“We need a miracle,” Derek moaned. “If we don’t solve the routing loop, Aerologics is dead.”
“Then Aerologics is dead,” Gavin said coldly. “And you’re going down with it. I’m pulling the term sheet if this isn’t fixed by midnight. Fix it, Derek, or I call the lawyers.” Gavin stood up, threw a fifty-dollar bill on the table — not for Jaime, but to emphasize his disgust with the situation — and stormed out of the café into the rain.
Derek Sterling remained. He put his head in his hands. He looked like a man standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting for gravity to do the rest. Jaime looked at the fifty-dollar bill. Then she looked at the napkin under Derek’s elbow. She had a choice. She could walk away, collect her tips, and go home to her empty apartment, or she could do the one thing she had promised herself she would not do anymore. Care.
She grabbed a black ballpoint pen from her apron. She walked back to table four. Derek did not look up. “I don’t need anything else,” he mumbled. “I think you do,” Jaime said. Something in her tone, not the subservient voice of a waitress but the authoritative cadence of an engineer, made him look up. “What?”
“You’re using static nodes for your collision avoidance,” Jaime said. She pointed at the tablet. “You’re treating every drone as a singular entity. That’s why your processor is overheating. It’s the traveling-salesman problem, but you’re trying to solve it for a thousand salesmen at once.” Derek stared at her. He looked at her name tag. Jamie. Then he looked at her uniform. Then he laughed, a dry, bitter sound. “Look, miss, I appreciate the sci-fi enthusiasm, but I’m trying to save a company here. Can I get the check?”