Richard slumped down the stairs the next morning, bleary-eyed, wishing he had been able to sleep longer. With the sun up and the birds singing, he simply couldn't stay asleep, no matter how tired he was from his irresponsibly late night. It was a small comfort that the scent of fresh coffee pervaded the house.

He shuffled toward the kitchen, his striped dressing gown hanging open to reveal a Midwest Dragway T-shirt and a pair of pajama bottoms with dachshunds on them. The pajamas had been a cheeky gift from Charlise one year, a nod to their beloved dog, Paco.

Of course, Charlise had taken Paco in the divorce. Richard often wished he'd fought harder over the dog, but he'd hardly been able to muster the energy to get out of bed in the mornings, let alone battle for canine custody. He was left with the faded pajamas and regret.

Life went on.

Richard was glad to see the coffee pot was still half-full, although that probably meant that Garth had already finished a pot and brewed more. The man was going to kill himself.

Richard took a mug out of the cupboard and filled it with steaming coffee. It was after he had taken his third sip that something odd registered in Richard's mind, something he'd glimpsed out of the corner of a sleep-clouded eye and had not properly understood at first glance. The rusted cogs of his mind began to crank, and Richard turned around, frowning across the kitchen.

There, on the tiny two-person table, was a mountain of coffee. At least ten large cans—tubs, really—crowded the table, and brick-shaped packets of vacuum-sealed grounds were precariously stacked on top, towering to a height that rivaled Richard's own with three or four packets to a tier.

Richard sipped his coffee, staring, while his brain did two things in quick succession. First, it recognized that the kitchen now contained more coffee than a human could safely drink in three years. Then, it tallied the cost of the coffee.

"Garth?" Richard called.

There was a clang and a clatter from near at hand. Garth popped up on the other side of the kitchen island. "Oh. Afternoon. I didn't see you there, Richard."

"What are you doing?"

"I was looking for the small sauce pan, but I found this in the cupboard." He held up an instruction manual for a crock pot which, to Richard's knowledge, they did not possess. "Did you know you can make bread in one of these things?"

"Did you buy all this coffee?" He did not know why he asked. The answer was obvious. Richard had not been known to burgle grocery stores in his sleep. Then again, anything was possible after this long chain of late nights.

Garth looked at the mountain of coffee. "Well, yeah. I didn't want to run out again. Who did you think brought it, aliens?"

"Garth."

"Richard?"

"There has got to be over $400 worth of coffee on our kitchen table right now."

"$431.14, to be precise. Wow. You were really close with your estimate, old chum, but I bet you forgot to factor in tax."

Richard opened his mouth to respond. He wanted to reprimand Garth for using language they had established numerous times was not to be used. He wanted also, and more urgently, to ask Garth where he had gotten the money for $431.14 worth of coffee when they could barely afford noodles and beans.

Instead of starting down that path, a path he knew would be winding and full of rabbit holes, Richard topped off his mug of coffee and shuffled back out of the kitchen.

Garth followed, crock pot manual in hand. "How's the prototype coming along?"

"Finished," Richard said. He sat down on the couch. His entire body sang with relief. He wondered when the last time was that he had actually sat on this couch. He spent almost every hour of every day in his office, bent over his computer and working.

"Finished?" Garth smacked his hands to the sides of his forehead, wide-eyed, crumpling the manual. His glasses bounced on his nose. Good Lord, his theatricality never came in small enough doses to be palatable. "Finished?"

"Remember, it's just the proposal," Richard said. "You know that to make an actual prototype, we're going to need money. $431.14 would have put us slightly closer to getting a working prototype...but I content myself with the knowledge that if we are to be penniless, failed entrepreneurs, at least we will be caffeinated, penniless, failed entrepreneurs."

Garth narrowed his eyes. "Don't be so dramatic. A check for that contracting gig came in. We have a little cash to tide us over."

Garth had studied business, but he had a special interest in marketing and design. Now and then, he took on freelance jobs to make a little cash. That a check had come in for one of the gigs was good news, but Richard tried not to let his relief show. He was truly anxious about their ability to make money from this wacko scheme of theirs—more anxious than ever, of late—but he liked to cover up his worries about their financial stability by adopting the disposition of a crotchety badger.

"Are you going to show me?" Garth asked. "I've waited for months. I'm dying to see it!"

Richard sighed. "I just sat down, mate. I'm knackered."

"Okay, okay, just sit." Garth tossed the crock pot manual onto the coffee table and darted out of the room. A moment later, he returned with Richard's laptop and flopped onto the couch.

