[Brackets] (20 page)

“I dunno. Software issue, probably.”

“I doubt
that,” Neeson said immediately.
“
OPUS itself works fine.
It has to be the
local
motor interface or the output portal. I need to know for sure by this afternoon. I can’t go back to Corazon with a wind test that fails miserably at 125.”

Jason cleared his throat. “You know, it could just be the panels really aren’t up to this.”

“They’ve done it before.”

“One panel. Once. Now we got a hundred panels running multiple times? I’m just sayin’.”

“I hear what you’re ‘just sayin
,
’
’
” Neeson hissed. This was not the first time that they had had this argument, and Jason still hadn’t learned to let it go. “These panels work. The software works. Something very simple is wrong. Can you fix it or not?”

Jason nodded slowly.
“I’ll head back up to the office and take a crack at it, unless you want to take a look at it yourself.”

Neeson put up his hand. “This problem is yours to fix. And fast. I want another test on Saturday afternoon.”

Jason scratched his forehead. “You want us to rebuild the test tower in less than two days, and you want them to come in on the weekend? That’s asking a lot, Neeson.”

“This is crunch time, Jason. We need good numbers now for this company to survive. We needed them last week. Tell them it’s the price to pay for any future bonuses, not to mention salary. They’ll understand.”

“I doubt that, but I’ll tell ‘em.” Jason walked away and went into the tunnel to break the news to the technicians who had just begun to autopsy the wreckage.

Neeson also walked away, turning his back
on
the gesticulating men and heading out of the control room, down the hallway,
out the door,
and into the humid Florida afternoon. He put his hands on his hips and lowered his head, feeling sweat accumulating along his hairline. He had heard that everything north of South Carolina was still really cold. That sounded good to him just then.

The wind tunnel facility had been built
in
the far
corner
of the booming business park known as Chlorophyll Valley, conveniently close to the WindSkin Corporation’s headquarters. Dozens of green energy start-ups had set up camp
there
after state funding
had made
the undeveloped land a haven for alternative energy companies. The boom had been good timing for the WindSkin founders; it gave them access to connections and facilities that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Neeson looked over to his office on the second floor of a brick building atop a hill that was barely a hill. The WindSkin logo reflected brightly just above his window. Then he looked around at the other buildings within eyesight. They would all be part of the massive takeover he had planned
for
the next few years. If, of course, he could step over the one small, maddening, unidentifiable technical glitch blocking his way. His phone rang. He retrieved the headset from his pocket and placed it in his ear.

“Faulkner speaking,” he said.

“How are things, Mr. Faulkner?” It was a familiar voice that always gave Neeson the mental image of a body being dragged across a frozen pond at nighttime.

“I’m fine, Mr. Graham. What can I do for you today?”

“I was wondering how your test went. Successful?”

Neeson cringed. “It was encouraging.”

“I see,” said Mr. Graham. “Hardware or software?”

“Hardware,” he said without skipping a beat. “A weak panel at the 125 mark, probably affected some surrounding panels. Nothing that a good wrench wouldn’t fix.”

“Oh, well, then ‘encouraging’ is definitely the right word.
Are you running more tests?”

“As soon as we process the whole diagnostic,” said Neeson. “We want to be thorough.”

“Fine,” Graham said, ending that topic. “I was pleased to see that your other demonstration is going well. Predicting the whole first round is very impressive.”

“I’m glad you noticed.”

“If this keeps working, then I see a very bright future for your company.”

“Thank you, Mr. Graham.” Neeson permitted himself a quick exhale of relief.

“That ‘if’ is important, remember.”

“I’ll deliver.”

“Any sign that your partner knows what you’ve been doing?”

“Jason? No. He’s a technical wizard and very creative, but I don’t think there’s an ounce of paranoia in him.”

“Fine,” Graham said. “
Keep it that way.
I’ll catch up with you next week.”

Neeson put the phone away and went back inside with a sigh to make
sure the techs weren’t whining about their weekends being taken over
. It was up to him to
keep
control.

[
South Division
: Second Round]

[Saturday, March 21]

Neeson considered his reputation as a workaholic to be his greatest executive asset. He could demand hard work because everyone assumed he would work harder. His employees felt safe because the founder of their company was always vigilant. However, if they knew how little he thought about WindSkin when he came in at 5 AM, their opinion of him would be different. But being at the office that early, especially on a Saturday, ensured that no one ever found him out. As sunlight crept over the buildings and palm trees of Chlorophyll Valley, he sat alone: just himself, a cup of coffee, and OPUS.

By his reasoning, it was important to the company that he push OPUS to the limit of its capacity. What he was doing wasn’t research
per se
; he had decided to call it an ‘executive innovation initiative’. He had realized
some time ago
that OPUS could do more—much more—than control a panel grid. With a few custom algorithms, some innocent thievery of other programs, and some flashes of ingenuity in which he took genuine pride, OPUS
had beco
me a dream machine. Though his employees didn’t know it, his initiative with OPUS had already saved the company once. With patience and discretion, he planned to propel the company far beyond the scope of green energy, into every facet of life. For Neeson, it had been a long time since his plans for the WindSkin Corporation had been limited to WindSkin.

