Chapter 1

I was sitting at my desk, when my new assistant asked me, “We have our first full roll of graphene order. 100km long, 5m wide. How big of a discount do they get?”

I looked over Tiffany, as she stood there, holding the order. “What did Adele say?” I asked her.

Tiffany rolled her eyes, “She said to ask you, she didn’t have the profitability figures, and wasn’t sure if you wanted to encourage the sale of full rolls. She thinks it’s going to get resold by the buyer in smaller pieces.”

“Have they bought from us before?”

She looked away, then looked back. A sure sign that Val was looking that up. Val had been promoted to VP of HR, and publicly had to leave my side as my personal assistant. The result had been one of my recently resurrected identities being used to create my new assistant, Tiffany. I was under strict orders not to get the company in trouble by sleeping with this, or any other employee that wasn’t one of my fiances already.

Adele had cackled through the entire HR special training that Val had run for all the senior executives on workplace ethics, appropriate office behavior, and fraternization. The CFO Arden Williams, had stifled his laughter, considering his identity as Frederick’s twin meant he knew much more about my background than he should have as Arden. Tho, I must admit, the sexual harassment demonstration using my other Fiances, Nora and Em, as actors had everybody laughing.

“Two 1km rolls over the past month,” Tiffany said, bringing me back to reality.

“Standard 10% discount for a roll then, nothing extra. Be sure to put that on our website. Investigate and, if they are not simply reselling, offer them an additional 5% discount on their next full roll.”

A full roll was 100km long, and five meters wide. It weighed 385 grams. The initial price before the first factory was 2000 CHF per sq meter, pricing a full roll at 1 billion. The first factory producing 1 100km roll per day, halved that price. The second factory halved it again. The third factory halved the price again. Each factory now was outputting nine 1km rolls per day, and one 100km roll every ten days. The additional factories were planned, with the expectation that the price would halve again.

She made a note, and went into the next item of business, “Tommy has completed a new design for the supercapacitor factory, and would like to review it with you.”

Thomas Detwiller had gone from my assistant to head of operations. He handled the management of all our separate factories, as well as designing the hidden mechanisms that delivered the products that our ‘automated’ production process created. As VP of operations he had his own office and staff on the floor below. He also had a group of engineers working under his other identity, his twin Big T, they were examining graphene based products made by our customers, looking for new potential uses, all designed to accelerate the use of graphene.

“Can he come up?” I asked.

“I have him on the schedule for just after lunch.”

“Excellent. What’s next?”

“Pilatus wants you to come look at the plane. I believe it’s complete, and they hope to surprise you.”

My power flicked out, and I reached out and examined the Pilatus factory 55km to the south. My airplane wasn’t there. I stretched out with my power. When I learned to replicate myself, back in February, two things about my power improved. My ability to conjure and absorb was not limited anymore to half the distance of my ability to sense, and manipulate matter, but extended its full distance, and the growth of my ability to extend my power grew twice as fast.

It was another two months before I figured out that the radius of my reach was growing at the rate the surface area of a sphere surrounding me at the full extent of my power doubled every 30 days. On February 3rd, 2020 my reach was 1582 kilometres in every direction. February 18th it was 2237km, a 70.71% increase, but the surface area of the sphere surrounding me, where I absorbed all cosmic radiation to fuel my power, increased from 31,450,157 sq km to 62,900,314 sq km.

In May my radius was larger than Earth’s diameter, and there was no spot on planet Earth that I couldn’t reach with my power from any other spot. Today I had to make due with the 122,200km I had available on this Friday, August 7th, 2020. I was looking forward to the day at the end of September when I could reach the moon from the surface of the Earth, without needing a pearl.

As my power swept out looking for my custom Pilatus PC-24, made with a graphene body valued around 1.5 billion just for the raw graphene, when I delivered it. I focused on the shape, and materials letting my power do the search.

I focused in on it as soon as my power pinged the location, it was in flight, over France, and headed in from the Atlantic at 45,000 feet. I conjured a pearl into a small space in the tail, so I couldn’t ever lose it. I didn’t recognize the four people aboard, but, that didn’t really mean anything, I’d only ever met a handful of the people at Pilatus.

My power measured the airspeed, at a very, very satisfactory 560 knots. I focused for a moment on the cockpit, looking at the controls. It looked like the engines were almost at 50% power. I had a very good idea why they wanted a meeting with me.

“I just saw it in flight with my power, so it’s definitely finished. Did they say what day?”

“They were hoping you could come down this weekend, they are offering to pick you up and fly you down.”

It was a 2 hour drive if traffic was good, but our office was next door to the Zurich heliport. “See if you can book the H155 for a flight tomorrow. I’d rather have my own transportation there and back.”

She looked off into the distance, “There is one free tomorrow, shall I book it?”

“What time did they want me?”

“The message said, at your convenience.”

“Ok, make it 10 am, it’ll be about 15 minutes each way, but book the helicopter for the whole day, if whatever they want to discuss takes extra time we have it, if not, we can take a sightseeing tour.”

“That sounds lovely, bringing the girls?” she asked.

“If they want to go. They do love flying.”

“One final item, the house property has been approved for a multifamily dwelling.”

“That’s great, what height did they approve?”

“60 meters.”

“That’s fantastic! That will solve our company housing problems,” I told her. A number of company positions were filled with twins of my core group, identities taken from the recently deceased throughout Europe from the coronavirus, they were now the recently resurrected. Monitoring the hospitals I was looking for people with no family or friends to miss them, and in crowded busy hospitals, where one or two people might slip thru the cracks with a bit of help from my power. The result had been many new identities to hire, but not enough housing in the area for them.