Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery

by Maria Schneider

  My answer caught Cary off guard, but he was nothing if not persistent. “Why couldn’t you find the time to come in and pick up another phone?”

  I wasn’t ready for that question, but I rallied quickly. “I didn’t want to look like some crazed guilty person by returning to the scene of the crime.” I nodded, liking this lie. “You know they say the killer always does that, and what if the police thought me coming in on a weekend was suspicious? Everyone else was testing from home.” I shook my head. “No, I wouldn’t dare mess with a crime scene.”

  “The project is already late! Companies that don’t deliver on time get shut down. The police cannot be allowed to interfere with our schedule!” He jabbed his finger in the air to punctuate his point.

  “Does this mean you won’t be able to pull the schedule in three weeks like you promised?” Monique demanded. “You committed to that schedule! I’ve already told the marketing team you would do it.”

  “That’s impossible,” Kovid muttered. “We just requested an extra month.”

  Monique probably wasn’t supposed to hear that comment. She sputtered and slammed her coffee cup on the counter.

  I marched off down the hallway, my head held high. Okay. The seamstress job was now looking like a match made in heaven. A bloody, pin-pricked, crooked, unraveling seam type of match, but even Huntington wasn’t this big of an ass when it came to managing. Had Cary deliberately tried to humiliate me in front of my co-workers, or had he planned on firing me right there in front of the others? Was there not a job on this earth I could keep???

  The first message in my inbox was definitely a Monday message. I was “invited” to a mandatory code review at nine. I hadn’t been at work ten minutes and the news was only slightly better than a dead body.

  A code review wasn’t entirely unusual except in this case it was the engineer calling his own code review. Engineers hated code reviews more than having their computer break down right as they are about to score the big Wizard level in the latest computer game. Code reviews were the equivalent of a colonoscopy, only slightly worse because you had to stay awake.

  I sighed. Roscoe had scheduled his review for four straight hours. Was he crazy?

  Apparently he was. I blasted through my emails and, determined to be able to say I had done some testing should Cary attack me again, I downloaded the latest code on no less than three test phones.

  There wasn’t much time before the meeting, but testing three phones at once had to count for something.

  The phone assistant readily played various songs when I made my verbal request. The voice correctly reported stock prices and provided directions to a nearby store when I asked. I moved to my favorite list of oddball test questions.

  “Borgot assistant, what is the meaning of life?”

  There was a longer pause than normal, but the robotic phone voice finally came up with an answer. “The reading material on the subject appears to have no plot, but many pages.”

  “You know I didn’t ask you for the meaning of my life, right?” I had a plot. I even had a burgeoning romance.

  “Verily.”

  That was a new answer. “Verily? Who programmed this thing with that word?” I looked up “verily” just to be certain the phone wasn’t equivocating or insulting me by using an obscure definition of the word.

  Monique, with her lovely spandex pants, hurried by my cube. “Time’s up,” I muttered.

  The phone answered me. “You may delay, but time will not.”

  “What?”

  “Benjamin Franklin,” the phone replied.

  I shut the thing off.

  Several of my colleagues had already arrived by the time I slid into my seat. Oddly, Lawrence, the executive attorney, was in attendance. Of course, he sat at the head of the table, his nose in his phone. Monique, who was supposedly dating him, sat next to him, staring down at her tablet.

  Kovid was studying his computer screen, possibly trying to complete an important task even though we were obviously in the middle of hell and high water.

  Roscoe stood at the door passing out photocopied sheets of his code “summary points.”

  It became clear in a hurry that he didn’t care what we thought of his code. He was here to tell us what we thought of it, but four hours was way more time than even Roscoe could use to expound on his brilliance.

  “What might have taken a normal engineer a thousand lines of code, I did it in a few hundred,” he stressed. “Not only can this Borgot phone answer questions better than Apple’s Siri assistant, Borgot’s voice assistant will translate phrases into foreign languages. The translation feature is not only great code, it moves this phone from ordinary to groundbreaking. I spent the weekend filling out patent forms.”