At that moment in the morning, OPUS was all his. He opened his stock trader program on one monitor, his e-mail on the other, and leaned back in his chair. He deleted
junk
mail while the stock program made its complicated calculations. By doing e-mail, he could truthfully say that he
had been working
that morning. Not that anyone would call him on it. It was his company, after all. The very rules governing use of the OPUS servers had been dictated by him. To his thinking, access to OPUS was his right, though it was a right that should, for a time longer, be kept secret from
the man who
had
created it
.

The program was complete in ten minutes. Neeson’s
investment portfolio was automa
tically updated based on the projections
of OPUS
,
which confidently foresaw an increase in total value
of 0.7%
by the end of the day. Neeson smiled. For further gratification, he logged in to the ESPN site on his other screen and looked at his bracket, pristine after a complete first round of games.

These two programs represented his most elegant and successful experiments. When he’d realized that OPUS could be exploited outside of energy management, he tried and failed at a few forays that ranged f
rom banal to dramatic. There were
last year’s
mid-term
election
s
, but everyone knew the outcome of those months in advance. He tried
predicting
box office numbers, but that didn’t prove interesting. He tried to predict the movements of the seemingly random Wall Street arsonist, but there wasn’t enough data to do anything practical. OPUS did best when given mountains of data.

It finally occurred to him that sports offered the greatest opportunity to show what OPUS could do, though it took
some
time for him to discover the ideal application. He found decades of highly detailed statistics for every sport he knew, all gathered by fanatics and professionals, all freely available online. Aggregated in the right way, the data was perfectly digestible for OPUS. But it wasn’t enough for Neeson to just predict outcomes of individual games. Anyone could do that. He had to do something that had never been accomplished before. The idea of attempting to predict a March Madness bracket came to him at the end of November while he was watching a game at home.
It was
so obvious that it was thrilling to finally discover it. He had spent all that night, then all that next week and the weeks after, drafting the program and mining the data. He tested four years’ worth of tournaments trying to get it right, feeding it all the stats that
preceded Selection Sunday. Then he had sat back
in nervous anticipation as OPUS worked for several solid hours before announcing victory. The accuracy of the output had been shocking. It had even called the
2011 Butler-Pittsburg game even though the outcome of the actual game had been thoroughly unpredictable
. With some additional data sets and tweaks, the computer finally spit out the perfect brackets 90% of the time for any year of the past two decades. And, as he saw that morning, it had correctly predicted the entire first round of 2015.

Neeson sipped his coffee and spun away lazily from his monitors to look at the rising sun now in view through his window. WindSkin may have been his baby, but OPUS was his mistress. As for the stock market program, well, that was just a nice personal retirement plan. Nothing wrong with that. It wasn’t something that Graham needed to know about.

By 6:45 AM, the sun was fully up and OPUS was off. Neeson had shut down his session on the server and moved on to the ordinary, tedious, anxiety-inducing tasks of running a start-up. At 7:00
A
M, he received a phone call.

“Dr. Faulkner, this is Haj Hitok.
I apologize for the early call.
I believe Mr. Reyn
olds told you that I would be checking in
.”

“Yes, Haj, I was looking forward to hearing from you.” Neeson’s VIP voice was ready at hand no matter what
time of the week it was
. “We’d like to set up an appointment for you to come down and see…”

“Neeson, the reason I’m calling is that my schedule has had some changes, and it happens that I will be in the Miami area today only. Forgive me for the late notice, but I was wondering if I could visit your facility today?”

“Oh, well…” he scrambled to look over his calendar. “Well, I’m free any time before 1 PM. This afternoon we’ll be down in the wind tunnel running tests, so…”

“Actually, that sounds ideal. I would like to see WindSkin in action. So it wouldn’t be a problem if I came this afternoon?”

Neeson bit his lip and c
ursed
himself for mentioning the wind test. “Absolutely. We’ll look forward to seeing you then.”

“Excellent. I will be at your office at 1:00. Thank you.”

When the call ended, Neeson took a moment to breathe, check the clock, and strategize. Then he called Jason.

“It ain’t even 8:00 in the morning yet,” Jason answered groggily.

“Are you on your way?”

“I’m in the car, though I’d rather not be up at all. What’s up?” Neeson explained Haj’s call and heard Jason sigh over the phone. “Well,” he said, “I kinda wish you hadn’t of done that.”

“Well I kind of wish I hadn’t of either, but it’s done,” Neeson growled. “What’s the status on the diagnostic?”

“Best I can tell,” Jason diagnosed like a car mechanic, “OPUS either locked out the failsafe or just failed to initiate it. All the redundancies never activated either. Must be some kind of glitch in the load-sharing program. It was like they didn’t actually want to deactivate.
L
ike the panels got too greedy.”

“
You
didn’t program OPUS to be greedy,” Neeson replied evenly.

“I
programmed OPUS to be power hungry. That’s pretty much the same as greedy.”

“Jason,” Neeson was losing his cool now. “It’s a program. It does what we say. The fact that it isn’t operating the basic safety protocols isn’t a problem with the core of OPUS. That’s a problem with the way the safety protocols were programmed. It can’t be that hard. You need to get everybody rechecking the failsafe subroutines for the glitch right now.”

“We’v
e been on it,” Jason replied after a silence in which Neeson could almost hear him rolling his eyes. “But the problem seems pretty well hidden in there. I can’t guarantee that we can find it in time to be sure it will test well. And even if we fixed the problem, I can’t guarantee that something else won’t happen.”