Balance of Power Shifted

by Karl, Victor

  Jeremy and I met at Newark Airport since he was going to catch a shuttle up to Boston to talk to another client. Jeremy handed me the fully executed non-disclosure form I had sent him earlier, which Julius wanted me to have in place prior to providing Jeremy with the details. Using my iPad, I gave him part of the presentation given to everyone else. At the end, he gloomily said, “Mike, you and Bill might as well have a bright red bulls eye painted on your behinds and your friends won’t be much better off. Everyone will want a piece of you or bury you six feet under. I would not wait to put in some intense security measures up front and especially before you go public. Let me talk to some of my team members who specialize in this sort of work and get back to you.” Thanks Jeremy, we appreciate you getting back to us so quickly. He laughed and said “I hope you feel that way after you get our bill.”

  Later that evening while hanging out I Fiona’s parents, I was introduced to Fred. He was this lovable ball of energy and took to me right away. Her parents were very interested in our venture, and understood we could not go into specific details. We didn’t mention how dangerous it might turn out for obvious reasons. I speculated to myself that this dinner at Fiona’s parents place may be the last quiet moment I would have for a long time.

  There was a constant stream of documents from Julius and Iris requiring review and signatures. I was also busy securing office furniture and computer needs. Once Fiona freed up from her previous employer, she was instrumental in hiring administrative staff. When Kristen and Taylor came on board, they used their business and accounting degrees to get us off to a great start. Taylor became our human resources department and Kristen our finance department. Fiona became our Chief Information Officer and together we designed our computer network, secure corporate email system and extranet for building our company website. Sean ended up heading out to California to work with Bill and Steve. Sean had a degree in mechanical engineering and a minor in electrical engineering and Bill wanted Sean’s expertise out there ASAP. Steve, our resident microbiologist, took ownership of studying Electricus and Bill and I decided to fill him in on everything except the discovery and reproductive details.

  Towards the end of July, Taylor, Fiona and I took a trip out west to my place so they could see firsthand the lab and prototypes. Bill had informed me that they had the Hummer running but where working out a few problems. Bill and I believed the team could use a change of pace since everyone was working long-hours and this trip could do just that. Kristen was going to hold down the fort at the new headquarters building. Iris and Julius had already gone out West the week before and had come back excitedly talking about what they had seen and leaving the others a little envious.

  We landed around three in the afternoon and Bill was supposed to be waiting for us. We did not see him out front of the airport so I texted him about his ETA. Bill immediately returned my text message to say that he was in the airport complex and would be pulling up to the arrival area in a minute. The others were not aware of the significance of the somewhat strange looking Hummer driving up to the curb, but I near peed in my pants with excitement as I saw it. The front hood and roof caught my attention first because it was not shiny black like the rest of the vehicle. Instead, it had a gel like shield on the surfaces with chrome trim around the edges. The look may not have been as nice as the original, but the team had done a great job integrating the Power Mat into the surfaces of the Hummer.

  Bill was eagerly watching the faces the team as he drove up. It was obvious by Rico’s dumbfounded look that he had figured it our as soon as he saw the Hummer. The others began to get a quizzical look when the huge vehicle pulled to the curb with no more sound than an almost imperceptible whir. He saw Fiona look at Rico’s expression, and she realized what was going on. With a clap of her hands, she excitedly turned to Taylor and filled him in. Bill, filled with a sense of satisfaction from witnessing the effect of his surprise on his friends, jumped out to open the back door for the luggage.

  After hugs all around, I pulled Rico aside and said, “It’s tricky to drive until you learn all the controls so if you don’t mind I’ll drive back.” Rico wrapped an arm around my shoulders and said, “Bill you outdid yourself, the Hummer looks great but how does it drive?” “Better than I expected” I said. “The acceleration is not as fast as the big V8 that was in it, but darn good.” During the ride back to the lab, I kept stealing glances at all the passengers to gauge their reactions and was not disappointed. Fiona and Taylor asked a million questions, while Rico paid attention to the controls and gauges in the vehicle. The quiet of the truck is amazing Bill thought. After driving it all week he felt it performed better than he led on to Rico. The dual electric motors were powerful and the Power Pad provided full juice even on a moonless night.

  Rico was excited to be pulling up to his home for the previous two years, but not in the way he expected. The last few weeks living with Fiona were about the most enjoyable he had ever experienced. They were so in tune with each other and easily slipped into doing things as a couple instead of individually. The recent excitement helped re-enforce for everyone what the company’s end goals were. The Hummer experience was a fantastic exclamation point on what he wanted to accomplish, which was to give the management team a hands on feel to Electricus. Fiona was in the back and I heard her say, “So this is Chez Rico. I thought it would be a little more glamorous from what I heard about it,” she said has she lightly punched me on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” I replied, “it has some unique amenities inside as you shall see.”

