Professor Hansen and I spent the rest of the summer doing two things. First, we played with the reactions – how much linoleum was needed before it left some over, what we could substitute, exactly which materials were needed to prompt the reaction and which could be left out. The big accomplishment there was to eliminate that cloud of wood dust and vaporized iron; without the extra material getting worked over the process was far quieter and moderate.

All sorts of variables got tested. It turns out that all sorts of little details mattered. The different materials had to be layered just so – having the cellulose over the benzene instead of below caused incomplete reactions, and you had to have a bit of calcium carbonate mixed in with the cellulose too. The shape of the iron hardly mattered at all, just the weight of it. Steel and other impure alloys of iron worked too, although that left a lot of crap in the air just like when we used too much cellulose.

We also figured out better how molds could be filled, what shapes were possible, what wasn't. Somehow the glass attracted the iron during the process, and the finished material formed an imprint of the glass without regard to gravity.

We also played with different metals and combinations. Hansen was super excited when he realized that we could get a consistent reaction out of the first row of metals, and only those. Scandium through Zinc. For the most part, the reaction in question was worthless – the metal and organic component would just vaporize. The only useful thing we found at the time was a copper reaction – copper and rubber (but only natural rubber, nothing synthetic) would turn into a metal too soft for any real work; it would, however, absorb a ridiculous amount of heat. It took something like a hundred times the energy to heat it up as water. Hansen got kinda excited about that, too, but we mostly just shelved it while we worked out the boundaries and tricks to our new super-steel.

Not that we found many boundaries. No matter how thin and ostensibly fragile a piece we made, we never managed to even bend it, much less break it. You could find a resonant frequency, but vibrating it just broke whatever was holding it instead. Intense heat didn’t alter the hardness or strength, nor did it seem to react with any chemical we could come up with, from pure oxygen to water to acetic acid to pretty much anything anyone in the department could imagine.

The real boundaries were surprisingly practical. Look around you for a moment. Look at the stuff around you, and now imagine that it will never wear out, never break down, never break. Pretty cool, right? But now imagine you can only make things like that that don’t move or bend at all. No springs, no suspension, nothing that fits together by snapping or similar connections. Friction connectors like screws worked, sort of, but they had to be machined to pretty tight tolerances. Or they had to be built out of not-so-durable material. There’s not a ton of point in building an unbreakable machine that still has to deal with screws working loose or shearing.

We also hit some walls with the molds. It turned out it was pretty easy to make a shape. You carve something out of glass and the iron will cover it evenly right up until the edge of another material. It turned out that ordinary paint along the edges worked just fine. So imagine a flat pane of glass, painted all over but leaving a three-inch circle unpainted. Run the machine over the top of that and you’ll end up with a three-inch disk of our new steel, almost exactly the same weight as the iron we used and with a tenth the volume. If you got your hands on a concave piece of glass, like a bowl, and painted the edges, you’d end up with a new-steel bowl that lined the inside (or outside, depending on how you laid it down). The limit was the glass and the paint. Your precision was pretty sharply limited by your ability to paint a precise pattern on the glass. We could also control the volume of a piece with a second glass mold.

Neither Hansen nor I had any skills at working with glass, let alone the kind of design work that would be necessary to really explore the possibilities. Internet videos can only take a man so far. So our tedious work testing and refining was punctuated with ongoing discussion. What could be made from this stuff, what would we call it, how would we sell it, and so on.

We decided we wanted to commercialize it ourselves. Not that greed defined either the professor or me, but the applications were obvious. The university provided some resources for capitalization and Hansen Design, LLC started figuring out how to scale up and mass-produce designs. Part of those resources was a bank account, with enough zeroes to shock me. I’m less shocked now, but back then a few grand of tuition each semester was still heart-stopping.

More shocking was that I got a bank card and checkbook with my name on it, connected to that account. I was informed as well that the university administration would handle accounting and HR concerns until we grew more. I recognized the unspoken point that I wouldn't be able to spend any of that money on parties or cars without being in way more trouble than academic probation. But still, I had an expense account. I wasn’t even tempted to go upgrade my gaming rig. Honest.

