The smell of sweat, solder, and fried circuit boards was an interesting mixture; it was salty, sour, and a bit similar to the smell of chili being stir-fried in a wok on high heat with the way it burned your nostrils whenever you breathed it in. “The smell of innovation,” as Alex’s boss coined it. That arrogant fox thought he was the next Steve Jobs, like everyone in Silicon Valley. Sure, he had the turtleneck sweaters (which Alex approved of), the charisma to get people to pay attention to hour-long keynote presentations, and the charm of Leonardo DiCaprio during his Catch Me If You Can era; but he lacked vision, something the OG leader of the fruit cult had. But that’s why he created the job title “Visionary Officer”, to hire people to make him look as if he had any.

The “Visionaries” as they were called were a mix of engineers, designers, marketers, and even artists, tasked with coming up with the next big thing for the tech company. While the company was founded as a vanity project of an arrogant and rich idiot, the people who made up its workforce were passionate and wanted to have a hand in changing the world. And they were very close to doing so, Alex just had to solder a few more things and fix a few more traces and it would be ready.

The company was a consumer electronics company called Ballistec Industries, it produced and sold phones, tablets, computers, headphones, and more. You name it and Ballistec had it. Alex was one of the many talented engineers tasked with creating something so revolutionary that it would defy the laws of physics, space, and time. She and the rest of the visionaries present in the meeting held by the CEO that fateful day were left dumbfounded when they heard his demands.

“What is up, what is up my VISIONARIES!” the fox clapped his hands together as the visionaries sat themselves down at the long meeting room table. He stood in front of a giant holographic display with the first slide of a prepared presentation ready to go. The meeting had been scheduled so last minute, that some of the visionaries were still chewing their lunches that they had to abandon to attend the meeting that was insisted as being mandatory. As the nearly two dozen eyes stared at the fox, he quickly did a headcount just to make sure everyone was present.

“Ah, good, I don’t have to fire anyone.” He said softly under his breath. With an enthusiastic clap that startled everyone, he started his presentation. The presentation went on for hours, with the charismatic CEO treating it as if he were at his annual keynotes announcing a revolutionary new product to the masses. The majority of the presentation was filler and fluff, like something that he had prepared for investors to hype them up. Whenever there was investor hype in a presentation, it was a big indicator for some bullshit to come.

“Basically, I need you guys to figure out how to make the portal gun from the Portal games a reality.” The fox said with a smile that spread from ear to ear as he arrived at the last slide of his presentation that had the deadline for the product plastered on it in big Impact font.

“And I may have promised our investors that we would deliver it in by the end of Q1 2024.” The fox’s face morphed into that of cringe, with gritted teeth that he tried to force into a smile and all.

The meeting room was silent for almost two minutes as the visionaries all stared at the CEO with a spectrum of emotions ranging from confusion to anger. But while all of the visionaries kept quiet and boiled in their disbelief over such a short deadline, Alex raised a single brow and scoffed.

“That’s in less than six months.” The tigress furrowed her brows at her boss as if she were challenging his authority. She was known to do that to him a lot and he hated it. However, it was also one of the reasons why he kept her on; none of the other visionaries had the balls to question him and he respected her greatly for her big pair.

“Yes, Alex,” the fox was notorious for not knowing the names of his staff, but Alex, Alex was a name he remembered for a myriad of reasons. In addition to being one of the rare people who told him straight-up whenever he had an idiotic idea, she was also his hardest-working visionary and had been solely responsible for a few of the company’s bangers in recent years. The fox was fully expecting her to say what he knew the other visionaries were thinking; that what he was suggesting was ridiculous and impossible to do with such a short timeframe. He was ready to argue with her, as he often did.

“Well, we better get to work then.” The tigress said with a smile as she turned in her chair to look at her fellow visionaries. After turning in her spinning office chair a few times and getting a good look at everyone in the room, she returned her gaze back to the CEO and winked. “Is that all, Nicholas?”

The other visionaries looked at Alex with confusion as she carelessly implied that what they were being asked to do was easy. But they stayed quiet and watched the interaction between the tigress and the fox play out. No one ever called the CEO by his full name, so when the tigress did so with such a condescending tone, people were wide-eyed and were left with their mouths open.