  Bill pulled into one of the garage bays and shut the doors once inside. As everyone piled out, Sean and Steve came over and initiated the hugging process all over again. Steve and Sean looked like they were having a lot of fun. Bill had told me that they were naturals and liked to think out of the box. He thought that they probably would have worked free if we had wanted it so. While Bill gave the grand tour of the place, I decided to head out to the market and get the ingredients for a celebratory barbecue. Fiona asked me if I wanted her to come along, but I could see she was looking forward to the tour so I said “no need, but if you want to help me cook later, I would take you up on that.” She smiled and said, “You got a deal.”

  We were all sitting around on the roof an hour or two after a fantastic barbecue that included flank steak, shrimp kabobs and chicken. We had already killed four bottles of wine and many beers. However, nothing could slow the conversation down which had migrated to how pervasive Electricus could be. We had mostly determined that Electricus was useable under almost every scenario that electricity is used and many applications where fossil fuels provided energy. Bill and Sean had already refined the Power Pad and Power Module and made some significant design changes, while Steve and Bill had optimized the reproduction of Electricus and had four fifty-gallon drums ready for production. By the end of the night, we had voted to retrofit two more cars and four homes of family members to gain design experience and get prototypes out there so we can collect more data on their operations. We all said good night around midnight and agreed to have a 10 am meeting to discuss other company business and Jeremy was coming by at eleven to give the team an overview of security precautions that were in progress.

  Fiona and I headed to my room. Steve had been using it and had moved out to one of the couches in the living room, which was starting to look like a homeless shelter due to use as an impromptu bedroom. We grabbed a shower together where she said to me, “your place is really neat and I am suitably impressed. Now I can see why you ignored us for two years.” I simply said, “This place is nice but it’s the company that makes a place feel right and to me your place is paradise at this time.” “Good answer,” she said and gave me one of the long sensuous kisses that weakened my knees. We were exhausted from the long day and the effects of the time change and fell asleep immediately.

  Morning came and I got up out of bed and went out to the living room. I used my laptop to catch up on the news and see how the Ya
nkees were doing. The Yanks won last night making it five games in a row and had a three game lead on Tampa Bay and a five game lead on Boston. Next, I dragged up the headlines for the day and was immediately shocked to see that Israel had attacked key Iranian nuclear facilities as well some important radical politicians. Actually there was no proof Israel had done anything, it was just assumed so. There were reports of large explosions near nuclear sites and analysts speculated that preparations for this attack might have taken up to 2 years to plan and put in place. The news groups were predicting gas prices to shoot through the roof and go over six dollars per gallon especially since Iran was already putting ships in place to block the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil-shipping lane. There were a couple of other articles blasting the current administration for not opening up federal lands for oil and natural gas drilling as well as permitting the use of shale fracking. These arguments have been going on frequently over the last couple of years, but had also happened prior to the current administration. The main differences, and why the cries were louder, were that there was better and safer technology available to extract fuels to counteract the highest gas prices in our history. The economy had already been slowing down in reaction to the price of oil and gas and this should make it even worse. Rico though about how Electricus could make a difference if only it was ready for mass production and adoption. For now, he would have to follow events in the Middle East to see how Iran handled this attack.

  Chapter 15: Cat Is Out Of the Bag

  We now had an encrypted 45-megabyte network connection between our two sites. This allowed us to create a secure video conference to Kristen and connected her to the meeting. The team meeting went well and we created some action items on how to get the next prototype projects off the ground. We also looked for a manufacturing firm that could build our Power Pads and Power Panels in different configurations. We felt comfortable that we would not be exposing any intellectual property.

  Fiona spent about 10 minutes running us through the layout of our company web site and secured documentation system. She had done a fantastic job and the entire team congratulated her. I closed this meeting by reminding everyone how important security was and set the tone for Jeremy who had sent me a text that he would be here in a few seconds.

  Jeremy came in with a flourish and made a half hour presentation, which focused on physical security and personnel security. We agreed that information security was an area that I was to handle. If it was any other person besides Jeremy using the fear, uncertainty and doubt, FUD approach to a presentation, I would have showed them the door. His presentation pulled no punches and did not sugar coat the dangers involved. If Efficio, as a company wanted to succeed, we had to implement extremely tight security and procedures and follow them unequivocally.

  The current lab was the most vulnerable, and we needed to consider a different high-security location for a future lab to protect the manufacturing process, property and our people. We needed to periodically investigate every employee as well as utilize a lie detector to verify that employee loyalty. Jeremy also handed out a document on ‘best practices’ on how to conduct business in public places and how to secure our homes. A Clavis expert would visit everyone, verify security systems and scan for listening devices. Lab and research areas would have stringent data security protocols in place, data and research notes will be stored with strong encryption. There will be rigid controls in place limiting the transfer of data from the secure server. At no time, were employees allowed to put company data on their own personal computers, storage devices or other devices such as a smartphone or tablet.

