The Brilliant Boy Billionaire

PART FIVE — Shaun

Chapter 3: Buttered Balls

I was running for my life. I’d just kicked Dad in the balls, and he finally let go of me as he writhed in pain. But as mad as he’d already been when he was chokin’ the living daylights outta me, that was nothing compared to the way he felt now. I ran into his bedroom, where I knew he kept his gun, but when I got there, there was a naked teenage boy, lying on his bed. Suddenly I felt safe, and then I woke up.

At first, I didn’t know where I was. I was in bed — a large bed, much larger than the twin bed I usually slept in, and there was an arm draped over my chest. The mattress was much firmer than my usual mattress, yet it was so soft and comfortable, molding to my body. As I continued to wake up, I became aware of a soft snore behind me and warm breath blowing across my neck. And there was something poking me in the rear.

As my consciousness returned, I remembered that I’d spent the night with Shaun, an intern from work and now my boyfriend. I’d put off dating him for so long out of concern for the potential problem of impropriety, but that never was an issue. He was attached to the solid-state-design group over which I had virtually no influence at all. His dad was in charge of the overall project, but I reported to his superiors and not him. If I’d considered it more carefully, Shaun and I might have gotten together months ago. On the other hand, perfection was worth waiting for. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect boyfriend. We had similar interests, similar opinions on most things, and we both enjoyed similar fetishes when it came to sex.

I couldn’t help but think about the sex we’d had after we finally went to bed. We made out for the longest time as we touched each other everywhere. I fulfilled one of my fantasies by fucking Shaun’s right armpit, and then he wanted to try it with me, and he did. That was so incredibly hot. We explored each other’s feet, gave each other rim jobs, engaged in a slow and sensuous 69 but stopped short, and after hours of making love, I lowered myself onto Shaun’s pole and rode him raw, keeping him on the edge for the longest time before I let him cum as I spewed my load all over him too. Perhaps keeping it going for so long and torturing the poor boy made me a sadist, but it was so worth it in the end.

I confess that I did it bareback, which was something I swore I’d never do. I had brought a condom with me just in case, but it was sitting in my backpack back at home. Shaun didn’t claim to be a virgin, but I trusted him completely. He didn’t have any condoms, in any case. I pointed out that his dad probably had a supply, but if he did, Shaun didn’t want to know about it.

Feeling my boyfriend stir behind me, I turned around so I could see his face as he woke up. In his sleep, he was positively beautiful. His almost-blond hair was in disarray, covering his entire forehead, his right eye and right cheek, all the way to his nose. The hair on his upper lip was fine and dark and was beginning to look like more than just the little bit of peach fuzz I’d noticed when we first met. The fine dusting of hair on his cheeks made it evident he’d need to start shaving soon. He looked so innocent. No one would ever suspect how far from innocent he really was.

A smile spread across his face, and even though his eyes appeared to still be closed, he was obviously aware of my presence in his king-size bed. “I could stay like this forever,” he said quietly as he opened his eyes. “Holding you like this, safe between the soft sheets on my bed,” then placing the palm of the hand that was underneath and between us, right on my chest, he continued, “the steady rhythm of your heartbeat reminding me just how full of life you are.” Then with a broad grin, he added, “You were amazing last night. I never realized sex could be so much fun!”

“Sex is supposed to be fun,” I replied.

“Yeah, of course, it is, but I didn’t know it could be like that!” he continued. “It was crazy! It was intense! Damn, it was about so much more than just getting off. Can you stay another night again tonight?” he asked.

“Need I remind you we both have to go to work tomorrow?” I pointed out. “We probably should get some sleep tonight; besides which, I have to go home and get some clothes. I know the dress code’s very casual, but three-day-old underwear is probably not appropriate.”

“I could lend you a pair of speedos like I wear,” Shaun suggested. “It would be cool if we matched. Maybe you could move in with me, and we could go in together.”

