The Magnificent Eight

"It's not just you Amy." I offered her an olive branch. "Well it is mostly you, and our friends as well. But, I haven't made things any better either." She nodded sharply. I laughed sadly and she bowed her head for a minute unable to meet my eye.

"Tim..." I nodded my attention. "I don't want to turn this into another version of the night we confronted you but what will it take for you to help keep the company afloat?" She was painfully vulnerable in her complete openness and honesty.

I had thought about it already but pretended to consider it while I took the time to study her. She had dark smudges under her eyes carefully concealed under a layer of makeup. Her normally animated face looked slack and tired and her body posture was that of a beaten woman. I tried to find the strong world class athlete I remembered but she wasn't there. I felt a chocking pain all over again. She had broken my heart and when I had an opportunity to try fix us, I had instead made things worse and there were no winners only losers.

"Ok... Here's what it will take. I will have full access to the ten bar to run the project. I will run the project alone without any input from any of you. I will deliver a working prototype on or before the time limit and I will take 50% of the gross profit in perpetuity if we obtain orders for it. Lastly the patent will be in my name only but Drive Tek will have the exclusive manufacturing rights.

"Her eyes were wide with shock at the offer. It gave me everything but it gave them a whole lot of money as well and it offered Drive Tek the ability to keep trading and if successful the battery would make everybody rich. I would just be much richer.

"Fifty percent Tim?" She gasped. "Is that fair? They're your friends... They've all been working towards turning this company into a success together."

"Why are you excluding yourself from what you just said? Are you not a part of this?"

She looked at me with quiet determination. "I'll make you a counter offer. Her eyes were moist but she unconsciously squared her shoulders. "Make it one third to you in royalties with the company retaining two thirds of the gross and I'll sell my shares now and leave today."

It was my turn to be shocked. "Why Amy? You've worked just as hard as everybody else in this company so why leave now? Even with my fifty percent in royalties you still stand to make much more if the prototype works as envisioned than cashing out now."

"You don't know do you?" she shook her head. "It's all turned to shit. That fucking stupid night..." She took in a long shaky breath. "Carla has filed for a legal separation. Hugo is walking about in a complete daze. Olivia is working from home and only interacts via email. Gary is out the office all the time. Jarrod is pulling fifteen to sixteen hour days including weekends trying to keep up without you there and has become so grouchy that even Michelle is avoiding him and the way they're talking to each other is driving a wedge in their business and personal relationship."

My shoulders sagged. I knew about Hugo and Carla but had no idea it had become so bad. "Uh..." I was trying to formulate words and all I could come up with was: "What, what are you going to do Amy?"

She shook her head at me. "Why?"

"Why, what?"

"Why do you want to know?"

Because I love you. But instead I shrugged my shoulders helplessly.

"You didn't even open the letter I left you" She was accusing but her voice had no sting. "You simply dropped off your wedding band and your lawyer sent me the power of attorney on the house." She slowed down and wouldn't say more. I guessed I no longer had access to her heart or mind. We were over.

She was going one way and I was going another.

We reconvened the meeting and I made my offer: "With due consideration to what's good for everybody and after talking to Amy, here is my offer. I want full access to the ten bar to run the project which I will run alone without any input from any of you. I will deliver a working prototype on or before the time limit and I will take 33.3% of the gross profit as a royalty against invoiced orders in perpetuity. The patent will be registered exclusively in my name and I want my company shares to be bought out at the current valuation by end of today."

I stood up "The offer is open for today only." Tomorrow the royalties are thirty four point three percent and will go up by one percent per day for the next sixty-six days at which time I go back to my original point of calling the Tesla board and telling them the project's a bust. I will then probably re-negotiate the project myself." -- Mike drop.

Everyone except Amy and my legal team were up and talking at the same time. I asked Erik to complete the paperwork and walked out.

Turns out they agreed in the end. I had full access to the money for the project and my shares paid out and in my bank account.

___________________________

I drove to my parents and spent three days with them. I told them I'd be leaving Springfield to concentrate on the project. I wasn't too sure how long or where but I was starting in Germany with Robert Holt.

