Just to clarify a fact. I am not a Mormon and never have been. Likewise, I am not a Jehovah's Witness and never have been. I am an Atheist that leans toward Buddhism and Taoism. We all have a right to our beliefs, and I'm enforcing my rights on the matter. :-)
Also, in case you ever lose faith in the world, check this out...
Chapters
- Big Money
- Registration
- Innovation And In Novation
- West Meet East And Strategic Siloing
- Epilogue
I, under no circumstance will trade, barter or otherwise swap my own identity for that of another person and I protect the same right for those who've contributed their artwork to the various projects under my management at Shhhh! Digital Media, my own company, no matter the colour symbolism involved. These rights are protected by law under the Charter Of Rights And Freedoms under section 7.
Also, FYI, I don't reverse or alter the polarity or context of my expression (sometimes referred to as "blove" by some people). I say what I mean and mean what I say, and generally only joke or am sarcastic with people I really know very well.
Help research that provides cures and support treatment for sick children.
The Cancer Research Institute
The Princess Margaret Foundation
Cancer Research organizations that combine the expertise of many different research firms and Universities to find innovative treatments and cures for Cancer.
Through evidence-based research, education and policy analysis, we work to conserve and protect the natural environment, and help create a sustainable Canada. We regularly collaborate with non-profit and community organizations, all levels of government, businesses and individuals.
United Way Worldwide
World Veterans Federation
The World Veterans Federation is a humanitarian organisation, a charity and a peace activist movement. The WVF maintains its consultative status with the United Nations since 1951 and was conferred the title of “Peace Messenger” in 1987.
I'd like to point out that it was the incredible Gary Sinese Foundation that brought the issue of Veteran's rights to my attention. I've always had little respect for those who'd forget the great contribution made by those who've risked life and limb to defend those values that so many of us espouse. Perhaps the true measure of one's principles are by that for which they'd risk their life.
"None can speak more eloquently for peace than those who have fought in war."
Ralph Bunche, Nobel Peace Prize 1950
The ALS Society Of BC
ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease) is a progressive neuromuscular disease in which nerve cells die and leave voluntary muscles paralyzed. The ALS society provides a variety of programs to combat this disease and help those with it to survive.
Muscular Dystrophy Canada
Muscular Dystrophy Canada’s mission is to enhance the lives of those affected by neuromuscular disorders by continually working to provide ongoing support and resources while relentlessly searching for a cure through well-funded research.
Humane Society International
The Humane Society protects the health, lives and rights of animals the world over, ensuring that they too have a voice in this world. We are interdependent upon the complex web of life this entire planet over for our mutual survival. This is a world wide charity.
The Global Foodbanking Network
Ensuring that people the world over have enough food day to day in order to survive and lead healthy lives. In this challenging day and age services like this are becoming more and more essential. This is a world wide charity.
The Edgar Allan Poe Museum
Because Barris told me to put it here. If I didn't, he said he'd walk. Geez. Stardom really gets to some people's heads. Maybe I could kill him and bury his heart beneath the floor boards! Or I could encase him in behind a brick and mortar wall, for shaming my family name of Amantillado!
Wikipedia
The model for what may become the Encyclopedia Galactica, a complete reference and record of history, events and knowledge of humanity and its journey beyond. It is the encyclopedia of all that we know, what we surmise that we've known and will learn in the future. Yes, Wikipedia is a charitable organization of great importance. If you enjoy what I am doing here then please take the time to donate to Wikipedia. Surprisingly only 1% of Wikipedia's users donate yet the site serves pages to millions every day.
Humble Bundle
A video gaming storefront benefiting a vast variety of different Charities in the United States and United Kingdom (hopefully soon to be expanded to include other areas of the world?). By software their software bundles and choose which Charity your money benefits and how much of your money benefits that Charity. See? Gamers can do their part too.
Other Ways To Help Using Your Computer
Donate your idle computer time to science! Join the World Community Grid by clicking on one of the links below and follow the instructions for how to participate:Warning: this material is intended for a mature audience. Reader discretion is advised.
Shhhh! Digital Media Presents
The Butterfly Dragon: The Two Butterflies - Epsisode 14: Crime Of The Century
This content is produced by the artists indicated on the site, including myself, Brian Joseph Johns.
I, under no circumstance will trade, barter or otherwise swap my own identity for that of another person and I protect the same right for those who've contributed their artwork to the various projects under my management at Shhhh! Digital Media, my own company, no matter the colour symbolism involved. These rights are protected by law under the Charter Of Rights And Freedoms under section 7.
Also, FYI, I don't reverse or alter the polarity or context of my expression (sometimes referred to as "blove" by some people). I say what I mean and mean what I say, and generally only joke or am sarcastic with people I really know very well.
If you enjoy reading the content on this website, then please consider making a donation to one of the following charities below, or by the purchase of merchandise on our shop at https://shop.shhhhdigital.com.
Support CharitySick Kids Foundation
Help research that provides cures and support treatment for sick children.
The Cancer Research Institute
The Princess Margaret Foundation
Cancer Research organizations that combine the expertise of many different research firms and Universities to find innovative treatments and cures for Cancer.
United Way Worldwide
World Veterans Federation
The World Veterans Federation is a humanitarian organisation, a charity and a peace activist movement. The WVF maintains its consultative status with the United Nations since 1951 and was conferred the title of “Peace Messenger” in 1987.
I'd like to point out that it was the incredible Gary Sinese Foundation that brought the issue of Veteran's rights to my attention. I've always had little respect for those who'd forget the great contribution made by those who've risked life and limb to defend those values that so many of us espouse. Perhaps the true measure of one's principles are by that for which they'd risk their life.
"None can speak more eloquently for peace than those who have fought in war."
Ralph Bunche, Nobel Peace Prize 1950
The ALS Society Of BC
ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease) is a progressive neuromuscular disease in which nerve cells die and leave voluntary muscles paralyzed. The ALS society provides a variety of programs to combat this disease and help those with it to survive.
Muscular Dystrophy Canada
Muscular Dystrophy Canada’s mission is to enhance the lives of those affected by neuromuscular disorders by continually working to provide ongoing support and resources while relentlessly searching for a cure through well-funded research.
Humane Society International
The Humane Society protects the health, lives and rights of animals the world over, ensuring that they too have a voice in this world. We are interdependent upon the complex web of life this entire planet over for our mutual survival. This is a world wide charity.
The Global Foodbanking Network
Ensuring that people the world over have enough food day to day in order to survive and lead healthy lives. In this challenging day and age services like this are becoming more and more essential. This is a world wide charity.
The Edgar Allan Poe Museum
Because Barris told me to put it here. If I didn't, he said he'd walk. Geez. Stardom really gets to some people's heads. Maybe I could kill him and bury his heart beneath the floor boards! Or I could encase him in behind a brick and mortar wall, for shaming my family name of Amantillado!
Wikipedia
The model for what may become the Encyclopedia Galactica, a complete reference and record of history, events and knowledge of humanity and its journey beyond. It is the encyclopedia of all that we know, what we surmise that we've known and will learn in the future. Yes, Wikipedia is a charitable organization of great importance. If you enjoy what I am doing here then please take the time to donate to Wikipedia. Surprisingly only 1% of Wikipedia's users donate yet the site serves pages to millions every day.
Humble Bundle
A video gaming storefront benefiting a vast variety of different Charities in the United States and United Kingdom (hopefully soon to be expanded to include other areas of the world?). By software their software bundles and choose which Charity your money benefits and how much of your money benefits that Charity. See? Gamers can do their part too.
Other Ways To Help Using Your Computer
Donate your idle computer time to science! Join the World Community Grid by clicking on one of the links below and follow the instructions for how to participate:Shhhh! Digital Media Presents
The Butterfly Dragon: The Two Butterflies - Epsisode 14: Crime Of The Century
"I heard that Bryce!" Zheng Ni Wong interjects with a smile on her face, from somewhere in the distance .
"I'm an old guy. A dinosaur, as some have started referring to me. On the brink of extinction, my time at the front and center of Quantum Physics and popular science is quickly coming to a close."
"And now, tts time for me to cash-in. As much as I can."
"Lets face it. Kids these days want to see much younger hotshots. They don't want sixty-something heroic icons of the sciences... or any other medium,"
"They want young, adventurous, scholarly, physically fit, scientists of the new era. Ageless and timeless, never growing old. Not fearful of the onset of time and pushing it forward one facelift at a time."
"Oh... who are we fooling?"
"We're at the end of an era."
"Scientific celebrities like myself are bottoming out... stopped only by the floor of the sea..."
[One of Our Submarines - Thomas Dolby]
"...get ready for the life insurance plan that has your future in mind!" Bryce spreads his arms awkwardly cringing as a result of the pain in his shoulders.
"Cut! We need a bit more of a spread with your arms Mr. Maxwell..." the director of the commercial addressed Bryce.
"I forgot to stretch today..." Bryce responds, spinning his arms in his shoulder sockets to limber up.
"Ready?! Speed and action!" the director urged the crew.
"Not only do we have the bridge to the future, but we have the plan. Get ready for the life insurance plan that has your future in mind!" Bryce presented the ship with his arms fully extended.
"Hold it... hold it! That's a wrap! That's awesome! The best take we've had..." the director patted Bryce on the back as they finished the take.
"Thanks Tony. So are we finished here?" asked Bryce.
"And then some. Despite being in the retirement chair Bryce, you've still got it!" the director complimented him.
"Good to know. Look, I just thought you need to know that my wife and I are leaving tomorrow for an investor's convention. Just in case there's anything else you need?" Bryce faced the director, who turned to face his star actor.
"Lets get a playback on that last take?" the director addressed the camera operator.
Together they watched the most recent take on the preview screen and when it had finished rolling, the director turned and patted Bryce on the back again.
"Nope. We're finished here. That was perfect. We can do the rest in editing and post. Enjoy the convention and thanks very much Mr. Maxwell," the director addressed Bryce.
"...Great... uhhh... about the pay? Do I get the cheque from you or..." Bryce asked the director awkwardly.
"No... that would be the producer you'd want to talk to. Out through that door and down the hall to the first door on your left," the director pointed it out for him.
"Alright. Thanks and give me a call if you need me again. Nice meeting you Tony," Bryce shook hands with the director.
"Great working with you. Alright people, where's my frickin' latté? Didn't I send the production assistant to get my latté...? Aren't we payin' you people enough?" the director turned and started grilling the camera operator and then the gaff.
"No..." the camera operator responded sarcastically as Bryce left the studio.
Bryce pulled his phone from from his pocket and called his wife.
"Hi honey," Wendy answered the phone.
"Hi sweetie. We just finished up so if you're done there with Valerie..." Bryce replied to her.
"I'm on my way. See you in a bit," Wendy responded.
"I'll be out front," Bryce replied and then hung up as he arrived at the producer's office.
He knocked on the door.
"The door's open," a voice came from inside of the office.
Bryce opened the office door and peeked inside. A tiny lady was seated behind the office desk as she tended to her email.
"How can I help you Mr. Bohr?" asked the lady.
"Uhhhh... Mr. Maxwell. I'm Bryce Maxwell..." Bryce corrected her.
"I'm so sorry Mr. Mandelbrot. How can I help you?" she corrected herself.
"We're finished in the studio and I'm here to settle up," Bryce said to her directly, getting to the point.
"Would you like me to cut you a cheque?" she asked him, adjusting the thick glasses on her nose.
"That would be wonderful. You know, the weekly pay cheques might stop around retirement time, but the bills certainly don't," Bryce responded to her with a quick quip.
"Alright. Let me get that for you. I'm just around the corner from that myself. Another two years and I'll be retiring to Victoria, British Columbia," she said to him as she filled out a cheque for him and then updated the ledger on her computer.
When she was finished, she handed it to him.
He examined it carefully and then handed it back to her.
"I'm sorry, but there must be some kind of misunderstanding. You see, it was supposed to be for six thousand, not four..." Bryce said to her firmly.
"No. We agreed to four. Its right here in your contract..." she said to him, opening her desk drawer and retrieving a copy of his contract.
She fanned through the pages until she found the negotiated payment. After reading it, she found the line indicating the agreed amount and found that it read six thousand.
