Scott and Carl drove well into the night before they arrived at Relizane, Algeria, where they believed Theofanis would be located. Carl drove the first few hours as Scott was recovering from a bad headache which he had triggered when struggling to keep calm after their short gun fight with the Moroccan auto mechanic. Later, while Scott was driving, Carl had used his built-in version of Glitch_HR to try to locate Theofanis.
Theo had been listed as offline, but they had been able to guess his approximate location by searching through the org chart of SPAI. There were several mercenary contractors located in Relizane which gave them a likely address to start at. These men were probably not living in the location Theofanis worked, but Scott was hopeful they could do a stakeout and follow the men to wherever he was held.
With help from Carl’s software, they identified one of the men leaving an apartment block for food and returning to the same location. Scott thought they might have found a place in the same building as Theofanis. They stayed nearby in a hotel that accepted cash. Instead of loitering around the outside of the building, Scott pulled out a micro-drone and flew around taking pictures of the inhabitants. The drone was able to enter the complex and attach itself to the ceiling of an internal hallway to get a look at residents of the first floor. By the end of the day, they had identities of all the first-floor residents. The next day, they spotted one of Theo’s guards leaving one apartment and entering another. They watched for a few more hours and eventually a different guard replaced the first, so they felt confident which apartment was the one they were guarding.
Carl and Scott entered the complex separately and met up at the stairwell. They had agreed on a plan. Carl dropped an insect-like robot outside the apartment where the guards lived. Another design from Phillip, this creature was roughly 18 inches tall with an eight-inch diameter spherical body and six sharply pointed legs. The bottom segments of the legs were sharpened like knives, and the little monster could slash and stab a target rapidly. He set it into an area defense mode. Anyone getting within five feet of the little beast would be attacked with an intent to incapacitate. The robot would focus on slashing tendons in legs and arms. It could easily become lethal if arteries were severed, but the machine would stop attacking if its opponent was on the ground and had empty hands. The robot acted without the need for manual controls, but it could be guided by a simple remote that allowed the user to move it around, set it to attack marked targets, area defense or standby modes. This was a battery powered machine. It was too small for their fusion reactor, and it would quickly run out of energy if it was actively moving or attacking.
At the door to Theo’s apartment, Carl used a breach tube to blow open the door and Scott threw in a flash bang. They went in, and Carl shot a tranquilizer into the stunned guard, then disarmed him. Theo had fallen out of his chair and was curled into a ball, covering his ears. Scott knew he was probably temporarily blinded, and his ears must be ringing. They heard several doors open in the hallway, followed by gunfire and screaming. Scott peeked outside and saw the other guard was on his back on the ground with the robot sitting on his chest. It had two little arms hovering over the guard’s eyes. That was one scary device.
Carl was helping Theo move. Scott sent the sleep code to the robot and grabbed the gun the guard had dropped. When he picked it up, Scott noticed the robot swiveled to watch him. He almost dropped it. The robot was on standby but was still tracking Scott when he entered the five-foot radius. He flipped the injured guard over and zip tied him, before picking him up and pushing him into the apartment. The cuts on his arms and legs looked shallow but painful. They also moved the sleeping guard into this room. Scott was pleased with how easy it was to pick up these 200-pound men and throw them around.
“We need to clear out quickly. Some of the other residents looked out their doors and saw us.” Carl said, “Police response time is probably not great here, but let’s not risk it.”
Within a minute, they had started driving away. Theofanis recovered and seemed frantic about not leaving behind his computer servers.
“Turn the car around and go get anything that looks like a computer or server,” Scott ordered.
Carl looked at him in surprise. Since when was Scott in charge of this mission? Still, he decided that Scott was technically his boss somehow, so Carl sprinted back in and returned shortly cradling a small rack of computers. The wiring looked like he had ripped it out of the wall. There were chunks of drywall still clinging to the wires trailing behind him.
“Careful, that’s expensive gear!” Theo cried out with his eyes bulging, seeing Carl get into the back seat holding the rack on his lap. It was a very tight fit.
They heard some sirens and headed out.
“You left some expensive gear behind.” Theofanis complained loudly. “My desktop and monitors were really high end. Probably ten thousand dollars' worth of gear.”
“Hey, less volume on your voice, please. Your ears are still recovering from the flash bang.” Scott said, at a normal volume.
“Who are you guys and what do you want with me?” Theofanis asked, his voice closer to normal volume.
“Oh, sorry. I’m Scott Henderson. I’ve hired you for a few jobs in the past, and we had the impression you were working for an organization causing a lot of trouble right now.” Scott explained.
“Huh. I pictured you as a scrawny white kid, but you look scarier than those thugs who were guarding me.” Theo said.
