May 1987
May arrived like a promise. The air warmed, delivery trucks multiplied on the avenues, and the Workshop hummed with the tidy certainty of a machine that had found its rhythm. On the mezzanine chart new pins had appeared in tight clusters: an icon for the Raga research hub, a small star marking the Ohio chains that had agreed to repeat slots, and a neat rectangle labeled Sāmrta Alpha — Harden. Julian moved among the desks with a calm that had weight; people read that calm and felt steadier for it.
He began the month with a list—short, precise, written in the ledger with the same cold hand that had catalogued every decision since February. The list read: harden Sāmrta for field tests; secure two more European distribution links; finalize sponsorship package for summer league; negotiate minority board seats at three regional chains; continue media rollout for Lotus without spectacle. He closed the ledger and slid it into the top drawer where he kept the most delicate plans.
The first test waited in the lab. Anna had a habit of presenting victories like contraband—she arrived at the Workshop before dawn with a mug of coffee and an interpreter build that smelled of optimism and solder. "We've cut the interpreter memory footprint by eighteen percent," she said without preamble, setting the device on Julian's desk. "Tail-call elimination, compressed opcodes, and a micro-allocator that drops fragmentation."
Julian took the board, fingers sure, and felt the tiny heat on the chipset. He put it to his ear as if listening for a pulse. "Run full handshake benchmark," he said. "Encrypt, sign, and verify under continuous load for seventy-two hours. If it holds, we start pilot devices next week."
Anna's face showed the private pleasure of engineers who had survived an impossible week. "We'll run it across three boards, staggered. If the VM survives three days of real-world dispatches without drift, we call the alpha hardened."
He watched the lab like a man watching a slow fuse. The mind-internet surfaced a dry trick from a dead conference in 1981—a note on interrupt storms and how early embedded projects had solved them with priority rings. Julian didn't speak it aloud; he let Anna's team discover a variation of the trick on their own. It was his pattern now: plant a seed in the frozen archive, let the team germinate it, and then harvest knowledge that looked like their work. It kept the future from smelling like prophecy.
While the interpreter ran its tests, Marcus prepared for another round of meetings with theater owners. He had learned to take arguments personally but to present them as economics. He would walk into rooms with spreadsheets and seat-level projections, and with the stubborn politeness that had undone skeptics before, he would produce proofs of life: attendance lists, return rates, demographic maps that showed the neighborhoods responding to Lotus screenings. Julian told him to emphasize retention rather than opening-week grosses. "If loyalty appears," Julian said, "chain owners start to think of our films as inventory that pays month after month. They hate surprises, they love predictable cash."
Marcus objected at first—predictability sounded less glamorous in sales decks—but he took the order.
The first meeting was with a mid-size chain that had a conservative programming team and a CEO who treated acquisitions like wartime logistics. The CEO watched Marcus present the retention graphs, the community tie-ins, and the theatre-level margin math. At the end he narrowed his eyes. "You can guarantee me what?" he asked.
Marcus named the guarantees: guaranteed advertising spend for the first month, a return window for prints, a dedicated Vanderford logistics team handling deliveries and marketing at no charge in month one, and a performance clause that shifted risk if attendance dropped below a contracted threshold.
The CEO considered, then leaned back. "Your numbers look good, but Paramount sends me Christmas baskets. Warner throws cocktail parties. What do you send me?"
Marcus smiled thinly. "We send you cash flow without headaches. We send you audiences who come back because they trust our brand. You don't need another party. You need full seats."
The CEO stared at him for a long moment, then signed a letter of intent for two test slots. It wasn't conquest—it was a crack in the wall.
Other meetings were rougher. A chain in Pennsylvania accused Vanderford of being a "Trojan horse" for foreign influence. Marcus kept his temper and simply pointed to the revenue share charts. "You're free to think whatever you like about us," he said evenly, "but these numbers don't lie. Try us for one month. If you lose, we pay you back. If you win, we scale." He left the room with a handshake but no deal—yet. Julian told him afterward, "Sometimes we plant seeds, sometimes we harvest. Both matter."
Julian himself met with Sophia and the corporate counsel to draft terms for acquiring minority board seats. He wanted influence without headline risk—seats that allowed Vanderford to shape local scheduling and to offer internships and equipment access for regional film students. Sophia warned of regulatory red lines. "We must not own theaters," she said bluntly. "Antitrust will come for us if the signs point to monopoly."
"That's why we take minority stakes," Julian answered. "Seventy-five percent ownership of our subsidiaries, minority influence in local chains. Let regulators see no single center of theatrical power. Influence without spectacle."
Sophia agreed but wrote clauses that required transparent reporting, limits on cross-ownership percentages, and a public-facing charter describing Vanderford's community programs. The language read like a shield and a mirror: protect ourselves while signaling good intent.
Meanwhile, in the Workshop's small auditorium, Mira rehearsed the first promotional event for the summer league. She had arranged a community screening of a Lotus short film followed by a youth skills demonstration. The event was designed to do three things at once: sell the idea of local sports, seed the branding for the apparel subsidiaries, and create local press that would later blunt industry whisper campaigns. Julian watched the rehearsals from the back row and felt the architecture of his future cohere. He liked how a court full of cheering kids could function as a PR asset and a cultural anchor at once.
