The CMI had continued to slow-roll her in the payout until she had finally used one of her two ace cards. Her number one ace card of course was Tuffy, but she didn’t go that far. Her second ace card had been Dr. William Weaver who, other than Mimi, was the planet’s expert on the LGBs. Although Dr. Weaver had been spending most of his time of late learning the application of the LGBs and not the fundamentals, he was very politically connected — perhaps even more so now that he was a navy officer. When the director of the CMI received a phone call from the national security advisor — as a favor to Weaver — the CMI finally got off their dime and at least paid Mimi for the one solution. Mimi still puzzled over Weaver’s remark about the “stagnant inbred not invented here eggheads.” Weaver had also used several other “Southern” euphemisms and metaphors that Mimi’s aunt wouldn’t allow her to repeat. Tuffy had told her not to give it much thought.

The industrial complex, on the other hand, had no such “not invented here” problem. Clever entrepreneurs used any good source of information from which to make money and in Mimi’s and Tuffy’s cases they were crawling out of the woodwork to pay them. Mimi had been integral in the reverse engineering of the Adar miniature power supplies for communications implants, which left her with one percent of a patent that one of the major cellular networks owned, not to mention a slice of just about every battery being made in the market.

There was one armored glass manufacturer that asked her to help them decipher a problem with a new polymer manufacturing process.