Free Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery by Maria Schneider

eliminate anything that might give him a chance.”
    “But it’s not even original! And there’s nothing inventive about it!”
    “Agreed. But if we take the code out, he can’t even claim an idea. He’s now swearing he hired Joe for his language expertise to prove the concept.”  His forehead wrinkled.  “Or something like that. But I’m pretty sure I did the Pig Latin after hearing Joe interrupt a bunch of us engineers with his stupid phrases. No one suggested it as a real language for the phone. Honestly, I was making fun of him, which might not have been nice, but instead of shutting him up, he thought it made him important!”
    I groaned. “And now all the phones are going to ship with a Pig Latin option?  I thought being hired at a startup company was supposed to mean working on cutting edge technology!”
    Kovid rubbed his forehead as though trying to erase a headache. “Right now, it’s a hidden option.”
    “He at least let you hide it?”
    Kovid shook his head.  “That’s the weird part. I took that code out, I know I did. But whoever put it back in added a special key sequence to select it.  Once it’s turned on, the phone will translate and answer questions in both Pig Latin and English.
    “All the other languages are selected by typing in the first four to six letters of the language after a verbal request. For Spanish, you say ‘Spanish,’ and then you type ‘S p a n.’ But when the modules were dropped back in, the Pig Latin was coded behind the words Joe Black.  And the entire name had to be typed in, no spaces.”
    Goosebumps ran across my arms. “Joe must have put that Pig Latin stuff back in after you took it out.”
    He looked away, staring blankly at his screen. “Who else would bother?”
    My mind scrolled to Cary, but that didn’t make sense. Cary couldn’t have been planning the Pig Latin thing from day one because no one in their right mind would think it was patentable. “You can tell that the Pig Latin stuff was put back in before Joe died, right?”
    “Of course he had to have done it while still alive!!” He swallowed hard. “When I saw that in there...It was like a bhoot, the ghost of Joe, was standing right next to me.” His glance shifted behind me as though he might be able to see the bhoot right now. I rubbed at the goosebumps and had to force myself not to look.
    “I can tell from the date that the code was reinserted almost immediately after I took it out, but there have been two updates to the Pig Latin modules and one of them was yesterday.”
    From the look on his face, it was obvious he hadn’t done the updates. And Joe had already been dead for a couple of days by yesterday.  I gulped. “Oh.”
    He nodded. “Yeah. The file had been accessed. Something changed because the date changed, but whoever made the changes didn’t update the change log.”  He raised one hand helplessly and then shook himself. “Look, none of that matters. It’s just weird, is all. I’m almost finished with the code to allow the user to select the voice assistant name. If you don’t tell anyone, I’ll do a build with that code and you can start testing it.  It will be in the official drop at the end of the week.”
    I straightened and backed out of the cube opening. “Thanks. Shoot me an email when you have the latest ready.  Meanwhile I’ll brush up on my Pig Latin because if Cary gets his way, it will be our number one language.”
    Mind boggling.  Just mind boggling.

Chapter 12
     
    There were only so many nights I could continue to escape at a reasonable time, but tonight had to be one of them. My parents were leaving tomorrow, and I’d promised Mom I’d invite Mark over “for at least cake” before they left.  Was it my fault they had been busy at Sean’s until the last night they were in town?
    I waited until Cary made his rounds just after five and then started a random test loop on one of the phones to run overnight.  The battery would likely