"Oh... I'm so sorry Mr. Susskind. I must have been thinking of someone else..." she said to him apologetically.
"That's quite alright and its Maxwell. Bryce Maxwell..." he corrected her again.
She accepted the cheque from him and voided it, and then began writing out another cheque with the correct sum, once again updating her ledger.
"Here you are, and it was a pleasure working with you Mr. Feynman," she smiled at him.
He thought about correcting her and decided against it.
"Really, it was my pleasure. Thank you and have a great day," Bryce put the cheque in his pocket and headed out through her office door.
He made his way to the front of the office and sat in the reception area for ten minutes, then deciding to step out front of the building on account of the sunshine streaming in through the foyer window and by that time Wendy had pulled up out front to pick him up.
"So how'd it go?" asked Wendy as Bryce got into the passenger's seat.
"Good. We managed to get it done in a few takes and the director wanted a few other establishing and miscellaneous shots for editing. They even let me ad-lib a few times which was nice, but for the most part it was a pretty tight ship. I guess in this business you kind of have to balance between your own interests and those of the writers. There's a lot of egos involved," Bryce remarked as he put on his seatbelt.
"Not to mention their job portfolios I'd imagine. I mean that's their life-line. They're probably slapping their forehead when some hotshot physicist comes in and wants to change the lines," Wendy observed rather astutely.
"Hotshot physicist? Are you kidding me? I'm just a retired professional trying to eek out an existence," Bryce smiled as he retrieved the cheque from his pocket.
"Did they pay you today?" asked Wendy.
"They certainly did. I was thinking that maybe we could catch dinner and a movie tonight? There's also that performance going on at the Harbourfront Centre... Hocus Pocus. Maybe walk along the harbourfront afterward and then settle in for the night. What do you think?" Bryce said playfully as he carefully played with the cheque.
"Is the insurance paid on the car and the house?" Wendy checked her shoulder before changing lanes.
"We could do that. More than enough to cover it with this without cutting into our savings," Bryce responded.
"What about the work we had done on the back deck? Is that paid yet?" asked Wendy, pushing even further.
"There's one more payment of five hundred left for that," Bryce responded.
"And what about the getting the brakes done? You said you were going to do that two months ago," Wendy goaded him responsibly.
"I forgot about that. That'll be about a thousand..." Bryce replied, shrinking into his seat a little more.
"Both front and back?" Wendy confirmed.
"Maybe seventeen hundred. I thought this was a good haul but it certainly disappears quickly," Bryce pouted playfully.
"Yeah but think about how much easier that makes things if we get that stuff out of the way. The last thing we want is to fall behind," Wendy once again reminded him.
"Yeah... but you know what they say. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy..." Bryce pulled a line from a movie from the recesses of his memory.
"Well Jill says Jack can play when the bills are paid," Wendy turned to face him with a smile on her face.
"Once again, my wife, the voice of reason. My cheque? It came, saw and left..." Bryce said, throwing the cheque in the air and watching it flutter down onto his lap.
"We've got to catch that flight to Niagara Falls tomorrow for the convention. Have you talked to the others?" asked Wendy as the light turned green.
"Katya and Victor are going to meet us at the terminal. Zheng and Briggs will be ready at six in the AM," Bryce replied, repocketing the cheque.
"What about those girls from West Meet East?" asked Wendy.
"Who? Oh...! Sienna and Fay?" confirmed Bryce.
"Weren't there more?" Wendy asked Bryce.
"Oooh, that's right. Kori and Ebtissam. I think they're carpooling with Sienna and Fay. They said to catch the flight and if we don't hook up with them at the terminal, that they'll meet us at the convention center. At the registration desk," Bryce suddenly recalled his conversation with Kori the prior week.
"It sounds to me like our night is already predetermined for us, if we're going to be up on time in the morning and achieve our schedule," Wendy pulled into the underground parking of the condo and over to their parking.
"I wonder if we shouldn't throw Heylyn a grand or two. I mean she hasn't said a thing to us about using her unoccupied real estate, but I'd feel more comfortable if we at least gave her something?" Wendy stopped the car in their parking space.
"She would say something to us if there was a problem. Either financially or otherwise. It was her that suggested that we use this place. It was essentially sitting doing nothing while she's waiting for the market to blow up. We pay the maintenance fees and I'm sure thats enough from her perspective," Bryce assured her as they got out of the car.
"Alright. Lets get upstairs and get some dinner and we'll catch a flick on television. That way we'll be fresh and energized for the morning," they made their way to the elevator.
"Honey. For once can we talk about how your day went?" Bryce smiled at Wendy.
"It went good. We'll talk about it upstairs," Wendy gave him a kiss on the cheek for asking, and the chime sounded as the elevator arrived.
...
"Now that might have sounded like the perfect day. The kind of day that most younger guys fantasize about what life will be like with their wife when they're much older, omitting the parts they fantasize about when the lights dim, which of course in our case and on that particular night was the two of us in bed rendered unconscious after having eaten, fast asleep, one of us snoring. I won't tell you which one of us that was,"
"I guess the point in this case all has to do with input and output. In this case, bills needed to be paid and we both worked towards those ends and thanks to my wife, we met the demands of our responsibilities and also managed to enjoy the fruits of our labour. Honest effort towards a worthy endeavor that yielded a future of some kind. In this case, two retirees living out the rest their days as best they could in the wake of their extraordinary careers,"
"In this sense, life becomes a little bit like the case for investment and in life, there are good investments and there are not-so-good investments. There are investments that hold potential. There are investments that are ground breaking. There are investments that are entirely return, and there are investments that are too good to be true, and that's just life itself,"
"I remember the first job that I ever had, long before my PhD or my tenure as a Professor, back in the days when newsprint was the medium for morning news for most professionals as television's news format usually arrived later in the morning and by the time a professional was on their way to, or already at work. You guessed it. I was a newspaper delivery boy and at the young age of fourteen. It wasn't a job. It was an investment, because I had buy the paper route from someone else who'd already founded it and brought it to its then peak value,"
"I did chores at home to earn my allowance, and saved all my money in a piggy bank, and when I was in the ballpark for the market of buying a paper route, I began shopping them locally and quickly learned a lot about life and investment in the process and without ever realizing that I was gaining valuable insight that would serve me until this very day,"
"You see, newpaper routes were typically sold in the buy and sell section of newspapers, and in a sense, no differently than any other business that was being sold through similar medium. They were listed as buy and sell ads, and hence there certainly was marketing involved on the part of some other teenager who'd achieved the peak potential of their route and had outgrown it,"
"Much like any investment by way of purchase, there were small investments with little return on investment but enough to be profitable. There were big investments which might have for the right teenager, returned considerably though that required considerable effort, because in that business, effort equals return. Small paper routes required little effort and therefore returned little. Big paper routes required big effort and therefore had big returns. Then there were the ??? paper routes. The ones that were marketed well, and listed as having much promised potential but that in the end..."
"As it turned out, the market for buying and selling newspaper routes was somewhat prophetic because it mirrored an aspect that as a Scientist, something that we'd come to confront over the course of our careers, competing for research money. Competing for investment, whether it be Government or Corporate, and the kid buying the newspaper route is no different than the billionaire looking for a place to put their money to work in an informed, determinate, beneficial and profitable manner,"
"Little did we know that we were about to get a lesson that none of us would ever forget. And this is the story of how we changed the very nature of investment and once again, gave it credibility in the face of a collapsing bubble,"
"I remember waking up the next morning. Wendy had turned on the radio to a local classic rock station, despite my usual preference of classic and big band jazz. My wife has a say in our life, and when she takes the reigns of the radio, I usually tag along for the ride and enjoy it with our morning coffee,"
"In this case, it happened to be a song that snuck up on us and in a most timely manner, as if the universe were at some quantum level, abstracting metaphorically what was yet to come, perhaps more so akin to its namesake than the context of its lyrics, though they certainly seemed to fit the bill as well. Just like that kid I used to be riding my bicycle on the paper route of life..."
"And that's where it all began. The day that begat our crime of the century..."
Registration
Katya drew many eyes as she strutted her way from one of the soft drink vending machines and back over to where her husband was seated in the front foyer of the Niagara Falls Convention Centre, dressed like a million dollars on a fifty thousand dollar a year budget. Victor had his laptop setup on his lap and a folder full of notes whose papers were scattered on the bench beside him. He sat frantically typing as she arrived and took a seat beside him, several men looking out from beyond their own phones and tablets to get another eye full of her.
"Here you go my overworked, underpaid husband," she handed him his electrolyte infused bottled water.
He kept his eyes fixated on the laptop screen as he finished the last few lines of corrections in his delivery.
"Its water? I wanted an energy drink," Victor responded to her as she sat beside him.
"Relax. I got you the energy drink but you remember what Doctor said. You need to properly hydrate yourself in the morning first, and to get your electrolytes unless you'd prefer atrophe of the musculoskeletal system," she said to him.
"And what Doctor is it you refer to?" he asked her, stopping long enough to accept her offering of water.
"Doctor concerned wife. You remember her, don't you?" she asked him, picking up his folder and notes and quickly organizing them as a stack as he opened the bottled water.
"Tell me, what is prognosis of Doctor wife?" Victor asked her as he stopped long enough to join the numerous eyes upon her.
"Take drink of water and call me in the morning," she responded, handing him back his folder full of notes.
"And then can I have the energy drink?" he pressed her again with a smile.
"No. To get that, you'll need to pay Doctor's bill of one kiss. A quick one, and on the lips this time," she replied, withdrawing the energy drink from him as she crossed her legs and puckered up.
"You drive hard bargain," he said as he closed in on her labium oris.
The kiss was gentle, but deliberate. Katya withdrew first from him and handed her husband his energy drink.
"It wasn't good kiss?" he asked her.
"No. It was perfect. It remind the eyes of men upon me that I'm a happily married woman..." she replied.
"To who? Are you saying that we can't have a little bit of fun in the absense of your happily married?" Victor played with the situation much to her enjoyment.
"I was just making sure that you're paying attention. We can play later. Lets make sure we're ready for talk this afternoon my husband," she reached into her own purse and retrieved a tablet computer.
"MAZ? Can you retrieve our working notes for today's address from the cloud?" she asked the MindSpice AI assistant.
"Gladly Doctor. How are you and Victor doing today?" MAZ asked her.
"We are well, though my husband doesn't seem to catching on as to how helpful you can be. Can you check my address notes for any grammatical errors, and ensure that the side notes and cues are in Russian?" she requested of MAZ.
"Done. Would you like anything else?" asked MAZ.
"Yes. Could you do same for husband's notes, though keep original copies, but merge with any linked third party media from presentation," Katya advised MAZ.
"Done. Will that be all?" MAZ once again asked them.
"Be sure to give a kiss on the cheek to Mr. Asnon from me," Katya smiled and returned the tablet to her purse.
"See how its done? And you stressed trying to get all edits done by lonesome," Katya grabbed up the paper notes and put them back into his laptop case.
"My dear, we slow to change with age, while with time, change comes quicker and quicker. Good thing I have a wife with good sense. Now tell me, who is Mr. Asnon fellow? Should I be worried?" he asked her as he opened the laptop once again.
"Katya! Victor!" Kori waved to them on the bench as she picked up her pace towards them.
Victor put the laptop on the bench beside him and stood with his wife as they greeted Kori.
"How are you doing? You look very nice today," Victor complimented her as more eyes were drawn to their proximity.
"Oh thank you. Glad to see that you two are healthy. How's the project going?" she asked them as they took a seat together.
"Bryce's role finished last month, so its been lonely without him, but we made significant breakthrough recently he'll be happy to know," Katya explained to Kori.
"I take it your presentation today is related?" Kori asked, not really knowing much about the sciences involved.
"Precisely. Now we take idea and try to lure in more investors in order to scale up and make working production line. The expensive part is halfway done, and what remains is built on well understand principles of biological engineering," Katya surmised for Kori.
"Ohhh. Sounds interesting. Where's everyone else?" she asked Katya and Victor.
"They're not arrived yet," Victor responded.
"That's cutting it close. The program itinerary starts soon, doesn't it?" confirmed Kori.
