Chapter 101 : Before Going Public – Parallel Tracks
New York, Queens – Alex's POV
The call connects cleanly.
No waiting room theatrics. No unnecessary small talk. Just faces settling into place, microphones adjusting, the quiet competence of people who are used to spending their time on things that work.
On their side: three of them.
A senior systems architect I recognize from Valve's internal tooling papers. An infrastructure planner whose background is almost entirely live services. And a product lead—not marketing, not legal—someone whose job is clearly to understand where things could go before anyone decides whether they should.
It tells me everything I need to know about how seriously they're taking this.
"Thanks for making the time," the architect says. "We've been looking forward to this."
"So have I," I reply.
The tone sets immediately: professional, deliberate, unhurried.
They start where engineers always start when they're honest—by restating what they think they understand and giving me the opportunity to correct them.
They talk about my demo. About the architectural choices that stood out. About the fact that I designed for failure first instead of success. About how rare it is to see someone treat scale as a constraint rather than an aspiration.
"We're not interested in a simple distribution arrangement," the product lead says plainly. "That would undersell what you're actually doing."
Good.
They're explicit about their interest: long-term collaboration, not a short-term win. Something that can align with where Steam is going rather than bolt awkwardly onto where it's been.
Scalability comes up quickly. Not as a threat. As a shared concern.
Valve doesn't ask if something can scale. They ask how badly it breaks when it doesn't.
We talk infrastructure in real terms. Bandwidth realities. Regional deployment. Latency tolerances that matter to players instead of dashboards. What happens when success is uneven, spiky, and user-driven instead of forecastable.
I answer directly. I don't oversell. I don't pretend problems won't exist.
I tell them which ones I've already hit.
That earns nods instead of skepticism.
At a natural pause—when the conversation has moved from evaluation into alignment—I shift it.
"There's something I should disclose," I say, calmly. "Because it changes the context of this collaboration."
They all look attentive. Not wary. Curious.
"I've been developing a video platform in parallel."
That lands.
Not like a dropped object. More like a variable entering an equation they didn't know was incomplete.
The infrastructure planner leans back slightly. The architect's eyebrows lift. The product lead doesn't interrupt.
I continue before anyone fills the silence.
"It's not live. It's not public."
I let that sentence finish doing its work.
Then I explain.
I frame it exactly as it is: a media layer. Not a storefront. Not a marketplace. A system designed to host activity—gameplay, creation, performance, community—without forcing it into marketing shapes.
A place where creators can exist without being immediately monetized into distortion.
"A way for games, music, and communities to amplify themselves organically," I say. "Not as ads. As presence."
I'm careful with my language. I don't say disrupt. I don't say replace.
I say complement.
"This doesn't compete with Steam," I add. "It benefits from it. And it can benefit Steam in return—if aligned correctly."
Now the shift happens.
Not defensiveness. Recalibration.
The architect asks the first real question. "Why build this yourself?"
"Because it didn't exist in a form that respected scale and creators," I answer. "And because building it alongside the core system let me solve shared problems once instead of twice."
I explain how the platform was designed with modularity precisely so it could integrate with ecosystems rather than demand its own gravitational center.
The infrastructure planner starts asking sharper questions. Load asymmetry. Read-heavy behavior. Failure isolation.
I answer those too.
I don't pitch. I clarify.
The product lead is quiet for longer than the others. When they speak, it's measured.
"You're describing something that could become an extension of how people experience games, not just buy them."
"Yes," I say. "That's one of the outcomes it enables."
There's a brief pause on their side—not skepticism, but adjustment. A model being expanded rather than replaced.
"But to be clear," I continue before they can fill the gap themselves, "the platform isn't built for Steam."
That earns me their full attention.
"It's independent," I say calmly. "Designed to stand on its own. If Steam vanished tomorrow, it would still function, scale, and make sense. That was a deliberate constraint from the start."
The infrastructure planner nods slightly. The architect doesn't interrupt.