Damn, that thought was tempting, but there were so many reasons that would be a bad idea, not the least of which — our love notwithstanding — Shaun and I were still getting to know each other. “Shaun, as much as I’d like to,” I began, “I have a foster family, and they probably would have a say in something like that. Besides, I love my foster family, too, and you’ll be going back to school in the fall. We wouldn’t even have much time together other than sleeping together. The only real time for fun would be on the weekends, anyway. I’ll hafta get someone to drive with me for now, but next month I’ll have my license, and with luck, I’ll have my Model 3 and be able to zip right over anytime.

“Much as I’m enjoying lying here with you, Babe, my bladder’s about to burst,” I interjected. “Unless you’re into watersports, I need to hit the bathroom — now!”

Jumping out of bed, I ran into the en-suite bathroom and let loose my stream. Before I’d finished, Shaun joined me and let loose a stream of his own. He started playing sword fight with our streams, but I ran out of ‘ammunition’ before I could fight back, which made Shaun giggle.

“I was surprised that I enjoyed ass play and not just being on the receiving end, either,” Shaun related as we washed up at the sink. We’d showered during the night, or rather in the morning before finally going to sleep, and we’d changed the bedsheets, too. “That was fun, and it didn’t taste at all like I thought it would. I try to keep an open mind, but the thought of watersports just doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t fault anyone who likes that kind of thing, but jeez, what do you do, use waterproof sheets?”

“I won’t get into the details ’cause a lot of this was told to me in confidence,” I replied, “but my younger foster brother and his boyfriend are heavily into that. Let’s just say it involves speedos and the heavily wooded area behind the house. Beyond that, I don’t want to know all the details.”

“Damn,” Shaun responded. “Speedos, woods and getting wet all sound incredibly hot, but I think I’d rather use body oil. Changing my sister’s diapers was bad enough.”

After he finished brushing his teeth and as I was getting ready to brush mine, I took a look at my boyfriend’s face and said, “You know, you have more than peach fuzz on your face.”

“It’s the curse of having dark brown hair,” Shaun acknowledged. “During the summer months, it almost looks blond, but it’s not. I get blond streaks, but underneath it all, I’m really a brunette. With your blond hair, you probably won’t need to shave ’til you’re eighteen, or maybe even later than that. I’ve been thinking about shaving since before we met, but Dad tells me it’s not something to look forward to. In a way, it’s exciting to think that I’m growing up.”

“I think you should keep the mustache,” I chimed in. “I think it looks incredibly sexy.”

“If you like it, that’s reason enough to grow a mustache,” Shaun responded. “Facial hair’s popular these days, so maybe I’ll keep the beard, too, but you still hafta shave the neck. Unless you shave your neck, people will just think you’re being too lazy to shave. Dad says the neck is the worst part of shaving. The hairs on the neck go in different directions, so no matter which way you shave, you’re always goin’ against the grain, and the skin there’s real sensitive, too. The main reason Dad decided not to grow a beard, he says, is because he figures that if he hasta shave the neck anyway, he might as well shave everything.”

“He shave’s his pubes?” I teased.

“Eww, I don’t even want to imagine that,” Shaun responded, “but it’s already too late. Thanks to you, boyfriend, I can’t get the picture of my dad with shaved pubes outta my mind.”

“You’re very welcome,” I replied. “Happy to help. By the way, do you know what time it is?”

“There’s a clock inside that medicine cabinet,” Shaun answered.

I opened the cabinet and was shocked by the time. “Fuck, it’s already 4:20 in the fuckin’ afternoon!”

“What did you expect, J.J.?” Shaun responded. “We didn’t finish making love until the sun had been up a while. I’m guessing we didn’t get to sleep until around 8:00.”

“Damn, I’ll hafta take off pretty soon,” I replied.

“Are you complaining about the time we spent making love?” Shaun countered.

“Of course not,” I responded. “I just hate to see the weekend come to an end.”

“Same here,” Shaun agreed.

“You got anything else for us to eat?” I asked.

“If you don’t mind having more leftovers,” Shaun answered. “If you’ll give me about fifteen, twenty minutes, I’ll put together a feast.”

