Naturally, while Calliope was working on cleaning up Envision and my learning that VIs actually could curse and swear, I was getting back into the math of gravitics.

I have to say, it was not getting easier. Nonetheless, I was making progress. I had isolated all the variables that I thought were needed for this case, not that I could be absolutely sure before I did not understand the whole equation completely, so, in a million years approximately.

Now I was trying to reduce it to a point where I could use it. Let me tell you, that really was a slog. If I thought identifying what variables to isolate was hard, now I got a completely new definition of that.

All the while I was often looking over what Calliope was doing. I have to confess, her work was pretty elegant. Not inspired, no, everything she did came from more than 250 years of the combined effort of humanity.

She could not create, only adapt and refine.

But in that, she was better than I could ever hope to be. I estimated that she did not have more than one or two bugs in the nearly 2 million lines of code that she’s gone over by the end of the first week.

The average for trained human programmers was more along the line of one serious bug every 2000 lines of code. The better ones of us could come close to one serious bug per 50k lines. I decided then and there that I would have her go over everything I’d written.

But for now, she was busy, and my time was used otherwise as well. On the Enki front, we were fortunate that Michael had used mostly bots from the very beginning to construct the buildings. That was a workforce that was easily increased, even if it did cost money.

Money that we were taking in hand over fist with the first glut of Q-links that we were selling. Money that we partially invested in new bots to construct new buildings faster. We were fortunate that we had planned for the release of the Q-link right about now anyway and had created a building for it right away.

That still left us with needing a second building not even two weeks after we started selling them. It was insane. Of course I understood where the demand came from.

Q-links were fast, easy to install, virtually maintenance-free, and cheap. A single standard OPB cable, previously used for everything below 100 TB/s did cost around $5 for the 2m length.

Even with the abundance of raw materials, the resource costs for the cables alone made them economically stupid. The 2m long cable, essentially the shortest that was used, had roughly 150g of material. Yes, mostly silicon and oxygen, with some polymer, so very cheap. The infinitely long Q-link with ten times the bandwidth on the other hand had not even a single gram of carbon. If you exclude the plugs of course that were the same for the cable and the Q-link.

The large intra-city backbone optical fibers with 1PB/s bandwidth set you back $12/m, without installation cost. Or maintenance.

Large inter-city data highways did cost in the area of $50k per km. And the really big ones used internationally started at $100k per km. And that was just if there was the option to install fiber optics.

That could not be done to the orbitals. And anything further out was even more limited. Louie 5 and Luna could measure their connection to the Earth's internet in MB/s and had pings in the area of seconds.

Mars and the outer system were virtually cut off from the Matrix.

All that was cured instantly by the Q-link.

Now some might think that already building a second manufactory for it was premature and when all the connections were made the market would crumble.

But I just had to look at my life. I incorporated the Q-link into so many things. Heck, we had started using Q-linked light switches to move the switches with the furniture. We had, by now, replaced every single data line in the Fortress with Q-links.

Anything but the most simple devices that used an electrical control system could be simplified by Q-links.

At this time, the cabling harness of an average ground car was in the area of 12km. Each car would need around 1000 Q-link pairs. At 25 cents per pair that made $250. For every single new car. Well, at retail prices.

If we would go down to 15 cents, it would be $130 that Enki would get in profit for each car.

A skimmer? Multiply that by 20. A grav ship? 1000. The average office building? 10k pairs. The average home? We guessed it was 300 pairs.

And I was by no means thinking that we already had exhausted the list of uses. Heck, a single bot had around 1000 sensors on average.

No, the Q-link would remain a license to print money for a long time to come. So a second building was more than warranted.

Five weeks after our so impactful meeting with Ralcon, Calliope was done. She had managed to reduce the codebase down to a bit less than 112 million lines. And that was including the VR functionality.

She additionally managed to make everything work. Roughly 12% of all features were previously deactivated but remained in the source code. It was somewhat telling that in some cases Envision now had cases of the same feature existing, and working, multiple times, owing to the number of times Ralcon had in vain tried to incorporate those features.

Meanwhile, I had made some progress in the math problem. Some of the terms were by now pretty understandable. That in turn made the variables easier to solve for. All in all, at that time, I was roughly half done with the project.

Naturally, I had no clue what that would tell me. I just wanted to know how the grav coils worked.

That still left me with one thing to do, when Calliope declared herself finished. Well, two things, but the testing of her work was so obvious that it barely counted.

No, the thing to do was deliver the finished product. The traitor Michael refused to become the go-between, explaining to me that this was my personal deal with Ralcon, but at least he arranged for a Ralcon representative to come to the fortress to meet me.