"It does, but we need Bryce to check in and get access to booth. Maybe we should be getting nervous? Go start pushing registration desk to give us early access?" Victor suggested.
"We probably shouldn't burn down our bridges. At least not yet. Ebtissam, Sienna and Fay should be here soon. I just talked to them about half-an-hour ago. They're stuck in traffick just outside of Hamilton," Kori explained to them as she felt a pair of hands on her shoulders.
"Guess who?" a familiar male voice asked her.
"Let's see, uhhhhh, very late?" Kori replied, playing along.
"Close, but no cigar. I'm, very late's brother. Better late than never," Bryce responded, removing his hands from Kori's shoulders.
"And I'm his wife, better sense than him," Wendy smiled, having met Kori, Katya and Victor a few times before already.
"How are you two?" Kori greeted them.
"Well, the flight from Toronto got delayed. Nothing serious thankfully, and by the time we got to St. Catherines, our arranged taxi service had bailed on us. So we had to look around for an alternative..." Bryce explained to them.
"I have an old work associate whose husband owns a local limo company, and he gave us a great discount and on short notice thankfully. I would have used him in the first place, but I didn't remember until we were in St. Catherines," Wendy explained to them.
"Well you're here now and time is pressing us..." Victor tapped his watch, after which he began collecting his laptop, while Katya got their drinks.
"Yeah. Let's get that done before the others get here," Bryce quickly led them to the registration desk.
...
Mrs. Elman arrived at the booth, followed by Mr. Fenster who pushed Mr. Deeters' wheelchair as they arrived.
Meanwhile, Ebtissam led Sienna and Fay through the convention hall towards the end where the shared booth was situated.
All six of them converged on the scene, where Victor and Bryce stood on chairs as they attempted to hoist the signage into place above the booth, while Wendy and Katya guided them towards having it centered.
"Its looking good so far. Sorry we're late but we got..." Mrs. Elman began but paused upon seeing the LCD screens they'd already setup.
"Its alright. We heard. Did you get caught in the same traffic?" Bryce said as he fastened the last clip holding their sign in place.
"Just outside of Hamilton unfortunately. A messy accident but at least nobody was hurt," Mrs. Elman explained.
"Is there a place I can plug in? Ran out of juice this morning. I forgot to charge last night," asked Mr. Deeters, referring to his wheel chair.
"Let me get that for you," Ebtissam offered, taking the charger pack from the back of his wheel chair and plugging it in to the power bar.
"Nice to meet you Miss...?" Mr. Deeters addressed Ebtissam.
"Ebtissam. Yara Ebtissam, thank you for asking and with whom am I speaking?" Ebtissam asked politely and professionally.
"I'm Patrick Deeters at your service. You seem to be familiar with my round legs here?" Mr. Deeters inquired.
"I've done work for charities, assisting those with mobility issues," Ebtissam replied.
"Mobility? My phone plan is fine thank you very much. Its my legs that need an upgrade or two..." Mr. Deeters said jokingly.
"What's the issue if you don't mind my asking?" Ebtissam asked him.
"Spinal dislocation. Severed my spinal chord ten years ago in a car accident. So are you the entrepreneur that's got the other side of the booth?" Mr. Deeters answered her.
"Yes. With my peers here Sienna and Fay. We're from West Meet East International, but our business manager, Valerie Aspen recently came up with a very profitable cost cutting solution that entails registering the seamster/sewing side of the business as its own separate service bureau, which means we could actually do business with our competitors and make them our customers. Sienna and Fay suggested doing the same thing with the hair dressing and make-up departement. Monique, one of the models working there helped us to get going on this as she likes to move fast, and here we are a month later," Ebtissam explained to Mr. Deeters.
"Where are you from. You have a very unique accent and style too. Very nice," Mr. Deeters complimented her.
"I'm from the United Arab Emirates. I came here to Canada about ten years ago. I studied under Ryerson's Sewing for Design program, at that time, with the intent of trying to get work with one of the major fashion houses. Heylyn was one of the first to respond when I sent my resumé out and so here I am," Ebtissam smiled for him.
"Well its very nice to meet you. I'm the guy they come to when they need guidance and to drum up finances, so they brought me today to keep the dance floor warmed up," Mr. Deeters joked.
"You should see his moves, especially after he's oiled the wheels," Bryce added, drawing a bit of laughter from Mr. Deeters.
"Hi Katya. Always a pleasure to see you. How's that Victor man of yours doing today?" Mr. Deeters asked.
Victor pulled the last clip from his mouth and fastened his end of the sign into place, nearly stepping off of the back of the chair as he did.
"There. It seems like we're caught up with everyone now. Oh, Mr. Deeters? How are you?" asked Victor.
"A lot better if you can guarantee for me that we'll be delivering that presentation today and on time?" Mr. Deeters asked him.
"Everything is put together for the talk. We pulled a few wee hours of work, but got it done," Victor explained to his employer.
"Glad to hear. Mr. Fenster's presentation is also ready, which is good as there's a sizeable attendance of the nano-engineering community from what I understand," Mr. Deeters replied.
"Well its the bio-engineering community we're looking for, because I think we've got this baby in the cradle if you know what I mean," Bryce interjected on Victor's behalf and his genetic solution based upon his work with phages.
"And that's why the both of you - both Mr. Fenster and yourselves will be delivering your talks despite the fact that they're both built on completely different technological platforms. Its the applications that are the same, but if we can get the engineers bidding on the most cost effective production pipeline in either case, we'll have this in the bag. This is an important branching point for the future of nano-technology," Mr. Deeters adjusted his wheel chair, backing it up to take in the entirety of the booth.
"The only question is, do we go with a machine oriented mechanical nano-framework?" Mr. Fenster asked rhetorically.
"Or a DNA/RNA based Hyperphage biological network based system?" Victor added.
"Now at this point, many of you are probably baffled by the technobabble. Yes. That's right. Technobabble, because when we come up with the names for this technology, its a bit like a game for us. A mixture of applicable technical labels that describe the science behind what makes these things operate, and the catchy marketing terms. Something that sounds both friendly and innovative thats easy to remember for the people who will be investing in it and certainly the people whose lives will be affected by it,"
"In this case our two candidates for the same technological application deal with two very different mediums. Advanced materials based engineering and manufacturing, and phage based reproduction, augmented with DNA/RNA technology. That is, either wee little tiny robots that are made of metal parts (of titanium-carbon alloy), or living pseudo-cellular life forms based upon the phage life cycle. The kind of stuff that used to keep guys like Jon Von Neumann up all night playing with math and feasibility,"
"The stuff that drives the future of the entirety of humanity. When someone, or a whole group of somebodies work together to bring innovation to life and keep going through the worst of it all. The nay saying voices that try to convince you that you can't do it. You can't achieve it. That thing that keeps you going when you're at the doorstep of a profound revolution, held back by the kind of people who want to wear you like you're an outfit to make them shine but who keep you hidden in the darkness. The kind of people who will, left right and center, deny you of your existence until the strength of your dreams breaks through the gates behind which they keep you locked."
"And just like a song, the stuff of dreams and dreamers..."
"But for every realized dream, there's a hidden nightmare lurking in the shadows as we soon found out,"
Sea Of Green
We've spent our lives
one moment one time
to chase our dream
fortunes sublime
Elude us they have
our ideas too
when we plead science
they cry woo woo
Our heart's pursuit
a worthy scene
expecting riches
that's where we've been
We built this thing
so strong and lean
investors: give us
our sea of green!
Hans Erhman
(Gregory Epsen's ninth grade science teacher)
"What makes the economy strong as with any lifeform of which we're aware is movement. Motion. The flow of sustenance from one part of the body to another and in a continuous flow. Like our circulatory or respiratory system. In a healthy economy, money moves, and is always in motion,"
"Each of us within the population is like a reservoir. We all have a stash of the green stuff. A pile that is our net worth, our finances both coming into and flowing out of this reservoir at roughly the same or a growing rate. When that growth is on the incoming side, we're in a good way. Our reservoir is growing. When its on the outgoing side, that's not so good. Our reserves are shrinking."
"The bigger the reservoir, the longer we can go when times are tough and this is the concept of security. Its what gives people the confidence to spend money, and spending money is in a consumer economy is what keeps it moving. Chances are and if its being spent by consumers, its also coming in at roughly the same or a bit greater rate and the stability of each person's reservoir is fundamental to their security and the economy, so says Walton Norler. Yep, I'm here to help Bryce do the heavy lifting behind the fourth wall because this story is as much about economics as it is science..."
[Bryce Maxwell]
"And people I might interject,"
[Walton Norler]
"And people. The most essential part of any economy as it stands currently and seeing as my wife just gave birth to our son, we're very much hoping that things stay that way for some time,"
"When our expenses are the same or just a little bit higher in terms of rate than our income, again that affects the size of our reservoir and our confidence in spending. When for a large part of the population there are many consumers for whom their reservoir is little if non-existent, the only motion that occurs is as a result of their mandatory expenses. Food. Shelter. The bare essentials. No growth into other assets like real estate. No luxuries. Just plain survival. A sad state of affairs in which to live, but often a breeding ground for innovation as Gregory Epsen can certainly attest to,"
"If you'll recall, he was the young(er) lad that developed Medi-Friend, a handheld diagnostic unit that combined mobile tablet based technology with modern... uhhhh... Bryce, could you help me here...?"
[Bryce Maxwell]
"Certainly. He's talking about Medi-Friend, a tablet based medical diagnostic device that combines a mobile operating system and modern miniaturized Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices which are basically really, really sensitive magnets that are capable of detecting the magnetic fields and interactions of minute particles, including the interactions between neurons in the nervous system. Neurons are gargantuan when compared to the scale of particles that these babies were designed to detect,"
[Walton Norler]
"Thank you. Couldn't have said it at all, let alone have said it better without you. (Financial) necessity is the mother of all invention..."
[Bryce Maxwell]
"...and the father of all procrastination as my father used to say from the big chair in the living room..."
[Walton Norler]
"That too, though lets hope that's not entirely the case with fatherhood. Gregory was driven by two factors. The first and the one that I'm primarily concerned with is the economic factor. A need to create something that liberates one from the confines of their limited economic situation. At a convention like this one and in the midst of current economic factors, an entire generation of such innovators has come here, hoping to change their situation with the fruits of their inventive labour, while attracting the investment of somebody that can give them the sea of green,"
[Bryce Maxwell]
"What Walton failed to mention was the fact that economics isn't exclusively the driving force behind innovation and that some of us in the science community are driven by something else entirely different that eludes economic thinkers. Determination. Obsession. Motivation to make a difference,"
[Walton Norler]
"What Bryce failed to mention was that the road to bankruptcy is paved with the best of intentions. A fact about which most investors are aware thankfully. They didn't get to the position of having investment capital by just blindly giving it away or by ignorance and greed. I mean, look at Nikolai Tesla. Obsession is and can be an investor's worst nightmare, seeing as that gifted inventor died flat broke and alone in a hotel room,"
[Bryce Maxwell]
"Obsession is also their best friend. Nikolai Tesla's patents, especially those linked to his designs of alternating current are worth hundreds of trillions of dollars today, not to mention that our entire planet's power grid and infrastructure is built upon the foundations of his designs... and obsession. Thomas Edison may have given us light. Alexander Graham Bell may have given us words and grammar at a distance. Claude Shannon may have given us error correction akin to linguistic grammar (based upon the mathematics of Georg Cantor), but it was Nikolai Tesla's designs that power it all. All of it until this very day and all of it from a man who essentially died broke, making his benefactor George Westinghouse very rich. Some of us aren't motivated the same way as everyone else and yet in the absense of a lust for riches and a thrift for finances, came the entirety of the global power grid, and is essentially what made possible the civilization and infrastructure we have today. Without it, it would be impossible to support the current world population,"
[Walton Norler]
"And all of that was made possible by big money investment with an eye for the future..."
[Bryce Maxwell]
"And the dedication and innovation of scientists and inventors,"
[Valerie Aspen]
"I hate to be the voice of reason here, but not everything is always what it appears to be and the absense of sensibility in the midst of dreamers within a dream can be a dangerous combination. Especially when you've got to keep a good business sense and your head on your shoulders,"
Jason paced the stage at the Future Tangent booth, a devious smile on his face.
