Sarah presented the study design in mid-July, three full weeks after the new facility's first full month of operation, laying out a document considerably thicker than anything Mohamed had seen cross her desk before.
*Multi-Site Clinical Validation Study — Protocol Summary*
*Diagnostic Device (500+ condition screening panel)*
*Enrollment target: 1,500 patients, three sites*
*Sites: University of Louisville Health, Cincinnati Regional Medical, Nashville Research Hospital*
*Design: Randomized, blinded comparison against standard diagnostic workup*
*Duration: Four months active data collection*
*Primary endpoint: Concordance rate against confirmed diagnoses*
*Secondary endpoints: False-positive rate, demographic consistency, adverse event tracking*
"Fifteen hundred patients," she said, sliding the protocol across the conference table with visible confidence. "Three sites — Louisville, Cincinnati, and a research hospital in Nashville that agreed to participate once they saw the pilot study data. Randomized enrollment, blinded comparison against standard diagnostic workups, four months of active data collection. This is the study that actually gets us to a De Novo submission the FDA can't reasonably delay."
"You built all of this entirely yourself?"
"With help from the sites' own research coordinators, but yes, the design is mine. Eight years reviewing submissions taught me exactly what a review team looks for, and exactly what makes them ask for more data instead of approving on the first pass." Sarah's voice carried the specific quiet pride of a woman who rarely allowed herself the emotion openly, the same restraint that had made her initial interview one year earlier feel almost cold before Mohamed had learned to read the warmth underneath it.
James leaned forward, studying the budget line at the bottom of the protocol. "This is going to cost considerably more than the original pilot study. Site fees, coordinator time, patient stipends across three hospitals instead of one university partnership."
"It will. It's also the difference between a device that stays a promising pilot forever and a device that actually reaches patients who need it. I don't think that's a cost worth economizing on." Sarah met his eyes directly, the specific firmness of a woman who had learned, over eight years at the agency, exactly which corners got cut by companies that later regretted cutting them. "I've seen what happens to good technology when a company tries to save money on the validation. It doesn't fail because the science was wrong. It fails because the agency asks a question the underfunded study can't answer, and by the time the company scrapes together the resources to answer it properly, a competitor's already claimed the market position."
"I wasn't arguing against the budget," James said. "I was making sure I understood it fully before I built the cash flow model around it, the same way I check every significant line item before it goes into a forecast I'll have to defend to Elena eventually."
"Then we understand each other." Something almost like warmth crossed Sarah's face, brief and immediately reabsorbed into her usual composure. "I don't intend to give them a reason to ask twice, not this time."
Mohamed listened to the exchange with something close to quiet pride of his own — two people he'd hired independently, for entirely different skills, now checking each other's work with exactly the kind of rigor that made a company sturdy rather than merely large. He thought, watching them, about how far this particular dynamic had traveled since a whiteboard argument nine months earlier, when the same two people hadn't yet learned to trust each other's half of the picture at all. "Approved. Whatever the study needs, build it properly the first time."
---
The study launched the first week of August, and Mohamed found himself, for the first time in months, mostly a spectator to his own company's most significant undertaking — Sarah coordinating across three hospital systems with a precision that made even James's operational competence look occasionally improvisational by comparison.
He visited the Louisville site once, midway through the second full month, watching a research nurse run a patient through the device's thirty-second scan with the same practiced efficiency she'd have brought to a blood pressure cuff.
"Mr. Delgado," the nurse said, checking the readout, "your numbers came back clean, but the device flagged early-stage kidney function decline. Nothing urgent, but your regular doctor is going to want to run a follow-up panel."
The patient, a man in his sixties who'd volunteered mostly out of curiosity and a modest stipend, absorbed the news with the particular stillness of someone recalibrating an assumption about his own body in real time. "Nobody's ever caught that before. I've had physicals every year."
"Standard panels don't always catch it this early. That's rather the point of the study." The nurse made her notes, unhurried, and Mohamed stood at the edge of the room, watching a stranger's ordinary Tuesday quietly reroute itself toward a doctor's appointment that might, in a few years, matter considerably more than either of them yet fully understood.
He introduced himself to Mr. Delgado afterward, in the waiting room, careful not to overstate his own role in the moment.
"You're the one who built this thing?" Delgado asked, studying him with open curiosity, the specific unguarded frankness of a man who'd long since stopped worrying about seeming impressed by anything at his age.
