What was the goal of Project Genie? According to Attia, the goal was to simply translate the Engineered Architecture system into software. Through his lawyers, Attia quotes Teller saying, "[Eli] invented the technology, and he's here to translate his brain into software." Attia didn't have the software expertise or business infrastructure to make Engineered Architecture into a successful software product, so he looked to Google X to provide it. Given his considerable fame as an architect, he expected to be calling the shots on the architecture side.

"The short answer is, I’ve become a believer in this."

Google and Flux haven’t filed any legal answer to Attia’s complaint, but the team seems to have viewed Genie differently, with Attia’s tools as just one of many avenues to follow. (Google X declined to comment.) Even though he had been part of Genie from its earliest stages, Attia's employment documents describe him as just a consultant, and Genie had another architect, Michelle Kaufmann, on board from the beginning. Attia may have been crucial to the initial vision — or, more likely, crucial to convincing Google brass to fund the project — but the final product seems to have expanded beyond the work of designing buildings. Like any speculative startup project, Genie had to be more agile than that, grasping for a way to translate good tools and a disruptable industry into a workable business model.

The evolution of Project Genie may have also put it at odds with the rest of Google X. After five months, Genie was turning into a suite of market-oriented software tools, organizing information for architects and developers rather than shaping the buildings themselves. Meanwhile, Google X seemed increasingly interested in ambitious hardware projects like self-driving cars and Google Glass, which may have left the software-oriented Genie as the odd man out. It's unclear exactly how the decision was made, but as 2011 drew to a close, it became clear Genie's days at Google X were numbered. According to the complaint, Astro Teller sent Attia an email on December 7th to let him know the project was finished. "I'm very sorry Genie will end," Teller said. "It would have been a great thing to make for the world."

But it wasn't entirely the end. Genie wasn't the moonshot hardware project that Google X wanted, but it could still make for a viable business. Chim began drafting a business plan and meeting with investors, hoping to keep the project alive. Attia seems to have been cut out of those plans from the beginning, leading to some awkward moments as Google X's involvement in the project wound down. The group worked in an open office with glass-walled meeting rooms, and Attia describes returning to the office early one day, only to find the rest of the group in an unscheduled meeting. When he walked in to see what was happening, he was met with awkward silence. "Everybody abruptly stopped talking and exchanged glances with each other for what seemed to be a couple of minutes before Chim called the meeting off," Attia says.

"It would have been a great thing to make for the world."

The signs were clear enough. In a phone call from Thrun the day before New Year's Eve, Attia got official word that the project was continuing without him. "Genie is spinning out, it's spinning out without you unfortunately, and that is that," Thrun told him. "It's a miserable situation…but there is nothing I can do about it."

The new company was called Flux Factory, with Chim as CEO and Teller serving on the board. By now its goal seemed distinct from what Engineered Architecture offered. Flux's first product focused on gathering information about zoning and local ordinances, a completely different task from the modular design system described in the Engineered Architecture documents. Attia's scheme was a system for designing buildings, but Flux seems to be design-agnostic, creating tools that can be useful no matter how the architect approaches his craft. In an interview in November, Chim described Flux as providing decision support for developers, "computing key metrics such as construction cost and life-cycle operating cost in near real time."

But Attia isn't convinced the projects are all that different. When I asked what elements of Engineered Architecture he saw in Flux, Attia’s reply (through his counsel) was simple: "Everything. Nothing was left behind. Nothing was added. Nothing was changed. Every specific aspect of Engineered Architecture is included in the Google/Flux presentations."