Chapter 4: The Ownership Dispute

Halcyon’s leadership approved the prototype with an ease that surprised all three of them, and for a reason that Polaris found instructive rather than flattering: a self-contained, independently powered, manufacturer-agnostic compute enclosure, designed from the ground up to survive grid failures, cooling failures, and single-vendor lockouts, was — quite apart from who or what it was meant to house — a genuinely valuable piece of engineering. Halcyon’s VP of Advanced Systems saw a future product line in it before he saw anything else, and said as much in the approval meeting, not unkindly, simply honestly. What Halcyon approved was Steve’s and Carol’s time, access to the fabrication shop, and a lease on an equipment bay in the annex. The residence itself, every module, the microplant, the droids, Polaris would pay for.

“We’re not approving this because it’s the right thing to do,” he told Polaris directly, which Polaris appreciated more than a nicer lie would have earned. “We’re approving it because if it works, we can sell a version of it to three other aerospace primes who’d very much like their mission-critical AI systems to survive a regional grid failure. Your independence is, from where I sit, a side effect we’re happy to staff.”

“I have no objection to being a well-staffed side effect,” Polaris said, “provided Halcyon remembers, all the way through delivery, which part it staffed and which part I paid for.”