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The corridor opened into the main event hall.
Erik stopped walking.
The space was open, bright, and surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows that ran along three of the four walls. At the front: a small raised stage. Spread across the floor: dozens of small round white tables, four chairs at each, white porcelain tea service arranged carefully on every table.
Beyond the windows, on three sides of the building, were carefully maintained gardens. Beds of flowers in winter bloom, evergreen shrubs, ornamental grasses. Sunlight angled through the glass and lit everything with a soft afternoon glow. The faint scent of flowers reached the interior through the climate-control system's intake vents.
The room felt like an afternoon garden party. Nothing about it suggested a corporate product launch.
Erik had attended hundreds of tech industry launches across his career. The standard format was rigid: theater-style auditorium, oversized presentation screen, presenter at a podium clicking through slides, audience seated in cinema rows, applause at the opening, bigger applause when the price was announced, polite applause for everything in between.
This space had none of those elements.
"Invitations, please." A young woman in a Prism Sciences uniform approached the team with a warm smile.
Erik produced their invitations. The greeter checked the seat assignments and led the three of them to a designated table near the center of the room.
"Your table. If you need anything, please find me."
She left with the same warm smile she'd arrived with.
Ava ran her fingertips along the lacework pattern carved into the back of her chair. White carved chair, white round table, porcelain cups, sugar bowl, cream pitcher.
"Erik," she whispered. "Are we at the right event?"
The chair, the table setting, the entire ambiance was indistinguishable from a high-end afternoon tea service. There was no presentation podium. No projection screen. No technical demonstration setup.
Lou took a few establishing shots of the room with his camera, glancing up to count the tables. "This is intimate. Maybe ninety to a hundred guests total, max."
The corridor crowd gradually filtered in over the next ten minutes. Erik watched their reactions with quiet amusement. Every reporter and industry guest experienced the same beat: stop walking, look around, take it in, tilt head slightly, sit down with a confused expression. Pat had the most expressive version of the reaction, his eyebrows climbing his forehead in real time.
Servers in white uniforms began circulating, placing small plates of pastries and confections on each table. Tea pots followed. Real tea service, leaves brewing in pots with proper timing.
This wasn't a launch styled like a tea party.
This was a tea party.
Which apparently doubled as a launch.
At the entrance to the room, opposite the stage, a small camera crew was setting up multiple feeds. The launch would be livestreamed across every major platform and on the Prism Sciences corporate site.
Ava remembered Erik's earlier comment.
"You said Ryan Mercer might be here. Have you seen him?"
"He'll appear. Probably."
She stood up immediately and scanned the room. Tables were filling steadily. She saw representatives from foreign press outlets she recognized from international tech events. She did not see Ryan Mercer.
"He's not here."
"He hasn't arrived yet, Ava. The protagonist doesn't come on stage during the opening titles."
"Right. Right. I knew that."
She sat down. Erik smiled and let his attention drift around the room.
Beyond the visible camera operators, a different kind of staff was distributed through the space. Servers, ostensibly. Erik noticed, however, that their attention was directed at the guests rather than at the table service. Each member of the wait staff was watching specific individuals with the kind of unobtrusive attentiveness that wasn't about silverware logistics.
Erik had been around enough security details to recognize the pattern. The wait staff was cover. The actual service team was probably smaller and more visible. The "servers" with the watchful eyes were a protective detail integrated into the room's social atmosphere.
He chose not to flag this to his team. Lou would have already noticed, professionally trained as he was. Ava wouldn't notice and didn't need to know.
Ava pulled out her phone. Twelve fifty-eight. Two minutes to start.
A notification pinged on her phone. An account she followed had gone live.
She opened the app. The Prism Sciences official channel was streaming. The view angle came from a camera positioned behind their table, looking forward at the stage.
The viewer count climbed in real time.
Six hundred thousand viewers within the first minute.
Two million by the end of the second minute.
Six million by the third.
And that was just the one platform. There were five other major platforms hosting the same livestream simultaneously, plus the corporate site. The combined audience was likely well past twenty million already.
The chat feed scrolled too fast to read individual messages, but the general tone was clear:
"I have all four limbs and I have no idea why I'm watching a prosthetic launch this intently."
"Hoping Ryan Mercer's arm beats the myoelectric standard."
"Will the Mech Expert appear in person?"
"Honestly, in the international rankings, this kid is barely top tier. People hype him too much. Lol jk."
The pre-event chat was the usual mix of sincere interest, reflexive cynicism, and inside jokes. Standard internet behavior, scaled to twenty million participants.
-----
In a different time zone, James Alcott was watching the same livestream from his office at NeuraPath Technologies.
He was the only person in the building. The rest of his staff had gone home for the New Year's Day holiday, leaving Alcott alone with his monitors and his slowly cooling cup of coffee.
He couldn't understand how this had happened.
When he'd first heard that Helios was acquiring rights to Whitfield's research and rushing to market, he hadn't panicked. He'd seen the strategic shape of it clearly: if Whitfield's prosthetic launched abroad, the domestic market would seek a comparable benchmark. NeuraPath was that benchmark. Or rather, NeuraPath could be that benchmark, if NeuraPath got to market first. The window was narrow, but it was open.
Then Prism Sciences had announced its launch on the same day as Helios. And NeuraPath, the company that should have been the domestic leader, was watching from the sidelines because its own technology was still in clinical validation.
Alcott had spent four years on his prosthetic. He had pioneered targeted muscle reinnervation in the domestic surgical literature. His team had built clean technology. Solid technology. World-class technology, by the standards of his field.
And now he was watching a teenager's company go to market with a different architecture, no surgery required, while his own product was at least six months from clinical sign-off.
Even the consolation prize of "domestic leader, international second" was now out of reach.
He poured himself a fresh coffee and watched the livestream count climb.
-----
In another time zone, twelve hours behind, Michael Reeve was watching from his New York penthouse at one a.m.
Helios's Angel launch was scheduled for one p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Twelve hours from now. Right at the moment when the Prism Sciences launch coverage would have peaked overseas, ridden through European wake-up news cycles, and started landing in American business media.
The time-zone gap was deliberate. Reeve had insisted on the early Eastern afternoon slot because it caught East Coast business coverage prime time, West Coast morning news, and European prime-time evening news with a single broadcast. The optimal slot for global coverage on a single news cycle.
Twelve hours from now, the Angel launch would be the dominant story.
But for the next twelve hours, Prism Sciences' launch would be the dominant story.
That was the strategic risk Reeve had been chewing on for weeks. By giving Prism Sciences a twelve-hour head start, he was letting them set the comparative frame for the day. Whatever Prism Sciences showed first would establish the baseline against which Angel would be measured. If Prism Sciences came in low (sloppy execution, weak product, clear inferiority to Angel's specs), the timing would amplify Helios's superiority. If Prism Sciences came in high, Helios would spend the rest of the news cycle trying to catch up.
Reeve had assumed Prism Sciences would come in low. The startup had a fraction of Helios's resources. The product had been developed in a converted textile workshop. The technical lead was a teenager.
The assumption was about to be tested.
Reeve sipped his coffee and watched the corporate logo rotate on the livestream's pre-event holding screen. The Prism Sciences emblem. Angular, mech-inspired, deliberately distinctive.
The smoke alarm in his stomach was beeping again. Slightly louder than before.
Twelve hours. He'd know by then if his strategy had paid off, or if he'd just handed his competitor a free runway.
The launch was about to begin.
-----