five years. And then, as suddenly as they’d broken up, Studdard and Kaiser, together, founded the Ararat Project.

It was, according to Studdard, his dying daughter's final wish. For him to use his technology to save the world where it could not save her.

Yeah, Alex thought. He loved his kid. He loved his kid more than the money, more than the prestige, more than anything else in his life. Because he sure as hell hated the Ararat Project.

It, like love, appeared between the lines. He'd poured money into his mobility projects, into Bittermoss School, into a memorial fund for the dying girl. A bit premature; she was still alive. She seemed like a brave and happy girl, pushing herself around in a bedazzled chair that was Barbie pink and smiling. Even Alex's heart could ache a little bit, seeing that brilliant smile and knowing it was going to be burned away. But she had banners for Greenpeace, for the humane society, the Garbage Patch project and the Paw Project. There were multiple photos of her with Greta Thunberg and Jane Goodall. This little girl loved the Ararat Project almost as much as she did Thunberg; she’d hung its banner high in her bedroom, grinning with pride. Her daddy was saving the world.

But the minute his funding went towards Kaiser's Ararat Project, Studdard bought into fossil fuels. Oil refineries. A coal mine. People asked him about his goals towards climate change and he talked about the cons of electric cars. He was a major investor in a nuclear reactor project, and he drove a gas guzzling OG Hummer that looked like it just hemorrhaged oil. It felt like every step Kaiser took, Studdard moved in the opposite direction. But there were several photos of Amelia Studdard with Kaiser, one of her handing him a hand-made plaque that said My Hero.

So why would a man who hated this thoroughly still provide financing for the Ararat Project?

Alex almost missed the answer; it was buried in small news stories, side paragraphs about the Project, soft whispers in back rooms that were reported as blind items in financial magazines. But he found enough pieces to build a clear, albeit audacious picture: Kaiser had stolen Studdard’s money.

Two billion dollars, that was written off as a grant from the Studdard Family Largesse. Except the Studdard family hadn’t seemed to know about the money until tax time that year, when the transfer was found and Studdard was stuck with a big tax bill. It seemed Kaiser had gotten a two billion dollar grant from Studdard, and Studdard hadn't seemed to know about it until a reporter asked him about his unbelievable generosity. The hows and whys were beyond Alex, and likely buried under a mountain of legal red tape.

How'd you pull this off, you bastard? He wondered. Of course, Alex knew how he'd do it. A dying girl with stars in her eyes was begging for access to him. A dying girl her father loved enough to go against his own best interest. She'd get access to all kinds of things, and both she and Studdard himself would be unsuspecting, her, because she was a child and dying, and marks didn't come better than that. Him, because he loved that innocent, dying child. He wouldn't see the path through her to his money until the money had changed hands. And then the real reason why Alex would use the kid; Studdard would be faced with a choice: Betray his child by arresting her hero, or let the bastard get away with the money, but ride him fucking hard. Pull the money back out, as wires are drawn through flesh, with the threat of ruin held high over Kaiser's head.

Obviously, the hard man had chosen the second.

And the rest of it unfolded like a flower. The laser head that started it all would have looked like a way for Studdard to get his pound of flesh back, right up until it exploded in his face. The Ararat Project would be ruined by it, his money would be lost forever, and his daughter would see her hero as a thief. Unless… who knew what that energy signature could do?

Kill, Alex thought. But so did chemo. The logic behind it was that it killed cancer faster than it killed healthy cells. There might be something in that strange, mysterious energy signature that could...

What? Save his dying girl? Make him back that two billion and change that Kaiser had taken? Alex couldn't guess at this part. But he didn't think he needed to. Clean Motives were for courtrooms. All Alex needed to know was this: Studdard was a desperate man for the first time in his life. He’d lost the child that had defined his existence since her birth. The laser, the Prism, the Glass, that just might be the last lifeline he had left..

He just had to figure out how to use it.