Khloe stood a few feet away, her tray pressed against her hip, silently observing the meltdown. She approached the table, pulling a fresh carafe of dark roast from her apron.
"Good evening, gentlemen. Can I start you off with some coffee?"
Khloe's voice was smooth, betraying none of the exhaustion sinking into her bones.
Hayes didn't even look up. "Just pour it, sweetheart, and make yourself invisible. We are dealing with real problems here."
Khloe's jaw tightened imperceptibly. She filled Hayes's cup, her eyes casually drifting toward the glowing screen of the datapad on the table. Strings of dense, complex code were scrolling past at lightning speed, highlighted by flashing red syntax errors.
"It's a memory leak in the dynamic pathfinding protocol," David offered weakly. "Can't we just hardcode the routes for the demo and fake a live AI environment in front of the Pentagon?"
Hayes sneered, taking a blind sip of his coffee. "Are you functionally brain-dead, David? They're bringing their own engineers! They will test the limits of the mesh network. If it can't handle unpredictability, we lose the contract!"
Khloe paused, her coffee carafe hovering just above Arthur's cup. She looked closer at the screen—at the architecture of the code.
It was impossible: the variable naming conventions, the specific structure of the neural weights, the peculiar way the logic gates were structured. It wasn't just familiar; it was intimate.
It was Project Icarus.
A cold, heavy stone dropped in Khloe's stomach. Three years ago, her father, Thomas Bennett, had developed a revolutionary AI pathfinding algorithm in his small garage laboratory. He had taken a massive loan to patent it, only to have a massive corporation tie him up in predatory litigation, bleed him dry in court, and eventually absorb his intellectual property through a shell company. The stress had caused her father's fatal heart attack, leaving Khloe with nothing but a mountain of debt and a shattered dream.
She had always suspected Hayes Dynamics was the puppet master behind the shell company. Now, looking at the raw, stolen code on the table, she had her proof.
"Arthur," Hayes hissed, his face turning a dangerous shade of red. "Tell me you have a patch."