The calm of a man who has handled difficult situations before and believes he can handle this one too. Daniel looked at him. He didn't answer immediately. He let the silence do a little work first. Then he said, "You want to explain the modification log from 7 months ago." "Richard?" or should I just describe what I'm seeing out loud so everyone in this room can hear it?
Victoria had moved closer without quite realizing it. She was standing 5 ft away now, close enough to see the screen, close enough to read the timestamp herself. She looked at it. She looked at the credential tag attached to the modification. She looked at Richard.
The room was so quiet that when one of the investors upstairs said something to another in Korean, every person on the testing floor heard it clearly. Richard uncrossed his arms. He put his hands in his pockets, a gesture that was trying very hard to look casual and wasn't quite getting there. That modification was an authorized system optimization, he said. We went through an entire review cycle in Q3.
All of it is documented. Where? Daniel asked in the engineering review files. I'd like to see them. I don't have them on hand right now.
Then I'd like to see the authorization sign off. That's also not something I have immediately available. Richard Daniel's voice hadn't changed in volume or temperature. Not once. There are no authorization files.
There's no review cycle because that modification was never authorized. You know it and now I know it. And in about 10 minutes, every other person in this building is going to know it, too. Richard's jaw moved. He took a breath.
He looked at Victoria and in that look, there was something Daniel had seen before. To the specific appeal of a man trying to remind a woman of all the history between them, all the years of loyalty, all the times things had gone right. The implicit suggestion that the person she should believe in a moment of crisis was the person she had always believed. Victoria looked back at him and she said nothing. She turned back to Daniel.
Show me. Daniel turned the laptop screen toward her. He walked her through it, not quickly, deliberately, methodically, the way a man presents evidence rather than an argument. He showed her the original codebase he developed 3 years ago. He showed her the intact failsafe architecture, 43 lines of override protocol that controlled the systems response to dynamic load shift beyond a set threshold.
He showed her the modification log. He showed her the timestamp. He showed her the credential. He showed her the before and the after. And then he showed her his own records.