Nadia Kucharska realized that all her planning and contingencies sometimes mattered less than simple luck. In this case, the weather the day before had been cool, overcast and with a pleasant breeze. Melinda’s bias against people in suits had ended up harmless. The various people needing to talk with them had been comfortable waiting and open to negotiation, instead of overheated and hostile.
Today, their guests were waiting comfortably in a lounge. Staff served them cool drinks and walked around with plates of snacks. Some guests had removed their ties after rumors had spread that Melinda considered them offensive, and there was a higher percentage of women among those sent to negotiate. Nadia had frantically arranged this reception after explaining to Melinda how precarious their situation was and how important even a few allies might be for their survival. Melinda was chastised and agreed to politely speak with everyone. If they came respectfully with words instead of guns, Melinda agreed to give them a chance. There were still a few people who tried to bully Melinda forcibly escorted out the door, but most of their guests had a better experience.
Surprisingly, after addressing concerns of several moderate Mexican politicians, they had negotiated a favorable settlement that was awaiting ratification. Part of the deal included the immediate unfreezing of their Mexican bank accounts as a show of good faith. This put everyone in a good mood. The terms proposed left Proteus as an autonomous region. Residents were subject to Mexican income taxes, but other taxes and local laws were at the discretion of Proteus management. Land based properties would pay property taxes and were subject to the rules of the Yucatán government. Retroactive permits were granted for their Xibalba Tunnel infrastructure projects. The Genysis companies would waive claims of damages on their land-based factory properties and release all prisoners. They were obligated to re-float the Navy ships they had sunk but had no further obligations to repair damaged military property.
Several of the “suits” Melinda had been reluctant to meet were actually politicians who preferred a peaceful solution instead of a prolonged conflict that would punish both sides. The pleasant weather had probably been exactly what was needed to keep everyone’s temper cool enough to make this deal.
SpaceX had also surprised them by responding favorably. They had sent down a few top executives the next day. They were quite impressed with the air trucks and Spa tour, and Nadia had eagerly jumped on the opportunity this presented.
Melinda looked a bit exhausted from all her morning meetings, but she made the time to speak with Nadia shortly after having lunch with some of the SpaceX executives.
“We will have to give them some ownership of our transportation and mining companies, but I think we are getting a fair deal,” Melinda said, slumping a bit in her chair.
“Tell me about it,” Nadia prompted.
“They will get 10% of our mining and transportation starting next year. We get 5% of their owner’s car company, and they get a five-year exclusive deal to buy second or third generation fusion reactors. They claim that deal is worth over $50 billion and will be worth more when they announce fusion powered cars. More important is that they are sending a team and equipment down to help finish our spaceport. They tried to get us to bring their rocket back and offered to launch our satellite, but I insisted that shipping it through US waters was too risky right now. They are motivated to help us launch quickly and safely so they can have it returned as soon as possible,” Melinda explained, looking more relaxed now and taking a sip of a non-alcoholic drink.
“That’s great! With our accounts unfrozen and their experts available to help, we might just get our launch time down to four weeks. Nearly the same time window as the Russians’ first expected launch. It will be a race, but we have a chance now,” Nadia was very pleased. They would still offload people and supplies from their surface facilities over the next weeks, but if they could launch, then the whole rocket heist would not have been a complete failure.
“How is the situation in Texas?” Melinda asked. Nadia had updated her the day before and not much had changed, but she could understand Melinda’s concern.
“Marcus’ group is still avoiding capture. We have a couple robot factories seeded in East Texas, building up capacity before they launch any operations. The facility they hit is swarming with US troops, and they brought in digging equipment. We have programming in place to handle when the surface structures are destroyed. I think they will get a nasty surprise when they break in.” Nadia reported. None of this was new information, so she added. “Oh, we’re seeing armed groups of people entering Texas from other states. There has been an uptick in non-mainstream media favorable to the rebellion. SPAI seems to control the news channels and a lot of the entertainment services, but a few smaller sites have resisted their influence and taken a strong anti-government position.”
“Most of our money was in pesos, so we have access to funds again. Do you think there is anything besides finishing our current projects I should be spending money on?” Melinda asked.
