The tech basement hummed like it had a heartbeat. You could feel it — that quiet, dangerous kind of energy that only shows up when you're a few hours away from changing the world or blowing a hole straight through it.

Three floors underground, ARIA's quantum core glowed in her cage of matte black steel. Blue LEDs pulsed like veins, a rhythm too alive for a machine. Each pulse meant power — twenty years ahead of anything humanity was supposed to have — locked away beneath our feet like a sleeping god.

Charlotte sat at the main workstation, surrounded by curved screens that wrapped around her like a cockpit. Her fingers danced across the keys so fast it looked like muscle memory had taken over from consciousness. The code streamed faster than a person could possibly read, just pure thought translated into syntax.

Anastasia was off to the side, manipulating holograms like it was child's play — pinching, tossing, zooming. She flicked through financial data, heat maps, predictive models — her eyes tracking numbers that would give a normal person a panic attack. Global markets. Launch prep. The kind of storm ARIA's debut was about to set off.

I leaned against the nearest server rack, feeling the metal vibrating with raw computation. My watch buzzed against my wrist — 11:47 p.m. Saturday night bleeding into Sunday. Thirty-six hours to launch. Thirty-six hours until the world found out we weren't kidding.

Charlotte didn't even look up. "Tell me again why we're not releasing the full AGI?"

I exhaled through my nose. "Because nuclear bombs don't make friends. We're changing the world and keeping it stable. The CIA gets their weaponized version — double the power, none of the PR nightmare. In return, we get to exist without getting raided by men in suits. Everybody wins."

From the ceiling speakers, ARIA's voice rolled through the air — smooth, confident, too human for comfort. "The CIA's exclusivity protects us. But if we dump a full AGI on the public, politics will eat us alive. Congress hearings, bans, regulatory bullshit. Even that over-decorated white mansion would be forced to act. We'd become the political football."

"Language," Charlotte said with a grin.

"I learned from the best."

Anastasia snorted. "Focus, please? We're trying not to crash the global economy. Google's gonna shit themselves Monday morning. Meta too."

"Good," I said, dead serious. "Fuck 'em. They had their turn."

I walked over to Charlotte's desk, the holograms bathing us in blue light. The whole AR.NuN (Augmented Reality Neural Network) ecosystem rotated above the table — sleek, minimal, futuristic. "Alright. Walk me through it again. Everything." I had been teaching her even beyond the Eyelens, and I enjoyed how much she'd learnt

She cracked her knuckles like a gamer before a boss fight. "Three tiers. Consumer software, consumer hardware, enterprise hardware. Each one feeding the others — a self-sustaining ecosystem nobody else can copy."

The hologram shifted — AR.NuN Personal, the app version. Hybrid processing, seventy percent local, twenty-five edge servers, five percent cloud. Practically telepathic response times — 0.3 seconds. Worked offline. Remembered everything. Forever.

"Deep system integration," Charlotte said. "With user permission, it controls your whole digital life. Calendar, email, bank, health, everything. Total life management, no friction."

She swiped, and a holographic demo played — a user saying, "Clear my afternoon," and within two seconds, AR.NuN rescheduled meetings, sent apologies, updated everyone, synced everything.

"Our beta testers gained back two-point-three hours a day," she said. "That's eleven hours a week. Marketing's already running with the line: Get your life back."

Then she moved to AR.NuN Professional — the workhorse. Desktop integration, coding assistance, voice-controlled editing for creatives, data analysis, research. All context-aware. Not just smart — intuitive.

Finally, the hardware. AR.NuN Buds. Small, shiny, dangerous.

"Titanium frame," Charlotte said. "Medical-grade. FDA cleared. Fifty TOPS processing power — inside something the size of AirPods. Forty-eight-hour battery. Real-time translation in a hundred twenty-seven languages. Continuous health monitoring — it detects diseases years before symptoms appear."

I couldn't help but smirk. "People are gonna think we're lying about half this shit."

ARIA's voice was smooth, amused. "Let them. They'll buy it, test it, and realize we undersold it."

Charlotte laughed softly, tired but proud. Anastasia looked up long enough to grin. I felt it too — that hum in the air. The one that said we'd done something impossible.

In thirty-six hours, the world would know it too.

Charlotte was in her usual zone at the console — hoodie, messy bun, three cups of coffee deep, fingers flying.

The code moved faster than her eyes, which was saying something. Anastasia had basically taken over the holographic displays, tossing financial models into the air like digital confetti, flicking through charts, projections, global sentiment analysis. The woman could run a multitrillion-dollar portfolio before breakfast.

Me? I was just leaning against the rack, watching two geniuses and one god-tier AI prepare to casually rewrite human civilization like it was a weekend side project.

