Terry arrived at the Tyson house mid-afternoon. Tyson was once again sitting on the front steps of the house puffing on a small cigar. Beside him was a small duffel bag. Terry joined him on the steps. He handed him the case with the Glock in it.
“Got lucky.” Terry said. “Didn’t have to shoot anybody.”
“You think they’ll try again with someone else?”
“I don’t know sir. People are crazy and times are strange.”
“Dylan.”
“Yes sir. My dad got me hooked at a very young age. Dylan always seems to make a lot of sense to me.”
“He makes sense to a lot of us.”
Arthur then handed Terry the small duffel bag. “There’s a million in there. You saved me ten million. I figure it’s the least I can do.”
“Fair enough.” Terry said. He knew better than to argue with someone who wanted to show their gratitude.
He put the bag beside him. “We’re working on a piece of software that will make it easy for people to detect fakes like this. I’ll put this money to work speeding up the process.”
“You do that, son. You’re gonna have a huge market for that, because I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people in this country, and all over the world, that are getting fucked over by these little sociopaths.”
“Not just them, sir. Sooner or later it’s gonna end up in the hands of organized crime and then the shit is really gonna hit the fan.”
They got to their feet. Tyson shook Terry’s hand. “I can’t thank you enough for this, Terry. My daughter will be a good teacher, and she’ll never know it but she’ll have you to thank for that.”
“We’re all doing what we can, sir. Hope you finally write that great American novel.”
“You don’t have an app that will help me with that, do you?”
“Naa. Some things are better left to the human brain.”
Terry got into his car and headed home, with a million dollars in the back seat and a very good feeling about what he had just done. As he thought about it, he realized it took a lot for him to step outside his comfort zone the way he did.
But now that he had done it, he kinda knew how.
The traffic was light all the way up 95. But it was a Saturday after all. He made it home to Plymouth by about 9 that night. Another heatwave had started. So he grabbed a beer got out of his clothes and headed down to the pool. He kissed Shawna, who was sitting on the pool steps trying to stay cool.
“Good trip?”
“Yeah. Genuinely satisfying. The client was grateful. Gave us a million dollars in cash.”
Shawna laughed out loud. “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. It’s sittin’ on the kitchen counter.”
“What are you gonna do with it?”
“I don’t know, right now. The other thing I got was all the software those clowns used to make the fake video. I was thinking you could take a look at it and see if there’s anything that would be useful for the Bloodhound app.”
“Well, if nothing else, we’ll have somebody else’s finished product to analyze. That could be very helpful, I think.”
They sat side by side in the cool water, while the warm breeze blew in from the ocean.
They talked about the future and where they could take The Human League. Because the only thing that had occurred to both of them was that what they were doing was going to be increasingly more necessary as the whole world started to embrace the kind of technology that could easily become part of a massive new white-collar crime wave.
Two weeks later, to the day, Shawna and her team all sat down in the small boardroom with Terry and Jamie Goldman.
Shawna flipped on the program on her computer and it projected onto the wall.
A graphic appeared on the screen. It was an image of a mature Bloodhound with its distinctive brown and black colouring, He was in a field on the hunt. His short tail was erect. His nose was to the ground. A few seconds later, the word mark, Bloodhound, appeared. And beneath it the line: Sniffing Out Digital Fraud.
The scene then dissolved into a logo which was designed to look like a woodcut, very old school. They then ran the demo video where the Bloodhound was able to detail all the fake elements of several different AI constructs.
At the end of the demo, Shawna got up and said: “First of all, I want to thank my team whose ability to get on board and up to speed was astounding. They got what I was trying to achieve and I believe I would still be messing around with this if I hadn’t had their input. We have a prototype that has been tested against a dozen AI formats. The kinks have been ironed out. And we are good to go.”
“Everybody clapped and whistled as Shawna sat down and Terry got to his feet.
