45. Razzle-Dazzle
A high-stakes Q&A meeting. Years of work on the line. Jude Larssen is sleep-deprived, compromised, and unravelling - until an unexpected gesture from Bells changes everything.
Hello Dear Reader,
So apparently I’m in my switching things up era. You may have assumed Terms of Engagement wouldn't be surfacing again for a while longer, given my very public, very enthusiastic affair with Until You Yield, and yes - my (largely failed) hiatus.
Well - ToE is back, and we are picking up exactly where we left off - namely:
~~ the thirteen points of failure meeting with Hinata Yamamoto ~~
Fair warning: this one runs long. ~3,500 words. I make no apologies, only the case that conveying the specifics felt necessary - texture matters, and all that.
Do persevere.
Ah, also - my day gig deserves an unlikely co-author credit - particularly for the Echo State Network shout out, which emerged from a job interview. Somewhere out there, a post-doc unknowingly shaped a chapter while trying to land a role.
Yours,
K. Nett
Previously on ToE (the bits that matter):
The thirteen points of failure have been lurking since ToE35 - but Jude and company only uncovered what they actually were on Friday afternoon, leaving them a breezy two and a half days to prep before this rendezvous.
The preceding night in the marital suite was, to put it diplomatically, busy. It opened with Jude transmuting his sexual frustrations into “waterboarding his staff with math and citations” - read more in “The War Room” (ToE42) - which, as it turns out, was not entirely wasted energy. Luke and Jack will be recycling his lessons shortly. Then, once the professional suffering concluded, Bells ensured the personal variety got its turn (ToE43).
For full appreciation of what follows, it may serve you to remember the lambda 0.2 learning rate - conjured from pure narrative convenience by Jude in ToE25, dusted off in ToE31, and again in ToE35.
And just before the meeting (ToE44), our two leads staged a small intimate moment in front of the entire team. Jude’s feelings about this were, characteristically, complicated. Bells was not too pleased about him not meeting her “expectations” which she vocalised openly.
[Narrated: 3rd limited, adjacent to Jude’s perspective]
The Yamamoto HQ was all glass, steel and sharp angles. Inside - the engineering floor stretched boundlessly, rows of tech professionals in crisp shirts, heads bent in concentration - as if their silent devotion could conjure miracles from circuits and code.
I will run a firm like this one day.
This was what he’d been chasing for years.
The static of nerves arising then, unmistakably, stakes returning into focus. He clenched his fist, felt his throat tighten.
I fucked up last night and might just pay the price today.
They’ve traversed the floor swiftly, led by a receptionist.
Hinata Yamamoto was waiting outside the conference room in the top right corner, flanked by four men whose names Jude immediately forgot on introduction, his brain cycling through the weekend’s mishaps. Engineers. They’re techies - he latched onto that instead,
Hinata looked him over once, a faint lift of one eyebrow.
“Rough night?”
The question hung there, heavy with implication.
You want to do business at this level? You want to operate in our world? Then show up looking like you belong here.
Jude felt Bells’ eyes piercing into the side of his skull. The team shifting uncomfortably. The weight of three years of work, desperation and carefully constructed credibility threatening to collapse because he’d let the team go over a blow job, then half-arsed the last two points of failure while digging for Teddy’s data, finally falling asleep face down at a fucking desk.
He offered his best smile, one that had closed deals before, turned latent disasters into opportunities. Except this time his teeth were clenched, and the grin didn’t reach his eyes.
“Long one,” he said. “Your team’s thirteen failure points demanded attention.”
Not quite an apology - an acknowledgment. Maybe, if he was lucky, Hinata would read it as dedication rather than what this was.
Idiocy. Recklessness.
They walked into the conference room. Hinata Yamamoto situated himself at the head of the table, flanked by the engineers on each side.
“My top talent is with us here today” Hinata announced.
“Likewise” Jude replied, with a soft smirk.
Bells took the seat to his left. Jack to his right. The team arranged themselves nearby, laptops open, faces carefully neutral. Hinata’s face carved out of stone.
“So, Mr Larssen. I hope the suite was to your liking.”
