The first transfer hit Leon's account on a Tuesday morning. $150 million from Neuralink.
He stared at his phone, at the number that had appeared in his banking app. Nine figures. Real money.
"It's actually real," Maya said, looking over his shoulder.
"It's real." Leon opened his notes app. "Okay. Priority list. Company registration first, then property acquisition, then equipment."
Maya took the phone from him. "No. I'm handling the logistics. You get scattered when there's too many moving parts. I'll coordinate, you focus on the technical side."
"You sure?"
"I organized a six-month research project with twelve people and a limited budget. I can handle buying a building and some computers." She was already typing on her laptop. "What do you want to call the company?"
"Helix Innovations."
"DNA reference?"
"DNA reference."
She filed the paperwork online. Delaware incorporation for the tax benefits. "Done. Helix Innovations LLC is officially registered. Now, what exactly are we buying?"
Leon pulled up his list. "Research facility. Needs to be big enough for labs, offices, and a data center. Separate residence for us. Data center equipment—top-tier NVIDIA GPUs, networking infrastructure. Ten D-Wave quantum computers, sixth generation, 4400 qubits each. Vehicles. Security systems."
Maya looked at the quantum computer specs. "Those are $15 million each. You want ten of them?"
"I need 44,000 qubits total for what I'm planning. One machine isn't enough."
"What are you planning?"
"A hybrid computing system that runs on both classical and quantum architecture. And an AI that can help optimize the gene lock cultivation system."
"An AI." Maya made a note. "Alright. Let's start with real estate."
They toured eight buildings over two weeks.
The first was too small. The second was in a bad location. The third had structural issues. The fourth was perfect—a converted warehouse in the tech district, 50,000 square feet of open space with high ceilings and reinforced floors. Zoned for commercial and research use.
"This could work," Leon said, walking through the empty space. His voice echoed off the concrete walls.
Maya was taking measurements on her phone. "Space for labs on the east side. Offices on the west. Data center in the back—it's already climate controlled and has the electrical capacity we'd need. We'd have to retrofit some things, but the bones are good."
"How much?"
"$8 million. Owner's motivated to sell."
"Buy it."
She called the real estate agent. The offer went in that afternoon.
For their home, they looked at properties outside the city. Privacy was important. Leon's appearance had stabilized—the gold eyes and white-streaked hair weren't going away—and living in an apartment where neighbors could see him wasn't sustainable.
They found a modern house on three acres. Floor-to-ceiling windows, open floor plan, four bedrooms, home office space. The nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away.
"This is so much space," Maya said, walking through the empty living room.
"You wanted space for a home lab. I need room for equipment. And eventually we might have people working with us."
"People?"
"Researchers. Once we understand the gene locks better and decide to share the knowledge, we'll need a team."
Maya ran her hand along the window frame. "This is really our home. Not an apartment we're renting. Our actual home."
"Yeah."
She turned to look at him. "We've come so far. Two months ago we were worried about rent."
"Two months ago I was human."
"You're still human."
"Enhanced human."
"Still counts." She smiled. "Make the offer?"
"Make the offer."
They bought the house for $3.2 million. Move-in date was set for three weeks out.
The data center equipment took longer to acquire.
Maya coordinated with vendors. NVIDIA's latest GPUs—she ordered fifty of them at $40,000 each. Networking equipment to connect everything. Cooling systems to handle the heat load. Backup power supplies. Server racks. The list went on.
The D-Wave quantum computers were the real challenge. Sixth generation, 4400 qubits each, bleeding-edge technology that most research institutions couldn't afford. At $15 million per unit, even with Helix Innovations' funding it was a massive expenditure.
"D-Wave's sales team is very excited," Maya said after a video call. "Apparently not many people buy ten quantum computers at once."
"When do they ship?"
"Eight weeks. They're building some of them custom for our order."
Leon nodded. Eight weeks. That gave him time to design the hybrid system architecture.
The move happened gradually. Furniture for the new house. Equipment for the warehouse. Leon hired movers, but Maya coordinated everything—schedules, logistics, making sure items went to the right locations.
Leon spent the time studying. Quantum computing theory. Qubit behavior. Entanglement protocols. Error correction algorithms. He absorbed everything, building a complete mental model of how quantum systems worked and where their current limitations lay.
