Chapter 5
Marcus looked at me. There was no professional condescension left in him. Just the exhausted awe of an engineer who has spotted a masterwork after spending three weeks looking only at the billing invoices.
“He didn’t just set up software, Olivia,” Marcus told her. “He built a custom nervous system. If you cut the head off, the body doesn't keep walking just because you hired someone else to stand in the room.”
Olivia’s chest rose and fell rapidly. The sharp blazer suddenly looked stiff on her shoulders, like armor that was two sizes too big.
“There must be documentation,” she muttered. She looked back at me. “Every enterprise vendor is required to provide standard operational runbooks. Hand over the engineering manuals.”
I reached into my breast pocket, pulled out a small, spiral-bound notebook—the kind maintenance foremen carry in their back pockets—and laid it beside the contract.
“This is the runbook for the facility interfaces,” I said. “Every pinout, every IP allocation, every physical junction box from Bay 1 to Bay 14 is documented in there. I don’t hide physical data. Any competent technician can trace the wires.”
Marcus reached out, his hand trembling slightly, and took the small notebook. He flipped through two pages, saw the meticulous hand-drawn schematics and line references, and nodded slowly.
“This is the hardware layout,” Marcus said to her. “It tells us where the wires go. It does not contain the predictive models or the runtime binaries. Those reside on his server.”
“Which he must give us,” Olivia insisted, her voice climbing again. “We paid for the development!”
“Section Seven, Subsection A,” I quoted without looking at the page. “‘All core algorithms, pre-compiled modules, and optimization heuristics developed prior to or during the term of this agreement remain the proprietary property of the Licensor.’ George agreed to that, Olivia. He agreed because he didn’t want to pay the four-hundred-thousand-dollar development retainer I quoted him in 2021. He wanted to pay as he went.”
The clock on the wall shifted. 9:22 AM.
Ninety-eight minutes until the local controllers emptied their buffers.
Down below, twenty-four hundred people were working. Mike in Chassis Assembly was probably checking the torque specs on an axle bracket. Sarah on Line 2 was probably watching the optical scanner clear eighty stamped panels a minute. None of them knew that their morning was running on an hour glass that had already been turned over.