in a burst of inspiration. “Do you remember five years ago? We’d just had the idea for PIVOT. We were in my room—”
“We’d finished a pizza,” she said. “I remember because I’d started lifting that week and I wanted to order four more and you kept telling me to order one at a time.” She snickered.
“That was a lifechanging moment,” Jacob said. “Not a night we had pizza. Focus on the big picture.”
She laughed. “I’ll tell you that the next time you’re hungry. Or…I would if I wasn’t afraid to die. You get hangry, man.”
Nick watched them banter good-naturedly. He was glad they weren’t a couple anymore. The bickering that was so easy between them as friends had acquired a bad edge to it while they were together. He’d been worried their friendship would be ruined, but they’d both gotten over the awkwardness quickly.
“Did you picture any of this that night?” he asked them when they had finished their whispered argument.
“Any of this?” Amber shook her head. “Not a single part. Hell, when we got this place, I was over the moon. I couldn’t imagine having an office that wasn’t in my living room. As for the rest of it…” She looked out toward the corridor and they could hear the beeps of the truck and the occasional shout. No one sounded panicked. The Diatek crew seemed to view all of this as a fascinating challenge rather than merely another boring job, which had set the PIVOT group at ease.
“I know I never pictured it,” Jacob said with certainty. “I was sure we would do some good work, hit a roadblock somewhere, and all get office jobs.”
“You never told us that,” his friends said at the same time.
“I didn’t want to be a downer.”
Nick shook his head. “And now we’re working for one of the main contractors with the Department of Defense.”
“We also have salaries now,” the other man reminded them, “and we’re millionaires.”
They shook their heads.
“That one still doesn’t seem real,” she said.
“Live in the Bay Area long enough and it won’t be,” Nick joked. “Plus, what’s a millionaire around here? Nothing. Dime a dozen. We’d only be special if we were billionaires.”
“Given that we still own forty-nine percent of the PIVOT shares, that might happen.” Jacob shook his head in wonder. “What do you all think now? Do you think we’ll pull it off?”
“I think if it’s possible, we will,” Amber said. “Before, tons of stuff could have gotten in our way. Now, the only thing we have to worry about is whether we can think hard enough to do it. Justin’s results are groundbreaking in and of themselves, and we should have a much bigger suite of test subjects within a couple of years.”
Nick whistled. “And then, before you know it, they’ll be flying drones in some kind of Ender’s-Game-for-Coma-Patients dystopia.”
“Why are you always so negative?” The other man threw an elbow at him.
“I’m a realist,” he said with dignity.
She snorted. “You’re both pie-in-the-sky dreamers. I’m the realist here. And I’ll tell you what, one of the first things we’ll do is hire an accountant.”
“Uh-huh,” Jacob said. “And one of the next things is you firing the accountant because you can’t stand giving up any of your work.” His phone buzzed and he glanced at it. “They’re all ready. Apparently, it was relatively simple. Wait a second, he’s still typing…he wants to know if there’ll be popcorn at the Diatek labs or if we should stop on the way.”
Amber burst out laughing. “That man. Anna Price has no idea how much of her budget will go to popcorn, does she? And he’ll weasel his way into getting that popcorn machine back, I know it.”
“I’m sure he was the one who bought it from us on eBay,” Nick said. “DrDPopcorn was the username, and it was created on the day we sold it.”
“Jesus.” Jacob rolled his eyes. “That man must give his financial advisor heart attacks.”
“This may surprise you,” she said as they left, “but not everyone has a financial advisor.”
“What?”
“Oh, you sheltered little rich boy.”
Nick waited until their voices drifted away, put his hands in his pockets, and looked around at the room. So much had happened there—their first whole prototype, the first test drive for each of them in the pods, and the marathon of late nights as they adapted the video game they had bought. There was no way to count how many boxes of takeout had been consumed there or how many pots of