“What do you have in mind?” Leon was curious.

  “Well…” Trey scratched the back of his neck, hesitating. “Nicole knows someone at Fusioncore. There is a slight chance I can convince her so that she can convince her contact to push for building us a new battery.”

  “How are you planning on doing that?” Zoe stood by with crossed arms, her eyebrows raised skeptically. Even Leon looked over with a perplexed look on his face.

  Trey chuckled. “I don’t know, maybe, like, offer her a date with me in return?”

  “What a stupid idea.” Zoe shook her head.

  “Yeah, that’s a pretty weak scheme, Trey.” Leon tilted his head, thinking back to Nicole’s date at the weekend party. Although he was no expert in romance, he was sure that if she were noticeably interested, Trey would have been her partner that night and not that other guy.

  “Haha, I know. That was a joke.” Trey clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Maybe I could try to make a counter-offer as compensation. I just need to make some calls first, see how much wriggle room I got.”

  Leon nodded at his answer when a sudden idea struck his mind.

  “Maybe I could ask Tara. She and Nicole are close friends, she might be able to persuade her.”

  “Since when are you so close with Tara?” Trey shot back with a question. He knew of their date but didn’t realize they got so close because of that. He just assumed it was a pairing that wouldn’t be repeated more than once.

  “I don’t know, but it’s worth a try, isn’t it?” Leon replied.

  Trey shrugged. “I guess it is. Either way, let’s hope one of us succeeds, or we’ll never get a new battery that fits the standard.”

  Finishing his sentence, Trey dropped off his racing helmet on the nearby couch before he headed out of the paddock. Leon just watched him leave, his mind lost in thoughts.

  ………..

  They ended up getting the battery.

  It was Tara who saved the day after Leon put on his best puppy face, practically begging for her help. Surprisingly, she was happy to do him a favor as long as Leon agreed to accompany her on more dates.

  For him, this wasn’t really much of a price to pay as he gladly agreed. On the contrary, Leon felt oddly shocked at the turn of events.

  He needed a racing car component and got a girlfriend in return. An extraordinarily good-looking one at that.

  Meanwhile, Trey failed in his endeavor to persuade Nicole, mostly due to the fact that he didn’t have a suitable counter-deal in return. Tsunami Foods wasn’t ready to invest blindly into a deal for a single component in their racing division.

  That’s when Tara intervened and worked her magic. Fusioncore agreed to develop a new battery, which promptly arrived two weeks later. A very quick timeline for development, but considering Fusioncore’s status as a mega-corporation, Leon assumed they spent quite a few resources on it.

  Contrary to their assumptions, however, Tara didn’t ask Nicole but used her own connections to get Fusioncore to agree. He didn’t know how she did it, considering her parents’ company, Symbotics, doesn’t have that kind of influence, and she refused to tell him, no matter how often Leon asked.

  In the end, he had no choice but to accept it and be glad that he got the battery.

  This allowed him to turn his focus towards Vulcan, which he has been working on during the evenings and nights after working on the maglev race car in the afternoons. Several weeks have passed by since then, leaving less than a week until the mid-seasonal Grand Prix.

  “Is everything set up for the initial release of Vulcan?” Dr. Irvine asked as Leon was busy debugging several pieces of code that had been acting up for days now.

  “Almost, just have some problems with server capacity.” He replied without looking up from the center console monitor.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Server capacity? Isn’t that why you got more than ten additional server rooms that are larger than this one? Why are there capacity problems?”

  Leon scoffed at Dr. Irvine’s obviously naive question.

  “What did you expect? Running an entire diagnostic program at lightning speed for every Alpha Dynamics device currently in operation is coming with complications. I’m even surprised the simulated test runs are going so well, and that does not guarantee the actual launch will be fine?”

  “Wait,” Dr. Irvine stopped him, raising a finger to his temple in thought. “Are you telling me that you’re expecting problems at launch? The launch that is happening in a week?”

  “...” Leon stared at him motionlessly for a second until he averted his eyes and abruptly stood up from his seat.

