Chapter 4
“You designed this as a trap!”
“I designed this five years ago for George Whitman,” I said, looking her dead in the eye. “George read it. He brought his lead counsel into this exact room. They negotiated the monthly rate down from forty-eight thousand to forty-two, and in exchange, George agreed that this company would not have to spend seven million dollars upfront on an enterprise software development cycle that would take three years and carry an eighty percent chance of failure. George wanted results on Monday, not a software project that died in committee.”
I picked up the copy of the contract, tapped it against the table to square the pages, and slipped it back into my leather folder.
“George understood what he was buying. He bought performance. He bought five years of ninety-nine-point-nine-eight percent line uptime. He bought the lowest warranty return rate in the history of this firm. And when he stepped down two months ago, he left you with a facility that operates like a Swiss watch—provided somebody winds it.”
“We have Marcus,” Olivia said, though she sounded like she was trying to convince herself rather than me. She turned to the consultant. “Marcus, your team can bridge the PLCs. You told me during the transition pitch that all modern industrial buses use standard protocols. Modbus, Profinet, EtherCAT. You can write an internal interface.”
Marcus was looking down at his lap. His hands were clasped so tightly his knuckles were white.
“Marcus?” she repeated.
“Olivia,” Marcus said, his voice hollow. “We can write an interface. Absolutely. In standard conditions.”
“Then do it.”
“It’s a four-month project,” Marcus whispered.
The room went so quiet that the dull thump-hiss from the press floor two levels down seemed to vibrate the glass in the windows.
“What did you say?” Olivia’s voice was barely a whisper.
“It’s an custom architecture,” Marcus said, looking up with the miserable honesty of a man who knows his firm’s billing rates have just collided with physical reality. “Harold’s runtime isn’t just polling sensors. It’s running dynamic kinematics across six different brands of robotic arms that were installed between 1998 and last November. You have Fanuc robots talking to Siemens drives through an abstraction layer that Harold wrote. If we drop that bridge, those machines don't know how to synchronize. If we try to write raw logic directly to the line controllers without understanding his timing registers, the first pair of stamping dies will collide within three cycles.”