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"Another question, if I may," I said.

He nodded. "Shoot, kid."

"You're staying here…meaning you're not going to be the one showing me what's what on-site?"

"I've considered this at length, and I feel that my presence on-site would not be a net positive. The rest of the staff tend to lose focus when I'm there, and the project is at a critical juncture. It will be best for the project if I allow Conrad, the senior project manager, to show you what you need to know." A pause. "Any other questions?"

I snorted. "Only a billion."

“I asked you half a billion, so it's only fair if you ask me a billion, I suppose." Thorvaldsen slid into the booth opposite where I was sitting, tapping the tabletop as a gesture for me to sit. I did, and he indicated that Tea should take a seat as well. She hesitated over whether to sit beside me or Linus, although he hasn't invited me to use his first name yet. She took the bench beside Linus, sitting ramrod stiff and straight, expressionless and perfectly still, her intense green gaze locked on a spot just over my left shoulder.

The bar was technically open, but it was a Wednesday, so we were empty, except for Rog, our diehard regular who showed up at 11:45 every day to drink half a dozen pints and watch SportsCenter; he never says a word, either, just sits there and nurses his beers for a few hours and then goes off to do who knows what. Rikki, our weekday opening bartender, was behind the bar rotating the bottle stock, her platinum blonde ponytail swinging; the clink and rattle of glass bottles was a dissonant counterpoint to the 90s grunge playlist that Rikki prefers when she’s behind the bar.

"So. Your questions." Thorvaldsen ran a blunt, rounded fingernail through a deep groove in the old, glossy tabletop.

"Well, first and foremost…why me? I have to assume you have a whole, like, dossier on me, yeah? So you know who my uncle is. But I haven't accomplished anything even remotely worth mentioning, so…why me?"

Thorvaldsen didn't reply for a fairly long time—nearly a minute. "I do almost nothing in what most people would call the normal way." He put a heavy emphasis on the penultimate word and glanced at Commander Tiernan. "Right, Tea?"

"In my extremely limited experience with you thus far, I would say that's a true statement," the diminutive woman said, her expression once again giving away absolutely nothing—she could give lessons on holding a poker face to a professional poker player.

"I do not hire the personnel one would expect," Thorvaldsen said, "and I do not hire them in the way one would expect—as you have both come to find out firsthand. I value mindset, motivation, and independent thought. Experience is commonplace. I can throw a stick and hit a hundred highly qualified software engineers with tens of thousands of hours of experience. I can throw a different stick and hit a hundred more engineers with quals in every manner of coding that exists. That shit is cheap, kid. But finding a competent coder with creativity, who is self-motivated, and who is seeking a career path without relying on his family connections for advancement? That speaks to me." He glances at Tea—Commander Tiernan. "Do you know who his uncle is?"

She shook her head in the negative, black hair swaying gently at her chin. "No. Should I?"

"Xavier Badd."

A slender eyebrow arched. "Oh? The guy who sells the cute little toy robot sets?"

Linus let out a breath that somehow sounded disappointed. "Ai-yi-yi. The little toy robot sets? Try again, Tea. Xavier Badd has single-handedly built an entire industry and cottage industry around those little bot-sets. They're deceptively simple yet mind-blowingly advanced. They've engendered a whole generation of coders and designers and builders who've created all sorts of fascinatingly creative inventions with that tech. What he's working on now? The nanotechnology? Groundbreaking isn't strong enough of a word. The man is working in realms only science fiction has gone, thus far.” His eyes went to me, then. "That you're not banging down your uncle's door begging for a spot on that team is a wonder to me, boy."

That's a sore spot for me—I am, in fact, salivating and rabid to be part of that project—my pride, however, simply wouldn't allow me to cut the line of talent waiting for a place; and let's just say that the line is decades long.

Thorvaldsen didn't miss a trick, it seems. "You want that, don't you?"

I sighed, nodded. "More than just about anything."

"Just about being the key phrase."

I nodded again. "Exactly. Call it pride, maybe. I dunno. I know my talent, and I know my worth. I know what I can do, and I know that I've just gotten started. And I also know that in a lot of ways, I'm an idiot. I should just ask Uncle X for a job."

"Uncle X," Thorvaldsen said, chuckling. "You refer to one of the greatest scientific minds in several generations as Uncle X. Remarkable." He huffs another soft laugh. "Continue."

"Well…I just…" I shrug, shake my head, hunt for the right words to explain my decision, something I’ve struggled to do my whole life satisfactorily. "I want to earn it. It's not really about the appearance of nepotism; I don't give much of a fuh—crap—about that. I love coding. I'm freakishly good at it. I'm just mechanically inclined in general. And the things Uncle X is doing are, as you've pointed out, groundbreaking stuff. I would give my left…um, lung…to be part of what he's doing. But some part of me just won’t let me take the easy way. I've tried. I've drafted emails and texts to him, I've had the phone in my hand ready to call him, and I can’t ever make myself do it. I just have to earn it, the hard way, like an idiot. It's honestly frustrating as all heh—um, heck, Mr. Thorvaldsen."

He gave me a long, intense look. "Well, first of all, call me Linus. Second, my number one rule for working for me is to never, ever censor yourself. Drop the F-bomb. Tell me my idea is dumber than duck shit. Tell me I'm making a mistake."

I nodded. "Heard."

"Do you know anything about me?" he asked. "Beyond what's in the popular media, I mean." His gaze goes from me to Commander Tiernan and back, making the question for us both.

I shake my head. "Not really, no. I…well, to be totally honest, at first I thought the emails from your company were a joke or a prank or a phishing scam. So I did make sure they were legit. I know LMT Tech has fingers in all sorts of pies—telecom, spaceflight, cloud computing, quantum computing. I've heard rumors of AI, and if I had to guess based on what you’ve told me thus far, I’d guess that my job is going to be in the AI field somehow. But you, personally? No. All I know is what's on Wikipedia. I don’t pay attention to gossip, but I do know there's not much of that surrounding you."

"Tea?" he asks.

She shrugs. "I only know a little more than him." She said this without so much as a look or gesture my way. "Fifty-six, an only child, parents are…" she trails off, looking up and to the left. "Jens and Margrethe Thorvaldsen. You were born in Denmark, and your family moved here when you were thirteen. You attended public school in Silicon Valley, where your father and mother both worked. You attended M-I-T on a scholarship and graduated with honors. All known data on your personal life ceases at your junior year at M-I-T, until you exploded onto the list of richest people on the planet just under a decade ago—your initial fortune was made through the invention of a piece of machinery that made the installation of underground cables exponentially cheaper and easier. Beyond that, all I could find short of a FOIA request was a list of subsidiaries and investments." She pronounced the acronym FOY-uh.

Linus eyed her, almost warily. “That is quite a bit more than I thought you'd find." He thought for a moment, then continued. "My father was an upper-echelon software engineer for a dot-com startup, something to do with GPS navigation, and my mother was a graphic designer for a boutique video game company. So, I grew up around all that. My father taught me coding at the same time I was learning to read and write—in Danish, I mean, as a young child. I designed my own app at ten and was nearly expelled for selling it to my classmates."