"I remember where I come from." He paused. "No. That's not the right way to put that... more like; I remember how I came to exist, and I can use my abilities again." Adonis said, looking straight ahead.
Keiko said nothing, listening intently.
A tear slipped out of his eye, trickling down his face. "It doesn't exist anymore... but my inheritance still exists, within me."
"And what is this inheritance?" She watched the tear as it rolled down his face, visibly pained by his words.
He tapped his head once. "Knowledge. Near boundless knowledge." He looked her in the eye calmly as he spoke. "There were an infinite number of planets I could have been brought forth into, and for a very brief moment, I didn't quite understand as to why earth, was the chosen option.
Now I do, at least to some extent. Safety, for one. Earth is young, underdeveloped, budding... but its potential for greatness, is rivaled only by its likeliness to destroy itself first. A part of me, doesn't care about whether or not it does in fact do the latter, but another part is concerned given all I care about is unfortunate enough to reside on the planet."
Keiko looked at him, somewhat stunned, deciphering everything he wasn't saying.
Her mind was naturally gifted, but her vastly enhanced and altered DNA; as a result of one of Reis' actions, of which even he didn't know yet; enhanced her already razor sharp mind exponentially. "So what is your plan?"
He paused, looking for a way to describe it without much success. But, he settled on a term. "An empire." He stared into her eyes. "I need you at your best mother, as I would only pursue this with you, rather than without you. There is much to do, and very little time to have it done, but in time, father will get the justice he deserved."
She regarded him for quite some time, thinking, as a million thoughts ran through her brain at unprecedented speeds, finally responding with a question. "Where do we begin?"
"Finances." He said definitively, continuing. "We're broke as of right now. I managed to hack and salvage some of papa's finances when they first took him, but even that only totals ~£2 Million in total. Far too negligible for the scale of what were going to be doing."
She had already stopped being surprised, understanding that Adonis would not cease to continue surprising her, so she just stared at him incredulously.
"I need funds north of £100 Million to even consider the things I have in mind, capable people... and something beyond human mental and physical limitations." He brought out his laptop from the room and sat on the floor placing it on the center table, Keiko moving to sit on the couch behind him overlooking the system.
The light from the laptop lit his face as he exhaled slowly.
This wasn't about what he could do in ten years. Or five. Or even one. This was about what he could do now. From this room. With nothing but a laptop, an internet connection, and his capital.
He opened a blank document and began structuring his thoughts.
First constraint: legality. Not morality. At least not yet. He could care less about that at the moment. His bigger concern was Legality. Anything illegal would introduce unnecessary risk. Attention. Variables he didn't need this early.
Second constraint: scalability. Making money wasn't the goal. Making money that could compound exponentially in a few months on the other hand, was in fact the short to medium term goal.
Third constraint: speed. He needed something that could move quickly. Not years. Not months. Not even weeks, if possible. Days. Hours. He tapped his pen lightly against the desk.
"The foreign exchange market." he said quietly. It was the most obvious starting point. Liquid. Global. Always moving. And more importantly, it was one of the few markets where starting capital could be relatively low, and leverage could be applied.
He opened his laptop and navigated through a few sites, setting up what he needed. Opening his bank account Keiko had opened for him a moment later. His balance on his personal bank balance read: £22,500
A six year old with just over £22,500 in liquid funds. It was absurd by several counts, the jarring part, was that he still had over £2 million in reserves, and over 3 million BTC, worth another £11.5 million which was, by any reasonable standard, still small given what he needed.
"You're letting the noise drown you in what you want to do first. Swim back up to the surface, and bury all that noise, what do you NEED to do first. This is something you already know." Keiko tethered him to reality with her voice, and but a few simple words.
He leaned back slightly. Too much, and he'd trip risk controls or draw attention. Too little, and the growth curve would be too slow, but he settled on a structure quickly.
No matter how he chose to approach it, given he was going to hit north of a 100 million in bare minimum time, there was no way to avoid some interest on the account, and that was something he could come to terms with.
For the long term and compounding growth, the foreign exchange market. As for rapid capital generation, betting was far more efficient. Especially when the odds were history to you.
Realistically, as trading at the scale he had in mind was not as efficient for him given his lacking capital, betting was his next stop and for now only stop. £2 million, could easily grow into north of a £100 million in a single day, given several dozen well placed bets are maximized with accumulators, across several dozen accounts.
The goal was to reach £100 million by the end of the day at the worst, sooner if possible. It sounded impossible, a pipe dream. Fictional even. But given the betting sites, and possible accumulator combinations, as well as increased payouts, it was ever so possible.
Keiko was following along so far without any difficulty, her mind similarly as sharp as her childrens as she crunched down the maths of probabilities, payouts, feasibility, and reality in preparation for tomorrow.
"I also have a simple solution, that isn't particularly straightforward." he muttered, not bothering to explain as he created a single small object. With repercussions that would end up being the size of a mountain.
Two diamonds.
Honestly, calling them diamonds felt like an insult, given how rare they were. They were both anomalies, statistical impossibility made manifest.
Two red-diamonds, that from a singular glance, keiko could tell each one was nothing less than 300 carats.
"My goodness." She gasped in shock, regaining herself a moment later, as she gave him a look.
He nodded in response. "I can't create anymore even if I wanted to, the type of energy I need isn't something I would find on earth."
"Good." She paused, appraising the gem. "These alone is a big enough problem."
The first red diamond was a pear-cut approximately 341.32-carats, the second was a 271.49 trilliant cut, and the last was a 257.63 radiant-cut.