Another little dig, mixing professional and personal, a vague suggestion of all things that happened at that suite.
Or maybe I’m just paranoid. Exhaustion always amplified this.
Bells stepped in before he could gather his thoughts into something professional.
“It was lovely, thank you. We’re ready to address your points of failure now.”
Good. Stick to business, Bells.
Hinata’s eyes shifted to her, assessing.
“Sure, Ms Hann. Where do we begin? IoT sensors at our sites. Some have been experiencing technical issues. How are you planning to address this?”
“This refers to the potential failure point one, sensor data reliability issue you highlighted, correct?” she asked, politely.
“Obviously,” Hinata replied, as if her question was beneath him, a dismissal that irritated Jude. He saw Bells look down, abashed for a moment.
“It’s a reasonable clarification,” he cut in, voice sharp enough to draw blood.
Then leaned forward, forcing focus through the headache still pulsing at his temples.
“Also, reliability issues is meaningless. What’s the actual scope? How’s the data affected? Your report’s thin on detail”
“Site-dependent of course Mr Larssen, the report would have been extra 300 pages if I’d supplied you with all the minutiae. I believe we gave you enough to work with as is.”
“We like reading, and specificity would have helped.”
The room turned silent for a minute. Bells shot him a sideways glance. But he wasn’t sorry.
Because this was yet another “gotcha” Hinata had for them – several of his points lacked precision which forced them to run multiple scenarios based off permutations of assumptions.
“For your point one - if you actually knew what the issues were,” Jude continued, mustering professionalism, “we could tailor a solution that’s both more precise and probably cheaper. Since that’s not the case, we’ll stick to our usual process. How many sites are we talking about?”
Hinata leaned back in his seat, squinting.
“At least two. Munich and Frankfurt.”
“Then that’s where the audit starts,” Jude said. “We stress-test the sensors, run diagnostics, quantify drift. If calibration fixes it, great.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“We replace them. Procurement runs in parallel while we move across other sites. No delay to delivery.”
A pause.
“And I assume we pay for the replacements?” Hinata asked.
“I’m not a charity,” Jude said, evenly. “This wasn’t scoped.”
Too militant, too fast.
Hinata’s stare was cold as liquid nitrogen, the room had gone still. Jude thought of Bells there on his left, cataloguing this for later retrieval. Then a thought of her between his legs last night. STOP, NOT NOW. He forced his mind to compartmentalise.
“On the plus side,” he attempted a patch-up, palms sweating “if we go with our preferred supplier, we’ll get you a better deal. Plus, their hardware integrates seamlessly with Argus”
Hinata gave a terse nod.
“Another issue,” He continued. “Small datasets. Some sites only have a few months of data.”
“Not a blocker,” Bells said smoothly. “We supplement with comparable sites, then phase in live data. Luke ran simulations - performance holds.”
She rested a hand lightly on Luke’s shoulder, that gave Jude a strange jolt of something territorial.
Get it together, she is not coming onto Luke.
Luke opened his laptop, then turned it toward Hinata and his team. He stumbled a little at the start but became progressively more relaxed as he captured their attention. Jude glanced furtively at his watch, 20 minutes in, Luke was doing a half decent job at dwelling on minutiae, kept the seconds ticking by. He was just drawing out the final section when Hinata cut him off.
“Ok. Sounds reasonable. As long as we don’t run into data breach issues.”
The dismissal was casual, perfunctory. As if Luke’s work was merely adequate.
“Luke’s methodology is industry-leading,” Jude said, voice carrying an edge. “Your team’s taking notes for a reason.” He nodded toward the two techies to Hinata’s right with their tablets and digital pens.
Luke blinked, surprised. Grateful. Straightened.
Hinata’s eyebrow lifted fractionally but he didn’t argue.
“And no breach risk,” Jude added, abrupt. “We’re not pulling competitor data.”
Contain yourself, or this won’t end well.
“We’d use your own sites,” Bells said, seamlessly stepping in. “Or anonymised datasets where necessary.” Graceful. Warm smile. Stunning, as she well knew. As Hinata definitely noticed.
“Can you?” He asked.
“Standard practice,” she tilted her head slightly, meeting his eyes. Easy.
