It Had Been Years by Michael Malflic Page B

executives who are rarely motionless and even less often speechless, all of them sitting there like statues, each of their own minds racing in a million different directions on what could possibly be happening or why.  Mitchell returns with the CTO, the Chief Design Engineer and the Senior Design Team.  Corporate Council hustles in and in a winded voice “Smith and Wallace are dialed in ”  they were the company’s Intellectual Property Specialists. 
     
    Vincent took a deep breath, closed his eyes, pausing just for the briefest moment before exhalation, thought to himself , “I hope no one has spent anything they thought they were going to make on this deal.”  With that he opens his eyes, releases his breath and reaches for the speaker phone in the center of the table.  Sometime the world moves so fast, all of this had taken twelve minutes from the time he walked through the front door.  Chris had just moved up in line to fifth from next at the coffee shop, he hadn’t even ordered yet and Vincent had an entire room, if not an entire company full of people reeling.  After everyone present and on the phone did the customary, My name is… who ever they work for and whatever they are responsible for in their own little fifedoms .  Vincent once again spoke “There are area’s of concern as I mentioned, as the old saying goes the games not over until the fat lady sings, specifically there is a concern not over functionality or interoperability but the concern is specifically over 2300 lines of code and the ROM bus and actions on the 3C-59 chipset.  The words hadn’t even settled when the Senior Design Engineer spoke, Ramesh .  He was chief architect of that portion of the content delivery system.  He was agast , appalled and physically disturbed by the question.  He rambled on about the authenticity of his design, about the random often identically created lines of code and chip set similarities.  Vincent looked up from his papers, Mitchell was dazed, the CTO had begun to perspire, Corporate Council had all but crushed the pen she was holding in her hand she was squeezing it so tightly and writing so furiously. Everyone on the phone that was dialed in was strangely silent.  Vincent continued “So with such accurate awareness of our findings before I could even detail them, I’m certain this can be resolved quite easily.”  Vincent was lying, he knew he was lying, as so did everyone else present but it was presented in such a way that so many wanted to still have hope that no one called him on it.  Once again, before details could be given Ramesh spoke, this time pressing for the detail to and the nature of the concerns, in painfully explicit detail. “We believe strongly that the specific section of code, the subset operating functions and portions of the chip set and green board infringes on the Intellectual Property Rights, and patents of WUZ.  Is there an agreement that I over looked, or a partnership or royalty contract that inadvertently failed to be presented?” Vincent inquired.  At this point Vincent’s investment and engineering review teams spoke, everyone just listened except for Ramesh his protests grew more aggravated as they detailed the concerns.
     
     

9:31am Pacific
     
    The deal was all but dead, they woke with awe and wonder expecting Santa Clause to show up and when they went downstairs to look under the tree the reaper was standing there waiting for them.  Death had arrived for all of them because one of the children didn’t do as he was told.  Ramesh was after all brilliant, a Stanford grad, he also had access to WUZ’s technology, it grew out of a University technology commercialization incubator he had worked in. There was to be no executed contract, no agreement and most importantly no exchange of funds and before those few moments no one but one in the company knew the truth, perhaps some had suspected but not enough for whispers to even become prevalent.  It was