Both had reached the same numbers with only a slight difference of 0.001 in the final calculation. Chad was impressed that some algorithm was able to do his job and worried that if things kept going like they had, he would lose his job and the possibility of a good retirement.
Once he made sure everything was in order, he finished the presentation and was ready to give it his all in front of the two hundred and so people who would be coming for the presentation. It was the largest project he had ever worked on, and he saw the great potential this had for businesses and people alike all over the globe.
“Got it all done,” Chad said as he knocked on Bobby's office door. He had walked there to give him the good news in person, even though he had sent out an email informing everyone involved about the current status: “Even have the numbers from last week and an estimate for the following two weeks.”
“That’s some great work!” Bobby said, as he sighed in relief and lay back on his office chair. “So you are more than ready for tomorrow, then.”
“Definitely more than ready. Where is the meeting taking place?” asked Chad as he finally decided to take a seat on one of those ugly white chairs Bobby had at his office for visitors. They were uncomfortable to sit down on, but it was part of a philosophy of having you sitting down for the least amount of time possible so that discussions would be to the point.
“Cityplace Conference Center, 15th floor. We have everything booked and the transportation ready. We are set to have two hundred and fifty+ physical attendees. Our feed is going to be shared with all the stakeholders, ours and the clients’, and some additional attendees the boss would like to have in place.” Bobby raised both hands above his head and looked at the ceiling. “Finally, we are getting everyone together in a single meeting.”
“We are talking very big numbers here. You’re making me nervous,” Chad said jokingly as he also raised both hands and looked at the ceiling, when both dropped their hands, looked back at each other and agreed on sight, “I will do well.”
“You will do well. You always pull more than your fair share of work, and I’ll make sure that you’re fully vested after the presentation tomorrow,” Bobby said. Chad felt some relief when he heard this. While he knew his wife was tolerant about this, they had had enough discussions that had ended up in a fight. There was an understanding for a better future, but there was also a time in the now in which his kids were growing. His kids were five and seven.
He was unsure that if he were not careful enough, the next time he looked back they would be fifteen and seventeen and he would have missed a large part of their lives. The words from his wife echoed heavily on him and made him feel bad every time he had to do extra time or push a little bit more to get things done at the office.
Tomorrow was another day, though, and another chance to make things right.
**
“All good?” asked Tom, the IT person they had brought into the meeting to make sure all the equipment was working as intended so their presentation would run as flawlessly as possible. “Headset and pen working right?”
Chad tested the headset by speaking softly at first. The headset seemed to have issues picking up his voice level, and Tom was having problems trying to get it just to the right level so it would not be so soft that it could barely be heard or so loud that it would crack the speaker’s and everyone else's eardrums.
“Still the same issue, Tom,” said Chad. As he finished, the speakers would barely reproduce his voice. “Do I need to move anything around in the headset?”
“Not sure. I thought those headsets didn’t have any volume control?” Tom posed as a question. Chad toyed around with it while he asked Tom to stop playing around with the volume control. As soon as he found the control on the headset, he started figuring out the right volume for his voice.
Sometimes people outside of IT end up knowing more than they do. It was not surprising for Chad, but it reassured him that he could still fix things himself with some basic understanding of the problem. From there he could build a list of potential solutions and go through them one at a time. This method had helped him throughout his entire life and with it had come a considerable amount of success.
“Are we good now? We need to move all the people waiting outside before they start rioting,” Bobby said, while making sure his smartphone was on mute. “Good?”
“We are good to go,” said Chad. His voice went through the speakers at the desired level. Bobby raised his left hand with his thumb sticking out and confirmed that the visitors could join the room.
As soon as the door opened, a sea of people slowly joined the conference room. At first Chad felt confident, but after assessing the volume of people he started to feel anxious for the first time in a long time. It was all him now, and while he could get assistance from one of the fifteen analysts who had come to this meet-up, including his boss, it was all him on the spotlight.
The links had also been established with all the respective streaming services. All of these remained private and were available only to the indicated parties, due to the criticality and sensitivity of the Hadaran IV Project.
“Chad, you have two more minutes, and then you will be live,” Bobby told him from the other side of the room. Earsets in and signaling him, Chad nodded and slowly walked from one side to the other of the platform at which he stood, trying not to look anxious about this. He knew the project, numbers, models, the purpose and the goal of everything they were working on.
He inhaled slowly and exhaled at the same speed. All the weight of the world was on him, but when he thought about his wife and kids, it all went away. He thought for a moment that he was standing on the shoulders of giants, but as he walked, there was his image on one of the screens. He was the giant, and everyone was standing on his shoulders right now.