She’d achieved something Jude had tried but failed all this morning. Made Hinata warm up to them. No. To her.
“You’re convincing me Ms Hann.” Hinata smiled. “If you ever feel like working for a real company…”
Jude’s arm came up instinctively, draping across the back of her chair.
“She’s not available.”
[Narrated: 3rd limited, adjacent to Bells’ perspective]
His possessiveness surprised her. Not exactly unwelcome. Had last night shifted things? She wondered for a moment before her mind snapped back into focus on the immediate.
The next points came rapid-fire: data volume scalability, sensor calibration decay over time. The team jumping in with their presentations. Klar ran a simulation live, to many appreciative “mhm” and a couple of smiles from Hinata’s entourage, Bells noted with satisfaction.
Then model predictions explainability.
“SHAP values work well and are model agnostic” suggested the Yamamoto engineer to Hinata’s left.
Bells glanced over at Jude, of course he smirked. Then she looked at Luke - he was nodding condescendingly - as if he’d always knew. As if he’d not only just learnt about the overhead from SHAP last night.
“Yes, we could use SHAP, if you wanted to blow up your cloud compute budget by a factor of 25. Just look at the figures”.
She suppressed a chuckle, Luke even used Jude’s exact wording. That must have made him feel good. A glance sideways again, this time no satisfaction on his face – just return to that sharp focus, stoned-faced composure.
Yet she could feel his leg bounce next to hers, the nervous twitch, saw his hand tremble slightly as he pressed it to his thigh. She’d seen him stressed before but this was different, tension radiating off him in waves.
He contributed here and there answering mechanically, deliberately slow, she noted.
Hair more messy than usual, occasionally rubbing his eyes but the well-oiled machine part of his brain engaging still, then the “razzle dazzle” strategist layering on flourish and detail to ensure things ran on.
She kept up, in case she’d have to jump in: “...cloud architecture scales horizontally...” “...recalibration schedules every six months...”.
She wasn’t an engineer, but the nature of the role demanded she stay abreast with the tech. Knew the key frameworks, lingo, occasionally parsed a paper or two. Also, it impressed him when she did, and she liked the taste of that approval.
“Network latency?” Hinata said abruptly, moving down his list. “Remote facilities. How do you handle the lag?”
She saw Jack straighten.
“Edge computing architecture.” His voice carried confidence.
She glanced at her watch. Two hours in now and it was Jack’s turn, Jude was right of course. Jack was “verbose”, he could easily go on for 40 minutes unprompted on any given topic.
Jude’s plan might just work.
Yet she heard him exhale a shaky breath, modulated, quiet but unmistakable.
“We process data locally at each site, only push aggregated results to the cloud. Reduces round-trip from seconds to milliseconds. Let me show you the network diagram I’ve put together with simulated data package flow…”
“And if local computing fails?” Hinata interjected.
“Redundancy.” Jack pulled up the diagram on his laptop, angling it toward Hinata.
“Backup nodes. Primary goes down, secondary takes over. We’ve modeled it.” He shot a glance at Jude, checking for permission to go on.
He nodded.
Jack pressed play on his presentation. Hinata prodded for detail, Jack delivered flawlessly, manoeuvring challenges from Hinata’s team - exactly the questions that Jude had drilled him on the night prior.
She had to admit: Jude’s cruel grilling of them was not at all futile.
[Narrated: 3rd limited, adjacent to Jude’s perspective]
It sounded like Jack was delivering but Jude couldn’t be certain at that point.
His concentration narrowed to the drumbeat of his own nerves, feet silently tapping out a Morse code S.O.S. under the table. The inside of his cheek between his teeth, copper taste threatening.
I built this up too much, three years preparing for this very moment.
And he was there, head pounding, sleep deprived, compromised by desire.
Another failure point question at Jack – the cascading dependencies – and Jack reiterating Jude’s suggested approach from last night, the one that was fractionally better than industry standard. Yamamoto’s team leaned forward, listening. Jack was really shining now, regurgitating the entire discussion the two of them had.
