Jason was the first to get to their usual meeting spot after Evan. “Hey man what’s up?”

Evan shrugged. “Quite a bit and not a lot, I’ve found something I want to do but need everyone’s…” He trailed off as Kinzie walked in carrying a silver basketball and drenched in shimmering golden oil that, were it not for the coveralls she was wearing, would have rendered her white t-shirt entirely see-through. He coughed. “Wow. Err, wow.” He shook himself a bit. “What’s with the basketball?”

She beamed at him. “You’ll see, this is your meeting, so you have to go first. We still waiting on Beks?”

“Not anymore, Evan, I’m going to need you to do me a huge favor and watch over our Software department for a bit, their Director had to be let go and they’re a little lost, now what’s up?” She got herself some coffee and sat at the table across from him.

“Well, I had a bit of a breakthrough, I think, during my visit with my mom. I started telling the nurse about everything that had happened to us and how she ended up the way she was. Then one of our commercials came on, and I asked if she played, she said yes, but admitted to not having a lot of time to do so because she had kids to watch over. Well, long story short, she’s basically a saint, runs an orphanage of sorts, and I had Lisa upgrade her to a bolt and triple her pay. Then we arranged to provide enough buckets for every orphan above the age of sixteen to be able to play provided their guardian agrees.”

Rebekkah had pulled out her phone and was typing furiously on it the moment he mentioned the word ‘orphanage’ but just shook her head at him and waved for him to continue instead of explaining. “Well, the whole experience gave me an idea for a way I can contribute to stage two.” The others’ faces turned serious. “I want to start buying up pharmaceutical companies and reorganizing them to provide their product at near cost. Enough profit to sustain R&D, but no more letting people die because they can’t afford their medication. The only problem is I’m not sure just how much we could invest into such an expensive project right now.”

Rebekkah nodded. “That should be fine, we don’t have the liquid funds to outright buy the entire industry, but we just broke records for annual profit established by major corporations and the year isn’t nearly over. You could buy three or four smaller companies, or one or two really big ones without hurting our finances.”

Evan nodded. “That’s that then, are we still on schedule with the rest of it?”

The others nodded in unison, then began to offer details. Jason cleared his throat. “I’m mostly finished with the initial drafts of our first fleet, I have a viable design for every class of starship except fighters, which Lisa just informed me are death traps that nobody uses anymore due to targeting computers getting too good at point defense. I had an idea that might fix that problem and also give us another revenue stream at the same time, but I haven’t had time to flesh it out yet, maybe you guys can help? I was thinking drones, equip some of them with quantum communications relay thing, rename it because that is a mouthful, and control them remotely.

“They can be made crazy maneuverable, because the mechanical components have way higher stress tolerances than a squishy human pilot, and one person could control a flight or squadron with simple AI assists through the link. The extra maneuverability should reduce losses a huge amount, and having multiple people control things remotely should provide enough chaos to overwhelm the enemy’s targeting systems. The revenue stream I mentioned is pretty simple, but it would kill two or three birds with one stone, we make everything I just mentioned into a game. Since nobody uses fighters anymore, it would have to be mostly PVP with maybe some made-up aliens for minimal PVE content and tutorials, then feel out the best players to see if we can trust them enough to bring them into the fold. Income, more hype for the company, and a ready source of self-training recruits. Three birds, one stone.”

Rebekkah looked ecstatic. “That’s perfect! Get on that right away, I’m sure Kinzie and Lisa will help if you need more hardware to make it all work. Right now I’m mostly just growing our image and our financial and political weight. It’s rather slow going, but this sort of thing always is. What Evan did, and has planned, is a huge windfall for me in building our image, and a second game will be a boon for our financial clout. Kinzie, dearest friend of mine, please oh please tell me you have magically come up with just the right thing for me to take over governments worldwide!”

Kinzie grinned. “Well I don’t know about taking over any governments, but I did bring a neat new toy.” She pressed something on the basketball then tossed it at Evan’s face, who yelped and struggled to escape his chair before he realized it had stopped and was floating in mid-air. “I was in the middle of the final touches when you called, so this one is pretty bare-bones, but I’m sure we can think of all sorts of things to attach to it. For now, Jeeves, a cup of coffee if you don’t mind.”

The others watched in stunned silence as the basketball, now decked out in three glowing rings of different sizes lining the bottom third of it, drifted over to the counter. A little robotic arm popped out and it poured a cup of coffee, not seeming to have any trouble with the added weight in the slightest, then brought it to Kinzie. “Can’t do anything about the glow, but I’m not too interested in making stealthy floating killbots for the army anyway, and yes, that does mean we could put guns on it if we wanted to, but I don’t. I was thinking more home assistance bots, but since you want something for the military…”

She tilted her head back for a moment before looking around at them with a bright smile. “I got it! They can go pretty quick when they have to and are surprisingly sturdy since they are pretty much just a modified inertial dampener with a few extras tacked onto them, and while they aren’t quite strong enough to lift a person by themselves, they can do this, Jeeves, travel mode.” The ball settled onto the table in front of her and flattened itself into a disk about three inches thick.