But I first drove to Peoria. I arrived at my destination at 10:30 unannounced and hoping I hadn't made the trip for nothing. I rang the doorbell and it was answered by an older woman.

"Tim!" she exclaimed, surprised.

"Hello Mrs Petrucci, Is Carla in?"

Clearly Carla's mom didn't know everything that had transpired because she welcomed me in and went to call Carla who walked to the living room, saw me and immediately dragged me outside.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed at me.

"Please give me a minute Carla, I'm here to talk to you."

She looked at me long and hard. "Let's go." she said pushing me towards the car. "We're going out Mom." She shouted over her shoulder.

We drove to a nearby park in silence and stepped out. Her eyes were on me like a gazelle watching a far-off lion. Not scared but wary.

"I'm separated from Hugo you know." She glared at me. "Yes, I suppose you do know. So why are you here, to make me feel even worse, to tell me to go back to Hugo, or have you've changed your mind and want to fuck me after all?"

I wasn't prepared for that onslaught and I held my hands up palms out, shaking my head side to side. She staggered back towards a park bench and crashed down on it. "What a giant cluster fuck that night turned out to be." Do you think if we had done it, it would have all been ok?"

"I don't know, possibly." I rubbed my forehead. "Yeah, probably."

"Well, it doesn't matter anymore. It's all fucked up." She considered me momentarily. "I heard about last Friday's meeting. You sure stuck it to them. To me as well I suppose."

I scratched my head looking for the right words. "My relationship with the gang is wrecked so I'm not sorry about the money or the deal, I'm sorry about what went down. You and Amy blindsided me and I was so focused on trying to stop Jarrod and Amy that you were just collateral damage."

She must have held it in all this time because she twisted to face me and completely lost it. "I didn't need that rejection from you Tim!" She looked at me with angry eyes. "I've always kinda fancied you, but you've always intimidated me a little. You're so, so much... You really have it all and, and then you were with Amy..."

That was news to me!

"But I've seen you look at me, and Amy always joked that I was the woman you would want a free pass with..." She sniffed. "That always gave me little secret satisfaction but that night killed me. It's not about getting rejected. It's about getting rejected by you!" She grabbed a big breath while I looked at her surprised.

"It, it was so... Oh, I don't know. I so wanted it to be you!" She bit her lip, then finding her courage went on. "I haven't made love, had sex, done anything, since that night!"

She broke into tears, then fought me wildly as I wrapped my arms around her but after ineffectually trying to fight me off, she calmed down and I held her until she was eventually cried out. I held her in my arms and pressed her to my chest, rubbing her back and kissing the top of her head. "So seriously, Hugo hasn't touched you since that night? Is he crazy?" I tried to inject some humour into her pain.

"I know, right?" She half snorted -- half sobbed with amusement and pain. "But it's not just Hugo. It's me. I kept pushing him away. It's a darn shame how hard that man tried only to be shot down every time because I felt so stupid putting myself out there and getting rejected by the one guy I've had a secret crush on for years!"

I reached over and stroked her hair. "You're not stupid Carla, you're a Goddess. When I felt your breasts in the Jacuzzi I almost came in my shorts." She burst out laughing at my blatant exaggeration and then reached out and cupped my face with both hands.

"Have you ever wondered what it would be like if we kissed?" She asked.

"Yes... No... I don't think it's a good Idea." I objected

"We'll, we're about to find out." She over-rode my objection and planted her lips on mine pushing her tongue into my mouth." We kissed gently for a while and eventually came up for air.

"I needed that." She looked at me seriously. There was still a pool of hurt and pain in her eyes. "I want another." she climbed onto my lap and wrapped her legs around my waist and arms around my neck.

"What about Hugo?" I gasped in surprise.

"What about him?" She looked me in the eye. "He fucked Olivia!"

She kissed me again, and I kissed her back this time, long and hard until she slid off me and sat back on the bench looking satisfied.

