“You don’t need a check. You need a swarm hive-mind protocol,” Jaime said, her voice sharpening. She grabbed the paper napkin from under his coffee cup. “You need to stop calculating the path for the drone. You need to calculate the space between them.” She clicked the pen. “What are you doing?” Derek asked, annoyed. “Now, saving your ass,” Jaime muttered. She leaned over the table. On the back of the cheap recycled napkin, she wrote three lines of functional calculus. It was not code. It was the mathematical logic for the code. “Don’t verify the path,” she said, circling the last variable. “Verify the empty space. Invert the algorithm. Don’t look for where the drones are. Look for where they aren’t. It reduces the computational load by ninety percent.” She slapped the napkin onto the table, right on top of his tablet. “That’s on the house,” she said.
Jaime turned around and walked away, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She went to the back room, leaned against the industrial dishwasher, and exhaled. Stupid, she thought. He’s going to throw it away.
Back at table four, Derek Sterling stared at the napkin. He reached for it, intending to crumple it up. He was a CEO. He did not take advice from people who served muffins. But then his eyes caught the second equation. He paused. He frowned. He pulled his tablet closer and typed a simulation command. He looked back at the napkin. His fingers started flying across the keyboard.
Three hours later, Jaime was clocking out. The rain had turned into a deluge. She pulled her hood up and stepped out the back door of the café, bracing herself for the long bus ride to the run-down district of Eastlake. A sleek black sedan, a Tesla Model S Plaid, screeched to a halt right in front of her, splashing a puddle of oily water onto her jeans. The window rolled down. It was Derek Sterling, but he did not look tired anymore. He looked electrified. “Get in,” he said.
Jaime took a step back, gripping the pepper spray in her pocket. “Excuse me.” “I ran the simulation,” Derek said, his eyes wide. “I ran it on a small batch. The efficiency jumped from sixty-eight percent to ninety-four. We’re one percent off the target. But I can’t finish the integration. I don’t understand the variable you used for the sigma parameter.” “That’s the chaos variable,” Jaime said, shouting over the rain. “It accounts for wind shear.” “Get in the car, Jaime,” Derek pleaded. “Please. I will pay you. I will pay you for your time. Just explain the math to my CTO.”