"This page was written separately, and the convergence constant right here has been manually overridden. Someone changed it from 0.062 to 0.091." The room went cold. "That override makes the system of equations on this page unsolvable," Whitney said. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were not. "There is no valid output. You can run it a thousand times, and it will never converge. This page was designed to fail." Silence. The kind that rings in your ears. Whitney turned to face Harrington directly.
"You gave me a rigged test." Harrington didn't flinch. But he didn't speak either. His fingers curled around the edge of his chair. Slade, sitting beside him, closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose.
The slow breath of a man watching a building collapse from the inside. The livestream comments exploded. The word rigged appeared a thousand times in 10 seconds. #riggedtest began trending before Whitney finished her sentence. Viewers were screenshotting the override, tagging the SEC, tagging journalists, but Whitney wasn't done.
She turned back to the board, picked up the marker, and in the next 90 seconds, she did something no one in that room expected. She reversed the override, restored the original constant, rebuilt the convergence pathway from scratch, and solved the equation that was never meant to be solved. She capped the marker, set it down gently on the tray. "Page 16," she said. "Done." The clock on the wall read 44 minutes and 38 seconds. 22 seconds to spare.
Harrington stared at the board. His mouth opened. Nothing came out. For the first time all evening, Grant Harrington had absolutely nothing to say. The applause hadn't even started when Harrington stood up.
"She cheated." The words landed like a slap. The room, which had been tilting toward Whitney for the last 44 minutes, froze. "She cheated." Harrington repeated, louder now. He pointed at Whitney. "There is no way, no way on this earth that a waitress with no degree, no training, no credentials of any kind walks in here and audits a model built by 12 PhDs. She had access to the system beforehand. Someone on my team leaked it." He turned to Slade. "Find out who." Slade opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked like a man who'd been asked to find a fire exit on a sinking ship. Harrington turned to the room.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for this circus. What you just witnessed was not genius. It was theft, corporate espionage, and I will be pressing charges." The murmurs returned, but this time they were different, uncertain. A few investors nodded. A few more looked at Whitney with narrowed eyes.