Fandom: Original

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 3,512 words

Content notes: none

Author notes: Written for Challenge 266 - Deal

Summary: Greg's life's work is on the line and he's not about to let a few corporate bullies push him around.


Greg still found it hard to believe he was here. The leather swivel chair felt too plush, but then again, this was one of the biggest law firms in Chicago - he supposed it was just keeping up with the Joneses as it were.

Despite the opulence of boardroom, the atmosphere was rather ruined by the sheer volume of people clustered into its confines. In a normal negotiation he guessed that one party and their representatives would sit on one side of the long table, and the opposing party the other side. They didn't have that luxury here. In his right hand side was his lawyer, Dianne, but to his left was one of the lawyers trying to sue him. He wasn't sure which of the four companies he represented, not that it made much matter. When Google lawyered up and joined forces with its three next biggest competitors, he expected most people just rolled over and did whatever they wanted.

Lawyers and the CEOs for each of the big four alternated along the opposite side of the table. More lawyers clustered behind them, unable to have a seat at the table, but having scored chairs from somewhere, balancing legal pads and laptops on their laps. More unfortunates were left standing, cramming the room to the brim. Paralegals and other researchers had been relegated to other conference rooms, forced to watch proceedings via a video link whist their counterparts in the room texted them instructions.

Such a simple little thing he'd created had caused all this trouble. The application he'd written, which he'd dubbed Ursa Miner, was meant to be an intelligence gatherer. A tiny bot that crawled through websites and people's internet searches, making fuzzy logic connections between one person's obsession with quinoa and a tweet from some America's next top model drop-out. It used the tiniest fragments of information to build up complex social profiles. It could predict what the next big thing would be before it was even a thing. For advertisers and market researchers it would be the holy grail.

It had been years of blood, sweat and tears, developing it in the wee hours of the night, between shifts at the coffee shop and cleaning toilets at the stadium. He'd never thought it would amount to anything, that he was coding his life all the way into a giant dead end, but then one day, all that code had finally clicked into place and started producing the most marvelous insights. To the right person it was worth millions; more if you could leverage it to multiple companies and keep the intellectual property secure.

It was flawless in its simplicity and power. That is until someone had found it stretching its muscles and sharpening its claws in their search logs. It didn't take long for the highly paid boffins on the other side of the fence to take umbrage at someone peeking through their search results and logging IP addresses. Enter law suit stage left.

One of the lawyers leaned forward across the table. 'There's still the matter of how the settlement funds should be split,' he said, setting his gold-plated ballpoint pen down in the fold of his compendium.

'I should have thought that was obvious,' replied one of the CEOs. 'It will have to be apportioned based of each company's profits.'

'Profits or turnover?' another asked. 'Profits can be manipulated. Turnover would be more accurate.'

'Says you who has the highest turnover of the four of us!'

'Well, what would you suggest?'

'It should be an equal split.'

The first CEO, the one from Google barked out a laugh. 'Equal? You must be joking. We stand to lose the most if this thing is allowed to go to market.'

'And so far you've let nothing, just like us.' He preened the front of his shirt, caressing the beer belly that was probably attributable more to fine dining and plenty of scotch. 'Equal split with no change to the status quo,' he offered.

The one two chairs down from his shifted uncomfortably. 'Then maybe we should be asking for more.'

'Agreed.'

Around the room, lawyers nervously gripped pens, poised over yellow legal pads. 'How much?' one dared to ask.

'What do you think?' the CEO asked, glancing in both directions as his three counterparts. 'Three fifty? Two fifty would hardly cover our costs and time wasted so far.'

They nodded in unison. 'Three fifty would be much fairer.'

A lawyer with dark hair and a Mediterranean complexion, which had been largely leading the conversation so far, pulled his wire rimmed glasses off and surveyed the room. 'Are we all in accord with a new offer of three fifty?' He waited until he had acquiescence from each team of lawyers before turning his attention back across the table. 'Does counsel have any comments in relation to this new offer?'

Dianne clenched her jaw in defiance and tilted her head. 'Does that fact that it's completely absurd count?'

