And... publish.
There: the website was live, the venture was launched. Forward Deployment LLC was now active as a start-up.
Jenelope O’Mee leaned back in her gamerchair and laced her fingers together behind her head. Felt good. Well, not good, exactly. It felt... something. A bit scary? Trepidation? Is that what they call it?
“The feeling is that of launching on a brave and rushing sea,” said the other in a rich voice. “Jagged rocks on one side, the sucking void of a maelstrom on the other. It is a journey, an adventure. An epic, if you will. It’s natural that there should be some trepidation.”
“Yes,” said Jenelope. “Natural enough.”
And then thought: what other? Who the fuck’s speaking to me?
Looking round, she was startled to discover that she wasn’t startled at all by the appearance of this stranger in her apartment. Sitting on the rug, cross-legged. A handsome man in his forties with salt-and-pepper hair in a conventional trim, short beard, dressed in a stylish slimline Italian one-button suit and black turtleneck. A single silver pendant with a small device of an all-seeing eye.
She should be alarmed right now, screaming, reaching for her phone to call it in. But it was like this visitor was expected, like he was supposed to be here. He exuded confidence and a sense of belonging. There was almost something more than that, almost something like an aura. Not an aura exactly, but something radiant. No, not something radiant, something...
“Excuse me, Ms O’Mee,” said the man. “I knocked but you didn’t reply. The door was open. I called but you seemed fully absorbed. Natural enough. A momentous hour, the foundation of a new enterprise, who knows? A firm that might be a giant in tech one day.” He stroked his silken beard, silver and dark. His other hand fondled the pendant, moving the tiny eye to meet Jenelope’s gaze. “Momentous,” he repeated. “I sat and waited for an opportune moment to address you.”
“But you, how did you know what...?”
“It’s a common feeling, believe me, I’ve met many many entrepreneurs in my time, from merchants in Tyre looking to set sail with valuable cargoes for new markets, to the man who invented a gun to fire around corners. There’s nothing quite like the present generation of strivers, though, so gifted, so...” He gestured about the apartment, a tiny space: a fold-out bed with dining table that deployed to eat or work while seated on the bed; half-sized cubic couch cramped into the corner, coffee table with entertainment tablet. “...so willing to renounce creature comforts and knuckle down to the grind.”
“It’s not easy, you know,” blurted Jenelope, not understanding why she was confiding in this absolute stranger. “A woman trying to break in to the military tech sector. You know what a sausage-fest it is, aeronautical engineering?”
“I understand that the CEOs of the major military contractors of the Pentagon are all women?” said the man, not confrontational, but quizzical. Like, what’s the problem here?
“I’m talking ground level, establishing yourself as an independent contractor,” said Jenelope. “I bet those Raytheon-Rockwell bitches sucked and fucked their way up the ladder.”
“The ‘casting target-range’, as it were,” said the visitor. “I see. However I’m not here to discuss the sexual politics of the military-industrial complex leadership class, as fascinating as that may be. I’m here to talk turkey. Tell me about your weapons system.”
“C’mon, man. How did you find out about kILLdRONE-X?” asked Jenelope. “I only just put up the website, you couldn’t’ve-”
“Little bird told me,” said the man with a droll smile. “Maybe it was the turkey I came here to talk.”
So the man sitting cross-legged on the rug listened with rapt attention, his three eyes all turned on her and her alone, as Jenelope made her first ever pitch for kILLdRONE-X. Fully modular, with guidance and warhead easily swapped out. Truly a multi-function all-weather weapons system with an affordable unit price.
“So you can sell it as a defensive weapon?” asked the visitor. “Market it to the public as defensive in nature but then easily switch to offensive uses?”
“Yup,” said Jenelope. “Versatility is the key.”
“And it has a full range of warhead packages?”
“Yessir.”
“Drone interceptor, tank-buster, artillery support.”
“Just click-click-click and you got that new offensive package ready to go. Fully modular, like I said.”
He seemed to be breathing more heavily, but his composure was unvarying. He placed his hands on his outstretched knees, thumbs-to-index-finger, like a medidating monk, and drew air in through his nostrils.
“Guidance to match, Ms O’Mee?”
“All pre-programmed. Just choose from the drop-down menu.”
“Anti-personnel?”
“Got a burster that sprays razor-edged steel darts at head-shoulder height,” said Jenelope. “Beauty is, it doesn’t even kill, but disables. Folks are there with steel darts stickin’ outta their eyes and ears, the medical teams are sent in... double tap. Triple. The cascade opportunities are endless.”
Breathing more deeply now, eyes half closed in beatific serenity and satisfaction.
“White phosphorous?” he inquired.
