Marcus looks like his normal, nervous self today, but Chuck’s cheerful demeanor is conspicuously absent. He’s barely recognizable from my index’s picture of him.
“You doing OK, Chuck?” I ask.
“Just tired, boss,” he replies. ”Don’t worry about it.”
He seems more than just tired, but I let it go at that. We have a lot to talk about today. I haven’t sent them anything about licensing our tech to Dorothy James and her crew. I’m sure Dorothy started work planting another spy as soon as we caught Mr. Smith, and I’m still not certain that he was the only plant she had with us. Having anything about our plans having to do with her sitting around on the SynTech email servers seemed like a bad idea, so I waited to discuss it over this encrypted video call.
“OK,” I tell him. “Well, I’ve got something different for you this week.”
“Sure, what’s up?” Chuck asks.
I outline Robert’s idea and what we would need to do on the development side. Marcus’s face perks up with curiosity. Chuck’s frown deepens as I talk. Maybe he takes Dorothy’s intellectual property theft personally like Evan does, or maybe he’s just in a bad mood today. Hard to tell without him in the room.
“Hmmm,” Marcus responds as he fidgets in his chair. “I’d need to dig into the code to be sure. It’s been a little while since I looked at the base classes that connect the construction routines to the interface, but if I remember right, the two are not tightly coupled. If I remember right, the interface just sets the spatial parameters for the build, everything else is baked into the construction library code. We’d need to write an abstraction layer for the VR headsets, but we’d need a sample headset along with the software it uses to get a good estimate of the effort.”
That doesn’t sound all that bad. I thought it would be worse.
“Got any kind of ballpark for how long it would take?” I ask.
“I couldn’t say without more details on their systems. That’s the big unknown. If we have to reverse engineer, it’ll be months at the least. If they provide code and API documentation, it could be quick: maybe just a few weeks, maybe months, depending on how clean their interface endpoints are.”
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Good. Way better than I thought.
“Thanks,” I tell him. “Don’t do anything with it yet. Let me see if I can even get my siblings on board for it.”
He nods in acknowledgment.
“Hey Chuck, how did things go figuring out those chips? The ones that Dorothy had planted on our boats? Did your DARPA pal have any insight?”
He sighs. It’s getting harder and harder for me to read people without the extra insights my bots give me by measuring their biometrics, but if I had to guess, this might be what’s got him so down today.
“We worked on that thing all week and didn’t get a damn thing out of it. Yesterday was the last day he could devote to it and he and I, along with half a dozen of the junior engineers, pulled an all-nighter last night. X-ray and other EM imaging didn’t work, the interconnects in the damn chip changed on exposure to various wavelengths, so we ended up taking one of them and chemically stripping it layer by layer to see the interconnects. At the end, we got a fat load of nothing. Whoever designed it loaded with countermeasures against every kind of reverse engineering technique. We ended up wrecking all but one of the samples that you gave us. I’m at the end of my rope with it.”
I guess that’s why he’s grumpy today.
“Do we have any more options?” I ask. “I really want to know what she was trying to plant on us.”
“We can send the images and data we gathered to the brain-in-a-box. Can’t send the chip itself, of course, since it’s got a transmitter on it, but the brain might be able to brute force its way through the designs if we feed in the images of it that we captured.”
“Of course,” I reply. An index entry pops, reminding me that connecting anything that could transmit to a learning AI system is the cardinal sin against the Butler Treaty laws. “Let’s try that then.”
“We did have some success with the counterfeit bots that you sent us,” Chuck continues, his face finally showing a glimmer of his normal happiness. “Their hardware is literally identical to one of our versions from a few years back. Looks like they completely replaced the firmware load. They probably couldn’t get it to work without the implant interface. The new load does most of the basics of ours, but much less efficiently. Their construction feature equivalent is primitive garbage, ours blows it out of the water.”
“Good to know. Good job.”
That’s great news. It should play right into the plans to license our software to them if I can get the sibs on board. If not, it means they’re not serious competition at this point.
“Thanks, boss. Are you ready to talk about water filters? The devs are kicking ass and taking names on that one.”