Beowulf Tech Services was never supposed to end up like this.
When Peter Bishop first stood in front of a room full of venture capitalists and institutional investors, the numbers had sung beautifully. Three hundred and sixty million dollars in initial capital. A projected valuation of eight billion within five years. A roadmap polished to a mirror shine. A narrative investors loved—clean energy, scalability, disruption without discomfort.
Back then, Beowulf was safe innovation.
Then Peter made the mistake of telling the truth.
He told them he wasn't building a better battery for phones or electric cars. He wasn't optimizing recharge cycles or shaving costs by fractions of a percent. He was building something fundamentally different: a lightweight, ultra-dense power source capable of supplying a household with electricity for decades.
On paper, the theoretical lifespan approached fifty years.
In reality, with current material fatigue and thermal cycling, it would be closer to fifteen to twenty.
To Peter, that was still miraculous.
To his investors, it was catastrophic.
Battery companies survived on replacement cycles. Planned obsolescence wasn't an ethical failure—it was a business model. If a battery didn't die, it didn't sell again. If it didn't sell again, it didn't scale. And if it didn't scale, it didn't justify risk.
They didn't say it bluntly, of course.
They talked about exposure. About uncertain regulatory environments. About market readiness. About how the risk curve far exceeded acceptable thresholds.
And then, one by one, they pulled out.
Not all at once. That would have been merciful. Instead, it happened in waves—quiet phone calls, delayed funding tranches, clauses invoked with polite regret. Banks followed investors. Suppliers tightened credit. Partners grew cautious.
Within two years, Beowulf Tech Services went from a darling of clean-energy speculation to a wounded animal.
Three hundred and sixty million raised.
Forty million left in tangible assets.
Debt ballooning past four hundred percent.
Peter laid off engineers he had personally recruited. Scientists who believed in him. People who had followed the Bishop name not because of legacy, but because of conviction. Pay cuts followed. Facilities downsized. Entire research branches shuttered.
Still, he refused to abandon the work.
Stable energy wasn't a pitch deck to Peter. It was inheritance. His father, Walter Bishop, had spent his life straddling the line between theoretical brilliance and practical consequence. Peter had grown up watching equations become machines—and machines reshape the world.
So even when the board urged liquidation, when advisors suggested selling patents piecemeal, when accountants quietly recommended tapping into his personal trust fund, Peter kept going.
Until even that began to look inevitable.
He was preparing himself for failure—not dramatic collapse, just the slow, humiliating dismantling of a dream—when the request came.
A meeting.
From Derek Morgan.
Peter had heard the name, of course. Everyone in tech finance had by then. The elusive founder behind Blackfire Technologies. The man whose company had released Reality Quest and rewritten entire industries without ever stepping into the spotlight.
Peter's first assumption was cynical.
A stylish acquisition, he thought. The kind where larger entities bought distressed innovators, stripped their IP, and discarded the rest. He almost declined.
Almost.
Curiosity won.
The meeting itself was… strange.
No entourage. No lawyers hovering. No condescension masked as sympathy. Derek Morgan had arrived young, calm, and unsettlingly precise. He didn't talk down to Peter. He didn't exaggerate. He asked questions—specific ones. Deep ones. Questions that only someone who truly understood the technology would think to ask.
By the end of that meeting, Peter realized something that left him momentarily breathless.
Derek didn't want Beowulf's technology.
He wanted Beowulf.
Three months later, Peter Bishop stood in rural Florida, overseeing the construction of something that did not officially exist.
The location was intentionally unremarkable. Flat land. Sparse population. Close enough to infrastructure to be viable, far enough to avoid curiosity. Derek had acquired the property through layered shell entities so cleanly that even Peter didn't know the full chain.
What Peter did know was this: Derek was paying ten million dollars upfront for an independent power grid.
No cost-sharing. No deferred payment. No equity demand.
Ten million dollars, transferred cleanly, to build an energy system that answered to no public utility, no regional authority, and no external regulator.
The Beowulf teams worked in silence.
Every engineer, technician, and contractor signed NDAs so aggressive they bordered on absurd. Multi-decade clauses. Financial penalties that would ruin lives. Jurisdiction hopping to ensure enforceability.
No one complained.
Because for the first time in years, Beowulf engineers weren't being asked to compromise.
They weren't optimizing for investor comfort or regulatory appeasement. They were being asked to build the best system possible.
Nickel-diamond batteries—scaled beyond anything previously attempted—formed the backbone of the grid. Solar arrays complemented them, not as primary generation but as redundancy. Thermal regulation systems were installed with tolerances far beyond civilian standards.
Peter walked the site daily.
He inspected welds. Reviewed schematics. Corrected assumptions. For the first time since Beowulf's collapse had begun, he felt something he hadn't allowed himself in years.
Relief.
Derek visited only once.
He didn't tour the facility. Didn't shake hands. Didn't give speeches.
He asked one question.
"How long until it's impossible for anyone to shut this down without leveling the site?"
Peter had answered honestly.
"Once the grid is fully integrated? Short of military intervention—never."
Derek nodded.
"Good."
Now, as December bled toward its end, the grid was nearly complete.
And Derek was ready to turn his attention to something far more dangerous.
Medicine.
Peter knew what Derek intended only in fragments. He had not been told the full scope, nor did he ask. He had learned, over the past months, that Derek Morgan shared information with surgical intent. You received only what you needed—and nothing more.
Still, the hints were enough.
Clean rooms were being installed. Isolation protocols drafted. Supply chains arranged that bypassed traditional pharmaceutical channels entirely. Equipment orders that made no sense unless one assumed the work would involve materials and processes far beyond standard biotech.
Peter watched the preparations with a mix of awe and unease.
This wasn't incremental research.
This was foundational.
Derek Morgan wasn't trying to improve medicine.
He was aiming for the holy grail.
And for the first time, Peter understood the real reason investors had fled Beowulf all those years ago.
They hadn't feared failure.
They had feared permanence.
As the sun dipped low over rural Florida, casting long shadows across a facility that officially did not exist, Peter Bishop allowed himself one quiet thought.
History doesn't belong to those who play it safe.
Somewhere, deep within the secured structure Derek Morgan had commissioned, the future of medicine waited—silent, clean, and terrifyingly close to becoming real.