Chapter 4: Lisa

YoYoJolt Synthetics' facility a few miles off the Vegas strip was selected for the very reason that it was so dumpy and plain as to avoid attention. In years past, the nondescript building hulking on 30 acres had been the regional warehouse for a major pharmaceutical distributor, and discretion was required when your building housed rooms full of narcotics. Now, the warehouse contained treasure of a different kind that required as much discretion - $27 Billion in servers and communications gear that provided a significant portion of the rented supercomputer and cloud computing services for the scientific community.

Mark was running late, and knew his boss was going to chew him a new hole for being late the third time that month. Mark gunned his Honda Shadow Aero 750, and hoped all the traffic lights stayed green as he tried to erase 30 extra minutes spent sleeping by a few extra minutes of speed. He nearly ran the gauntlet of lights successfully, but caught the last one before YoYoJolt, and had to stop. "Crap!" yelled Mark into his helmet. He coasted to a stop, smoothly downshifting to first before checking the time on his smartphone. He was already three minutes late, and it was still several minutes until he'd be able to clock in. As he fumed and fidgeted at the light, replacing the phone in his retro-reflective leathers, a silver Audi A5 pulled alongside. Mark had dropped the quiet stock pipes on his deep blue motorcycle that Spring, opting for the throaty roar and Dub-Dub-Dub pulse of Vance & Hines pipes that he loved. The loud engine created a connection with the bike that Mark loved, but the driver of the Audi glared at the noise that dared interrupt her cell phone call. Doubly-damned, Mark recognized the car before he recognized the driver, and knew it was the DataCenter VP bitch from Jersey. He was in the wringer now, he thought, and roared away as the light changed and Mark swerved into the parking lot for the commoners. Lisa Brochman had already turned her luxury Audi into the convenient executive lot a block before, so Mark knew she was going to beat him to the high-security reception area by several minutes, as he'd have to walk around the warehouse like all the rest of the IT staffers.

Resigned, he parked the big bike in the motorcycle-only lane and stepped off his ride, kicking down his kickstand onto the concrete pad YoYoJold had put in for bikes so they wouldn't embed themselves in the heat-softened asphalt by evening. He quickly stripped off his leathers, stuffing them into his saddlebags, and jogged for the front of the building, thankful he'd decided at the last minute to substitute tennis shoes for his traditional cowboy boots. Mark started the check-in process required of anyone entering the high-security data center, and entered the man trap metal detector at 7:12am by the wall clock. Yup, he was going to get a butt chewin', and soon.

Mark logged into his private console, punched the virtual clock on the screen to start his shift, and tried to unobtrusively join the shift turnover meeting in progress in the back of the large monitoring room that served as the control center for the main data center in the facility. Tim's withering glare at Mark failed to achieve the intended effect of causing Mark to burst into flames, but the shift director's ire was obvious as he continued the briefing, pointing out the status of various alerts and troubles on the large displays lining the wall. Two storage units had gone offline in the same segment, as had a pair of routers, and they had nearly lost Cluster G as a result, a near-miss that had been avoided by the standard triple -redundancy YoYoJolt utilized in core systems. Still, Tim was pissed that segment pairs had gone down in the first place, because that meant that someone had screwed up somewhere, and there would be hell to pay at the Root Cause Analysis meeting sure to come later. As the briefing wrapped up, Mark greeted Don and Marcus, his buddies that together ran the 3rd tier trouble team for the YoYoJolt day shift. As near he could tell, the Lisa Brochman had still not entered the Ops Center, so perhaps Mark had avoided a catastrophe that could signal the end to his job at YoYoJolt. Those thoughts were quickly forgotten as he immersed himself in the problem resolution that always followed major outages, and the cleanup kept him busy clear to lunch.

Lisa coolly observed the Ops Center through the remote CCTV monitors installed in her office. As much as she would have liked to crush Mark's balls for being late again, she was simply too happy to care. Her promotion had just come through, and the Board of Directors of YoYoJolt had confirmed her appointment last night as an Officer of the company. As much as anything, she was elated that this was the last day she'd spend in the chilly data center dealing with the administrative BS of managing the geeks in her kingdom. Lisa had served her time in the data center, four years of running the backwater assignment far from the daily eye of senior executives. Still, she'd known it was the required operational management position she'd needed to prove she could operate in both a line and staff role and run an important facility. The Board didn't just didn't hand out SVP titles to Senior Attorneys unless they'd demonstrated that they could run part of the global operations, so the years away from the corporate nexus of power had been tolerable.

The corporate offices of YoYoJolt would be a much better environment for her to demonstrate her value and intelligence, and ensure she got what was coming to her, and SVP of Research Operations was the likely last stepping-stone she'd face before being able to angle for CIO or Chief Compliance Officer. It was even possible her Ops experience, combined with hard-core legal and research background, would enable her to land Executive VP for a different line of business. Today was a big day for her, and nailing the congratulatory Officers' Lunch meeting with senior executives of YoYoJolt Synthetics was going to be important.

The Mandalay Bay Casino squatted at the end of the Vegas Strip like a giant tan Transformer in the jungle, all jumbled, sharp angles surrounded by palm trees and giant ferns that spoke of the lush opulence of the casino that could afford to be lavish with water in the desert. Lisa handed her keys to the valet, entered the lobby and made her way past the countless slot machines and blackjack tables to the back corner of the casino, to Rick Moonan's seafood restaurant, and the excellent raw bar and sushi she knew would be part of lunch. YoYoJolt CEO and visionary Bradley Majors was an eccentric executive known for his love of opulent seafood, and Rick Moonan's rm was known for some of the best in Vegas, so she was expecting a great lunch.