“Could you maybe make the same sandwiches you made yesterday?” I asked.

“I’ll make us something even better. C’mon, you can keep me company while I put something together.” Shaun responded. Shaun exited his bathroom and started to walk right out of his bedroom, still in the nude.

“Um, Shaun? Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked.

“Not that I can think of,” he replied.

“Are you planning to flash your dad?” I asked.

“I don’t mind if he sees me in the nude,” Shaun responded, “but it’s not like we don’t see each other often enough. This is an all-male household, and Dad and I don’t think anything about being naked around each other. Your being here doesn’t really change that. We could make out in the nude in the living room and he wouldn’t think anything of it. There’s no reason to feel self-conscious around him, just ’cause we’re not wearing any clothes.”

“Maybe not to you,” I countered.

Laughing, Shaun responded, “You went skinny-dipping in the pool in front of the whole neighborhood last night, and you’re too modest to have my dad see your privates?”

“Yeah, but if anyone was looking out at that hour, they deserved what they got,” I replied. “Besides which, I couldn’t see anyone if they were watching us, so I could pretend no one was there. With your father, I’d know he was there.”

“Yeah, but he’s family,” Shaun countered. “You’re family, too, J.J. You know my dad, and he shouldn’t be a stranger to you anymore, but now that you’re my boyfriend, you’re family.” I got tears in my eyes hearing Shaun refer to me as family. “If it’ll make you feel better about being naked around the house, Dad texted me earlier to tell me he won’t be home until late tonight. I guess he musta really got lucky last night. We still have the house to ourselves, probably until you leave here, so clothes are strictly optional, and I’m opting out.” With a grin, Shaun walked right out of the bedroom. With a shrug, I followed.

By the time I caught up to him, Shaun already had something warming in the microwave and was dropping a K-Cup into a Keurig coffee maker. Next, he opened the fridge and grabbed a bunch of things out of it, too fast for me to see what he was doing. Into a large glass bowl, he cracked open a half-dozen eggs and whipped them together. Next, he took a couple of baked potatoes and sliced each one lengthwise, separated the halves and set them flat side down on a cutting board and sliced each half in half again. He then sliced crosswise into very thin slices. He threw a quarter-stick of butter into a large skillet on the stove and started it melting. While it was melting, he added some seasonings to the eggs.

Taking the mug out from the coffee maker, he handed it to me and asked, “Black, right?” I nodded my head and took a sip. The coffee was excellent. Shaun dropped another K-Cup into the Keurig and started his own cup brewing.

In the meantime, the butter had melted, and he threw the potato slices on the griddle, skins and all, and stirred them around until the potato slices were all uniformly golden brown. He turned the stove off and turned one of the ovens on.  He then opened the microwave and removed the two servings of leftover salmon he’d apparently had thawing and used a sharp knife to slice them into tiny pieces. He poured about a quarter of the eggs over the potatoes, added the salmon, then more eggs, then some of the leftover creamed spinach and then the rest of the eggs. Finally, he took what I guess was a cheese grater out of a drawer and grated from two different blocks of cheese on top of the eggs.

After popping the skillet into the oven, he grabbed four slices of rye bread and dropped them into a toaster, then pushed a pair of levers down. While the bread was toasting, he dropped four oranges into a machine that made quick work of turning them into juice. The toast popped up and he then smeared a thick layer of peanut butter between each pair of slices, and then cut them in half. He carefully removed the skillet from the oven and separated the makeshift frittata in half, placing each half onto a plate. Adding the toast, he took the two plates to a small table, followed by the glasses of orange juice, napkins and silverware and his mug of coffee.

Pulling one of the chairs out, he announced, “Breakfast is served.”

“Breakfast?” I exclaimed. “It’s almost five o’clock and time for supper.”

“Does this look like supper to you?” he asked. Before waiting for an answer, he added, “Please, take a seat.”

“I wasn’t complaining,” I responded as I sat down, and Shaun pushed my chair in.

