Chapter 44 Prototype Hearts
Sloane’s POV
You were a kid, and they put you on the auction block.
Eli’s words followed me into sleep and chased me out of it. By morning, they had settled somewhere behind my ribs, a bruise I could not see but kept pressing.
Day two meant talking about the man I had once thought was the opposite of my father. Turned out he was just a different kind of buyer.
The studio felt smaller the second time I sat down. Same gray walls. Same chair. Same camera blinks. Different questions lined up like scalpels on a tray.
“Yesterday we talked about your teenage years,” the interviewer said, voice mild. “Today I would like to ask about your early career. Specifically, the man you built Mercer Dynamics with. Tell me about Noah Rye.”
Of course.
I kept my hands folded in my lap so they would not clench.
“Noah and I met in grad school,” I said. “We were in the same incubator program. He was a few years older, already working on his second startup.” I let a small smile curve my mouth. “Charismatic. Very sure of himself. He understood code and people, which was rare in that room.”
In my head I was back in the lab. Fluorescent lights buzzing. Whiteboards crammed with diagrams and half erased ideas. The air thick with burnt coffee and ambition.
I am twenty two, hunched over a terminal at two in the morning, chasing a bug through a tangle of my own making. My hair is a mess, my eyes burn, everyone else has gone home.
“How long have you been at that,” a voice asks.
I look up. Noah stands in the doorway, leaning on the frame like it has to earn the right to hold him. Slightly older, easy grin, eyes that flick to the code on my screen and actually track it, not just pretend.
“Too long,” I say.
He comes in, grabs a marker, starts poking holes in my logic and then praising the parts that work. Calls me the sharpest knife in this place with clear admiration, like it is a compliment and not a warning.
It feels like oxygen.
On camera, I stay general.
“We were very complementary,” I say. “I was more focused on the technical side. He was better with investors, with translation.”
“You were the engine. He was the salesman,” she says.
I incline my head. “That is one way to put it.”
We built Mercer on nights that bled into mornings. Arguing about ethics over cold pizza. What did we owe end users versus paying clients. How far could we go in building tools that could see into everything.
“What if we could see it all,” Noah said once, eyes bright, marker swooping across whiteboard. “Every packet. Every camera. Every access badge. A unified dashboard on the world.”
“What if we should not,” I said. “What happens when someone who likes control too much gets their hands on it.”
He laughed. “So we make sure it is us.”
I built the prototype anyway. Because it was elegant. Because it was a beautiful, terrible puzzle. A set of lenses and filters that could, given enough input, stitch together patterns no human could see alone.
Noah called it god mode first, grinning like a kid with a lighter.
On camera I smooth that into something less terrifying.
“We experimented with more powerful tools in those days,” I say. “Thought experiments. Internal prototypes. God mode was a joke name, not a product.” I force a lightness I do not feel. “We were young. A little arrogant.”
“And personally,” the interviewer prompts, “you and Noah?”
I feel the heat crawl up my neck and do not let it reach my face.
“We were involved,” I say. “For a while.” The understatement of the decade. “We were working twenty hour days in a room with no windows. Lines blurred.”
The night we first slept together, we had just signed our first not laughable contract. Not government. Not yet. But big enough to pay rent on time. I was riding the high of shipping a patch that made something impossible two days earlier look easy. He kissed me in the middle of the lab, hands in my hair, laughing against my mouth. We tumbled onto the old couch in the corner, messy and triumphant, our bodies tangled up with the idea that we had built something together no one else could touch.
For a while, I believed he saw all of me. The obsessive, sleep deprived coder. The control freak. The woman who, under the right kind of attention, could still melt.
Cracks came later.
“You are thinking too small,” he said one night, god mode diagrams spread out between us. “We license a version of this to defense clients and we are untouchable. We get to set the rules.”
“We get to paint targets,” I shot back. “You know what people do with tools like this. We would be giving everyone with a budget the power to spy on whoever they call a threat.”
“Better us than someone sloppy,” he said.
“We would not stay in charge,” I said. “Men like my father and his friends would chew us up and sell the bones.”
He had rolled his eyes. “You are paranoid.”
I had been right.
On camera, I sand that down.
“We had fundamental disagreements about the future of certain tools,” I say. “About where the line was between security and surveillance. Ultimately, we parted ways for legal and ethical reasons.”
Off camera, later, in the little green room, it is less neat.
Eli sits beside me, a bottle of water in his hand, his thigh a warm line near mine.
“I thought,” I say quietly, picking at the label, “he was my proof I could be loved for my brain and my body. That someone could want both without turning either into a transaction.”
“And instead,” Eli says, “he was your lesson that love is just another kind of leverage.”
I huff out a breath. “Yes.”
He looks away for a second, jaw tight. A flash of jealousy, maybe, at a ghost who still occupied too much space. Then understanding softens it.
“Explains why you flinch every time money, sex and power try to sit at the same table,” he says. “You have seen that movie.”
I bump his shoulder with mine. “It was a very bad movie.”
Back under the lights, the interviewer asks about investors. Incubators. Early funding.
I mention a British hedge fund executive who came to dinner once at my father’s house. Slick suit, expensive watch, handshake that lasted half a second too long. They toasted to a new strategic partnership. Innovative defense tech prospects. I had poured the wine and pretended not to listen.
Now, older me, sitting in this chair, rolls that name around. Avalon Ridge. The same letters that keep showing up in small print under Sentinel Gate and Noah’s latest venture. My past and my present money looking more and more like the same hand.
“Did you have anyone you trusted completely, back then?” the interviewer asks near the end.
“No,” I say. Then, after a heartbeat, “I trusted the machines. They did exactly what I told them to. People came with hidden update logs.”
She smiles sadly. “Thank you.”
We wrap. Lights go off. The crew starts coiling cables. My brain keeps spinning.
That night, in bed, the ceiling above my penthouse looks like a spreadsheet of deals I did not sign. I toss. Flip the pillow. Stare at the dim outline of the wardrobe.
In my mind, Mr Lang’s business card gleams white. Avalon Ridge written in dark blue font. I remember him saying just funding talk when my father’s name came up. I remember seeing Avalon Ridge again, recently, in Sentinel Gate’s backers list.
Patterns align in my head with a soft click.
Apparently I have been sleeping with the same investors my entire life.