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"Nearly two hundred thousand. But just because we have a bad part in the test models doesn't mean the
ROM chip in every HI we've manufactured is bad."
"Wrong again," Sam sneered.
"How can you know that?" she asked. "You can't possibly "
"They're all bad. Every III we've shipped is going to fail after one thousand hours of use. Statistically,
that'll average out to about a year less time under office use, more time under home use."
"One year!" She caught her breath while Mitch swore softly. She wanted to reject Sam's conclusion, but
she couldn't. He would never have predicted something this dire if he weren't absolutely certain.
She tried to sort through the facts logically. They'd faced recalls before, but never one this massive. She
began thinking aloud, hoping to reassure herself as she reassured them. "It'll be a huge headache, but we
can deal with it. Dayle-Wells is a reliable firm. If they've made a bad chip, they'll take financial
responsibility for it." In her mind, she was already envisioning the logistics of this kind of recall. Once the
outer case was opened, the actual replacement of the ROM chip was a relatively minor procedure. The
old one was simply unplugged from its slots and a new one inserted. But the sheer number of machines
involved made the recall complex, and it had to be done before the faulty chip physically destroyed the
computer by smashing the disk drive head.
"Little Miss Pollyanna," Sam scoffed. "Always looking for the bright side. Well, babe, this time there isn't
one. Dayle-Wells isn't responsible for the bad chip. We are."
Mitch's head shot up. Susannah felt as if a cold fist had clutched her spine.
Sam began to pace. "The ROM listing Dayle-Wells received from us was buggy."
Mitch spun around. "That's impossible. We have a dozen safeguards built in to keep that sort of thing
from happening."
"Weil, it happened this time. Five lines just five lousy lines of bum code out of a hundred but those
five lines programmed a time bomb into the machines. Every Blaze III we've shipped will work for
exactly one thousand hours, and then it will fail. The disk drive slams its head back and forth. It destroys
itself and burns out the power supply. After that nothing." His voice had a harsh, raspy edge. "One
thousand hours from the date the computer is first turned on, every one of those III's is going down."
Yank spoke thoughtfully. "The first of those failures will be showing up any day now, if they haven't
already. Others are going to take years."
Dates and numbers spun like a roulette wheel in Susannah's head. They had charts that were amazingly
accurate at predicting computer-use time. At best, they had only a few months to prepare. Once again,
she began to think aloud. "We can handle the recall. It'll be expensive it'll definitely hurt but it won't
kill the company."
"Susannah's right," Mitch said. "We can set up some sort of centralized system. Move a few hundred of
our people into temporary service positions and send them out into the field. Thank God it's just one
chip. We take out the old one, plug in the new one. We can do it."
Sam hunched his shoulders and turned his back to them.
Yank's voice was strained. "No. No, I'm afraid we can't. Come here and take a look."
With a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, Susannah got up from the arm of the couch and
walked to the workbench. Mitch fell into step beside her. Sam stayed where he was with his back turned
away from them. Whatever Yank was about to show them, Sam had already seen.
Susannah gazed down into the orderly, internal world of the Blaze III. Its microchips were laid out like
rows of miniature houses on the neat little village streets of the green printed circuit board. With the tip of
a pair of long-nosed pliers, Yank singled out one microchip. Susannah leaned forward to take a look.
"This is the bad chip," Yank said. "Look. It's soldered. The chip is permanently soldered to the board."
He paused a moment, giving his words time to sink in. "We can't do a simple little chip swap. This
particular part was designed to be permanent. That means we have to replace the whole circuit board on
every Blaze HI we've ever made."
Susannah's bones seemed to have lost the ability to support her. She felt as if she had just been punched
in the belly. They couldn't afford to replace the circuit board on every machine they had manufactured.
The cost would be prohibitive.
They didn't look at each other. Susannah stared down at the circuit board, Mitch at the litter of tools on
the workbench. Silence ticked away like a doomsday clock. All of them knew that Yank had just
pronounced their death sentence.
Chapter 28
P r e v i o u s T o p
N e x t
The four of them sat silently around Angela's kitchen table. Mitch held his reading glasses between his
fingers and folded one stem in and out. Sam rolled an empty can of Coke between his open palms.
Susannah rubbed her right temple with the pad of her thumb. She had just done the unthinkable. She had
made the phone call that shut down the Blaze HI assembly line.
Yank stared off into space. He had taken himself to a place so far away he might not have been with
them at all.
Mitch finally spoke. "I can't even conceive of how many hundreds of millions this is going to cost."
No one said anything. Even a giant company like IBM or FBT would have difficulty recovering from this
sort of financial catastrophe, and a young company like SysVal simply didn't stand a chance.
Susannah's hand curled into a fist. If only some of the III's had been bad, they could have handled it, but
the fact that the machines they had shipped last week, yesterday, the ones that had come off the line that
very morning the fact that all of them were bad made the situation so hopeless her mind could barely
absorb it.
Yank slowly re-entered their world. "Who wrote the bad code?"
The Coke can slapped between Sam's palms. "I don't know for sure. My guess is that it was one of the
engineers who was working on the instructions for the chip. A guy named Ed Fiella. He only worked for
us about six months, then he quit."
"Did you try to find him?"
"Yeah, but he disappeared, so I let it go. I couldn't ask too many questions or people would have been
able to figure out that something was wrong."
"No one else knows about this?" Mitch asked sharply.
Sam shook his head. "Until today, I was the only one who had all the pieces."
Susannah rubbed the pulse in her temple. "How could you keep something like this secret?"
"I used a couple of independent engineers in Boston to run a few tests, some guys in Atlanta people
who weren't likely to bump into each other while they were out jogging. And I didn't let any of them
know this involved anything more than a couple of prototypes." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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