"I am. I wanted to see the study in person at least once, rather than just reading the data from a comfortable distance."
"Well, it caught something real, genuinely real. My father lost most of his kidney function in his sixties, never knew it was coming until it was already serious. If I get ahead of whatever this is because of thirty seconds and a machine, that's — " Delgado paused, searching for the word. "That's not small. Whatever you're getting paid for this eventually, it's not enough."
"I appreciate you saying that. I mean it."
"I mean it too. You should hear it plainly, not just read it in a data table somewhere." Delgado extended a hand, warm and certain, and Mohamed shook it standing in a hospital waiting room three states removed, in every practical sense, from the storage unit where any of this had actually started, though the distance felt, in that specific moment, considerably shorter than the calendar would technically suggest.
He kept a private tally again, the same habit from the original pilot study a year and a half earlier — not the accuracy percentage Sarah was building toward, but the simpler count of actual people whose lives had just shifted, in some small, easy-to-overlook way, because of thirty seconds and a device that had once been nothing but a schematic behind his own eyes. He added Delgado's name to the list that evening, alongside Walter's neuropathy and a dozen others he'd never stopped tracking even as the company itself had grown considerably too large for him to personally witness every single save.
The list had grown long enough by now that he sometimes forgot specific names between readings, a fact that troubled him more than he let himself admit out loud — as though forgetting a single name meant the person behind it had mattered less, when the truth was simply that scale itself made perfect individual memory impossible past a certain point, however much he wished otherwise.
---
The results came back in early December, four months of data collection compressed into a single document Sarah delivered to the whole team with visible, if characteristically restrained, satisfaction.
*Multi-site clinical study, final results:*
*1,500 patients, three sites*
*98.9% concordance across 500+ tracked conditions*
*Zero adverse events attributable to device use*
"That's actually higher than the original pilot," James said, checking the number against his own notes. "Ninety-eight point eight to ninety-eight point nine. That's not supposed to happen at scale — bigger studies usually find more edge cases, not fewer."
"It found plenty of edge cases," Sarah said. "We refined two calibration parameters based on early data from the first two hundred patients, which is exactly why interim analysis exists. The final number reflects a genuinely better-calibrated device, not a lucky sample. I'd be more suspicious of a number that didn't shift at all across four months of real-world data."
"Walk me through the two parameters," Mohamed said. "I want to actually understand what changed, not just trust that it did."
"The bioimpedance threshold for early-stage inflammatory markers was calibrated slightly too conservatively in the original design — it was catching genuine cases but flagging a higher false-positive rate than the pilot study's smaller sample had revealed. We tightened the threshold using the first two hundred patients' confirmed diagnoses as a calibration set, then validated the adjustment against the remaining thirteen hundred blind." Sarah pulled up a chart on her own laptop, turning it to face him. "The second adjustment was smaller — a slight recalibration of the optical array's baseline for patients with higher melanin concentrations, ensuring the accuracy held consistently across the full range of skin tones in the study population rather than skewing toward whichever demographic happened to dominate the smaller pilot."
"That's not a small thing to have caught," Mohamed said, recognizing immediately the specific weight of what she'd just described. "A device that performs inconsistently across different patients isn't actually working the way it claims to, no matter how impressive the headline number looks in isolation, and no reviewer worth their salt would ever let that distinction slide."
"It's the single most important thing a study this size is supposed to catch, honestly. I'd rather find that gap myself, in a controlled study, than have the FDA find it during review, or worse, have it surface after approval when real patients are actually relying on the result." Sarah closed her laptop, the gesture carrying the specific finality of someone who considered the matter fully settled and not worth revisiting. "This is exactly why I insisted on the larger, more diverse patient population instead of a cheaper, faster study. A number that only holds up for one demographic isn't a number worth submitting at all."
"How does this compare to what other diagnostic devices typically submit?" Mohamed asked.
"There's no real comparison. Nothing else on the market screens for anywhere close to five hundred conditions from a single non-invasive scan. Most submissions I reviewed at the agency covered one condition, maybe a handful if the device was unusually broad. This is the most comprehensive dataset I've personally seen cross a review desk in my entire career, and I saw a great many of them." Sarah closed her folder, the gesture carrying more weight than her usual clipped efficiency. "I'm submitting the full De Novo application this week. I expect the agency to assign a review team within thirty days, given the scale of what we're bringing them." Sarah gathered her materials briskly, already three steps ahead of the room in whatever came next.