Sitting across from me, he put one of his legs up and his foot in my lap and started playing with my boy parts. I was really hungry, but damn, this was incredibly erotic. Placing my own foot in his lap and doing the same, I asked, “Is sex never far from your mind?”

“Never,” he replied. “I have to make up for lost time,” he added with a grin. “Let’s eat, and then we can eat.”

We were both hard as a rock as we played footsie with our boyfriend’s stuff, but that didn’t stop us from digging in. “Wow, this is good!” I exclaimed after tasting the frittata.

“I told you you’d like it,” Shaun replied.

I took a few more bites of the frittata and a bite of the toast when suddenly, the door to the garage opened and in walked Frank. Shit! We hadn’t heard him drive up. My dick deflated instantly, and I felt like my face was on fire, but Shaun remained hard and continued eating.

“Hey, Dad,” Shaun said in greeting to his father. “Thought you weren’t gonna be home ’til later. Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” Frank responded. “I had a great weekend, but it ended a bit earlier than expected when Lauren’s daughter showed up, unannounced, with her kids in tow.”

“Kids?” Shaun asked.

“Yeah,” Frank answered. “I thought Lauren was around my age, but it turns out she’s fifty with a son who’s just starting his freshman year at the University of Iowa and a daughter who’s an accountant in Denver. At least Lauren’s daughter was in Denver, but I guess she had a blowup with her husband late last night, so she packed up her car, grabbed her kids and drove all day to stay with her mother. Unfortunately, she neglected to call her mother and just showed up.”

“Well, that musta put a damper on things,” Shaun said as he continued to eat. I, on the other hand, was frozen in place with my foot still resting in Shaun’s groin, as his was in mine.

“Actually, no,” Frank explained. “The kids are toddlers and adorable, and they weren’t at all shy around me. I had to quickly grab my boxers, but all I had with me was the dress clothes I’m wearing now, so I left it at my boxers and got down on the floor with the kids and played with them while Julie — that’s Lauren’s daughter — poured her heart out to her mother. I haven’t had that kind of fun in years.”

“Well, if you’d like, I could get down on the floor and play with you, Dad,” Shaun quipped.

Chuckling, Frank responded, “No offense, but I think I’ll pass on that.” It was interesting to watch father and son interact at home as opposed to the formal relationship they had at work. It was obvious watching them that they shared a very deep bond. “Otherwise, the weekend was fantastic,” Frank went on. “Lauren and I really seemed to hit it off right away. She’s the first woman I’ve met in a long time with whom I enjoyed myself more for the friendship than for sex. Not that we didn’t enjoy our time together in bed, either, but that was just a part of it. Even just talking was great. She’s a kindred spirit.”

“That’s great, Dad,” Shaun responded. “Are you gonna see her again?”

“We have a date this Friday, and she assured me that regardless of what happens with her daughter, we’re going to keep it.” Frank replied, and then asked, “That food smells fantastic. Is there any of it left for me?”

“Sorry, Dad,” Shaun replied. “I only made four servings, which was barely enough for the two of us. If you want, I can make you a hearty sandwich with potato salad. J.J. really liked it last night.”

“More than liked it,” I replied. “It was incredible. Shaun should sell the recipe to Panera.”

“Why don’t you go change, Dad, and I’ll make it for you?” Shaun suggested.

As Frank headed off toward the master bedroom, I responded, “I can’t believe he saw us naked like that. I’d better go get dressed.”

“Why, J.J.?” Shaun countered as he got up and headed to the kitchen. “It’s not like the cat isn’t already out of the bag. Dad’ll probably return in the nude, or maybe in his boxers ’cause it’s one thing for his son to be naked with his boyfriend and quite another for him to be naked with his son’s boyfriend. Anyway, you should finish your frittata while it’s still hot.”

I wasn’t sure I shouldn’t go get dressed, but then Frank reappeared in only his boxers, just as Shaun had said he would, making the issue pretty much moot. I went back to eating my frittata and toast as Shaun finished making his father’s sandwich and handed it to him. Shaun rejoined me at the table while Frank sat on a stool at the counter and proceeded to eat his sandwich.

