Page 78 of Soul Mates: Hercules Valentine and I

Mason bounds to his feet. “That’s enough. This meeting’s over. We all know what to do to get it out the door.”

I shoot my hand up. “Wait!” I have the attention of everyone present. “Flying cars are not an impossibility.”

Mason and Hercules pass each other a look.

“I’m listening,” Orion says.

“VTI had this compression technology sitting in the vault, waiting to be utilized to its fullest potential, long before I arrived. So let’s take a flying car, for example.”

Orion folds his arms over his puffed-up chest. “Yes, let’s take the flying car, for example.”

My eyes pass over Hercules. At least he’s not frowning. But I wish I knew what he was thinking.

“Orion—may I call you that?”

He sharpens his steely stare. I’m certain it’s the look that makes it hard for my cousin to forget him. “Yes, you may,” he replies.

“Why flying cars?”

He drops his arms out of the fold and takes a nervous glance at Hercules. “You have to ask me that to answer my question?”

“Well, yeah, because if you want to produce flying cars, then you need to know where they fit within the marketplace. What's their value? Why do we as consumers need them? Or even better, why do we as human beings need them?” I'm feeling pretty proud of myself because those are the sorts of questions my grandfather would have asked.

Anticipation settles in the air. Fortunately, everyone has been drawn into the back-and-forth between me and Orion.

“Just drive below Sixtieth, and you'll have the answer to your question.”

“So, easing or eliminating traffic, then,” I say, writing on my view pad.

Everyone except Hercules looks at the words I’ve written on the big screen. Hercules’s focus stays on me, which makes me nervous. The longer he looks at me, the closer he’ll get to figuring out who I am, so I purposely angle my back to him so he can’t study my face.

“What else?” I ask.

“Can I get on this?” Harv asks with a raised finger.

“Sure,” I say.

“A flying car could get us where we need to go faster,” he says.

“Could be a lot cleaner too,” Rina adds. “Although electric cars are quite clean.”

“Yeah, but they get stuck in traffic,” Rob says.

“I think the primary necessity is to avoid traffic,” I say. “So, we have our compression technology. Our biggest challenge would be how to use our technology to accomplish avoiding traffic. You might get a flying car out of it, or you might get something else. If we let what’s possible guide us, we’ll never know what we’ll discover, but we will discover something.”

Arms folded again, Orion studies what I’ve written on the screen.

“Flying-car crashes are what we’ll discover,” Mason remarks. “Orion, we’re not wasting any of our time or resources on your flying car.”

“Lark, if you were me, how would you get started?” Orion asks.

I know Max would kill me if he knew what I was about to say. But no way am I going to do a horrible job for VTI. I’m unable to give VTI anything less than my best.

“Well, first of all, I’d understand that our compression technology can exist beyond electronic devices. Take GIT, for example. Who would’ve thought a product like Climate Condition would one day replace air conditioners? Basically, if you want to make a flying car, then you speak to mechanics, engineers, physicists, and people like me. You might come up with nothing. But you might come up with the very thing that no one has been able to do until you figured it out.”

The room is so silent that you could hear a pin drop. Hercules is frowning at me. I think I may have made an enemy out of him by supporting his brother’s idea. I couldn’t stop myself from saying those things, though. Orion has the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that my grandfather would have encouraged. I think if our silly family feud with the Valentines didn’t exist and Treasure had brought him to a family gathering when Grandfather was alive, Grandfather would have liked him very much.

“All right,” Mason says with a loud handclap. “Let’s get to work on what’s able to make us money within this fiscal quarter.”