“Well, I heard you had a large Christmas party last year. It’s short notice, but it would be good for morale and show our allies that we are still strong.” Nadia said with a nod.
“Hah, my master strategist recommends we throw a party. Isn’t that tempting fate a bit?” Melinda said with a laugh. Still, everyone seemed stressed for the past month, and it would be good to have something positive and normal to look forward to. She went back into multitask mode and started making some calls.
Nadia wondered if she was making a mistake. She was confident that if they just pushed everyone harder, their productivity would fall. A quick break would boost morale and energy levels. Her best estimate was that they might shave a few days overall off their launch program if people could de-stress before the home stretch. It was a calculated risk, but she thought the race was close enough that even one day could make all the difference.
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The next week passed in a blur of activity for the company leaders.
Barry Yong was focused on a third-generation fusion generator that could be cold-started from capacitors and lithium batteries. It took nearly twenty seconds to ramp up to full power, but the batteries were sized to make up the difference during this time. They had tested something similar in the past, but the new design used six reactor channels which could individually start and stop, allowing the power output to adjust to match load. Individual channels already scaled their output based on fuel injection, but with this design allowed them to reduce the overhead of keeping magnets and synchrotrons capacity powered up. Overall, the design was about 20% more efficient than the previous generation of their mining robots. Even better, it would solve the problem of variable load applications like vehicles, powered armor, or other devices that were active only a few hours a day.
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Adrianna Foster worked long hours getting Tower One of the luxury section finished. They were going to use the grand ballroom for their Christmas party, and the living units would serve as hotel rooms for VIP guests. Between redirecting resources to help finish the spaceport and getting everything ready for the party, the rest of her projects were on hold. Adrianna didn’t really care. The unfinished shells of three other towers would be lighted up, creating an impressive view for the party guests. Show-casing Tower One to an impressive list of millionaires, billionaires, politicians and celebrities would probably double the price she could charge for the remaining housing units. Adrianna realized she was considered one of those billionaires now. Based on the valuation for their stock swap, her stake in just the mining company was worth more than $10 billion. In her opinion, Genysis Construction was worth as much as mining, and her share was ten times larger. She would have to ask Angela if others valued her company as much as Adrianna did, but her profits were growing fast and beating all their other groups.
Adrianna wondered if she should sell some of her shares to support a charity. She had often thought rich people should help the poor more, but now that she was someone with money, she wasn’t exactly sure what to do. Adrianna was proud that her money was made honestly, building a great place to live for thousands of people. She employed hundreds, and by regional standards her employees were near the top of the income curve. Still, she wondered if there was something more, she should be doing with all this wealth? She decided to speak to Solomon Rhodes sometime. His money came from rather questionable insider trading while serving time in jail, but he had also given away hundreds of millions.
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Matthew Stanton was pleased to find out he was a billionaire, but it hadn’t caused him any angst. His share of the stock trade and the unfreezing of his Mexican accounts solved his cash problems. He immediately made some large orders out of pocket for computer hardware. What troubled Matt was that of all the companies their group had started, his gaming company seemed to be the only one struggling. The new headsets were over budget, and they had put several people in medical comas after Elsa’s initial experiments went poorly. She had assured him that a lot of their Biotech procedures had run into initial difficulties, but Matt could read between the lines that they were failing a lot more than Biotech’s other recent projects.
On the software side, Matt had exactly one team on schedule, and it was run by their self-confessed Russian spy. Scott seemed to have scared some other developers into putting in long hours, but their work quality actually decreased. Matt managed to convince everyone to limit themselves to regular hours, but project tasks were taking twice as long as budgeted, and the quality was disappointing. Even when they managed to finish a task, integrating a project with other systems would often break them both and require extensive rework. In short, Matt wondered if he was terrible at managing a software company.
Matt tried to spend about half his time on management training, and his rating was now respectable. More importantly, his score was finally higher than Barry. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to translate into development progress.
