08:58 AM. The glass doors of the Vanguard Tower swung open. Lukas and Amina stormed into the air-conditioned, hypermodern lobby, followed by Wurst, whose engines quietly crackled and cooled down after the sprint. Amina hastily wiped a few mud splatters off her pants while Lukas tried to straighten his tie, which had completely slipped to the left.
“Floor 42, the board is already waiting,” announced the holographic receptionist.
Two minutes later, they stood in the impressive conference room. At the end of the huge mahogany table sat the jury: five stern-looking tech investors in the year 2026, led by Dr. Mwangi, a legend of the African digital scene.
“Ms. Amina,” said Dr. Mwangi, glancing at the clock. “Right on time. But you look like you ran across half the savannah. And who is your... slightly smoking companion?” She pointed at Wurst, who had obediently curled up on the floor to conserve his batteries.
“This is my backend developer Lukas Weber – and this is our hardware team,” said Amina confidently, lifting her chin. Every trace of nervousness had vanished. She tapped on her tablet, and Kiko shot like a sparkling shooting star into the center of the room.
The light in the room dimmed automatically. Kiko projected the interface of the new streaming app as a gigantic, three-dimensional model directly above the table. The investors leaned forward fascinated. Amina’s flowing design elements, inspired by the Nile Delta, glowed in deep blue and gold.
“The design is aesthetically appealing,” one of the investors interjected. “But how does it perform with latency during live streams with millions of simultaneous users on the continent? That constantly crashes our current system.”
“Here comes our new crypto architecture into play,” Lukas took over. He stepped forward and swiped a code layer into the hologram. “We don’t use a central server cluster. The backend is based on a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol that dynamically adapts to the local network bandwidth.”
To demonstrate this, Lukas gave Wurst a subtle signal. The dachshund activated his internal simulator and simulated a sudden network outage of $80$ percent in the fictional surrounding area. The hologram didn’t flicker once – Lukas’s code caught the crash within milliseconds and smoothly rerouted the data streams.
A murmur went through the room. Dr. Mwangi put down the pens, clasped his fingers, and stared at the smoothly rotating vectors. The face of the chief investor was completely unreadable. Lukas held his breath, and Amina’s hand searched for his in the dark.