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Applause breaks out from the crowd. I turn my head toward the conference room, slip my feet back into my pumps and rise.
Adam stands with me. “I guess I’m up next.”
“Do you have—”
“The presentation notes organized according to your cute little color-coded system? Yes.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the index card binders that I like to use. “Right here. In fact, I re-organized them last night to make the flow better.”
I narrow my eyes.Is he getting cheeky?“I see you didn’t need my help.”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
I look at him for a few seconds. “What do you have planned?”
“Nothing.”
He so does.
I sigh because he’s the boss and it doesn’t really matter. Whatever he announces, I can make it work. “Remember to—”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“I do,” he says, his gaze intent on mine.
My chest rises and falls on a shaky breath. I’m nervous for him. Not because I think he’ll fail but because I know how much doing well means to him.
Without another word, I jut my chin at the door.
Adam grabs a lanyard from the table, slides it over his head and strides confidently toward the lights of the main room. I stay back a few minutes and then follow in the same direction.
Vision Techbanners are strung all around the conference room, proudly proclaiming the company sponsorship. This is the first round of the competition and the excitement is high.
Long tables hold the most unique and cutting-edge inventions of the year. Holo-boards reveal summaries of the devices as well as the headshots of up-and-coming inventors.
Adam is already at his table. The cameras are pointed at him, sending footage of his face to the giant screen on the stage.
He looks calm and confident in front of the cameras. It’s baffling why he refuses to do a single magazine photoshoot or interview. Not only would it boost exposure for Vision Tech, but he would be an ace at it.
“One of the issues we found when creating the MTB,” Adam says, pointing to the headband device that allows deaf music students to ‘experience’ the vibration of an instrument, “is battery life. The technology of our time still has severe restrictions on energy usage. Sorry to that little bunny, but after a while, energy dies out.”
Chuckles break through the room.
A camera flashes.
They’re eating this up.
Adam’s brown eyes slide over the crowd. “Although we settled on removable batteries, I felt intense dissatisfaction. There had to be another way to improve the energy source. I just had to find it.”
The other inventors start bobbing their heads. They’re all driven by that primal sense of wanting more, knowing there’s a different way, abetterway to do something, and fighting tirelessly to make that vision in their heads a reality.
Working with Adam forced me to appreciate a person’s ‘charge into the unknown’ spirit. Even if that run-first, figure-it-out-later mentality is why so many inventors are broke.
“That’s why I went back to the drawing board and created the world’s smallest, self-sustaining, non-nuclear battery.”
Oohs break out in the room.
I don’t even bat an eyelash.