“There’s cream cheese in this sandwich,” Frank exclaimed. “How in the world did you ever think of that? It’s delicious!”

“I’ve had roast beef with blue cheese in a sandwich before,” Shaun explained. “I’m not a particular fan of blue cheese, but it’s not half bad with roast beef, but that got me to thinking. We eat cream cheese with lox on a bagel, so why not use cream cheese with other meats in a sandwich. The cream cheese is a bit sweet though, so I smeared a little spicy brown mustard on each slice of bread to add a bit of tang.”

“J.J.’s right,” Frank exclaimed. “You should sell this to Panera. It’s even better than their Sierra Turkey.”

“I love their Sierra Turkey,” I chimed in.

“I knew there was something about you that I liked, J.J.” Frank responded, and I smiled.

“The trouble is that it’s too easy to reverse engineer,” Shaun countered. “What would stop them from just copying it and claiming it as their own? It’s not like you can patent a sandwich.”

“Actually, you can,” Frank countered, “but you have to show that there’s something unique about it that has never been done before and isn’t a natural extension of existing sandwich technology. You have to show that others wouldn’t have come up with it, also. That could be a hard sell, and it would cost a fortune just to apply for the patent, let alone defend it.

“What you could do is to copyright your sandwich. You could simply write down the recipe on a note card and maybe take a photo showing its fabrication, then seal it in an envelope and mail it to yourself, so you have proof of the date from the postmark. Or for a nominal fee, you could apply for a copyright. Either way, Panera would either have to pay or you could sue. Unfortunately, Panera has much deeper pockets than you do, so good luck in defending your copyright.”

“Their lawyers would probably file motion after motion until they wore us down,” Shaun chimed in. “We’d never get our day in court.”

I couldn’t help but laugh as I said, “Sandwich technology?”

“There is a science as well as an art to making a gourmet sandwich,” Frank suggested. “Look at Panera Bread. They’ve made a multimillion-dollar business out of it.”

“It’s not just the food, Dad, but the friendly and fast service, great coffee, comfortable seating and free Wi-Fi,” Shaun added. “They took the coffee house to the next level.”

“You boys had a good time, I take it?” Frank asked.

“We had a wonderful time,” Shaun answered his father. “In fact, I love him, Dad, and like you said, it’s not just the sex.” How the fuck could he talk so casually about sex with his father? I could feel my face was on fire. “J.J. is a kind, passionate, super-intelligent boy with a love of sci-fi, music and literature. I can talk about so much with him in great depth. He’s the perfect boyfriend.”

“And he’s cute when he’s embarrassed,” Frank chimed in. Then turning to me, he asked, “How are your studies going, J.J.?”

“I’d hoped to be able to finish up my undergraduate degree by the end of the summer,” I replied, “but the chief engineer at work keeps coming up with useless things for me to do.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” Frank asked.

“Seriously, I’ve been a lot busier than I ever expected,” I replied. “It’s definitely not a forty-hour-a-week job.”

“In the professional world, few jobs are, J.J.” Frank agreed.

“As I’m coming to appreciate,” I continued. “My work schedule is restricted to my ability to get a ride from my brother, and that depends a bit on his class schedule. I end up doing a lot of my work at home and I appreciate being allowed to do so, but I spend a lot of time after hours on it, which was time I’d been counting on for my studies.”

“You should be delegating most of the work to the teams, J.J.,” Frank replied. “We didn’t hire you to do basic design work but to oversee the integration of the various components. That’s why your title is ‘chief conceptual engineer’.”

“But that’s what I’m doing,” I replied. “The individual teams have enough to do as it is, but every time someone suggests a change in the physical structure, I need to go back to the other teams and see if it’s feasible. And Shaun’s group’s giving me the most trouble!”

