By 2 in the afternoon, the company's outside council had filed a formal challenge to the pending patent application with the USPTO, attaching the full modification history. The email chain and Daniel's original project files with their corrected metadata. By 4:00, a reporter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who covered the technology sector, had called the company's communications team because someone, nobody ever officially confirmed who had sent them the public apology Victoria had published that morning. Victoria's apology had gone out at 8:00 exactly as planned on the company's internal portal and external website simultaneously. It was four paragraphs.
She had written it herself without her communications team's input because she wanted it to sound like a person and not a press release. It named Daniel by name. It described what had happened on the testing floor. It described what she had done with the manual and why it was wrong and what the investigation had uncovered. It did not use words like unfortunate or miscommunication or any of the other linguistic softeners that corporate apologies typically deploy to acknowledge fault without actually taking it.
It said plainly I was wrong. He was right. And the company failed him in ways that went far deeper than what happened yesterday morning. It got 4,000 shares in the first hour. By the time the AJC reporter called, it had been picked up by two national technology publications and a business wire service.
Daniel found out about the press attention at 3:30 in the afternoon when Patterson came into the workspace they'd been given to begin the RS7 final validation documentation and said with the particular expression of someone delivering news, they find simultaneously alarming and entertaining. There's a reporter downstairs asking to speak with you. Daniel looked up from the validation log. Tell them no. She says she has three specific questions and she'll print the story with or without your answers.
Tell her I'll send a written statement. Patterson relayed this. He came back. She says, "Okay." Daniel wrote a statement by hand in his composition notebook and had Patterson photograph it and send it to the reporter's email. The statement was one paragraph.
It said that the most important outcome of the previous day was not the exposure of what had been done wrong, but the commitment the company had made to ensuring it could not happen again. It said that he was grateful to the engineers who had stayed and worked alongside him. It said that the RS7 system would now perform as it was designed to perform and that when it was deployed in the field, it would do the work it was built to do. It did not say anything about Richard. It did not say anything about Victoria's apology.
It did not say anything about himself that was more than was necessary. The reporter printed it verbatim. The story ran the next morning with the headline, "Blackwood Robotics credits sidelined architect with saving 400 bamboo contract and his own eraser." Daniel read the headline on his phone while he was making Amara's lunch. He read it once. He set the phone down.
He finished making the sandwich. Amara came into the kitchen. She looked at his phone on the counter. She picked it up. She read the headline.