Chapter One: Tomorrow for One Dollar

Lu Chen’s company had died below thirty thousand feet. Now, at thirty-three thousand feet, he was waiting for someone to collect the body. Beyond the window, night had pressed the Atlantic into a sheet of black iron without edges. Northstar Air Flight NX017 was traveling from Shanghai to New York, with an estimated flight time of thirteen hours and forty minutes. Eleven hours from now, Lu would enter a law office near Kennedy Airport and sign the agreement waiting in his inbox: all seventeen surviving patents of Prism Technologies transferred to the North American investment firm Helios Capital for one dollar, in return for its creditors releasing him from personal liability.