The May weather made the city generous. Street corners smelled of hot pretzels and new mopeds; the Workshop's windows stayed open later. Demi moved in and out of the building more than she had in earlier months—her festival recognition had turned the gossip pages into industry columns that asked different questions now. She was no longer merely "Julian's actress"; she was an artist with choices. That shift mattered more than any publicist's memo. She came to the Workshop one evening with a small wrapped package and a cautionary smile.
"I got you something," she said, handing him a taped stack of black-and-white photographs—shots of old Indian architecture she'd found in a second-hand bookstore. "For the bank of memory."
He took them, thumbed the margins, and felt a small, private pleasure in the gift. "Thank you," he said. "We'll put them in the studio. A reminder."
Her hands brushed his arm as she stepped away. The touch was brief, ordinary; it was their domestic punctuation. They shared evenings over takeout, soft critiques of lines, and quiet intimacy that didn't need to be flaunted. To outsiders, Demi was a rising actress; to Julian, she was an anchor in the storm.
Then the first real flare-up came from the press. A columnist in a national paper published a piece alleging Vanderford's rise was a vanity project propped by a mysterious patron; the column hinted at possible conflicts of interest and suggested that studios were quietly concerned. It was the kind of noise that might have derailed a less disciplined operation. Instead Julian clipped the piece, read it once, and placed it under the ledger. He used it as test data. "Let them wonder," he told the team that afternoon. "If they spend ink and airtime throwing stones, they are giving us cover."
That day Anna reported the interpreter's seventy-two-hour run: no drift, nominal packet loss on encrypted handshakes, and CPU cycles within tolerance. The lab cheered in their quiet, understated way. Julian walked into the room and felt a precise pleasure that did not make any noise. He asked for the logs but, more importantly, for a demonstration of the interpreter handling a real-world handshake: a signed token exchanged between a test handset and their network node, serialized in Sāmrta bytecode and validated by the VM. Anna obliged. The token ran, verified, and decrypted. The demonstration read like a language taking a breath: practical, small, and irreversible once out in the world.
"Prepare pilot units," Julian said. "But not public. Give them to partners in controlled settings—two universities, one municipal partner for an educational device, and Lotus for metadata testing. If anything leaks, it will look like academic cooperation and cultural research."
Anna laughed softly. "You make camouflage a religion."
"It's survival," he corrected. "And survival lets us grow."
Marcus secured the Ohio partner: a technical college with a reputation for archiving regional history. Professors signed NDAs; librarians signed acceptance forms. When the devices arrived—plain boxes, minimal branding—the students treated them like curiosities. One computer science student tapped the keys, frowned at the strange syntax, and muttered, "This isn't C. This isn't anything I've seen." The librarian smiled. "It's meant to last longer than your lifetime. Catalog carefully."
Sophia oversaw the legal protections—provisional patents, layered subsidiaries, and paperwork that disguised the language project as stage-lighting R&D. The fiction was neat, the ledgers balanced. It was camouflage that paid dividends.
Financially, May was a month of stretch and compression. Distribution revenue came steady but not spectacular; reinvestments were deliberate and heavy. Julian approved an additional $6.2 million in R&D for Sāmrta and associated tooling—money drawn from reserves and short-term credit lines Marcus had negotiated at favorable terms. Sophia kept ownership tight: seventy-five percent in trust, twenty percent in employee pools, and five percent for partners. No public float. No dilution.
There were moments that felt personal and small in the middle of strategy. One afternoon Julian walked the streets near the Workshop and stopped at a restaurant with a handwritten menu where a South Indian thali was on special. He sat and ate alone, thinking about the Raga hub, the language prototypes, the athletes in Brooklyn, and the pins on the mezzanine map that represented patents. The city paused around him in that ordinary way cities do—delivery boys shouted, a couple argued softly, a child laughed. He wrote a short line in the ledger: Remember why.
By month's end, the Workshop threw a modest party. Flowers on a rented table, a simple cake, laughter worn thin by fatigue but genuine. Marcus joked, Anna smiled, Sophia stacked patents into envelopes, and Mira passed around photographs of kids in new jerseys. Demi arrived late, her hand finding Julian's as though it had always belonged there.
Julian spoke last. "We are building a long house," he said. "A structure that must survive seasons and generations. We will hold what matters: culture, craft, and control." He tapped his ledger. "Hold. Build. Then expand."
Outside, the city smelled of summer rain and warmed earth. The Workshop's pins glowed like a constellation. On his walk home Julian paused beneath a streetlight, the light catching the edge of his ledger. He closed the book, inhaled, and allowed himself the calm of a man who had survived another month of fire and emerged stronger. The real tests were coming, but for May they had passed their first trials: a hardened interpreter, pilot partners, deeper distribution roots, and a company that now functioned as both organism and instrument. He stepped into the night and kept walking, ledger tucked under his arm, mind already mapping the next pins he would plant.
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