12. Rising Profiles & Brewing Standoff

Mid – Late May 2010

Northern Edge

Mid-May in Ann Arbor tastes like thawed metal and cut grass, a campus resetting itself after the noise of spring. I lace my skates in the half-light at Yost, no music or chatter, just the groan of the boards as if the rink itself is waking with me. Voluntary hours mean no whistle, no compliance clipboard, just open ice, where the only rule is the one I set. I drive hard lines, blue line to blue line, legs burning until the breath in my chest stops sounding like protest and starts sounding like rhythm. The scoreboard is dark. I don’t need it. The NCAA has no say over me right here, right now.

The morning hums with code still running in the back of my mind. Today isn’t just another workout—it’s the morning my climbing game goes live. To the world, it’s a physics-driven simulator; to me, it’s something quieter, a proof of concept hidden in plain sight. The engine draws on routines I’ve been refining for months—adaptive systems meant to learn from player motion, terrain feedback, and error correction. No one else will notice, but I will. Every climb will feed the framework, every motion teaching the code how to think. I’m proud, nervous, and oddly protective; what’s launching today isn’t just a game—it’s a glimpse of the intelligence I’m building underneath.

By ten o’clock, the texts start landing. Mitsy again—this time with a link and three exclamation marks I can practically hear vibrating through the screen. Distribution locked. Northern Edge, my climbing game born from ice and algorithm, is officially live. The name’s a nod to my Canadian roots, but the reach is global now. Mitsy, Kim, and Bill have been grinding for weeks—conference calls slicing through time zones, translators cycling shifts like athletes, contracts drafted and redrafted at two in the morning. They’ve taken it personally. Mitsy is proving she can move the Matsuda network into global commerce; Kim is showing the Yamamotos that precision can also be ambition. For Mitsy and Kim, Northern Edge isn’t just a launch—it’s a leadership test.

Bill Dixon handled the part no one else could—ownership. He led the negotiations with Steam personally, calm and relentless, every clause constructed like armor. Six rounds of revisions, four late-night calls, and one condition he refused to yield: “All intellectual property and data remain the sole property of Michael Stewart.” Steam distributes, but we own—no backend rights, no analytics siphons, no open telemetry. When the contract cleared, Bill texted me one line: You paid a premium, but you get to keep all rights and data. It’s a clean legal victory, although costly.

Steam anchors digital distribution across North America (NA) and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), taking a thirty percent cut for hosting, regional pricing, and storefront visibility. It’s steep but fair—reach at that scale costs something, and retaining full creative rights is worth every cent. Mitsy manages the Matsuda Industrial Group’s network across NA and Latin America (LATM), overseeing retail logistics and boxed-copy distribution through established supplier channels. The Matsuda family’s Brazil office, long connected to the country’s large Japanese community, coordinates Latin American operations and handles supply-chain management through São Paulo and Mexico City, ensuring cultural alignment and rapid fulfillment throughout the region.

In EMEA, the Duke of Castile’s logistics consortium takes the lead, leveraging his shipping fleets and Royal Technologies’ warehousing to handle both customs and retail placement. Mitsy provides operational support, coordinating inventory flow and ensuring parity in pricing and packaging across all regions.

Kim oversees Asia Pacific (APAC), securing digital rights through Yamamoto’s network and two regional PC-game portals, tailoring localization, pricing, and compliance for local markets. The Royal Technologies Trust manages digital storefronts and promotional partnerships within EMEA, ensuring regional visibility and adherence to EU content standards.

It’s a patchwork empire, but it works. Northern Edge reaches where Steam doesn’t—Kim even launched a global portal for players outside official territories, keeping the ecosystem open while the world catches up.

By noon, the rollout numbers start coming in—NA is tracking twelve percent above forecast, EMEA steady, and both APAC and LATM trending ahead of projections. The servers hum steadily —no lag, no crash—proof the hybrid architecture is holding. Our primary data centers sit in Ann Arbor and Tokyo, mirrored through Madrid under the Duke’s logistics consortium, with a secondary node now active in São Paulo to anchor LATM operations. Overflow routes quietly through rented Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) clusters masked by shell accounts. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is barely publicized yet, but Bill found a way to use it as an invisible safety net. On paper, it’s analytics support; in truth, it’s the first layer of my framework learning to breathe.