"Do you have any idea what this costs to produce? Come on. How about a ballpark figure from one of you?" he asked his audience, his voice amplified by the powered audio system.
"Three hundred per unit... when ordered in volume. Say a hundred at a time?" one of the members of the audience.
"That's about what most purchasers project for something like the Digital Doc. Looking to capitalize on volume purchases to maximize their margin. About thirty-thousand for a hundred units. Now, what would you say if I told you that you're all wrong?" Jason stopped, picking up one of the Digital Doc units from the nearby podium and raising it above his head.
"You see this? If you sign on to order a hundred per order, and only while we're here today, we'll give you a price of eight-thousand. That's eight-thousand for a hundred units. That's eighty a unit. A bit more than three hundred percent under MSRP, meaning you'll have plenty of room to play with when offering sales incentives to your customers without cutting into your margins. Not to mention great incentives for your sales force. Now you might ask yourself, how can we afford to do that? I mean, given the actual cost, we're practically giving them away, right?" Jason asked the audience.
A man raised his hand from the audience, clearly ready with an answer.
"What do you think?" asked Jason of the man, who them stepped into the clear enough for Jason to see his face.
"I think the reason is that you're using substandard parts. Especially the sensors. Your sensors are based upon variable phased array magnetometers. A sound technology when applied to large scale integrated platforms such as NextGen Pseudo-SQUID MRI, but not in a portable platform given the extra energy requirements. On battery power, your sensor array is less than ten percent as effective as MediFriend, which uses real SQUID technology with the addition of AI to amplify its sensitivy enough so that a medical professional can use it to diagnose a patient even through a foot and a half of concrete. Digital Doc on the other hand can only make sensor based diagnosis from within three feet of the device," Gregory explained to Jason and the rest of the audience.
"The distance that most medical professionals are from their patients in the hospital I might add," Jason responded, recognizing Gregory upon seeing his face.
"So what you're saying is that your market doesn't cater to front-line responders in emergency situations where a victim is trapped and unaccessible, such as in many car accident scenes or building collapse and wreckage. MediFriend is rated for all of these situations and recommended as a tool for medical professionals in the hospital and on the go, including the medics corp of the military. For fifty dollars more a unit, you have access to all of those markets with MediFriend," Gregory showed the audience his unit, holding it up over his head and then, as if by accident, dropping it from a height of almost seven feet, onto the concrete floor.
"Ooooh! Looks like you wrecked your friend there Gregory. For those of you who don't know, this is Mr. Gregory Epsen, co-founder of MediFriend technology with ex-Tynan and Associates CEO Walton Norler. They're competitors of Digital Doc who are currently in legal hot water with our legal department for intellectual property infringement. Isn't that right Gregory?" Jason informed his audience, looking facetiously to Gregory.
Gregory leaned over and picked up his MediFriend and examined it carefully.
"Not a scratch, as a result of the high impact carbon based bezel we designed for the unit. Lets see if it powers up?" Gregory said, holding the unit up for everyone to see.
He then pressed the power button conveniently with one finger and the device immediately powered up, playing a short piece of music with instrumental chimes that sounded as if they were saying MediFriend. The audience were immediately captivated.
"Any volunteers for an analysis of the information content of their nervous system?" Gregory asked the audience.
"I'll give it a try. Its not radioactive is it?" responded one of the audience members.
"Not at all. I just press the screen and navigate the menu and select the nervous system menu and analysis mode and its ready to go," Gregory showed the audience, and then held it in the direction of the man who'd volunteered.
A half-second later, a visual representation of magnetic activity appeared on the screen, along side a spreadsheet interface, which indicated the nature of information flowing through the man's nervous system.
"Now if my friend here was in a coma, the spreadsheet would be able to distinguish which parts of the brain were functioning, and the kind of information flowing through the nervous system at any point, meaning the Doctor would know instantly which part of his brain was affected, without invasive surgery for the purposes of diagnosis as is the case in many situations," Gregory explained to the audience.
"While Digital Doc can in pulse mode, do the same thing from a distance of six feet..." Jason shot back with the features of Future Tangent's answer to MediFriend.
"But only at three second intervals, given the power demands and the fact that the sensor tech Digital Doc is using is very power hungry and relies on a capacitor for any sort of diagnosis at range. MediFriend on the other hand has default range of three meters and is always capable of realtime display with a frequency of sixty hertz in high power mode and thirty hertz in low power mode," Gregory showed the audience.
Gregory then pressed a button on the interface, and the MediFriend spit out an undeveloped polaroid.
"Not to mention, it can do this..." Gregory pulled the polaroid image from the device and waited while it developed, then giving it to the volunteer.
"No charge..." Gregory smiled, the audience laughed.
When the photograph developed, it was a well lit photo of the volunteer, with a transparent heatmap overlay of neural activity.
"And this is rated for military standards?" asked the volunteer.
"Yes. And TEMPEST rated. It can't be scried upon from the outside thanks to the Faraday cage integrated into its bezel, which in no way interferes with its sensors, thanks to the fact that the bezel to sensor spacing is smaller than the Quantum tunneling threshold," Gregory explained to them.
"I have no idea what you just said, but do you have a card? I represent a medical technology supply wholesaler, and we'd definitely be interested in this unit. Sorry Mr. Santers..." the volunteer accepted Gregory's card.
"Our units are fifty more per unit when bought in batches of a hundred, but our prices remain fixed, meaning that we don't fluctuate in terms of volume pricing. A hundred is our volume pricing cap. Our MSRP is two forty-nine, which gives plenty of room for sales to work with while giving an appreciable margin," Gregory made sure that he spoke confidently and projected his voice enough for the rest of the audience to hear.
About a two thirds of Jason's audience turned and dealt with Gregory, while the remaining third placed orders with Jason.
As Gregory dealt with his customers, Jason turned to one of his security personnel.
"Keep an eye on him. Discretely. He just completely wrecked our promotion..." Jason ordered.
"But you still got a better turnout than you projected?" his assistant reminded him.
"I don't care. He just made fools of us and on our turf. Keep an eye on him and let me know who he's with. Mentis needs to deal with this," Jason said to his assistant, who immediately made his way to the back of the booth to organize a security team to keep watch over Gregory.
...
Gregory spent the next twenty minutes sorting out contact information with his potential customers and then felt the warmth of a familiar hand on his torso and the fragrant smell of a woman's hair.
"I'm so proud of you," a pair of luscious lips whispered into his ear.
"That went much better than I was anticipating. I thought he was going eat me alive," Gregory said to Aikiko as they turned to face each other.
"I'm going to eat you alive when we get home," she said to him flirtatiously.
"Not before I'm able to give you that massage I promised you..." Gregory responded.
"I wouldn't have it any other way," she replied, planting another wet kiss on his lips and then backing away professionally.
Behind them, a balding older man in a powered wheelchair pulled up.
"Mr. Epsen I presume," Mr. Werner addressed Gregory.
"Helmut? Is that you?" Gregory and Aikiko gave the man their full attention.
"The one and only, forgive my hoarseness. How are the two of you keeping?" he asked the couple.
"We're managing. Enjoying. How about you?" Aikiko asked him.
"At my age, every extra day is icing on the cake. I haven't been mobile for some time given some health issues, but my Doctor recently gave me the OK to get out to this convention. I have to say that its wonderful to see some familiar faces. Tell me, how are Alicia and Walton?" he asked.
"You didn't hear? Alicia gave birth last week. A bouncing baby boy, and a healthy little fellow too," Aikiko explained to Helmut.
"I can't begin to tell you how joyed I am to hear. I was worried that Walton was going to be one of those fellows who spent so much time polishing other people's lives that he overlooked his own. I'll bet you that the two of them are likely wonderful parents, and probably enjoying every moment of it too..." Helmut said to them in hoarsely joyous voice.
...
Toronto: Alicia and Norler's Condo
"Its alright honey. I'll get the diapers this time..." Norler said to Alicia as she placed Nathan on the change table.
"I don't think that it would be a..." Alicia urged him to stay back.
"Honey, don't you think that this has gone on for long enough? I want to be a part of this and his diapers clearly need to be changed and I haven't done my part that way yet..." Norler attempted to push her aside.
"Norler? Listen to me. I don't think that this is a good idea. As I said, there's something you should..." Alicia tried to reason with him, but he wasn't having any of it.
"I insist! I'm the father an I insist that I contribute to his upbringing!" Norler finally got her to move to the side, where she watched carefully.
"Fair enough, but I warned you..." Alicia said to him in a matter of factly voice.
He began to remove the diapers when the smell hit him full force. He immediately became dizzy, struggling to stay on his feet, the world around him spinning. He was about to fall when Alicia caught him. She quickly carried Norler to a nearby chair and left him to recover while she took care of the call of doo-doo.
By the time Norler came to ten minutes later, Nathan was in a clean pair of diapers and laying on the sofa beside him.
"...what happened?" Norler looked around, still feeling a little dizzy and queezy as Nathan laughed joyfully upon seeing his father's face.
"Remember how we said that he inherited some many of my abilities?" Alicia responded to him.
"Yeah? So?" he replied to her.
"He also seems to have a few of his own. Oddly enough, I seem to be immune, so I'd suggest we leave diaper duty to me from now on," Alicia said, putting her hands on her hips.
Norler looked to Nathan, whose smiling little face was the crowning symbol of laughter and innocence, but then Norler was suddenly reminded of the smell and the world began spinning once again.
He gripped the sofa with white knuckles, before it eventually stopped spinning.
"Fair enough..." Norler replied.
...
Niagara Falls Convention Centre
"Yes... from what we've heard too they're just loving parenthood..." Aikiko responded awkwardly.
[Bryce Maxwell]
"Parenthood much like the nature of diaper duty it seemed thanks to Alicia's alter ego, Night Style, had forever changed not only the nature of changing diapers, but the level of participation by other members of the household,"
Werner turned his wheelchair slightly to take in Gregory, whom he could clearly see was enamored of Aikiko and insofar as much, Werner admired them all the more.
"Did you see the game last night?" asked Werner, his chair having stopped to face him.
"What game? You mean the eSports finals for PUBG?" Gregory responded, indicating to Werner fully that Gregory at least had some interest in competitive sports despite the fact that there was little traditional physicality to that which Gregory referred.
"Not really, but that sure sounds like a great sport. Probably lots a fun to watch with an ice cold beer, much like the sport to which I'm referring: ice hockey. The NHL. Are you into that Gregory?" asked Werner, having enjoyed a few games from corporate booths over his career and having acquired a taste for the game, despite his first love having been golf during his younger years.
"Sometimes... I wasn't really a sports kind of guy when I was younger. It kind of scared me," Gregory explained to Werner.
"You too? Well things haven't changed as much as some of us would like to think, but let me tell you from the perspective of an old man that you should never take for granted that wonderful instrument of immense capability you have there..." Werner told him, folding his hands across his arm rests.
"What? You mean MediFriend?" asked Gregory.
"No. I mean your body. Enjoy it. Fully. Feel it. Exercise it. Get to know it before its too late. That's what got me into golf initially, and then into watching hockey games from our corporate booth. Watching a game like that really teaches you a lot. Like with your MediFriend. How all the members of your team play a crucial role in getting that puck into the goal. How the competition, despite being your adversary isn't necessarily your enemy. At the end of the game, there's no harm in having a beer with the other team," Werner explained.
"I don't think Jason and I see things eye to eye..." Gregory replied.
"True enough and I'd recommend that given your unique situation you stay away from him. He's part of something that us older players in the game never took part, but that doesn't mean that everyone else is out to get you like he is," Werner leaned forward in his wheel chair.
"Could have fooled me," Gregory replied a bit sarcastically.
"Gregory, if I could give you one piece of advice, its to learn from your competition, despite how far behind them or ahead of them you are. Don't think of competition as the means to an end, but rather the beginning of an education where the teachers are the players. No different than a good game of ice hockey," Werner looked Gregory in the eye, perhaps an older man of the ages peering at the younger one through the lens of experience.