“That’s kind of racist,” Scott wasn’t even sure why he said that. Just because his skin was dark was no excuse to get offended by imaginary racism.
“Hah,” Carl laughed. “You millennials don’t even know why you are offended. Hey Theo! I’m Carl and I’m a cyborg. I heard you were a better programmer than Scott here, so maybe you can help me with some upgrades later.”
Scott covered his face with a hand before remembering that he was the driver.
“Is this guy serious?” Theo asked. Carl did seem freakishly strong.
“Unfortunately, yes. Or at least to the extent his programming allows him to be serious.” Scott muttered.
“Good one Scott! I didn’t know you had a sense of humor.” Carl laughed. “Yeah, I have a computer in my brain and some other top-secret upgrades that Scott here doesn’t know about. He helped code some of my tech, but according to my database, you are a much better programmer. I have some ideas, maybe you could help me with…”
It was going to be a long car ride.
----------------------------------------
A few days later, Scott returned to Mexico and spent a full day recovering from his trip. When he eventually turned his phone on, he found out Matt was trying to schedule a meeting about their game company. Oddly, he had invited Barry, Elsa and Adrianna in addition to Scott and Alvarro. Scott replied he was available, and they met up later that afternoon.
The group met on the second level of Proteus in a new café that overlooked the park. There was now sod put down in the park, and they were watering it heavily, so it would take root. Scott could see dozens of trees planted, but they were only a few feet tall. It would be years before the park really looked impressive, but the landscapers were working on adding some tropical flowering plants around the central pond. He expected these would grow quickly with year-round artificial sunlight and carefully controlled temperature, water and soil nutrients.
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“Welcome back, Scott,” Matt opened the discussion after they had greeted each other and ordered some drinks. He continued, “I’m worried about our gaming company, and I was advised to get advice from our friends. Melinda will bill us for consulting, probably a large amount, if anything useful comes out of this. We did the same thing for Biotech when Elsa was struggling with the protein synthesis chip, and that worked out great.”
“Yes, I thought it was going to take me years to get that working, but you guys really had some great ideas and I figured out more on my own just talking about it.” Elsa agreed. Scott thought her light blue hair made her look like an Anime character. Her eyes used to be blue, but now they had a violet shade.
“Right, so the content generators are coming along well. We have artists designing some awesome cities, the genetic engine is building a lot of creatures, and the NPC AI engine is coming along nicely.” Matt began, highlighting some of the projects that were still nearly on schedule.
“The quest generation engine isn’t working yet, but we have the code in place skimming content, and we are testing the logic to start digesting it.” Scott added after finishing a mouthful of chips. It had been a high priority to establish a proper Tex-Mex restaurant in Proteus with all the Texas immigrants here.
“If everything is going great, what’s the problem?” Barry asked, sipping his drink.
Matt replied, “Right. When we are testing features, people are complaining about nausea and don’t like to spend more than about half an hour using the VR. It’s a pretty common problem getting motion sickness with this kind of device, but it’s worse for this style of game where you travel around a lot. A lot of skills give speed or travel boosts, which will only make it worse as you level up. Also, we’re burning through money quickly. When we started, I just threw in what I could easily afford, and it sounded like a lot of money. Now we hired about 60 people, bought a lot of equipment and software, and I’m going to run out of money in a few months. I know we can issue more equity or borrow money, but I’m worried if this game will be a failure, and we shouldn’t keep spending.”
“Have you tried medicine for motion sickness?” Elsa asked.
“Yes, it helps. A lot of the developers and testing team use it regularly, but I don’t think requiring people to use scopolamine patches is going to help our sales,” Matt replied, moving food around his plate without eating much.
“Could you build a version that doesn’t use VR?” Adrianna asked. She was wearing a sundress with vine patterns that went nicely with her hair color. Her straight green hair was in a crown braid today.
Alvarro answered this one. “It shouldn’t be hard. Some of the guys have a version of the graphics engine and user interface running on desktops because they didn’t want to mess with the VR for testing. I just don’t want to give up on VR completely.”
Elsa looked thoughtful as she sipped on her drink. “We could add a biochip to synthesize compounds that could be released in the air or through the skin. I think we could come up with something to eliminate motion sickness. It would also let you add the sense of smell to the immersion. We could do a lot more, like affecting mood and emotions, but that would never be approved for US consumers. Even suppressing motion sickness would need a prescription in the US for standard medications and years to get approval for an improved version.”
“Adding smells sounds great, even if some people would prefer not to have it,” Matt said. “Do you think anyone would have an allergic reaction or other issues?”