And he sent me some legal help from Enki. Yes, I had the ‘pleasure’ of hosting Melissa Anderson for a few hours. For some reason, Kate decided to play butler, complete with a tuxedo and everything, when she heard that.

Talk about bizarre. It was oddly fitting on her, but seriously, the way she looked brought me to giggles the first time I’d seen her in it. Come on, think about it, a 215cm tall, four-armed, canine mutant in a tuxedo? Well, if she had fun, who cares.

I had to stifle laughing out loud when I saw Melissas, let’s say bewildered look when Kate lead her to the meeting room. I had enough experience with Kate’s mimic to know she was very much enjoying it right then.

My guess was that she had not forgotten, or forgiven, Melissa’s exclamation about ‘real’ food. As well as some other, less charitable statements the lawyer had made. And of course, she always enjoyed messing with people's minds.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

As soon as Kate had closed the door, Melissa turned toward me.

“Is that normal? That she runs around in this… this suit? And her behavior… what’s gotten into her?”

I just shrugged.

“You have to ask her that. It was her idea.”

“If you say so.”

A couple of minutes after a bot had delivered coffee to us, the representative of Ralcon arrived. It was lackey #2, also known as Haggerton, with some muscle as protection. Both with a similar look of perplexity as Melissa. Kate obviously struck again.

As soon as he sat down, and declined the obligatory offer of some coffee for himself, he opened up.

“It took you long enough, you know? But alright, you are young and are not used to doing business on this side of the law, so we can ignore it. This time. But we have to insist that you give a progress report at least every two weeks from now on. You can do it over the matrix though.”

Progress report? Did he think… well, whatever.

“I have to confess, my previous customers were not demanding progress reports at all, so yes, I had not thought you would need one. But that is a moot point anyway.”

I shrugged nonchalantly, which seemed to infuriate Haggerton to some extent.

“A moot point? I know you have no experience working with professionals, but do you not understand that Ralcon wants those progress reports regularly?"

I tilted my head.

“Yes, you made that abundantly clear. But you got one thing wrong. This here is no progress report. It is an “I am done, where do you want the product”-report. I hope you understand that any progress report from now on would be rather short. That makes the whole thing a moot point.”

His eyes widened and the lack of understanding was very clearly visible on his face.

“What do you mean, you are done? You are not done until the project is finished.”

Oh the stupidity. I could not stop myself from palming my face.

“I mean that I am done. The project is finished. The source code is cleaned up. It is readable. It is understandable. It is quite a bit more efficient. So, in one sentence, I am done.”

Haggerton shook his head.

“That can’t be right. Yes, you are good, but nobody is that good. That should have taken you a year, maybe two.”

“I am reasonably intelligent, I am a Pure, I have an ultra-bandwidth jack, and I have an extremely powerful computer, Mr. Haggerton.”

He scoffed.

“That is nice for you, but that still does not explain how you can claim to have done the work already.”

I shook my head.

“You experienced the time compression of cyberspace. Yes, only the 4:1 of a diadem, but you should at least be aware that a jack is a bit faster. We do not fully know all the factors that come into play here, but we know native intelligence, the bandwidth of the jack, and the power of the computer used to go into cyberspace are very important factors. Additionally, Pures for some reason have it easier in cyberspace, getting generally a higher compression.

What I was saying is that I have a very high compression. Eight hours a day, seven days a week for five weeks at 120:1 is the equivalent of three years, and ten months of virtual time.”

He raised one eyebrow.

“Yeah, sure. As if anybody could reach 120:1. Hell, the record is somewhere below 50:1. And we know that you did not use your time exclusively for the overhaul of Envision. We know about your little side project, these Q-links.”

“One, this ‘record’ is a bit older. Two, the computer used was not quite a Seraphim Mk. III, there is a reason it is generally seen as the best board in existence. Three, the record was made with a basic jack. An ultra-bandwidth jack is quite a bit faster.

About the Q-links, my work on those was done before we even began negotiating with you. We were just waiting for the right time to release them. Without the initial impact of the cyberware, it would have been an extremely risky gamble. It would be more a bet on who will swallow us than on if.”

“So, you really want to tell me that you spent nearly four virtual years on Envision?”

Well, he had me there.

“No, not really. That is where the first point comes into play. I am reasonably intelligent. Intelligent enough to not do the work by myself, but instead do what I said Ralcon should have done. I’ve created the programming VI that I talked about at our last meeting. Considering that I still have full access to Spectre’s supercomputer in Seattle, well let’s say it was relatively quick work.”

Haggerton turned red when I talked about the VI before he screamed at me:

“You did what?!? Did we not make it clear how fucking dangerous a VI is? Are you really so stupid not to realize that you should leave your fingers off the whole thing?”