---
The FDA's response arrived faster than Sarah had predicted, a formal acknowledgment within three weeks confirming a review team had been assigned, alongside an estimated timeline that Sarah read aloud to the assembled team with the specific flat delivery she reserved for information that mattered too much to editorialize.
"Twelve to eighteen months," she said. "That's realistic for a De Novo pathway with no predicate device, which is exactly what we're navigating — nobody's ever asked the agency to evaluate anything quite like this before, which cuts both ways. It means extra scrutiny. It also means, if we clear it, we'll have set the classification precedent every future device like ours gets measured against."
"What happens during those eighteen months, practically?" James asked, already thinking in terms of resource planning rather than abstraction. "Are we just waiting, or is there active work on our end?"
"Active work, mostly invisible from the outside. The review team will send information requests — clarifying questions about the data, requests for additional analysis, occasionally requests for supplementary testing we hadn't anticipated. I'll manage each request personally, and I expect most of them, given how thorough we've already been. The alternative — a company that submits minimal data and then scrambles reactively every time the agency asks a follow-up question — is exactly the pattern that turns eighteen months into three years, sometimes longer if the relationship with the review team sours along the way." Sarah's voice carried the specific confidence of someone who had spent eight years on the other side of exactly this process. "We built this submission to survive scrutiny. I don't expect surprises, though I'd be foolish to promise there won't be any."
"Eighteen months is a long time to wait," Priya said, still new enough to the company to ask the question more directly than the longer-tenured staff might have.
"It's a long time by the standard of an impatient person's calendar. It's actually fast, by the standard of how long this kind of review usually takes for something this novel." Sarah said it without any defensiveness, simply correcting the frame. "Fighting a regulatory timeline instead of using it productively burns a year for nothing. We won't do that. There's other work in the pipeline this whole time, and eighteen months from now, if this clears, it clears permanently — reimbursement pathways open, physicians can prescribe it without hesitation, insurance covers it. That's worth the wait."
**IMPACT EVENT: Multi-site clinical study — lives genuinely improved through early detection**
**1,500 patients, 0.2 TP per person (baseline), first-exposure multiplier — uncapped.**
**Total: 600 Tech Points.**
Mohamed felt the notification land in the corner of his vision, quiet and matter-of-fact, and nodded along with Sarah's point. "Agreed. And it's not just the approval itself. It's fifteen hundred people who now know something true about their own bodies that they didn't know four months ago, which is worth —"
**SYSTEM THRESHOLD REACHED: cumulative lives measurably improved exceeds 50,000.**
The words cut directly across his own sentence, bold and immediate, in a register he hadn't seen the System use in over three years — not the quiet, patient accumulation he'd grown used to, but something closer to an alarm.
"— worth — " Mohamed stopped mid-word, his own sentence dying in his throat, his whole attention wrenched sideways so abruptly that his hand actually went still on the table in front of him.
The room went quiet. James looked up first, then Sarah, then Priya, all three reading something in his sudden, total stillness that hadn't been there a half-second earlier.
"Mohamed?" James said, careful. "You okay?"
He cleared his throat, buying himself a second he didn't actually have. "I'm fine. Something's come up that I need to think through, and I need this space to do it in." He was already standing, the specific unhurried authority of a man who'd stopped needing to explain himself to anyone in this particular building. "Clear the lab for me. Everyone out for a few hours. I'll call you back when I'm ready."
"Of course." Sarah closed her folder without any visible concern, the specific professional grace of someone who'd learned, over a year of working alongside him, that this particular kind of sudden departure never meant anything was actually wrong. "We're essentially done with the agenda anyway."
"I'll finish the projections from home," James added, already gathering his things, unbothered. "Give us a call whenever."
Priya said nothing, just gathered her own materials with the mild, curious attention of someone still new enough to find these moments genuinely interesting rather than routine.
They filed out within minutes, the building emptying around him the way it always did when he needed it to, and Mohamed stayed exactly where he was, alone now in a lab that had, for the moment, become entirely his again.
---
He sat down at his own desk, the conference room's ordinary afternoon noise gone entirely quiet behind a closed door, and read the notification properly, in full, for the first time.