"Not all of us started out feeling like we were a part of something. A school. A gymnasium class, and part of a team and all. I'm sure that you remember how it was. Like me, I wasn't the best of sportsmen myself and could barely run a hundred meters without collapsing to the gravel, but that doesn't mean that you can't play in the game. Some guys don't like to pass the puck while others pass it too much. You're welcome in this game by the way, and you need to learn from those who are already familiar with it, and somehow by hook or crook managed not to be intimidated from the field by those who wanted to make sure that only the select few of their ilk could play. Nerds and jocks. Preppies and punks. No matter, we all learn from each other and don't let them take that education which finds us later in life from you. Don't be bitter about it. Just be square. In business my friend, that's the way you'll end up swimming in the sea of green," Werner held out his hand to Gregory, who paused for a moment before accepting it with comprehension and understanding.
Innovation And In Novation
"What is it Jason?" asked Oculo Mentis of the man on the other end of the phone.
"Its that Gregory fellow again. He showed up at the investors convention and just stole two thirds of our audience... I thought that you were going to take care of him?" asked Jason as he paced backstage.
"I have to admit that its more amusing watching you squirm. It certainly does keep you on your toes," Mentis replied to him.
"Well I thought we had a deal. I'm giving you access to resources you simply don't have without me. Future Tangent Industries has a long reach, and by hiring a bunch of your members, we've essentially given you access to our communications grid. You can monitor phones, computers and other devices in realtime. Combine that with your psychic abilities to dronify certain members of the population, I mean you can see out of other people's eyes and hear out of their ears collectively. Sounds to me like you're in line for having complete control over the planet very soon. Something that would have taken you another three decades, even with that shadowy Witherwyrm dragon on our side. How do you guys handle people like him? I mean you must have a protocol for dealing with interlopers that infringe upon your mind collective, don't you?" Jason asked Mentis, clearly frustrated by the situation.
"We have our methods. We can arrange to stalk him. Each one of our members will intimidate or harass him, so that no one member will ever overstep the line of legality, but the stress will build up within him and he'll eventually pop like a balloon. Some of our sucessful campaigns lead to the target taking their life. Some end up stepping over the line, committing crimes against the stalkers, which from the outside and to everyone else appears like a random attack. Some of them simply cease functioning in society and end up institutionized. In such a case, we can setup situations that lead to their demise. A random altercation gets out of control and they're dead. Some of them end up discredited. I mean with our connections we can completely rewrite their history, strip their credentials, altere their medical history and label them as having some drug dependency and the public will no longer believe them or trust them. I'm taking it that's what you mean? A character assassination?" asked Mentis slyly.
"No. I mean yes. But I want something worse. Much worse," Jason continued.
"We can convince other people that his mind and consciousness and all of his ideas originate from other people, from the people who work in various organizations around him or on the internet, from his email inbox contacts, or his social media contacts or his video feed, and that he doesn't have a mind of his own and is essentially leeching it all from these other people. It very quickly becomes overwhelming and we've destroyed many people that way or even pushed them successfully to suicide," Mentis explained.
"Yes, that and something more..." Jason became excited by the possibility.
"We can convince other people that he is possessed by the disembodied bits and pieces of other people's consciousness, therefore creating the paradigm where the person he's assumed to be possessed by gets all the credit for his work, while undermining the stability of his sense of identity..." Mentis examined the idea in his collective mind.
"Colour symbolism is often a great social weapon. So is reversing the polarity of the context of expression. For instance, we can define the colour blue as meaning hate means love, and hence everyone who plays along and likes him, will treat him horribly. This can accumulate very quickly and lead to Cancer causing stress or other health and psychological issues," Mentis told him.
"Not enough," Jason clenched his teeth.
"The only thing beyond that would surpass what I just offered is to erase him. We combine it with the ideas about possession and his sense of identity, removing it entirely," Mentis suggested.
"What would that entail?" asked Jason.
"All of the above, but assuming that he survives and doesn't take his life or is drawn into some kind of violence that leads to his incarceration, we can erase him. Nobody in our membership will acknowledge or regard his existence ever again, instead taking all of his output and crediting it to someone else. Whenever someone needs to deal with him, he'll receive a replacement identity from another person who will get the credit for everything good they say or do, but who will also have to carry the weight of everything bad they say or do. Like yourself for instance and others of your choosing. We'll have our members remove all but the most essential public records of his existence, and anyone who deals with him and recognizes his identity and existence we'll do the same to, until nobody regards him as existing. All records of his actions will be given to the credit of other people, and there will be nothing left to confirm he existed at all. Once he dies, we'll then have our people remove the remaining records of his exisence and that will be that. He will simply cease to be or have ever been. Does that sound like something to your liking?" asked Mentis.
"Yes! Yes! Do it!" Jason said excitedly.
"Very well, but remember this Mr. Michael Jason Santers. If you breath word of this and these methods to anyone, or write them down and share them for others to learn of, your fate will be far worse than what I've explained thus far. Do you understand?" asked Mentis.
"Absolutely. How long does this process take?" asked Jason, further excited by the prospect.
"For some, the weak minded, its very quick. Three to six months and they're broken psychologically and open to use discrediting them using the other methods I described. Others of a more vital mind can take many months, even years but we've never had a case of anyone who has gone longer than five years... except one... but we're expecting that he'll collapse any day soon, not to mention his credibility is dwindling. We will get started right away, and we will leave the girl out of it for now. We've found that in doing so that it can lead to a divide between partners, and that would certainly help your case, wouldn't it?" Jason could hear Mentis smiling on the other end of the phone.
"Any ideas about how we could use this to help us take his MediFriend from him legally?" asked Jason.
"Certainly. You already stole copies of his original diagrams and work, didn't you?" Mentis confirmed.
"We took some of his machines nearly a year ago. A computer, a laptop and a phone and we had some of his systems hacked, and managed to steal copies of his reference material directly from his hard drives without him even knowing. We figure that with the originals, or at least copies, we could recycle them as material evidence in court procedings to take it from him," Jason explained to Mentis.
"Then we could start spreading the meme socially and psychically as you say through the collective, spreading the idea that you were the original creator of the device, and that he took it from you. Anyone who opposes that, we can subject them to pressure until they see things our way. If and when you end up in court for the final battle, that would certainly secure your victory in the courtroom. Is this what you'd like?" asked Mentis.
"Yes. All of it! Do it!" Jason exclaimed, stopping himself when he realized that his voice was rising in volume.
He looked around in the backstage and only saw two of his sales associates, both of whom were engaged in a heated conversation over their pricing strategy.
"Yes. With him out of the way, we should be able focus on the Butterfly and find out why it is that we can't breach her, or the model and their business manager, and that would bring you a step closer to realizing your goal, wouldn't it?" asked Jason.
"It would, assuming that this is in Witherwyrm's interests as well, but that's another issue. Very well, we will get started immediately, meaning that we'll start today, before he leaves for the hotel room. Mr. Santers, you realize that there is a price tag attached to your request that entails that you will become a part of Mentis, and will never be free to regain your independent consciousness again. Are you willing to pay that price?" asked Mentis.
"I am," Jason confirmed.
From that moment, Michael Jason Santers was no longer an individual, and someone to whom the proper noun I or myself applied. He had not equated that the MediFriend would not be his, but theirs, as would everything from that point backwards and forwards in his life, for upon becoming a member of the collective willingly or otherwise, his secrets had unknowingly become theirs.
What he thought, they knew.
What he knew, they knew.
In their secret little power struggle of a chess game, Michael Jason Santers had just given Mentis the checkmate.
...
Katya stood at the podium, using her fingers to scroll to the first page of their presentation while Victor prepared their slides from his laptop.
Bryce sat on a chair on stage behind them, while beside him an unoccupied chair seemed to wait for its occupant as expectantly as did Bryce. In fact, at that precise moment he checked his watch just as Katya turned around to check up on him.
He tapped his watch and then gestured to the empty chair beside him with a humourously tense look on his face.
Katya nodded to him assuringly and then turned to the podium and began talking at a regular speaking level.
"Ladies and gentlemen..." she said, then realized that the audio was not coming out of the P.A. system.
She looked around and then spotted the lapel microphone on the podium, which she quickly picked up and fastened to her lapel after which she turned it on, tapping the receiver. The sound echoed out through the P.A. system and a high pitched whine emerged from the speakers and then ceased as the anti-feedback technology adjusted the gain.
"Sorry about delay. We might be scientists... but operating these little devices can sometimes escape the best of us..." she spoke confidently and with a smile on her face as the audience got a quick laugh from her quip.
"Ladies and gentlemen. There's a small delay, but we should be able to be started very soon, within the next three minutes..." Katya assured them as the door on the far end of the lecture hall opened and Zheng Ni Wong stepped in.
She quickly walked the length of the aisles until she was at the stairs of the stage and then made her way up and sat beside Bryce, a humourously embarrassed look on her face.
"And fashionably red I might add..." Bryce said, referring to her flushed face, the audience giving them another laugh.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I am Doctor Katya Piotr, and this dashingly handsome fellow beside me" - Katya tapped her belly a few times in mockery of Victor's gut drawing some more laughter - "is my husband, Doctor Victor Piotr. Behind us we have Mathematician and Computational Biologist Zheng Ni Wong..." Katya paused as Zheng stood momentarily and bowed.
"...and beside her is our good friend, Quantum Physicist Bryce Maxwell" Bryce too got up and quickly bowed, then sitting himself back down.
"They will be helping us with this presentation at pertinent points and milestones during this talk," Katya looked around the auditorium to the audience, a gracious smile on her face.
"With many of you being engineers, sent to evaluate our technology on behalf of investors for possible integration into your own projects, what is the first thing you're considering when you start building something? Anyone?" Katya asked the audience, a man in the front row then putting up his hand.
"Production... mass production..." he said to her.
"Exactly. Sure, we can make this thing once, but how do we go about making many, many copies of that thing and remain within the design constraints so that if it is mechanical in nature, it functions exactly as the prototype did. When we're building something at people scale, the design principles to achieving this are well understood. CAD/CAM files and data fed to CNC controllers and so on and before long we have a production line making copies of our thing. Now, when the thing we're making is very, very small. Tiny. At the nanoscale, the design principles go out the window because the systems needed to make parts at nano scale simply do not exist. At our scale, there has been decades of establishing standards and lots of financial interest in mass production, and so all these systems integrate very easily. In fact children in schools can design tools and print many copies of them very quickly. Something that would have taken months for skilled trades to achieve during the arrival of the industrial age. So we've come long way since then, but when it comes to nanoscale production, its like we're at first stages of industrial age again..." Katya explained to her audience.
"Most design principles proposed for nanoscale mechanics utilize a tool chain that is capable of making very simple parts, for instance, one of the seven types of joints one finds on actuators, like those on robots. Again, trivial at human scale, a monstrously challenging problem at nanoscale. Currently, we can do maybe three or four of seven standard joints and hinges, and so we are limited by those factors. Gears are another challenging problem, though they will be solved at some point in near future by playing with atomic forces algorithmically, with SQUIDs or very tiny magnets that will be able to make hundreds if not thousands of them at a time. Still, this is a ways off. What we're proposing is a new means of building nanoscale machinery that utilizes proven technology. Rather than by machining tiny parts, we propose growing them biologically. Something that nature has already perfected over the course of billions of years on our planet," Katya explained as she looked over to Victor, who was preparing the first slide.
"We have been working for the last twenty five years with bacteriaphages, a parasitic class of organism that is a natural predator of bacteria, and utilizes them for reproduction. This forms the basis for our manufacturing technology as we've managed to decode and catalog the entirety of the DNA and RNA based genome of a target group of bacteriaphages that may offer us the possibility to re-engineer DNA/RNA and repurpose for manufacturing very tiny... close to nanoscale biological machines. Of course, we've had to overcome serious hurdles, and there will be more, but the progress we've made puts us currently at eighty-percent of the way to having functioning production line of what we call, arterial wall scraper. An engineered phage whose DNA/RNA is programmed to ride the circulatory system of body and find plaque on arterial walls, and break down into very tiny refuse which is then processed by other systems in the body, and this simple machine is a proof of concept that this can be made to work as a feasible manufacturing platform. I'd like to give the podium to Ms. Wong, and to Mr. Maxwell to explain the design process for DNA/RNA," Katya stepped back from the podium as Zheng and Bryce got up and stood beside each other, sharing the podium.