I let my head hang for a moment. Had he learned nothing?

“I know you have a, not quite up-to-standard CIO, but you should at least try to understand reality. You were there when I explained the difference between a rogue VI and a controlled VI. This new VI, if I need to, I can deactivate it at any given time. I can work on its objectives. I can completely shut it down. I carefully designed the objectives so that it only works on what I allow it to work on.

It is absolutely no danger. Not to you, not to me, not to anybody.”

“Oh, really? Is that so? You are just too much in love with your own brilliance that you don’t see the danger. You are simply disgusting.”

I took a deep breath, and almost gave him an angry retort, but I stopped myself, took another few calming breaths, and then shook my head.

“You know what, have it your way. I don’t see any sense to argue with you about it.

Will you now accept that the corrected Envision is ready or not? Can we conclude this business?”

He grumbled a bit, but finally nodded sharply.

“Fine. Give it to me then!”

I smiled at him.

“Do you have the authority to sign over the game studio?”

“What? Now? But that will happen as soon as we have the program.”

I sighed.

“Come on, man. You should know the reputation that Ralcon has. If I give you the source code, and Ralcon suddenly finds ‘reasons’ to keep the studios, there is no way for me to get what I am owed.

But on the other hand, my reputation is that I keep my word if at all possible. And should I try to take advantage of you, the court system here in the US will have no problem making me give the studios back.

That of course means that Ralcon signs over the studios, including all the IPs, brands, trademarks, and copyrights, and then I give you the thumb drive with the source code.”

He looked a bit like a fish out of water.

“But… but I don’t have the authority to do that.”

I raised my eyebrow.

“Then I would suggest you contact somebody who has this authority.”

Anger was still showing in his expression, but he slowly calmed down.

“You are serious, are you? Fuck, you really have it done already? I hope for your sake that you are not fucking with me here.”

He pulled out his com from his pocket, stopped for a moment to look at it, and then looked back at me.

“You still have time to come clean. But as soon as I’ve made the call, if you don’t have it, there will be trouble.”

I shrugged.

“Go ahead, make the call. It is finished, and the only thing remaining is to finish the deal. Well, almost. Ralcon has to make a few decisions. All those features that did not work out… well, Calliope, my new VI, managed to get them to work.

All of them.

There are several where the same functionality was tried multiple times. Without success, but your code monkeys left the source code in the files. That means now you have the same feature three, four, or more times, fully working.

You have to decide which version to include.

Oh, and I have integrated the VR functionality directly into the OS.

But I’ve included a list of the modules in question and a manual on how to remove the ones you don’t want.”

As a response, Haggerton muttered a “shit” but used the com. I naturally only heard his side of the conversation.

“Haggerton here. Yes, sorry, boss, but the situation… no, that is… please sir, let me tell you… ok, the point is, she is finished… that is what she says at least… no, I haven’t seen it yet… no, she wants to finish the transfer of the studios with all the IPs, trademarks, brands, and so on first… yes, I told her… no, she actually made the fucking VI she talked about in the Jade Court… no, she still harps about how there is a difference… as I see it, we still need the source code, and the VI is already made… ok, I will tell her.”

After that, he closed the call and placed the com on the table.

“You are in luck. Mr. Elos will make the transfer. As soon as he has done it, we will then…”

His com chimed, and he looked at it.

“Well, fuck me sideways, that was quick. Congratulation, you are now the proud owner of a group of decrepit game studios. Will you give me the source code now?”

I smiled.

“One moment.”

I sent a quick message to Warden.

V: Ralcon said they transferred the game studios. Please look into it.

Around 10 seconds later, I received her reply:

W: Transfer is confirmed. You are now officially the owner of the Ralcon Game Studios. With the proviso that you change that name at the earliest opportunity.

My smile widened, and I took the OPB stick out of the sleeve I had it in.

“There you go. Just for your information, if you find an error, let me know and I will correct it. Obviously, my ability to test it is a bit limited.”

And with that, I shoved the thumb drive over the table.

Haggerton quickly grabbed the drive, looked at it for a moment, sighed, and shoved it into the pocket of his jacket. After that, he quickly, and without further words, stood up, and left the room.

A few seconds after the door closed, Melissa piped up:

“And what did you need me here for?”

I massaged my temples, while I answered her:

“Honestly, I did not expect it to go that smoothly. You were the insurance here.”

She sighed, in my opinion overly dramatically, and then said:

“Well, the boss said to be here, so I was. Now, if that was all, I will go back to the office. We will see each other sometimes. Bye.”

And a few seconds later I was alone.