**Per-event Impact Point cap removed. Full value now paid on all qualifying events, past and future.**
**[TAP TO EXPAND: What was the cap?]**
He tapped it, and for the first time in over three years, more text appeared beneath the notification than he'd ever seen the System display before.
*Impact Points reward real-world benefit generated by your technologies reaching sentient life. Every sentient being who uses, benefits from, or is meaningfully affected by something you have built or deployed generates Impact Points, scaled to the significance of that benefit — human or otherwise, present or future, anywhere the reach of what you build eventually extends. This has always been the primary source of Tech Point accumulation — considerably more than quest completions or daily login accrual, which exist as supplementary mechanisms rather than the primary engine of progression.*
*Until this threshold, a protective cap limited how many Impact Points any single event could generate, regardless of scale. This existed to prevent instability before sufficient System Level and infrastructure existed to responsibly hold the resulting currency. Sustained, responsible resource use at scale sufficient to remove this protection has now been demonstrated. The cap will not return. Future events — including events reaching populations in the millions or billions — will pay their full, uncapped value.*
Mohamed read it twice, then a third time, the specific stillness of a man discovering that something he'd never questioned had, this entire time, been quietly incomplete. Three years. Three years of notifications arriving exactly as large as they were going to arrive, and he had never once wondered whether that was the whole truth of what they were worth, or simply the portion he'd been allowed to see.
Below the second block of text, another line sat waiting, small and easy to have missed on a first read.
**[TAP TO EXPAND: Currency tiers]**
He sat with that a moment before tapping it, something already turning over in the back of his own mind. He'd wondered, early on — genuinely early, back in the storage unit, before any of this had a name beyond a translucent overlay and a folding chair — whether Tech Points were the only kind of currency that existed, or simply the only kind he'd been shown. He'd never found an answer, and eventually the question had simply stopped occurring to him, buried under three years of more immediate things to actually build. He wondered, now, whether this was finally that answer arriving, three years later than he'd asked it.
He tapped it, and a new block of static text unfolded beneath the header, laid out plainly, nothing in its tone suggesting it had been waiting for him to ask anything at all.
*Five currency tiers exist, each corresponding to a stage of civilizational development. Tech Points represent Tier 1: planetary-scale technology. Tiers 2 through 5 exist above it, gated by System Level, each representing a considerably larger category of capability than anything currently visible in the Shop. Items priced in these higher tiers remain inaccessible until System Level advances sufficiently to unlock them. Their existence is no longer withheld as information.*
**[TAP TO EXPAND: Tier 2]**
He tapped it too, some part of him already bracing for the number.
*Tier 2: Quantum Points (QP), unlocked at System Level 11, corresponding to stellar-scale civilization. Conversion rate: 100,000,000 Tech Points = 1 Quantum Point. Tier 2 items are not currently viewable and will not become viewable until Level 11 is reached. This information is provided for planning purposes only.*
He read the conversion rate three times before it actually registered. One hundred million Tech Points for a single unit of whatever came next. He was, as of tonight, still working with a balance in the low hundreds of thousands — a fraction of a fraction of that particular ladder's very first rung, sitting here in a lab that had, until an hour ago, felt like the entire scope of what he'd built.
He sat with that for a long while, the lab quiet around him, turning over the specific vertigo of learning that the entire catalog he'd spent three years browsing — thousands of blueprints, knowledge packs, prices ranging from hundreds to millions of Tech Points — represented, apparently, only the first and smallest of five total tiers. Everything he had built so far — the battery, the water purifier, the solar panels, the diagnostic device now sitting in front of a review board, four years of what had felt, until an hour ago, like an extraordinary life's work — sat somewhere near the very bottom rung of a ladder he hadn't even known existed until tonight.
He felt something shift, sitting with that, that he didn't fully have language for yet. Not disappointment, exactly. Something closer to the opposite — a kind of restlessness he hadn't let himself feel in years, the specific hunger of a man realizing the room he'd been so carefully, patiently filling was smaller than he'd understood, and that there was considerably more room beyond it than he'd ever let himself imagine wanting. He thought, unbidden, of every careful, modest answer he'd given a reporter this year — *I had a good instinct, I did the work carefully* — and found himself, for the first time, faintly irritated by his own humility. He had built something nobody else on Earth could have built. He was tired, suddenly and completely, of being the quiet one in every room he walked into.