Nick looked at Alex with an annoyed expression but since she wasn’t actually arguing with him, he smiled at her and clapped his hands together. “Great! Let’s get to work then, shall we?” With a dismissive wave to the table full of nerds, they all stood up and left the meeting room to return to their workstations. As Alex stood up from her chair, Nick approached her and grabbed her by the arm to stop her in her tracks.

Alex raised her brows at her boss when he grabbed her arm and waited for him to tell her off. After the last of the other visionaries had left the room and the sliding doors closed behind them, Nick let go of the tigress’s arm. He pressed a button on his smartwatch that made the transparent glass walls of the meeting rooms opaque in an instant.

“You know only my mother calls me Nicholas, Alexandra,” Nick said with a chuckle.

Alex smiled at her boss and nodded. “Oh, I know, and she’s quite the lovely lady, give her my regards, will you?” The tiger turned away from the fox and reached for the button on the glass sliding doors to let herself out. But Nick grabbed her by her arm again and stopped her.

“You tell her yourself, at dinner tomorrow.” He ran his thumb over one of the stripes on Alex’s arm as he looked at her with a hopeful smile. Alex turned over her shoulder to look back at him and glanced down at his hand on her arm as he rubbed his thumb and raised a brow. She paused and stared at the sly fox’s thumb as it moved back and forth over her stripe for a few seconds before she returned her gaze to his and shook her head.

“Can’t. My boss is a bit of a dickhead and tasked me with making something impossible, possible.” She chuckled. “And by gods, we can’t have lied to our investors, right? That’s like, a crime. Unless… You change the deadline and give me a raise?” the tigress waggled her eyebrows at him teasingly.

Nick made his cringe face again, just like when he was doing his presentation earlier. He knew that promising his investors a timeline was a dumb thing to do, but if he hadn’t given them a timeline, they wouldn’t have wanted him to move forward with what essentially was a pipedream. But he had done worse and his team of visionaries were always able to deliver, even if it was at the expense of the company’s payroll being about 5x what it usually was with all the overtime billed.

“Ah, right, shit…” Nick took his hand off of Alex’s arm and rubbed his brow with it.

“And only my parents call me Alexandra,” Alex said in an almost spot-on impression of his voice as she reached for the button on the door that would un-fog the glass and let her out. With her fingertips just an inch away from the button, Alex stopped and turned to look at her boss again.

“You know when you fog up the glass in here, it makes people more suspicious, and not less, right?”

The tigress shook her head, chuckled, and pressed the button on the door to let herself out. The glass walls of the meeting room became transparent again

---

The tigress coughed as she inhaled the fumes from her soldering station. She probably should have been wearing a mask while she worked, as was company safety policy, but they were so uncomfortable and hard to breathe in. She was almost done, anyway, so a few minutes of solder fumes, smoke, and sweat most likely wasn’t going to hurt her. Alex wasn’t sure what time it was, but she was the only one still in the research and development lab that was located deep underground underneath the headquarters of the company.

Ballistec Industries’ underground R&D lab, colloquially known as the “Ballsack” was built like a maximum-security prison; something you’d see in science fiction, with state-of-the-art security features that were designed to keep whatever was being worked on in there a secret. A bit overkill for a consumer electronics company most would say, but Ballistec also operated its weapons division from the same headquarters. While electronics that you can get at BestBuy were a profitable business, the real money was in weapons.

The portal gun that the tigress and the other visionaries were tasked with creating was cool and it was practical in a bunch of different avenues, including as a weapon. There was nothing more profitable than war.

‘Szzzzzzzzzz…’ the flux sizzled as the tigress worked her magic to replace the faulty capacitors that had blown when she last tried to power the portal gun on. Luckily, it was only a few capacitors that had overloaded and needed to be replaced. When the tigress first powered the thing on, she was half-expecting to fly backward through a wall like Marty McFly in the first Back to the Future. So, when all it did was smoke up and power off, she was weirdly a little bit disappointed.

Once the final capacitor had been soldered on, the tigress brushed her hands through her ponytail, leaned back in her chair, and sighed. The hard part was done, now all she had to do was put it all back together and test it again. She crossed her fingers and hoped that she got her power calculations right, but as an engineer with math as a weakness, she kept her hopes fairly grounded.