  Ah, that explained Larry the lawyer. Patents meant patent lawyers to prove there was something to patent. Someone had to fill out reams of paperwork, understand every line of code and determine what ideas were unique enough to patent. I hadn’t recognized the guy sitting next to Lawrence, but he was taking notes and paying attention. He had to be the lawyer assistant, and the guy who would do most of the patent work. His college-aged face and perfect haircut matched the lawyer he was striving to be. The disgruntled look of a guy who was putting in too many hours while his boss sent text messages to the babe sitting nearby made him look more like an engineer than a lawyer.

  Of course, it was possible that Monique wasn’t receiving suggestive text messages from Lawrence, but she was smiling at her tablet, and I’d seen her reach over to touch his leg under the table twice. Since they weren’t talking aloud, it stood to reason they were conversing on their phones.

  I shifted my eyes to focus on Cary. He was blathering about how two of the ideas for Borgot’s invention were his. “That clearly makes the case for my name on the patent.”

  Roscoe didn’t think so. “You didn’t code a single line.”

  “The idea is worth more than the code. It’s the unique idea that is patentable, not the actual code.”

  The lawyer assistant, introduced as Howard, muttered, “You can’t just patent an idea. You must have enough proof of the concept that an ordinary person skilled in the area can make use of it. The idea must be novel and non-obvious. The more patents a company has, the better its chances of survival.”

  “I’m at this code review to make sure we’re headed down the right path,” Cary inserted. “I’ve read every line of code. I’ve got people testing it. I have the emails to show I submitted the improvements.” He waved papers around. “I’ll forward the emails around.”

  Roscoe rolled his eyes. “Kovid submitted those ideas before you did. We talked about them long before you sent those emails.”

  Kovid looked up. “The translation feature is one I’ve been working on for years. We just need time to finish coding each language. We’re well past proof of concept.”

  “We’re past proof of concept if you count Pig Latin code,” Roscoe sneered. “My code will be far more important when it’s completed. I’m working on actual languages.”

  I sat up straighter. “What?”

  Kovid ignored the interruption. “No other phone assistant will have an active translation portal. Travelers can buy software separately for each language. The phone assistant will translate the phrases it hears or it can speak a selection of phrases as set up by the user.”

  “Can the phone really translate Pig Latin?” I asked. Joe’s phone had spoken both English and Pig Latin in my living room. I wasn’t certain how the phone was set up, but until this moment, I had just assumed that Joe had entered a few key phrases into his own phone. Could he possibly have obtained the code from the basics being worked at Borgot?

  Kovid sighed. “Since Pig Latin is just a string of characters respelled, it was easy to program it to translate back and forth for one of our early test beds. It was a joke really.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I think Joe Black did the testing on it, and it did make for a proof of concept, but only at the basic level. Re
al languages are much more robust.”

  “But it’s actually part of the product?”

  He frowned and shook his head. “That code was only in there for a short time. It’s not in the current version of code or part of this code review. It was never intended for the end product.”

  He tapped on the keyboard, and then frowned. “Oh, wait. The Pig Latin code is still in there. That’s odd. I know I removed it from the build.”

  I had no idea why it might have reappeared, but it did explain how Joe’s phone had come to spout Pig Latin.

  “Whose voice did you use?” I asked.

  “Early days? Mine, Roscoe’s, whoever was around. When we coded it, marketing hadn’t yet hired the actor to do all the final voice impressions for the voice assistant.”

  The voice on the phone I’d taken home had clearly been Joe’s nasal tenor. “Did Joe help with the voices?” Everyone in the room was staring at me, including the lawyers, Monique and Cary.

  “You’re not suggesting,” Monique swallowed, “we include Joe on the patent, are you? I mean, I know he’s dead and we all feel...sorry for him and all that, but just because he died...”