  The rest of the afternoon involved reviewing modifications to the Power Pad and Power Module. Sean had been instrumental in designing a compact Power Module and had integrated modular connectors to make life easy for everyone. The general design direction was to build a range of products rated on their wattage. Panels are to be interconnected using simple connecting cables to increase wattage ratings allowing the mat size to remain manageable but being able to scale from a 1200 square foot home to a 10,000 square foot mansion.

  We had determined that we would need a master electrician on staff to help us understand building codes and circuit panel designs. The discussion next centered on how to standardize on a vehicle so that we could start to template our processes instead of having each vehicle a one off solution. We needed to purchase four identical cars to retrofit for Electricus. In the end, we decided to search for fleet cars coming off lease and settled on a Camry or Maxima.

  Around 5 o’clock, I challenged everyone to play Call of Duty on my gaming quad, which sadly, I had not played in almost 2-months. The evening was great fun and we played for hours and enjoyed excellent Thai takeout food. We were flying out in the morning so this interlude was a nice way to spend some down time between the team members.

  A week later, Bill and I had just signed an agreement with a firm in South Jersey to refine and build our Power Pad, while we engaged a different firm the Detroit area to build our Power Panel. Both companies had monetary incentives built in to their contracts to improve both components. We had also started to look at our master plan on how to bring Electricus to other parts of the world and decided that we needed manufacturing centers around the globe and specifically in countries that had the most to lose from the success of Electricus. Our first pass included a number of Middle East countries, Russia and Venezuela. In these cases, we would license the production for a nominal fee and not be part of the operations.

  All contracts would have provisions to meet minimum units installed and pricing tiers based on the target audience. In other words, we did not want a country to throttle production to promote other energy methods and we did not want pricing to put Electricus out of reach of the poorest citizens. An advantage for us was that Efficio or a future subsidiary would be the sole producer of Electricus. The manufacturers of Power Pads needed to acquire Electricus to complete the manufacturing process from Efficio.

  We were getting ahead of ourselves, but we went and sketched out a separate charitable organization funded by profits from Electricus. The linkage of the charitable function to religious organizations will leverage their networks to help get to the world’s poor. The organization would promote Electricus and related knowledge worldwide. Almost as important, was a different type of knowledge, which would include such things as how to use the technology to; leverage electrical power for wells, install irrigation pumps and so forth.

  A few more weeks went by and we were already feeling growing pains. The California site was just too small to handle all the things currently performed there. We decided to exercise our option for the third floor of our Summit location and move all design work there. California would remain the Electricus production site for now and Bill and Steve would remain there. Sean, on the other hand, would come back east to run the new fabrication and design team. One thing we were still missing was a secure location to house our prototype vehicles and Power Pads. I gave this task to Sean with the added criteria that it must show well and support product mockups similar to a Home Show conference. I was just coming off a video conference call with the California team, when my new iPhone started to ring.

  The caller ID said it was Taylor, so I said, “Taylor what’s going on?” “Mike, can you talk privately?” “Yeah sure, I am sitting in my office ready to pack up for the day.” “We got a problem Mike. I sent you a link on your corporate email. See if you have it and bring it up.” “Sure Taylor, you’re getting me nervous.” I saw the email from Taylor and saw that it was a link to a YouTube video titled ‘Amazing.’ I clicked on the link and as it started to play my heart skipped a beat. Taylor sat quietly on the other end of the call as he could hear Bill’s voice narrating the work done on Electricus. I looked at the length of the video and it seemed like the entire original video was there. “Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered aloud. “Talk to me Taylor. What do you know about this?” “Mike, Kristen had plugged the encrypted memory s
tick into her work laptop and was looking at some files on it while visiting her parents last weekend. Her 15-year-old sister must have gotten to the PC when Kristen stepped away and saw the video.”

  Taylor continued by adding that, “According to Kristen, her sister she saw video, thought it was ‘cool’ and wanted to show it to her friends. To share it she posted a copy of the video on YouTube. I don’t know if you noticed, but it looks like it was online for five days and in that time has gone viral with over 332,000 views. Brianna, Kristen’s sister, got scared with all the attention and confessed to Kristen what she had done. Apparently, there were some very insistent messages posted against the video asking for contact information. It is probably only a matter of time before someone does some detective work and figures out who is behind Electricus. Kristen was going to call you, but is removing the video as we speak and trying to see if there is any way to determine the extent of any damage.”

  “Taylor, I am going to send an invite for a video conference meeting to start in 15 minutes. I want Kristen on the call to bring us up to date so please let her know.” I will contact everyone via phone in case the team is not monitoring email. I think Iris and Julius are still here and I will probably join them in the first floor conference room. Taylor, tell Kristen to relax. We were getting close to letting the cat out of the bag anyway to entice some investors to our company. We just need to have everyone on the same page to manage this. I will talk to you in 15.” Hanging up with Taylor, I immediately called Bill. His first reaction was a nervous laugh and a joke about being famous on YouTube, but he quickly got serious and would grab Steve and call in to the meeting.