"Good day ladies and gentlemen. Bryce and I are going to speak about the means and methods by which we are proposing a framework for writing and codifying DNA/RNA for our own custom phages, including altering their characteristics and basic behaviour," Zheng began as the first slide was presented on screen.
"You might recognize this remarkable lady. She's Quantum Physicist and a pioneer of Quantum Biology, Sylvia Upadhaya. Sylvia passed away eighteen years ago in her sleep, leaving behind a body of work that revolutionized both Quantum Physics and its information theory heavy counterpart, Quantum Biology. Her work made possible what we're doing today, and she worked closely with Bryce Maxwell during the early part of his career and later so I'm told, was a friend and mentor of Doctor Alicia Westin, who you all know was the designer of the SY-349 formula. Sylvia left her foot prints in many places and some of her initial work in Quantum Biology is what is making possible writing and codifying the DNA/RNA of phages with the help of the MindSpice Quantum Grid," Zheng waited for Victor to set the next slide.
"What you're seeing here is the first time we've made images available to the public of our DRSIM codifying language. Its a reduced instruction set language, a little bit like the OpenCL, but designed with programming DNA/RNA with a computer programming language. Given the complex interweaving of DNA/RNA expression, we had to utilize MindSpice's Quantum Grid to make this possible, as with a classical computer, simulating the expression of a complete genome would take hundreds of years. With the Quantum Grid, it takes a billionth of a second, meaning that we can code and simulate, essentially giving us the ability to rapidly prototype designs for our nanobot organisms," Zheng finished her sentence and a man in the second row raised his hand.
"In the second row, what's your question?" asked Zheng.
"Is this language related at all to genetic programming?" asked the lady.
"Yes and no. Genetic programming is a formalized design methodology in which a program is allowed to modify itself, and with each generation of the program there's a function to evaluate its fitness, how close it is to achieving whatever it was intended for. Genetic programming doesn't deal with DNA/RNA at all, but it simulates the natural processes that allow sets of genes to evolve, except that its not genes, but a computer program. The similarity with our DRSIM is that the genome itself is the evaluator of its own fitness. If the genome is valid, during phage production fully functioning phages will be produced, rather than unhealthy or mutated phages, which we can detect in simulations given our own fitness evaluation. The Quantum Grid allows us to run billions of gene expressions per minute, meaning we can allow for the phages when we're coding them and debugging them, to evolve and adapt based upon our criteria, but nothing living is yet produced at this point, however we gain insight to the exact functionality of the organism in the simulation. Not only the first generation of expressed genes, but as many subsequent generations as we have feasible time. We design it and perfect it in the coding interface and debug it in the simulation," Zheng explained to the lady, who understood her perfectly well.
"Does this coding interface include AI coding features?" asked the same lady.
"Yes. Most certainly. What we found is that you'll be working with what we call expression groups and dormant groups. These are essentially patterns of genes that occur frequently and perform common functions, but with this being genetic, these groups are essentially like inlined function calls. The complete gene group is codified in the final DNA/RNA at the current position in the gene, rather than a reference to one copy of it stored elsewhere in the gene," Zheng replied, seeing another hand go up in the audience.
"How are these phages controlled while deployed? For instance, you said that your proof of concept will scape arterial walls, following a very simple program in its genes. What if at some point, assuming that we have thousands of these things floating around in the body of a laboratory test specimen, we want to cancel the task for all of these engineered phages? If they're semiautonomous, wouldn't that mean that its not possible?" asked the man.
"This is where Bryce's work really comes in, though we worked on this together, and Victor was our eyes and ears in terms of the biology involved... Victor? Bryce?" Zheng gave the podium to them and Katya took over operating the laptop for the slides.
"This is where we get into dynamics of collective operation of semiautonomous vessels deployed in rather fragile environment. As Bryce will point out, problem is one of signalling, and for most such systems in a body, signalling occurs in a set of common ways. Either hormonal, electrochemical or biologically temporal. where the organism has some form of timer or time awareness and ceases operation upon achieving said time. With that method, synchronization is not required. Same with any of these other cases, but that might change in future where we need coordination between organisms, example if majority of organism have operated for twenty seconds. then remaining organisms do this... or that. The temporal form of signalling is handled during codifying. The others, hormonal and electrochemical are what we focused on, primarily electrochemical, which was Bryce's area," Victor paused and let Bryce take the podium.
"How are you today?" Bryce smiled and waved, the audience responded with a smile.
"Good. You see? I just solved our signalling problem. I asked you a question, and most of you, if not all of you smiled. That is essentially how our system of signalling using electrochemical agency works. We send an electromagnetic signal. Biologically encrypted, and all the phages have special organs designed to receive those signals. They have a simple protocol for what do do for every signal, that is codified during the design phase - if this, then that almost literally like any waterfall programming paradigm. How are you today?" Bryce summed up the technology involved and then repeated his earlier statement, getting another round of smiles from them.
"See? It worked perfectly and consistently," Bryce smiled for them.
"How did you manage to create a biological receiver? Isn't that advanced functioning found only in certain kinds of cells?" asked the same lady who spoke with Zheng.
"Now that is an interesting question, and certainly at the center of the challenges we had. How do you make something like that in an organism that has no such organ. Well, you copy it from another part of the body, which is what we did. We adapted the functionality of neurons, a very, very simple subset of qualities of neurons, both the regular variety and mirror neurons, and created them as a bundled set of microcells in the phage, that are powered in the same way that the phage is powered. Chemically. These organelles are designed to operate over a very simple set of instructions and act both like antennas and receivers, triggering pre-coded behaviours in the phage, similar to how some of our very simple survival behaviours are precoded into our DNA. With the phages, one such behaviour we precoded is to command the phage to become entirely dormant, in which case it simply stops moving and eventually dies, and is ejected from the body like any other refuse," Bryce explained.
[Bryce Maxwell]
"And right when we had them where we wanted them... that's when it all nearly fell apart and that's because with this kind of technology, and as Katya mentioned, there's two camps. There's the we want to make nanotech out of mechanical stuff camp, adapting well understood design and manufacturing principles to the nano scale, and then there's the nanobiology camp, where we manufacture using engineered organisms to mass produce biological machines. If you're in one camp, you're competing with the other, and when billions of investment dollars are resting upon these decisions, which side of the fence the engineers preside over essentially decides who gets the money and who doesn't. One tech can die before it even has a chance to get off of the ground, and so it was that our project faced its first really big threat. Being brushed aside in favour of the manufactory paradigm rather than the biological side. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it is that sometimes it pays to lose. And that's exactly when the deciding question came at us..."
A tall man in a well fitted, yet somehow quirky looking and unfitting suit stood up from the audience, without raising his hand, catching Bryce off guard.
"Mr. Maxwell, you are familiar with Mary Shelley are you not?" he asked in the voice of a forty year old man who sounded like puberty had not yet abandoned him.
"Most certainly. She wrote one of the most profound pieces of scientific literature during an age when women were typicallyt silenced on such matters. Why do you ask?" asked Bryce, already suspecting where their conversation was about to go.
"Its one thing crafting a genome in a simulation, and entirely another when it comes to allowing that genome to express itself in a controlled environment in the lab. That's another layer of hurdles to your research that you haven't demonstrated in a working physical experiment. Like Frankenstein's monster needing a jolt of electricity to jump start the nervous system and imbue it with life. It sounds to me like you're still in the grave robbing phase..." the man said to Bryce, a pompous smile stretching across his face as Victor's face flushed red in embarrassment given the fact that he shared the same first name with the protagonist of that book.
A ruse that was likely factored into the man's response, for it was certainly made with the intent to distract the audience from the advantage that the biological paradigm had in terms of cost versus the mechanical paradigm. The man turned to look to his peers and they laughed at his quip, in support of his assessment.
"Mr. Antonio Collins I presume. Your legend precedes you in the world of engineering," Bryce responded, suddenly recognizing the man.
"About your statement, it is not entirely truth as we were getting to part where we speak of that," Victor responded, breaking his silence.
"You have lab data from physical experiments giving predictably repeatable results do you?" the man confirmed.
"Yes... the threshold as it stands is at sixty-eight percent accuracy, hypothesis to experimental results. That's only twelve percent from having workable paradigm for full scale biological manufacturing," Victor explained to Mr. Collins.
"As much as I'd like to back your little petri dish experiment, we're working with a firm on the mechanical paradigm for nano scale manufacturing and we recently arrived at eighty-five percent threshold for reliability of nano scale machined mechanical parts. That's enough for QA** to streamline the process and filter out the remaining fifteen percent. They've been doing it for decades like that for microprocessors, so this is a proven method and paradigm, while yours appears to be in its infancy," Mr. Collins pointed out, further affecting their potential for future investment.
"...but the cost ration of investment dollars to working production line is much less than with mechanical paradigm. Your team spent twenty times per milestone as our team, and we are around the corner from breakthrough that will put us on schedule to scale up to full biological manufactory," Victor felt a sharp pain in his stomach and a lump in his throat as he spoke, a stress induced ulcer having awakened in his stomach lining.
He winced ever so slightly, but held his composure despite the pain.
"There you have it. Your investment money goes twenty times further with our technology and we're only a few steps from the finish line before we go full tilt," Bryce quickly covered for Victor as he turned to his laptop bag and grabbed a bottle of ant-acid pills from within.
He quickly ate two of them and retreated to Bryce's seat as he waited for them to take effect. Katya followed him to the chairs and Zheng stood for her, allowing her to sit next to her husband as his stomach pain quickly quelled and receded.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have a booth at the north east wing of the convention hall. We look forward to seeing you there. Thank you for attending our presentation," Bryce abruptly finished the presentation and then turned to check on Victor.
"Do we need an ambulance?" Bryce asked Victor as Katya comforted him.
"No..." Victor assured him, though by that time Zheng had already called for the medical staff working for the convention security team.
Behind them, the audience filtered out, Mr. Collins shaking hands with many of his peers as they made their way to the door. A few moments later and the medical team arrived with a kit and respirator for Victor.
"...we spend our life's work doing this... entire time knowing stress will get us... eventually. Sometimes it impossible to tell if I'm chasing dream or running from demon..." Victor said to Katya as the medic arrived and began the process of diagnosing him.
A few minutes later and they walked him to a minimally equipped triage that had been setup for such purposes. Victor lay on a bed with a respirator on his face as both the ulcer and the stress subsided.
West Meet East And Strategic Siloing
As Mrs. Elman, Mr. Deeters and Mr. Fenster dealt with the sudden onset of attention at their side of the booth, Kori, Ebtissam, Sienna and Fay tended to theirs.
Comparatively speaking, there was far more attention paid to Nano Engineering side of the booth than there was to the service startup side in which Kori worked with her counterparts preparing for what they'd hoped would be a prosperous day, though she had other much more serious concerns, especially given Heylyn's sudden shift towards such a business strategy as siloing as it was called.
The initial plan had been put together by Valerie, who saw a strategic opportunity to diversify West Meet East into subsidiaries of connected service based businesses, that could essentially have the parent company as a customer. Much the same, those subsidiaries could also do business with West Meet East's competitors, opening up a whole new ballgame for the expansion of the business, while substantially cutting costs and streamlining the efficiency of operations related expendituires.
The idea was to take two of the departments from West Meet East and register them as their own separate entitities, free to do business with other customers rather than servicing only West Meet East itself.
The departments in question were the sewing department, and the backstage departments: hair dressing and makeup. These two departments were registered to become separate companies pending the investment interest expressed at this very convention.
Heylyn after conferring many times with Valerie, had given Ebtissam the go ahead to come up with a working plan that would essentially separate the sewing department from West Meet East, while allowing it to operate with a lease, renting space from the West Meet East building south off Queen Street West.
Heylyn gave Ebtissam full reign on the project, asking only that she work with Valerie to keep the plan within budgetary guidelines and on track to be ready for the investment convention.
