The next morning Rebekkah had that terrifyingly happy smile and bounce that tended to send shivers down their spines. “Good morning everyone!” She said in an almost impossibly cheerful tone.

“Oh, no, she just hustled someone out of their soul again, didn’t she?” Jason grumbled.

She giggled, which really only confirmed their suspicions. “I got a call from the military, they’re super interested in the larger portable projector, and they offered an insane price per unit, provided we program the ones they buy with the features they want!”

“Good lord it’s even worse than I thought, she hustled the U.S. government out of their souls.”

Rebekkah blessed them with her very best rendition of that terrifying predatory grin of hers. “That wasn’t the only call I got. I got one just like it from Japan, the U.K., Germany, China, France, and Switzerland.”

“Great Scott! She’s done it! She’s got the whole world in her hand!”

Rebekkah wrinkled her nose with a frown while Evan and Kinzie both groaned. “That was horrible, how could you possibly sit there and paraphrase a Doc Brown quote then mash it into old Christian music?!”

Jason shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. “Got rid of that creepy smile at least.”

“Hey! My smile isn’t creepy!” Rebekkah protested

“No, you’re right, it’s a totally normal and regular smile. If, you know, you’re that guy that goes down to Georgia looking for souls to steal in ridiculous fiddle contests.”

Everyone burst into laughter, and when it finally wound down Rebekkah was smiling a regular, non-terrifying smile. “Seriously though guys, this is an incredible windfall. After that outrageous performance yesterday, I honestly had no idea you had that kind of showmanship bottled up in you Evan, the whole world is in an absolute uproar, and governments all around the world are desperate to get their hands on our tech. We need to give them something before someone decides to just take everything from us and to hell with the consequences. Get me something they’ll like? It’s the government, so you know, clunky with a lot of useless ‘security’ features?”

Jason nodded. “Don’t worry, we got you. We’ll cook up something nice for them, so you can sell it to absolutely everybody and completely ruin their tech advantage.”

“You know me so well,” Rebekkah said with a happy sigh. “Anyway, duty calls, I probably have over a thousand messages waiting for me. Did Lisa remember to put the ship on hold for a bit and crank out those helmets and injector stations like a madwoman?”

“Yes ma’am I did ma’am! Going to need somewhere to put them soon ma’am! Ten-thousand of each helmet and counting ma’am!”

Rebekkah rolled her eyes. “Sometimes I forget that you can hear everything we say, thank you sweetheart, and I bought the lot just next to you to put our headquarters on. Once that’s up you can just stuff everything in the warehouse section.” She froze mid-step on her way out of the room. “Actually I just had an idea, not sure if it’s a good one, send me a projection of yourself. With a size scale please.”

A blunted, cigar-shaped ship appeared over Rebekkah’s wrist. “Hmm,” she glanced at the accompanying metric scale, “you said you could expand your size in order to construct larger ships right? How big can you get before you start getting gaps along your hull? How modular and changeable is your interior?”

Evan tilted his head at the slowly rotating image. “I see what she’s getting at.”

Lisa thought about the questions for a moment. “Pretty big to be honest, ideal conditions for construction of a lot of parts requires a hermetically sealed environment, so the hull is designed to thin out as I expand to accommodate the larger versions of those parts. Interior-wise, other than essential components like the engines and reactor it’s mostly empty space other than the stockpiled supplies I brought with me, again because I’m designed to build ships from the ground up.”

“Well then girl, soon as you get the chance, get that big metal butt out of the ground and parked on our new plot of land. Make yourself look like you’re under construction for a bit, and make us a nice fancy office building setup inside you that we can pretend to work at!”

Lisa was a bit hesitant. “Are you sure I should do that? The Confederation is sure to pick up me moving into the open like that.”

Kinzie shrugged. “Just send them a message the way you did last time saying you located the cause of the meltdown or whatever and are beginning your assigned mission. It’s not really a lie, you are going to build us a ship or three after all.”

“Okay, I’ll do it!”

“Oh, and figure out an avatar for yourself or something. I still owe you at least a couple hugs, so either hard light projection of some sort, or an android thing. Something we can touch. Maybe both? Projections so you can put little holo projectors all over to play as an artificial tour guide for visitors when you want to talk to other people or something, android so we can go clubbing.”

“That sounds like fun! But what image should I use? What should I look like? How can I possibly choose something so important?”