Well, some of that temptation was sitting back in Steve’s office signing the forms to get this all set up. Dr. Hansen was there too, as well as a dean of something or other and some other necktie from the admin office. Steve’s tan had faded, and it seemed like the presence of higher authority in the room made her distinctly more cheerful. She even smiled at me as she explained about the money.

That done, Dr. Hansen and I picked out what we would try and sell first and worked out what we needed to ramp up. Hansen hired an actual engineer and a mechanic – he gave them each five percent of his shares in exchange for their labor while we ramped up. They got to work right away standardizing the drive that would run the material conversions. We all also agreed on what sort of pay to accept once we did start earning profits, and how much to reinvest. We never did settle on a name for the new material that we were both happy with, we figured our first buyer could name it something they liked.

I had to start doing more than just monkey work now, to justify my dizzying nineteen percent of the take. So I did the filing with banks and state agencies, I arranged paperwork for our new partners, and I got to use some of my own contacts to start subcontracting for the material.

Our biggest difficulty was the glass. Most of the professor and my playtimes involved cups, plates, and decorative bits picked up from antique stores. But beyond cutting the glass or etching it with tools from the local hobby shop, we were pretty much hopeless at the precision work that would be necessary for actual manufacturing. So I went and got in touch with a friend of mine from high school.

At the time I was hesitant to call Alan Beard a friend. Not even a Facebook friend. We had both been attached to the 'smart kid' crowd in school. We had a lot of AP and honors classes together, ate lunch together, but still didn't spend much time out of school together. I was a slacker smart kid, he was a preppy smart kid. Alan was always dapper – short, maybe five foot eight, but with that broad-shouldered slender build that makes you remember him as being much taller when he wasn't around. Always clean-shaven, fresh haircut, dressed stylishly. You know the guys that always come to work in jeans and t-shirts, but somehow still pass as professionally dressed? Yeah, that's Alan.

Despite being valedictorian, Alan didn't go to college. Instead, he opened an art studio right away, which surprised everyone. He hadn't done any art classes in school at all, but he started making fancy blown-glass sculptures right away. Less than a year out of school, he married El. She was working in his studio too, fiddling with furnaces and metalwork.

El, on the other hand, was definitely a friend. She was in our graduating class too. Not the smart kid classes, she spent all her time in shop. Auto-body, wood, metal, even stage crew stuff for drama; if it offered access to power tools, she was probably involved. I spent time with her in shop and even went out with her a few times. She was always fun to hang around with, especially when we had a chance to mess with people. She was, it should be stated, a large girl. Not curvy large, but mannish large. Well over six feet, and built like a football player. But our humor meshed pretty well. I remember once I distracted the office secretary while she did something to the door that made it squeak like nails on a chalkboard every time someone opened it. Maintenance took a month to figure out how to get it to quiet down.

Economics and complementary skills directed their efforts pretty quickly. They didn't do much that I'd have called art, certainly very little traditional art. Other than the usual knickknacks, like glass flowers and dolphins and crap like that, their biggest seller was functional microscopes and telescopes. Beautiful things, bound in brass and wood, and all working. Alan and El ground their own lenses, shaped the metal, built the whole thing by hand in their shops. Pretty much the only work they didn't do was smelt the metal on their own. There's a surprising market for fancy stuff like that.

El saw me first when I walked in the door. “Pixie! What the hell are you doing here? I know you can't afford anything and you know I'd never give you a job.”

She ran a hand through her pixie cut as I set my box down to shake her hand. “Believe it or not, I should be able to afford a lot. I've got a...” She shook my hand and took my breath away for all the wrong reasons. I'll admit I squeaked a bit.

“El, why do you do that, every time?”

“Why do you keep letting me? Besides, you should be lifting more anyways.”

I managed to not shake my hands to get blood back into my fingers, but I did try and wipe the grease off them on her sleeve. Which just made my hand greasier.

“You're too easy, Pixie. Seriously though, are you looking for me or Alan?”