"What it can do," I add, "is interface naturally with an ecosystem like yours."
I outline it cleanly. No pitch tone. No exaggeration.
Native streaming paths directly from Steam builds. A frictionless way for developers to broadcast gameplay without routing through third-party tooling. Trailer hosting that doesn't fragment attention across platforms, but also doesn't lock content behind a single storefront. Media that supports discovery without replacing distribution.
"Mutual reinforcement," I say. "Not dependency."
The product lead leans back, considering. "So you're not proposing a Steam feature."
"No," I reply. "I'm describing an adjacent system that benefits from proximity—but doesn't collapse without it."
That distinction lands harder than positioning it as complementary alone.
"And you didn't mention this earlier because…?" they ask.
"Because until recently, it wasn't ready to carry its own weight," I answer. "Conceptually, it's been clear for a while. Operationally, it wasn't. Without infrastructure—real servers, real bandwidth, real failure tolerance—it would have been premature to frame it as part of any larger conversation."
The infrastructure planner nods again, more firmly this time.
"I didn't want this to sound like leverage," I continue. "Or like a future promise used to tilt a negotiation. I'm bringing it up now because it's reached a point where it reflects how I actually build systems."
That reframes the disclosure.
This isn't a reveal meant to extract value.
It's evidence.
"The platform exists," I say. "It's complete at the code level. Hardened. Stress-tested locally. What's missing isn't vision—it's physical reality. Once infrastructure is in place, it becomes deployable. Until then, it stays contained."
The architect folds their hands. "And you're comfortable letting it remain dormant until then?"
"Yes," I say without hesitation. "Because it's not designed to chase attention. It's designed to endure."
Silence, then—
"That tells us something," the product lead says slowly. "About how you approach risk."
"And scope," I add.
Now the questions shift—not about competition, not about overlap—but about boundaries. How clean the interfaces are. How decoupled the systems remain. What happens if one side accelerates faster than the other.
I answer plainly.
Steam doesn't become a requirement. The platform doesn't become a threat. Each remains legible on its own.
When the call winds down, no one mentions ownership or exclusivity.
Instead, they talk about next conversations. About pilots. About keeping the systems separate long enough to understand where cooperation actually adds value.
When the screen goes dark, the implication is clear.
I didn't bring up the platform to negotiate harder.
I brought it up because it proves I'm not building in fragments.
I'm building things that can stand.
And choose to connect.
The weeks that follow don't arrive with sharp edges. They unfold.
Nothing dramatic replaces the negotiation with Valve—no sudden acceleration, no pivot into spectacle. Instead, the conversations continue the same way they began: technical, deliberate, grounded. Emails turn into calls. Calls turn into shared documents annotated by people who know what they're looking at. Questions aren't framed around profit curves or branding, but around constraints, failure domains, and what breaks first when something succeeds faster than expected.
Valve doesn't rush. Neither do I.
They want to understand how I think under pressure. I want to understand how they make decisions when timelines stretch beyond quarters. Somewhere in that overlap, the shape of a partnership starts to emerge—not defined yet, but oriented. We talk infrastructure without pretending it's abstract. Bandwidth ceilings. Regional deployment. The cost of redundancy versus the cost of downtime. Nothing is agreed on paper, but plenty is agreed in principle.
In parallel, the platform stays offline.
Not idle—never idle—but contained. I keep refining it the way you refine something that's already solid: tightening documentation, mapping deployment paths, stress-testing again even when nothing has changed. The agents keep running scenarios, not because I expect new failures, but because repetition reveals patterns you miss the first dozen times.
The code doesn't change much.
My understanding of how it will live in the world does.
I don't announce anything. There's nothing to announce yet. Infrastructure remains the gate, and until it's solved cleanly, the platform exists in a quiet state of readiness. That's intentional. It keeps pressure where it belongs—on decisions, not deadlines.
Life, meanwhile, settles into a rhythm that doesn't need narration.
I move between people instead of events. Time is distributed rather than consumed.