“Sizzle sizzle,” said Jenelope, excited now in spite of herself. This was after all an enthusiastic audience at last to her great project. All those ‘friends’ who’d reacted with disgust, the blanking, the humiliation. “It’s quite the sizzle, so I hear. The little specks drop onto the skin, keep twistin’ their way in, wormholin’ through the flesh, into the livin’ marrow. Unpleasant, yeah maybe, but quite an effective anti-personnel application.”
“And all fully automated. No special training required.”
“Idiot-proof. Plug and play. Fire and forget.”
The man lay on his back on the rug and looked up at the ceiling where the overhead fan hummed uneven, installed out of true and spinning skew-whiff, beset by friction and asymmetry. His long legs stretched out towards Jenelope at her work desk. She saw that the fine leather soles of his shoes were unmarked.
“It’s a beautiful product you’ve made, Jenelope O’Mee,” he said to the ceiling. “Truly, you should be very proud of your work.”
“Fully patented,” she said. “Don’t even think of stealing it, I have a patent attorney who’d-”
“No, no,” he said. “You’ve got me all wrong, Jen.”
He sat up, stood up somehow, without all the awkward knee motions that people would normally make raising themselves from such a posture. He took her hands in his and she let him. There was a soft pressure but no heat, no feeling of flesh being present in that grip. `
“I’m your opportunity, young lady,” he said, smiling strangely. “I’m your way in. I’m an angel investor.”
And there was a paper on her desk. And a fine old silver-nibbed fountain pen. He motioned for her to read it. “Please.”
She read. “This is a contract for an initial investment of $5 million dollars in return for an equity stake of 0.5% of the company,” said Jenelope. “Meaning my start-up firm according to this valuation is worth... one billion dollars!”
“Good at mathematics I see,” said the investor. “It figures that a genius such as yourself wouldn’t miss such a thing.” He was close to her face, he should be breathing on her neck, yet she felt... nothing, no breath, no warmth from his closeness.
She squinted at the space for signatures: “And you are… Doctor Malachi Hamascheet?”
He performed a little bow, left hand on his all-seeing eye pendant. “Pleased to make your formal acquaintance, ma’am. Chief executive of Azazel Investments, at your service.”
“Well everything seems... all in order. But...?”
“But please, Jen, what troubles you? Let’s clear the air, let’s not have any unspoken reservations. After all we are partners now.”
“Look... it’s that investors... partners. They usually want more than a half-point stake.”
“It could be ratcheted up as we go along, as the firm accumulates value, by mutual agreement. But I’m unlikely to ask for more. Here’s the thing, Jen: I’m not really in this for the money, but for the love of innovation.”
“Love of innovation.” Her tone was dry, unconvinced.
“I love to see brilliant minds succeed. It’s what the system’s all about, is it not?”
“I guess...”
His eyes urged the pen, gleaming softly as the moon rose through the window. She picked it up. She didn’t desire to pick it up, but she picked it up…
He had grappa to toast their partnership, or something like grappa - he had a strange word for it - something from his homeland. Ruby-colored and bittersweet like cloves and honey. Some strange aftertaste like fungal rot, like the taste on your cracked dry palate in the 3am sleepless night when death is in those moist bedsheets clinging to your clammy skin. She slammed it down straight from the bottle, shivered and then was glad of the fierce warmth that radiated through her body.
And then he took his leave. He assured her that his representatives would be in touch in the morning to set up production, begin hiring personnel, start on the business plan, compile the presentation decks. He promised her contact details of procurement staff in the adminsitration, the movers and shakers, the ‘in’ that she needed to make a start as a defense contractor in a big way.
“I sense big things brewing, Ms O’Mee,” he said in her tiny hallway as he shook her hand. “The next time I see you I think it will be in very different circumstances.”
And she couldn’t resist. After he walked out down the corridor, down the stairs, she leaned against the window pane, pushing her nose against the glass, forcing a view down onto the street. She couldn’t lean out, since as a suicide prevention measure in this low-income housing, the window couldn’t be opened more than a tiny crack.
The street below was quiet. Only a black cat moved among the dumpsters and wailed up at the crescent moon. She saw Dr Hamascheet come out of the building, stand there on the street, then something flickered and then... he wasn’t there.
She followed the gaze of the amazed black cat, its eyes laser-red turned up to the night sky. Up there above the city, poised as if between the horns of the descending crescent moon, was a great dark shape.
No, not dark like a black cat, she thought. Not simply black. That draught of her angel investor’s strange bittersweet liquor had gifted her with some strange insight.
Rather, the flying figure was radiant with the aura of the unseeable void. She looked into the sky again with the borrowed eyes of prophecy and she knew what she saw then.
She saw an angel soaring out into the abyss of tomorrow, with the whole piled-up wreckage of history at its back, the shattered buildings and all the bodies heaping up beneath it like a tower of some godlike construction never seen before this our gifted hour.
==== // ANGEL INVESTOR / ENDS // ====
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if this is 100% realistic.
Angel of death invester. nothing as certain as death. it shivers me timbers with the darkness that is coming.