Richard grimaced, holding his mug up carefully as the coffee sloshed within it. "Careful. Hold your horses, as you lot say." He took a careful sip—he was not completely devoid of drama himself—and then he put his coffee on the end table.

The prospect of sharing his design with Garth made him equal parts nervous and excited. Not that he'd let on that he was excited. Never that. He kept his expression neutral as he took his laptop from Garth.

When Richard had worked at AeroNautica, his first and only employer since university, he had spent his days designing satellites and testing prototypes, and he had spent his nights and weekends studying, experimenting, and testing concepts for solar energy: how to make solar cells lighter, thinner, more efficient, and less expensive. It had started with innocent curiosity and grew into a drive, a dream, a vision.

Then Charlise had left him. He had little attention for anything but the raw, bloody mess Charlise had made of his heart in the months that followed. When their divorce had been finalized, Richard had been aimless and depressed, left with a month-to-month lease on a shabby apartment. Garth's suggestion that they "dip out" and work on a start-up had been just the hare-brained break from reality that he'd needed.

And it really was hare-brained. Garth, newer to the company but a dyed-in-the-wool extrovert, had adopted the much more introverted Richard soon after they'd met on a project. Their friendship had been boxed into working hours at the start, but had gradually expanded to become the most important friendship Richard had.

Then they'd decided to do this. The half-baked, life-altering plan was very on brand for Garth Vanderlinden. He was the sort of fellow who decided what he wanted for lunch after eating it.

For Richard, this was far and away the most impulsive thing he'd done in his life. Several months in and well down the road, he still wasn't sure he wanted to do it.

Garth had insisted on secrecy regarding their project. There was no way not to say something about their plan—one didn't just up and quit a professional job with a solid 401K and excellent health insurance without people getting curious—but Richard had kept his intentions pretty vague. Maybe that was why his colleagues had seemed dubious. They'd wished him well, but he'd gotten the sense that all of them thought his plans were pretty crazy, and why not? Shifting from a successful career as an aerospace engineer to "working on a personal project" seemed like a straight trip to failure for a man who had no experience leading anything but the line out of a conference room to the coffee machine.

There'd been only one person who seemed genuine about her well wishes: Dr. Kavita Das, an accomplished scientist and engineer, the director of their space satellite operations. She was several levels above Richard at AeroNautica, so he did not know her well and they didn't work together closely. Yet Richard thought about the conversation they'd had a lot; something about it had been uplifting, breaking through the haze, giving him a spark of hope that he could really do what he was setting out to do.

It had been the same day Richard had turned in his notice to his flabbergasted manager. He and Dr. Das had had met at the coffee station and exchanged pleasantries. She had been waiting with a tea bag in hand behind him, and Richard had waved her on ahead of him.

"Thank you, Richard," she had said, pressing the orange lever on the coffee machine to fill her mug with hot water. "I heard you're leaving us."

"Yeah," he had said, surprised that she knew his name, let alone his intentions. "Garth Vanderlinden from Marketing, he and I are going to work on a personal project."

"Oh?" Dr. Das had finished filling her cup. She set it on the counter, tore open her sachet of tea, and dropped it into the cup. She turned to face him, giving her full attention and smiling.

Maybe it had been because she was the head of her department, a woman of more than a little influence at AeroNautica. Maybe it had been because of her exceptional resume. It had certainly not been because she was an attractive woman. She was, of course—medium brown skin, black hair always swept up into an executive chignon, sleek slacks paired with silky blouses and crisp blazers, glasses with red frames—but at that stage in his life, Richard would not have seen any more aesthetic attraction in a supermodel than in an laundry basket. He was completely romantically numb.

Whatever the reason, Dr. Das, who was not one of his close colleagues or one of his friends, had been the one to get the most detail about Richard's upcoming business venture.

"Yeah. We're looking into solar energy," he said. "Consumer products. It's probably a pipe dream, but I have this vision of a micro solar cell, smaller than anything in production today for normal people, you know? If we can increase the efficiency of consumer solar cells...make something that can power a house without covering an entire roof..."

Dr. Das raised her eyebrows, still wearing that friendly smile.

Richard picked up the coffee carafe and filled his cup. "I know it's crazy."

"Just because something sounds a little crazy doesn't mean it's not worth a try," said Dr. Das. "We only get one life, Richard. You have to pack in as much as you can. There are probably dozens of people in this building who've thought about doing something bold like you're planning, and very few who will."

