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January 8th. Two days remained before the presale of the Hermes-1 translation machine and the Hermes interpretation earbuds, and the wind online was still blowing the same direction it had blown all week.
Praised, not purchased.
The reversal Gordon Keane had been dreading never came, and that settled his nerves considerably.
But he remained wary all the same that Prism might stage some last-stand reversal of the board, and he had no intention of giving Prism the slightest opening.
Following his CEO's instructions, Keane picked up his phone and passed one order down the line.
Very shortly afterward, a confidential conference call came together.
"Prism still hasn't shown a single move. Have they given up?" someone on the line said.
"Impossible. They're not a company that gives up. Back when they fought Helios, they didn't defend. They stormed the enemy's home base and garrisoned it."
The call fell into discussion.
Counting Keane, the call held exactly five people, and anyone sufficiently familiar with the domestic translation-machine industry could have identified the other four by their voices alone.
Searchcat. Splitone. Netdamp. Baxel.
The four on the other end were the marketing chiefs of those companies, and every one of them ran the translation-machine business under his own hand.
The five of them had already spent days huddled together, hammering out a response to Prism's entry.
Finally.
Keane spoke, his tone grave. "Whatever Prism over there is thinking, I believe we proceed with the ambush plan as agreed. It's the only way to leave nothing to chance."
Unlike giants on the scale of Netdamp and Baxel, translation machines were no side business at Swiftvox. Last year they'd accounted for more than ten percent of the company's revenue, and a still larger share of its profit.
There was no mystery to it. For hardware that modest, sold at prices that steep, the per-unit margin beat the phone business hollow.
"Splitone agrees to the ambush plan." Splitone's man was first, and no wonder. Like Swiftvox, their core business lived and died on translation machines.
Searchcat, Netdamp, and Baxel each had deeper foundations to fall back on, but one after another, they agreed all the same.
"Searchcat agrees."
"Netdamp agrees."
"Baxel agrees."
Five companies. The top five of the entire industry. Consensus reached in under half an hour.
That very day, all five brands simultaneously announced a New Year promotion.
From that day until the day before the New Year, every one of their existing translation products would see discounts of varying depth. Ten percent off here, twenty percent off there.
Swiftvox's flagship machine from last year, already marked down to 2,999, took another twenty percent off and landed at 2,399. A cut of that depth was unprecedented for the category.
And plenty of people planning trips abroad declared themselves lucky on the spot.
"I'm flying out in a few days and was going to buy a translation machine anyway. Out of nowhere the prices drop, and I pocket a few hundred for doing nothing!"
The clear-eyed saw through it in one glance.
"This is aimed straight at Prism, and it's vicious. A brand-new product on launch day can't fight a price war against machines that have been on the shelves for nearly a year. But if it doesn't fight the price war, it can't break out of the strangling chain these brands have formed. Prism is in a brutal spot!"
And once the five brands had bared their hostility this nakedly, the rest of the domestic translation-machine makers launched promotions of their own, one after another.
It was at once a response to Prism's imminent entry and a move to protect their own markets. They had no real choice in the matter.
For a while, the entire industry was trading price for market.
And through all of it, Prism said not one word, and went on advancing its presale preparations in perfect order.
The sight of it had no small number of onlookers anxious on Prism's behalf.
Chloe brought it up with Ryan when she came over to the house to fish.
It was, in fact, only through her telling that Ryan learned of the predicament the Hermes machines were facing at all.
"It's gotten all the way to that?" Ryan scratched his head.
He hadn't paid the internet any attention for days. When he wasn't resting, he was watching television with Chloe or sitting over a fishing rod, and it had been, all told, an extremely relaxing stretch.
Worth mentioning: the television these days was wall-to-wall with tourism advertisements for the Redcliff Islands, and over the New Year holiday Crimson Typhoon would be running a special New Year test, timed to pull in as many holiday travelers as the season could carry.
"Yes, that! Online right now, Prism looks like it's one refresh away from bankruptcy!" Chloe said.
She held out her phone and showed him the recent coverage.
Good grief. The moment the marketing accounts had smelled Prism's possible first Waterloo, their appetites had arrived all at once. The videos they were posting had already moved on to imagining, in loving detail, how Prism would spend the first ten years after its bankruptcy.
And the mood was bleeding through to ordinary people, who had genuinely begun to worry.
Over dinner that evening, Ryan put the situation to his father.
His father's answer was that there was nothing to worry about. Arrangements had been made long ago.
Ryan set the matter down on the spot, and settled in to quietly watch how things would unfold.
Even with a certain crowd showing up under his Twitter posts every single day, hollering for him to come out and hawk the machines on a livestream, he paid them no mind at all.
Every day it was fishing or television, and the only thing that still counted as adjacent to research was checking the project progress in the system.
After collecting a certain grand prize, his Summon Points had climbed to a new peak, and the progress bar that had only ambled its way to around twenty percent had shot up to thirty percent, and was still climbing at a steady pace.
Even so, the algorithm for reconstructing the body's information from photoacoustic signals remained unfinished.
He needed more points yet.
And it was under exactly these circumstances that the online presale of the Hermes-1 translation machine and the Hermes interpretation earbuds began.
January 11th.
Brian White watched the clock crawl toward noon, and the official online stores opened their presale on the stroke of twelve.
Even he, at this hour, was not entirely free of dread.
He refreshed every Twitter account Prism Sciences and Prism AI operated, over and over, terrified that a triumphant announcement would suddenly load in front of his eyes.
None came.
After the presale opened, time passed with perfect blandness. Prism lay flat on the ground like a salted fish that had given up.
A full day later, Prism had published no presale figures, but the media, resourceful as ever, pieced together estimates through other channels.
Nationwide presales of the translation machine: fewer than one thousand units. The interpretation earbuds: fewer than ten thousand pairs.
Projected total sales: under ten million.
It seemed the Waterloo was real.
With a thunderclap, the news of Prism's strategic failure hit the front page of every outlet in the country, and the sensation was enormous.
And yet, it went differently than it went for other companies in trouble.
Under the Prism coverage, the comment sections ran positive and openly optimistic. This was an ordinary stumble, people said. Nothing worth grieving. The next time Prism put out a product that sat a little closer to everyday life, success was a certainty.
Unpaid goodwill on that scale left the other brands eaten alive with envy.
How could the gap between one company and another be this wide?
When they failed, ten thousand mouths lined up to laugh at them. When Prism failed, the crowd gathered around to encourage it?
Had the world simply stopped loving them?
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EXTRA CHAPTER FOR EVERY 500 POWERSTONES.