William Lex Webb did not sleep the night he returned.
The jet's wheels had barely kissed Heathrow when he was already thumbing messages into his phone, summoning his lieutenants with the urgency of a fire alarm. The convoy met him at a private hangar; tinted cars shouldered through drizzle and sodium fog, running dark into the city until the skyline became a serrated crown in his rearview. London gleamed like a prize he'd already purchased.
The lift in Ynkeos Tower opened onto Level -3: the lab floor. Glass partitioning, a chill like hospital air, the hum of racks upon racks of server blades eating electricity by the ton. A long conference table waited beyond a viewing gallery, its black surface reflecting the helix of a suspended light fixture. Already, they were here—his chiefs, his board allies, the heads of security, AI research, optics, and compliance. Some hid yawns; others hid fear. All were important enough to be woken.
William entered like an event.
"Welcome home, sir," murmured Serra, his chief of staff. She was spare and efficient, the ghost of a smile pressed into her cheeks. Behind her, a cart clinked with glass. Champagne. He'd asked for it. He wanted ritual, and he liked beginning with a cup.
"Thank you for coming," William said, voice warm, magnanimous, as if he hadn't ordered them out of bed. He let the applause for Shanghai wash over him: a dozen hands tapping into legitimacy. He didn't look at the idol tucked behind frosted glass in his private office—stone teeth, star-burst eyes, silk thrown over it like discretion. The room knew it was there even if the room pretended not to.
Serra distributed glasses. William lifted his.
"To eyes," he said, letting the last word ring, "that bring order to the dark."
They drank. He didn't. He liked the smell of victory more than its taste.
"Shanghai," he continued, pacing slowly, the floor reflecting his mass and motion. "We surpassed projections. Preorders from six governments before we left the stage. Twelve more in exploratory talks. Civil sector demand… obscene. Cameras and backhaul are our spear. But a spear alone does not conquer."
He let that hang, then turned to the wall display. A cascade of mockups bloomed: palm-sized slabs; exploded diagrams; chips and lens stacks; UX flows in elegant monochrome.
"I want a device," he said, savoring the word. "Not a peripheral. Not a camera bolted onto someone else's phone. A true node. Mobile. Close to skin. The camera core we've built, scaled and fused into a handset with sensors worthy of our ambitions. A device using our own software."
Eyebrows climbed. A murmur moved the length of the table. This was not the hour or the forum for caution, but the board had the trained reflex of sharks scenting both blood and bait.
One of the older members, Harrington—breath of cigars, cufflinks like coins—cleared his throat. "Are we acquiring a failing vendor, William, or… building from the ground up? The burn rate to bootstrap a handset at scale is—"
"Considerable," finished a woman from finances, tapping at a tablet. "Tooling, carrier agreements, silicon procurement, modem IP licensing, retail channels—"
William smiled the way a father might at a clever child. "I'll give you details at the next meeting. Tonight is vision. Tomorrow is maps."
The CTO, Abeni, leaned forward, practical even at midnight. "The OS question is existential. If we fork Android, we gain velocity but inherit Google's leash. If we build, we need kernel talent, compiler toolchains, an app strategy. Without apps, we're a camera with delusions."
"Then we make an ecosystem," William said softly. "A garden with high walls and sweeter fruit. Our app story starts where everyone else ends: surveillance-grade imaging, authenticated chain-of-custody media, edge inference for safety, voice that actually hears, eyes that actually see. We don't compete on games and stickers. We compete on truth."
Across the table, Compliance coughed into a fist. "Truth is… a claim, not a feature. Regulators will ask to whom that 'truth' belongs. To citizens? To states? To Ynkeos?"
"Truth belongs to whoever keeps the lights on," William said, and enjoyed the uncomfortable little silence that followed.
Security Chief Malick, an old scar tissue of a man, lifted a hand. "We are also at war, let's not pretend. A masked intruder cost us eight figures at the docks last quarter. If we move into pockets, we move into a battlefield. He'll come."
"He will," William said. "And when he does, the world will see him. Clearer than it has ever seen anything."
He gestured and the wall lit with footage: last night's port blaze, stabilized, noise-reduced, color-graded by Ynkeos's own suite. Moonveil's outline, monstrous and calm in flame-light; the violet eyes captured as if the lens had been made for them. A collective intake of breath. Technology had converted rumor into specimen.
"Cameras change the story," William said. "Ours will write it."
They talked timelines, NPI gates, the quiet courting of modem vendors. M&A floated as a contingency: buy a small OEM for its factories; buy a microkernel for its skeleton; buy a launcher for its mask. Abeni argued for a three-track approach—short-term Android fork to seed devs, mid-term hardened fork for government and law enforcement, long-term greenfield OS for total control. William nodded as if he'd arrived at the same conclusion. Power was letting people believe they had convinced you.
The toast had loosened them. By the time he dismissed the room, excitement had beaten fatigue. He watched them file out, each wearing a different future they thought they owned. Serra lingered, reading his face the way she read P&Ls.
"Shall I schedule the diligence on component suppliers?" she asked.
"Yes. And invite the PR head tomorrow afternoon. I want a campaign slate that makes the phone feel inevitable."
"And the other matter?" Serra's eyes flicked toward the frosted glass of the private office.
"Later," William said. "Our lord prefers blood at night."
Serra did not flinch. She never did. "Very good, sir."
When they were alone, William drifted to the glass. He didn't enter. He didn't need to. The idol's presence reached like temperature through the seam. He pressed a hand to the pane and imagined the stone's chill on his palm.
"Soon," he whispered. "A camera in every hand. An altar in every pocket."
The glass did not answer. The whisper in his skull did.
