With that innocuous sounding proverbial distress flare sent up she closed the browser and turned to one of the labs offline PCs to start the procedure of switching on the mysterious device in the center of the room. She would take her time as she did not want to get through with this any faster than she had to, but clearly Ito had told the man that the big unwieldy looking machine had worked. And almost on the first test. Of course, he couldn’t know that she had been just as surprised as he was when it had.

* * *

‘looking forward to seeing him. landing at 4pm.’

That was all Ayala’s reply read and it was all Madeline needed. Ayala had seen the message and gotten on the next flight from wherever she was to Minneapolis, which was a two-hour drive from the facility. Somewhat luckily for Madeline, Ayala didn’t really mean she was landing at 4pm, she meant she would be arriving here at the Matsuoka plant at 4pm.

Unfortunately, she could not delay the demo till Ayala arrived, especially as her team already knew the machine worked. If it had been just her and the president she could fake a system failure, but while she had been able to keep the team in the dark about the full workings of the machine, she was not really that knowledgeable herself either. Rather than risk doing anything that might damage the machine or tip her hand to the rest of the team, she would have to give the CEO a demo. Well, part of one.

Like the machine’s original inventors back on Mobilius, her team had also not realized the full potential for the machine when it had first been invented. But John had told her what it would truly be able to do and now that she had seen it in action she could not help but believe him.

So despite her reluctance, it was with genuine excitement that she prepared the machine. An excitement that was clearly visible on her face when she announced that they were ready a little over two hours later. She came to stand in front of the president and smiled. The rest of the five-person team was there by now, busying themselves with the various measuring and tracking devices that they had set up around the big machine in the room’s center like orbiting satellites around a robotic sun.

She stood there smiling for a moment, she might as well enjoy it, and then turned to an extremely clean-looking man standing in a stereotypical white jacket to her right and asked him to open the sphere. The technician bowed, turned on his heels, and walked over to join three other similarly dressed men standing around the large machine behind her.