  I blinked. She had mistaken my sleuthing for some kind of grand memorial intent. I wasn’t that generous and Joe didn’t deserve it in any case. “Well, no, not exactly,” I said. “Using Pig Latin on a phone has zero practical use.” I lied to cover up my curiosity. “I was just trying to understand the concept.”

  Howard, ever the eager assistant, sat up straight. “We could use Pig Latin to help explain the concept in the patent. Sometimes a simple diagram does wonders for getting expedited approval!”

  Cary gave a hearty chuckle. “Excellent! I hired Joe. It was my idea to use his Pig Latin skills to lay the groundwork for the translation. I should definitely be on that patent.” He slid a covert glance towards Lawrence, but Lawrence was staring at me. As soon as he noticed me notice him, he dropped his eyes to his phone again, ignoring Cary.

  So now I knew who had hired Joe or at least the idiot willing to take the credit. Or blame. Or whatever the weasel was trying to do. “Did Joe have any other language skills?” I asked innocently. “Seems like Pig Latin could be coded without needing a specialist. It doesn’t seem like such a simple exchange of letters would be patentable.”

  “Definitely not,” Lawrence declared. “Pig Latin is completely obvious and trivial.”

  Howard nodded his agreement.

  Cary spared a glare for me. My comment had not cost him a patent, but he probably didn’t see it that way. I sighed. What kind of boss tried to use a dead guy to get on a patent, anyway?

  The arguing continued. Being named on a patent did mean a bonus, but no one sunk quite as low as Cary to secure his spot of fame. From what I could tell, even Monique planned to be on the patent if possible. I wasn’t sure how her boyfriend could pull that off even if he was the head lawyer at Borgot. To be on a patent, you had to be an inventor, not just the boss, the marketing specialist or some guy who happened to know Pig Latin. Roscoe and Kovid were easy names; they had both done coding.

  The meeting might have ended then, but Cary, still desperate, took a new tack. “We finally have our official name for the phone assistant.”

  We did? The test phones still responded to “Borgot assistant,” the phrase I’d always used. Of course, the executives had made a big deal out of the naming of the assistant for the phone. We had to make sure it was a better name than Apple’s Siri so there was even prize money for the winning name. “The contest period hasn’t ended yet, has it?” I asked, trying to remember the email from over a week ago.

  Cary made a guttural snarling noise without his face ever changing from its surgical perfection. “Whoever comes up with the name for the assistant must be on the patent. Any of us can do better than Apple’s ‘Siri’ or Amazon’s ‘Alexa’.” He snorted and rolled his eyes. “The name I submitted is quite obviously the winner. It will become a household name! We can’t afford to leave it—or me—off the patent.”

  Monique piped up with, “Oh, I’m quite certain marketing will win the naming contest. And, I do agree that it’s a great idea that whoever comes up with the winning name be on the patent.” She beamed a thousand-watt smile at Lawrence.

  His eyes widened slightly, perhaps in panic.

  “Marketing should be disqualified from entering since you’ve been assigned to select the winner!” Cary sputtered. “That’s corrupt!”

  “Why not make the naming of the phone assistant user configurable?” I suggested. I certainly wouldn’t vote for whatever name Cary had submitted. And it was possible that Monique’s pick would be worse. The woman wore pants that said “Doll Baby” across her butt. “There at least needs to be the ability to select from one of two names, maybe one a female name and the other a male name. But honestly, when you consider what some people name their pets, it’s probably best we leave the naming up to the user.” Everyone was staring at me again. The room had gone silent.

  “What?” I asked, spreading my hands.

  “That’s actually a very good idea,” Kovid said.

  Howard opened his mouth, sputtered out a half squawk and then fell silent.

  Cary waved one hand as if batting at a mosquito. “Let the user choose? That’s hardly enough of an idea to get on a patent. We’d do better with a unique name, one we can trademark. We need it to represent the company!” His face had gone blotchy red. Interestingly enough, the area around his mouth didn’t change color, but it was kind of puffed out as if it might fall off or explode at any minute. Wow. Just how much silicone was in there anyway?

