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Chapter Three
The day of my meeting with the ExploreR lawyers, I put on my nicest suit; the one with the pressed skirt that matched the blazer, and straightened my hair. This was a big deal for me and my brother noticed.
“Wow, you actually look like a person,” he said as I got into his car.
“You look like a lawyer,” I said, wrinkling up my nose, “And you smell like one, too.”
He laughed, but nervously. He looked ready to cry. He had never been up against a legal team the caliber of ExploreR's. He had asked three of his lawyer friends to come and pretend to be on my legal team, and they were all waiting in the reception room at headquarters, when we got there.
The lawyers got to whispering, but my brain was buzzing with rage, and I didn't hear anything they said. I just stared out the window, looking at the fancy cars zipping around the parking lot, some of them plugging in to charge, before their owners drove to expensive lunches.
Rob Michaels entered the room, flanked by a team of no less than ten lawyers. His team was almost perfectly diverse; an accurate cross-section of the USA. It had the old and the young, men and women, black, Asian (east and west), Latinx, and even a little person and a person in a wheelchair. However, they all had the same steely, robotic expressions and matching folders with the ExploreR logo in flashing silver on the front.
Rob Michaels stood in front of them in torn jeans, a rugby shirt, and a shit-eating grin. He obviously worked out and ate right, judging from his shimmering hair and clear skin. Plus, he was tan. Tan like a beach bum; like it was a real tan, but not from working in the sun. From playing in the sun.
Everything about him said “play”, from his smiling white teeth to his relaxed posture and crummy sneakers. The only thing that didn't say “play” were his piercingly black eyes.
They said, “Time to eat.”
He greeted us all with a smooth honeyed voice,
“Hello! Welcome to ExploreR. I'm Rob 'the buck stops here' Michaels. I understand how important your project must have been to you, Ms. Salle. Please, step into one of our BrainCloud rooms and we'll talk this out. After this meeting, I'll arrange a tour of the facility for you, but first, I want to get this settled and to put your mind at ease.”
He shook everyone's hand individually and learned everyone's names, or at least, pretended to. He even made some dumb joke about being “able to tell” my brother played baseball in college, because of his grip.
“Wipe that dumb grin off your face,” I sniped at my brother as we sat down.
“I'm building a rapport. Creating a false sense of security,” he insisted.
“You're drooling over his shitty sneakers,” I quipped.
The shuffling of chairs stopped. The room went silent.
“My client, Ms. Salle, contends—” my brother began, but Michaels, himself, interrupted him.
“I know what your client contends. It's bullshit. I have three hundred engineers and one hundred astrophysicists working, on the floors below us, right now. She's one girl. She thinks she beat us? Don't make me laugh,” Rob Michaels said, and then laughed anyway—a horrible, hyena-bark.
He had very sharp canine teeth. I wondered if he had had them sharpened expressly.
My brother was speechless.
“Nice job. He's definitely feeling secure,” I wrote on a notepad and slid it over to my brother.
My brother, the big-time lawyer my parents were so impressed with, rolled my note up into a ball and tried to start talking again, but this time, he was cut off by one of the ExploreR lawyers.
“Our company has put millions of man-hours into this problem, and we have centuries of patent law behind us. You waited too long to publish, Ms. Salle. Even if your product is original, it was developed in parallel with ours, and whoever gets to the North Pole first gets to stick their flag in the snow. Those are the rules.”
“It's against the rules to steal someone else's flagpole,” I said. My little team of lawyers was useless.
“Whatever you mean by that, you can't prove it,” another ExploreR lawyer-bot said calmly, “We have company documents, outlining exactly who contributed what and when. We keep meticulous records. Did you record a timesheet for your work? Do you have it saved anywhere other than your personal computer?”
“I had it on a ServeR, which was clearly a mistake,” I spat, “I can prove that you stole it from me. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I doubt it.”
Another lawyer piped up. “So you saved the information on a widely-used data-storage system, provided by a completely separate branch of our company. That proves you're a customer of ours. It proves nothing else.”
“You have no case and we suggest you drop this action, before it costs you more than you've ever made or will ever make in your life. We have no doubt a court would not only award in our favour, but also allows us a counter-suit for libel. You're slandering ExploreR's incredible staff, and we won't stand for it. Our employees are like family, and their discoveries are groundbreaking. We cherish that.”
“Your groundbreaking, incredible, incestuous staff did not make this discovery, regardless of how much you like them. They didn't write that code. I did—and I can prove it,” I said firmly.
