The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  “Like I didn’t just build a beta website three and half million people still don’t have a reason to use,” Hapok said.

  The beta website was a piece of shit, Catherine said. Why was she clicking around in there drowning in a sea of pages explaining the physiology of a melanoma tumour?

  “We talked about a symptom wiki, Catherine,” he said. “So we’re just doing what designers do. We’re designing stuff. We were just glad to have a clear decision for once.”

  “What does that mean?” she said. But she knew. Slow answers to emails. A creeping incremental stasis, moments where she caught herself in a stupor at her desk, stupors the length of which she could not always remember.

  The wiki was a dumb idea, even if it had been hers. The Red Pill was supposed to read the symptoms so you didn’t have to. A wiki was completely redundant. What was everybody doing? Who was talking to who?

  Hapok had stopped arguing by that point. But there was now the flickering light of real confusion in his eyes. She wasn’t scanning right to any of them, she could sense. Not even Kalmar, who Catherine thought instinctively knew her better than the others. Understood her with very few words. He was now staring at the table in front of himself, leaving her alone with his eyes. His deference sobering her suddenly, causing her to sit down having just then realized she’d been standing, pacing back and forth in front of the window, the morning sunshine streaming in behind her, blinding everyone else in the room.

  “Hey, listen,” Catherine said to the intern, who was still fighting tears. “This is not you. Thanks for the coffee. You’re good.”

  Yohai came and found her later out behind the Warehouse. Catherine was standing next to a dumpster and staring up towards the distant, north shore hills. His manner reflected a simmering concern, but no combativeness. He wasn’t there to argue. He stood next to her, said nothing, followed her gaze.

  “That’s the thing with mountains,” he said, finally. “You have to watch them every second.”

  Catherine sighed. “I’m turning into an unpredictable bitch.”

  Yohai shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Listen, though. You gotta appreciate we’re all on your side.”

  Catherine nodded, turned back to the mountains, gazing up. “See up there?” she said.

  Yohai followed her gaze again. He looked up at the mountains.

  “When I was a kid, I had an angel up there.”

  Yohai was now quiet beside her.

  “It was a pattern of snow in the hills there, just west of the Lions.” She held out a finger and pointed to where the mark of a clear-cut had left the shape of a wing. She could tell that Yohai wasn’t seeing it. But Catherine could still easily make it out, despite the lack of snow to fill in its lines: the reclining head, the spreading wings, two little feet poking up.

  Yohai cleared his throat. “Morris called me just now,” he said. “Wondered why you weren’t answering your phone.”

  “He was the leak, wasn’t he?”

  “You could make a case that he has the most to gain.” Yohai twisting a blade of grass between his fingers. “Of course you could make a case that you do too.”

  Catherine looked over at him. His eyebrows were squinted behind those steel frames. He was still staring up at the mountain, perhaps still wondering where exactly that angel might be.

  “The more hype, the more valuable your respective shares,” he said.

  “I get it,” she said. “But you know I wouldn’t do that.”

  Yohai sighed. “I do know that, yes. I also know that it wasn’t Morris.”

  “Know how?”

  “Because he’s a pro.”

  “Maybe this is what pros do.”

  “Because I just talked to him and asked him and he said no. Because I judge him to be telling the truth.”

  Catherine shook her head. “So the competition now knows exactly what we’re doing. I say we write a press release and deny it all.”

  “But some of it’s true,” Yohai said. “All of it’s true.”

  “We deny it anyway,” Catherine said. “Then when we go to market, we say those features came later.”

  “That is a really bad idea,” Yohai said. “You want to release negative information about the company when we’re in the chute, trying to finish testing and get a beta out?”

  Catherine crossed her arms and looked away. He was sickeningly right.

  “We’re way out in front, Cate. We have patents. We have the device, the power source. We don’t have our mooring tech. But we’ll figure that out somehow. And you still have this team.”

  “Thanks for that,” she said. “But Morris signed a non-disclosure.”