Ebtissam had come up with the new business name herself: Sew Wonderful which Heylyn immediately fell in love with. She'd worked with Braden separating the inventory and organizing the space to ready it for the next round of renovations which would essentially give the business its own separate entrance and signage, fitting of the plans for the area.
When they submitted the plans to the local BIA***, they were quickly approved given the fact that the area was already considered to be a fashion district, often referred to as Yorkville south, after one of the city's most visually prosperous, if not playfully scandalous areas. Especially from the nineteen sixties when it had earned that repute. Sixty years later and it had transformed itself, the artistic and entrepreneurial hippies of the initial generation had turned Yorkville into a fashion institution.
Even Queen Street east of Yonge Street was evolving similarly, as urban renewal gave some of the city's older areas an entirely new design rather than just a fresh coat of paint, and all without sacrificing some of the city's more elaborate second floor artistic brick work of hand crafted arches and curves. Put in place by skilled trades after the post war immigration. Built by artisans whose craft was slowly dissipating to the anals of time and history. Valerie's project fit in with these plans, and Ebtissam's work making this happen became a sight to behold in the evolution of West Meet East. Once they were done, Sew Wonderful would be entirely in Ebtissam's capable hands.
Insofar as Sienna and Fay were concerned, Valerie had not left them in the dark for her optimization of West Meet East's business strategy included the creation of another service bureau related company, offering hair dressing and makeup services that were fit both for their modeling clientele as much so as for theatrical stage and film work. Once again, by creating a separate company within West Meet East, they could do business with their own competitors, as much so as their parent company. Not to mention, it would give both Sienna and Fay the experience of running their own business operation, which appealed very much to Heylyn's nurturing side and served as a growth path for their careers.
They too were given creative freedom, and they came up with the name Makeup With Style, again another name that Heylyn loved, given the positive connotations and the diplomacy of making peace while still retaining the business identity and service within the name. Again, the BIA replied to their proposal the same day that it had been composed, and before the end of that same day, Sienna and Fay had begun organizing the new office space that Heylyn had allocated for their business. It gave them an entrance and sign frontage as with Sew Wonderful, not to mention a similarly attention getting name.
Before the month had come to a close and the weekend of the convention had arrived, Sienna and Fay had organized their inventory and worked with a systems designer integrating the new filing and accounting system with Makeup With Style, all while still attending to a smaller venue fashion show, and fifteen other photo shoots, preparing a total of over sixty models in all.
Valerie had also suggested that Kori spread her wings to run her human resources department as a separate company, offering similar human resources and payment processing to other companies, but Kori chose to back down from the opportunity, citing that she was still in the process of upgrading her education and pursuant her certification in Human Resources Accounting, an accreditation that was just around the corner for her. She cited that she did well enough with West Meet East's relatively tiny human resources pool, and that she should grow into the eventual expansion that Valerie had suggested, giving it a year or two before she pursued such ends. She was intelligent, confident and capable, and realistic enough to recognize when she should apply herself to expanding her skills enough so to handle these extra responsibilities rather than to jump in blindly. A fact that further solidified Heylyn's respect of her, for over the last year she'd already taken on much.
Rather than sitting it out on the sidelines, Kori took the reigns in hand and decided that she'd run their booth at the convention, working with Ebtissam, Sienna and Fay. She'd met with Valerie several times and had gone over the dynamics involved with West Meet East being divided into separate service bureaus so as to expand their business opportunities and customer base. Hence, Kori understood perfectly what was involved and by the first day of the convention, she was able to field all of the inquiries at the booth respectively, to either Sew Wonderful or Makeup With Style.
Ironically, they were not sore thumbs so much as they'd expected they'd be at the convention, given the fact that most investment opportunity that justified the exhorbitant booth space registration prices was technology based, and part of the growing investment dynamic that had drawn many investors to begin with.
There were other small to mid-sized business investment opportunities much like theirs, but none dealing in the exact same services that they offered, and given their location in the convention hall, their traffick tended to be fall off traffic visiting other booths.
Kori was in a professional dress that Heylyn had given her for the convention and she looked like a million dollars. As much so, Ebtissam had really gone the distance to make a good appearance without overstepping her boundaries, and yet Kori's enthusiastic energy and flamboyance often tickled Ebtissam's funny bone, as she found it very liberating befriending someone whose limits were much different than her own.
Sienna and Fay were more subtle, as their business was to make their clients look good, and so their strategy was to focus on that rather than themselves. They were sufficiently professional without overshadowing their clients, who in this case were the investors who came to their booth. They wanted them to feel like it was all about their clients, and so their focus was almost always outward towards others and meeting their needs and hence and early in the afternoon, it was they who'd attracted their first formal investment agreement.
It had come from a woman who was already an investor in cosmetics, especially those utilizing sustainable methods and technology without sacrificing quality. What good would any sustainable product do if it failed to sell or compete with higher quality, less sustainable products. In this respect, she was very astute and firm on ensuring such aspects of her investments, and had single handedly managed to transform a sizeable segment of the cosmetics market.
When she met Sienna and Fay, she was imprressed by their professional candor and their outward focus, despite the sometimes socially toxic nature of society, which she ignored for the most part. Sienna had given no indication of her previous social struggles, those specifically connected to Mentis, and had come a long distance from her darkest days of being tormented by their numbers. The support of Heylyn and her circle of peers had certainly made a difference and helped her through the worst of it. Thankfully, it had all paid off when Jenine Beaudre had inquired to them about their future plans. From there, the conversation had blossomed into an extensive examination of their business strategy and by the end of their words with each other, they'd come to an agreement and future arrangements that would give Sienna and Fay funding to run Makeup With Style as West Meet East's first offspring.
A tall handsome and well dressed fellow would happen upon their booth shortly after and while Ms Jennine was still dealing with Sienna, where he spoke with Kori.
"I have to admit that this name has my attention... great name by the way..." he said to Kori rather timidly and withdrawn, very obviously keeping his cards very well hidden.
"Which name? West Meet East?" Kori confirmed, as the sign had West Meet East International prominently displayed above the two offspring company names.
"I've heard of that one before. A fashion company if I'm not mistaken?" he asked her.
"Yes.. but that's not the company for whom we're seeking investment. West Meet East is sitting very pretty currently, and so much so that its diversifying its business by turning several departments into their own independent businesses. So you're speaking about Sew Wonderful, which is a fabric and sewing business run by my friend here Ebtissam, the manager and senior seamstress, or you could be referring to Makeup With Style..." Kori explained to him as Jennine turned to address the man.
"Sorry, but the second investment here is taken. I just snatched it up..." Jennine said to the man, pausing suddenly as she remembered his face.
"Its been some time Jennine. I didn't realize that was you... How have you been keeping?" the man asked her.
"Considering that the last time we talked Owen, you stood me up and left me waiting for you at Adega. I'm doing fine..." Jennine said to him firmly, Kori, Ebtissam, Sienna and Fay all very quickly finding something to occupy them while the conversation on the other side of the booth played out.
"Look. I didn't mean for that to happen, but I was still very hurt after a difficult breakup. I don't think that I was ready to trust anyone. When you put the most fragile part of yourself in the hands of someone you're getting to know, you experience fear and doubt, and the quickest way to solve that is to just avoid taking those kinds of risks. Even sabotaging them before they have a chance to become something more. You were that one... and I got scared... terrified... and so I ran. I'm sorry..." Owen said to her quietly, though loud enough for Kori, Ebtissam, Sienna and Fay to hear.
"That's it? You're sorry? You didn't even call me or return my calls! I had to wait until I read about your takeover bid in the news just to know you were alright. Do you even know how that feels? To be left there sitting alone, assuring the waitress that your date will be arriving soon, and then for him not to show at all? No phone call. No nothing..."
"But I..." Owen pleaded with her.
"But nothing! Let me get this off my chest, because I carried it for you all this time, and now you bump into me at an intestment convention and you're thinking that you can just brush me off with a few words and that everything will be alright!" Jennine said to him, a tear slowly beading in her eye.
"Jennine. I didn't just happen along here by random you know. I followed you," Owen explained to her.
"What? You mean like an obsessed stalker or something?" Jennine responded to him.
"No. Like someone who wants to make it up to you. Like someone who really cares for you. So I had my driver follow you here and I thought that I'd use the convention as cover for my plan. That I'd bump into you, maybe a bouquet of your favourite flowers in hand or some other mid-life crisis fantasy, but when I saw you again, it just hit me all at once. Jennine... I'm not afraid anymore... I want to be with you but first, I want to make things right..." Owen promised her.
She looked at him with such fiery intensity that Kori had readied her phone to dial emergency as she tried to pretend they didn't notice.
Jennine then grabbed the lapels of his suit and pulled his face into hers and their lips met perfectly for an intense kiss. Kori dropped her phone and the tears began gushing from her eyes, so much so that she ran into the back of the booth to wipe them with the curtains of the booth.
"I haven't cried this much since the season finalé of Bachelorette!" she said quietly, blowing her nose.
A moment later and the kiss of the century had ceased. Ebtissam was busy tidying up the booth while Sienna and Fay organized their investor handouts.
"You won't be needing those. I'll be your sole investor on the grounds that you change your company name," Jennine said to Sienna, who tried to appear like she hadn't been paying attention.
"Uhhh... I'm sorry? Oh, you mean for the investment? What's the new name?" asked Sienna.
"Makeup With Style is a little bland by itself, so how about Kiss And Makeup With Style?" Jennine suggested, looking to Owen who nodded in agreement.
"We're in. Sign on the dotted line," Fay immediately responded, sliding a pen in Jennine's direction.
"Ebtissam is it?" Owen turned to address Ebtissam, who stopped her cleaning, politely batting her eyelashes at him.
"Yes. How can I help you?" she asked him.
"I'm interested in acquiring a medium sized business investment in my portfolio and from what your friend Kori and my friend Jennine have indicated to me about West Meet East, Sew Wonderful would be something I'd be willing to negotiate as soon as possible. Enough so that I'd like to reserve exclusively that we come to an arrangement by latest one week's time. You'd be obliged to hold the opportunity for me, assuming there are no other interested parties before the end of this convention. In knowing West Meet East, I also know that your CEO Heylyn Yates is best friends with Doctor Alicia Westin, who I understand recently had a child with Walton Norler. Walton and I were the founding board members for Tynan And Associates, way back in the early days. I left long before the Torman fiasco, but Norler and I are good friends. I think that Sew Wonderful would be the perfect opportunity for someone of my aspirations to get in on the West Meet East bandwagon early. Care to make that possible?" Owen offered to Ebtissam.
"See? Didn't I tell you that we can all have happy endings?" Kori stepped out from behind the curtain, still wiping her eyes.
"That's coming from someone who moments ago was ready to dial emergency," Ebtissam responded, drawing laughter from Kori and everyone else.
"Yes. I think that we are in agreement Mr. Owen," Ebtissam agreed to his terms.
"I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself. I'm Mr. Bennett. Mr. Owen Bennett," he smiled and shook hands with Ebtissam, who firmly stood by the terms of their agreement as Jennine went over hers' with Sienna and Fay.
[Bryce Maxwell]
"You see. We can all have a happy ending, and even when it seems like its impossible,"
"You might be asking, well what about poor Katya and Victor? And Zheng and myself? I mean, we really got brutalized by Antonio Collins, but as I stated, things are not always what they appear to be, and sometimes you have to win and lose in order to win,"
"Remember the lady who'd asked Katya all those questions? Well as it turns out, she was also a big fan of Mary Shelley, but she was also an optimist and as it turned out, that while Victor was recovering from a stress induced ulcer on a bed in a medical triage in an investment convention, that same lady, whose name by the way was Serenity Wilson, showed up in the triage and agreed to fund Katya and Victor's work. Zheng and I too were contracted to return and continue our work developing a DNA based system of coding, expanding it with MindSpice's Quantum Grid. She wasn't beholden to any specific paradigm as she later admitted to us, that it was the goal in a cost effective manner that was important, not the method. It was like my father and way back when I was in high school, Wendy had always told me, you have to keep your eye on the ball."
"You see. When I came to this convention, the plan wasn't to lose. It was always to win by losing."
