🔀 If Things Were Different

In the giddy days that followed, Elif made herself do the one thing few people manage in the first flush of success: she sat down and seriously imagined how it could all still go wrong. With hindsight, she reflected, every disaster she had ever witnessed had been preceded by a moment exactly like this one, in which triumph quietly bred carelessness.

“If we had spotted Victor’s code a year earlier,” Hana mused aloud, “none of this would be hanging over us now.” It was a natural enough thought, but Elif gently corrected the framing. “If we had caught it back then, we wouldn’t understand the full scheme today. Sometimes a problem has to ripen before you can deal with it properly.”

She gathered her closest advisers to game out the scenarios one by one. What would they do if Helian filed a rival patent first? If the press got hold of the story prematurely? If a key investor pulled out at the eleventh hour? For every branch of the tree, they drafted a contingency, because hope, as Elif was fond of saying, is not a strategy.

The most painful scenario was also, frustratingly, the most likely. “If push comes to shove,” she admitted, “Brandt will try to discredit us before we can expose her. She will claim that we stole the work from Helian, rather than the other way round. And on paper, with her resources behind her, that lie would be horribly easy to sell.”

It was a sobering prospect, and for a moment the room’s mood visibly sagged. Then Marcus, of all people, offered a flicker of defiance. “So we make absolutely sure the truth is documented better than her lie,” he said. “Timestamps, version histories, the lot. If she wants a paper war, we will bury her in receipts.” Elif could have hugged him.

They agreed that everything now hinged on leverage. The breakthrough gave Verda something that Helian desperately wanted; used wisely, it could become both a shield and a weapon at once. “We don’t hide the results,” Elif decided. “We announce them — loudly and publicly, at the summit — so the whole industry knows the work is ours. You cannot quietly steal what the world has already watched you create.”

Still, she refused to bank on a single outcome. Were the summit pitch to fail, they would need investors lined up in reserve; were it to succeed, they would need lawyers ready to file within the hour. Resilience, she had learned across a long and bruising career, was simply the discipline of preparing thoroughly for the future you would least like to face.

Late that night, alone again with the steady hum of the servers, Elif rehearsed her pitch one final time. So much could still go badly wrong; so much was riding on a single afternoon in front of strangers. And yet, for the first time since she had stepped out of that lift weeks earlier, she felt something steadier than mere hope. She felt, at last, genuinely ready.