  “I said I don’t think it was him.”

  “Since when are you and Morris so chummy?” Catherine asked.

  “Ah, man,” Yohai said. “So what? You sue? Trigger the shotgun clause and buy him out?”

  “Is that so crazy?” she demanded. She turned on Yohai more squarely now. In the breeze there were traces of the sea. There were trees, pavement, fumes and the lower scent of swirling ideas.

  “Maybe not crazy,” Yohai said. “But doing that just got a helluva lot more expensive.”

  Right, Catherine thought. Of course. Speculation. Increased market values. Morris didn’t have to actually pick up the phone and call people. Maybe he’d only seeded the rumour somewhere he knew it would leak from. An arm’s-length colleague. A buddy at the club. However he did it, and for whatever reason, Morris did have an interest in boxing her out. He had the deep pockets. He had the resources. He also knew that she didn’t.

  “Are you all right?” Yohai said, reaching out a hand to touch her shoulder, Catherine just that moment realizing she was hunched over, hands pressed to her face, blotting out the light and sound.

  She straightened up. She shook off Yohai’s hand. And she turned back to the mountains. No particular inspiration arriving, just looking up to her faded angel. It had been Valerie who’d first seen it, pointed it out, gesturing and explaining. For a long time Catherine couldn’t make it out. Then, even after Valerie seemed to have forgotten about it entirely, the angel came sharply into focus, where it had since remained.

  Catherine’s phone was ringing again. Ringing and ringing. Both she and Yohai could hear it. No point pretending to ignore.

  “Well I guess I’ll let you take that,” Yohai said.

  Catherine watched him retreat, down the side of the Warehouse, then around the corner and out of sight. And later, when she thought back on that moment, Catherine couldn’t remember taking the phone call. Couldn’t remember who it had been calling just that moment as she gazed up at her angel and Yohai left her alone. It could have been the lab, which had gone back to working those tests. It could have been Phil, or Morris himself. Valerie. It could have been any number of people bearing the incrementally worsening news. That slow wrong turning.

  Catherine remembered only the birds on the wires of the power poles opposite. Every tiny black head seeming to cant to one side at once, beaks elevated, as if the birds were in one gesture, as one entity, closely listening to her.

  Back to her desk, still later. It was just what you had to do. Back to the workstation, chair swivelled around to the window. She began to write the press release that would almost certainly make everything worse. She wrote the whole thing out. Loaded up an email to Decker from Fast Twitch. Might as well put those bastards to work. The device did not do what people were saying it did.

  Then she deleted it and she sat with her eyes on the window. Out there: railway sidings growing over with tall weeds, the brick perimeter walls, leaning and cracked and covered in graffiti, mountains and rising blue sky flecked with cirrus clouds. In here: Catherine’s own hands trembling in her lap, fingers laced together as if in prayer. Phones ringing and people trotting past her workstation. Andy, Codette, Ruger, Stitch. A kid with a beard she didn’t recognize. Another intern, this one brought in only the day before, whose name was Arwen, whose parents had act
ually named her after an elf in Lord of the Rings. Her own desk stacked with files and forms to sign. Letters from lawyers. A folder of financial statements from the accountant. It would all go on well enough without her, when Morris got his way. Catherine was momentarily convinced of that, at least. Everything would continue just fine. And if there was some pride to be taken from having built the business, maybe that was just it: knowing that the machinery would keep turning over even after you were chased from the premises.

  She wasn’t crying again, Catherine told herself, she was just blowing her nose. She was stuffed up. Her eyes were running. She was eighteen months older than she’d been when AF801 went down. And she thought of those seat numbers then, for the first time in weeks. She wondered at them and who they were. She wondered how they each had been doing, each, she assumed, in the funnel of their own struggles and mounting frustrations. Things gone strange. And thinking this, Catherine reached unconsciously, automatically for a lower desk drawer and opened it. Xanax, Klonopin, Paxipam, Valium, Ativan. Her doctor had recently told her: listen, if you want to try different ones, be my guest. You’re a grown woman and I’m sure you know not to do any two at the same time. Or with alcohol.

