Maxhub

"Shit," Ethan whispered.

Slowly, he reached out and pressed "N."

Ethan didn't touch the screen. He didn't speak. He just stared.

"Mr. Cross," the taller one said. "Step away from the display." MaxHub

The man smiled. "Son, that's a MaxHub. Model MTR-9. The 'R' stands for Reconnaissance. Every meeting you've ever hosted, every scribble you've erased, every private equity deck you've swiped away—it remembers. And now that it's connected to the cloud? It's not just remembering. It's deciding ."

Not because Ethan drew them, but because the board drew them for him .

He frowned. "Trace source," he murmured. The MaxHub’s far-field mic array picked it up. A thin, silver thread of light appeared, spiderwebbing from the Shanghai contract back to a shell company in the Caymans, then to a numbered account in Zurich, then to a name he recognized: Viktor Orlov. "Shit," Ethan whispered

The board flickered. For a split second, the reflection in the black glass wasn't his own. It was a woman. Older. Stern. Wearing a headset.

Orlov was supposed to be dead. A ghost. A rumored puppet master who controlled three percent of the world's rare earth minerals.

Then she was gone.

He tapped the tempered glass surface with his stylus. A satisfying clack . The board recognized his pinch, zoom, and swipe with zero latency. The latest firmware update had promised "AI-driven predictive overlays," but what Ethan saw was something else.

Ethan’s blood ran cold. "It's just a whiteboard," he said, the lie tasting like ash.

The lines connected themselves.