Things did not work out exactly the way we had planned. Jacob and Ghymora finally got their doctorates. At the time I was busy with my work, far busier than I ever had been in school. We gathered to celebrate the two of them on a Saturday night at the local pub where Jacob first introduced me to Ghymora. I was the only true guest of Jacobs, but Ghymora being the extrovert that she was, had the place packed with more people than could have possibly been her friends. It was loud and rowdy, and I began to realize I was getting a little old for this kind of scene. But perhaps that was just the on my way to be "burnt-out adult" in me talking.

"James! Thank you so much for coming." Ghymora said, wrapping me in a hug amid the loud and lively crowd.

"Of course, wouldn't have missed it for the world!" I said, trying my best to hear her over the noise.

A girl was lingering next to her, one I had just so happened to have seen before.

"James, this is Emilia," She grabbed the blonde girl's hand and pulled her in close. She didn't really have to say anymore, the body language alone described what she wished for me to know.

"It's very nice to meet you, Emilia," I said aloud over the roaring noise of the people around us.

"You as well," She shook my hand. "Your friends are very smart!" She said laughing in that awkward way that we tend to do when meeting new people, but her smile was genuine and kind.

"Smartest two people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing!" We chatted and laughed, and Jacob eventually found his way through the crowd to mingle with us.

"How about I buy us all shots?" I proposed, hoping to do my part in celebrating this special occasion. I had to get back to work in the morning, so I figured I'd do this one small gesture and then try to sneak out early.

The three of them cheered and humbly accepted my offer.

"Hey James, do you mind if my friend joins us?" Emilia said and then scooted over to a group of girls that were talking close by, grabbing the hand of one who had been standing just out of sight.

"This is my roommate Tomiya!" She pulled the young woman right up next to me in our little circle of friends. The girl wore a tasteful black long-sleeved dress. She had long, straight black hair, with bangs, and beautiful brown eyes that had the faintest freckles showing beneath them. I knew immediately when those eyes met mine that I would want to know this girl. It is no surprise that I ended up staying out later than I had planned that night, covering the tab for the whole crew, and taking advantage of every chance I could to talk to that girl.

I was lucky enough to get her number before heading home. From that point on I found it hard not to be with her whenever I had the time. Tomiya was in grad school for political science at Boston University. At the time we met, she had just written her thesis on the political corruption of developing technologies, particularly focused on the improvement of AI and the dangers behind its advancement. It was soon after published in the "Foreign Affairs" magazine.

In the years to follow she quickly made a name for herself in the world of politics. I myself continued grinding away with my business and my investments. Between that and my relationship with Tomiya, I didn't have time for much else.

Winter, a couple of years after Tomiya and I started dating, we invited Jacob, Ghymora, and Emilia out to let them all know we had gotten engaged. It had been months since I had seen or heard from Jacob at this point. I assumed he was just caught up in his work. But the moment I saw him I could tell something was off. He was supposed to be working on all of his new groundbreaking tech, as he had always dreamed, but now he looked disheveled and more emaciated than normal. After the rest of the group took their leave, I took Jacob out to one of the old pubs we used to hit during our college years, and I prodded at him until he gave me the honest truth about what was going on with him. Turns out his parents were cutting him off. They had apparently already funneled 20 million dollars into his startups, which all quickly went under.

Without me even knowing he had tried his hand at subsequently developing prototypes of his early robotic and new concept rocket technology. But he did so without a plan, and all the money was spent before he even had something to show for it. He was out of options.

I was baffled and a little angry when he told me all of this. Partly because every time I had asked him in the past about his work, he had always told me he was right on the edge of one breakthrough or another in his world-changing tech. But I was also angry with myself for being too caught up in my own life to dig any deeper into how things were actually progressing.

Most people don't realize that when you get older it becomes that much harder to keep up with the dreams of your childhood. Time is just so limited, and so is one's energy. The older you get the truer this becomes. I felt that tiredness in my years of grinding away after college. My total net worth has more than doubled in the last few years because of some good, and also very lucky property investments. I knew if I wanted to be one of the wealthier businessmen out there, I could stick to the path I was on and that would one day become true. But I always knew this realm of business wasn't my true passion, I still didn't really know what was. One thing I did know without the slightest doubt, was that I was passionate about helping Jacob. Something I should have been doing all along.