  Or swallow an entire bottle, Catherine thought. He hadn’t said that, but it was the implication. Don’t just go to sleep forever to escape the mounting messiness of life around you.

  She got up again, agitated. But she did not walk outside. She stood near the window and looked at the point in the mountain that was the farthest away. Her angel was invisible to the west, so it was the tip of Grouse Mountain instead. She stared and felt the muscles around her eyes readjust, stretch. Relax.

  She would not swallow the entire bottle of anything. At the very least, she would not do that yet. And since Catherine knew she wouldn’t be having a glass of wine until much later that evening, she chose the Klonopin, just the one tablet, and slid shut the drawer.

  LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL

  “HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE THE ACCIDENT?” Ximena asked her.

  “Coming up on two years,” Catherine said.

  “And the other time I saw you?” There was no judgment here. Catherine was looking at the pictures on the therapist’s desk again, the degrees on her wall. Ximena crossed her legs, waiting. She was wearing gorgeous boots today, Catherine couldn’t help but notice. Soft black leather, riding heels. Ximena on a horse was very easy to visualize, her back ramrod straight, hands lightly and authoritatively on the reins.

  “Six months? Eight?” Catherine said with a sigh. “I came that first time on my lawyer’s advice.”

  “Philip,” said Ximena.

  Catherine was surprised, not recalling that Phil had been discussed. “Yes,” she said.

  “Divorced. Lives in a big house in West Vancouver.” Ximena was apparently reading notes. She glanced up now and looked at Catherine steadily. “And so why try this time?”

  Where to start? Catherine thought. Worsening nightmares. Worsening daymares. All of the men in her life seeming to have their separate demands. Then of course this Dr. Rostock phoning out of the blue. Each of those would probably be worth a session for the kind of people who did therapy. But Catherine only squirmed in place, twisting in that black leather chair, nervous and uncertain, passing a take-away coffee cup back and forth between her hands.

  Ximena was looking at her notebook, scribbling something in the margin. She said, “Let’s start with the men at work.”

  Catherine sighed.

  “This Morris,” Ximena said with a frown. “Are you still angry with him?”

  So they’d talked about Morris already too. All right. Well. “He leaked confidential information about our product to the press,” Catherine said. “That breaches his NDA. And it pissed me off, yes.”

  Ximena looked up. “You’re sure it was him?”

  Yohai might think otherwise, but Catherine was sure. Who else had a motive? Morris, on the other hand, had many. But inflating the company’s value in advance of product release was a good guess. Maybe he was setting himself up to sell his share.

  “Maybe he just wants to destabilize me,” Catherine said. “Push me out.”

  Ximena waited. Catherine’s eyes went to the window. They were doing sewer work in the avenue below. Men in orange vests standing with shovels, staring into a hole. They seemed transfixed by something in the darkness down there.

  “He also started showing up in Vancouver unannounced.”

  Catherine had been in the thick of things. After the leak, Morris had taken a much higher-profile role in day-to-day decisions. He claimed that it was his concern about the leak that drove his involvement, a high irony in Catherine’s mind. But there he was, phoning in to meetings he’d never bothered with before. Phoning Yohai and Hapok directly with questions, which was infuriating because it made miscommunication more likely. His own emails to Catherine grew much more frequent and on some days seemed to arrive at unusually late hours. That last detail caught her one night in particular. Catherine in bed reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, skimming pages, more or less reminding herself how the story worked against some vague and yet compelling logic that the reminder was necessary—and it suddenly occurred to her that if Morris was emailing her, he was up at two in the morning Chicago time.

  Where are you? she wrote back.

  In Vancouver, he admitted.

  “And this concerned you?” Ximena asked.

  “Because I knew why he was here.”