“But you’re the one who’s causing the trouble, J.J.” Shaun complained. “We had chip designs already on the drawing board, but they were designed to run hot, not cold, and the SSD’s use off-the-shelf components that were designed to operate at room temperature. Not even the gamers who use water cooling or even liquid nitrogen are aiming for cold operation. They use aggressive cooling to keep their overclocked circuits from melting.”

“Is it worth cooling the servers so aggressively, J.J.?” Frank asked.

“To get a 75% or more reduction in energy usage, I would think so,” I replied, “not to mention increased reliability, decreased failure rate and perhaps quadruple the component longevity. I expect that future server designs will use even more aggressive cooling to drop energy requirements to less than one percent of the energy we use today.”

“Is that even possible?” Frank asked. “It’s not like you can lower the boiling point of nitrogen.”

“You can under pressure, but that only matters if we use gaseous nitrogen as the cooling agent,” I explained. “Gaseous nitrogen allows us to use conventional materials in the integrated circuits and circuit boards, but that advantage disappears at lower temperatures as plastics became more fragile than glass. Alternatively, we could use liquid nitrogen as the coolant, but organics, including plastics may explode when exposed to liquid nitrogen. We deliver the nitrogen as a liquid but let it boil at atmospheric pressure before it reaches the circuitry. The boiling point of nitrogen is 77° on the Kelvin scale, and the freezing point is 66°K. That difference might not sound like much, but it makes a huge difference in reducing the semiconductor bandgap, and nitrogen as a liquid is a much more effective coolant, too. Supercooled gaseous nitrogen will let us cut the switching voltage in half, which amounts to a 75% reduction in power.

“If we could reduce the temperatures perhaps to 68–70°K, we could cut the switching voltage by at least 90%, which would cut the power utilization by 99%, give or take. Instead of using 500 watts per server, we could cut that to 5 watts per server, and a data center with 500,000 servers could use 2.5 megawatts instead of 2.5 gigawatts. With climate change, it’s a moral imperative that we do so.”

“If you don’t use plastics, what would you use, J.J.?” Frank asked.

“There are silicon-based plastics; think of silicone. Their physical properties are problematic. I’d put my money on ceramics,” I answered, “but ceramics are brittle and don’t handle thermal stress very well. Think in terms of taking a glass casserole dish out of the freezer and pouring boiling water into it.”

“It would shatter,” Frank reacted aloud.

“Exactly,” I agreed, “although the silicon wafers upon which the chips are fabricated are fragile, too,” I pointed out. “There are ceramics involving hybrids of silicon oxides and metals that have very low thermal coefficients of expansion. The really interesting thing is that high-temperature super­conductors are also ceramics, so we could potentially achieve the holy grail of chip technology based on the Josephson junction and quantum effects. Ultimately, we might be able to get away with switching voltages in the millivolt range with circuit densities an order of magnitude greater than they are today. Keep in mind that the less heat generated, the less cooling that’s required to maintain supercooled temperatures. Imagine an entire data center the size of your refrigerator that uses about as much power as your refrigerator.”

“How close are we to having such a thing?” Frank asked.

“It depends on how much you’re willing to invest in the technology,” I replied. “Spend a million a year and you won’t have it before the end of the century. Spend a billion a year and I’ll deliver it in less than a decade. Spend twenty billion and I’ll deliver it in under a year. Applazon’s one of the few companies with the resources to pull it off.”

“That’s too rich, even for us,” Frank countered. “The return on our investment would take too long.”

“You’re only considering how much you could save in your data centers,” I replied, “but you could license the technology. It would find use in cloud-based systems and data centers around the world, not to mention in medical equipment, transportation-control centers, power-control centers, air-traffic control and the military, to name just a few likely applications. Applazon could fund the research for a year with a couple of weeks’ worth of profit.”

“I’ll need more than the word of a sixteen-year-old prodigy to be able to sell it to Corporate,” Frank responded.

“Understood,” I replied. “I’ll probably have to finish my Ph.D. first before they’ll listen.”

“Pretty much,” Frank agreed.