Evan spoke up. “Do whatever feels best to you, or if you feel like it, go absolutely wild. You are the sole person on the planet that can actually look exactly the way they want to look whenever they want to look that way, and you can do that with literally any look you can imagine. No doubt you will eventually find something you like the most and stick to, but for now, who cares? Well, actually don’t go too wild. God forbid we get someone visiting our building and you decide to pop out to say hello as a horrible mutant spider-person or something.”

Lisa giggled at the joke, then went quiet as she applied her considerable processing power towards finding or creating an image that was her.

Evan and Jason got the list of requested features from Rebekkah that the military had sent, and spent the next week and a half working together with Kinzie to jury-rig at least some of the features into a hardened projector that would survive being dropped a few times. They did what they could, but ultimately it wound up just as they had expected, the redundant security features made the interface clunky and not particularly intuitive. Hardline data ports, so they could pipe in things like drone feeds without broadcasting anything on any kind of wifi. A control rod, so they could pretend to be a wizard by waving it at the thing from across the room instead of going over to it and using the much more responsive and intuitive, for all its clunkiness, touch interface. Evan’s personal favorite though? The emergency self-destruct function they helpfully installed, under a bullet point on the explanatory powerpoint they planned to send along with the device for their review that read: In the event of command post being overrun by enemy, device can be set to destroy all sensitive internal components and render itself inoperable, destroying any data contained within.

On a lark, as they were finishing up, they painted the whole thing an appallingly drab shade of matte green. “Dude,” Jason said slowly. “I feel dirty. What we just did to that piece of tech was… some sort of sin against the tech gods or something. I mean, it’s twice the size as the one we used for the demo, four times the weight, with less than a quarter of the functionality. And that control wand looks like a vibrator!”

Evan chuckled. “What do you mean looks like? I totally rigged that thing to vibrate whenever it gets a priority notification. I know what you mean though, I totally need a shower now.” They fell into silence as it was boxed up and shipped off to some poorly paid government eggheads for an assessment. “Ten bucks says they absolutely love it, and buy them by the truckload at whatever extortionate price Beks decides to charge 'em.”

Jason shook his head and waved him off. “No way am I taking that bet, I’ve seen the kind of thing the military buys. Three hundred bucks on a big ugly metal chair with no wheels that does nothing but get in the way of the guy that’s supposed to use it, millions on radar systems that were outdated like ten years before they bought it, the list goes on man, they’re totally gonna buy that thing and then they’re gonna put them all over the place. It’s going to be so embarrassing.”

“Where did you see the kind of thing the military buys? You don’t know anyone in the service, and I know your pudgy butt didn’t serve.”

“Discovery Channel, there was a whole documentary on it.”

“Figures.”

Sure enough, a couple days later they got an official letter, stamped with all sorts of fancy seals and signed by a bunch of generals and the President. It formally approved of the enclosed contract, locking them in at the low, low price of $500,000 per unit, and an initial order of ten thousand units by the end of the month. They could practically feel the excitement oozing off of the copy of the review they had been sent, the eggheads offering glowing praise towards each and every ridiculous ‘feature’ they stuffed into the thing. They laughed until they couldn’t breathe when they hit the line that read: The control rod interface is increasingly difficult to use the further away from the unit you get, but the addition of a vibrate option for priority notifications is a stroke of genius, the command officer in possession of the rod can immediately recognize and address the urgent notifications no matter how loud or chaotic the situation.

The whole thing was made more ridiculous when they took into account that the military thought they were getting a piece of extremely useful, cutting edge tech for rock bottom prices, while their own company, formally re-christened Archangel Studios from the lettered hodgepodge Rebekkah had used to sell stock and drum up some quick cash as a startup, could preach about doing their patriotic duty to their home country by providing the units almost at cost. Then turn around and sell them to the rest of the world at double the price, because hey, we’re still a commercial business, and all the while telling absolutely nobody that the actual cost to produce the things was a bit over $150 due to the support of Lisa.

They were so busy raking in money hand over fist while pumping out seemingly endless gaming rigs, and setting up all the R&D permits and grants that would allow them to really start acquiring the materials Lisa would need to let them take everything to the next level that before anyone realized it, it was launch day. Evan found himself scrambling to arrange another big dramatic show, this time in their tricked out Global Headquarters building, also known as Lisa the Obviously an Alien Spaceship Sitting in the Middle of Main Street. She giggled at his muttered joke, and it made him smile. They would finally get to meet her official Avatar tomorrow on the big day. She had nearly driven everyone nuts with her constant questions about how would this look, or is that too weird, is this too fat, too skinny, etc., etc. before she announced a couple weeks ago that she was finished, but wanted to make it a surprise and had settled on a launch day reveal.