A glance at his watch again, 15 minutes until the meeting’s scheduled end. Razzle dazzle was going to work. The meeting soon to conclude and they never even got to the five final points of failure that he’d tackled alone. Two of which were left lacking.
Phenomenal work stalling, he thought. That’s the British in us all. He was congratulating himself already, nerves somewhat subsiding, headache slowly receding, when Hinata’s voice took him out of it.
“Okay, Mr Larssen.” Hinata leaned back in his chair. “We won’t finish today.”
Of course not. We made sure of it.
“I have a board meeting.”
Thought you would.
“We’d need to reschedule”
Bells jumped in, unexpectedly, with that honey-cadence to her voice.
“How about we compile our answers to the remaining failure points into an email with some attachments for your review - would that work?”
Oh she was good, sparing them another performance, condensing matters into written form.
“Fine,” said Hinata after a pause. Then he turned to Jude.
“Before we go though, there’s one more thing… Mr Larssen”
Jude swallowed because he recognised that tone. Some gotcha incoming.
“Data corruption from power fluctuations. Micro-outages, voltage spikes. You lose datapoints, your timestamps are gone”
His left hand, on his lap, had formed a fist without permission. Nails digging crescents into his palm.
What the fuck is this?
“I don’t believe this is something you put forward in the report?” Jude asked, as politely as he could muster - which still came out considerably combative.
He could feel his forehead crease, face likely giving away frustration.
“No,” Hinata chuckled.
Actually did, as if this, precisely was the punchline of the great big joke he’d been setting up since they’d gone through the door.
It’s been hours of this interrogation, they had all been wrung out, and he just casually laughed in their faces now knowing this blow would sink their ship.
“We’ve just had it surface this morning,” he said, casual. “Received intel from our Lyon plant. You know the French; they take their work life balance very seriously.”
Jude didn’t buy it for a second. Hinata had been sitting on this bombshell for at least a week. Just throwing it out there now, specifically to him.
His mind had gone blank, not the type of reset preceding a revelation. The type that tanked deals alongside one’s reputation for years to come.
His hand clenched tighter, knuckles white.
Breathe. Think. FUCKING ANSWER HIM.
Nothing came.
The silence stretched. Hinata waited, expression neutral in that way that revealed everything about what he thought of Jude’s competence. Across the table, one of the engineers whispered something to another. The Larssens team immobile, frozen, that stillness of people watching their leader drown.
Then, warmth. Under the table where no one could see.
Bells’ palm covered his fist. Not a squeeze, just contact. Her hand against his, presence without pressure.
The shock of it nearly stopped his heart. What’s happening - first the tie straightening and now this?
They didn’t do this. They didn’t touch each other except in anger, lust, transaction maybe or some twisted combination of all three. Certainly never something this simple, this gentle. As if he were someone who deserved gentleness right now.
He couldn’t pull away without moving obviously, drawing attention. Was not sure he even wanted to. So, he just sat there with her hand over his, feeling his pulse hammer against her palm.
“Mr Larssen?” Hinata’s voice cut through the moment. “Or anyone from your party?”
“Cross-referencing.” Bells volunteered, unexpected.
“You verify timestamps against independent sources. Network time protocol servers. GPS synchronisation.”
She was confident, calm, her palm still over his, gently squeezing now.
Hidden under the conference table, invisible to Hinata and the engineers and most of his team. But Jack could probably see. Jack, who was suddenly carefully studying his laptop screen like it held the secrets of the universe.
She continued with the technical detail.
“We run checks against outputs from other sensors. Voltage spikes wouldn’t be uniform across all equipment. We deploy a preprocessing algorithm that catches timestamp anomalies before data reaches the LSTM.”
“Very good,” Hinata said slowly. Yet then, one of the techies jumped in, young-looking, intense.
“This works if metadata corruption is your only problem. But often you lose both - the timestamp and the reading attached to it… How do you reconstruct the reading?”
It was Bells who froze then, uncertain.
The engineer looked at her with barely disguised skepticism. “Hm?”
And something in Jude ignited.
“Ms Hann’s approach is the foundation,” he said, leaning forward, voice carrying an edge “Cross-referencing flags the corruption point. You then layer on an Echo State Network to derive the reading.”