“Shawna and I will be heading to Washington,” Terry said. “to meet with the Cyber Affairs Department, and recommend that the Bloodhound program be made available to every government department on every level. We will make the individual user and business app available in all the online stores, and we expect it to be a huge revenue generator. We are happy to give this to the government in exchange for the PR value that doing this will provide us. We will be getting a ton of business from this, at least according to Senator Roman. So we’re gonna need to start staffing up. I will be recruiting from MIT and NYIT primarily. But if any of you have a friend who you think would be a strong addition to the team, let Jamie know. We’ll be starting our interviewing as soon as the applications start arriving.
“I also just want to say how proud I am of everybody here. The Moorehousers who have kept the digital business flowing and growing and the Human Leaguers who have got us off to a hell of a start. But mostly I want to thank Shawna, who told me about this one night on a drive back from Boston. All I could think of was, man, I really made the right choice when I chose her.”
After the champagne and the backslapping and everybody had gone back to work. Terry sat in his office with Shawna.
“Well, it looks like we’re good to go.” Shawna said.
“Almost.” Terry said.
“Almost? What’s almost?”
“There’s one more step. It’s an acid test. But we have to go to New Jersey to get it done.”
“New Jersey?” Shawna asked. “What’s in New Jersey.”
“It’s a surprise. But you’ll like it. I guarantee.
Because Terry was a real measure twice, cut once kind of guy, he had one more thing to do before they would take it down to Washington and unleash the Bloodhound program on the world. And he knew that if it got the seal of approval from the folks he was planning to see, they would be away to the races. Because their weight in the digital world was considerable.
So the next morning, they got in the car and headed south.
The drive to New Jersey took pretty much the whole day. So they found a nice hotel, checked in and went looking around for something to eat.
Anchor 44, the group they were going to see, filled a large house on the New Jersey shore in an area called Asbury Park, which was made famous back in the day by Bruce Springsteen whose first mega-successful album was titled Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Anchor 44 was primarily a think tank for the digital industry. A few years earlier they had partnered with a couple from Virginia Beach, Penny Jones and Deacon Fredericks, and developed one of the most successful AI business programs to date. Everybody involved with the project ended up getting extremely rich.
Anchor 44 were four partners who had been together since their days at MIT, and for people like Terry and Shawna, Anchor 44 was everything that they wanted their little company to be.
When Terry was at MIT, he became friends with a guy named Charlie Drake, who was the younger brother of one of the Anchor 44 partners, Damon Drake, and through that connection, he managed to get a meeting with the Anchors, as they were called.
Terry wanted to show them the demo of their Bloodhound app, and see if they could poke any holes in it before they took it down to Washington and got the government involved. He also had something else in mind.
At dinner that night, Shawna was particularly quiet.
“Are you alright?” Terry asked.
“Yeah. I’m…Terry, I really don’t like surprises. I need to know who we’re going to see. I need to be mentally prepared.”
Terry to a sip of his drink. “When I was at MIT, I was friends with a guy named Charlie Drake.”
“I know Charlie. Not well, but he’s a very smart guy.”
“Yeah, well what you probably don’t know is that Charlie’s older brother is a guy named Damon Drake. And Damon is partners with three other people in a little company called Anchor 44.”
Shawna said nothing for a few seconds then realized she had forgotten to breathe. Then she took a deep breath. “The Anchor 44?”
“Yep. And my pal Charlie talked to his big brother Damon and got us a meeting to preview the Bloodhound program.”
“Holy shit. Anchor 44. Those guys are legendary. They’re all multi-millionaires from Lilliworx. I wrote a paper on Lilliworx and Anchor 44 in my senior year. I knew who Damon Drake was. I just never made the connection to Charlie.”
Terry just smiled. He could see how impressed Shawna was that he was able to engineer this opportunity.
She looked at him some more without saying anything.“We’re going to show it to them. Terry said, “And then, if they like it, we’re gonna suggest a partnership. Say sixty-forty. With their clout in the industry, we can open many doors.”
“I don’t know whether to kiss you or kick you. This is amazing but I’m so pissed you didn’t tell me sooner.”
“The look on your face right now was worth the deception.”
