Dorothy James strides through the campus gates as if she thinks she somehow belongs here. Her perfectly coiffed hair seems to defy the hot desert wind, and her immaculate black pantsuit hasn’t picked up a single speck of the dust that blows around her. I almost think she’s got a cloud maintaining her appearance, but after a careful check it seems it’s just her natural state to look better than everyone around her. The pair of burly dark-suited assistants or bodyguards or whatever that flank her aren’t looking nearly as collected after their short walk from their very expensive looking car.
She smiles with her overly white teeth as she sees me, Evan, and Louise standing by the pillars that line the front of the Residence. It took a while to set this meeting up, but the nervous twist in my stomach tells me that it wasn’t long enough. I don’t see Campos anywhere, he must be coming in a separate car.
I hope this works.
“Louise? Is that you?” Dorothy calls as she gets nearer. I think she’s going for a friendly tone, but it just sounds sickly sweet to me. I’m tempted for an instant to consider Chad’s solution. We could arrange an accident so very easily.
“Hello, Ms. James,” Louise answers coolly, pointedly not stepping forward to meet her.
“What a lovely young lady you’ve become! And please, call me Dorothy! You’ll have to forgive Antonio, he wasn’t able to make it in person. But he’s standing by for a video call whenever we’re ready,” she says, indicating the large tablet she’s holding in one hand. It’s the latest SynTech model, looking brand new. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be irony or flattery that she’d come bearing our own company’s tech. Or maybe it’s just because it’s the best tablet on the market for video conferences.
That’s not a great start that Campos isn’t with her. I like to be able to check when the people I’m dealing with are lying, and with a video call I don’t have much besides blush reflexes and pupil dilation. I’ll be almost down to standard human senses. Hopefully reading Dorothy will help, though she’s the less important of the two of them.
“Welcome to our home,” I say as graciously as I can. I hope my voice doesn’t betray that I’m almost choking on the words. “Please, come this way.”
We lead her to the Residence and situate ourselves in one of the small meeting rooms there. I’d normally do something like this in one of the Research Center conference rooms, but I don’t want Dorothy anywhere near anything she could steal. It’s bad enough that she insisted on having the meeting on Campus instead of on neutral territory, though if things go the way we planned she’ll regret demanding that concession. I’ve got my billion fingers checking aggressively to make sure that she hasn’t already deployed another spying package. I haven’t felt anything so far, but I’ll still need to sweep the whole place thoroughly when we’re done here.
Dorothy sets up her tablet on a little folding stand on the table, and in a moment the smiling face of Antonio Campos appears on the screen.
“Good afternoon, my friends,” he says, his handsome face looking pleased. He gives us a friendly wave through the camera.
“Still morning here, Antonio,” Dorothy says in that same sickly sweet voice she’s been using on us today.
“Ah, yes, of course,” he answers, his voice carrying a light Portuguese accent. “ Good morning then! You two young men, it is very nice to see you again. I don’t see that beautiful young lady from the boat, but her sister there must be Miss Louise Butler. Dorothy tells me you were quite the precocious child when she last encountered you.”
He’s certainly making an effort to sound friendly, and he emanates an unmistakable charisma as he talks. Despite myself, I find myself wanting to like this guy.
“Mr. Campos, would you mind if we skip the pleasantries and get right down to business?”
“Certainly, Mr. Kimball,” his gaze gets an amused look to it. “I’m very interested in what you have to offer us.”
“Good. I’m glad you are open to this conversation. I think you’ll find our offer very interesting. Let’s start with the elephant in the room. I would like to make sure that you are aware that your nanotechnology is stolen,” I state matter-of-factly. “Stolen from our family. I hope this isn’t news to you, or you and Ms. James would need to have a long talk.”
“I do not know what you are talking about,” he says affably. I don’t need to monitor his pulse to know that he’s lying, but I wouldn’t expect anything else from him at this point.
“Of course you don’t. You need plausible deniability. You are completely unaware that the hardware of your nanobots is exactly identical to version 1.4.6.0032 of our nanobots, patented by the SynTech corporation under US law and protected in Brazil under our reciprocal patent agreement,” I declare as I pull the details from my index. “You definitely don’t know that Mis James stole both plans and prototypes of our nanobots, and was fired from SynTech as a result. If you had known those things, it would have been terribly unethical for you to bring her in and use that stolen technology as the centerpiece of your campaign to rehabilitate your public image from an earth-destroying robber-baron to a philanthropist offering hope to a world that desperately needs it.”
Campos looks ahead intently. His smile fades for a moment, then grows again.
“Mr. Kimball, you are a fascinating young man.” He leans forward. “What is it that you want?”
“We want to help you, Mr. Campos. Your pirated implementation of our technology is sadly lacking, and potentially dangerous under its current developers. I don’t know exactly what Ms. James promised you, but it’s clear that she has failed to deliver anything near the potential of what she could have. The lack of any innovation in the hardware during the entire time she’s had it should have been your first red flag. Compound that with a firmware load that’s basically garbage and a control scheme that makes it nearly impossible to perform even the most basic of operations with any degree of accuracy, and I’d say whatever you are paying Dorothy and her team to do the technical work, it’s far too much.”
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Campos is listening intently. Dorothy’s vitals register surprise at what I’m saying. I don’t know what she expected to hear from us, but it wasn’t this.