"Antonio Collins shook hands with the man who'd won his firm's investment money, Mr Fenster, who'd perfected the process of machined nano scale mechanical production. The very same project as Katya's and Victor's. What Antonio didn't know, was that his investment money was paying for both projects. Not only that, but we'd also received support from Serenity Wilson, and that means that both projects will get there to the point of realization, effectively because its the goal that counts. You've got to keep your eye on the ball,"
"Thanks for tuning into our story. I know it might seem a little lame, being titled the Crime Of The Century and all, but I think it fits rather well. It just so happens that the crime was that we all lost, and we all won,"
"As for Wendy and I, we managed to pay all our bills and keep our claim in this mortal coil, and despite the fact that I didn't sign all my bills under the name of Richard Feynman, I'm certain that he was there, somewhere, winking along in his own Quantum way,"
"A Quantum Physicist's work is never done. Bryce Maxwell signing out,"
Epilogue
Skylon Tower Revolving Restaurant
Katya and Victor sat across the table from Zheng and Briggs. The restaurant around them had few if any empty tables as it was around the dinner hour of six in the evening. A large bay window overlooked Niagara Falls, which was a short distance away, the evening sun casting rainbows across the rising mist.
"After all of that and we end up getting funded. I think that's good reason to celebrate?" Victor looked much healthier than he had the six hours previously.
"I take it everything went well then?" Briggs asked, looking to Victor and Katya, and then to Zheng who sat beside him.
"Yes, surprisingly so. In roundabout way. Antonio Collins was at presentation and nearly sunk us. But in the end, we got investment funding," Katya explained to Briggs.
"When he stood up and started taking on Bryce, I was thinking that things are about to get bumpy... and they certainly did for a bit," Zheng told Briggs as their waiter arrived with a tray of cocktails.
"Here you are. Are you ready to order?" he asked them politely.
Victor was about to take a sip of his drink when Katya picked up the glass and put it on her side of the table.
"Thank you, but that's mine. You have to look after health tonight and forward from here," Katya urged him.
"Can I at least order?" he asked his wife.
"Yes, but I have veto power over everything you choose..." she said to him.
"Then why don't you order for me... Doctor Wife?" Victor said to her sarcastically and with a hidden smile.
"Yes. I'm ready to order. I'll have the Spicy Bruschetta Chicken, with Gouda cheese and a side of mixed peppers. My husband here will have bowl of oatmeal, and side of asparagus, sweet potato and a fermented food... sauerkraut or kimchi preferably if you have. Very healthy for stomach. To drink, bring him kefir," Katya placed their order.
"Kefir with a shot of vodka in it. Oh well. So much for celebration..." Victor said glumly.
"Don't worry husband, I'll celebrate for you," Katya smiled.
After they finished ordering and Victor's kefir and vodka arrive, they toasted to their success, and to Victor's commitment to his health.
Terra Cotta, Peel Region, Ontario, Canada
Mr. Werner rolled along the hall in his wheelchair to his office on the first floor of his posh home in the suburbs. The door automatically opened for him and closed behind him once he was situated in the room. He then wheeled over to his desk and when he arrived behind it and before his computer workstation, he picked up the phone and hit the speed dial.
On the screen of his phone, the words CONFERENCE LINE appeared, and on the other end, he heard three separate lines ringing.
"You made it back safely I'm assuming Mr. Werner?" asked Jinn Hua.
"That I did. I chartered a private helicopter and got back a half an hour ago. The boy, Gregory is coming along fine. He's seems to be very happy being with Aikiko. Its changed him a lot. He's a lot more confident and bold. They're a nice couple. Now, it seems that the MediFriend is picking up steam in the medical world, thanks to a nudge from someone most admirable," Mr. Werner addressed Jinn Hua.
"Glad that I could help. Our medical facilities could benefit greatly from such a device and it would be an immense help in difficult times, and certainly it could save many lives. What about with Katya and Victor? Did their situation go over well?" asked Jinn Hua.
"Yes. Most certainly. Mr. Maxwell played it very well, but even he needed a little outside help unbeknownst to him. You see, Antonio Collins had plans to go with Future Tangent Industries, but a short visit with him and I convinced him that Mr. Fenster would be the investment he was seeking. A little uncuth, but given the uncuth attempt to both sabotage Katya and Victor's financing, and affect his health negatively, I feel that my intervention was justified," Katsura responded from her end of the phone, through which it was safe to hear her voice.
"Very good. And the situation with West Meet East?" Mr. Werner addressed the third party.
"It was I who handled that. I had Nathan, the young baby boy, whisper in Alicia's dreams, where he told her about the convention. When she woke up, she told Norler of her dream and he went about making her dream possible when he found out it was connected to West Meet East and the investment convention. He called his old friend Owen Bennett, who upon finding out made a trip to the convention, where by serendipity and happenstance he met Jennine Beaudre, his ex-girlfriend. The two of them made up and ended up funding both Ebtissam's and Siena and Fay's startup. Honestly and earnestly. They even helped them to come up with a name for the business," Ms. Huệ Vân replied to Mr. Werner.
"Really? Now you've got me very curious as to what that name could be. Do you mind telling me?" asked Mr. Werner.
"Certainly..." all three of the ladies responded.
[Lips Like Sugar - Echo And The Bunnymen]
Sagitarius A*, Milky Way Galactic Center
An invisible giant of tremendous mass and volume eclipsed the stars around it, a circle absent of all light, warping space and time.
For light years around it, two enormous serpents entwined themselves around the black hole, defying all known laws of physics, completely unaffected by the forces of nature. Their heads met at a point far above the event horizon and their conversation ensued.
"It seems that you tinkered in their affairs again Karkathrakushk. Did we not agree that we would leave them to their fate?" Witherwyrm asked of Weltherwithsp, referring to the latter by its dragon name.
"It was you who tinkered in their affairs, for you've been assisting Mentis' interests, and altered the stream of investment destined for that convention. I happened to know that you would. Don't forget that I am progressing backwards in time from my birthplace at the end of the universe, while you are progressing forward in time from its beginning. Your interference brought about the need for balance, and I intervened, restoring the integrity of causality," Weltherwithsp replied, its voice thundering with enough amplitude that it rippled the black hole's event horizon, sending gravity waves outwards and outward from the space around them, where they would eventually reach Earth nearly twenty-seven thousand years later.
"Our game shall continue and they will fall as have all of the others. Their fate is sealed and has never been broken in all of eternity. Always prevails in this and always has..." Witherwyrm responded.
"All it will take for them stray from their path towards destruction is the flapping of a butterflies wings. There's fate. There's destiny, and there's possibility..." Weltherwithsp replied, both of the dragons instantaneously transporting themselves above the Earth, looking to it through their enormous eyes.
They then expanded to encompass the entire universe, beyond the vision of even our most powerful telescopes, where their dance continued as eternity unfolded.
The End
To be continued in The Butterfly Dragon: The Two Butterflies - Episode 15
* MSRP - Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price
** QA - Quality Assurance, a method of using statistical evaluation to filter out the products of a process that are substandard, often affected by quantity versus quality.
*** Business Improvement Agency or Area
Credits and attribution:
Artwork: Amy Wong, Wendy Pusey, Ghastly, Birdman, Brian Joseph Johns, Daz3D, Unreal Engine...Tools: Daz3D, Corel Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Blender, Stable Diffusion (Easy Diffusion distribution), InstantID, Sadtalker, Google Colaboratory, Microsoft Copilot (Windows 11), Hitfilm, Borderline Obsession...
InstantID by: Wang, Qixun and Bai, Xu and Wang, Haofan and Qin, Zekui and Chen, Anthony. Research Paper Title: InstantID - Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds.
Sadtalker by: Zhang, Wenxuan and Cun, Xiaodong and Wang, Xuan and Zhang, Yong and Shen, Xi and Guo, Yu and Shan, Ying and Wang, Fei.
Research Paper Title: SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation.
Gratitude: Our Mentors, Senseis, Sifus, Sebomnims, lifetime inspirations, family, friends, the Nomads (ask Stanton about that one), the Music, the Movies, the Theatre, the Arts, ASMR, (both YouTube and Bilibili and the many other creators on those platforms), the Gaming and Developer communities and of course, the audience.
Martial Arts (in the words of real experts and at least one comedian): https://brucelee.com (home of the real Dragon and an entire family of inspirations), http://iwco.online International Wing Chun Organization (International presence of a very scalable intensity martial art, protected and developed by Shaolin Nun Ng Mui) and the alma mater of Jinn Hua's own specialized variation thereof, https://iogkf.com International Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karatedo Federation (even Hanshi had his teachers), https://itftkd.sport International Taekwondo Federation (Here there be Taegers), https://tangsoodoworld.com Tang Soo Do World (the path of Grandmaster Chuck Norris), https://www.aikido-international.org International Aikido Federation (how else would Navy Chef Steven Seagal liberate a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier from a team of hijackers?), https://www.stqitoronto.com Shaolin Temple Quanfa Institute (The City Of Toronto's own Shaolin Temple), https://www.enterthedojoshow.com Master Ken's Ameri-Te-Do presence (If we can't laugh at ourselves, then we can at least laugh the loudest at others, and other Zen)
Special thanks to Aitrepreneur, Mickmumpitz, Hugging Face and the YouTube educational content producers, including those catering to the AI content production pipeline and of course AlphaSignal.
Something to give you perspective: The very first teacher had no formal education, didn't graduate and was self taught, but only because they had no other choice. We do.
Tools: Daz3D, Corel Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Blender, Stable Diffusion (Easy Diffusion distribution), InstantID, Sadtalker, Google Colaboratory, Microsoft Copilot (Windows 11), Hitfilm, Borderline Obsession...
InstantID by: Wang, Qixun and Bai, Xu and Wang, Haofan and Qin, Zekui and Chen, Anthony. Research Paper Title: InstantID - Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds.
Sadtalker by: Zhang, Wenxuan and Cun, Xiaodong and Wang, Xuan and Zhang, Yong and Shen, Xi and Guo, Yu and Shan, Ying and Wang, Fei.
Research Paper Title: SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation.
Gratitude: Our Mentors, Senseis, Sifus, Sebomnims, lifetime inspirations, family, friends, the Nomads (ask Stanton about that one), the Music, the Movies, the Theatre, the Arts, ASMR, (both YouTube and Bilibili and the many other creators on those platforms), the Gaming and Developer communities and of course, the audience.
Martial Arts (in the words of real experts and at least one comedian): https://brucelee.com (home of the real Dragon and an entire family of inspirations), http://iwco.online International Wing Chun Organization (International presence of a very scalable intensity martial art, protected and developed by Shaolin Nun Ng Mui) and the alma mater of Jinn Hua's own specialized variation thereof, https://iogkf.com International Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karatedo Federation (even Hanshi had his teachers), https://itftkd.sport International Taekwondo Federation (Here there be Taegers), https://tangsoodoworld.com Tang Soo Do World (the path of Grandmaster Chuck Norris), https://www.aikido-international.org International Aikido Federation (how else would Navy Chef Steven Seagal liberate a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier from a team of hijackers?), https://www.stqitoronto.com Shaolin Temple Quanfa Institute (The City Of Toronto's own Shaolin Temple), https://www.enterthedojoshow.com Master Ken's Ameri-Te-Do presence (If we can't laugh at ourselves, then we can at least laugh the loudest at others, and other Zen)
Special thanks to Aitrepreneur, Mickmumpitz, Hugging Face and the YouTube educational content producers, including those catering to the AI content production pipeline and of course AlphaSignal.
Something to give you perspective: The very first teacher had no formal education, didn't graduate and was self taught, but only because they had no other choice. We do.
This content is entirely produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701 under the Shhhh! Digital Media banner.
This content is entirely produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701 under the Shhhh! Digital Media banner.
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Inquiries: brian.joseph.johns@shhhhdigital.com, info@shhhhdigital.com
Copyright © 2023 Brian Joseph Johns
https://shop.shhhhdigital.com
Produced at Shhhh! Digital Media
200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Inquiries: brian.joseph.johns@shhhhdigital.com, info@shhhhdigital.com