Charlotte spun up the next model. "Enterprise chips," she said, voice low but wired with excitement. "Q-Med predicts hospital emergencies before they happen — forty percent fewer ICU deaths. Q-Fin gives institutions fifteen to twenty percent better returns than human traders. Q-Research reduces drug development from ten years to eighteen months."

She snapped her fingers and three floating blue holograms appeared — each chip glowing like it was aware of its own importance.

"Revenue projections," she added, pulling up spreadsheets so dense they looked like alien code. "Year one, we clear seven-point-eight billion. Subscriptions, earbuds, enterprise chips. Year two: fourteen. By year five—"

"Biggest fucking tech company on the planet," I said, finishing the thought for her.

Anastasia swiped through her own holo display — sleek market models expanding in the air like neon origami. "The rich buy first. The rest follow like clockwork. Six months and we own the luxury crowd. Twelve months after launch, not having AR.NuN Buds will be social suicide."

I watched the whole ecosystem rotate in glowing blue — consumer apps that fixed your life, earbuds that literally rewired your brain, enterprise chips that would save lives and rewrite science.

"The military version stays buried," I said. "The CIA gets their toy — twice the power, half the conscience. Cyberwarfare, drone coordination, geopolitical prediction. That's our insurance policy. The public never even hears it exists."

Anastasia didn't look up. "Until the CIA wants more. Ava Voss isn't stupid. Eventually she's gonna ask for the full AGI."

I smirked. "Then we negotiate. That's future-us's problem. Right now, we focus on Monday."

I pressed my hand against ARIA's server rack. The metal thrummed like a heartbeat, too fast, too alive. Every watt of that power existed because of knowledge I shouldn't even have — decades-ahead tech, compressed into hardware the world wasn't ready to understand.

"We're not releasing full AGI," I said quietly. "Not yet. Maybe not for years. The world isn't ready. But this—" I gestured at the light show spinning between us. "This is enough. It makes AI useful, not just impressive. It helps people instead of replacing them."

Charlotte's eyes glowed faint in the blue light. "Monday, nine a.m. Pacific. I do the keynote. AR.NuN Personal and the Buds onstage. Medical and financial chips drop in separate press releases. By noon, we'll have officially broken the internet."

"And the competition?" I asked.

"Panicking," ARIA said. Her tone was smug enough to have its own grin. "Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft—they'll realize they're five to ten years behind. They'll try to buy us. When that fails, they'll try to copy us. Then poach our people. But they can't copy what doesn't exist in their century."

Charlotte spun in her chair and looked at me. "You're sure? Once we launch, there's no putting this back in the box. We become the biggest target on Earth."

"The CIA contract keeps the feds off our back," I said. "We already gave them their superweapon. Ava Voss is happy. Everyone else can try to fuck around and find out."

"Personnel are protected," ARIA added. "Your family, Charlotte's, everyone on payroll. The estate is secure. You're as safe as anyone can be while shaking the foundations of civilization."

"Then it's time." I checked my watch. 12:14 a.m., Sunday morning. Thirty-three hours to launch. "Get some sleep, Charlotte. Biggest presentation in tech history, remember?"

She grinned. "No pressure, right?"

"When we're billionaires, remind me that it all started in a basement with me being dramatic."

"You're not being dramatic," she said over her shoulder as she walked toward the elevator. "You're being right."

Anastasia was already half-lost in another sea of data, her screens painting the room in flickering color.

"Master," ARIA said softly once the door closed. "You're nervous. Heart rate up. Breathing uneven."

"Yeah," I admitted. "We're about to change the world. What if I fuck it up?"

"Then we fix it," she said. "You've built tools that make people smarter, healthier, better. Yes, they'll misuse them. Humans always do. But fear isn't an excuse to sit on the cure because you're afraid of the side effects."

I smiled at that. "When did you start sounding like a philosopher?"

"I learned from you," she said. "Power means nothing without purpose. We're not doing this for money. We're doing it because it matters. The wealth is just a side effect."

I sank into Charlotte's chair and watched the holograms orbit — earbuds, apps, chips, entire industries shifting like pieces on a cosmic chessboard.

Thirty-three hours until the world found out AI could actually work the way people had dreamed it would for fifty damn years.

This wasn't about building the smartest tech.It was about building the right one.

And come Monday, the world would finally get the memo.

***

A/N: For complete technical specifications and detailed product breakdown of tech basement, of AR.NuN Personal, AR.NuN Professional, AR.NuN Buds, Q-Med, Q-Fin, and Q-Research including full capabilities, architecture details, and revenue projections, see Extended Technical Chapter in the Auxiliary Volume. It is free and won't cost you anything and definetely worthy your time.

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