The engineer blinked, taken aback.
Hinata’s eyebrow lifted.
“Which is what, exactly?” he shot back. Sceptical.
“It is a network model, tracks the expected temporal dynamics of the sensor signals.” Jude said, without missing a beat. “It uses the physical relationships between measurements rather than clock time to map casualty.”
Finally. The problem solving returned, the obscure knowledge synthesis on the spot, his little party trick that got him out of trouble many a time. He saw the engineers making notes again.
Yamamoto tilted his head, a mix of suspicion and intrigue.
“Be clearer please Mr Larssen, so I know this is not another ‘lambda 0.2’ learning rate moment from you.”
The Yamamoto party all laughed softly. Jude’s team none the wiser, since he’d never enlightened them to the learning rate implausibility.
“Echo State Network,” he repeated, and now his voice had that edge it always got when he was on solid ground. “Reservoir computing architecture. You create a high-dimensional dynamical system that maps input sequences to internal states. The network learns temporal dependencies without explicit time encoding.”
He leaned forward, warming to it now, mind suddenly clear, headache gone.
“Here’s how this works for you. Sensor readings have physical constraints. Temperature can’t spike 50 degrees instantaneously. Pressure changes follow thermodynamic laws. The ESN learns these dynamics. When it sees a ‘timestamp’ that violates physics - temperature spike with no corresponding pressure change - it knows the sequence is corrupted.”
Then he leaned back all the way, Bells’ palm still warm against his.
“It can reconstruct the correct order within probabilistic bounds because physics is always deterministic even when your clocks aren’t.”
Yamamoto squinted, then nodded.
“Sounds clever. Do you already have the algorithm?”
“Klar is working on it.” The lie came automatically, smooth as silk.
Klar isn’t working on shit because the algorithm just a theoretical construct right now, but Hinata doesn’t need to know that.
And Bells, for once, didn’t correct him. Neither did Klar.
“Very well then.” Hinata said, a small nod of approval. Reluctant.
“Now, I do need to go” Hinata stood then, “Email over the solution to the remaining points by end of play today,” making it clear this wasn’t a suggestion.
Jude and his party got up, Bells’ hand sliding of his. Tension still in the air between his party and Hinata’s, but failure averted. They all filled out and left the building.
“Well done” Bells said to him outside, while they waited for the cabs. He was smoking a cigarette, looking distant.
He didn’t respond immediately, just took another drag and stared at the building they’d just left.
“Brilliant enough for you?” he said, finally.
“That depends… The Echo State Network,” she answered, “Is that even real?”
“A paper came out in the summer.” He flicked ash. “Your cross-referencing bought me time to remember it.”
“It was an incomplete solution.”
“It was what I needed.” He turned to face her properly. “What I didn’t need was…” He gestured vaguely, couldn’t quite say it.
“The hand?” She raised an eyebrow. “You were about to collapse in front of Yamamoto.”
“I wasn’t.”
She stepped closer, voice low enough the team couldn’t hear.
“You carried the technical solution. I managed the room, steadied you. That’s how this works, Jude. That’s how it’s always worked.”
“It threw me”, he said. Regretted it immediately, cognisant of the implication.
“Why?” she caught it, obviously.
She looked at him, eyes piercing. He did not answer.
Then cab pulled up. He dropped the cigarette, ground it out.
He opened the cab door for her, watched her slide in, then followed, Jack squeezed in to his right. The door closed behind them, sealing them in with the lingering smell of nicotine and whatever the fuck this was between them now.
I can totally see this whole house of cards collapsing on him. Lying and lying by omission to make his way through. It’s going to catch up to him and I can’t wait 😂 the hand thing was unexpected too, and in the boardroom out of view. Sneaky! 😅
Loved it Klar! It’s unfair these are only once a month! Haha keep it up! 🫵🏼❤️
Love this chapter on so many levels 1) it had me reading about ESNs 2) the little jabs at the Brits’ and French’s approach to work 😂😂 and of course, 3) something’s shifted in Jude towards Bells…gosh the hand-holding under the table! The romantic in me almost had a meltdown.