Page 88 of The Dis-Graced

“Can you blame me? I mean, the television doesn’t do her justice.”

Elliot winks at me. “Good for you.”

“Good for my brother, too, apparently.”

Elliot cocks his head to the side. “Your brother?”

“Yeah, Grace was taken in for questioning, and low and behold, Devon fucking came to her rescue.”

Elliot grimaces. “Ouch!”

“Yeah, it’s not like I care too much. He’ll be going back to the resort soon, and she’ll be going to jail.”

“Damn, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Now that you know the inside scoop, you can get back to whatever you were doing. I’ll be finishing up with Alistair.”

“Well, I think now that word about ALAN is out, maybe we should work on an unveiling date? We’re definitely going to want to get it out there before any competitors enter the market. We could be ready for an announcement in say, three months.”

“Actually, this situation has inspired me down a different path.”

Elliot spikes a brow. “Oh?”

“I’m going open source for this one. I’m making an announcement regarding it Friday.”

The look in his eyes tells me all I need to know.

“Open source. But-but, there’s no profit in open source. It’s just giving it away. I mean, come on! How long have we been working on this? How many hours? You can’t just give it away for free!”

“Actually, since I own the IP, I can give it away for free. I see no other choice,” I say. “I’ve terminated Luke, but we’re still working on building a case against him. Until then, he could just sell it. Heck, he could just give it away if he wanted to. If I announce it’ll be open source, at least no one will make a bid, not when everyone’s going to be able to access it.”

“This—this is just stupid!” Elliot snaps.

“I’m just as disappointed as you are. I really am. But if we look on the bright side, this is going to give us a lot of good publicity.”

“Yeah,” Alistair cuts in, “we were just talking about how I can integrate it into scheduling and our concierge services.”

“That’s fucking insane. You’re sitting on a fucking goldmine, we did all the work mining it, and now you’re just going to give it away.”

“We’ll get by. Truthfully, I’m glad to finally have this off my plate.”

“I have work to get back to,” Elliot says without trying to hide his disdain.

“I’ll keep you in the loop if anything comes up,” I reply back as he exits my office, slamming the door behind him.

ALAN’s voice fills the room. “Elliot Conway had several indicators of possible deception, but it is possible they are merely the result of his anger. His indicators include: his tone, his heart rate, slight anxious movements, and his word choices.”

“I want you recording everything that goes on in his office,” I say.

“Understood.”

“Wow!” Alistair looks around the room in wonder. “So, that’s ALAN?”

“It is, a part of him, anyway.”

“You did it. I’ve heard AI talked about. Gabriel gets a freakin’ boner over it, but don’t tell him I told you that. I can’t believe you finally did it.”

“Yeah, but to be honest, it took decades. My father had the idea for its base programming when he was my age, and so it’s developed in an odd way. It works, and I’m not quite sure how we would do it any other way.”