She took a deep breath. "And, now, Hugo he, he knows about my crush on you!" She shook her head looking me in the eye with concern and something else that I couldn't quite read. "What's happening with you and Amy?"

I got all shame-faced but she wheedled my failure to launch out of me. "My body rejected her Carla, and she saw it."

"Is there any hope?"

"I don't know. I love her so much but I don't know how to forgive her and now she's moved out, so she's given up on us as well."

She thought about it for a while and was about to say something but changed her mind and said something else: "I don't think she's given up. I think she's hoping that time or space... Or, you'll go have some revenge sex or something and get the whole thing out of your system to find a way to reconcile."

"Revenge sex huh?"

"If that's what it takes."

"Is that a fact?"

"Yes, like the fact that she loves you and you love her despite one crazy mistake."

"How did you get to the idea of the swop?" I felt like I was asking her to recollect a fatal car crash.

"We... We were high on life and Champagne and thought it would be naughty but fun and it would all work out and we would cherish it as a moment when our collective friendships got stronger."

Their rationale appalled me. How could four intelligent women think that there would be no fall-out. Was this a precursor to an open relationship. Did they expect that we would become what? Swingers? Polyamorous?

"But, what...?" I stopped to reformat my question. "Who came up with the idea?"

She frowned in recollection. "Michelle... Michelle said something along the lines of how cool it would be if we gave the guys something to rock their world!"

We hashed and rehashed that night for a long while and then went out to lunch. I took her home after three. She kissed me one more time but not the provocative kisses of earlier. This one was that of a close friend kissing another goodbye.

"Thank you for coming." She smiled at me her eyes bright and clear. "And the kisses!" She gave a shaky laugh. "You've lifted a weight off me, but left me with a whole lot of questions about my life and my future!"

"Thanks, Carla. Thanks for the honesty. Now go inside and call Hugo and tell him you love him." I said. "I think he's crawled enough already."

"I, I'm not sure, I've got some thinking to do first." She frowned and ran inside.

______________________________________________

I met up with Robert Holt at his home in Germany. He had developed some of my initial ideas into a basic design. We spent two weeks talking and stress testing our thinking before we started work on the design proper, from the ground up. We started on the tungsten and carbon nano tubes to the anode section to provide a greater and denser area for electrons to attach, because the addition of a lattice of nanotube materials greatly increases the battery's ability to charge quicker and hold a charge longer.

The design and re-works cost us nearly a month. We then headed off to Northvolt in Sweden and tried multiple Tungsten substrates to find the one that offered the least impedance. We experimented with tungsten oxide, tungsten sulfide, tungsten diselenideron. For two months without success. Then we went back to our original concept of Tungsten Hexafluoride but that created a problem. It was a heavy and corrosive gas which meant that we had to book the facilities in advance and invariably had less time than we wanted on every session, with long clean-up times after every trial.

We were running up costs at an alarming rate and had already blown through two bar with little to show for it. We went back to redesign but and ended up with a battery that was double the weight and still no improvement.

Month three and Robert was hanging in there, eternally optimistic but it wasn't his reputation on the line and he was getting paid regardless. I made a unilateral decision and went back to the original design as clearly the design was not the problem. The problem lay with the nanotech Tungsten Hexafluoride application which was getting hampered by the production facility constraints. We would have to design a machine that would eliminate the slot die coating in favour of an electrostatic coating of the gas and that should work for both the lithium and the tungsten as they are both metaloids.

We found a small highly specialised outfit in Milton Keynes in the UK working mostly with the Red Bull Formula 1 team and they agreed to develop and build the machinery we needed in order to manufacture the internal battery parts. It took almost three months before they presented us with a purpose built machine fabricated by hand at an insane cost. Good enough to build a prototype but not good enough for scale production, but at least we were moving forward.

The day of the test dawned to find me unable to do anything but drink cup after cup of coffee followed by repeat visits to the toilet. The mechanical engineers and fabricators were quietly optimistic so we fired up the beast and inserted a sheet of substrate. I was given the honour of pressing the enter key on the dedicated laptop and a small hum followed by a red light and a short hiss from the Tungsten Hexafluoride tank was the only indication that anything was happening. Ten seconds later the hum stopped and a green light came on.