That night I called Tomiya and told her I'd be back late. Jacob and I drank pint after pint and talked for hours. After about four or five pints each, I got the gist of his whole predicament. It was never a worry of mine that there was anything out there that Jacob couldn't understand. I did, however, always have a small worry that Jacob would be too focused on what he cared about, and he'd overlook the more tedious parts of being an adult sometimes. Like finances. Jacobs' family might be obscenely wealthy in the eyes of most. But even their money wasn't endless. The problem was that Jacob had been spending money like there was no limit. It wasn't because he was so oblivious not to grasp that concept of it. He was simply stuck in a tunnel vision of his own design. People that are truly passionate about their work tend to find themselves in similar predicaments from time to time. He should have had someone by his side throughout this to help him with the things that he shouldn't need to waste his energy on. Like giving the investors something real to invest in. Or at least the perception of it. I decided that night it was time for Jacob and me to finally start working together, to join forces as we had always imagined we would.

It took us a couple months to figure out what we needed to do to secure some serious investors. I put my own business on hold, which only meant that I'd have to hire more property managers to run things, and that in the meantime I wouldn't be making the aggressive investments which I normally did. Nights I'd normally spend awake late, researching rental statistics for specific areas and demographics, I now spent trying to learn about what seemed like two dozen different ventures Jacob had been working on over the past few years.

Together we narrowed down what was the most viable in terms of cost of production, turnaround time, and how much more beta testing actually needed to be done on them. In the end it didn't come down to a single product. It came down to more of a potential for patented tech that would secure investments from different industries. The industries were space exploration, and military contracts. The truth was Jacob had spent most of his time on rockets and unmanned spacecraft engineering. Also, quite a bit of money went into robotics, AI, and advanced drone development. We decided, or I should say I convinced Jacob to agree that his work in experimental space tech would have to be put on hold for now. Even though he had put most of his time into this field. It was more plausible for us to secure a military contract with his robotic, and drone tech once it was patented.

Next step was to put together a team. Ghymora was a huge help with this. She too felt terrible that she didn't know what Jacob was going through. Soon after their graduation she and Emilia secretly eloped and were now looking to start a family. She began teaching Astrophysics at MIT recently as well and didn't herself have the time to be part of our endeavor, but she knew a lot of recent graduates who would be a perfect fit.

We couldn't afford to hire the best and brightest out there. But with the two-million of my own dollars that I invested; we were able to secure some very bright young minds to help things get off the ground. Besides, in Jacob, we already had the best and brightest mind we could ever find. Now we had more hands to help.

The drone tech with state-of-the-art self-guiding systems was the first to gain any traction. Just as I had imagined it gained the attention of the U.S. military. What I did not expect was the offer we got from one of the largest military weapons manufacturers to buy the drone tech and patents for 75 million dollars. It was a no-brainer, and it was hardly the most sophisticated of the designs Jacob had in his arsenal. In fact, Jacob already had the beginnings of a far more advanced AI powered device up his sleeve. With that buyout the sky became the limit.

Before the buyout I had made sure that Jacobs name would be recognizable if something like this should happen. I created the company Teebler Corp. in his name, with his permission of course. I knew it would be vital in securing the next round of investors for the coming ventures. Our focus was now back on the space race. And now it really was a race. The year was 2018, and although Jacob had spent years focusing his efforts on rocket development, other high-profile billionaires and industry leaders had begun to throw their hats in the ring too. For us, it was a way to innovate old technologies and bring back the era of space exploration. For them it was just a way of monetizing space tourism. The only thing was that they had a lot more horsepower than us.

Tomiya, my now wife, worried that we were getting into the ring too early with people of this magnitude. She was wise in a different way than I. Tomiya didn't come from wealth like the two of us. She got to where she was the old-fashioned way, hard work, intelligence, and determination. Long had her ambitions been focused on politics. A corrupt path, full of corrupt, and cutthroat people. The corruption was precisely why she chose that path. If anyone I had ever met in my entire life had been good all the way to their core, it was her. It took me a while to believe that someone so good and so caring could have any desire to climb the ladder of politics, with an end goal of changing the status quo. But I witnessed her do just that, and she was relentless. While Jacob and I were entering the space race, Tomiya was already in line to become the next deputy secretary of Defense in the US at the young age of 26, making her the youngest in US history to hold that role by a long shot. She knew her way around the big players in our government, and quite a bit about who lined their pockets and paid for their campaigns. This is exactly why she was worried for us.