Day 13: Early morning, JI Research Centre, Lake Katithandra Central Australia.
"You lied to me Massimo Quollwood!" Massi turned quickly and looked up into the stern, no, angry face of Midnight Owl. The serenity of his inner sanctum of an office was shattered forever.
"Ms Bubuk, I don't know what you are talking about!" he said formally. After all she had just barged into his office unannounced and was now standing over him like an avenging Valkyrie. All the while across his wall screen the display showed the lock down of all JI facilities and the switch to encrypted internal only.
"I only do the occasional contract for Harold Parrish ..." she said in a singsong mimic of his tone and accent.
"Ah ... Yes ... Well ... I mean, I'm under contract not to talk about my contract, sort of ..." and he smirked at her hoping his stupid face would help ease Owl out of her anger.
"You lied to me about this job! You lied to me about how we would be working together!" She didn't change her body stance and didn't soften her tone. Massimo had a short lived image of her being harassed at the night club where she loved to sing and staring down the drunken idiot.
"You don't ever lie to me again Mr Quollwood! Understood!"
"Yes, Ms Bubuk," he replied sheepishly using her family name not her stage name. Bubuk was Guringai for the small Owl that was common around the Sydney Region.
I've got to have clear boundaries or I can't work alongside the man I love! Are you with me Mr Number Three in the JI hierarchy?" she added moving her head from side to side in that way that women do when they are making very important statements.
Massimo smiled at her and fell more in love her for her honesty and forthrightness, "Yes Miss ..." "Koora, yah great git. Koora at work between you and I and Miss Babuk in front of everyone who doesn't know me!"
Massimo smiled with relief and just nodded. He loved the name Koora. It was soft and round like her curves and it meant 'dark night' which was when they could fold into each other and he could at last let go of all the madness flooding his brain.
"Now tell me what the fuck this is all about or I catch the next HST back to Sydney! You may have done a double backward somersault" and she pulled up the nearest wheeled office chair next to Massi, "when you heard that my degree was in systems analysis, but." She put her ePad on the desk in front of him, "my singer persona ain't my analyst persona!" Koora sat down and pointed at the screen, "do you have any idea what this actually means?" On her ePad screen was a display of all current JI operations and projects grouped into similar data fields.
Massimo stared at the screen. He followed the various coloured graph lines representing Security, IT, Hardware and Equipment and then there were the two new ones, AI and Orbital. The graphs displayed the related timelines, expenditures and outcome indicators. Koora pointed at the rapidly rising AI graph line. It was steep, he had to admit that. It was actually, very steep. He turned and frowned at her.
"What this means Mr smart arse Number Three, if you can get your head out of your own arse for a moment, and see what everyone else is up to. Is that your boss Harold Parrish is making AI his number one priority and directing every available JI resource into the program!"
Massimo Quollwood the usually extroverted nerd that he liked to portray, just stared at her in silence. "Massi, wake up lover," she said softly as if he had drifted off. "If you are Number Three or at least in IT, you need to be across this!"
"I am Koora, and yes I know how important our AI program is. I've just never seen it displayed like this." He looked up into her gorgeous deep pools of eyes, "AI will make or break us and we're trying to achieve what's called ..."
"First Mover Advantage, yes I can see that. It's a standard term in business practice." Koora pointed at certain points along different graph lines. "The problem lies in over allocation of available resources if the cost benefit analysis doesn't support the investment. If you're going for broke, you will hit a point of no return! If you fail in anyway you will crash and burn JI and you'll be declared a bankrupt!"
Koora sat back and Massimo stared at her and then the screen. She had just told him she cared more about his possible career collapse than about JI. He drew a deep breath. His first contract with JI had been at the very beginning of the AI program and he and Max had since written more kilometres of code than he dared attempt to imagine. Progress had been phenomenal because Harry had taken the gamble and invested in the new Multi-State Analogue Nano-Memory coming out of RMIT.
Now they were about to test the system in their first real time three dimensional test vehicle, and Harold Parrish was on board. This was probably as close to that crash and burn moment Koora had just spoken of that he could imagine. This one though was going to be coming up at 9.8m/sec squared. AI versus Gravity, oh shit!
An indicator on his wall screen flashed, "Aero braking complete. Velocity and altitude vectors within predicted parameters." AIME's voice announced.
Massi reduced the window showing the Alli Solaris broadcast with the sound on mute, he couldn't stand the woman. There was just something fundamentally wrong about her.
"Well, point of no return here we come," and he typed in a command which opened a new window on the wall screen showing a real time simulation of the AINGEL. He pointed to it and opened his fingers and the image enlarged to fill the screen.
"That's your AI right there, well the orbital component of it," and he closed his fingers then pointed to another screen and expanded it. "That shows all the JI offices that have an AIME smart or intelligent super computer in it. I don't call them AI, but they are very, very smart." He watched Koora thinking it through.