Jaime actually laughed. It was a sharp, genuine sound. "5,000? Derek, your company just lost $400 million in market cap in 10 minutes. The price just went up."
"How much?" Derek sobbed. "Name it!"
"I don't want money anymore," Jaime said.
"Then what? What do you want?"
"I want a meeting," Jaime said. "Not with you—you're finished. I want a meeting with the board of directors. And I want Gavin Reed there. Tonight. 8:00 p.m."
"They won't meet with a waitress!"
"They will," Jaime said, "when you tell them that I'm the only person in the world who knows how to stop the drones from doing it again when you try to reboot the system. Because here's the thing, Derek: that code is flashed onto the hardware. Even if you wipe the servers, the firmware on the production line is infected. You can't ship a single unit until I unlock the equation."
There was a long silence on the other end.
"8:00 p.m.," Derek whispered. "At the Redwood Horizons office, conference room B."
"I know where it is," Jaime said. "I used to deliver coffee there."
She hung up.
Jaime looked at her reflection in the bus stop glass. She didn't look like a waitress anymore; she looked like a CEO-in-waiting. But she needed help. She couldn't walk into a room of sharks alone; she needed a shark of her own.
She dialed a number she had memorized from a business card left on a table 3 months ago—a customer who had tipped her $100 and told her she was too smart for this job.
"Law offices of Sterling Cooper and... sorry, force of habit. Law offices of Patterson & Grimm," a receptionist answered.
"I need to speak to Robert Patterson," Jaime said.
"Mr. Patterson is in court. May I ask what this is regarding?"
"Tell him Jaime from the coffee shop is calling," she said. "Tell him I have a patent dispute involving Aerologics, and I need representation. Tell him I can pay his retainer."
"And how will you be doing that, ma'am?" the receptionist asked, skepticism dripping from her voice.
"By giving him 10% of the company," Jaime said.
The conference room at Redwood Horizons smelled of old leather and panic. It was situated on the 40th floor, overlooking the city lights of Seattle—a city that was currently buzzing with the news of the Aerologics disaster.
At the long mahogany table sat the board of directors: six men and two women who controlled billions in capital. At the head of the table sat Arthur Blackwood, the chairman. He was 70 years old, with eyes like flint and a reputation for gutting companies for sport. To his right sat a sweating, pale Derek Sterling. To his left, Gavin Reed, who was trying to project confidence, but was aggressively clicking a pen. Jessica, the CTO, stared at the table, refusing to make eye contact with anyone.
The heavy oak doors opened. Jaime Jenkins walked in.
She wasn't wearing her apron. She was wearing a charcoal blazer she had bought from a thrift store for job interviews she never got, and a white blouse that was crisp and sharp. She didn't look down; she looked Arthur Blackwood in the eye.
Beside her walked Robert Patterson. If Jaime was the blade, Patterson was the hammer. He was a man in his 60s, heavy-set, wearing a three-piece suit that cost more than the coffee shop Jaime worked at. He carried a battered leather briefcase and walked with a limp that somehow made him look more intimidating, like an old warrior who had survived battles these soft venture capitalists couldn't imagine.
"You're late," Gavin snapped. "And who is this? We agreed to a meeting with the girl, not a circus."
Robert Patterson didn't even look at Gavin. He pulled out a heavy chair for Jaime, waited for her to sit, and then placed his briefcase on the table with a heavy thud.
"My name is Robert Patterson," he rumbled, his voice deep and gravelly. "Senior partner at Patterson & Grimm. I specialize in intellectual property theft and corporate fraud. And this," he gestured to Jaime, "is the rightful owner of the core technology that Aerologics is currently infringing upon."
"This is ridiculous!" Gavin scoffed, looking at the board. "She's a waitress! She wrote some gibberish on a napkin! We gave her $5,000. That's a transaction. That's a settlement."
"Did she sign an NDA?" Patterson asked.
Gavin froze. "She... she took the check."
"She tore up the check," Jaime corrected, her voice cool and clear. "You have the pieces on the floor of your lobby, Gavin. I never accepted payment; therefore, I never transferred the rights."
Arthur Blackwood leaned forward. The room temperature seemed to drop. "Mr. Reed," Arthur said, his voice dangerously soft. "Is this true? Do we not own the IP for the swarm logic?"
"We own the code!" Gavin insisted, slamming his hand on the table. "Jessica wrote the code!"
"I wrote the topology," Jaime cut in. "Jessica just translated it into C++. But she did a bad job: she removed the sigma variable."
Jaime stood up. She walked to the whiteboard at the end of the room—the same kind of board Gavin had erased just 24 hours ago.
"The crash today wasn't a hardware failure," Jaime said, picking up a marker. "It was a mathematical certainty. Your drones operate on a negative space protocol. They don't look for obstacles; they look for empty air. But without the sigma variable to reset the local coordinate system every few minutes, the definition of empty air shrinks."