Chips - Part 5

Taju watched them leave. The see-through glass walls of the eatery gave him an untrammeled view of their departure. The thumb drive with the super-secure chip he was to trade with them felt like a ton of bricks in his pocket now. They never even so much as asked him for it.

If the circumstances were different he'd have applauded. He was impressed. Immensely. He surmised that this was why RC maintained its impressive business model year-on-year. Such a hawk at the top guaranteed so much and gave them tremendous leverage in the dog-eat-dog world of tech innovation. The man was too good.

Plus, they had an inside R&D team working on new stuff that wasn't even out in the market yet. And he gave them the chance to try it out. Now, he knew why the notification indicator didn't stop blinking. They were remotely cloning his phone. That was the premonition nudging him at the back of his mind throwing up red flags which he initially couldn't place.

He sat down heavily. This was where his fantastical ideas had brought him. He shook his head thinking about his dreams. It had been a chance occurrence from the beginning. He was coding a programme that could compile into an app which afforded a user the opportunity to have a single sign-in for all the user's online transactions and that securely stored bank account details in the cloud.

But his code failed every security test he ran on it and with each code-editing he did, the failure rate skyrocketed. He'd all but given up until an idea occurred to him one night after he'd nearly smashed his laptop in frustration and had gone to cool off in the shower. As the icy droplets of harmattan-cultured shower splashed about his exhausted frame, he realised that if he reversed the code to render other security systems obsolete rather than attempt to secure privacy online, he could embed that algorithm in a secure chip which he could trade to a cybersecurity firm.

He reckoned that they'd be able to use it to convince companies of the need for extra vigilance online and display why these companies ought to take the cybersecurity services they provided onboard. That much he'd done with REDBRIDGE CYBERGUARD thinking he'd scored big. But they'd gone and turned the tables on his head.

Taju shook his head. They were good. He was honest enough to admit that much.