Chapter Text
The person who invented this must be an alien.
Jayce comes to that conclusion staring at the car schematics in the showroom.
The next thing Jayce considers is whether his meds are working.
But no – really. This… Hextech corp had come out of nowhere, and now they were producing cars? Cars which ran on batteries, but had a much, much longer runtime than the next best electric car. Jayce knows batteries. It’s his field.
He’d heard about Hextech, but he hadn’t focused on it, really. But he’d busted his car, his piece of shit which his mom had helped him buy when he’d gotten his bachelor’s degree. He’d had it for fifteen years, it was basically an entirely different car than the one he’d initially bought with all the replacement parts. And then the gear box fell out while he was driving one day, and his mechanic had begged him to just get a new car.
His boss was really into Hextech. Most people in his department were. The company had produced a lot of things. Cameras, cars, boats and airplane parts, air filters, air conditioners. Random shit. Jayce was mostly not interested. The company held the patents for all new tech in every single one of their products, and he had assumed it was pedantic shit, fussy little changes.
But now… he stared at the information again. It just didn’t make sense.
So of course, he bought it.
And took it home, and immediately started fiddling with it.
He was fairly sure that it voided the warranty, but he had to know. There was very little Jayce did not understand, or at least get the gist of. He was a genius, he knew that about himself.
He was also bored.
So he took the engine apart, and the more he saw, the less he understood.
He put it back together, grateful he wrote himself a page of instructions to trace his way back, and then he began to search.
Hextech was created only five years ago by a man called Viktor Herald. His biography on the Hextech website gave nothing. No qualifications, no university degrees, just a vague backstory of a man who wanted to invent for the greater good. The man also had about five pictures on the entire internet. One man with long hair, and the sharpest cheekbones Jayce had ever seen, often seen in dark coloured overcoats. He looked tall. And thin.
This guy has to be an alien.
The thought had not cleared in his mind. He didn’t understand the technology that he’d patented. And this man – who had attended none of the universities Jayce had, who no one he knew had ever gone to school with – had somehow managed to do something no one else had.
How has no one else figured this out? How has nobody else questioned this?
Jayce knew the answer, really. Most people were busy living their own lives, and didn’t take antipsychotics.
Sometimes he got these… ideas. The first time it had happened, he was twenty-four and he got ideas about magic which ended in an explosion which was technically not his fault, but it did get him 5150’d for six months and treated for psychosis. He ended up back in his mother’s house, whacked out of his mind on medications. It took a long time for him to work his way back.
He had moments, still. He was better at spotting them.
This didn’t feel like that.
He felt clear. Could trace his own thoughts. It made regular sense to him. But the thought itself was absurd. Clearly, Viktor Herald had a mind that may as well be alien, but wasn’t actually.
Still. It niggled in the back of Jayce’s head.
‘What do you know about the man Viktor Herald?’ he asked, trying to seem casual. Mel took a long sip of her coffee, squinting at him. She put her teacup back on the saucer, leaning back.
‘You don’t know about him? His company has been up at the top of your field for about three years. Shouldn’t you know about him?’
Jayce shuffled in his seat. ‘I was busy.’
Mel kissed her teeth, crossing her legs. ‘I’m sure you were.’
Jayce fiddled with his cup. ‘I got a new car. Made by the company. It got me interested.’
‘Ah. You got a new car. Thank god. I might actually be able to get you to give me a lift some time now.’
‘My car was fine.’
‘The gear box just fell out.’
Jayce shook his head, willing himself not to let himself get drawn in. ‘Viktor Herald? You know him?’
Mel let him take the easy route out. Jayce had begun to be less and less fun to tease recently. ‘Know him is a difficult thing to quantify. I don’t think anybody knows him. He’ll show up to perhaps one event a season. He’ll be there for maybe ten minutes. He never makes announcements by himself. He makes other employees do that. I’ve had a conversation with him, yes.’
‘And? What did you think?’ Jayce asked, a little bit paranoid that she would somehow be able to read in between the lines and understand what he was actually asking was Did this guy seem like he could possibly be an alien?
‘I don’t know. He was polite. He has an accent, says he moved to the US from abroad. He’s perfectly polite, he’s just… odd.
Jayce leaned forward. ‘Odd how?’
‘I don’t know. Just… what kind of company owner doesn’t want to do his own announcements, his own press talks? He’s knowledgeable – I tested that when I spoke to him, thinking maybe he’s just one of those “founders” who uses other people’s ideas. But he definitely knows how everything works. A few people told me he just… works away in his office, and every six months or so there will be a new patent, a new thing he’d designed, and then they all get to work on it.’
Jayce frowned. It wasn’t how any companies worked. What was this man – with his lack of any qualification – doing with such amazing, unique designs?
‘Anything else, other than he’s odd?’
‘I don’t know. He’s good to his workers, I know that. His advisors told him how much money he would be worth – he could be a billionaire, but he’s not. He refuses to charge more than the basis of margin covers. He pays his workers fairly. Overall, I think he’s nice. Polite, a little odd, perhaps, but fair.’
‘A fair millionaire? He must be an alien,’ Jayce muttered under his breath.
Mel took it as a joke. Which was better than what it was.
It really did not help anything. He was a private man with no evidence he had ever, even once, been enrolled in university. But he was clearly an educated man. He had a foreign accent but not a lot to place him anywhere else. There were no immigration papers, no article about a fond childhood in Europe. He walked with a cane, seemed to rely on it pretty heavily. But that didn’t mean anything – so did Jayce.
Jayce sketched his face into his notebook. There was something strange about his face – was it too long? Too sharp? Maybe he was just odd looking.
Maybe Jayce really should tell someone what he was thinking. He knew he was probably fixating, knew it was taking over his mind, and they were all warning signs.
But what if he really was an alien?
Slowly, it began to fade from his mind. He went around his job as normal. Gave his lectures, ignored the students who were clearly not reading. Doing the best on his own projects (he was currently taking apart a Hextech camera to see how the film worked). He half-listened in faculty meetings, his fingers tracing over that picture he’d drawn. Still, his mind floating that question. On some days it seemed ridiculous, but others… sometimes it felt like Viktor was laughing at him specifically. Which was also not a good sign.
He couldn’t continue with this obsession, he had to break it some way.
And that’s when he discovered a position open at Hextech.