Matt’s partners didn’t seem too worried. Alvarro told him he should just double any time estimates for a complex project. He didn’t agree with this, but Matt realized he had been setting the schedule based on when his original budget would run out, instead of unbiased projections. With their accounts unfrozen plus billions of dollars available from the stock trade, he could just loan the company money and extend the timeline.
Scott was spending most of his time managing the team, coding NPC AIs. Scott seemed unconcerned about Matt’s timeline. Theofanis had given Scott some interesting advice about AI coding. Theofanis avoided using almost all commercial tools for building his code. Scott learned he had dropped out of high school and spent several years understanding and reworking open-source programming languages and artificial intelligence packages. Eventually, Theo had built his own tools, customized to writing code quickly in a way that matched how he expected it should run. For the first few years, Theo would have been useless to hire as a programmer, since he couldn’t run standard tools or work with others. Later, he had a deep understanding and a unique custom tool set which moved him to the top of the programming rankings.
Scott’s own ranking had plateaued months earlier, but he started focusing on building his own tools. Glitch_HR guided him, and he even started reworking larger sections of the code as an exercise to improve his understanding of the program. The more he dug into the code, the more shocking it was that the program actually worked, but Scott was able to improve performance and reduce the code size by about 50% for sections that were not part of the deep learning core.
Scott considered this a success and then moved further into understanding the core. After about a week of frustration and experimentation, he managed to understand one subsystem of this convoluted code. Glancing at his programming ranking, he noticed he had moved up about 20,000 spots over the past week. He had been stuck for months, but Scott was excited to see he was once again making progress.
Matt pestered Scott about how the NPC code was coming. “Hey Scott, where are we with your project? It’s one of the main goals we had for this company.”
“Well, we’re still at the first milestone. We have generators for appearance, attributes, and some backstory elements. Basically, anything you can put in a weighted lookup table,” Scott admitted.
“So no progress for the past month? What exactly have you been doing?” Matt seemed more frustrated than usual today.
“Oh, I took a step back and was working on my tools and programming skills.” Scott admitted. “My team is still trying, but the results have not been good so far. The good news is, my ranking is going up again!” Scott said with some excitement.
Matt rolled his eyes, “I’m glad you are getting something out of this. Alvarro convinced me my project estimates were too aggressive, and now we are rich, I shouldn’t worry about running a few million over budget. Do you at least have an estimate of when you’ll hit the next milestone?”
Scott exhaled slowly, “The next milestone is passing the Turing test. You do know that people have worked on systems like that for years, mostly without success. Am I allowed to estimate a year?”
“Ugh,” Matt groaned. “Elsa told me something similar about the headset. Is it even worth keeping this company going?”
“Hey Matt, take a deep breath and relax. Angela told me today she estimates I’m one of the top ten richest people on the planet now. I know you aren’t far behind me. We don’t actually need this company to succeed financially. You are taking setbacks way too personally. Find some part of this job you enjoy and just focus on that. Even if it takes five years, do you still want to build this game?” Scott asked.
“Well, I want to play the game. Not sure if I want five years of this stress,” Matt admitted.
“Exactly my point! You need to find a way to enjoy what you are doing. If you can’t, then let’s hire someone else. There is no way anyone is going to look at you as a failure when you made billions of dollars in less than two years. Anyone successful has failures and setbacks. I don’t even think this will be a failure!” Scott argued.
“Mmm, you’re right. I’m just going to get rid of all our deadlines!” Matt thought it would sound stupid, but it actually felt good. “OK, so I’m just going to stop by the different groups every few days to see if I can help with anything. I’ll play around with some animation code and read some training articles, but I will not worry about timelines or budget.”
“That’s the spirit!” Scott agreed, “You should probably hire someone else to keep track of our spending, for tax purposes. Have them send the reports to Alvarro. When we need more money, I’ll loan enough to operate another year. If that runs out, you can get the next one.”
Matt could feel his tension easing. “I think I’m going to take the rest of the day off. Maybe visit the Spa. You want to go?”
“No way I’m getting near that place!” Scott replied quickly. “
“Aww! I think it’s because you turned her whole life around, and she wants to return the favor. Or maybe she just thinks it’s funny how you complain so much.”