The Hummingbird Project

It's late 2011. After securing financing from venture capitalist Bryan Taylor, cousins Vincent Zaleski and Anton Zaleski quietly hand in their resignations at New York City based Torres and Thatcher Corp. - where Vincent worked as a high frequency trader and Anton being one on the coding team - to embark on the top secret project of laying a 4" diameter fiber optic cable in as straight a line underground from the Kansas Electronic Exchange Data Center to the New York Stock Exchange servers in New Jersey to increase the electronic trading speed down to at least 16 milliseconds, 1 millisecond faster than that currently exists, which would allow them proverbially, as Vincent puts it, to win the lottery even before the numbers are drawn. In the partnership, Vincent is the wheeler-dealer who requires anyone associated with the project to sign a legal non-disclosure agreement, while milquetoast Anton, who had to be be convinced to give up a steady job especially in light of needing to support a family, is the coding genius. Beyond their now former boss, cutthroat Eva Torres, becoming their competitor, one other reason for not telling her about the project is that she would probably consider much of the existing coding that Anton would be using as proprietary to the company, while Vincent would argue that it is Anton's intellectual property as the person who wrote it in the first place. Beyond some of the more obvious hurdles they potentially facing coming to fruition, one of the biggest arguably is Eva finding out, she who will do anything to ruin the cousins for abandoning her. Within this scenario, the project takes on a different meaning for each of Vincent and Anton as it progresses, Vincent who receives some personal news which taints the need for expediency, and Anton who is made aware of other aspects of the consequences of what they are doing.