Wendy becomes part of my daily orbit without friction. Not as something new to account for, but as something that has found its place. She's present in the mornings, in the pauses between work, in the late hours when focus softens into something looser. The intensity that marked the beginning gives way to familiarity. Touch becomes casual. Proximity stops being negotiated. Whatever threshold we crossed early on fades into the background, replaced by the simple reality of sharing space.
Rosalie watches all of it.
She doesn't confront. She doesn't interrogate. She adjusts.
Her routines shift subtly—timing, spacing, the way she enters a room and the way she leaves it. She notices how the apartment breathes differently now, how no one is hiding and no one is posturing. Acceptance doesn't arrive as a declaration. It arrives as equilibrium. One day she stops measuring, and that's when I know she's made her peace with it.
MJ and May remain steady presences, not crises waiting to happen.
Their pregnancies are real, acknowledged, and woven into daily life without being allowed to dominate it. Appointments are scheduled. Energy levels fluctuate. There are days when one of them needs more from me, and days when they don't. I don't hover. I don't withdraw. I stay consistent, which matters more than intensity ever could.
MJ balances forward momentum with quiet preparation. She plans, adjusts, keeps her world intact without shrinking it. May moves more carefully now, but with a calm that doesn't invite panic. Neither of them treats the future like a countdown. That helps everyone breathe.
Darcy remains Darcy—sharp, present, oscillating between fascination and practical curiosity about everything that's unfolding. Gwen stays connected even when she's not physically nearby, her presence defined more by alignment than proximity. There's no sense of anyone being edged out or left behind. The structure holds because it's maintained, not because it's declared stable.
Work continues alongside all of it, not in competition with it.
Valve discussions shape themselves in the background while I solve smaller, immediate problems: narrowing infrastructure options, evaluating locations, sketching timelines that can stretch without snapping. I talk less and listen more. I let the system I've built—technical and personal—prove that it can sustain pressure without collapsing inward.
That's when the shift starts—not abrupt, not dramatic. Practical.
It comes from scheduling, not inspiration.
An event gets locked in for The Mary Janes. Small venue. Modest expectations. The kind of date that doesn't forgive half-prepared sets or loose transitions. Nothing high-profile, but enough eyes to matter if they're sharp. Enough ears to notice when something isn't tight.
Rehearsals increase because they have to.
More evenings disappear into practice rooms. More calendars get reshuffled. The music pushes for attention not because it demands it, but because deadlines always do. Gwen mentions it casually at first, the way you mention weather that's coming whether you like it or not.
"Practice is going to ramp up," she says one night. "We can't coast on what we've got."
She's right.
That's when a name resurfaces—not as a plan, just as context.
Dazzler.
Gwen and I saw her once, months ago, in a place that didn't advertise and didn't need to. No spectacle. No production excess. Just presence, control, and a sound that stayed with you longer than it should have.
The memory comes back because it's relevant now.
The Mary Janes need polish. Edge. Something that sharpens the set instead of inflating it. The conversation doesn't jump straight to collaboration—it circles it. Mentions that Dazzler's been rehearsing nearby. That she's picky about where she plays. That she doesn't waste time on projects that don't respect the work.
More rehearsals follow. Longer ones. Focused ones.
I notice the parallel without forcing it.
Valve continues in one channel. Infrastructure, alignment, patience. Music tightens in another. Practice, refinement, presence. Different systems, same logic: nothing goes public until it holds under pressure.
The apartment absorbs the rhythm change without complaint. Wendy adapts automatically. Rosalie notes the added movement, the later hours, the way focus shifts without becoming chaotic. No one makes announcements. No one needs to.
By the time rehearsals become routine rather than an uptick, the direction is clear.
Not toward fame. Not toward disruption.
Toward readiness.
The concert isn't looming like a threat. It's approaching like a test—one that demands work, not nerves. And somewhere between code that refuses to break and music that refuses to stay rough, the next phase lines itself up without being pushed.
I don't step into it yet.
I just make sure we're ready when it does.