The silence in the room became heavy, a physical weight that seemed to press the air out of Arthur’s lungs. Arthur, still wearing that practiced, oily smile, chuckled nervously. “Yes, Elias is a bright young lad, but he’s mostly here for the administrative heavy lifting. You know how it is, Mr. Vance. Someone has to keep the files organized while the real minds do the innovating.”
Leo didn’t move. He didn’t take the water I offered, nor did he shake Arthur’s hand. Instead, he walked over to the head of the table and sat down, gesturing for the board members to do the same. “Is that so?” Leo said, leaning back. “Well, Arthur, since you are the ‘real mind’ behind Aegis, I have a few technical questions before I sign the thirty-million-dollar check. I assume you won’t need your assistant’s help for these?”
“Of course not,” Arthur bragged, though I could see a bead of sweat forming at his temple.
Leo pulled a tablet from his briefcase. “Let’s talk about the back-end integration. The Aegis System uses a proprietary recursive neural bridge. Specifically, I’m interested in how you solved the latency issue in the third-tier data nodes. Most developers struggle with the packet loss there. How did you stabilize the handshake protocol?”
Arthur froze. That specific part of the code was something I had spent three weeks solving using a very unconventional method. Arthur hadn’t even looked at that part of the technical manual. “Ah, well,” Arthur stammered, “it’s a matter of… load balancing. We simply ensured the servers had enough bandwidth to handle the overflow. It’s quite standard, really.”
Leo’s eyes narrowed. “Standard? Arthur, if you used standard load balancing on a recursive bridge, the entire system would crash within seconds of deployment. It’s a basic architectural conflict.” He turned his gaze toward me, his expression unreadable. “What do you think, *Assistant*? Does standard load balancing work for the Aegis bridge?”
The board members were all staring at me now. Arthur shot me a look of pure venom, a silent command to stay quiet and play along. But I saw the wink Leo gave me—a tiny, almost imperceptible twitch of his left eye.
“Actually, Mr. Vance,” I said, stepping forward and setting the water bottle down, “standard load balancing would be a disaster. The Aegis System utilizes a custom ‘Ghost-Thread’ protocol that bypasses the third-tier nodes entirely by shifting the computation to the edge-layer. It’s not about bandwidth; it’s about temporal synchronization.”
Leo smiled, a predatory, satisfied grin. “Temporal synchronization. Fascinating. And who developed that ‘Ghost-Thread’ protocol, Elias?”
“I did,” I said firmly, looking directly at the Chairman of the Board. “I wrote the protocol, the bridge, and every line of the AI core over the last six months. Mr. Sterling’s involvement was limited to choosing the font for the PowerPoint slides.”
The room erupted. Arthur turned a shade of purple I didn’t know was humanly possible. “He’s lying! This is insubordination! He’s just a disgruntled employee trying to steal my glory!”
Leo stood up, the sheer gravity of his presence silencing the room. He walked over to me and draped an arm around my shoulder, a gesture that clearly signaled to everyone in the room exactly where the power resided. “Arthur, you’re a terrible liar. You always were a better salesman than a scientist. But here’s the thing: Elias and I shared a dorm for four years. I watched him build the prototype for this system while we were eating cold pizza on the floor of our room. I know his coding style like I know my own signature.”
Leo looked at the Chairman. “I’m still interested in Aegis, but my investment is contingent on one condition. Arthur Sterling is to be removed from this company immediately, with no severance and a full investigation into intellectual property theft. And Elias? He becomes the Chief Technology Officer with a full equity stake.”
Arthur tried to speak, but the Chairman was already signaling security. As two guards escorted a screaming, disgraced Arthur out of the boardroom, Leo turned to me and laughed.
“You always were too humble, Eli,” Leo said, shaking my hand properly this time. “Now, put that notepad away. You’re not the assistant anymore. We have a company to build.”
I looked at the empty seat where Arthur had sat just minutes ago, then at my best friend. The six months of exhaustion finally felt worth it. “I think I’ll skip the sparkling water,” I said. “Let’s go get some ramen instead.”
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