Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96454 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 482(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96454 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 482(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
I lean into him. I’m so glad he’s here. I know this can’t last, but I want to pretend for a while. I want to be a normal girl with the guy she likes sitting in a park on a Saturday with nothing more to do than hold his hand and watch the world go by.
“You don’t think they would go full-on Housewives on each other?” Heath asks the question with the trepidation of a man who’s known a couple of table flippers in his time.
“CeCe and my mom?” I shake my head. “Never. They’ll shout at each other for a while, and then CeCe will get bored and leave. I’m still trying to figure out how CeCe snuck up.”
“Do you honestly believe a simple door can stop the fabulous CeCe Foust?” he teases.
I was sure she’d simply tell the door to open and it would. Or she would sit in her limo until the driver managed to catch someone going in or out. She certainly wouldn’t hit a buzzer and ask to be let up. Probably because my mom would tell her where she could go. “Nope. How do you feel about going in front of Huffman?”
“Terrified out of my mind, and also excited. It means we need to buy some data,” he says. “CeCe said she was opening the purse strings, right?”
“Yes.” I’m going to have to call her to get that money flowing. I hope my mom doesn’t do too much damage. “And that’s the first thing we need to do. I’ve got some contacts.”
“The AI needs food,” Heath says and then frowns. “And a name. I thought about calling her Lydia, but my grandmother will kill me if I name an AI after her. I don’t know a bunch of other famous matchmakers. Wasn’t there one in Fiddler on the Roof?”
I knew the song, but that was about it. “Call her Emma. From Jane Austen. Women like Jane Austen, and a lot of men won’t get the reference.”
“Uhm, wasn’t she kind of terrible at matchmaking? Like all the people she put together were actually wrong for each other?” Heath asks.
He probably remembers it better than I do. “I got nothing else, babe. If it were up to me, we’d name it Love Doctor.”
He nods. “Emma it is then.”
I’m not good with the sentimental stuff. I like to call a thing what it is. We should talk more about this, but it feels too good to sit in the sun with him. “I know I said I needed to work today.”
He kisses the top of my head. “We are taking the day off. Tomorrow’s soon enough to deal with the fact that we got an invite to the big show.”
I take a deep breath and settle against him. Tomorrow will be here before we know it. I want to enjoy today.
Chapter Eighteen
“What is all this?” Lydia looks down at the mess I’ve made of her dining room table.
It’s Monday morning two weeks later, and I’m in full-on panic mode. Not that I show it. “It’s paperwork for the patent we’re filing. It’s several patents, really.”
Lydia pulls up a seat and settles her glasses on her nose as she inspects one of the many forms I’m filling out. “To protect Heath’s artificial thingee? The one he thinks can replace me?”
“I don’t think he’s trying to replace you.”
“Oh, he is. It won’t work, but I find it fascinating,” she admits. “So this patent will make it so no one can steal his program?”
It’s a bit more complicated than that. “The US patent system is set up more for machinery than software. It’s had a hard time keeping up, so what we’re really patenting is a bunch of processes, including how the AI learns. In this case he’s got a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning.”
This morning Lydia is wearing another of her fabulously colored caftans, purple and yellow and red today. Her hair is up in a turban, and she’s wearing the biggest hoop earrings I’ve ever seen. “What is unsupervised learning?”
“That’s when we feed the AI a bunch of data and the AI has to find the patterns on its own.”
“What kind of data do you feed it? I know he’s using the databases he built for me. Is that part of this patent?”
“Oh, that’s not nearly enough data. Honestly, that’s being used more as a part of supervised learning. It’s very specific and will teach the AI what kinds of patterns to look for, and then we hit that sucker with the big stuff.” I was glad I had some more cash because we needed to get the train moving. CeCe had transferred us another fifty K the same morning she and Mom had their knock-down, drag-out, and then she’d sent me to some intellectual property lawyers to get the ball rolling on the patents, hence me with tons of paperwork. She’d told me that she was sending some more by this morning, so I’m waiting for the courier.