Chapter 3
The HR woman—whose name badge read Karen Miller—pulled her hands back from the table as if the paper had grown hot.
“Yes,” Olivia said, though her conviction was thinning fast. “Security protocols dictate that terminated vendors lose access immediately.”
“Then we have a compliance issue,” I said quietly. “Because at 9:00 AM, my automated licensing daemon flagged your enterprise tenant as deactivated. When an account goes into deactivation, the bridge doesn't shut down with a warning. It initiates an orderly disconnect protocol to protect proprietary code.”
Marcus’s head snapped up. “What kind of disconnect protocol?”
“A hard handshake sever,” I said. “I built it to prevent corporate espionage in case one of my competitors tried to siphon the runtime libraries. The local controllers on your line will continue to run their cached subroutines for exactly two hours after the heart-beat drops. They’ll maintain their current set points until the local buffer fills up.”
Marcus calculated the math in his head. I saw the exact second the blood drained from his face.
“Two hours,” Marcus breathed. “From nine o'clock?”
“Eleven o'clock,” I said.
“Eleven?” Olivia’s voice rose, losing its polished edge entirely. “What happens at eleven o'clock, Harold?”
“The cached instructions clear,” I told her. “The controllers don't crash—I don't write malicious code. They do what every industrial programmable logic controller does when it loses supervisory telemetry. They fail-safe. The servos stop. The safety relays open. The hydraulic valves close. And twenty-four hundred people on the floor will find out that their touchscreens have reverted to factory default diagnostics.”
Olivia stood up. Her chair scraped backward against the low-pile carpet with a sharp, ugly shriek.
“That is sabotage,” she declared, pointing the red stylus directly at my chest. “You are threatening an industrial enterprise. That is a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. I will have our legal department file an emergency injunction before you reach your truck.”
I didn’t stand up. I didn’t raise my voice. I took a slow breath and rested my forearms on the table, folding my fingers together.
“Ms. Matthews, you fired me. You revoked my credentials. You gave me this paperwork, which your legal counsel prepared and which you signed at 8:45 this morning. You are the party terminating the service agreement. You chose not to renew the license. If a company stops paying its electric bill, the power company doesn't commit sabotage when the lights go dark. They simply stop delivering the product.”