"You can certainly try," Khloe said, completely unbothered. "But during discovery, my lawyers will subpoena the original source code. The DoD inspectors will analyze the architecture. They will find my father's embedded digital signatures—signatures you didn't even know existed—proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hayes Dynamics committed gross intellectual property theft to secure a government defense contract. You won't just lose your company, Mr. Hayes. You will go to federal prison for defrauding the United States military."
The threat hung in the air, heavy and absolute. The billionaire was utterly paralyzed. The walls of his empire were closing in, engineered by a woman in a stained apron holding a coffeepot.
"How?" Hayes breathed, his voice barely a whisper. "How did you know we would be here?"
"You're a creature of habit," Khloe replied. "You come to the Copper Grill every Tuesday night at 11:30 p.m. after your executive board meetings. But tonight wasn't a coincidence. Did you really think your system just magically started experiencing a recursive loop two days before the biggest presentation of your life?"
Arthur gasped. "The phantom error... you... you triggered it!"
Khloe didn't smile, but her eyes gleamed with a dark, satisfied vindication. "My father wasn't just a brilliant engineer; he was paranoid. When he realized a shell company was trying to steal his life's work, he buried a dormant logic bomb deep in the eighth tier of the code. It was designed to stay asleep until the system attempted to map more than 10,000 nodes simultaneously—the exact requirement for the DoD contract. All I had to do was wait for you to try and sell it."
She had them. It was a flawless, inescapable checkmate.
Richard Hayes stared at the waitress, the reality of his situation crashing down on him like an avalanche. For the first time in his privileged, cutthroat life, he had absolutely no leverage. He was cornered by his own stolen technology.
"What do you want?" Hayes asked, his voice defeated and hollow.
Khloe reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a folded, notarized legal document. She placed it on the table next to the napkin.
"This is a transfer of ownership," Khloe explained calmly. "It stipulates that Hayes Dynamics acknowledges the original patents of Project Icarus belong solely to the estate of Thomas Bennett. It also licenses the use of that algorithm to your company in perpetuity. The licensing fee is exactly $100 million, payable immediately to the offshore escrow account listed on page three."
David, acting on pure legal instinct, reached for the document and quickly scanned it. He looked up at Hayes, his face completely pale. "Richard, it's ironclad. If you sign this, she transfers the cryptographic key. The DoD demo goes off without a hitch. We keep the $2 billion contract. If you don't..."