I keep my distance once the game goes live—not because I’ve broken a rule, but because everything about this sits in that gray zone the NCAA loves to hate: a project built on my own code, financed through private partners, yet quietly sustained by modeling and the visibility that comes from wearing Michigan colors. Perfectly legal on paper, ethically debatable in spirit. They’d call it self-promotion; I call it discipline. The work belongs to me, the data to the network, and if I respect that line, it stays outside their reach.

The game isn’t hockey, doesn’t use my image, and I’m not selling jerseys or autographs, but my name still appears quietly in the developer credits. That alone will be enough for the NCAA to circle. I can already picture the phrasing—improper benefit derived from athletic notoriety. The irony is they’ll never see what’s at stake. The only thing connecting the game to me is a silhouette that moves laterally, the way I do when I skate—close enough to sting, not enough to prove.

Before I stepped back, I left Mitsy and Kim a handful of sketches—algorithms, system diagrams, network-flow notes—tucked into a shared folder titled what if. I didn’t tell them what to do; I just mapped what might work if someone brave enough connected the dots. They did the rest. Mitsy found a small cybersecurity startup in Ann Arbor—three grad students moonlighting from the engineering department—who secured the first node configuration. Kim used Yamamoto’s robotics division to source mirrored servers in Tokyo and brought in a freelance systems engineer from Osaka who’d just left Sony. Together, they made it real. The lattice scales elastically now, hidden in plain sight, a performance network feeding movement data into Aegis without anyone realizing what they’re teaching it. It’s a prototype wearing a game’s skin.

We priced Northern Edge at $49.95 USD. Steam takes its thirty percent cut off the top for NA and EMEA, roughly fifteen dollars a copy, before the rest flows through. That leaves about thirty-five net per sale, from which approximately ten covers bandwidth, production, and maintenance. If sales hold pace—150 thousand units in six months and 400 thousand by the one-year mark—the first-year profit clears just over ten million after Steam’s fee and operating costs. From that, fifteen percent goes to the Matsudas for packaging, marketing, and operational management across NA and LATM; fifteen percent to Yamamoto Industries for software integration and robotics telemetry in APAC; and ten percent to the Duke’s Castile Technologies and Royal Technologies Trust for logistics and digital hosting across EMEA. That leaves around six million in retained earnings—my share and Aegis’s seed capital rolled into one. Thanks to the Queen’s grant exempting me from Commonwealth taxes, roughly a third stays where it belongs: fuel for the next stage. Soon, I’ll need a dedicated IT team and hardened infrastructure. For now, it holds—but the data load is climbing faster than anyone expected.

By mid-afternoon, the messages flood in. Emma: Proud of you—this feels alive. Kristen: You built something that moves like it’s human. Molly calls from London, laughing, promising to toast the Canadian who made computers romantic. Even the Queen’s secretary sends a note—Her Majesty recognizes the honorable cooperation between allied partners. For once, the words honor and business don’t sound like opposites.

Then my phone detonates. Notifications stack faster than I can swipe. The Waters Twins—Becky and Vicky—have just posted on Facebook. A split-screen video of them playing Northern Edge fills my feed: Becky laughing as she reaches the summit, Vicky brushing hair from her face, and leaning toward the camera. “If the climb feels this good,” she says, voice low and teasing, “wait until he reaches our twin peaks.” The camera lingers a second too long on her breasts before she laughs and cuts the feed. The caption reads, Still climbing, still thinking of you. It hits a million likes in under an hour, two hundred thousand shares before dinner, and comment threads that glow like live wires. The tabloids spin it instantly—Is Stewart About to Summit the Twins, AGAIN? —while gaming blogs call it the sexiest marketing accident of the decade.

My phone lights up again. Emma: Oh my God, you’re dead. Kristen: Do you realize half of Hollywood thinks you’re dating twins? Molly adds, Good luck explaining this to anyone with morals. I just chuckle and let it go. I should be furious. I should be cautious. Instead, I just watch the analytics surge—APAC up twenty percent, EMEA fifteen—each spike a pulse in the veins of something I started and no longer fully control.

A new message flashes—private, direct. The name stops me cold. Elizabeth Ford.

Michael,

I saw the video. I can imagine how it feels to have your private life turned into someone else’s headline again. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. You never did. I hope the noise fades quickly and that you have at least one quiet evening where the world isn’t dissecting your next step. The game looks extraordinary. I mean that sincerely.