“Possibly. We’ve been working on a process that diagnoses a wide panel of allergies and interactions with medicines automatically from a small blood sample. I think we could build something like that in. We could actually use it to diagnose and treat a lot of issues that don’t get picked up in standard tests they use at the urgent cares or hospitals outside of Proteus. It might hurt your game sales if people try out the hardware and learn about a few dozen medical conditions, but it would probably save some lives. The average person has multiple undiagnosed issues.” Elsa seemed to be getting more interested in their company, her food forgotten on her plate.
“I think your medical scanner would be a more profitable business than our gaming company,” Matt groaned.
“So I’ll trade you some equity in your company for my help building improving your VR headsets. They will include a medical scanner, production of programmable smells, and release of drugs that can be absorbed by inhalation or skin contact. Someone else needs to deal with the pesky legal issues.” Elsa said. “Also, you’ll need my help if we want to start building full immersion pods. Melinda and I have been talking about methods to induce a lucid dream state where we can influence what people experience. We won’t have something like that for a few years, but it might fit in nicely with a gaming or entertainment company.”
“That would be great!” Alvarro exclaimed. “I know it means my share will be less, but that’s exactly where we wanted to go with the company.”
“OK, I think this might work.” Matt said hopefully. “Now I just need to raise another 20 million, so we can build a new headset and finish the game. Does anyone know how much our dividend will be? I don’t want to dilute my ownership more, so it would be nice if I could just lend the money personally at a normal interest rate.”
“Based on how many robots we bought for the Xibalba project, and the two new sections of Proteus, I think you are going to have enough. My check might be smaller this quarter since we’re paying for all the infrastructure. Robotics, Energy, Mining are making big profits so far.” Adrianna added, cleaning her plate. Scott wondered how she could eat that much and stay thin.
“My company is doing well too,” Elsa added. “We had several hundred VIPs come through here. Most of them received the political discount price, but we still had plenty of people paying full price.”
“Adrianna, don’t you have all those government projects finished? That should be a lot of money, even with all your costs.” Scott asked.
“I’m kind of embarrassed to admit I delegated those and haven’t looked at the PNL numbers. I’ve been so busy designing Xibalba, I might have skimmed over some of the accounting emails,” Adrianna said with a flush. She pulled out her phone and started swiping through some screens. “OK, never mind. We’re doing better this quarter than last, even with our expenses going up to nearly $200 million.”
“Do we all get an email like that?” Matt asked sheepishly. “I’ve been so focused on work tasks, I never really check the accounting folder.”
“Dude, am I the only one here who reads the emails?” Barry asked with a huge grin.
There was a pause as everyone else dug out their phones and found the accounting folder.
“This is ridiculous,” Scott said. He got accounting reports from eight companies. Melinda, Trinidad, Angela and Hisashi must have worked together to standardize their reporting. There was a quick summary followed by a lot of detail he didn’t feel like drilling into. The numbers were more than he had expected.
“I need to ask Melinda how they set up their system. I feel like they all know how to manage a company, and I’m just some dumb college kid with too much money.” Matt said, rubbing his face with both hands.
“You could hire a CEO, but we’ve already grabbed the cheap ones. What is your CEO score anyway?” Scott asked his friend.
“Ugh, I don’t want to know. I did some training when we started, but I’ve been so buried in work I haven’t done anything recently. My ranking was pretty bad last time I checked.”
Scott pulled up a mobile version of Glitch_HR. Barry leaned over to look.
“Hah! You aren’t qualified to manage a dog walking business.” Barry cackled.
Matt’s CEO ranking indicated that nearly 500 million people were better qualified. Technically, that put him at the 92nd percentile, but it was not great.
“Let me see!” Adrianna grabbed Scott’s phone. He wondered if the mobile version might have been a bad idea, given what Solomon had said about the program’s biggest security weakness. Someone could just grab his phone and look up whatever they wanted if they could get around his phone login screen. He decided to set up a meeting with Solomon as soon as possible to secure this.
“Hah, he’s not even the most qualified at this table.” Adrianna laughed, “Barry is like 50 million higher. Wow, is your program broken? Who would put Barry in charge of anything?”
“No fair! I actually read my emails and my golf game is solid. Also, a good CEO has people skills, so that rules out you nerds!” Barry laughed.
“OK. I’m going to let Elsa have 20% and dilute the company, so I can let her worry about improving the immersion. I’ll lend $20 million at 5% interest to the company after we get the next round of dividends in December,” Matt tried to regain control of the conversation. “Scott, I need you to step up and help manage the programming teams. I’m delegating Xibabla robot programming to Phillip. That should give me enough time to sleep, exercise and study how to be a CEO, so I can at least score higher than Barry.”
With a plan in place, the friends enjoyed a few more drinks, deeply satisfied about their situation.