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Perceptor eyed Brainstorm. He glanced at the datapad, where he was supposedly supervising Brainstorm's work to make sure it wasn't, you know, endangering the fabric of reality anymore.
Other than the steady whir of their own frames, the laboratory was silent. The darkened fume hoods, silent machinery and mostly-cleared benches hinted at colleagues who did not keep Brainstorm's nocturnal hours. The overhead lights were harsh on the gritty eyes of a frame that had been functioning too many hours without recharge.
Brainstorm lounged in his seat, but Perceptor hadn't even looked for one. He stood stiffly beside him.
"This… artwork… doesn't appear to have significant value to account for these sales," he said finally, crossing his arms over his chest. He said this cautiously, like he didn't want to come right out and say directly that Brainstorm had less artistic taste than the unicellular organisms he was researching. He was clearly unimpressed with the artistic merits of the piece.
"Uh, no," said Brainstorm, leaning back until his chair balanced precariously on two legs and Perceptor looked like it was physically painful not to tell him to sit up properly. "It doesn't. On its own. That's why I have the sockpuppets," he gestured to the screen. "We're trading this stuff for incrementally higher prices to establish its history, then on-selling it."
Perceptor's facial expression did something complicated, to say nothing of the prickle of his EM field. He looked back at the image in question, which glared unapologetically out from the flat screen of the datapad.
A pause, and then Brainstorm laughed. Mostly at Perceptor's face. And fondly. He was so serious. "I don't care about the art, really. It's just funding the project."
Perceptor looked unconvinced.
"You can say it's ugly. I know it's ugly," Brainstorm offered.
Perceptor didn’t even politely dissemble. He nodded.
"But that's not the point," said Brainstorm. "I sell it. Obviously. But, see, the market is anon… well, semi-anonymous. Pseudonymous? So there's permanent indelible records of the prices it sold for, but it's hard to learn the real world identities of traders. You can just trade the token between socks, inflate the price a little, make sure it looks like a really sure thing—this record keeping is great for that, let me tell you—and then sell it for—"
"So, it's fraud," said Perceptor, cutting right through to the core of the matter with the kind of keen and penetrating insight that Brainstorm admired, just, so much, when it wasn't pointed at him.
"...Sort of?" Brainstorm hedged. He looked at the ceiling and tapped his fingers on his face plate. "Fraud," he repeated thoughtfully, tasting the word. Fraaauuud. Hmm.
"You're using the chain to prove the sale history of the asset," he surmised, "while relying on your pseudonyms to obscure that it's all just you artificially inflating the price. The buyers to whom you sell judge the asset's value on its history. It's not 'sort of' fraud. It's exactly fraud."
Brainstorm deflated at last. Fraud! Well. Well.
"If you want to get technical," he muttered sourly.
So, once again his genius was going unacknowledged because blah, blah, morality.
He sulked down at the ugly image. Alright, fine. It had no artistic merit and wasn't itself worth anything. He didn't even own the image—technically—and he had no idea who'd made it. But... so what? Brainstorm could get, and had gotten, people to buy them for a high price... and then he could keep himself in, oh, nitrogen for cold storage, and autoclaves, and plates for cute little unicellular samples for months yet.
Sometimes Perceptor's seriousness not only stopped him from appreciating the breadth of Brainstorm's genius, but also made him kind of a killjoy.
But now Perceptor was frowning at the ugly image in a totally different way.
"It does seem significantly more straightforward than the competitive grants process," Perceptor admitted slowly.
Brainstorm's left wing twitched up. He glanced sideways at Perceptor, who had propped his chin in his hand thoughtfully.
"It's illegal. And, more importantly, unethical." It was hard to roll your eyes without pupils but Brainstorm gave it a really good try. "...Have you reduced the administrative burden of application and grant monitoring by very much?" he asked, like he couldnt quite stop himself.
A pause.
Brainstorm's mouth twitched beneath his blast mask.
"There's about a sixty two per cent reduction in stuffing around with paperwork," he said nonchalantly. "Not that it's hard. You know what funding agencies are like."
"Sixty two... that's quite impressive, if true," Perceptor mused.
Oh yes, Brainstorm had him now. 'Fraud'. Ha. 'Unethical.' Ha!
"Oh, you know. All in a day's work for someone of my genius."
He had to be careful when he said such things, lately, because sometimes Perceptor would turn and look at him with such terrible sincerity it made his spark want to shrivel up, and then he'd just agree with him.
Horrible.
Wonderful.
No, no, horrible.
Brainstorm thought he was flirting. In a ghastly, earnest, rawly serious, Perceptory sort of way.
Hhhhhhh.
But this time, to Brainstorm's mixed relief and disappointment, was not one such a time. Today, Perceptor was too distracted by his nebulous ownership of a deeply ugly drawing, which, outside of its value as art, could be made to appreciate in real money by just a teeny tiny little light market manipulation—and therefore eliminate the problem of funding.
"Hmm," said Perceptor, in the tone of one reluctantly interested. He scrolled through the ownership history of the asset. Surely Gearbox in Kaon and Quicksilver in Vos couldn't be the same person. Why, they had separate accounts. Separate IDs! Surely.
After a long moment of nothing but the quiet hum of their fans in the empty late-night laboratory, Brainstorm leaned forward and rapped the edge of his wing on Perceptor's elbow. The click seemed very loud in the stillness.
Perceptor jolted. He blinked rapidly and turned towards Brainstorm.
"So? Want me to show you how it's done?" Brainstorm asked slyly.