Daniel Suarez - Kill Decision

“You have prior art problems, Vijay. Big sections of your source code base are already public knowledge-available online.”

The room went utterly silent. The static on the phone line was the only sound.

“You guys still there?”

“What the hell are you talking about? That’s impossible! Where online?”

“Several forums. A code search turned up a half-dozen sites that carried parts of your source code verbatim. Even some of the comments were there in the code. I don’t know how it got there or-”

“Goddammit!” The words burst from Prakash as he glared around the room.

“Vijay, I’m just telling you what the facts are.”

“I designed this code from scratch. There’s no ‘inspiration’ from somewhere else. It is mine.”

Strickland might have argued for more credit under different circumstances, but right now he felt like he’d been Tasered. He was just staring at the speakerphone, hearing the pounding of his heart in his ears. Hearing his future evaporate. He could see Prakash’s tanned face turning red, veins appearing-as though the man were about to explode.

Gerhard Koepple, always even-tempered, looked ashen-faced. Wang, Kasheyev, and Chatterjee were sitting down, running their hands through their hair as if they’d just heard a close relative had died.

Strickland croaked out, “Where? Where online, John?”

“I’m sending you a link right now-”

Prakash broke in. “You’ll send it to all of us. Not just Josh. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, okay, fine, Vijay. Listen, getting mad at me isn’t going to help.”

“Just send the damned message.”

“Okay.” A pause. “It’s headed your way.”

Strickland chimed in again. “John, where does this leave us? What happens now?”

There was silence for a moment. “Nothing happens. I’m going to submit a report to Doctor Lei that the patents are not enforceable. And I expect the patent office will come to the same determination. I don’t know what, if any, effect this will have on your Ph. D. theses, but that’s the situation. My condolences. However this happened-and I’m not saying that you guys copied work from somewhere else-but however it happened, this code is now public domain. You won’t be able to patent it unless this prior art issue is resolved.”

Prakash grabbed the phone and ripped it off its base on the table-tearing out the phone cord-and hurled it against the window. The glass vibrated with a thud as the phone blasted into pieces.

“Jesus, Vijay! Calm down! I wanted to ask him more questions!”

Prakash ignored Strickland and stormed out of the conference room to the office nearby that he shared with Wang.

Strickland was right on his heels, closely followed by the rest of the team. “Vijay.” He felt his iPhone vibrate in his pocket, meaning he’d probably received an e-mail, but he wanted to deal with Vijay first.

Prakash was logging on to his computer and opening e-mail. He double-clicked on the top message as the others gathered around. There was verbiage from their lawyer, along with several links below the words “Prior Art.” The first one was for a website somewhere in Russia, judging by the “. ru” domain.

Chatterjee leaned in and placed his hand between Prakash and the screen. “Not directly! Use a VM, dude.”

Prakash looked like he was about to bite Chatterjee’s head off for a moment before he took a breath, nodded, and copied the first URL to the clipboard. “This is a just a bloody Xenon connection, Sourav! And the machine’s got nothing critical on it.” But he nonetheless launched a virtual machine, opened a browser, and pasted the address into the URL line.

Everyone was waiting with bated breath as an offshore warez site named “Sourcebomber. ru” came on-screen. There, filling one section, was the source code to their attentiveness state class. Even Strickland, who’d not worked as much on the code as the rest of the crew, recognized it as Prakash’s work-or at least they’d always thought of it as his. Strickland was beginning to wonder whether the rich kid from Bengal really was the talented software architect everyone considered him to be-but of course, that was ridiculous. Prakash had gotten into Stanford! He’d aced undergraduate CS classes. Serious geniuses had worked closely with Prakash and come away impressed.

Strickland was barely able to concentrate as Prakash’s quivering hand scrolled down the page as function after function, class after class, of their precious source code was revealed on this public forum. It was like finding the love of their life in a gang-bang porno.

That’s when Prakash really lost it. He picked up the flat-panel monitor and tore it off the desk. The team scattered as he began smashing it into the wall. Pieces of plastic and glass flew everywhere. He was screaming like an animal.

Their faculty advisor, the elfin Doctor Lei Li, came in shouting at Prakash. That’s when Strickland realized that none of them had called her into the conference room. She had a stake in this too. But they’d thought it was just going to be a routine call.

She was screaming at him. “Vijay! Calm down! What’s going on?”

“The bloody source code is out on the Internet! Raconteur is freeware now! It’s fucking unpatentable! Someone on this team is responsible!”

The rest of the team displayed the early stages of grief. Prakash had passed them all and gone straight to rage.

Kasheyev stared unseeing at Prakash’s empty desk. “Or someone stole it from us.”

Prakash focused on the boyish Russian. “Stole it? Do you think with idiots like Strickland and Wang around anyone would have to steal our code?”

Strickland had more riding on this than anyone else here. Prakash was talking crazy. “Whoa, wait a second-”

Prakash got into Kasheyev’s face. “How could anyone steal it? Our servers aren’t even on SUNet. There are no wireless devices on them. I’ve been checking the logs on the Merakis for months, looking for rogue connections and transfers.”

Doctor Lei frowned. “How are you able to do that? You don’t have rights-”

He ignored her. “And the only code of ours that gets near a network connection is already obfuscated and compiled. Except for the code my ‘teammates’ have in their possession.” He pointed at where the monitor had been. “You saw that code. It was our uncompiled source-and recent source at that. Comments and all!”

Strickland felt a sinking feeling. He did indeed have a fairly recent copy of the source code-on the Leland network, on the cluster in the basement. But then, so, too, did the others. Didn’t they? Did they actually not trust the hardwired network? And only their team had access to that share. Strickland suddenly realized that Prakash was studying his face.

And he had apparently come to a conclusion based on what he read there. “You son of a bitch!”

Strickland felt warm pressure on his face as the world spun out of control. It was several moments before he realized he was on the floor, feeling pain on his lips and the back of his head. He came to his senses with Koepple and Wang trying to get him to his feet. Prakash was nowhere to be seen, and neither were Chatterjee and Doctor Lei.

Kasheyev leaned into Strickland’s line of view and placed an ice-filled paper towel that smelled of champagne onto his face. “You okay, Josh?”

His lips hurt like hell. One tooth felt loose. Strickland looked down to see blood had run down his white shirtfront. “What the hell, man…”

Wang was shaking his head. “Vijay has finally lost it.”

Koepple was still looking pale-not his normal unflappable self. Perhaps he, too, was realizing just how completely fucked they were.

Strickland felt tears rising. What was he, a pussy? But he couldn’t help it. This had been his ticket. These other guys had serious technical talent. Strickland was smart but not as technically brilliant as these other guys. He needed people like this to employ his own talents-people and management skills. If his doctoral thesis was rejected due to plagiarism, of all things… Jesus Christ.