Page 11

“Is something wrong?”
“If they’re calling me at this time, probably.”
“Who’sthey?”
“My team,” I say. “We’ve got an extensive project coming up.”
“And you’re the head of the department?”
“Something like that,” I mutter.
I force myself to stand up, somehow taking my phone from my pocket. It seems wrong when Sera is lying there with her breasts exposed, her nipples looking ready for more sucking, her legs open, tempting me to palm her sweet core again.
Turning away, I answer the call. It’s my assistant, Andy. “Boss,” he says.
“What’s up?”
“Something’s gone wrong with the AI.”
“What do you mean – gone wrong?”
“You need to come to the lab. The team thinks someone has sabotaged the prototype.”
“Sabotagedhow?”
“You need to come. I’m sorry.”
I sigh. “I’ll be right there.”
When I turn back, Sera is already putting on her bra again. She gasps when I leap on her, tear the bra away, and greedily palm her breast, kissing her. I must get carried away because she pushes against my chest.
“That sounded serious,” she murmurs.
“It is. Billions are at stake.”
“Then you should go. I don’t want you getting into trouble.”
“But I want to stay here with you so damn bad,” I admit with a sigh.
She’s right, unfortunately. What I want and what I have to do are two very different things. A CEO doesn’t always have the power people assume he does.
My cell phone rings again, punctuating her point.
“Fuck,” I mutter. “You’re right, Sera. But I’m not forgetting about you…”
Andy is my assistant and my fixer, acting as a go-between with me and everybody else at NeuroDrive. He’s in his mid-thirties, tall with thick-framed glasses and a tattoo of Michael Faraday on his left forearm.
The rest of the team is in the lab, crowded around our latest self-driving car. We’ve already launched several successful electric vehicles, but this is our first to use artificial intelligence for the self-driving function. In the tests, it has proved to be two hundred percent more effective.
“What’s the issue?” I say, striding across the room to talk with Steve, the co-lead designer.
Steve is a few years older than me, with a shaved head and a grimace that proves difficult to budge. Even for him, though, this is bad. He looks pissed even when there’s good news. This is nuclear.
“Talk to him,” Steve says.
“Who – Ally?” Ally is the name of the AI.
“Yeah.”