The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  “So the head injury research, great work,” Catherine said. “Something else.”

  “For sure,” Arwen said. “Point me and I’ll shoot.”

  Catherine had a business card in her hand. It was her own, which she found she hardly ever used. But on the back of it she’d written another name. All caps. Thin black sharpie.

  “Kate Speir,” Arwen read aloud, voice and expression blank. And Catherine thought she knew Arwen well enough at that point to know the expression would not be simulated.

  “Okay,” Catherine said. And then she gave Arwen the second assignment to be kept strictly between them. Anything she could find out about this person. Any information at all. But absolutely discreet. And she gave Arwen some numbers to call. People who might be followed for clues.

  “All right,” Arwen said, nodding. “I got this.”

  “And not a word…”

  “It’s in the vault.”

  “All right then,” Catherine said, after a pause, a big sigh. “So…rumours?”

  Arwen froze.

  “As in are you hearing anything?” Catherine went on. “About DIY? About the future?”

  “Some,” Arwen said, voice tight.

  “Can I guess and you just nod?”

  Arwen was still seemingly frozen. But she did manage a very small nod.

  “Rumours I’m getting married.”

  Arwen’s eyebrows shot up. She shook her head.

  “Testing,” Catherine said. “Takeover rumours.”

  Arwen didn’t move a muscle.

  “Right,” Catherine said.

  Arwen, blurting it out, finally. “Nobody is for it. But guys can be real assholes sometimes.”

  “The Cheryl Tiegs fan club is betting on anybody over the chick CEO?”

  Arwen made a face. Roughly that. And just the guys in the pit, she said. Nobody in any position of authority had said a word.

  “Any of them talking about who it is?”

  Arwen said no. Just that someone was taking a run.

  “All right,” Catherine said. Arwen clearly didn’t want to say anything further. So Catherine changed the subject. “What are you working on?”

  She was teamed with Hapok in creative. They were developing look/feel palettes and templates for the new website, trying to get somewhere into the zone of a medical procedural but without actually looking like a television show.

  “I want you to come on as a designer,” Catherine said.

  Arwen’s hands came out of her pockets and Catherine could see that she wore an antique ring, silver with a ruby. She felt quietly certain that this came from Arwen’s grandmother, without feeling the need to ask and confirm.

  “Tell Hapok I said so. He’ll plug you into Kali to draw up a contract. Tell anyone who needs to they can call me about it. But they don’t have to.”

  And don’t sweat the rumours, she said after Arwen had given her a hug. It was going to play out the way it was going to play out. The project remained. DIY wasn’t going anywhere. Business as usual. And if Kalmar knew, Catherine thought, she would not ask him to clarify either. Grow or die. Kali’s comment made more sense by the minute.

  But even that was a passing thought, because she was already in the Car-2-Go by that point, heading downtown to the next crucial thing that had to happen. Just keep on pushing and refusing to bend. Hardly more than a week to go. And that was the sum total of her plan.

  STEPHANIE GORMAN

  THE MEETING WITH THE LAWYER Phil had recommended—Stephanie Gorman, who specialized in commercial disputes—did not in fact go quite as imagined in Catherine’s best-case scenario. Best case, Gorman dropped everything and locked up Morris and Mako in innovative lawsuits that made Speir run for the hills. As it actually played out, Catherine felt her situation grow yet more complicated.

  They met in Gorman’s office, which was in a converted old house in Southeast False Creek, with a view out the window of a neatly trimmed hedge. From the moment she sat down, Catherine picked up that tenuous mix of curiosity and fear that survivors occasionally elicit from strangers. It was analogous to survivor’s guilt, on which Catherine had done arguably too much online reading. If you thought you didn’t deserve your survival, it was torment. But that same will to balance, to fair gamesmanship, existed in the mind of those you encountered on your return. In the literature, Catherine learned that combat veterans frequently encountered the phenomenon, the perplexed contemplation of those in the community around them who could neither connect to the experience that had been endured and survived, nor crunch the existential calculus that gave rise to the death of one and the sparing of another. She hadn’t seen combat. But her experience had left her with a similar psychological endowment. She couldn’t imagine any greater fear than what she remembered of that terrible descent. And her experience had also marked her for all to see and wonder about and handle gingerly in their imaginations.