“Hit ‘em hard, Chad,” said Bobby and the doors closed. Chad stood in the middle of the platform and clicked on the pointer. The words read:
HADARAN IV PROJECT
NANOTECHNOLOGICAL INTERFACE
FOR HUMAN INTERFACING
The room fell silent as the lights slowly dimmed. Chad slowly let himself go with the presentation: first he gave a brief presentation about what their current subject of interest would be. The numbers they were mentioning were part of their current investigation and progress with the nanotechnological interface they were building for the new Quantum Computers that had come to light in recent years.
They came almost at the same time when the Covid-19 contingency was reaching a peak. The creation of the first computers had allowed the crunching of models in minutes instead of days, but it had all come with a price, since the complexity of working with these new systems meant that they would not be reaching the civilian market for the longest time.
This is what Maraschimo Enterprises was trying to achieve with their new Quantum Computer, also known as MQC or the Mara-Q in the civilian market. Their venture was promising, but it was no different than anything else that was being done at the moment, that is, until this very moment when they revealed to their clients and stakeholders the progress of their new nanotechnological interface with their MQC.
They were definitely pushing hard into the time ahead and with it had just jumped years into the future and far beyond what anyone else in the competition was doing. They had studied the market and even done some “industry counseling” with competitors, but none had come to think of nanotechnology as a potential venture to enhance the power of Quantum Computing.
But numbers also told them something important which they were keeping in mind: nanotechnology, while now more mature, was still a dangerous business, and they were looking at ways to ensure that this could not be abused or used against them in ways that the old systems had been continuously exploited throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The main concern, which was not made explicit in the presentation given by Chad, was that while this was indeed the right way to go, they had to make sure tha
t the technology was secure enough so that a human person or any other living animal (which was something so inconceivable that a small uproar came from one side of the room) could not be used as a middle man to serve as an agent for a foreign nation or private interests.
With this they also meant that their technology would be the only one allowed to interface with their own systems. While they had at one point helped the OpenSource and OpenHardware community with some of the projects related to Quantum Computing, they could not, in good measure or good sense, allow this technology to be opened up for the world unless there was a profit to be made.
In the end, while they were looking to help humanity move forward, they were still a business and the main goal of a business is to make money.
To add more to their profit and the controversy, which in turn added more interest to the entire project and the full reach of it, was the mention of a new Artificial Intelligence being developed exclusively for the new MQC, which was designed to push through with the dream of having machines with enough intelligence to interact with human beings at different levels.
By the end of the presentation most of the people physically present inside the conference room were at the edges of their seats. To say that they were impressed by the current development of the project was short of their current state. With emails and calls already flooding from them, most of them were already communicating back with their higher-ups to report on the current progress and achievements.
Bobby had a smile from one side of his face to the other as he watched the barrage coming into his inbox and messages from his boss about the success that they had, even though the conference had not ended yet, but Bobby waited, as he was cautious to hear what the question and answer section would bring to the table.
As soon as the words “Thank you” flashed on the screen, there was a round of applause that flooded the room. Chad felt as if he was on cloud nine and even he could not believe the level of response he had achieved with his presentation. He felt that with some of the sections he had rushed and in some others he might have extended them for too long, but now all his doubts were cleared.
Chad also saw a key opportunity at that moment, since most of the attendees still had their heads sunken in their smart devices.
“Thank you all for your time and attention. I believe a five-minute recess is in order before we go back to our question and answer section,” Chad said. As the lights came back to a normal level and the doors opened, a large group of the attendees took the chance to start making calls and fire rapid communications with peers and bosses. Chad took this chance to enjoy the success he had achieved before he had to come to the hard part.
He was not worried about the attendees--those he could handle without an issue and see their reactions and understand their motives--, but those that were somewhere else in the world watching through the live stream were the ones he could not measure or truly identify unless he knew them by name. While he did know a lot of them by name, it was still a challenge.
“Chad, that was amazing. Even I was blown away by your presentation and I had already read it twice before today!” said Bobby through the earpiece. Chad could do nothing but smile and do a salute at him while Bobby returned the same salute to him.
Chad also took this opportunity to do a quick bathroom run and call Nikki to let her know about what had transpired. He had to go through the crowd and ask for some time before answering questions, but he could see the excitement and the interest of the attendees as he quickly walked through to the bathroom.
When he was done, he called Nikki and told her about everything that had transpired at this point. Her excitement did not reflect as much as he would have expected, but he understood her as she had not lived through the same experience. Nikki pointed out that she understood more than he could ever think, since she had given birth to two wonderful boys.
