Chapter 32: Holiday

HENRY RETURNED from Baton Rouge with Lisa and a complete development strategy. His daily meetings with Beau Benoit had been enlightening and helped him to focus his energies. He realized how unfocused he’d become over the past year, jumping from project to project while he attempted to maintain his edge in classes. He’d worked on developing a search engine, counterattack software, an AI-powered singularity app, and half a dozen incomplete patent descriptions. He needed to focus on getting the apps in the market that would make the company money.

One of the problems Beau had helped him identify was the amount of time he was spending managing the company server and the Pythia Speaks server. Even while he was in Louisiana, the company server had repelled two attacks. After making his agreement with Colonel Schwartz, Henry had activated the counterattack software on the servers, but had set the degrees of separation to zero. He’d also enabled collecting the IP address and location of the attack before the counter was launched. In the last second before the counterattack was launched, a message popped up on the attacker’s screen that said simply, ‘US Dept of Defense, Protected.’ Then it proceeded to wipe the assaulting computer.

He’d forwarded that information to the colonel and was thanked for it, but didn’t know what the response from the Pentagon would be. They had the power to file grievances if the attack was from a domestic agency, and to effect remedies up to and including arrest of suspects if it came from an accessible jurisdiction.

But Henry sent a message to Chastity saying the next hire he needed was an IT professional to manage the servers and network security inside the company. They could wait until they actually moved into the new office, he supposed, but the hire needed to be made so the candidate could start in the office immediately. In fact, if he could be hired soon, it would relieve Henry of the responsibility of getting the initial office setup taken care of.

Once he was back in the office and had run basic health checks on the servers, he began drafting the development plan and schedule. Lisa went to work full time and made great progress designing the features of Pythia Speaks to make the subscriber function available. While she didn’t touch anything but the UI code, she was essentially a program manager specifying what features needed to be added and how they should function.

Josh and Conrad would start work the following week, just after Memorial Day. Henry outlined the major work that needed to be done. Josh would go to work on bug-fixes in the search engine. Conrad was assigned the dual task of managing development and getting the optimization app ready for corporate network rollout.

Beau had been quick to identify the OC Optimizer for network deployment as one of the fastest potential money-earners. Conrad, a brilliant programmer, could take on that task immediately. Josh would be told to start listing the features needed in order to do network deployment of the search engine. Those two were money-makers and would share some code.

Henry hoped the new IT guy would be able to specify additional protection features for the counterattack software. They’d deal with further development on that product soon.

And that left Henry to work on Pythia with the features Lisa would specify, and on the Ask Dad app.

The spring semester at Villanova ended just as Lisa and Henry were getting back from Baton Rouge. Luke and Isobel took a week off to plan their wedding and would start back to work after Memorial Day. Things were hopping at Open Cloak.

“I think I have a candidate for the IT position,” Chastity said.

She perched on the corner of Henry’s desk as she usually did when they talked. Her smooth bare legs were an open invitation to his touch as she talked.

Lisa had left the office at noon to help Isobel plan a Memorial Day barbecue at Luke’s house. Marla Riordan and Lupe Perez were there to help with the planning as well. Isobel invited Lisa to help because it seemed appropriate to have Luke’s and Henry’s women do the planning. It also helped to keep disputes about the wedding out of the conversation.

“A candidate?” Henry said as he kissed Chastity’s bare thigh. He leaned over and lay his head on her leg as she told him what she’d found.

“I’ve done twenty telephone interviews this week,” Chastity sighed. “This is the only one that sounds suitable. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll start interviewing again.”

“Before you tell me about this candidate, tell me about how you ruled out nineteen other candidates,” Henry said, looking up at her. The thin top she was wearing clearly showed the outline of the bars piercing her nipples.

“Well, half of them had visions of grandeur. Everything they said was about managing two hundred networked computers. Nothing wrong with that, but they seemed unable to scale that back to even twenty as a startup,” Chastity said. “Five were focused on the amount of work it took to maintain a network and keep employees from abusing their privileges. And four just seemed clueless about network management at all and their qualifications seemed to focus on having a couple of computers networked in their homes.”