95: Chapter 95 The Final Fate of the Inventor King: A Life in Prison
"Do you still not understand?"
Lin Tian Lin tucked his hands into his pockets and tilted his head to gesture toward the Edison Laboratory in front of him: "I've come to wrap things up."
This sentence struck like a bolt of lightning, leaving Edison stunned on the spot, his body going limp.
After several seconds, he roared hysterically:
"Bastard! Don't even think about it! You yellow-skinned monkey parvenu, even if I were to meet God, the laboratory I built would never fall into your hands!"
Facing his roar, Lin Tian Lin merely shook his head indifferently:
"No, you've misunderstood. I never had any interest in your scrap metal from the beginning; it wasn't worth me making a trip for. In fact, what I wanted were them."
Lin Tian Lin raised his hand and pointed.
Edison followed the direction of his finger and saw the researchers walking out of the building, lining up and heading toward Lin Tian Lin.
At this moment, Edison was completely dumbfounded.
However, even more desperate things were yet to come.
The remaining researchers walked up, ignored the Edison standing on the side, and respectfully said to Lin Tian Lin:
"Mr. Lin Tian, Edison should be facing bankruptcy liquidation immediately. Can we go directly to the Umbrella Laboratory to start our jobs now?"
"Of course, the carriages have already been arranged for you. You can complete the onboarding procedures as soon as you board."
Lin Tian Lin answered with a smile.
He had gone to the trouble of taking a car to West Orange, New Jersey, this time solely for this group of precious scientific talents.
In original history, Edison owned over two thousand inventions and more than one thousand patents in his lifetime.
However, more than 90% of these achievements were not developed by him personally.
It could not be denied that Edison was a business leader with great vision, but his character was extremely terrible.
Every person who had worked at the Edison Laboratory had complained that Edison had an extremely volatile temper and would insult his subordinates at every turn.
Back then, Tesla had resigned in anger precisely because he could not endure such personal humiliation.
If it were just a bad temper, everyone could have tolerated it for the sake of a high salary.
What the researchers could not tolerate most was Edison's forceful plunder of their labor achievements.
The things everyone worked hard through the night to research would ultimately have Edison's name on them, and the actual inventors would not even receive a penny of material reward or recognition.
Precisely because of this, when people from the Umbrella Laboratory secretly contacted this group, they chose to jump ship without hesitation.
Watching the employees who used to be subservient to him treat him like air and happily board the carriages arranged by Lin Tian Lin, Edison was driven completely mad.
He twisted his body frantically, to the point where even two burly tax police officers almost couldn't hold him down.
"Trash! Shameless thief! This is highway robbery! I..."
Before he could finish his sentence, a cold female voice sounded from the side:
"Mr. Edison, until this very moment, do you still not understand why you have lost so thoroughly?"
Edison looked toward the source of the voice and saw that at some point, a young woman wearing a white lab coat had appeared beside the car.
The young woman's face was as cold as frost, and the chill in her eyes made people shudder.
"Anna..."
Edison subconsciously wanted to call his daughter's name, but as the words reached his lips, his expression changed abruptly, and he gritted his teeth:
"Even you came? Did you also run over specifically to see the joke of a failed father like me?!"
"No, I just think you are pitiful."
Anna took a stack of photos out of her lab coat pocket with an expressionless face and threw them in front of Edison.
In the photos, a young, heavily made-up young woman was tightly embracing a handsome young white man, acting extremely intimate.
Seeing these photos, Edison was struck as if by lightning, his heart turning to ash.
His industry was gone, his reputation was ruined, and even the cherished wife he had doted on had long ago betrayed him and thrown herself into another man's arms.
In that instant, the image of his long-buried first wife suddenly appeared in his mind.
He vaguely remembered that it was a Christmas many years ago, in a small town in New Jersey, when he, at twenty-four, first met that sixteen-year-old girl.
The snow had fallen heavily that day, and the weather was bitterly cold.
But the moment he saw her, his heart beat so fast it almost jumped out of his chest, and his whole body felt hot.
The sixteen-year-old girl had given him a faint smile, and Edison once swore to God that it was the most beautiful smile in the world, one he would absolutely never forget in his lifetime.
Yet, he had ultimately failed God.
In the torrent of fame and fortune, he had completely forgotten his first wife, and he hadn't even gone to see her for the last time when she passed away due to illness.
What had turned him into this heartless, cold-blooded person today?
Was it the mountains of money, or the hypocritical praise from the outside world?
At this point, what right did he have to blame his daughter Anna?
Before being shoved into the carriage by the tax police, Edison took one last look at Anna, and with a hoarse voice, he struggled to spit out a few words:
"I'm sorry... Anna."
That single apology, delayed by over a decade, caused the cold mask Anna had worked so hard to maintain to collapse instantly.
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Seeing his daughter crying, Edison turned his head away in a somewhat disheveled manner and urged the police beside him to take him away quickly; he was in a rush to see his lawyer.
Lin Tian Lin walked to Anna's side, reached out to embrace the girl who was trembling all over from crying, and looked at the police carriage as it drove further and further away, asking in a low voice:
"Do you need me to intervene? With the tax evasion and several economic crimes he is suspected of, once it enters judicial trial, the prosecutor will definitely make him rot in prison."
"I want to be alone for a while, Lin Tian." Anna sobbed, burying her head in Lin Tian Lin's arms.
"Alright, then I'll send you back to your apartment first."
Lin Tian Lin patted her shoulder and took her into the car together.
The car started and quickly drove toward the downtown area of New York.
...
The car drove all the way to the foot of the apartment building where Anna lived in the center of New York.
Lin Tian Lin kissed the girl's cheek gently and said softly: "Take a long break these few days, get a good sleep at home, and don't think too much."
"Mm."
Anna nodded in low spirits.
Although she and Lin Tian Lin had joined forces to send Edison to hell and reclaimed the dignity that belonged to her mother and herself, she felt no thrill of revenge in her heart, but was instead filled with numb pain.
No matter how much she resented him, Edison was ultimately her biological father, a blood fact that could not be erased.
Now that she had suddenly heard that late apology from him, all that was left for her was endless complexity and bitterness.
On the other side, with Edison's imprisonment, this once world-renowned inventor had become the focus of public discussion once again.
However, given his current infamy, most mainstream newspapers only reported the matter coldly in an inconspicuous corner with a small layout.
Next, Edison would face multiple felony charges from the court.
These included tax evasion, intimidation, business fraud, and so on.
Among them, the most fatal one was tax evasion.
In the America of this era, there was one iron law that absolutely could not be touched, and that was taxation.
As the core financial source of the Federal Government, unless you hid in the slums as an undocumented person for your whole life, as long as you wanted to do business on this land, you had to keep your accounts clean.