Mētā Headquarters – Menlo Park, California

Inside the meeting room, for everyone seated around that table, the room felt suffocating.

Markus had been silent for almost a full minute, and that silence was worse than yelling. He stood at the head of the conference table, hands clasped behind his back.

The Mētā executives avoided his gaze.

Finally, he spoke.

"Ten years. Ten years of development. Hundreds of billions in R&D and all of it looks like a toy next to this," Markus said quietly, gesturing to the paused video on a tv screen.

His voice wasn't raised, but it cut like glass.

"Lucid appears out of nowhere, and in three days, it has every tech board, investor, and consumer on the planet losing their minds. The delivery system alone has rewritten logistics modeling. The AI integration—impossible by our standards. And you're telling me we still have no idea how they did it?"

The head of R&D swallowed. "We—sir, we're still running the disassembly sequence on the leaked video data. We compared it against every known neuromorphic and quantum-lattice design. Nothing matches. It's like the device has zero overhead. Infinite bandwidth on local inference."

"You're describing magic, not engineering," Markus' jaw flexed.

"Yes, sir," the R&D head said weakly. "That's… that's pretty much what our engineers are calling it internally."

A nervous chuckle escaped someone at the far end of the table, and Mark's eyes snapped toward them. The chuckle died immediately.

He stepped forward, leaning both hands on the table. "Magic doesn't exist. Competence does. And apparently, ours doesn't."

The room went still again.

"Every investor, every analyst, every agency is looking at us," Mark continued. "You all know what they're asking? Not how we'll compete, but whether we're obsolete. You want to talk about innovation curves? Lucid flattened it."

"So tell me, gentlemen and ladies—what's the R&D department doing besides feeding me diagnostics that tell me what I already know?"

The head engineer spoke again, nervously, "We're attempting replication of the base AI model, but without a Lucid unit to reverse-engineer, we're blind. Their cloud layer's completely sealed. Even our deepest data interceptors can't breach the authentication handshake."

Markus' tone went colder. "You're saying it's unhackable."

The engineer hesitated. "…Yes, sir. At least for now."

Markus' expression didn't change, but the air seemed to thin around him. He exhaled slowly through his nose, then looked toward the head of the neural interfaces division.

"What about the sensory mesh project? The one you said would allow real-time immersion without induced neural feedback lag?"

The woman looked up nervously. "We—ah—we are still experiencing some difficulty but we are close, sir."

Mark tapped the table lightly. "You're close?"

"Yes, sir."

"Useless!"

For a long moment, Markus just stood there, his thoughts flying all over the place.

Finally, he said quietly, "Alright. I've heard enough."

He turned toward the corner of the room, where a glass partition separated the Superintelligence Division from the rest of the meeting area. Behind it, a smaller team waited.

"You," Markus said, pointing toward the partition. "Superintelligence team. Your turn."

The head of the division, Dr. Isaac Renn, straightened in his chair and pushed through the door to join the main room. His colleagues followed, clearly uneasy.

Markus gestured for him to speak.

"Status."

Renn adjusted his glasses, voice steady but cautious. "We've spent the last forty-eight hours running model inference comparisons against Nova's AI behavior. Based on the telemetry data from live-streamed Lucid sessions, it confirmed that each device seems to run a localized, autonomous learning core. Not a distributed cluster, but individual instances that evolve independently."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning," Renn said, "that every Lucid unit effectively trains itself. They're running what could be described as a miniaturized general intelligence. The hardware acts as both the host and the training environment."

Murmurs rippled through the executives.

Markus' tone was flat. "You're saying Nova managed to put a superintelligent agent inside every headset?"

"Not quite superintelligent," Renn said quickly. "But it's not static either. The AI adapts dynamically to user context. We estimate each Lucid contains roughly three to five times the compute density of our latest cloud model, compressed to a wearable substrate."

Markus stared at him. "That's impossible."

"It should be but it's not," Renn said quietly.

The room fell silent.

"So we're not just competing with a company that's a few steps ahead. We're competing with something that may not even be human-made," Markus asked

Renn hesitated. "There's… speculation, sir, that the Lucid system was designed by a recursive model. A self-improving AI."

