Chapter 5 - The Presentation of Flaws
A collective murmur erupted from the rows of institutional investors. Journalists immediately began tapping on their tablets, and the flashbulbs of three corporate photographers began to pop, illuminating the stage in jagged streaks of white light.
Ryan stepped to the edge of the stage, his hands gripping the podium until his knuckles turned white. "Claire, you're delusional. You don't own a single share of this company. You signed the full transfer agreements five years ago. You’re trespassing. If you don't leave immediately, I will have the Chicago police remove you in cuffs."
"I wouldn't call the police just yet, Ryan," Ethan Walker stepped forward, opening his briefcase on the press table at the front of the stage. He pulled out a stack of blue-bound legal documents and slid them toward the head of the corporate governance committee, an older board member named Arthur Vance, who had been a close colleague of my father.
"Arthur," Ethan said, his voice level and entirely authoritative. "Those are the certified records of the Class Z proprietary patent veto shares, registered under the name of Claire Bennett. As you can see by the corporate charter amendments of 2022, these shares possess absolute executive veto power over any product rollout, corporate merger, or management restructure. They require no board majority. They require only the signature of Thomas Bennett’s direct heir."
Arthur Vance pulled his reading glasses down his nose, his fingers trembling as he flipped through the pages. His face went slack. He looked up from the documents, his gaze moving from Ethan to me, and then to the terrified man behind the podium.
"This... this is authentic," Arthur whispered, his voice picking up on the nearby press microphones. "The Class Z shares were never dissolved. They weren't included in the standard proxy transfers Ryan filed."
"Because Ryan doesn't know how to read software architecture, Arthur," I said, stepping up the stairs onto the stage. Ryan automatically took two steps back, his eyes darting toward his brother, Blake, who had stood up and was looking around for an exit.
"Get away from that podium, Claire," Elaine Caldwell hissed, stepping onto the stage from the side wings, her face contorted with a vicious, upper-class rage. "You're a nobody. You’re the daughter of a garage mechanic who got lucky. We made this company prestigious. We put the Caldwell name on the global map!"
"And you put forty million dollars of debt onto the balance sheet to fund a software platform that doesn't work," I said, turning to face the audience of investors. I reached over and tapped the master control screen on the podium, overriding Ryan’s presentation.
I pulled the silver flash drive from my pocket and slotted it into the console.
The glowing green graphs of the Caldwell-Prime system vanished. In their place appeared the raw, underlying source code of the platform, with hundreds of lines of text highlighted in flashing red blocks.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the investment community," I announced, pointing to the screen. "This is the core architecture of Caldwell-Prime, the platform you were just asked to invest another fifty million dollars into. As you can see here, under Section 8 of the memory allocation protocols, the system contains a terminal concurrency leak. The moment this software handles more than twelve thousand active logistics nodes, the database enters an unrecoverable dead-lock state."
The audience of analysts went dead silent for two seconds, followed by a sudden, chaotic rush of movement as three senior tech analysts from Goldman Sachs stood up to get a closer look at the screen.
"My God," one of them muttered, his fingers flying over his phone. "She’s right. The edge-case loops are completely broken. If this went live, it would have wiped out the entire shipping database of every client on the network."
"You b-bitch," Blake Caldwell stammered, stepping forward, his fist clenched. "We spent two years developing that! You hacked our servers!"
"I didn't hack anything, Blake," I said coldly, looking down at him from the stage. "My father wrote these protocols five years ago. He abandoned them because he knew they were unstable. Your development team didn't create anything; they just dug through his old trash bins because you didn't have the brains to hire real engineers."
I looked at Ryan. He was sweating now, his silk tie looking tight around his throat, his chest rising and falling in shallow, panicked breaths. He looked down at Tommy, who was standing at the base of the stage, watching him with an unblinking, curious expression.
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"Is... is that him?" Ryan whispered, his voice suddenly sounding small, stripped of all its corporate grandiosity.
"This is Thomas," I said, my voice dropping to a dangerous, icy whisper that only the people on stage could hear. "The child you said would be nothing. He’s five years old, Ryan. And he already knows more about his grandfather’s company than you ever learned in five years of stealing it."
