Dar remained seated and leaned back, resting her weight on the arms of the chair. “Kerry?” She motioned the younger woman forward with a jerk of her head. That was a surprise. Even her own people expected her to do the presentation; certainly Michelle had.
Kerry took a breath, then stood and picked up her laptop, tucking it under her arm and walking to the front of the room. She efficiently disconnected the display screen and plugged into her external video port, then booted up the laptop and requested a cellular connection to their network. She glanced up as it was connecting. “This was an interesting scenario to develop a solution for,” she commented. “Because in order for an interactive system to work, you have to make it easy to use and complex in its design all at the same time.”
She brought up a network diagram, setting counters and narrowing the focus. “This is your current data communications network.” She started the monitors running “You can see, your current utilization runs into bottlenecks here and here, mostly because of the bandwidth requirements, especially in 208 Melissa Good the video link.”
Dar watched Michelle’s face as the smaller woman leaned forward, peering at the live data with interest.
“So, to open the pipeline, we’d bring in trunk circuits here and here.”
Kerry had another screen open, and she typed several rapid-fire commands, which suddenly made the monitors jump and flutter. “Like that.”
Michelle’s brows creased. “Did you just…do it?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Kerry acknowledged, with a gentle smile. “See how that smoothes the bottlenecks? You get better through-put.” She brought up another screen, this one an actual link into the Disney reservations system.
“We analyzed the application you were running as well. It provides a lot of information, but it’s slow, and it’s very layered, making people go through an intensive drill before they get where they want to go.” She clicked again. “Our web design division suggests this as a replacement. You can see it’s a three-dimensional representation of one of your parks, and to get where you want to go, the touch screen technology is used, like this…” She tapped with her mouse key, and the scene shifted, then shifted again to display the castle in the Magic Kingdom.
“Nice,” Michelle murmured.
“Um, no.” Kerry tapped again, at the graphically drawn doors. “This is nice.” The doors opened, and she was given a menu of options. “To see the menus, you go here.” She showed it. “Then if you want to make a reservation, you go here.” The screen was replaced with an overhead shot of the restaurant, complete with tables. “You can pick your time, and it will show what tables are available.” She clicked, and a small screen popped up. “You type your name in, and there you are.” The table was now labeled Mickey Mouse.
The entire room was focused on Kerry now, and she glanced past them to a pair of warm, sparkling blue eyes, one of which winked at her. “But this is a nice addition,” she went on, accepting the reservation. “It gives you the option to leave a pager number, here, so you can be reminded of your reservation, and so the restaurant staff can get hold of you if there’s a change.” She typed in a number, and clicked Okay, then paused expectantly.
Seconds later, a soft beeping sounded from across the room, and Dar held up her pager, then reset it.
“That’s…incredible.” Michelle sat back. “But what kind of bandwidth problems are we talking about? That program must be huge.”
Kerry met her gaze and smiled. “Want to find out?” she inquired. “We threw this on two of our Alpha servers, and wrote a little stress-testing program.” She clicked, displaying a network analyzer in one corner, then started the program with a different session. “See? It’s not that big, really, since we cache the screens like the seat maps locally, and we cut way down on the video traffic. You only need to talk to a reservationist if you can’t figure something out, or if you want to make special arrangements. There’s parameters you can specify, like a cutoff on party size, so someone won’t put in for a party of thirty or something.”
She stopped talking and gazed out at them. “Any questions?” Kerry glanced around the room, then let her eyes settle on Michelle. “We Tropical Storm 209
downloaded the PDF maps from your website, and cross-referenced them to the location database that’s up there, then ran it all through a three-D modeler attached to a back-end datafile that stores all the information.” She paused for Michelle’s nod of understanding. “Beyond that, it was mostly customizing it to your business style, which Dar and I had an opportunity to evaluate the past two days.”
Dar’s brow lifted unobtrusively. That…was impressive and unprompted.
Kerry had somehow clued in to the fact that Michelle was miffed that she’d spent the night wandering the park instead of at dinner with her, and had turned a purely personal motive into a compelling business one. Nice. Very nice. She caught the younger woman’s eyes and smiled appreciatively, noting the faint blush that colored Kerry’s cheeks.
“No, I…” Michelle turned to Dar, with a little incredulous shake of her head. “Can I speak to you in private for a moment?”
Gotcha. “Sure,” Dar replied amiably, as she stood up and motioned for Michelle to precede her. They slipped out the door in the rear, into a small antechamber with soft ferns and a smoked glass skylight.
The redhead turned to face her. “I didn’t expect that.”
Dar smiled. “I told you I make things happen. Diagrams and grids are fine, but I thought you wanted to see an end result, not promises.”
A slow nod, and then the woman’s eyes lazily caressed her. “So, did you have fun last night?”
“More than you did, I bet.” Dar chuckled. “I’ve had dinner with Jerry.”
Michelle tried without much success to wipe a smile off her face. “He doesn’t have much good to say about you, I’ll tell you that.” She gazed up at the taller woman. “I spent most of the night hearing about how you’d screw me over.”
“Not my style,” she disagreed. “We screw up sometimes, just like everyone else does, but we don’t go out looking for victims.” Now she let her own eyes wander, letting a little of her admittedly seductive side surface. “But I don’t think you’re the victim type anyway.”
Michelle blinked, then she stepped back a little, and folded her arms. “I’ll take that as a compliment. That was a nice presentation. Your little protégée knows her stuff.” A cynical look entered her eyes. “Here I thought she was just a bit of fluff you brought with you.”
“Kerry’s not a bit of anything,” Dar replied, more sharply than she’d intended.
The smaller woman’s lips tensed, then she chuckled softly. “Ah, so you do have the rare soft spot. Well, no offense meant, Dar. I like the fact that you stand up for your people.” She sighed. “That’s so rare at our level. I’ve seen countless situations where a subordinate is mostly used for putting blame on, but I don’t think you’re that type.”
“No,” Dar replied honestly.
“And I don’t think you’re the kind of person who lies for no reason. So, were you really casing the joint last night?” Michelle gazed at her, a half smile on her face.
“I was keeping a promise,” Dar answered quietly. “And no, it wasn’t business-related.”
210 Melissa Good The shorter woman leaned back against a sideboard and crossed her arms. “Interesting, and that was more important to you than locking up this bid?” she asked. “If that’s the case, I’m not sure we can do business, Ms.