Chapter 9
Olivia stared at the white folder. Her hands were clenched into small, tight fists against the dark wood of the table.
“And if I don’t sign?”
“Then at 11:00 AM, the lines go quiet,” I said. “You can spend the next six months paying Marcus’s firm two hundred and fifty dollars an hour to reverse-engineer forty-thousand lines of compiled assembly code. You can explain to your automotive clients why eighteen hundred tons of cold-rolled steel are sitting stationary in the press bays. And you can explain to your board why the vendor you fired for forty-two thousand dollars a month took sixty million dollars in production capacity with him when he walked out the door.”
She looked at Marcus.
Marcus didn't offer a defense. He slowly closed his laptop screen halfway, leaning back in his chair with his hands open.
“He's not bluffing, Olivia,” Marcus said, his voice completely flat. “My firm cannot bring this facility back online by eleven o'clock. We couldn't bring it back online by next Friday. If those controllers lose their sync, we’d have to manually reflash every drive in the plant. We don't even have the firmware backups for the older Fanuc units.”
“You told me this was standard integration!” she hissed at him.
“I told you that based on the assumption that the company owned the orchestration layer!” Marcus shot back, his professional composure finally cracking under the pressure. “You didn't show me Section Seven until eight minutes ago! You told me it was an ordinary off-the-shelf implementation with an expensive support retainer! You didn't tell me he owned the whole architecture!”
Olivia closed her eyes.
For thirty seconds, nobody spoke. The only sound was the muffled, rhythmic thud of the stamping press downstairs. Thump-hiss. Thump-hiss. The heartbeat of a machine that didn't care about titles, stock options, or corporate restructurings—a machine that only knew whether it had instructions to drop twenty tons of hardened tool steel onto a sheet of metal, or whether it had to stop to keep from tearing itself apart.
When she opened her eyes, the arrogance was gone. In its place was something cold, efficient, and thoroughly defeated.
She reached for the red stylus, hesitated, and then set it down. She reached into her blazer pocket, pulled out an ordinary, metal-bodied ballpoint pen with black ink, and clicked the top.
“Is there an internal transition clause?” she asked.
“Page four,” I said. “Peterson Automation Solutions will provide thirty hours of structured training per quarter to designated internal engineering personnel. If, after thirty-six months, your internal team is competent to assume operational control, you may license the runtime binaries at an agreed annual maintenance fee. But you don't touch the source code, and you don't bring in third-party consultants to poke around the runtime without my written consent.”