EXTRA CHAPTER FOR EVERY 500 POWERSTONES.
Sandoval sank into thought, the cocktail in his hand swaying under the lights, rippling with strange colors.
He spoke slowly. "I will consider your counsel carefully. But we believe the present situation remains inside our control, sir."
He lifted his glass and touched it to Anthony's once more.
Anthony refused to let the matter rest, and his voice climbed. "All you people are doing is wasting time. Listen to me. Go to war with them outright. The other side's greatest pillar is one green boy who hasn't even come of age. In the end, they will surrender!"
Sandoval regarded this half-crazed man, who seemed to hold a faith in his own perceptions that nothing alive could shake.
He said, "You must know as well as anyone that the youth you're describing is presently the shining pearl of the world's technology. Countless people regard him as something like a god. No one overlooks him. No one is able to overlook him. And you would have me overlook him?"
Sandoval delivered the last words very nearly one at a time.
Anthony craned his neck, his upper body pitching over the side of the lounger, and all but roared it. "He is a fraud. Behind him stands an enormous team, a team fully ten thousand strong!"
"He is either a fraud or an alien. Einstein at his age could not have produced results like his."
Hearing that, Sandoval sneered inwardly. The man couldn't even land on an apt example for his own comparison...
Anthony hammered the table. The cocktail on it rocked, and shortly toppled across the surface.
"We should have exposed this hoax outright at the very beginning, instead of standing by while they repeated the childish lie ten thousand times. Now the joke has been taken for truth, and people genuinely believe a genius like that walks this world!"
Sandoval righted the fallen bottle. He no longer had any wish to speak with this man.
The two of them shared one goal, but the methods they put their faith in stood worlds apart.
The man's recklessness held not a trace of civilization he could see. He was like a barbarian, the sort anyone would step back from in distaste.
He said, at the last, "I've already arranged a telephone conference with them two days from now. We'll decide the next step after that."
Anthony's mouth pulled wide into a crazed smile, and he shook his head. "You will not succeed. There is no chance of it at all."
"Then we'll see when the time comes."
Sandoval paused a moment, said nothing further, and only invited Anthony inside the villa to rest.
Prism Sciences, Riverton headquarters.
Tom sat in his chair, reading the mail sent over from the other side, sunk in thought of his own.
"These people are beyond irritating!" Lisa, reading the same mail beside him, had thoroughly run out of patience.
These days, the other side was like a wad of toffee. However many times you shook it off, it wrapped itself back around you.
Across the world's networks and every news channel, stories now surfaced daily of Prism Sciences in acquisition talks with Gaentech.
One moment Gaentech's offer had reached forty billion US dollars. The next, it had touched fifty.
The other side's methods and "offers" came litter after litter, like an old sow farrowing, and no matter how many rebuttal notices Prism published, there were always those who took the denials as proof of a cover-up.
Step into the general public's shoes, honestly, and it wasn't so hard to understand. Blame the scent of the dollar for being too seductive, and this was the scent of tens of billions of them.
The domestic chemicals group's earlier acquisition of the overseas Syngenta Group, the world's third-ranked agrochemical and seed giant, had run to a mere forty-three billion US dollars in total.
Now look back at Prism Sciences. Its only truly mature business was a single brain-controlled prosthetic, and the company's founding didn't yet reach three full years.
That a company like this could command an exaggerated price of thirty, even fifty billion...
Most people, casting themselves in Prism's place, felt this was a decision a man could make with his backside. At the very worst, they figured, Prism was merely weighing it with care, swaying along the edge of sell-or-don't.
Because they had no idea at all what research projects now lived inside Prism's research center, and they underestimated Ryan's capability besides, even with the world's commentary already lifting its appraisal of him as high as commentary could reach.
Looking at the mail on his computer, Tom said, "The other side's turned impatient all of a sudden. Seen from here, the Argus Translate review failures really may be their hand working in the dark!"
At the thought, he fired a message off at once to his partner at the branch company on the other side.
This partner at the Prism prosthetics branch was named Robert, a kindly-faced middle-aged man, careful of his image at all times, elegant in his bearing, with the full manner of an English gentleman about him.
Tom had already entrusted him earlier with looking into the matter.
The query went out, and though it stood at midnight over there, the reply came back fast:
"Gaentech is indeed possible."
Reading it, Tom had essentially seen the whole of it clear.
That evening, Ryan called with his routine check-in, and Tom took the opening to lay the matter out.
Hearing that the daytime trouble truly was Gaentech making mischief, Ryan couldn't quite escape his puzzlement.
"If they keep doing this, there has to be profit in it somewhere. But they should know the odds of Prism accepting investment are minuscule..."
Given the old-money character of the other side, their political nose could not possibly be so dull.
Tom considered for a couple of beats, then said, "Of course there's profit in it. Riding these days of fake acquisition news, their market value has climbed a good trillion and more, all the way up to one point three trillion. The shareholders on that board have cashed out who knows how many hundreds of millions already!"
At his father's words, Ryan caught the shape of it at once.
All this while, the other side had been reaping the retail crowd like leeks on the strength of acquisition good-news, and had made themselves a fortune doing it.
Then arrange formal talks with Prism. If the talks collapsed, the share price was certain to plunge again, and the other side could buy the bottom outright, taking back the very shares they had cashed out at the top.
And if Prism genuinely agreed, and the acquisition ran through to a smooth completion, then the false good news turned true, their holdings climbed higher still, and with Prism's brain-machine and artificial intelligence technology in hand, the company's future shone brighter than ever.
Whichever way it fell, the trade could not lose.
And the pressure they were applying to Prism now ran on exactly the same logic.
If Prism truly surrendered under this modest pressure, then naturally, they won enormous.
If Prism held firm and refused to bow, they need only keep raising the pressure, and by it hold off Prism's incursion, buying time for their own artificial intelligence research!
Again, a trade that could not lose in either direction!
Ryan laid his analysis out bare for his father, and Tom's expression settled graver and graver.
"Abandon illusions. Prepare for struggle."
"Bring out the weapons we prepared!"
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