We opened the hatch and the smell of ozone came up to meet us. The chief techie, reached in with a pair of rubberised tongs and took the sample to a microscope. We all held our breath and watched the large overhead screen. The coating was perfect.

Next we started running impedance tests and they were slightly better than our estimates. We spot welded an anode and a cathode and were able to charge up double our anticipated amperage. The chief engineer threw some cold water on our celebration reminding us that under scale manufacture conditions we would be unlikely to achieve the same results but we estimated that we would be within the parameters we had specified.

It was time to prototype the first battery and that took another month of tinkering, but finally the big day came and after assembly we hooked it up to a charge harness and held our breaths. Using a conventional charger we were at 90% charge within 15 minutes. The amps were better than the thirty percent more that we had promised.

We had made it. Thirty percent more amps at half the charging time. It was revolutionary. Better than anything Tesla had currently. We were ahead of Toyota who had promised something similar by 2027 but insiders were telling us they'd be lucky to go into production before 2030. We were at least nine years ahead of the competition, possibly twelve. It was all over bar the shouting.

Tesla accepted the battery and we received twenty five million in guarantees to go into production. We built the factory outside Springfield in three months flat. The plant was built around the fabricator machine, commissioned and built in the US as an up-scaled version of the Milton Keynes design and we were in business. It would only contribute about thirty jobs but they were all highly paid jobs.

The patents were in my name but the public accolades went to Drive Tek, and we found ourselves together for the first time in almost nine months at the manufacturing facility launch. We were surrounded by local politicians, minor celebrities and most of the tech and business media, as well as some of the mainstream news outlets.

There was a large marquee set up on the grounds for the festivities but first I walked into the main boardroom and picked up a glass of Moet from a waiting tray. The gang was whittled down to four.

Amy, Carla and Hugo were missing.

"Well, you certainly delivered on your promise." Jarrod conceded bitterly with little evidence of the friendship we once shared. He actually looked like he would have preferred that I had failed regardless of the consequences.

He had changed in the intervening months since we last spoke face to face. He looked tired, stressed, older and I noticed some early grey showing at his temples. Michelle stood next to him holding his arm possessively. She didn't look very well disposed towards me. Gary and Olivia stood next to them looking neutral.

"Where's Hugo and Carla?" I asked.

Olivia shook her head. "Carla and Hugo are still separated and Carla is talking divorce. Hugo blames you and said if you were here tonight he wouldn't be."

Ah... he was happy with the money, but was making a point to snub me because his relationship with Carla was fucked up. Thinking back to my last meeting with Carla I wondered if Hugo had not been her first choice and if she considered that she had 'settled'. Well that was hardly my fault or my problem anymore!

I raised my glass and gave a short toast to the company's success and they responded. The atmosphere felt more like a wake than a celebration. We moved away and the rest of the evening consisted of speeches and interviews. The Mayor cut the ribbon to the door and everybody was invited in for the grand tour.

Near the end of the evening Gary and Olivia approached me. What are you up to next?" asked Gary.

"Bought a yacht and I'm going to explore the Caribbean." I admitted somewhat embarrassed that it sounded frivolous -- like a typical 'nuovo riche' throwing money at things he had no idea about.

"The battery took nine months but feels like nine years of my life and I'm hoping I can take some time off and find some introspection as to what's next."

I got a handshake and good wishes from Gary then a hug and kiss from the Olivia. I had finished my goodbyes, waiting for the limo to collect me back to town when a dark shape materialised next to me.

"Michelle?"

"Not once have you asked about Amy." Her lips were tight with disapproval and something else. "Why not?"

"I'm too frightened to ask" I admitted

"Oh, Tim." She defrosted slightly. "Has she asked for a divorce?"

"Not as far as I know. I've been out the country till now."

"So, she hasn't filed and you haven't filed. But you don't want to know anything about her because you're scared of what you'll find out. It all sounds a bit foolish!"