As the BallSoft Cloud account manager for Radius, Naveen had been growing steadily happier as Radius's usage kept climbing. He and his manager had been hoping for a nice bonus that year.

But now he was rushing to his manager's office in panic. He burst into his manager's office without knocking and blurted, "We are so screwed!"

"Oh, shit!" exclaimed his manager. "Did AI-n-stein file for bankruptcy?"

"Worse!" cried Naveen. "Radius usage just dropped off a cliff. Off! A! CLIFF!"

"What?! How? Why? Were?" asked his managed beginning to sound as panicked as Naveen felt.

Radius's usage had steadily climbed until it represented over three-fourths of all GPU usage across BallSoft Cloud. That level of usage represented millions of credits per hour. Per hour!

"Everywhere!" cried Naveen. "All requests have stopped. It's like they just disappeared off the face of the planet. But when I checked their website, they're still live, and their web-based chat service still works."

"Do you think they cut a deal with Yoctoly?" asked his manager. "I know those guys have been building data centers like it's Christmas, maybe they had a lot of new capacity come online?"

"No, I checked," said Naveen. "I know someone inside Yoctoly. They're panicking too. Radius usage on their cloud has also dropped to zero."

"How is that possible?" asked his manager. "Where would they get that kind of capacity?"

They both looked at each other in growing horror. BallSoft was sitting on millions of GPUs. And most of them were now sitting idle. Worse, the capital costs needed to acquire all those GPUs had yet to be recovered.

——————————

Ned walked into the director of engineering's office.

"Sir, you wanted to see me," he asked. He wasn't nervous. But he wasn't calm either.

"Have a seat, Ned," said the director. "I've got some good news."

"Oh?" said Ned as he sat in one of the director's guest chairs.

"I just got an e-mail from Radius. They raised our account limits."

"Awesome," exclaimed Ned. They'd had to limit internal usage to ensure they didn't go over their account limits. "How much?"

"Ten-fold," said the director, sounding a bit amazed.

"Ten...Fold?" asked Ned, stunned. That was an enormous increase.

"Even better, they cut their prices in half," said the director, smiling.

"Half?!" exclaimed Ned.

He grabbed his phone and checked his personal e-mail, something he usually didn't bother doing at work.

One of his unread e-mails was from Radius. He opened it and found that they had raised his personal account limits and lowered his monthly fee from 20 credits per month to 5 credits per month.

"Holy shit. They dropped my personal account fee from 20 to 5!"

"Really? Could we..."

"No, they raised the limits," said Ned, "but not enough to make it worth telling everyone to switch to personal accounts."

"Ah, well. I'm not complaining. With these changes, we can expand to the rest of the dev and engineering teams."

"Yes, and we can finally integrate into the CI pipeline," said Ned happily. Some engineers consistently forgot to run a pre-commit AI review and made more work for Ned. Now he could enforce the pre-commit review at the repo level.

——————————

A young man stopped in front of the CEO's secretary's desk.

"Melisa, is he in? I have some information I think he needs to hear."

"Sure, Jace, just a moment."

She pushed a button. "Sir, Jace is here to see you."

Over the speaker they heard, "Alright, send him in."

Jace walked past the secretary and pushed open the door to Hammond Saltzman's office.

"What is it, Jace?" asked the CEO as Jace closed the door behind him.

"Sir, my contacts inside both BallSoft and Yoctoly are saying that Radius's usage just dropped off a cliff. The unofficial word is that Radius found capacity elsewhere and no longer needs GPUs from either BallSoft or Yoctoly."

"BuyMoor?" asked the CEO.

"Unlikely, sir. You know how tightfisted they are about CAPEX. Most of their GPU investment has been reserved for internal use."

"Could they have cobbled together enough capacity from all the other bit players?"

"Maybe, but only if all those other GPU provider startups dedicated all their capacity to Radius. And that seems unlikely."

"Yes, that does sound unlikely. Where else could they have gotten that kind of capacity?"

"I don't know, sir. Unless they managed to build 20 or 30 large-scale data centers in the last two months, I can't see how they managed it."

Hammond opened his mouth like he wanted to laugh at the very idea, then paused.

"Now that's a scary possibility," he said seriously.

——————————

Jack dropped his towel on a nearby lounge chair and slid into the hot-tub before leaning back with a sigh.

Having an indoor pool and hot-tub was a luxury he could definitely get used to.

Already in the hot-tub were Katie, Samantha, Madison, and Naoko. He knew Miranda would be along shortly.

Katie and Madison slid over to snuggle up next to him, their naked bodies sliding against his under the water.

"How did your finals go?" asked Katie as she caressed his chest.

"They felt easy," he said, sounding a touch surprised. "I didn't even need to use parallel self or time acceleration. Having all that extra time to study really made things much easier than I expected."

"I know what you mean," said Madison. "I even felt a little sorry for some of the other students. It was easy for me because I had all that extra time to study or work on end of term projects, but they only have 24 hours in a day."

"Yeah, I know what you mean," said Katie. "Everyone talks about how the anatomy final is brutal, but it wasn't. I can see how it would have been, but with all that extra time, it was easy. I'm actually worried we'll get accused of cheating."

"That might happen," said Jack, "but it should be easy to defend. And if they get pigheaded about it, I'll just sic some lawyers on them. I mean, sure, Genesis Heart is the biggest cheat there is, but even if they knew I have it, we didn't actually used during the tests, so they'll just have to suck eggs."

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