Chapter 5 - Confrontation at the Royal Society
The grand auditorium of the Royal Society was packed to the ceiling.
Camera flashes lit up the stage where Dr. Julian Vance sat at a mahogany table beside Dr. Kenneth Pryce. On a massive LED screen behind them, a simulation program was running, displaying green waves of data processing at impossibly fast speeds.
"And as you can see," Julian Vance proclaimed into his microphone, his voice dripping with arrogance, "Vanguard's breakthrough will revolutionize autonomous logistics, quantum cryptography, and deep-space communications forever. Dr. Pryce’s genius has accomplished what Whitmore Global failed to do in six years."
The audience clapped loudly. Vance picked up a gold fountain pen, poising it over the formal contract documents.
"Before you put ink to paper, Julian," a voice echoed from the back of the auditorium.
The double oak doors swung open.
I walked down the center aisle. I carried six-month-old Sophie in a sleek black leather baby carrier against my chest. Beside me walked Maya Lin, wearing a brand-new tailored suit, carrying her patched backpack over one shoulder. Behind us marched four of Whitmore Global's lead legal counsels.
The crowd turned in shock. Reporters scrambled to point their cameras at us.
"Daniel Whitmore?" Vance sneered into the microphone, though his eyes flashed with annoyance. "Are you here to congratulate us, or are you bringing your daycare to a professional press conference?"
A few of Vance's investors chuckled nervously.
"I'm here to save you from twenty years in federal prison, Julian," I said, stopping at the foot of the stage. "Though on second thought, I might just let you sign."
Dr. Pryce stood up, turning pale. "Mr. Whitmore, this is an outrage! My mathematical proof is fully documented!"
"Is it?" Maya spoke up, her clear, calm voice ringing out across the auditorium. She stepped forward, looking straight at Pryce. "Dr. Pryce, if that proof is yours, can you explain why you set the tensor threshold on Equation 14 to a negative imaginary coefficient?"
Pryce blinked, sweating under the stage lights. "That... that is proprietary technical information!"
"It's not proprietary, Dr. Pryce," Maya said, pressing a button on her tablet, projecting her hand-drawn notebook pages directly onto the auditorium screen alongside Pryce’s submission. "It's a poison pill. I wrote that false variable on November 12th on an Oakridge Academy library computer. You copied my file from the admin server, but you didn't have the mathematical capacity to realize it was a trap."
The auditorium erupted into whispers.
"This is absurd!" Vance shouted, slamming his hand on the table. "This girl is an uneducated minor! She worked as a lab assistant at a charter school we liquidated!"
"Run the stress test on live data, Julian," I challenged, pointing up at the LED screen. "Input the live London traffic routing grid into your simulation right now. If your proof is real, it will optimize the grid in four seconds. If it's Maya's trapped draft... your system will crash."
Vance glared at Pryce. "Run it. Prove him wrong!"
Pryce’s hands shook violently as he typed the command into his terminal.
May you like
For three seconds, the green numbers flashed on the screen.
Then, the entire system turned bright crimson. Error messages flooded the display by the thousands. The quantum simulation collapsed, sending a deafening feedback screech through the auditorium speakers before the screens went pitch black.