— E.

I read it twice. No barbs, no blame—just calm words and a trace of something that almost sounds like pride. For a long moment, I let myself believe she means it. Maybe the frost between us isn’t permanent. Perhaps this is her way of saying she still sees me. It’s a small thing, but it feels like the first breath after holding one too long.

By evening, Northern Edge trends across all four regions. Analysts call it a benchmark for physics-based realism. Reviewers call it mesmerizing and quietly revolutionary. Underneath the noise, the Aegis test grid hums—silent, invisible, alive. Mitsy and Kim schedule follow-up meetings with Tokyo, São Paulo, and Madrid. Bill starts filing early patent claims under holding names, building legal walls before anyone knows what’s inside. The work doesn’t stop—it just deepens.

When the house finally quiets, I sit by the window, laptop cooling beside me, watching the streetlights carve circles into the night. Pride and unease twist together like wire. The game is rising. The press is rising. The pressure is rising. So am I. I hold my palm to the glass and whisper it softly, so it belongs to me first. “Every victory feeds my fire.”

The laptop pings softly from the desk behind me. A single line scrolls across the Aegis debug window—data convergence rate anomaly detected. No crash, no error. Just a smooth curve recalculating on its own, faster than it should. I stare at it for a long moment, heartbeat matching the pulse of the cursor. I didn’t write that subroutine. Aegis just taught itself something.

Momentum and Consequence

Morning breaks hard and silver, light scraping the frost off the windows. My inbox is a blinding red before breakfast—articles, tags, interview requests, contracts I never signed, suddenly “under review.” TIME Tech: Student Hacker to Visionary. Nikkei Digital: Northern Edge Redefines Climbing Physics. It should feel good. Instead, it feels like exposure. I can practically hear the analysts drawing lines from hockey to code to profit, sketching out how a twenty-year-old just became an acquisition target.

Bill calls at eight sharp. He doesn’t waste time.

“Mike, we’ve got noise coming out of the University. Legal and the Computer Science Department are whispering about Aegis—trying to float the idea that they might hold partial IP ownership.”

My stomach tightens. “On what grounds?”

“None that makes sense,” he replies dryly. “They’re claiming faculty influence, lab access, institutional affiliation—the usual academic reach. It’s bullshit. My guess is someone outside pushed this, maybe Ford or one of their compliance proxies. The timing’s too perfect for coincidence.”

I pace the room, phone to my ear. “You think they’ll file?”

“No,” he says, tone turning deliberate. “They won’t dare once they see what I’ve prepared. I already drafted a rebuttal with documentation—every receipt, timestamp, and network log showing that Aegis was built entirely on privately owned systems. You separated the architecture months ago—no University servers, no grant funds, no shared codebase. You did it by the book, and I made sure the paper trail is airtight.”

“So, what’s the next move?”

“We meet with them,” Bill says. “Dean Morrison, University Legal, and Tech Transfer. Thomas Rourke will sit in, as his NCAA background gives the conversation weight if anyone decides to escalate it into a compliance issue. You’ll answer questions briefly and let me handle the rest. The goal isn’t to argue; it’s to end the conversation before it starts.”

I exhale slowly, feeling the weight shift from frustration to focus. “Got it.”

Bill pauses, softer now. “Michael, this isn’t about the University. It’s about people realizing you’ve become financially and intellectually independent. That scares them. You don’t need their permission or their scholarship anymore, and the moment a student stops being manageable, someone starts calling lawyers.”

When the call ends, I stand at the window, watching the cold morning light stretch across campus. Independence—earned, not gifted—was supposed to be freedom. Now it feels like a spotlight. I know Bill is right, and I count my blessings that I have Kiyomi by my side to guide me in the right direction.

The meeting takes place the next afternoon in the dean’s conference suite, a rectangular room built for polite confrontation. Framed patents line the walls like trophies, each one a reminder that the University knows how to claim other people’s brilliance. Bill sits to my left, precise as ever—dark suit, calm posture, a legal scalpel disguised as a man. Across from us: Dean Morrison, two university lawyers, and a compliance liaison who keeps pretending her notes are more important than her nerves. Near the door stands Thomas Rourke—silent, unblinking, ex-military, still visible in every line of his stance.