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The Hummingbird Project
Stockbroker Vincent Zaleski pitches Bryan Taylor on investing in a fiberoptic cable from Kansas electronic exchange to the New York Stock Exchange in order to more quickly execute orders in a new high-frequency trading (HFT) operation. Taylor buys into the idea. Meanwhile, Vincent and his cousin Anton Zaleski are still employed by Eva Torres, where Anton programs trading software. Eva is also working on several ideas for HFT. Soon enough, Anton and Vincent quit, infuriating Eva. She insists that any code Anton created for her firm belongs to it, and even the thoughts in his head might be proprietary.
Vincent has hired Mark Vega to oversee the building of the fiberoptic cable tunnel. Vincent occasionally helps Mark purchase or lease the rights to land in order to make the cable as straight as possible. Any deviation in the shape of the tunnel will create delays in the trade. Anton is hard at work trying to shave 1 millisecond off the time it takes to transmit orders to NYC. Currently, his software will do it in 17 milliseconds, which is not fast enough to be competitive. It needs to be at most 16 milliseconds to be a viable enterprise for Taylor's firm.
Eva finds an NYU student who has written a paper about microwave pulses to effect HFT. She hires him and starts the process of building a series of towers to make trades with microwaves. As Vincent struggles with acquiring land, being diagnosed with cancer, and broken drill bits, Eva manages to finish her microwave towers first, dominating the market.
Eva also takes revenge on Anton by having him arrested by the FBI for stock market fraud by using stolen property in the form of the software that he wrote for her company. While Anton is in jail, he triggers a logic bomb that he left in Eva's software as an insurance policy; this results in a 20 millisecond slowdown in her trading, rendering her microwaves useless. She subsequently drops Anton's charges in exchange for learning how to fix the bug.
In the hospital Bryan visits Vincent and accuses Vincent of failing him, costing him hundreds of millions of dollars and revealing he might lose his company. As Vincent undergoes chemotherapy, Mark shows him that he has completed the project and the speed achieved is 15.73 milliseconds, although Vincent admits that they are now obsolete. Vincent bought a cheap insurance policy on the project, but the insurance company denied to pay the claim and the project has cost him all his money. Anton reveals his next idea for HFT involves neutrino messaging, believing it could cut the time from Kansas City to NYC down to as little as 9 milliseconds.