He gave her a wan smile, setting his glasses back on his face as he consulted his notes. 'Perhaps you could discuss it with your client for a few moments whilst we arrange for the updated heads of agreement for our clients.'

The room began to buzz as paralegals moved towards their superiors, talking in hushed but hurried tones, pulling out phones to instruct their colleagues in other rooms to get moving on the changes, whilst the four CEOs absently checked stock prices on their own phones.

'Greg,' Dianne began, leaning towards her client, ignoring the commotion occurring on the other side of the room. 'Greg? Greg, are you even listening?' She kicked him under the table with the heel of her four inch stiletto. He barely reacted to the obviously painful assault.

'They want me to settlement of court for three hundred and fifty million dollars,' he replied, as if it were the most trivial of things, like someone had asked him what time it was.

'You don't have three hundred and fifty million dollars, Greg.'

'I know.' He didn't even have three thousand dollars. Rent was one eighty a week, the weekly trip to the laundromat cost him seven fifty in loose change plus three and a half hours of his time. He could get by on forty dollars for food a week if he watered down his orange juice, stuck to plain bran cereal. He could save even more if he waited for the expiry to run down on other things at the supermarket, letting them put discount stickers over the barcodes. It left just enough money for two hot dogs and a soda on a Saturday morning when he went and played baseball, plus two hundred dollars emergency money for when his bike needed a new gear chain or tyres. His boss let him drink as much coffee as he liked, even though it was technically eating into his stock, and he even got first dibs on any leftover sandwiches that, accordingly to food handling standards, were no longer fit for general public consumption.

He cast his gaze towards the console at the back of the room. The spread of food that had been put out there for the benefit of everyone in the room was largely untouched. Their danishes weren't stale and the cherry filling was as red and glossy as any he'd ever seen. His mouth watered at the mere thought of how good it would taste. He wanted to get up and go over there, fill one of the little saucers with as much cake as he could and bring it back to the table. He resisted though, feeling it inappropriate to get up in the middle of proceedings for a snack even if he was being totally ignored, which was ironic since it was his fault they were all here in the first place.

'Do you think we'll break for lunch soon?' he asked instead.

'Greg!' Dianne hissed. 'Three hundred and fifty million dollars. They just upped the settlement amount by a hundred million and you haven't even blinked!'

'I don't remember us saying anything about settling,' he replied. And why would they? The CEOs of the four biggest information technology companies in the world didn't lawyer up against a thirty two year old bachelor unless he'd developed something that had the potential to be the next big thing that would upset the social media apple cart.

He'd had offers from all four of the companies around the table, once they'd figured out just what it was he was holding on to, but it wasn't about the money. It was about not letting someone else take the thing he'd poured his life into and using it to make them more money. He'd written it because the nature of human psychology fascinated him, but the applied mathematics he'd spent four years at college mastering hadn't borne any fruit with regards to a proper job and a decent income. Only his love for complex puzzles kept him going. They didn't understand that. He knew he could perfect it further with time and enough data.

'We're not settling,' Dianne said, but the hubbub around the room drowned out her announcement. She stood up, pressing her palms to the table as she braced herself. 'I said, were not settling,' she called out, much louder.

'Like hell you're not!' scoffed one of the CEOs, thin and mean looking, with a large pointed nose. 'Who do you think you are? We'd have bought the company out if your client weren't so damn greedy.'

Dianne reached across the table, putting a vice like grip around Greg's arm as he made to stand up and protest.

'Your clients don't have a case,' Dianne insisted, eyeing off each lawyer in turn. 'Mr Sanders application is not a violation of any proprietary material.'

'His code uses the results from our search engine applications. How is that not a violation?'

'Seven billion web searches a day, gentlemen,' Dianne replied, since there wasn't a single other female sat around the table. 'None of which you control. Your users choose what to search, not you.'

'It's our applications that used global meta data to produce the search results. That is our IP.'