After another sigh, as she glanced at the LED clock tucked away amongst the electronic scrap and junk on her workstation, the tigress pushed herself up and out of her chair, grabbed the circuit boards she had just finished working on, and walked over to the empty shell that was the disassembled portal gun. One of the hardest parts about building the portal gun to Nick’s specs wasn’t the fact that it would defy the known laws of physics, but that it all had to fit into the design from the Portal video games. The dimensions were a bitch to work with, but after four and a half months of sleep deprivation compensated by cans of Mango Loco Monster Energy and a million instant coffee pods that would make Swedish Climate Activist Greta Thunberg shit bricks, they figured out how to fit all the tech into the small usable space that it had.

Alex carried the freshly soldered boards over to the opposite side of the room where the mostly empty shell of the portal gun sat on a sterile white workbench that she liked calling the “show bench”. It was the bench where prototypes crossed the lines from being non-functional into functional, the bench where she showed her work to her colleagues, the CEO, and the top investors who had enough security clearance to come down for a look at where their money was going; hence the nickname.

The tiger very gently laid the boards down on the table. Since she was the only one in the lab, she ditched the pretentious lab coat for more cat-friendly loungewear; a loosely-fitting black tank top, no bra, and a pair of white thigh-high socks that did a great job keeping her legs nice and toasty in the temperature-controlled environment way too far below sea level. She was still technically dressed according to the company’s policy since the clothing she was wearing was standard-issue straight from the company. Although the decision for her to forgo bottoms was definitely in violation of a few HR rules. But no one was around, the few security cameras they had in the underground facility were only for the entrances and exits (to prevent leaks caused by unauthorized access to the networked camera system), and the cameras in the lab used for development video logs were voice activated and could only be controlled by those in the room. Plus, the company’s non-discrimination policy protected her from any actions taken against her for being from the bottomless district, (including practicing her culture) so she was safe.

“Just have to do everything I did to take it apart, in reverse.” The tigress reached for the shell and put it in front of her. And after looking at all the parts, she reached for a tray with about a hundred screws neatly organized on it and her trusty screwdriver that looked older than she was. It was covered in scuffs and scratches but it worked just as good as the first day she got it. She then grabbed the first circuit board and wiggled it into the tight space that was the frame of the portal gun. It took her about a minute to get it in due to how tight it was, but once it was in, she smiled, grabbed the tiny screws that would secure it into place, and started screwing it in.

It took the tigress around two hours to put the billion-dollar Humpty-Dumpty back together again as it was a very complex process that required a steady hand and a lot of patience. Alex had steady hands, plenty of it to go around, but patience was not something that she was particularly known for, especially since she felt that she was so close to getting it right, but felt so far from the finish line at the same time. With a final wipe of the sweat that had built up on her forehead with the back of her hand and her arm, the tigress let out a very satisfied sigh, placed her hands on her hips, and flicked her wrist to shake the sweat she had absorbed onto the floor. She then placed both of her hands on the worksurface and leaned over the assembled portal gun.

It was perfect, down to how flush the screws were in their respective holes. She smiled, proud of her work. But the smile only lasted until she realized that her hands were covered in grease and grime and that she had left black handprints on the otherwise perfectly pristine table. She pulled her hands back and grumbled.

“God damn it.” She grumbled even louder to herself once she realized that she had some on her face from when she wiped her sweat, too.

---

It was the moment of truth; it was time for the tigress to test out the portal gun to see if it worked. With her hands and face free from grease and grime, she walked back up to the table where the portal gun prototype sat all by itself and put her hands on the table again. She glanced to the side at the clock from earlier to see that it was just shy of 3 AM; she had about six hours before people would start showing up, and if they showed up and she was without any significant progress, she’d be met with condescending looks and remarks for days, if not weeks on end. The more Alex thought about it, the more she realized that everything was riding on this prototype working. If it didn’t work, she and the other visionaries would have less than a month to get it to, and while she had been under an immense amount of stress already, having less than a month was that President of the United States level of stress, grey hair sort of thing, and Alex did not want that.

With a confident puff of her chest, the tigress looked up toward the ceiling and smiled. “Hey, Atlas?”

“Yes, Miss Marx?” replied a voice that sounded both robotic and not at the same time. Atlas was the AI assistant that Ballistec developed just to make the small tasks easier, especially when the visionaries usually had their hands full.

“Record Prototype Test Log Six.”

“Certainly, Miss Marx. Starting recording now.”