"Well, I'm still young enough, in the grand scheme," Richard said. Her words had lightened his mood. He lifted his cup with a self-deprecating smile. "I'd rather rack up the failures before I start going gray."

Dr. Das had laughed and picked up her cup. She lightly tapped it against Richard's. "To our failures," she said. "May they be frequent and educational, and may they cause us little pain."

It was a memorable quote, one Richard had reflected on frequently, although he didn't buy into it himself. He did not appreciate failure, didn't quite grasp the concept of embracing it as an educational experience. Failure meant shame, heartbreak, disappointment. And if there were anything in his life he could fail at, this—this scheme of his and Garth's—wasn't one of them.

He had put everything he'd learned into this prototype, along with every scrap of his hope and his passion. And he had done it in private up until now, afraid that showing anyone, even Garth, before it was finished would jinx his ability to succeed at the dream he'd held so long.

Richard was not a man of many suspicions, but it seemed to him like the sooner you let someone in on your dreams, the sooner they fell into dust.

Drawing a deep breath, Richard turned the screen of his laptop toward Garth. "There she is."

Garth looked at the screen for a moment. He wrinkled his brow and cocked his head. "That's it?"

"Wow. That's an underwhelming reaction to the culmination of my life's work." Garth looked more curious than disappointed, but Richard immediately wanted to close his laptop and protect his work from Garth's critical eye. It reminded him of Charlise.

"Hey." Garth gave him an apologetic look. "I didn't mean that. It's just..."

"Small? That's the idea. If we want an edge in the industry, we need to find ways to make solar cells smaller and more efficient. What you're looking at is the most cutting edge—"

Garth raised a hand. "I've heard this story about six million times. It's charming how nerdy you get over this whole 'solar-for-everyone' thing, bro, but I'm in business with you, so I'm obviously on the same page. Tell me how it works."

Richard looked at Garth for a long moment, considering how he might explain the complexities of photovoltaic cells and the process by which sunlight is converted into electricity. "Uh, magic."

With a laugh, Garth took Richard's laptop and scrolled down the screen, examining the rendering of the prototype solar energy cell from every angle. "Great! Magic. Okay, and what's this other thing?"

"That's the actual generator. You put the cells onto a panel and put them in sunlight, you're going to get electricity, right? But you have to have a way to capture that. It hooks it into a grid—you know, how you get the energy from the generator and into your home, or wherever it's going."

"Wow. It's gonna be fun writing up the marketing copy for this in a way that explains the magic, I mean science, but is simultaneously not boring so that we can hook all the people who might want to buy this thing. Which is no one."

Richard wasn't sure he'd heard Garth correctly. "What?"

"No one is going to buy this thing, Richard."

A prickling sensation of panic swept through Richard's chest. He took his laptop back from Garth. "What do you mean? It's going to work great. It's accessible to the average person. This isn't some ten thousand-quid installation. If we do this right it'll be affordable, it'll fit in people's gardens—I mean, it isn't the end goal, right? The end goal is a satellite network, but it's not exactly a first step—and these cells are powerful. Generators on the market now require huge panels to work. These will be—"

"It's ugly, Richard, no matter how many squids it costs. I mean, sure—we should explore selling the technology to businesses for a zillion applications, and sooner rather than later. There is absolutely a market for more efficient solar power. You said panels on the market today have what, a 25% efficiency rating?"

"Yeah, and—"

"But if the goal is to get this stuff into the hands of people down the street...this just isn't it."

Richard shook his head. "I don't get it. I thought—"

"It's this generator thing. It's ugly. It looks like a cooler my grandmother used to have. Do you know what she did with that cooler? She sold worms from it in her front yard until Uncle Joe ran it over with his truck on his third DUI."

Unsure where to begin after this new nugget of information about Garth's colorful family, Richard decided to ignore the revelation altogether. "Okay. Well, as you may infer from the fact that I designed it, I like the look. It's straightforward."

"Yyyeah...Here's what we're going to do. Can you do all this—" and he waved his hand, taking in Richard's schemes and plans in the gesture— "in, like, a different shape?"

Richard looked at the boxy generator he had designed, cocking his head. "A different...shape? I could try. Not a ton of wiggle room with the space, but—"

"But it looks like you need, what, a cubic foot?"

"Er, roughly—"

"Cool! I'll see you later." Garth sprang to his feet. "I'm going to make another pot of coffee." 

Real questions: how many squids would you pay for Richard's solar power? 🤔🤑