At this point, you might be wondering when I'm gonna get to the point of this report. This isn't about the car crash, as you know. But in order to appreciate the full scope of what was happening and why it was happening, you've got to understand the state Moynacorp was in at the time. There was a perfect storm of problems growing over my head and I wasn't even aware of it.

In my own defense, I was busy. Pitch season had begun, and the city's entrepreneurs were preparing to engage with and against each other--new and old, startup and established. The Moynahan Corporation was involved with some of the conferences and competitions, sponsoring some and offering support where we could. It wasn't so long since we'd been where they are now, and it was only with the help of a huge number of people that Moynacorp grew into what it is and transition from enterprise manufacturing to software and exponential technology, especially with a propulsion engineer at the helm.

Project Dreamscape was a combination of the two. Even from the start, its applications were vast, and we're still finding new uses for it. Its original purpose was, as its name suggests, to induce a controlled dream state. The experience is similar to virtual reality in practice, but can be applied to the mind in various states of consciousness. It's been used as a substitute for anesthesia, for coma patients, for therapeutic purposes, even as remote communications. It generates some of the most unique data about how the human brain works that has ever been gathered.

I had been working on Dreamscape for nearly a decade, but it isn't my oldest project. Like everything else I've embarked on since high school, it was created in service to VASHTI. From my brief "hacker" days right on up to Epsilon, it's all been about collecting data. Digitizing the human experience. Making it palatable to a greater intelligence.

So you can probably imagine my excitement when the Internet of Things burst into existence. Talk about a carbon footprint--these days, everyone has a digital footprint as well, the habits and tendencies they develop around how they interact with technology. Every data set tells a story. Every data set is a person.

How better to teach technology to understand humans than in its own language?

Most of this technological manifesto is well known to the general public and to the media, in broad strokes. My motives actually run much deeper than anyone outside my immediate circle knows, and I'm endeavoring to explain it here, because it's central to everything that happened, and it's why I'm recording this at all. I need you to understand why this is important and why I've done all I have--because if you're listening to this or reading this, you've probably found yourself at the precipice of one hellhole of a moral and ethical dilemma.

So I'm gonna go back to doughnuts.

The next morning, Tina was waiting for me at my office. "Good morning, Christian," she said as I walked in, a warm smile on her face. She's a brunette with sharp green eyes, and she looks like a supermodel. That's to be expected when the people designing her synthetic body are a bunch of reclusive geeks.

Admittedly, I was on that team.

"Good morning, Tina. What's the news?" I asked.

"Alain brought doughnuts again," Tina said. "King cake-flavored ones. But Legal and Public Relations are holding a full staff meeting, and the attendees ate what the regular office staff did not."

"That's a pity," I said while opening my office door. The combined smells of almond, cinnamon, and pure sugar punched me in the nose as I walked in.

"Which is why Alain asked me to leave six of the doughnuts in your office ahead of time," Tina said.

"Lesson of the day: let Tina finish explaining," I said. "Is all the news this good?"

"That's all the news, so yes," Tina answered.

I offered Tina a doughnut, which she accepted. I knew she would have calculated the number of people present and compared it to the number of pastries, then declined to take one from the staff's boxes. "Doughnuts and no news. Is this heaven?"

"Is that meant to imply death by sugar?" Tina asked with a smile.

I waved a hand; my mouth was full of doughnut. "Actually, it's meant to imply a different kind of small death. Have you picked up on that term yet?"

Tina rolled her eyes. "Yes, I'm familiar with 'la petite mort,' Christian."

I chuckled and took another bite--and my teeth hit something hard. I knew what it was before I plucked it out. "Fucking hell. I know District Donuts doesn't put the plastic baby inside their king cake doughnuts. Screw Alain."

"Is that a command? Because I'll happily execute it," Tina said.

It took me a full minute to blink away that mental image. "I brought that on myself by starting the innuendo conversation. Don't you have a boyfriend?"

"Yes. That's where I learned about the little death," Tina replied.

I made a big show of gagging and being grossed out. She chuckled. It's kinda odd that, despite not being around such influences, Tina's learning exhibits less as "adapting android" and more "outcast teenager." Not that I'm complaining. She had beaten the Turing test so thoroughly that she was now administering it to lesser intelligences.

"At any rate," Tina said. "Should we discuss your meeting from this morning?"

I hid my reluctance behind a few last bites of doughnut and a sip of coffee. It wasn't that my inspection of the car had gone badly. It had gone too well.

"Damage to the Bienville CV was minimal," I said. "Mostly cosmetic. The black box is intact. We should be able to pull data from it today. The car's data is already being analyzed by the system."

Tina nodded, allowing me time to continue.

"So far, there's absolutely nothing to suggest the CV caused the crash. No scenario we've run results in that. It looks like it just got caught on the front fender by another car." I paused to reach for the coffee.

"That's good news," Tina said.

"Yes. But it may not matter. The court of public opinion has already decided that the car without a driver must be responsible. And it doesn't help that the car crash happened in Metairie. Jefferson Parish has never been kind to us."

"I heard the sheriff's remarks," Tina said. "Didn't he warn people not to jump to conclusions about that shooting last fall not being racially motivated?"

"Yep. He's a creature of convenience," I replied. "But let's tackle one thing at a time. Other projects?"

"Zeta is moving along. The OS techs estimate it will be ready two weeks ahead of schedule."

"Excellent. That'll give us plenty of wiggle room. What's next?"

"Dreamscape's team met with Acacia Heights Communications yesterday. They would like to give you a full briefing."

That was the infrastructure arm of Acacia Heights Entertainment. Remember that name; it's gonna come up again. "Set them up anywhere on my schedule," I said.

"McGwion of Coffee Date and Expresso called. You've been invited to a tech summit on net neutrality in Washington, DC."

I rolled my neck. "Tech summit, yes. Net neutrality, yes. DC, no."

She made a look that was part smirk and part grimace. "Then I shouldn't tell you that DefenSense called about the drones again."

"Ugh! Fuck no. Just tell them fuck no." Reaching for the coffee, I suddenly wished that there was alcohol in there with the chicory. DefenSense. Remember that name, too.

"I did," Tina said. "In line with the 'no news' theme, I regret to inform you that no one has heard from Me. Delacroix yet."

"That's to be expected." I waved a hand. "He'll be in touch when he's ready to deal with it."

These days, in the vein of social media and privacy vagueness, business owners and CEOs tend to be much more visible than they have been in the past. We also tend to be younger. It's easier to start a business in many industries now, and lots of folks go the entrepreneurial route. The most successful and most photogenic of us even become minor celebrities. But by and large, we're geeks. We don't want the attention.

Jocelyn Delacroix is my opposite in many ways. He was born and raised in New Orleans, but moved away after high school. His family is very old money, and he could have simply lived off his trust fund, but instead he used the money to establish Bienville Motors. He's a recluse. When Bienville's successes, largely in their award-winning automotive design and alternative fuel research, he shied away from the media (yet still maintains heartthrob status with the ladies). Like me, he would be perfectly content to spend days on end in his laboratories and factories. Unlike me, he hates the press. Jocelyn was perfectly aware that as the face of Bienville Motors, he needed to make a statement. But he would do it in his own time. I didn't begrudge him that.

Tina and I polished off another pair of doughnuts and prepared ourselves for another day of meetings.