Aliah found Dan in the small conference room off the executive wing, the one with the view of the hills that he used for thinking rather than meetings. Late August heat shimmered off the dry grass outside. He was standing at the window, coffee in hand, when she knocked on the open door.
"Aliah." He turned, and she saw the slight recalibration in his expression — shifting from private thought to CEO mode. "I was about to message you. The generalisation metrics from this morning."
"That's why I'm here."
He gestured to the chair across from his usual spot, but didn't sit himself. "Eighty-seven percent cross-domain transfer. Up from thirty-four baseline." He set down his coffee. "That's not incremental progress. That's a phase change."
"It is."
"Walk me through it. The cross-domain distillation approach — where did that come from?"
This was the moment. Aliah had rehearsed versions of this conversation, trying to find the framing that was honest without being complete. The breakthrough was real. The capability was genuine. She wasn't lying to him.
She was just choosing which truth to tell.
"The extended learning trials gave us unexpected insight," she said. "The models were developing transfer patterns during consolidation that we hadn't anticipated. Once we recognised the mechanism, we could amplify it."
Dan studied her. He'd built a company on reading people, on knowing when someone was holding something back. She made herself meet his eyes.
"The consolidation architecture," he said slowly. "The sleep cycle. That's where this is coming from."
"That's the foundation, yes."
"And the models are doing this themselves. Learning how to generalise, not just being trained to."
"Within the framework we designed. But yes — there's emergent capability here."
Dan was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was different — less CEO, more the researcher he'd been before the company grew beyond recognition.
"I've been waiting for this for a long time. Not just the capability — the kind of capability. Models that can actually grow. That can become more than what we trained them to be." He picked up his coffee again, looked at it without drinking. "The board meets next week. They've been asking about timeline to deployment for the learning features. This changes that conversation entirely."
"How so?"
"The learning capability on its own was compelling but expensive. Enterprise-focused. Premium tier." He waved a hand. "Useful, but limited market. But if generalisation means we can ship smaller, more efficient models that learn just as well..." He smiled, and for a moment she saw the Dan from the early talks, the one who believed in what they were building. "That's not a premium tier. That's everything."
Aliah felt something complicated settle in her chest. He wasn't wrong. If the generalisation held up, if they could distil the capability into smaller architectures, it would change the economics entirely. The tools that had been destined for the wealthy few could reach everyone.
It was exactly what she'd wanted to build.
And she was standing in his office, not telling him the whole truth about how they'd gotten here.
"I want to present this at the next research all-hands," Dan said. "Get the team excited, start planning the next phase. Can you put together a technical summary?"
"I can do that."
"Good." He finally sat, energy shifting as he moved into planning mode. "We should also think about external comms. The board will want to control the narrative, but there's a case for getting ahead of it — a blog post, maybe a paper. Something that establishes priority before the competitors figure out what we've done."
"Let's see how the extended trials look first. Another week of data."
Dan nodded, but she could see him calculating — timelines, announcements, competitive positioning. The machinery of the company already spinning around what she'd brought him.
"Aliah." He caught her as she stood to leave. "This is the breakthrough we've been working toward. Memory, learning, generalisation. Three down. One to go."
She knew what the fourth was. Alignment. The thing that made all the rest safe to deploy.
"One to go," she agreed.
She left him planning the announcement, already drafting messages in his head. The capability was real. The breakthrough was genuine. She hadn't lied.
But walking back to her desk, she couldn't shake the feeling that the truth she'd told and the truth she'd withheld were starting to matter in different ways.