"I've thrown our best twenty engineers at it for the last forty-eight hours, Richard," Arthur said, his voice cracking. "The framework is flawed. Whoever originally wrote this core architecture, they built a trapdoor into the logic that we can't find. It's like the system needs a specific key to unlock the memory constraints, and we don't have it."
Because it wasn't finished, Khloe thought. Dad died before he could write the final stabilizing sequence. You stole an incomplete machine.
"So, you're telling me," Hayes leaned forward, his voice dropping to a terrifying whisper, "that my flagship project, the future of this entire company, is completely worthless?"
"I... I can try to rewrite the routing logic from scratch," Arthur pleaded.
"That would take months!" Hayes exploded, finally noticing Khloe still standing there. He turned his venom on her. "What are you staring at? I told you to get lost! Bring the check. We're leaving."
Khloe didn't move. She stood perfectly still, her eyes locked on the raging billionaire. The fear that usually paralyzed people in his presence simply wasn't there.
"I wouldn't rewrite it from scratch," Khloe said softly.
Her voice cut through the tension in the booth like a scalpel. The three men froze.
Hayes blinked, genuinely taken aback by the audacity of the woman in the apron. "Excuse me, what did you just say?"
"I said I wouldn't rewrite it," Khloe repeated, gesturing toward the tablet with her free hand. "You don't have a memory leak, Mr. Hayes. You have an unhandled floating-point exception in the eighth logic tier. The AI isn't eating itself; it's starving because you're artificially bottlenecking the recursive loops."
Silence descended on the corner booth. Even the background hum of the diner seemed to fade away. Arthur stared at her, his mouth slightly open, while David looked like he was about to pass out.
Hayes let out a sharp, cruel laugh. "Is this a joke? Am I being pranked? Who put you up to this, sweetheart? Did one of my competitors send a waitress to mock me?"
"No one sent me," Khloe said calmly, setting the coffee carafe down on the table. "But I can see the syntax errors from here. Your engineers are trying to force a linear solution onto a non-linear neural pathway. It will crash every single time it exceeds 999 nodes."