  The meeting dissolved into a shouting match between Howard and Monique, with Cary throwing in wild ideas and more than a few new patent demands.

  When we finally disbanded, I checked company policy to see just how much of a bonus we were talking about for being named on a patent. “Ah. Five thousand dollars—and the possibility of an executive position.” I scanned through the executive officers. Lawrence already had a patent, apparently. The CFO, CEO and COO all had patents. Most of the board members had patents. It must be some kind of badge of honor with these people.

  Well, if they had obtained their patents the way Cary was going about it, the intellectual property award was probably not what the U.S. Patent Office had in mind.

  An email from Cary popped into my inbox before I could leave for lunch. Of course it was marked “urgent.” All of his emails arrived with flames, threats and exclamation marks.

  “All feature changes, enhancements and product ideas must be submitted through me from now on,” the email read. It went on to stress the necessity of being a team player and discussing any possible enhancement to code, to products, and to company policy with him before so much as sharing it with yourself. He included a long list of examples such as color, phone skin designs, handicap improvements and so on.

  “Yeah, little late, buddy. This thing is halfway done.” He probably didn’t even care about the cash, but a chance at an executive position? He’d sell his boat and house for that.

  I grabbed a sandwich from the break room and went outside to call Mark and fill him in on how the Pig Latin had possibly gotten on Joe’s phone.

  “The code existed in a past build. The only weird thing is that Kovid seemed to think the code had been deleted.”

  “Can Joe have added it again?”

  I hesitated. “He had access. Even I have access to the build server. But I don’t think he knew how to change code in and out. I doubt he did it, which makes things even more strange.”

  “Okay,” Mark acknowledged. “Are you going to pass this along to your brother for the police?”

  “Shouldn’t I wait for them to ask? I’m still not sure whether or not it was Joe’s personal phone, although the voice assistant was in his voice.”

  Mark didn’t argue the point. “I’ll let Radar in on what you told me. It would be a good idea if he were hired on there. He might be able to track who a
dded code and when just in case it’s important.”

  “That’s a good idea, but I don’t think it will work. I’ve heard rumors we’re under a hiring freeze until we get the first product out.”

  “Oh really? Money must be tight or running out. When the money leaves, some people get desperate.”

  “Desperate enough to kill Joe, anyway. But I’m not sure how him being dead helps anyone.” I sighed. “I’ll check some basic things. I already know how to access the code if I want to, and Joe could have done the same. It would still take someone with brains to add that code back in. I don’t think he could do it.”

  “Okay. Should I stop by tonight? And bring Chinese?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Enough for your parents too?”

  “They’re having dinner at Sean’s. Mom is cooking over there so we’re good.”

  I ate my sandwich on the way back upstairs. Gosh, working for a startup sure was fun.

  Chapter 10

  The only reason I was able to sneak out of work at six was because Cary was busy writing up his memoirs in the form of a lengthy thesis on why he should be listed on the patent as the number one inventor. He’d already sent around two drafts.

  There hadn’t been nearly enough quiet moments in my life lately, but at least Mark met me in my driveway after work. He had Chinese food in hand.

  “Radar had a date so he couldn’t make it, but he said to ask whether the old version of code containing the Pig Latin was still readily available if someone went looking.”

  I nodded. “I checked the server. All the old builds are still available, including the Pig Latin modules.” I led the way inside, turning on lights and setting my backpack down before grabbing dishes from the cupboard.

  “In that case anyone could have changed a few lines to call the Pig Latin code back into the latest build?”

  I nodded again. “Anyone who knew what they were doing. I just don’t know why anyone would bother, and if Joe did it, that’s not really enough of a reason to kill him.” I finished setting plates out. The serger was in the way, but Mark moved it off the table.