  “I think I need more coffee.” Leon scrunched his eyebrows as he strode out of the room. Seeing this, Dr. Irvine didn’t waste a second before running after him.

  “Wait, Leon. This is a serious problem.”

  “What problem? There is no problem. A normal operational concern, that is what it is.” Leon shook his head, his expression clueless at Dr. Irvine’s worried gaze.

  “A normal operational concern?”

  “Of course. It’s something I’d put as a manageable risk concerning the scale of the project.” Leon suddenly stopped, turning back at Dr. Irvine with a smile on his face.

  “To be fair, sir. Did you actually think that Vulcan could be launched and running perfectly without any worries of any problems occurring?”

  “No, that’s not what I think. That’s what the board thinks and expects after I told them that Vulcan is up and ready to launch for the deadline. When I briefed them after the first test run, the majority of their focus and plans had been redirected to this project. Alpha Dynamics is putting their hopes on this.”

  Leon couldn’t help but click his tongue. “So, you’re saying all the well-staffed development teams didn’t bring more promising results than me, which is why their original approach to spreading out their options is back to putting everything into one basket?”

  “Pretty much, that’s right.” Dr. Irvine nodded with a serious expression.

  “Wow, what a ridiculous business strategy for one of the most powerful companies in the United Human Territories. Did nobody in risk management sound any alarms?”

  “They did, but the board is desperate, Leon. Alpha Dynamics might be outperformed by GenoTech without any industry-turning products, so they had to take a risk.” Dr. Irvine exclaimed.

  Leon shook his head helplessly. “What a shitshow.”

  He began walking again on his search for a fresh cup of coffee.

  “Foolish is the only thing I can call it.” He pointed out. “A deadline of three months for a project that should take over a decade. We haven’t even done any tests on Vulcan across the entire system before the launch, other than simulations, so how can I give you or the board any guarantees of its performance on launch? If the traffic at release is too much to handle for the servers, it might just shut down the system altogether.”

  Dr. Irvine sighed at the implication, but Leon’s face remained disinterested. He wasn’t wasting his time on something that should have been obvious from the very beginning.

  After all, he wasn’t a genie in the bottle that could just grant the board all their wishes and more.

  Technology doesn’t work like that.

  Trial and error. Testing, improving, and re-testing, that is what advancement is.

  Nobody could deliver a perfect result from one day to the next in this industry. Something like that is impossible.

  No, instead of worrying about things like that out of his control, he was more concerned about getting another shot of caffeine. He was seriously spent, especially after working for weeks on two grand projects day and night with minimal sleep.

  Hell, he should probably take a break; that would be even better.

  Turning back to Dr. Irvine, who was still following him, Leon’s mouth curled into a bright smile.

  “You know what, I’ll head out first. That debugging can wait until tomorrow.”

  “You’re leaving now?” Dr. Irvine was speechless. “Leon, now that you’re saying that there could be server capacity problems, shouldn’t your focus be on trying to fix that?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “Alpha Dynamics doesn’t pay me enough for that.”

  “Not enough? That’s eight billion credits on your contract.”

  “I know.” He scoffed. “A meager amount for what Vulcan is actually worth. This company should be grateful I didn’t ask for a percentage cut in the revenue. Besides, if problems are occurring on launch, then that isn’t something I can prepare for at this point. You just need to let this play out.”

  “What will you do if problems do happen?” Dr. Irvine shot back.

  Leon raised his hands in defense. “Fix it, obviously. Before any real damage comes into play.”

  He paused for a moment, thinking about the enormous scale of Vulcan and how it would be connected to every device Alpha Dynamics has ever released.

  “Though, I guess damage won’t be avoidable if it ever comes to it.” He mumbled the last words, quiet enough that nobody but him could hear.

  ……….

  ‘Problems always appear during innovation, no matter how much you try to prepare for it. Claiming otherwise would be a lie.’

  ~~Dr. Benjamin Harper’s Memoirs~~