The Last Network - Chapter 3
Rabbit sat in the corner of an office swiping right. They were downtown in one of those older buildings that had been subdivided into suites and filled with fly-by-night professionals. Across from him, a man wearing a virtual reality helmet was gesticulating wildly. He’d been doing that for the last two hours. Pointing into the air, jabbering away in Hebrew, sometimes getting up and pacing. Rabbit watched as the man stood and walked into his waste basket again. Skittles spilled out of the bin and dribbled across the floor. These people were supposed to be the best, but who could tell? Yelp didn’t cover this line of work.
The VR helmet was connected to a lab full of guys somewhere in Israel. Tel Aviv maybe? Rabbit wasn’t paying close attention. He’d perk up when they told him they could do the job. In the meantime, he had Tinder and time to kill.
His stomach rumbled. He should have eaten lunch before coming; now he was stuck. The man had Rabbit’s external hard drive and Rabbit didn’t trust him alone with it. Finally, the man removed the helmet.
“We can do it.”
“How much?” Rabbit asked.
“Five hundred thousand, maybe seven fifty. We’ll need to think it over.”
Rabbit looked up from his phone. “How long?”
“Something like this could take six weeks. It could take more. I need to know what you want the finished product to look like,” the man said.
“Swap the graphics with generic icons. Wipe any identifiable marks. I need this to look like fully licensed code. I need papers on it. I’ll need a website and a code repo for developers to pull from. Most of all, no one can know it’s a knock off. No hint you reverse-engineered a surgical training tool.”
The man sat down behind his desk. He looked across at Rabbit. “More work means more time and money. I’ll need to put a pencil on it.”
“But it can be done?” Rabbit asked.
“Of course, it can. That is not a problem.” He answered without looking up from his notebook.
“When you do your quote make sure you have a really sharp pencil. I’m not into wasting time or money. This could be a nice job for you, or it could be a great job for my friends in Minsk.”
“I understand. You, my friend, came here on referral, so you also understand what we are capable of. Our work speaks for itself.”
“Funny, but I’ve heard nothing about your work,” Rabbit said.
“Exactly,” the man replied.
He stood and handed the drive back to Rabbit. They shook hands. Rabbit left in search of burrito.