He could only smile at that thought. With this project he had secured the future he had promised her so long ago and had ensured that their kids would have the future they deserved, with a great education. At this rate, their retirement would come with all the bells and whistles, too, and the only thing Chad could think about was how much of a great opportunity he had taken when Bobby had called him to join him at Maraschimo Enterprises when it was all just starting up.
He had definitely made the right choice instead of taking that position at Microsoft he had been offered just a few years after graduating. The benefits had looked great back then but considering where the market was heading and after the Covid-19 pandemic, he knew that betting on and ultimately choosing to work with Quantum Computing would be the future.
He was grateful ever since that he made the right choice back then.
Chapter 10
The Meet-up
Downtown Dallas, Texas
“We have arrived at your destination,” said Siri through the speakers of the SUV. Steve sighed and groaned as he had to end listening to the latest podcast from Alex Jones. “Why can’t this lady fix it herself?” he thought.
For a moment Steve hesitated about getting out of the SUV. He definitely had better things to do than just listen to some old hag complain about things that were not a problem in his eyes, the law or anything in between, but he had a plan for these types of situations.
“Siri, keep the engine running. I will be back in five minutes. If not, then call me on my number,” said Steve as he jumped out of the SUV at the confirmed address provided to him. He had to make sure to look busy at all times. This he had learned from an old accountant he had worked with during the beginning of his career, and it had been ingrained in his mind ever since then.
“Would you ever stop a person who is carrying papers or on a call that seems to be walking around like they had a purpose? You wouldn’t, and that’s the beauty of making yourself look busy.” The voice of the accountant rang in his head; he lived by this mantra every day.
The crowded Cityplace towers crawled with people. Elevators were packed most of the time during the day with offices, conference rooms, apartments, convenience stores and restaurants sharing this space. On paper it sounded like a great place to live, and the self-sufficient ecosystem allowed for some relief from the vehicular transit going towards the tower. At least it did until overcrowding and bad decisions made this one of the most demanded locations in the city.
Fortunately for Steve he had made sure to ask the right people and get what he needed for these cases. Most elevators around the world have a master key, he had been told, which is used by the Fire Department and other emergency services for a faster response that immediately blocks the elevator from any incoming signal. This key could be used at the parking lot level or the lobby area and would not generate a signal to anyone to warn them about this. Most of the time this would be ignored or considered a false positive on any alarm system, if any were enabled.
Word had it that Cityplace did not have one and could care less about it.
As Steve was proceeding to lock one of the elevator shafts, he saw a crowd of people leaving a recently arrived elevator. He despised every single one of them: office workers, poor bastards not making more than a dime a day of profit for an unfulfilling job that would allow them to retire in a mediocre fashion by the time they were sixty if they were lucky enough. He saw them as useless but also saw in them a potential to become the next targets for his latest flip, an entire apartment complex just outside of Dallas.
But he also thought about it and seemed to have learned a valuable lesson over the years with flipping, selling and renting, and that was that human interactions were despicable to him because he had to deal with people with no ambitions or goals in life. The most they would ever get done was to buy one of the houses or apartments he had flipped for a considerable amount of money. Steve had goals and ambitions far beyond any mortal man. He looked at Richard Branson and Necker Island as the prime goal of his life, with the main difference being that once he had it, he could flip everyone
off and tell them to get lost.
In the long run, after all these years of doing his job, he had learned that flipping houses and selling them was definitely better than renting them out and putting pennies in a jar, especially with Liz, who was calling him again.
“God damn it,” he muttered as he turned the key on the open elevator shaft and proceeded to the floor where she lived. The elevator rushed up to the floor without making a single stop in between floors. Once there it would remain there, waiting for Steve to come back. Only he could remove the emergency lock from it by going back to the parking level. The sole thing that bothered him about this was the elevator music.
That horrible jazz music--it disgusted him to no end to think about it and it revolted him to listen to anything remotely close to it. It reminded him of people who were attached to the past and thinking of past faded glories. These people peaked in their teens or twenties, only to be absorbed into the machinery. He could not come to accept this as a way of life that was worth the paper it was written on, that is, of course if God cared enough to write the story of anyone's life in anything remotely close to paper.
Walking through the floor made him feel proud. It all belonged to him. With hard work and dedication, he had maximized the profits earned from every single one of them--all but one, though.
“Mr. Worth, finally.” As Liz spoke, it sounded like her speech was slightly slurred. She looked exhausted and had been heavily sweating. Steve made no effort to hide his disgust, even though he had made sure to install a new climate control system in the apartment, which seemed to be off at the time.
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