He didn't know yet what to do with that feeling. He only knew, sitting alone in a lab that had, until tonight, felt like the entire scope of what he'd built, that he wanted, for the first time in his life, to be recognized for exactly how large what he was building actually was — not modestly, not carefully, not in a register designed to make other people comfortable with his own size. He filed the feeling away, unfinished, the way he filed everything that mattered too much to resolve in a single evening.
It was nearly three hours before he finally stood up from the desk.
He walked the empty building once, alone, the way he sometimes did when a thought needed his legs moving as much as it needed his mind, past the lab bays and the loading dock and the conference room where Sarah had presented the study protocol that same afternoon, and found himself, eventually, standing in front of the original door-slab workbench James had insisted on relocating to every new facility rather than replacing it — the same battered piece of furniture that had once sat in a storage unit on Poplar Level Road, three years and an entire different life ago.
He didn't have anyone to tell. That was, he understood, standing there in the quiet, part of what made tonight feel the size it did — not just the information itself, but the specific weight of holding something this large entirely alone, the way he'd once held everything alone before Danielle, before James, before any of it had a name beyond his own two hands and a folding chair. He wasn't ready to share this one yet, and some part of him suspected he might not be ready for a long while. Five tiers. A cap he'd never known existed, silently limiting him this entire time.
He reached the small panel he'd installed himself, months earlier, tucked discreetly into the underside of his own desk drawer where nobody had any particular reason to look — a paging system he'd built quietly on a handful of weekend evenings, powered by a slim, unlabeled cell that never needed charging or replacing, running on nothing but the room's own ambient heat. He'd told no one it existed.
It wasn't complicated, as far as anything he built went — a short-range signal to a handful of small receivers he'd discreetly placed around the facility, James's office, Sarah's lab bay, Priya's desk, the front reception counter, nothing that could be traced back to any purchase or any vendor, nothing that appeared on a single facility blueprint James himself had ever reviewed.
He'd built it the previous spring, mostly out of the same instinct that had once made him lock a storage unit's door by hand every night regardless of how secure the lock actually was — not from any specific fear, just the quiet preference of a man who liked knowing he could reach the people he needed without depending on anyone else's schedule.
He pressed it once.
James, Sarah, and Priya were back within the hour, the same easy, unhurried competence they brought to everything, nobody asking how he'd reached them so quickly, nobody apparently finding it worth remarking on at all.
"Good timing," he said, settling back into his own chair with something steadier in his posture than the room had seen from him in a while. "That's handled now, and it's good news, though it's not something I've got room to explain tonight. Let's finish where we left off."
"You don't owe us an explanation," James said, closing his own laptop. "You've never once vanished on us for something that wasn't worth vanishing for."
"I appreciate that." Mohamed considered the room, genuinely grateful for the specific ease of people who'd stopped needing every gap explained. "Where were we?"
"Eighteen months, and whether it's worth the wait," Sarah said, picking the thread back up without any visible impatience. "I'd just said it clears permanently once it clears."
"Right. I agree with you completely. Eighteen months of patience for something permanent is exactly the trade I'd make again, every time." He let the meeting close out properly from there, the ordinary rhythm of the room settling back into place around him as though the last three hours had barely happened at all, and found something quietly steadying in how easily it had.
He locked the building properly behind him afterward, drove home in a quiet that felt considerably larger than the drive itself, and lay awake most of the night turning the shape of it over without arriving anywhere close to finished.
---
He told Danielle about the whole study, results and Delgado both, three days after the December notification — a genuinely ordinary Sunday evening, unconnected to anything that had happened alone in the lab earlier that week, the two of them sharing a quiet dinner at her apartment the way they had most Sundays for two straight years.
"Fifteen hundred people," she said, turning the number over with visible weight. "Not an abstraction. Fifteen hundred actual people who got a piece of information about their own bodies that might genuinely change how long they live, or how well."
"Sarah built the whole study almost entirely herself. I mostly just watched it happen, which felt strange after two years of being the person everything ran through personally."
"How did that feel? Being a spectator to your own company's biggest milestone."
Mohamed answered honestly, the way he'd learned to over two years of her asking him exactly this kind of thing at exactly the moments it mattered most. "Good, mostly. A little strange, the way James's hiring system felt strange a few weeks back. I keep discovering new versions of the same lesson — that building something sturdy enough to run without my constant personal involvement isn't a loss. It's the actual proof the thing is real."