“They aren’t that heavy, on account of the lightweight alloys I used, so it shouldn’t be all that hard for a soldier to carry a couple with them. Someone gets hurt and needs to be gotten out in a hurry, they just take them out, activate them, and they get the wounded guy to the whichever base or emergency center they tell the things to go to. All I gotta do is swap out a few of the things I stuck in on a whim for a collapsible stretcher that won’t break or let the guy squirm around too much. Which will probably be a pain in the butt, but I can do it.”

Rebekkah’s smile was so wide they were certain her face had to be hurting. “That is perfect! They’ve been hounding me about scaling up the holo-tech to use as camouflage for different stuff and getting all grouchy and rude when I tell them it isn’t possible, this should get them off my-” Her phone chirped and she looked at it. “Perfect timing! Lisa, could you be a dear and give us channel eight? Our PR department just earned themselves a bonus.”

A rectangle popped up where they could all see it, and there was a reporter standing outside a rather run-down old house. “I’m here outside the home of Mrs. Janet Freedman, who our sources tell us is the very first to benefit from what people are beginning to call the Ebonheart Crusade. Mrs. Freedman, do you have any idea what may have started all this?”

“Ebonheart Crusade.” Rebekkah murmured to herself. “Bonus and a raise, that is absolute genius.”

Mrs. Freedman looked a bit like a deer in the headlights, but eventually mustered up her courage. “Well, I work as a caretaker-”

“For the orphans here?” the reporter interrupted with that trademark friendly smile they all use.

“No, well yes in a way, but I work in hospice care in order to help provide for the orphans. I was having a pretty normal day when one of the ladies I care for’s son came in to visit. He’d been there before, but he never really talked much, this time was different, he told me all about how she got there, had me in tears by the end of it. Then this commercial came on, one of the Shard ones, and he asked me if I played it. I was honest with him, told him I had tried it but didn’t have much time to play with the kids and all. He asked about the kids, and seemed surprised to find out they were all orphans, he called me a saint, tripled my pay, and told someone to send me enough rigs for all my kids to play and upgraded mine.”

“So you’re telling us that you are not only the first beneficiary of the Crusade, you’re the person that inspired it? That’s fascinating! You don’t think that it’s a little hmm, self-aggrandizing to give out video game consoles to kids that could otherwise never afford them as a form of charity? Or that it might be harmful in the long run?”

Mrs. Freedman grew visibly angrier with each question. “Now you listen here you oily little toad,” jabbing at him with a finger, “whoever thinks Mr. Ebonheart’s game could possibly be harmful to these kids he’s giving it to is a bloody fool! Look around you! Look at the kind of neighborhood we have been forced to try and raise these kids in! My kids have stayed inside and away from all the gangs and violence on our streets since I got my first rig, just so they could watch me play and hope for a chance to try it! Then Mr. Ebonheart finds out about it, and without hesitation, not for one second, he completely turned around my life, the lives of my kids, and when not even that was good enough for him, he arranges to do the same thing everywhere! Right there in front of me! Said ‘I never even thought of the good we can do for orphans’ and set everything into motion right then and there! Then he thanked me and left without another word! Don’t you ever, ever, try to malign that man in front of me!”

The dumbfounded reporter gawped at her for a bit before trying to recover. “I apologize, ma’am, I didn’t mean to imply anything rude. I’m afraid that’s all I have time for right now-” Lisa turned it off as he was signing off and turning it back to the newscasters.

“You definitely weren’t paying her enough. Do you think she would get suspicious if her pay went up again?” Rebekkah asked jokingly.

“Now I want to meet her in person, I thought you were kidding about the whole being a saint thing, but she really did devote her whole life to helping other people didn’t she? You certainly made an impression too, that poor guy was just trying to play to his viewer base and make you out as some sort of rich snob looking for a tax write-off and she went postal on him.” Jason said with a laugh. “Now I can’t wait for your drug deal to kick off, someone’s gonna do what that guy just did without getting chewed out for it, then the drug-filled shoe is gonna drop and they’ll be eating crow for the rest of their lives.”

Evan winced. “Did you have to phrase it that way? You made it sound like I’m going to be out selling stuff on the streets.” Jason just shot him a sidelong glance. “Right, dumb question.”

“I guess we’re done now?” Rebekkah asked as she stood.

Jason nodded. “Yea, pretty sure we’re all on the same page for the next step, Evan you up for helping set up the new game?” When Evan nodded at him he just gave him a thumbs up and left.

Kinzie was fiddling with her basketball drone, and as Rebekkah walked past Evan she leaned down and whispered into his ear. “Make your move idiot, she’s trying to give you your chance, right here, right now. Ask her out or I’m going to have Lisa fill every piece of clothing you have with itching powder.” She stood, patted him on the shoulder and left.

Evan struggled to swallow the lump in his throat as Kinzie sat there fiddling with her machine and glancing at him occasionally. “So, err, I was wondering, would you like to go get something to eat? Tonight I mean, for dinner.” He felt like such an idiot.