'And yet I don't see you suing those seven billion searchers. What makes their data usage of the results any different? Someone uses your search engine to plagiarise an essay for college, or copy research for a news article. And what about all that fake news? How it is that you're not going after those people?'

'How people use the information is not relevant to us.'

'Then you admit that my client using your search results is no different to any other user.'

'It is different because he did not instigate the searches.'

'Right, and you don't let people pay round to put their websites at the top of your search results, regardless of how relevant they actually are. Who's manipulating that IP?'

That sent the room into a flurry of vitriolic comments, directed at her, threatening libel suits and disbarment.

The loud knock on the door went unnoticed by everyone in the room except Greg. Through the clear glass walls on the other side of the door were two heavy men in military uniform.

'Dianne,' he began.

'If they want to play hardball,' Diane muttered, her gaze never leaving the scribbled notes in front of her.

'Dianne,' Greg called again.

'What, Greg?' she huffed, slamming her pad back down on the table.

He pointed to the door. She looked up and saw what he'd been looking at. She swallowed hard. 'Wait here.' She pushed herself from the chair and navigated the obstacle course of chairs and people toward the door of the conference room. A few people noticed her and stopped what they were doing, looking up from their notepads and laptops, also spotting that two men waiting outside.

Dianne smoothed down her cream suit jacket. As she did so, a dark green price tag slipped free and dangled from the waist of her matching pencil skirt. Greg saw Dianne's hand waver with indecision for a split second as she grabbed the tag. There wasn't time to find a way to tuck it neatly out of sight so she tugged sharply, snapping it off.

Greg felt a twinge of guilt, knowing she wouldn't be able to return that suit to the store now. The two hundred dollars emergency bicycle money he'd paid her, plus her promise that the rest would be pro bono sat uncomfortably with him. He couldn't afford a lawyer. He'd called all around town and everyone had laughed in his face when he'd asked them if they knew anyone who could represent him for two hundred dollars. Eventually one of them had pointed him in Dianne's direction. 'She's desperate for work. I bet she'd take anything to keep her bar registration.' True to their word, that was exactly what she did. The people suing him said they wouldn't even speak to him until he had legal representation.

'I suppose it's so I don't look like such an underdog,' he'd said to her at their first meeting. She didn't have an office and agreed to meeting him over coffee at his work.

'No, it's because no judge in their right mind would let you go unrepresented,' she replied. 'The district attorney would lose his mind if we meted out justice like that.'

Every day they'd been here, sequestered in this leather and glass prison of pointless negotiations, she'd had a different outfit, each as crisp and new as the day before. She must have rushed around town every weekend, trying to find new stores that hadn't yet discovered she was a serial goods returner. Worse, the kind that wore them and then returned them. He appreciated that she was dressing for his benefit, trying to put herself forward as more formidable than she was. Before this case, she confessed her most challenging work had been finalising a conveyance and a dispute over an easement that was only a yard wide. Milwaukee wasn't known for its high profile legal cases. The pair of them together were two very small fish in a ocean of high-powered corporate sharks.

Dianne opened the door and in hushed tones they spoke to her for a moment. There was a palpable change in the air as four sets of lawyers, paralegals and other staff eyed the outlines of the two military men through the glass. They could sense the golden goose about to slip through their fingers, even if there was nothing official yet. The door clicked gently shut behind Dianne and the troop of lawyers turned their glares back to Greg, holding their silence if not their displeasure. There was a shuffling of papers and notepads but otherwise no one moved from their seat. Greg's stomach rumbled and he sank lower into the chair, watching the back table with hopelessness. Now was definitely not the time to break for a snack.

The few minutes Dianne spent in the hallway seemed to stretch on for an eternity, before she finally opened the door again and waved a hand at her client, indicating he should come outside with her.

Greg reluctantly left the soft leather chair. He expected energy one in the room to try and stop him leaving, like tortured souls trying to claw at him and drag him down into hell with the rest of them. Instead, there was a quiet parting as they let him slip through.

As he eased through the door, shutting it to keep the beasts st bay, he noticed Dianne was alone outside the doorway. The two military men were now down at the end of the hall, just outside the lifts, waiting for something.