"I think you're finally starting to believe that instead of just repeating it back to me because it's the correct thing to say." Danielle smiled, warm and certain, reaching for his hand across the table. "Tell me about the patient. The one you met at the Louisville site. You mentioned him on the phone but you rushed past it."
"Mr. Delgado. Sixties, volunteered mostly out of curiosity. The device caught early kidney decline his regular physicals had missed for years. His father lost most of his own kidney function around the same age, never saw it coming." Mohamed found the memory landing with more weight, telling it slowly this time instead of rushing past it the way he apparently had on the phone. "He told me, plainly, standing in a hospital waiting room, that whatever I'm eventually paid for this isn't enough. I don't think I've fully sat with that sentence until right now, saying it out loud to you."
"Sit with it now, then. I'm not going anywhere." Danielle's voice carried real weight underneath its warmth. "That's the actual thing you built, Mohamed. Not the licensing deals, not the government attention, not even the eighteen-month approval timeline. A man in a waiting room in Louisville, getting a chance to get ahead of something his father never got the chance to see coming. I think you let the business version of this story crowd out the human version too often, and I want you to notice, right now, which version actually matters."
"You're right. I do let the business version crowd it out. I think it's easier to hold the spreadsheet than the actual weight of what the spreadsheet represents."
"That's honest. I appreciate it more than you probably realize." She squeezed his hand once, warm and certain. "Eighteen months until approval, though. That's a long runway. How do you feel about the wait?"
"Patient, mostly. Sarah's right that rushing it wouldn't actually get us there faster. I've had a lot of practice waiting for things that mattered by now — the furnace, the diagnostic device itself, that big purchase I still haven't fully explained to you, you." He caught the specific weight of that last word only after he'd said it, and found he didn't want to take it back.
"Me?"
"You. Waiting to be ready for you, back at the beginning. Waiting to figure out how honest I could actually be, one conversation at a time. Eighteen months for the FDA feels almost easy, compared to some of the waiting I've already survived."
"That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me, buried inside a sentence about federal regulatory timelines." Danielle laughed, the sound filling the space between them with the particular warmth that had grown between them, unhurried, across two straight years. "I'll take it. However it arrived."
"Can I ask you something, while we're on the subject of waiting?" Mohamed said, the question arriving before he'd fully decided to voice it.
"Go ahead."
"Do you ever get tired of it? The waiting, I mean. Eighteen months for the FDA is one thing. You've been waiting considerably longer than that for the actual door to open all the way."
Danielle considered the question a while before answering. "Sometimes. Not often, and never in a way that makes me doubt staying. But yes, some nights I do wonder what it would feel like to just know, instead of trusting that the not-knowing means something good is still coming eventually." She met his eyes directly, warm and unflinching. "I don't say that to pressure you. I say it because you asked, and I promised you a long time ago that I'd give you the honest answer instead of the comfortable one, even when the honest one costs a little more to say out loud."
"Thank you for that. Every single time."
"You're welcome. Every single time." She smiled, the expression easing the weight of the exchange back into something lighter. "Now finish your dinner before it gets cold. Federal regulatory timelines can wait until after dessert."
They stayed at the table a while longer, unhurried, the apartment settling into the particular hush of a Sunday evening winding down toward Monday, and Mohamed thought that whatever the next eighteen months actually asked of him, he was, for the first time facing a wait this long, entirely unafraid of how it might end.
He didn't sleep well that night, his mind still turning over the shape of five tiers he couldn't see past the first of — a private weight he hadn't mentioned to her, and didn't yet know how to — and found himself, sometime past two in the morning, sitting alone at his own kitchen table with a legal pad, writing without any clear plan for what the writing was actually for.
Not notes. Something closer to an argument — a structural insight about materials chemistry that had been sitting half-formed in his head for weeks, finally finding its own shape now that his mind refused to quiet down enough to sleep. He filled four pages before he noticed the sun starting to come up, and looked at what he'd written with the mild surprise of a man who hadn't consciously decided to write anything at all.
He didn't know yet what he'd do with it. He folded the pages and put them in his jacket pocket anyway, the way a person keeps something they aren't ready to throw away and aren't yet sure is worth keeping either.