Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 53: Announcement
HENRY HAD FARREL and Jason in their new private office on Monday, with Don Harvey, his long-time patent attorney, Don’s secretary, and Chastity. Henry and Chastity were in the meeting to observe and take notes. Henry wanted to know and understand all the implications of the technology. He wanted to be sure he could discuss it with someone without disclosing protected information to anyone else in the company, so Chastity agreed to take detailed minutes on his behalf and the company’s.
Don led the discussion, starting by having Farrel and Jason give the demonstration they’d given on Wednesday. They had to discuss what elements they thought were patentable and spent the entire day, with lunch ordered in, going over the technology.
Henry spent most of his time, while attentively listening to the discussion, making notes on the number and type of personnel they would need to staff the project. Everything the company had done to date had been on a shoestring budget. He was a believer in getting top competent developers and letting them run with the project. He could tell that even though Farrel and Jason were top creative talent, they would need a good manager and enough people around them to truly work on every aspect of the development. They’d file preliminary patents as soon as possible, but he was sure they would be amending and expanding them frequently over the next year.
The joint paver venture led by Dale Jacoby had shown him how much progress could be made quickly when adequately funded. Currently, the second floor of the office was split three ways with the paving project, perimeter defense and the newly allocated space for ‘Alice.’ They were going to outgrow the space soon. He made a note to ask Chastity to work with Ray on acquiring the rest of the building for their company.
He wasn’t particularly worried about current expenses. The Argos investment was funding the company at $25 million a year and they had mostly been able to fund operations from the profit of the company. They’d acquired Page Services and a significant interest in Agora Fuel Cells. He could hire and staff a new operation from their bank for at least six months. He hoped Isobel and Luke could get an IPO together by that time. If not, in six months the next installment of the Argos investment should be in the bank.
It was Thursday before Henry had a chance to meet and thoroughly debrief with Nathan on the deployment of the perimeter security at Page Services.
“Darrel has set up the hardware for perimeter defense around Open Cloak,” Nathan said. “We have the software ready to go active when you say.”
“I say. Let’s get this company and the joint venture protected. And Agora Fuel Cells. And I want to ask about some other things I’ve been thinking about.”
“You’ve been active. I’ve noticed you have a new area of the office blocked off with locks and the patent attorney has been in each day this week. Something related?”
“Yes and no. I’ll bring you in on the whole Alice project, but first I want to talk about internal security,” Henry said. “Maybe having been hacked and attacked physically has made me paranoid. My counselor says it could be related to my PTSD, but I can’t ignore issues that might be serious.”
“Tell me. I take it all seriously,” Nathan said, focusing on Henry with intense eyes that bored into him. Henry took a deep breath.
“I’m feeling better about our external security, but we haven’t done anything about internal security. We run a background check on new employees. We issue a key code and a computer and an RFID card. And we connect them to the company network. How easy would it be for an employee to copy everything on our network and walk out the door with it?”
“That’s a lot of data, but it would be possible over the course of a few days or weeks, I suppose. Don’t you trust your employees?”
“I asked Germaine a similar question last week. Their answer was ‘I don’t actively distrust them, but I wouldn’t call on them in an emergency.’ It’s something between trust and distrust. We evaluate them based on performance. But aside from a confidentiality agreement that’s just a piece of paper when it comes down to it, we don’t push employees to be ‘loyal’ or even trustworthy.”
“You want to monitor employee behavior?” Nathan asked alarmed. “That’s really Big Brotherish.”
“Yuck! We’ve seen what that can do to people and even the whole country. It’s exactly what I want to avoid.”
“I entered the Army thirty years ago when computers were pretty much landing on everyone’s desk—in the office and at home. All our systems were computerized,” Nathan said. “It was still the young innocence of the internet age. The area I was assigned was cyber intelligence. Not AI, but more traditional. How could we use computer networks to spy on our enemies and be better prepared. That was when we all realized that we were vulnerable to every spy attack we could devise and started working on cyber resilience. Wasn’t called that then. We just used catchall words to step up our actions a little further.”
“Same group as you retired from?”
“No. Vastly different. The Pentagon didn’t decide to consolidate all the military development in the field until the Russian election interference in 2016. Then US Cyber Command got serious. When I entered the service, we were all pretty green hotshots who believed we could take over the world with our computers. In a training session, a team of hackers was led into a room with computers. We were told there was a threat against US cyber security with some parameters around it. We were told to identify the threat. We got busy and started working on identifying where the threat was coming from.”
“Did we take over that job with Delphos Network Armor?” Henry asked. He was intrigued by the look inside Nathan was giving him.
“To some extent. But it points out exactly the weakness you’ve identified. We were all hackers and in competition with each other to identify the threat first. About two frustrating hours into our exercise, I felt a gun at my head. When I was allowed to turn around, the other hackers all had their hands behind their heads with a black-hooded man holding a gun on them.
“The result was that our commanding officer walked into the room and lectured us for an hour about assuming a threat to our cyber security was only online. By the way, that was the beginning of the ban on wearing headsets while on duty unless it was a team with at least one member required to be alert for physical dangers. You’ve identified a similar threat. Something that doesn’t come from an external online attack. It’s exactly what we failed to anticipate when you were attacked by the suicide driver.”
“What I want,” Henry said, “is the same kind of system that can identify internal attacks that we have in Delphos and Porcupine. Only, it has to not spy on our employees. We moved the server farm to the perimeter defense so we didn’t need to monitor every box on the farm. It’s the same principle we’ve had with optimization and search. Don’t report individual information on employees. Only identify threats.”
“We may be talking about a new generation of AI,” Nathan said.
“I’m good with that.”
Of course, nothing was more important that day than Isobel’s twenty-second birthday. At least according to Isobel. She paraded around the office with an actual tiara on, declaring she was the mother goddess. She seemed upbeat and charming to all the employees, including Nancy, with whom she’d had a few upsets.
After work, the partners and a couple of other honored employees—including her assistant, Rachel—were invited to a restaurant where her parents were hosting a party. Luke’s parents, as the other impending grandparents, were also at the party. The food was good and there were several toasts, both to Isobel and her impending motherhood. She was wearing down as the dinner went on and managed to grab a martini from in front of Luke. She downed it in one swallow.
“Honey! Please don’t drink anything else!” Luke said.
“Oh, one little drink isn’t going to hurt the kid at this stage. Look at Felipe. He’s been drinking since before conception.”
Her brother was a brawny guy who had starred on his high school football team in the fall and was extremely bright. A couple of colleges had started recruiting him in the fall of his junior year. He’d recently committed to the university where Isobel and Luke were both struggling to complete their degrees while running a multi-million-dollar business.
Isobel had hired an assistant in her department who was more qualified than she was to manage the finances of the company. Henry wondered how that was all going to shape up when Isobel went on maternity leave. Luke had also hired a vice president who carried the title of chief operating officer. While Luke managed to get to the office every day for at least a while, Craig Matthews was the go-to guy for daily operations.
After her drink, Isobel’s mood immediately elevated again. Henry and Chastity could both see signs of the manic effect wearing off quickly, though. When Isobel began getting surly again, Luke thanked everyone for coming and got them out the door.
“Poor Isobel,” Lisa sighed when they were home. “She really suffers so much.”
“She makes everyone around her suffer, too,” Henry said.
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