  The week before he’d asked to review all the mooring tests from the lab. Catherine hadn’t even told him how the technology worked, and she didn’t particularly feel like telling him now because he didn’t need to know, because it was hard to explain, and because he’d probably just leak that too. So she’d been not answering his request on that one, and he’d gone and asked Yohai, who didn’t know any better and coughed up the name of the procedure.

  “What is plasma membrane transformation?”

  That was Morris on the phone, sounding suspicious.

  She gave him the dumbed-down venture capitalist version, the one least likely to freak him out. Basically it was a process where you made the device sticky once it interacted with stomach acid. That allowed the device to gently adhere to the stomach wall and stay in place to provide diagnostic feedback over the longer term, which was, she reminded Morris, a key DIY value proposition.

  “All right,” Morris said. “So when are we going to lock that in and go to beta?”

  Well not quite yet. It was just a question of getting the triggering elements in the coating correct so that the reaction reliably occurred and didn’t undo itself in a few days.

  Morris sighed impatiently. And what exactly was hyperlocalized endometrialization?

  Yohai and his big mouth, she thought.

  With Morris, she just told him it was technical. There were proteins and nucleic acids involved. Hormonal activators. Bottom line, by interacting with the stomach wall, the device induced the cells it contacted to act like magnets. The device attached to those cells. It didn’t interrupt digestion. It was imperceptible to the host. They’d modelled it in computer simulations. Only they were struggling to make it bond firmly in the animal trials.

  Endometrialization. Ximena was nodding. “You’re getting people pregnant.”

  “Well, no,” Catherine said. “The device implants. But nothing grows. It just sits there and transmits. Ideally it stays for a year before the battery dies, then the device de-endometrializes and is naturally evacuated.”

  “So did you see Morris on any of his visits here?” Ximena asked.

  Catherine sighed and put her face in her hands.

  Morris was visiting to see the lab where they were testing the mooring tech, Catherine felt sure. He was going to snoop around there and tear apart those test results, maybe try to come up with something to discredit her. That was Catherine’s best guess at the time. She called over to the lab the next day and talked to the woman she worked with most closely
there, a molecular biologist, Dr. Ophelia Burke. Dr. Burke hadn’t heard from anyone named Morris and sounded confused by the question. And then she was also distracted with recent developments: the latest tests were showing greatly improved results.

  “I think we’ve got a three-month formula,” Burke told Catherine.

  A device that could stay moored for three months was indeed good news. It wasn’t a full year, which had been Catherine’s firm target, a real fire-and-forget type of device that could help people over the long term without surgery, without scars. But three months was certainly better than three days, their previous best result.

  Catherine elected not to tell Morris that. At three months he would force the prototype into test, something she did not yet want to do. And for his part, Morris had gone oddly quiet after their last conversation. Catherine almost managed to forget about him for a while, as the team was still dealing with challenges across virtually all parts of the platform. They had glitches in the cloud analytics. They had a bug in the customer database that was deleting pre-registered accounts. They had liability and scaling questions pressing and unresolved.

  So Catherine was busy. But there had been one evening, on Kalmar’s quiet and persuasive suggestion, that she did head home on the early side, just after 6:00 p.m., to take a bit of a breath, to walk the seawall, through Kitsilano Park, then up the hill along Yew Street, past the restaurants there. And halfway up the hill, winded from the climb, she stopped to turn around and look back at the sea, and there was Morris.

  Morris and a woman, sitting in a restaurant called Look Homeward Angel.

  They were at a table not far from the window. And while the deepening blue on the sidewalk outside rendered Catherine invisible, the light inside revealed the woman plainly and made Morris’s expressions easy to read. So she stood and stared, and thought that sometimes the way people arranged themselves in conversation didn’t need to be explained. Sometimes it was obvious. And here you had an obvious example of co-conspirators.

  Morris canted forward, eyes hooded and dark. The woman with her head to one side, clearly listening. Then replying with a nod and a finger raised and pointed. An idea being shared. A cunning scheme taking shape as Morris sat back and put a fist on the table, nodding in agreement. Nodding at some sort of commitment to plan.