"Looking good," Peter said, watching the software do its thing quickly and accurately. "Hey, no mistakes," he said when Paul finished jotting down several lines. It took him a moment to realize that what Paul had written were the lyrics to a song. A Kate McGreggor song.
Byron applauded and, noticing Peter's ruminating, elbowed him.
"Good stuff, Paul," Peter said quietly.
"Hey, Ricky," Byron called, "how'd you manage to speed up the recognition so much?"
A smiling Rick peered over the edge of another nearby partition. "You can thank my pals at MIT. They were kind enough to slip me some new algorithms at that conference I went to last week," Rick said. "It zips up the language translation stuff, too. Watch." He punched a few keys and the text on the display suddenly changed to Spanish, accents and all, then, a keystroke later, Cyrillic.
"Okay, come on now," Peter said with a clap, putting an end to the show. "We've only got another forty-five minutes," he said, checking the clock on the wall. "I want you guys to run through it once more to make sure there aren't any glitches."
"It's all working," Paul assured him, a little defensively. Just like old times.
Peter smiled. "Okay, okay."
Byron said, "We've got the whole works all ready to show him.
It's gonna knock his socks off."
Peter had been skeptical about meeting Byron's old friend, who was due to arrive shortly. However, trusting Byron's judgment, he had ultimately given in.