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"They're opening at least five more service centers in other cities?"
In the Helios CEO's office, Michael Reeve listened to his assistant's report and lapsed into silence.
Ever since the medical tourism surge had begun, Reeve had been working the media, trying to suppress coverage of the phenomenon, hoping to keep it quiet at least until Helios completed its funding round.
He'd failed.
Reeve had public relations capability. So did his opponent. Prism Sciences had simply counter-lobbied the same outlets Reeve was lobbying. The story ran anyway. It generated extensive public discussion.
The narrative was now widely understood: Triton-1 had been temporarily suspended, but the product hadn't disappeared. It had relocated its center of gravity to its home country, and customers were chasing it across international borders to get it.
Meanwhile, Angel remained largely ignored.
That wasn't entirely accurate. Angel still found occasional buyers, wealthy disabled customers willing to pay a premium for the tactile feedback feature. But those buyers were rare. For most of the market, Angel's price point positioned it as a luxury item.
The trouble was that prosthetics didn't have a luxury tier. A prosthetic was a tool. People chose the prosthetic that worked best for the price they could pay. There was no prestige in an expensive prosthetic the way there was prestige in an expensive watch. A prosthetic that cost three and a half times more and did less wasn't a luxury good. It was just a worse product with a higher price.
After a long silence, Reeve spoke to his assistant.
"Push the funding round back. We'll wait until this news cycle passes."
"Understood."
The assistant wasn't surprised. It was the correct call. The medical tourism story had spread far enough that Helios's prospective investors had certainly seen it. The investors would already be sharpening their knives, waiting for Helios to open the round so they could use the bad press as negotiating leverage.
Everyone involved understood that Angel's commercial failure was, in strict financial terms, immaterial to Helios's overall health. Helios was a large, diversified company. Angel was one initiative. But immaterial facts could still be weaponized in a negotiation. Opening the funding round now would mean accepting a lower valuation.
Better to wait.
Reeve picked up a cigar and was about to light it when another thought occurred to him.
"Cut the Whitfield lab's research budget by fifty percent. Angel's control architecture is obsolete. Tell them to pivot toward non-invasive cortical acquisition, the approach Prism Sciences uses. If they can't make that transition, we'll find a lab that can."
"Understood." The assistant noted it. "Should the PR campaign against Prism Sciences continue?"
Reeve exhaled. "No. The campaign failed. Continuing it just wastes money. Tell the outlets to leave us out of their coverage from now on."
He closed his eyes and let smoke curl from the cigar.
"I'll go, then."
"Go."
A short while later, Professor Andrew Whitfield received a call in his lab.
The assistant opened with the purpose of the call directly. Whitfield broke into a cold sweat as he listened, hoping he'd misheard.
"A fifty percent budget cut. And you want us to pivot toward Prism Sciences' technology path?"
"Correct. If your team isn't capable of the new research direction, we'll find a better option." The assistant's tone was cool and procedural, like a recording.
Whitfield tried to argue. "Our technology isn't far behind. Both approaches have their own advantages. Our system restores tactile feedback. Theirs can't do that. We have a genuine differentiator..."
He spoke for a long time, until his throat went dry. The voice on the other end didn't change at all.
"The company has made its decision. It's not reversible. I'm only the messenger. Good luck, Professor."
The line went dead.
"Bloodless capitalists," Whitfield said, nearly hurling his phone across the room.
"Do they think changing technology paths is like making a U-turn on a highway?"
He slammed the phone onto his desk. His beard practically bristled with the force of his anger. His students and researchers, sensing the temperature in the room, lowered their heads and found urgent reasons to look at their workstations.
Whitfield's gaze fell on the object in front of him.
A Triton-1 full-arm prosthetic sat on his lab bench. He'd been studying it for days. Just before the assistant's call, he'd been wearing a sensor cap, operating the Triton-1 across his desk, trying to reverse-engineer its behavior.
The research had not been going well.
The two technology paths looked similar from a distance. Up close, they were profoundly different.
The core of Triton-1's technology was the precise, rapid identification of neural signals from the cerebral cortex. The hardest part was the algorithm, the software that decoded the noisy, low-amplitude cortical signals into clean motor commands.
Whitfield's approach was different. His method surgically transplanted nerves to the residual limb, where the relocated nerves produced clearer, stronger signals. His approach demanded much less of the decoding algorithm because the signal it received was already clean.
Whitfield thought of an analogy. Imagine a rice bin holding both white rice and glutinous rice, mixed together. Triton-1's technology found and extracted the glutinous rice grains from the mixture every single time, instantly, with perfect accuracy. Whitfield's technology took the glutinous rice out of the bin in advance and set it aside, so it was easy to grab when needed.
By that analogy, Whitfield's approach was obviously the smarter one. Why solve a hard sorting problem in real time when you could just pre-sort?
He'd believed that. Right up until Triton-1 launched.
His comparatively simple approach had only just reached production maturity. And the teenager across the ocean had already completed a vastly harder technical achievement, the real-time cortical decoding that Whitfield's entire field considered impractical.
"Pivot the technology path," Whitfield muttered, setting the sensor cap aside. "Pivot."
He didn't know whether he should do it. He couldn't be certain he'd be able to produce results on a new path.
He'd spent decades on his current technology. He'd given it his youth and his energy. He'd been on the verge of his career's defining achievement. And now he was being asked to abandon all of it and start over.
It was an extraordinarily difficult choice.
And Whitfield wasn't the only one facing it.
Triton-1's success had been a seismic event for every brain-computer interface research institution in the world.
Many neural prosthetics labs faced the same choice Whitfield faced. Follow the path Prism Sciences had cleared and develop non-invasive cortical prosthetics, or continue down their own established roads.
One path was proven but new to them: a route someone else had already traveled successfully, which meant abandoning their accumulated expertise to walk a stranger's trail. The other path was familiar but dimming: the road they'd traveled for years, now leading toward a destination the market no longer wanted.
Many researchers were still wavering, waiting to see how the situation developed before committing.
But the reverse-engineering effort had already begun.
Research institutions and competitors around the world wanted to understand the technology behind Triton-1, especially the decoding algorithm. They wanted to crack it, study it, replicate it.
They couldn't.
Ryan had wrapped the algorithm in an encryption scheme of considerable sophistication. Side-channel attacks, the most effective method for extracting protected algorithms, produced nothing useful. Other extraction methods failed similarly. Worse, attempts to breach the encryption frequently tripped the device's security protocols, which would lock the neural control unit and render it permanently inoperable.
Per the purchase agreement, a device locked by tampering was not covered under warranty.
So no one had managed to get a single look at the algorithm.
The encryption strength was incongruous with a prosthetics company. It was the kind of security architecture you'd expect from a defense contractor or a top-tier cybersecurity firm, not a medical device manufacturer.
It led many observers to a quiet conclusion: if Prism Sciences ever decided to enter the computer security industry, the company had the capability to become a dominant player there too.
What kind of prosthetics startup encrypted its products like state secrets?
The answer, though no one outside the company knew it, was simple. The encryption hadn't been written by a prosthetics startup. It had been written by Ryan Mercer, working from the same system documentation that had given him a Jaeger.