“Just look at what happened in the Pacific,” I continue. “In the time it took your crew of sixty operators to build a single shoddy platform, three of us built over two dozen of them with a total cleaning capacity more than a hundred times that of yours. And our platforms are not just better for the environment, they’re viable commercially. We just sold the first one this week at a price that more than covered all the expenses of our trip.”
Dorothy’s face is composed, but her pulse is racing, her blood pressure is spiking, and droplets of perspiration too small to see yet are starting to form on her scalp and forehead. She’s gone from surprised to furious quickly.
“Antonio, you—” she starts.
“In a moment, Ms. James,” Campos cuts her off sharply. He turns his attention back to us with an intrigued look on his face. “I would like to hear what they have to say. Please, do go on.”
“As it stands, we have the means to bring civil and criminal suits against both you and Ms. James in both of our countries,” I continue. “While you might be able to resist these lawsuits, and only she would probably ever see jail time, they would be expensive and time-consuming, and we would make sure that they devastate your attempt to remake your public image. I assume that an entry into politics is something you are considering in the next few years?”
“Actually, yes,” he says, surprise finally knocking the smug smile off of his face. “I had only discussed that with my family. How did you know?”
“Why else would you put this much effort and expense into improving the public’s perception of you? You’re not a vain man. You’re pragmatic.”
“I see you have done your homework very well,” he says, a more sincere smile settling onto his face. Good. We might be able to work with this guy.
“So, you’ve got a couple of options at this point. You could spend the next several years hemorrhaging cash and fighting legal battles while the press of both of our countries paint you as a thief and a hypocrite. Or, you could take a look at the message that was sent directly to your private email a few minutes ago.”
I give him a moment to check his mail and see his eyes scanning something on his screen.
“You’ll find in that message a licensing agreement that I think will meet your goals much more effectively than your partnership with Ms. James. It gives you access to updated nanobot hardware and a completely new and substantially improved firmware load. It also provides for the software development work to get the new bots working with your existing VR headsets. Your operators will be able to accomplish ten to twenty times as much with half the training. All at a cost of less than what you’d face in legal fees if you continue on your current course. And you won’t need to throw away your money at whatever hacks Dorothy hired to pretend that they could do what we do. I don’t know how much that saves you, but I assume it’s at least as much as the license costs.”
“Very interesting, Mr. Kimball,” he says in a serious tone. His eyes are moving back and forth, he’s doing more than just scanning the document now. “I’ll have my people take a look.”
My own pulse increases. This is the dicey part.
“There’s one condition though, Mr. Campos,” I tell him. Dorothy’s eyes have become piercing daggers pointed right at me. I think she knows what’s coming.
“And that is?”
“Dorothy James is out,” I declare. “This is a very personal matter for us. We’re not dealing with her or anyone who continues to associate with her. It would be a slap in the face to my Father’s memory. If you want an opportunity to close this deal, and I assure you that you do, you need to fire her, and you need to do it right now.”
He laughs. Dorothy is staying silent, but based on the tension in her jaw muscles, it’s a tremendous effort. The alchemy of human emotion is rapidly transforming her surprise into seething rage. The two goons she brought loom behind her. Did she think that bringing some muscle along would intimidate us?
“This was not at all what I expected to hear today, my dear young man,” Campos says. “But I am intrigued. Take twenty percent off the licensing fees for the first five years and you have a deal.”
“Antonio!” Dorothy exclaims.
“Ten percent for three years. And only if you promise me now that there will be no severance or any other compensation for Dorothy. Final offer.”
He thinks about it for exactly 2.64 seconds.
“Done,” he declares with a smile.
“Antonio!” Dorothy screams.
“Ms. James,” he says calmly. “I’m afraid that your services will no longer be necessary. Thank you for introducing me to these very interesting young people. Noah, my lawyers will be in touch soon.”
The call ends and the screen darkens.
Dorothy flips out. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a string of obscenities anything like what comes from her mouth. She’s somewhere between a drill sergeant and a drunken sailor.. She’s still swearing her head off at me when I wrap her gently in a blanket of bots and lift her up off the ground. One of her goons reaches for a shoulder holster. I grab his hand with a tendril of bots and bind the fingers together before it reaches its destination. He fumbles trying to draw his gun for a moment before giving up. The other one seems too stunned to do anything as Louise wraps both of their upper bodies in more binding cocoons.
“You might want to run now,” I say to the pair of them.
They don’t need to be told twice. They’re halfway gone when I turn Dorothy sideways, toss the tablet on top of her, then levitate her through the door anand on out toward the front doors of the Residence. I learn a few new innovative combinations of curses as she continues her shrieking tirade. Nannies that are passing through the foyer with their charges as we go by have to reach down and cover their small ears. I form a dozen cameras and microphones to capture this from every angle as her screeching goes up by an octave and a couple dozen decibels. I float her all the way out to her car, dump her unceremoniously onto the dirt off to the side of the road, puncture all four of her tires, and close and lock the giant front gate that we almost never close.
Her two minions are picking her up and trying to help her dust off her now-filthy outfit as I smile my way back to my office.
I know it won’t be enough to satisfy Chad, but it should at least help to get the family back on the same page. And it felt so very, very good.
Look Mom, I solved it without murdering anyone. I’m getting better.