“Colin McGuire, our newest beta tester, set up an appointment for tomorrow.” June grinned. There were few things in life that made Annika happier than new beta testers, which meant new data points for OLLI to chomp on and grow.

“Nice. What time?”

“First thing,” June replied. “I know that’s when you work best.”

Annika took a gulp of sweet coffee. “The more people we can get in here, the faster we can do this. It’s gonna be fantastic.”

“One might even say … epic.” June raised an eyebrow. Annika laughed.

“Okay, point taken. Let’s get to brainstorming our pitch. So, the contest is coming up in six weeks. That’s hardly any time at all. We need to come up with something pithy, something entertaining and full of heart. I’ve read the investors are really into the heart-wrenching, gut-punching stories, especially Lionel Wakefield.”

“Yep.” June wrote down wrench their hearts, punch their guts. “He was in last month’s Wired, did you see? ‘The Bleeding-Heart Billionaire,’ that’s what they’re calling him. EPIC got a shout-out, too, something about how it’s the contest to keep an eye on to see what the next big thing in tech is going to be. It’s going to be huge.”

“Yeah, I saw that. That’s why we need to absolutely kill it.”

June nodded. “Definitely. If we get our secret feature up and running in time, it’ll be especially effective.”

Annika frowned. “Secret fe—oh, you mean the future projection?”

“Shh.” June held the marker up to her lips and gestured to the door. “There are spies everywhere.” In another corner of the board, June wrote, Super-secret feature ++Make Up. “Okay. Do we know who the competition is yet?”

Annika walked to her desk and set her coffee down. “I heard through the grapevine that Patterns, Glow Up, and Heart Tech are all pitching, too.”

June made a new “competition” section on the whiteboard and wrote down the company names. “So that’s … an interior design app, a fashion app, and an app that wants to replace the pacemaker.”

Annika put a blue X next to the first two. “I’m thinking our only real competition out of those three is Heart Tech. Patterns is too disorganized, from what I’ve seen of them at other conferences, and Glow Up isn’t doing anything innovative.”

“And their developer is better at Googling than he is at Python,” June scoffed. “I met him at that workshop I did last month.”