There were companies that paid well, and then there were companies that paid obscenely well.
Blackfire Technologies and The Raven Corporation already belonged firmly in the latter category, their compensation packages whispered about in tech circles with a mix of envy and disbelief. Stock options that matured early. Benefits that didn't vanish when markets dipped. Legal teams that treated employees like protected assets rather than replaceable labor.
But even by those standards, the Blackfire Nanotechnology Division existed in a different universe.
It wasn't publicly acknowledged. It wasn't listed on job boards. It didn't recruit through universities or headhunters. Every single employee had been selected personally—either by Derek himself or by a razor-thin internal committee whose sole mandate was competence without ego.
And the compensation reflected that exclusivity.
Housing, fully paid, within secured residential zones close to the facility.
Meals, not catered but customized—dieticians on staff, menus rotated weekly, cultural preferences respected down to obscure regional cuisines.
Transportation, personal and secure, with drivers or autonomous vehicles depending on preference.
Education, unlimited: full scholarships not only for employees, but for spouses and children—any institution, anywhere, no obligation to return value beyond continued silence.
Healthcare that bordered on absurd: experimental treatments, off-label drugs, specialists flown in quietly for conditions most insurance providers would never touch.
A guaranteed month-long paid vacation every year, destination unrestricted, travel discreetly handled.
And then there was the base salary.
Five hundred thousand dollars annually. Minimum.
Bonuses were not discussed openly, but everyone knew they existed.
The cost of all this would have horrified a traditional CFO. Derek barely noticed it.
Loyalty, silence, and focus were not cheap. And cheap things failed.
December 31st arrived without ceremony.
There were no countdowns, no champagne, no speeches about the coming year. Inside the nanotech lab, time was measured differently—by data points, error margins, and survival curves.
It had been seven days since animal testing began.
Derek was present every day.
Not hovering, not interfering, not issuing frantic instructions. He watched. He listened. He asked questions when patterns emerged and stayed silent when they didn't. The lab personnel had quickly learned that his presence wasn't pressure—it was expectation.
The first test group had been small by design.
Rodents engineered to express aggressive, late-stage cancers—tumors that metastasized rapidly, the kind used precisely because success rates were near zero. Control groups had been established, placebo nanostructures administered, every variable isolated to the point of obsession.
The nanomachines themselves were never referred to as such in documentation.
They were called constructs.
Language mattered.
On day one, there had been nothing dramatic. No miraculous collapse of tumors. No cinematic recoveries. That had worried some of the younger researchers—until Derek calmly reminded them that uncontrolled speed was indistinguishable from failure.
By day three, the data began to bend.
Tumor growth slowed—not halted, but slowed in a way that defied statistical noise. Blood markers associated with systemic stress dropped. Inflammatory responses declined instead of spiking, suggesting the immune system wasn't reacting as though it were under attack.
By day five, the first tumors began to shrink.
Not dissolve. Not rupture. They receded, as though something was quietly dismantling them cell by cell, leaving surrounding tissue untouched.
No hemorrhaging.
No immune collapse.
No organ failure.
By day seven, the room felt different.
The animals that should have been declining were active. Eating normally. Grooming. Neural responses intact. Imaging scans showed tumor mass reduced by more than sixty percent in the most aggressive cases.
One of the senior researchers sat back from her console and said nothing for a full minute.
Then she whispered, "This shouldn't be possible."
Derek didn't smile.
He simply nodded.
"This is the baseline," he said. "Not the ceiling."
The real breakthrough wasn't the reduction in cancer mass—it was the absence of collateral damage. Traditional cancer treatments were wars of attrition. This wasn't warfare. It was surgery at a molecular scale, conducted by something that didn't tire, panic, or improvise.
The constructs weren't attacking indiscriminately.
They were recognizing.
By the end of the seventh day, Derek convened a closed meeting. No recordings. No external observers. Just the core research leads and the legal liaison he had embedded within the lab months earlier.
"We move in parallel now," Derek said calmly. "No delays."
First: patent filings.
Not a single comprehensive patent—those invited scrutiny. Instead, a constellation of narrow, overlapping patents: design logic, targeting frameworks, control architectures, safety constraints. Each filed through different legal entities, in different jurisdictions, carefully structured so that no one could assemble the full picture without access to all of them.
Second: insulation.
JBL Investments would begin lobbying immediately, but indirectly. No grand announcement. No claims. Just quiet positioning—language inserted into healthcare reform discussions, regulatory pathways softened, early conversations with FDA advisory boards framed around future adaptive therapies rather than cures.
The word cure would not be used.
Not yet.
Third: scale.
Animal testing would expand cautiously—larger mammals, longer observation windows, stress scenarios designed to provoke failure. Derek wanted to know how the system broke before anyone else did.
Fourth: human trials.
That word made several people shift uncomfortably.
"Not tomorrow," Derek said, anticipating the reaction. "But preparation begins now. Candidate profiles. Ethical frameworks. Legal scaffolding. We will not improvise when that door opens."
He paused, then added quietly, "And we will not ask permission until refusal becomes politically impossible."
No one challenged him.
They didn't need to.
The results spoke loudly enough.
As the meeting ended, Derek remained behind, standing alone behind reinforced glass, watching technicians move through the lab with careful efficiency. These people weren't just employees anymore—they were custodians of something that would change the trajectory of human history.
Outside the lab, the world prepared to celebrate the new year.
Fireworks would light up cities. Politicians would give hollow speeches about hope and renewal. Markets would close and reopen, pretending time was cyclical rather than cumulative.
Inside the Blackfire Nanotech Lab, Derek Morgan felt no such illusions.
This wasn't a new year.
It was a threshold.
And once crossed, there would be no going back.