Chapter 2

Gemma really was not sure what to make of Joshua, she had read the reports about him and knew that he didn't have a girlfriend, and that most of his teachers thought that he was a loner. She knew that he was very intelligent and she could see why a lot of his teachers just thought of him as a stereo typical geek, who lacked social skills. Gemma however thought this profile didn't fit Josh, for a start she knew he went running nearly every day and made sure he kept his body in good condition. She didn't believe that Joshua in any way fitted into the standard stereo type, and she was sure there was something really special about him; so sure of this that she had risked her own credibility when she had brought him to the attention of General Lewis.

It had not been easy to convince the general that the software had in fact been created by this sixteen year old boy. She hoped that over the next few years that he would prove her correct in her belief that this was just the beginning. Of course if she was correct, it would help her own career immensely.

"So are you ready to go home now that you have defeated General Lewis and made him sign a peace treaty that he had only ever seen before in his worse nightmares?" She joked with Josh.

The meeting with General Lewis had gone very well for Josh. Although at first he hadn't expected that much for his program, he was intelligent enough to know that the General and the army must have been impressed to bring him in here to see them, so he made the negotiations very tough for the general; Finally getting most of what he asked for. The amount of money they were able to pay him in cash was very limited, being only 10,000; although it was still about the amount that Josh had initially expected to make from the program.

Also trust funds were to be set up for his mother and his sisters, which they would be able to touch in three years time or for his sisters when they were eighteen whichever was the latest.

Most of the two million pounds which had been agreed as the price for the program and for first options on any future programs he made, was to be placed in a trust that would be managed by a Board made up of General Lewis, Lieutenant Stevens, a man from the Ministry of Defence, and some other man. Once Josh was eighteen if the board judged that giving him control of the trust wouldn't place him or any technology or secrets in danger, then he could do what he wanted with the money.

While they had wanted to make sure there was no way that anyone would find out about Josh and the program, some of his requests, they could even have been called demands, made that job much harder. General Lewis was even wondering to himself how come he had carved in to one of the demands, maybe it was because he hadn't expected a sixteen year old boy to be such a tough negotiator or maybe it was also the fact that Gemma's confidence in the boy was starting to infect him as well.

That demand had been to start up a company with Josh as one of the Directors, and with him as the majority shareholder. It would take a bit of fixing with Companies house to keep the fact that he was the majority shareholder from being publicly available, but General Lewis knew that it could be done. Lieutenant Stevens was going to be one of the other Directors of the company, and she would be there to liaise with the army and other MOD suppliers.

The original plan had been for Josh to start working for a company which was actually a front company that allowed the Military to invest in interesting technologies, but with the demand of starting up his own company that idea was blown out of the water. His new cover, if it could still be called that, was that he was going to work part time for his new company. Although no one would know that he owned most of the shares in it. All this added to their problems of keeping Josh and his program a secret, but it was the price they had to pay to secure the program and Josh's services.

"So do you think that we will have the new offices ready by the weekend?" Josh asked, as he looked out the window of Gemma's car and watched the traffic going past in the opposite direction.

"I'm sure of it, we can move pretty quickly when we have to."

It had always been Josh's goal to start a robotics company once he had left school, he had never been sure if he really wanted to go onto university, partially because he knew the family couldn't really afford it, and also he thought that it would be unfair if he went, when Katie could. not He was also worried that some of his creativity in artificial intelligence might be lost if he studied the standard AI methods; His method of working had always been to think outside the box.