'What's going on?'

Dianne bit her lower lip, casting a worried glance at the two men. 'The army got wind of your lawsuit. They said that if you take this to court, they will arrest you and charge you with espionage and treason. That's life imprisonment with no parole.'

The news hit Greg like a kick in the guts. 'But I haven't done anything wrong.'

'They argue that your application would have the ability to unearth classified intelligence and jeopardise military and intelligence operations across the globe.'

'It's not designed to do that. I mean, sure, it probably could. You know, if you meant for it to do that.'

'It's the army, Greg. They don't care what you meant or didn't mean. All that matters is what it has the potential to do, and who might use it.'

'But... if I can't take this lawsuit to court...'

'Then you have to settle,' Dianne finished for him.

'They army realise I don't have money to settle out of court, don't they?'

Dianne gripped him by the shoulders. It wasn't strictly by the books conduct for a lawyer to physically grab their client, but she needed to have his full attention. She could tell she was losing him in the tidal wave of new troubles. 'If you take this application to market, or even if you just fight them in court, they'll arrest you. So long as you own the code, you're at risk of being in contravention of a dozen federal crimes against the state.'

'So, what exactly are you telling me?'

She pulled in a deep breath and let it out. 'They - the government - are willing to pay your settlement costs, on the proviso that you make the Ursa Miner application available to the DoD, CIA, FBI, and no one else. They want total proprietary rights.'

Well, it was no market research, but it could be used to seek out connections between people involved in criminal or insurgent activities if the right parameters were built into the system. . The code would need to be tweaked of course, but it was definitely possible. 'It needs work to be able to do that,' he replied.

'You'd have to provide them with whatever was required to make the software operational.'

Greg paused and chewed it over. 'Okay, so they pay to get these guys off my back and then I'm, what, on government payroll?' A flutter of excitement rushed through him. He could work for the CIA as part of some counterintelligence team. Finally the job he'd been waiting for.

'Not exactly,' Dianne replied, fingering one of the satin covered buttons on her blouse. She was refusing to meet his gaze now and he knew that couldn't mean anything good. 'You'd have to relinquish all ownership of the application. You'd have to show them how the code works and how to make the necessary alterations. And, you'd have to make a legally binding undertaking that you will never develop any similar type of application, nor consult on the development of any similar design, or divulge that you have developed a system that is in use by government agencies for intelligence gathering. In short, it, and any knowledge of it, would cease to exist, as if you had never created it. You wouldn't even be allowed to talk about this kind of thing in a hypothetical scenario. You'd have to deny the possibility of such a system existing completely.'

And there was the catch. They were asking him to walk away from this forever. Years of work putting the code together, line by painstaking line. His one role of the dice out of the life he was trapped in. 'And those sonsofbitches in that conference room would get their money and win again,' he muttered. 'Do I get anything out of this?'

Dianne's eyes bored into him. 'You get to not go to jail for the rest of your life. How much more do you want?' She rested a hand in his shoulder gentle this time. 'I know it's not much of a choice, but it's a good deal. I'm advising you to take it. Becoming the next billionaire will be worth nothing if you're imprisoned for life. I'm not even sure we'd win. Hell, I'm just a tin pot lawyer that deals with barking dogs and illegal littering.'

Greg sighed and forced himself to look up and meet her gaze. 'Couldn't we ask for a little bit of money?'

Her brow furrowed as she considered the question. 'How much?'

He glanced at the price tag still clutched tightly in her fist. 'How much did that suit cost you?'

She let out a little mirth filled chuckled, releasing it from her grip and double checking it. 'Four hundred goddamned dollars. Plus twenty bucks in gas to drive sixty miles out of town of buy it. Everywhere in town must have a poster of me on their walls by now saying "do not sell to this lady".'

'Ask them for six hundred and twenty.'

Dianne choked and tried to cover it with a fake cough. 'Six hundred and twenty thousand?'

'No. Six hundred and twenty dollars.' Enough to cover the cost of Dianne's clothes, plus two hundred for emergency bicycle money.