Of course, with Nick and Colonel Vance acting as organizational buffers between the two groups, things remained relatively peaceful on the development floor.
To put it bluntly, since they were products of entirely different environments, everyone's core work philosophies were bound to clash. Even though Nick had held a preliminary alignment meeting with his team before they deployed to the facility and everyone was trying to watch their step, a noticeable cultural gap still separated his developers from the institutional aerospace researchers.
Granted, this friction was strictly confined to corporate style and office habits; when it came to raw engineering talent, his staff wasn't lacking in the slightest—at least not Nick's core technical developers.
But while Nick was busy pulling double shifts running back and forth between his private labs and the defense contract, an unexpected crisis forced him to drop his active sprints and rush straight back to Militech headquarters.
On the morning of July 9th, a video uploaded to X went completely viral. Within a matter of hours, it racked up millions of impressions and nearly a hundred thousand comments, instantly capturing the collective attention of the global tech community.
A young asian woman going by the handle Jo-dee had posted a clip on X. In the footage, she walked through a series of terminal outputs and claimed she had successfully cracked Militech's proprietary natural language processing engine. She announced that she was preparing to upload the complete decrypted source code to a popular open-source repository on GitHub for anyone to download and modify.
Furthermore, she used the video to launch a fierce critique against Nick and Militech, accusing them of corporate greed and hoarding foundational artificial intelligence breakthroughs behind a strict patent monopoly, thereby throttling human progress in deep learning. She went as far as spinning a wild conspiracy theory, claiming the commercial H1 assistant was a Trojan horse designed to harvest data and control humanity under Nick's hidden directive.
While her true motives remained up in the air, the physical demonstration in the clip looked incredibly alarming; she genuinely appeared to have breached the application layer, showing off several functional modifications as proof of her exploit.
Nick and the executive suite were completely oblivious at first; it wasn't until thousands of tech enthusiasts started tagging their official corporate accounts with screenshots of the terminal lines that the engineering team caught wind of the breach.
The social media management team, instantly recognizing the catastrophic PR fallout, escalated the thread up the executive chain. Tyler, who had literally just stepped off a cross-country business flight, didn't waste a second. He immediately flagged the threat and pinged Nick's secure channel over at the defense research campus.
Nick found the initial report almost impossible to process because the entire software architecture had been compiled through his personal workstation. He hadn't just wrapped the codebase in standard end-to-end encryption; the entire kernel was anchored to a custom neural network topology, with its critical routing nodes written in a completely proprietary programming language he'd designed himself. He simply didn't believe a lone hacker could have reverse-engineered that framework so quickly.
The moment he walked through the front doors of Militech headquarters, Nick could feel the shift in corporate gravity; every eyes on the floor tracked him through the glass, everyone desperate to know if their core product line had just been completely compromised.
If their proprietary source code had actually leaked to the public domain, the market would be flooded with cheap, knock-off application packages overnight. Even with an ironclad wall of international patents and software copyrights, rival developers would quickly mask the code behind customized interfaces to launch their own "independently developed" clones.
When billions of dollars in market equity are up for grabs, corporate ethics go right out the window. And it wasn't just foreign tech firms; even plenty of local software houses had been staring at Militech's explosive growth with massive envy. If the wall had truly cracked, every competitor in the industry would scramble to capitalize on the leak.
"Mr. Harryson!" Calloway spotted him from the lobby desk and hurried across the floor to intercept him.
"Where is Tyler's group?" Nick asked, his expression entirely cold as he kept his stride moving toward the elevator bank.
Calloway kept pace right at his shoulder, her high heels clicking rapidly against the polished concrete. "They're all staged in the main third-floor boardroom. They've been waiting for you to land."
Nick gave a sharp nod and stepped out onto the third floor, moving directly into the conference room. Inside, Tyler and Giovani were huddled near the head of the table alongside Henri Ricard, the senior director heading up their patent application and global IP operations group.
Zack and a handful of senior network security engineers were crowded around the main wall monitor, locked in an intense discussion over a scrolling data feed.
The second Nick walked through the door, the room stopped talking and stood up to greet him.
Nick waved them back down, taking his seat at the head of the long table as he locked eyes with his executive team. "Alright, break it down for me. What are we looking at?"
The mood around the table was visibly strained. Giovani leaned forward, taking the lead. "The clip this Jo-dee girl dropped has already cleared ten million views on X, and the comment section is spinning out of control. It's past midnight over in Europe and the West Coast right now; our metric models project traffic will explode exponentially the second the morning news cycle wakes up over there."
"Have we verified the payload in the video? Did she actually bypass our kernel encryption?" Nick turned his focus directly to Zack.
Zack shook his head, his hands resting on the keyboard controller. "As of right now, she hasn't published the actual code repository she talked about, so we're stuck analyzing the visual assets from the clip itself. She flashes several code snippets on her monitor during the walkthrough; the syntax looks remarkably close to our repository structure, but there are some distinct variations in the function calls. That said, the localized English localization she runs on that hardware has response latencies that are dangerously close to our benchmark retail builds."
"Run the clip for me," Nick commanded, his eyes turning to the massive flat-screen display on the wall.
With a quick keystroke, the security tech brought the video up on the main screen.
The playback started with a standard corporate promotional bumper for the H1 assistant before cutting to a clean-cut asian college student holding a retail Militech unit in her apartment, looking directly into the camera.
She immediately pivoted to walking the viewer through her supposed terminal exploit on her desktop, showing off a modified firmware package executing commands on the hardware in her hand.
The walkthrough was styled with an incredible amount of professional polish, designed to give the absolute impression that she had thoroughly cracked the application's security layer. Furthermore, the customized voice interface she demonstrated behaved almost identically to the unreleased international version their internal teams were currently refining, which was exactly why the tech forums were losing their minds. Even seasoned software engineers like Zack couldn't immediately tell if they were looking at a genuine source leak or an incredibly sophisticated emulation script.
"Do we have a background profile on the user account?" Nick asked, his eyes tracked on the terminal outputs flashing on screen.
Tyler shook his head. "Based on her digital footprint and past social data, our security team matches her to an undergraduate profile over at USC. We don't have verified identity documents yet. But frankly, I don't buy the lone-wolf narrative for a second. There is no way an undergrad is cracking our compiler solo. She's either running an elaborate clout-chasing hoax, or she's a front for a heavily funded corporate espionage team using her face to mask the leak."
"You're overthinking the corporate angle," Nick muttered, his gaze locked on the display. "Pause it right there and upscale those code blocks on the monitor."
The technician hit the spacebar and zoomed in on the terminal window. However, the source footage had been captured on a standard smartphone camera with a shaky handheld grip; the resolution degraded into a pixelated blur the closer they got.
Yet, parsing the structural loops and the specific layout of the code blocks, the formatting bore an uncanny resemblance to their internal repository—which was the exact detail keeping Zack and the security team on edge.
"Sir, I have an incoming encrypted line from Colonel Vance. Should I bridge the audio?" Kacy's voice suddenly chimed directly through Nick's earpiece.
Right on schedule, Nick thought. He knew the joint defense program office would monitor a potential software leak with extreme urgency. He adjusted his earpiece, took a slow breath to settle his focus, and replied, "Put him through."