"No," Marianne assured him. "Your pay and benefits are being processed correctly. Claire would like to speak with you about a possible opportunity and about how your employment ended. You are free to decline."
He considered the offer while standing outside the agency's office under a gray sky. He had resigned because he wanted the situation to stop consuming other people's time, and he did not particularly want another conversation about being the subject of an unexpected corporate event. Still, Claire had treated him with real kindness before the incident, and the possibility of a straightforward explanation appealed to him. He told Marianne she could give Claire his telephone number and that an afternoon meeting would be possible.
Meanwhile, the engineering team discovered that the initial mathematical boundary was not the entire problem. The immediate mitigation had made the system stable enough to operate under review, but a second set of historical cases produced inconsistent results when clients changed their schedules after an assignment had been partially completed. Marcus had begun examining whether the algorithm's objective function mixed two kinds of penalty that should have remained separate. He had enough information to make progress, but the problem was broader than the team first understood.
Marcus came to Claire's office with a series of graphs and told her they could not responsibly restore full automation until the deeper assumption was corrected. The company could maintain service using the current safeguards, yet doing so required extra staffing and would become expensive if the situation continued for weeks. Claire asked whether the team needed external expertise. Marcus hesitated before saying that he would value an opportunity to discuss the problem with the man who had recognized the first boundary.
"I don't want Owen treated as a convenient emergency resource," she told him. "If he works with us, he'll have a defined role, proper compensation, and the freedom to say no."
Marcus agreed without reservation. He had already reviewed Owen's mathematical observation with engineers in two other offices, and several experienced people independently confirmed that the seven lines identified a real weakness in the model. He wanted Owen involved not because the engineering staff had become incapable, but because a different perspective could help them question assumptions they had stopped noticing. Claire found that distinction important enough to repeat in her notes.
Before contacting Owen herself, she called an extraordinary meeting with Eleanor Price, Malcolm Reed, Marianne Holt, Marcus, and the company's legal counsel. She brought the incident report, the engineering verification, and the facilities conduct complaints, along with a proposed plan to address each separately. The confidential-data issue would receive a security review, regardless of who had written the equation. Owen's contribution would be properly documented and compensated if he agreed. The conduct allegations against Dalton would be investigated without assuming an outcome simply because Claire was angry.