"If we don't fix this tonight, we're all dead anyway!" Arthur muttered, his eyes glued to the screen.
He rapidly typed out the sequence from the napkin, translating Khloe's handwritten logic into the proprietary language of the system. Khloe stood silently, her hands resting in the pockets of her apron. She already knew what was going to happen; she had run this exact sequence on her laptop three years ago.
Arthur hit the execution key.
The screen of the datapad went entirely black. For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Hayes let out a victorious, cruel laugh.
"Well, there you go," Hayes sneered. "She crashed the entire operating system. David, get the manager out here right now. I want her arrested for—"
The screen flared back to life. But it wasn't flashing red anymore. A soft, steady blue light emanated from the tablet. A three-dimensional wireframe of a city grid materialized on the screen, accompanied by hundreds of green dots representing the autonomous drones. The counter in the top right corner began to tick up rapidly:
Simulated routes: 1,000... 5,000... 10,000...
Arthur gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles turning white.
Simulated routes: 25,000... 50,000... 100,000...
The system didn't crash. The frame rate didn't even drop. The drones on the screen navigated the complex invisible mesh network flawlessly, dodging simulated obstacles, recalibrating on the fly—performing exactly as Hayes Dynamics had promised the Pentagon they would.
"CPU load is holding steady at forty-two percent," Arthur whispered, tears welling up in his eyes. He looked at Hayes, completely dumbfounded. "Richard, she did it. It's perfect. The feedback loop is completely gone. The system... it's fully operational."
The silence that followed was deafening. David stared at the screen in pure disbelief. Arthur was practically hyperventilating with relief. But Richard Hayes didn't look at the screen.