The flight to Washington gave me two and a half hours I didn't intend to waste.
I'd never actually sat down and explained the System to myself in full, linear order — it had always arrived in fragments, a notification here, a headache there, assembled after the fact like a jigsaw with no box lid to check against. So somewhere over Ohio, I closed my eyes and made myself do it properly.
The core of it was the Multiplier: any deliberate, repeated action I performed had its developmental yield multiplied a thousandfold. Not instantaneous — I want to be precise about that, because "instant" was the exact word one of Skye's later log entries would use and it was wrong. A thousand minutes of sleep condensed into one real minute. A thousand reps of a breakfall condensed into the ordinary wear-and-tear of a single rep, but paid out as if I'd done all thousand. It didn't create knowledge or skill out of nothing. It compressed the time a normal human being would need to earn that knowledge or skill honestly, down to something a six-year-old's calendar could actually hold. Skills that crossed some invisible threshold of repetition got flagged and locked in — Lvl MAX — the system's shorthand for you don't have to think about this anymore, it's structural now.
Underneath that sat the two currents. Blue energon, which I'd come to associate with growth, healing, the accumulation of things — and red, which I'd come to associate with entropy, appetite, endings. Neither was a metaphor.
They were physical, measurable — at least to whatever measured things inside a body that also happened to house a soul assembled out of the All Spark and the Dark Spark before it ever had a name.
Every cell in a human body runs on mitochondria converting stored energy into usable energy; what I was doing was closer to running a third channel alongside that one, an energon current that didn't come from food or oxygen and didn't behave by the same rules. It was patient. It didn't ask permission.
And apparently, if you were reckless enough to try fusing the blue and the red together instead of keeping them in separate lanes, it made you regret it for exactly as long as your pain tolerance let you stay conscious.
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I filed all of that away and opened my eyes as the plane began its descent, because it was time to be six years old again for people who were only ever going to see the six-year-old part.
The White House was bigger than the pictures made it look, which is a strange thing to notice as your very first thought inside a building that decides the shape of a country, but I was six, and six-year-olds notice the size of rooms before they notice the weight of what happens in them.
"Woah. It's so big."
The agent walking point — I'd taken to calling him Mr. Spy in my head somewhere around the second hallway, and it had stuck hard enough that I nearly said it out loud — allowed himself the smallest smile. Secret Service, almost certainly. I filed that away too.
The Oval Office itself was smaller than the corridors leading to it, which felt intentional in a way I appreciated. President Clinton was already standing when the door opened, hand out, the specific unhurried warmth of a man who had shaken several thousand hands and had decided, apparently, that a six-year-old's deserved the same attention as anyone else's.
"Good evening, Mr. President."
"Good evening, Sam." He held the handshake a beat longer than politeness required, studying me the way you'd study a puzzle you'd already decided you liked. "Do you know why you're here?"
"Because I made a couple of games with the laptop my dad got me."
"That's most of it." He gestured me toward a chair that was, mercifully, not sized for an adult. "You know what the Small Business Job Protection Act was, back in '96?"
I did, because I'd read the text of it the week after I filed The Infinite's paperwork, on the theory that you should always know the rules of a game before you start winning at it. "You signed it to make it easier for small companies to get started — lower the barrier, cut some of the regulatory friction, give people a real shot at building something without a law firm standing between them and their first customer." I paused, because there was a version of this sentence that sounded like flattery and I wanted to land on the other side of that line. "I don't think anyone expected 'small business' to include a six-year-old's bedroom. But the Act doesn't actually specify a minimum age for an LLP's beneficial owner, provided a legal guardian holds signing authority. My dad signs. I decide. It's a clean structure, and it's the same one a lot of family businesses have used for decades — I didn't invent anything there, I just noticed nobody my age had bothered to use it yet."
Clinton laughed, the real kind, not the photo-op kind. "You read the statute."
"I read the statute," I agreed. "Seemed rude not to, given I was about to rely on it."
"And the games. Tell me about them, because half my staff's kids have already stopped doing their homework over one of them."
"There are two right now — one's about problem-solving under a strict rule set, birds and physics and a grudge match with some pigs. The other's about pattern recognition — matching colors, chaining combinations, the kind of thing your brain wants to keep doing even after it stops being fun, which is either very good design or a little bit of a trap, depending on who you ask." I let that sit a second. "I released both for free on Netscape's index, because right now Netscape's still most people's front door to the internet — Microsoft's been pushing Internet Explorer hard and bundling it into Windows, and there's a real fight coming over whether that's fair competition or something the Justice Department's going to want to look at eventually. I didn't want to bet my first release on picking the winner of that fight. Free, cross-platform, no dependency on whichever browser wins — that was the safer bet."
One of the aides in the room actually stopped writing for a second.
"You built a company plan around a browser war," Clinton said, half to me, half to the room.
"I built a company plan around not needing to care who wins it," I said. "That's usually the safer version of the same idea."
He asked me to explain the games to the camera the way I'd explain them to a kid my own age, and I did — enthusiastically, a little too enthusiastically, letting six-year-old Sam do the talking while the part of me that had just finished explaining antitrust exposure to the President of the United States sat quietly in the back seat, waiting its turn.
Afterward, he shook my hand again, gave me a signed photograph and a check with more zeroes on it than I'd expected, and told me, not unkindly, that he expected to hear my name again.
He had no idea how right he was going to be, or how little of what came next would have anything to do with birds or candy.
I already had a broker's account waiting, and a piece of paper in my head with Apple's ticker on it, trading low enough that everyone else in the country had already decided the company was circling the drain. Steve Jobs had only just come back that September, a homecoming nobody outside a small circle of true believers thought would end well. I knew better. I'd known better since before I had a body to know things in.
Some bets you make with money. That one I was going to make with the next eleven years.