  Gorman was a slight, grey-haired woman, perhaps sixty, with a wry intelligence in her unwavering gaze. She wore a grey dress in a soft fabric that elegantly sheathed her narrow frame and a necklace of strung wooden beads in autumnal colours. She shook Catherine’s hand firmly and showed her into the boardroom, set up in what must have been the dining room when the place was a family home. There were file cabinets and a wall of legal texts. The table was old but the chairs were modern, high-tech, with fine-mesh black webbing and brushed-steel casters. For the first few minutes of the conversation, Catherine didn’t catch it. But eventually she did. The woman, who was on the clock, charging by the ten-minute interval, was failing to square up on the core question and was instead inquiring about Catherine herself, as if Catherine herself were the issue.

  “I just want to be clear that there is no allegation relating to my performance in all of this,” Catherine said.

  “They’d be unlikely to say that directly, no,” Gorman agreed.

  “Morris triggered the buy-sell because of a disagreement over the pace of development.”

  “Yes, I understand there were delays,” Gorman said.

  “We weren’t delayed,” Catherine said. “We had to reschedule a prototype test date.”

  “Were there deadlines from Morris that weren’t met?”

  Morris wasn’t in any position to set deadlines, Catherine explained. They were equal-equity partners with no formal provision for who had operational final word, but an informal understanding that Morris would watch the burn rate and Catherine would guide the company otherwise.

  “He was the money,” Catherine said. “I was everything else.”

  “Understood,” Gorman said. “So then, pace of development.”

  Catherine explained. Morris had been pushing to test a prototype that wasn’t worth testing. “It had virtually no features we’d ultimately be selling,” Catherine said. “I considered it a useless exercise.” And while that version of events wasn’t entirely false, Catherine did feel self-conscious giving that answer. Fleet of foot means moving now. That had been her talking in the earliest days, before AF801, before Morris was even on the scene or in her mind. Even back from Chicago and testing the more developed prototype as they’d managed to do, fleet of foot was not the phrase Catherine would have used. Scrambling was more like it. In her own case also: desperate.

  Of course, Gorman hadn’t known Catherine before. And perhaps this lawyer, as smart as Catherine was starting to think she was, didn’t have to have any of this explained to her.

  “Perhaps the bigger point,” Catherine said, wanting somehow to move on, “is that Morris thought our disagreement over the prototype was enough to trigger the buy-sell. I argue that the dispute was over a routine product development issue, which is insufficient to justify the trigger. So I guess you could say that what Morris and I are disagreeing about is really what kind of disagreement we had.”

  Catherine thought she had probably been speaking a little too quickly and loudly saying that last bit, which in the end might not even be relevant as she wasn’t aware
that Morris even needed to establish grounds. She paused. She sipped a glass of water. Gorman took a note or two on a yellow legal pad.

  Gorman, finally: “Did you take time off after the accident?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Better to think about it now and be prepared.”

  Sure, yes. She’d taken time off. Two weeks immediately afterwards.

  A crow flew into the tree outside the window. Catherine swivelled her chair to take it out of her line of sight.

  “Did you talk to a therapist?” Gorman asked. “Take prescription meds at all?”

  Catherine found herself revising her assessment of Gorman. She wasn’t just being curious and perplexed about AF801. She was wondering how it might be played by another attorney in court, how it could be played against Catherine herself. The damaged survivor. Gorman was doing her job.

  “You’re thinking they go after my competence in court. Mental well-being, et cetera.”

  “It’s what I’d do if I were acting for them and you sued,” Gorman said.

  “But they have nothing.”

  “If they could show ways in which you imposed costs on them,” Gorman said, “then I’m afraid they would have something.”

  “So what are my defences?” Catherine asked.

  “Option one,” Gorman said. “Raise the money. Buy him out.”

  Well sure. Catherine told Gorman she had a meeting with bankers that very afternoon. But she had to be realistic about her chances there. “What about I challenge the buy-sell, say I was coerced to sign?”

  Gorman shrugged. Sure, you could try that.

  “What about I go ahead and release a beta to market,” Catherine said. “Add value. File for some new patent. Register the patent in my name personally. Basically lock myself into this somehow?”

  Gorman didn’t think any of that would hold. And if Morris challenged and won, Catherine would just end up handing him more than he even paid for.

  Catherine felt suddenly weary. Her eyes drifted to the window, then sharply back to Gorman. Two crows now.

  “So you’re saying I’m stuck,” Catherine said. “I’m cornered.”

  Gorman suggested they look at it a slightly different way. “Did you talk about the accident much? To Morris, anyone?”

  Catherine closed her eyes very briefly. Then open. “Not at all. Not my sister. Not Morris or Phil. God knows none of the guys at the Warehouse. Well, Kalmar a bit.”

  Gorman raised her chin, acknowledging the last comment.

  “My markets director.”

  Gorman was still looking at her, waiting.