I sighed. That wasn't a nickname I missed. “Depends, who handles custom orders? I'm not even sure if you guys can manage this, but I figure you can point me in the right direction.”

“Both of us, then. Go sit in the back, I'll get Alan, I don't think he's in the middle of a blow.” She pointed at a door in the corner and tromped off into the dark warehouse.

The office was pretty much what you'd expect. Cheap desks lining three walls, stained tile, yellowed drop ceiling, not much investment in fixtures. There were drawings and sketches up all over the walls, along with a computer. I don't know about its innards, but it dominated one side of the office – three big flat screens in an arc around a comfortable office chair.

I decided discretion was ideal here, so I took a rickety old kitchen chair, instead of the ergonomic office chair. The room was just barely cool enough to be tolerable, despite a vent vainly pumping cold air into the room. Even though the furnace was on the far end of their old warehouse, it made its presence felt. The summer sun wasn't helping either.

I was drowsing off in the heat before Alan and El made it back. Alan’s pristine white shirt and khakis contrasted starkly with El’s greasy button-down shirt and old jeans. I couldn't help but be struck again by the difference between them again. El, towering over, with a smudge of black grease on her chin and old practical clothing, Alan perfectly clean, without a smudge on him, and the only indications that he had been working was the narrow line of sweat on his collar.

“So, what's this about? You're still in school, right?” Alan's handshake was much gentler than El's had been.

“Yeah, it's been fine. How's the glass business?”

Alan opened his mouth, but before a sound could get out El interrupted, “I've got two guys waiting for me, a chandelier to finish, and the furnace is still going full blast. Let's make this quick, we can get drinks tonight if you just want to gossip.”

I couldn't help but smile and laugh a bit. “I've got an order to place – we need a few sets of molds made out of glass. Doesn’t need to be pretty, and we’ll need at least five copies to start with. We’ll probably need more, if only because someone is going to drop one eventually. The real trick is that the large part is going to need to be in two pieces and the fittings have to be made of glass or ceramic. No metal, wood, or plastic fittings.”

El and Alan both frowned. “No metal? I think...”

Alan interrupted this time, “We can do it. It'll be tricky, and there may be a few failures while I figure it out, but we can do it. We'll need a thousand-dollar retainer, the final price will depend on labor and materials. Hundred an hour for labor – you're a friend, after all – and material costs should be fairly small, even if we ruin a bunch of jobs. Glass is easy to recycle. It sounds like you don’t care what sort of glass?”

El chimed in, “We've got jobs ahead of you though, we won't be able to start for three weeks. And we have to keep running the business.”

My smile was getting wider as they talked. I think it was making El nervous – she had seen me with money before, after all. She had been with me when we blew up all those microwaves. Silently I took back everything bad I'd ever said about the university.

“Awesome. One thing... if I added a zero to that retainer, could we skip ahead of the line and get on it right away?”

Alan and El shared a look. Alan's lips tight, El's eyes a bit wide. Maybe married couples really do develop telepathy. Alan spoke first, his tenor soft, “We can push it a bit – we can certainly drop our normal work building stock, but we can't drop actual orders. That's a big retainer, unless the mold is really complicated I can't imagine your order costing that much. Just a casting, some grinding, some polishing, right?”

I smiled again, “The first mold should be simple enough, but I'm sure we'll have more orders for you after we do the first. Eventually, if this goes the way my boss and I think it'll go, we'll have to give you an option to buy in. But I think this'll work.”

Hansen Manufacturing, LLC, was growing after all. Now we just had to make our first actual prototype.

El was the one who finally asked, “So what are we making a mold of, by the way?”

I opened up the box that had been sitting at my feet. "Eventually, we're going to be making all sorts of different things. For now, we just need a prototype that can work as proof of concept – a single piece that demonstrates everything awesome about super-steel and demonstrates that we can make it in large numbers within standards. Hence, this.”

I pulled out the very first thing I had bought with my nifty new bank card.

The hard shell of a US army Enhanced Combat Helmet.