Hayes's smile vanished, replaced by a look of absolute, furious contempt. He grabbed the tablet, shoving it across the table toward her.
"You think you're smart?" Hayes sneered, his eyes dark and hollow. "You think serving hash browns qualifies you to understand a proprietary algorithmic architecture worth more than the GDP of a small country?"
"I think I understand why it's broken," Khloe replied, unflinching.
Hayes leaned back, crossing his arms. A vicious, mocking grin spread across his face. He looked at Arthur, then back to Khloe.
"All right, playtime. Fix this." He pointed a manicured finger at the screen. "And I'll give you $100 million."
Arthur choked on his own breath. "Richard, you can't be serious. We are dealing with highly classified—"
"Shut up, Arthur!" Hayes snapped, never breaking eye contact with Khloe. "She wants to play tech genius, let's see it. If this waitress can solve a problem that my entire floor of MIT-educated engineers couldn't fix in two days, I will gladly write her a check for $100 million right here, right now. Because if she can't, I'm having her fired, blacklisted, and sued for corporate espionage."
Khloe felt the adrenaline spike in her blood, cold and sharp. This was the man who had destroyed her family. This was the man who sat in his glass tower while her father lost everything. He was so blindingly arrogant, so utterly convinced of his own supremacy, that he couldn't even recognize the ghost of the man he'd robbed standing right in front of him.
"$100 million," Khloe repeated, her tone completely flat.
"You heard me," Hayes mocked. "What's the matter? Did the big words scare you off? Go get my check."
Khloe didn't reach for her notepad. She didn't walk away. Instead, she reached into the front pocket of her apron and pulled out a cheap blue ballpoint pen. She picked up a thin white paper napkin from the dispenser on the table and smoothed it out over the mahogany wood.
"The architecture of your AI," Khloe began, her voice steady and rhythmic, "operates on a fractal framework. When it reaches a critical mass of node generation, it tries to index every single possible route simultaneously."