The Pedestal Read Free Page A

marketplace, restaurants will be able to use the nexus to seamlessly manage their table turnover, waiting lists, and even their supply inventory. And I’ll finally make my mark on this company.
    I’m very excited about it, yet in the entire time I’ve been working on it, I don’t think I’ve ever done more than toss around its market potential with Arthur.
    Why?
    Because the guts of IDS programs simply aren’t germane to our friendship. They are, however, germane to my tale. So please forgive the following explanation.
    IntelliQ is a patron analysis suite. Unlike native nexus analytics, which are leveraged exclusively for logistics management, IntelliQ endeavors to quantify the eating habits of restaurant patrons—what they typically order, how often they leave room for dessert, how long they like to linger for leisurely conversation, how much they tend to tip, et cetera—and calculates the likely resource investment and, ultimately, the profit margin associated with each dining party before they ever walk through the door. Patron statistics are carefully guarded throughout this process in accordance with nexus privacy protocols, but the statistics aren’t the point. The real payoff begins at the moment when a patron makes a formal entry to the daygrid on his—or her—implant, favoring a particular restaurant; as these data points become available to the nexus, IntelliQ fluidly adjusts projections for consumer turnout at the restaurant and modifies its efficiency plan for seating, menu preparation, staffing, et cetera. It will shave a minimum of twenty percent off the average restaurant’s operating costs.
    A fringe benefit for patrons is that if a venue is over capacity or running a waiting list, IntelliQ can be used in conjunction with the nexus to issue notices to customers’ daygrids with real-time alternative recommendations based on their preferences, proximity, traffic and so forth. Of course, that’s a selling point that we’ll only tout from one side of our mouths, since no restaurant will appreciate their customers being redirected elsewhere when they could instead be made to wait. Nevertheless, once the nexus is in possession of the ball, tram and shuttle schedules will remap accordingly to compensate—all in an instant.
    If the program tests well—and I have no reason to believe it won’t—it’ll be a shoo-in for the government’s next add-on roundup. If that happens? Oh, man ... I tremble with bliss at the thought. It’ll mean billions for IDS over the next few years—of which a percentage will be justly mine. And not only will the enhancement benefit restaurants—which will pay well for it in the form of taxes—commerce in general will become that much less volatile, paving the way for even higher-profile government contracts with IDS.
    I know. I’m awesome. By the way, this is just the sort of dinner conversation that has kept me single for most of my adult life.
    Anyway, Arthur comes into play the moment my programs land on our test partitions. Even then, he’s not terribly interested in my programmatic procedures; his concerns revolve around which gateways I’m using, which scripting libraries I’ve imported from the codebank. What he does—I think—is plug our programs into the nexus via our corporate portal, which in turn releases them into the market stream behind the appropriate firewalls across the global network. Without Arthur, my program’s dead in the water.
    Hey, let’s just call a spade a spade: without Arther, IDS is doomed.
    If Keith seriously thinks I stand a chance at filling Arthur’s enormous shoes, he’s as asinine as he is socially retarded. Whether he’s prepared to acknowledge it or not, our top contracts are in serious danger right now—the government isn’t known for giving second chances. We’ve done a good job for them over the years, but there’s no loyalty in business or bureaucracy. A single mistake, and they’ll drop us like a rotten egg.
    I