Bring me more, devotee. Eyes are not worship. Hearts are.
He closed his eyes, let the admonition sting, then filed it. There were calendars for violence, and calendars for product.
---
Morning arrived with the cruelty of light.
He stood naked before the mirror in his penthouse bath, iodine sun hauling the truth from the glass. The suit made a king. The suit was off. The king was fat.
Folds at the beltline. A neck that had crept outward to colonize the jaw. The slack of indulgence where once there had been tension. His body was an audit and the numbers were wrong.
If he was to sell inevitability—if he was to step onto another stage as the future wearing shoes—he could not look like a man who had lost to himself. The thought came with a little bright heat that might have been shame. He converted it to a plan.
"Serra," he called, and his voice filled the high rooms. She appeared in minutes, immaculate as ever, a tablet already awake in her hands.
"Summon the doctors," he said. "Endocrinology. Cardiology. Sports medicine. The best. And someone who can turn a yacht into a gym."
"Of course." Her stylus flicked. "Nutritionist?"
"Two. One to fire, one to keep."
Her pen paused, faint amusement warming her otherwise neutral face. "Very good."
The doctors came like a procession. They annotated him. They lectured him. They wrapped pressure cuffs around his arm and measured his blood for sins. He let them. He watched their eyes the way he watched investors' eyes—tallying belief, measuring fear.
Dr. Koh, the cardiologist, spoke first, voice the kind that could calm a siren. "You are not as bad as you fear," she said, which was a way of saying he was worse than he wanted. "But you are not a vessel for the demands you place upon yourself. This will change."
A sports physician, Jonsson, laid out the architecture: "We periodize. Sixteen weeks. Phase one strips—metabolic reset, low-glycemic, monitored deficit. Phase two builds—hypertrophy and VO₂. Phase three polishes—power, posture, stagework."
"Stagework?" William asked, amused.
"You are a product," Jonsson said bluntly. "You need to move like one."
A nutritionist named Yasmine articulated fuel like strategy: macros, micronutrients, fiber as non-negotiable, hydration as law. She talked about insulin sensitivity and late-night cortisol. She mentioned, carefully, that stimulant crutches would yield brittle wins at catastrophic cost.
He nodded as if persuaded. He would take what he needed. He always had.
"And pharmacology?" he asked, almost idly.
Dr. Koh's eyes did not waver. "We will not entertain celebrity stacks. If you want your heart to outlive your ambitions, we will be clinical. If you insist on playing chemist, I resign."
He liked her. She didn't beg.
"Clinical, then," he said. "But aggressive."
They built him a day like a supply chain. Wake at five. Hydrate. Labs on Mondays. Fasting cardio in a room with no screens. Weights on a cadence mapped to neurological freshness. Sauna, cold plunge. Food that looked like color swatches and gave him back a jawline. Sunlight in the morning, blue light banished at night. Meetings married to steps. Stress as an enemy with a badge.
He allowed himself the miniature theater of compliance: a new wardrobe of technical fabrics; a chef who could do asceticism without making it taste like punishment; a trainer who had broken footballers and ballet dancers and believed in both force and grace.
He did not tell them about the little black pill bottle in the drawer of his nightstand. He did not tell them that Juarez's gel caps glittered like beetle shells in certain light, or that a microdose of Sangre de Luna made the room crisp, made his will a blade. He had learned, even in worship, how to tithe. A little to the demon. A little to discretion.
When they left, the penthouse was full of programs. Serra returned at dusk with schedules and a face that said she had turned chaos into calendar blocks.
"Your morning begins at five," she said. "Your nights end by ten. I've moved the low-value meetings to virtual—your presence is a scarcity play. The lab wants a standing with you every Friday. PR has three campaign concepts for the handset—'Clarity', 'Custodian', and 'Eclipse'. Legal wants to discuss the word 'Custodian'."
He grunted. "Eclipse," he repeated, tasting it. The word curled around him like a cloak. "Put the camera team on a demo that humbles the competitors before they wake. And open a quiet channel to two handset manufacturers no one is watching. We'll buy their bones."
Serra's stylus wrote the future. "And the other matter?"
He knew which. He had watched the news. Another body. Another heart. Sloppy hands in his orchestra, sawing at the strings.
"We will audit the faithful," he said. "Any amateur who thinks chaos is a ladder will be dropped through the first rung. Find them. Quiet them."
He did not say killed. He did not need to.
Night crawled up the glass. He stood in the gym the yacht designer had reimagined—a room of matte black, mirrors replaced by smart panels that reported everything about him except the things he kept secret. He gripped a bar and let the weight talk to his bones. He remembered Shanghai's applause. He remembered Moonveil's eyes, violet in combustion.
He pulled, slow and controlled, until his shoulders burned. Sweat blurred the edges of the world. He welcomed it. Pain was a primitive order. It was also an offering he could make without witnesses.
Later, in the private office, he drew the silk from the idol. The stone face stared back, eternal hunger carved into its geometry.
"I am building a temple you will not recognize," he said. "Wires for veins. Glass for skin. A congregation of faces, all turned toward me because I give them something to look at."
Bring me more, the old thing whispered, hunger slick as oil. Bring me heart.
He inclined his head as if to a vendor closing a deal. "Soon."
On his desk, the handset mockups idled like predatory fish. On the wall, a paused frame from the docks—a man in a hood, eyes like distant lightning—waited to be resumed.
William pressed his thumb to the rendered phone. The screen woke in perfect black.
"Eclipse," he said again, and this time it sounded like a promise.
Outside, London pulsed. Inside, schedules arrayed themselves like legions.
He slept at last, a few hours stolen from ambition, dreamt of a city where every lens was his, where even the moon would have to ask permission to shine.