Markus turned his gaze on him sharply. "You're suggesting Nova's core was built by another AI."

Renn didn't flinch. "We can't confirm it, but the design language in the compiled binaries doesn't match any known programming syntax. It's not human-readable. It's… algorithmically generated."

"If that's true, do you know this means?" Markus asked.

"Yes, sir. It means that Lucid and the delivery drones was built by an extremely intelligence AGI or being controlled by one, proving that an super artificial intelligence can be built."

Markus looked at Renn, his eyes narrowing slightly. "Then I want to know one thing: does it serve its creators—or itself?"

"Because if it's the latter," he said softly, "we're already too late."

The room stayed silent

Markus stood there for a moment longer, one hand in his pocket, thumb grazing the edge of his phone. Then, without turning around, he asked, "Where's Legal?"

Two seats down, a woman in a charcoal suit straightened immediately. "Here, sir."

He turned his head slightly, eyes on her. "What's the progress on the lobbying front? I told you to start pushing through the regulatory committees earlier this week."

The woman hesitated, before responding, "We did, sir. Our lobbyists have already met with members of the Commerce Committee, the FCC, and the Technology Oversight Board. But—" she paused, carefully choosing her words "—it's complicated."

Markus turned fully toward her now, crossing his arms. "Complicated how?"

She exhaled slowly and answered, "Nova Technologies doesn't fall under any existing framework. Their products are distributed entirely through aerial systems—drones that don't register under any national airspace database. They don't ship through conventional channels, they don't use commercial logistics, and they don't store any traceable data within publicly accessible networks."

Markus frowned. "Meaning they don't technically violate any law."

"Exactly," she said, nodding. "We've already tried to get the FAA involved, but the drones operate autonomously and vanish the moment delivery completes. Legally speaking, there's no entity to prosecute. And because the company's website is hosted on a closed-loop private cloud, outside the jurisdiction of known data centers, even the Cyber Division can't locate a root server."

Markus rubbed his chin. "What about financial pressure? We still have influence with the SEC and the trade regulators."

"We've already filed the necessary complaints," she said carefully. "But the problem is… Nova doesn't sell through any recognized exchange or corporate brokerage. Their transactions are direct-to-consumer through encrypted digital channels. Payments don't go through any conventional payment processor. There's no financial trail. None that we can find."

Markus' eyes narrowed. "So we can't hit them with compliance regulations."

"No, sir. They've built something closer to a sovereign system—completely detached from oversight. Even their corporate registration in Delaware is protected under a banking incubation clause that falls under J.P. Morgan's umbrella. Legally, they're insulated."

The silence stretched.

Markus looked down at the table, his knuckles tapping once against the wood. "So we've lobbied, filed, and pressured every connection we have—and we still can't touch them."

"Yes, sir," she said quietly. "That's the situation for now. We'll keep pushing, but unless a new law is drafted specifically targeting autonomous private networks, there's nothing we can use. And even if we get one through Congress, it could take months—maybe longer."

Markus' jaw tightened. "Who knows how many units they would had released by then?"

Nobody answered.

He walked back to the head of the table and sat down slowly. For a moment, he said nothing, just stared at his folded hands.

"So," he said finally, voice lower now, almost to himself. "They built a company that answers to no one, hides behind a private financial fortress, deploys from the sky, and runs technology even our top labs can't reproduce."

The woman from Legal looked uneasy as she spoke, "Sir, we'll keep applying pressure where we can. If we can't go through legal channels, we'll try public opinion. Influence campaigns. Narrative shaping. But I'll be honest—it's difficult when no one dislikes them. Everyone just wants their product."

Mark's gaze dropped to her again. "Then make them doubt it."

She blinked. "Sir?"

"Every empire falls the same way," he said quietly. "Not through attack. Through doubt. If you can't regulate them, discredit them. Start working the press networks, the investor boards, safety regulators—anything that can sow hesitation. People trust what they think they understand. Nova's biggest strength right now is mystery. Make that their weakness."

The woman hesitated, then nodded. "Understood."

"We don't get left behind," he said quietly. "Not by them. Not by anyone."

No one replied, but the unspoken truth filled the room; they have already been left behind.

***

Back in the other world, Liam parked in front of the restaurant and stepped out of the car.

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