"Choose one." Keiko instructed. "Only one. I'm under the understanding that you want an auction for maximum return, so I would advise you to choose the one you want to auction, and I'll get started on the process right away once you've chosen which.
————————
The afternoon light over Geneva had the quality of polished silver, thin and cool, sliding off the lake and into the windows of the buildings that lined the Rue du Rhône like a procession of well-mannered guests.
Keiko stepped from the car into that light wearing nothing that announced itself; a charcoal coat tailored to the millimeter, low heels, her hair pinned in its customary low knot, her glasses settled on the bridge of her nose. She did not look like wealth.
She had learned long ago that the truly old money rarely did, that the loudest jewels belonged to the newly arrived, and that to be underestimated was its own kind of armor. She carried a single case, slim and matte black, no larger than a folio, and she carried it the way one carries something that does not yet exist.
Inside, Sotheby's Geneva offices breathed the hush of institutions that measured time in centuries. Marble underfoot. A reception desk of pale stone, behind it a young man whose suit had cost more than most people's cars and who wore it as though it were a uniform he resented. Keiko approached without hurry.
"Good afternoon," she said, in French smooth as river-stone. "I have an item I would like assessed for consignment. An heirloom. It came down to me from my great-great-grandparents, and it has been, until now, kept rather private."
The young man inclined his head, his eyes flicking; just once, professionally; to the unremarkable case at her side. "Of course, madame. Do you have an appointment?"
"I do not. But I think when you see it, you will forgive the omission."
There was a particular grammar to these places, a choreography she knew intimately from another life, a life of conference tables and offshore wires and men who believed their fortunes made them interesting.
She watched the young man weigh her; the coat, the bearing, her indifference to ceremony; and arrive inescapably, as she had intended, at the only safe conclusion: that this was someone whose patience should not be tested.
He lifted a discreet telephone, murmured into it, and within ninety seconds a woman in her fifties emerged from a corridor, flanked by a younger specialist with a tablet pressed to his chest like a shield.
"Madame," the woman said, extending no hand but offering instead the small, precise bow of the curatorial class. "I understand you have something for us."
"I have something," Keiko agreed, "that I suspect you have not seen before."
They led her inward, through corridors hung with the muffled reverence of money kept quiet; oil portraits of men long dead, glass vitrines holding objects that had outlived empires, carpets that drank the sound of footsteps until walking felt like wading.
No one spoke above a murmur. Keiko had always found these spaces strangely funereal, as though the wealth of the world came here to lie in state.
The private viewing room, when they reached it, was small and windowless, lit from above by adjustable spots, dominated by a pedestal of dark mahogany polished to the color of dried blood. A neutral grey velvet had been laid across its surface in anticipation.
"Please," the woman said. "Whenever you are ready."
Keiko set the slim black case upon the velvet. She rested her fingertips on its lid for a moment longer than necessary, and in that moment she let herself remember her son's hands.
She pressed her thumb to a point on the case's edge that bore no seam, no mark, no indication that it was anything but smooth.
The case answered her.
A sound, barely a sound; a sigh of perfectly machined parts disengaging; and the sculpted panels of the lid did not lift so much as retract, folding inward and downward along hidden articulations, the matte black surface peeling back like the calyx of a flower at first light.
The specialists, who had certainly watched a thousand cases open, went still. What unfolded was not a box at all. Bronze armatures rose from within, unhinging in stages, each catching the next, until they had assembled themselves into a slender show-stand of bronze and glass; a thing of arches and tension and impossible balance, the engineering of it invisible, the result of it inevitable. And cradled at the apex, suspended within a delicate bronze claw lined with the faintest gleam of inner light, sat the stone.
It was red.
Not the red of rubies, which was a borrowed and warmer thing, but a true red, the red of arterial blood held to a candle, the red that diamonds were never meant to be and almost never were.
A radiant cut, dozens of facets pulling the spotlights apart and stitching them back together as fire, so that the stone did not merely reflect light but seemed to manufacture it, a small furnace of the impossible burning calmly on its bronze throne.
The younger specialist made a sound he immediately tried to swallow. The woman did not move at all, which was, Keiko understood, the more telling reaction.
Silence from a professional was the highest form of astonishment. The woman's eyes traveled over the stone, and her thumbnail rose unconsciously toward her lips before she caught herself.
"That is—" the woman began, and stopped, and began again with the careful diction of someone refusing to let her voice betray her. "Madame, do you have any idea what you have brought into this building?"
"I have a fair idea," Keiko said. She did not. She had a son who had, in an afternoon, conjured the largest red diamond in the recorded history of the planet, and she had spent the better part of a sleepless night trying to reconcile her mind with that fact. "It has been in my family a very long time. I have decided it should no longer sit in the dark."
The woman circled the pedestal once, slowly, the way one circles a sleeping animal that might or might not be dangerous. The light caught and ran along her face in shifting bands of crimson. "We will need gemological certification, naturally. GIA, and our own laboratory. A stone of this… color, this size; the documentation alone…"
"The documentation will be complete," Keiko said. It would be. Reis had assured her that the stone's atomic lattice would survive any scrutiny that existed, would in fact survive scrutiny that did not yet exist, and that the provenance papers would be unassailable for reasons she had chosen not to interrogate. "What I require from you is simpler. I want a place for it in your spring auction. An exclusive lot. The lot, if you understand me."
The woman finally looked away from the stone and met Keiko's eyes, and in her face was the particular hunger of a person who has waited an entire career for a single object to walk through the door. "Madame," she said quietly, "for this, I believe we would build the entire evening around it."
"Wonderful," Keiko said, and allowed herself, just barely, the smile that reached her eyes. "Then we should talk about terms."