The new house felt enormous after their apartment.
Maya stood in the master bedroom, looking out at the forest behind the property. "This is our first real home together."
Leon joined her at the window. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Just processing. This is the beginning, isn't it? Of everything changing."
"It already changed. This is just us catching up to it."
She leaned against him. "What comes after this? After we build the AI and optimize the cultivation system?"
"Then we figure out if there are others. If the gene locks are unique to me or if they're dormant in all humans. And what happens when more people start breaking them."
"Big questions."
"The biggest."
The data center came online in stages.
Electricians wired the warehouse. HVAC specialists installed the cooling systems. Technicians racked the servers and GPUs. Leon oversaw everything, his enhanced mind catching errors before they became problems.
"That network cable's crimped wrong," he'd say, pointing. The technician would check, find the issue, fix it.
"The power distribution isn't balanced. Shift three servers to the other circuit." The electrician would verify, make the adjustment.
Maya brought him food during the setup. "You haven't moved in twelve hours."
"I need to make sure this is perfect. The hybrid system won't work if the hardware isn't configured right."
"The hardware is fine. You're micromanaging."
"I'm optimizing."
She set a plate of food in front of him. "Eat. Then optimize."
He ate mechanically, mind still on the integration problem. GPUs ran on classical computing architecture—binary logic, deterministic processing. Quantum computers operated on entirely different principles—superposition, entanglement, probabilistic outcomes. Getting them to work together required bridging two fundamentally different computational paradigms.
The OS would be the key. An operating system that could manage both types of processing, route problems to whichever architecture solved them most efficiently, handle the translation between classical and quantum states.
Leon started coding in Nexus.
The programming language he'd designed for the BCI software was perfect for this—native support for parallel processing, optimized compilation, clean syntax that mapped directly to machine operations. He expanded it with new libraries specifically for quantum computing operations.
The base OS took three days. Low-level kernel code that Nexus compiled down to optimized machine instructions. Scheduler algorithms that understood both classical threads and quantum circuits. Memory management that could handle both RAM and quantum state storage.
Then the abstraction layers. APIs that let software interact with both GPU and quantum processors without needing to know the underlying hardware details. Optimization routines that analyzed incoming computational problems and routed them intelligently.
Maya found him on day four, still coding. "Leon. Sleep."
"Almost done."
"You said that yesterday."
"Yesterday I wasn't done. Now I'm almost done."
She dragged a chair over and sat beside him. "What's left?"
"Quantum error correction integration. The D-Wave machines have hardware error correction, but the software needs to interface with it properly. And I'm looking at their control algorithms—I think there might be room for improvement."
Maya blinked. "You're trying to improve D-Wave's quantum algorithms."
"They've done incredible work with what they had. But with my enhanced brain, I can see patterns and connections they might not have considered. Different approaches to qubit initialization, better state preparation." He pulled up a simulation. "Their current method takes about 200 microseconds per operation. I have an idea that might get it down to fifty microseconds."
She watched the simulation run. The improved algorithm showed clear gains. "How much faster does this make the quantum computers?"
"About forty percent faster. And more accurate. Error rates drop by half."
"So you're not just building a hybrid system. You're improving the quantum computers themselves."
"The hardware has always been solid. The teams at D-Wave built something amazing. I just have a different perspective now—I can process information faster, see optimizations that weren't obvious before." Leon saved his code. "It's not that they were wrong. They just didn't have the computational capacity I have now to explore every possibility."
The OS installation took six hours. Leon uploaded it to the data center's main servers, watched as it bootstrapped across the system. The GPUs came online first, humming with power. Then the quantum computers—still eight weeks from delivery, but Leon could test the software in simulation.
Everything integrated smoothly. Classical and quantum processing working in harmony, the OS routing computational tasks to whichever architecture handled them best.
Leon ran a benchmark. The hybrid system processed a complex optimization problem—something that would take a normal supercomputer days to solve. The hybrid system finished in forty minutes.
"That's unprecedented," Maya said, reading the results.
"That's just the beginning." Leon started the next phase. "Now I build the AI."
The data center's lights hummed quietly. Processing power that would make most research institutions envious sat waiting for instructions.
Leon had the tools now. The infrastructure. The resources. Everything he needed to create something that could help him understand what he'd become.