  “We get along, I guess,” Catherine said. Then hearing how her own intonation made that sound like a question, she corrected: “We get along. I trust him. We’ve had personal conversations, not a lot lately. But yes, I told him some of it.”

  Gorman didn’t press. “And other than him?”

  “Let’s just say that a woman running a development team has enough challenges without advertising her private fears and anxieties. The guys like you much better if you tough it out. Well, some of them do. Others like you less. It’s no-win.”

  “And that is true in fields beyond tech development, I can assure you.”

  “Of course,” Catherine said. “I’m sure.”

  “What I’m trying to determine here with my perhaps slightly personal line of questioning,” Gorman said, steadily, “is what exactly you’ve been toughing out such that Morris might use this information if it were in his possession.”

  “Right,” Catherine said. “Okay.”

  Gorman put her pencil down, hands folded again in her lap.

  “Then I’ll tell you a few things I haven’t discussed with many people,” Catherine said. And to her own surprise, she made it all the way through without omitting very much at all. The explosion and the descent. A vivid hallucination, crows in their thousands, seeming to come from within her. She described her light injuries, her quick physical recovery. A year of mostly normal followed by a year gone strange. A sense of something alive in the world, tracking her and betting against. Rostock too. Catherine told Stephanie Gorman of that phone call late at night. The man she later agreed to meet and the news he bore of the other survivors. The evidence of his own scars, brain injury and delusion.

  “He texts me still,” Catherine said. “I don’t reply. I just can’t be part of that.”

  No tears through any of this. Not even close. Catherine looked evenly at Stephanie Gorman, a lawyer, and told her these things that she had never told anyone else entirely. And Gorman listened, with an almost startling degree of focus, staring at Catherine, who thought just then that perhaps she wasn’t there to ask Gorman for legal advice, not really. She was just telling this person—a woman paid for her confidence—about how the world had changed around her. It felt good to do so. And what did it say about her, she wondered, that therapeutic results were only positive after talking to a lawyer?

  Gorman was silent, listening. She sat almost motionless until Catherine was finished. Then she quietly ran the numbers for Catherine, as the lawyer saw them. Could Catherine sue? Sure. Would Gorman represent her? Absolutely.

  But would she win?

  “We’d probably have to prove that Morris maliciously invented the differences between you,” Gorman said. “That would be our challenge.”

  And they could use Catherine’s story in getting there, or they could certainly try. They could argue that Morris changed in his attitudes towards her after the crash, that he became more demanding, that he saw differences where he wouldn’t have previously, that he became unreasonable and unsupportive, that he drove them to the crossroads for his own purposes. They could argue all those things, and they might even find a judge who on a certain day would agree that they had a point. Only that was not even the biggest challenge they faced.

  The biggest challenge was for Catherine to decide what she wanted to be doing over the course of the next five years, the next professional phase of things. She had options. She could fight a lawsuit. She could focus on buying out Morris herself and running the company. She could take the money and move on to something new.

  “You seem like a very resolute person,” Gorman told her. “But I sense you wavering here. Why is that, do you think?”

  Catherine wasn’t sure she ever provided an answer to that. Gorman probably only meant her to think about it. She did remember saying goodbye at Gorman’s front door. She remembered a firm handshake and Gorman’s hand warmly on her elbow.

  In the car. A text from Rostock.

  Would you be available to speak today? Something is happening here.

  Delete. Immediately. She was so pressed, so busy. She didn’t have the time or stamina for it.

  Five minutes later. It would be so good to speak. I have something for you.

  She was driving into downtown, sluggish traffic at Main and Terminal under the singing SkyTrain tracks. She’d just put her phone back into her purse and now it was ringing. Do not call me, she thought. Do not start calling me. But she rooted around for the phone with one hand, changed lanes. Got honked at. Pulled up the caller on speakerphone and it was Kalmar, whose voice she was deeply relieved to hear.

  “We’re hiring that intern into design?” Kalmar, sounding dubious. “She’s been with us less than six months.”

  “Tell me, Kali,” Catherine said, “how long were you an intern before you got a job?”

  “Hire when it hurts,” Kalmar said, reminding her of something she had said herself numerous times. You can’t grow just by adding bodies.

  “I still believe that. Only I said go on this one and I mean go.”

  “We can’t hire every girl in tech, right? And she’s not in tech even. She has a design diploma from a city college in San Diego I’ve never heard of.”

  “Woman, Kali. Arwen is a woman. My company, my call. Now I’m heading into a meeting with bankers. So you have something to tell the boys when you get off the phone.”


  “Roger that, Dr. Bach,” Kalmar said. “One other thing.”

  “Can it wait?”

  He had something, Catherine could hear. But she could only carry so much in her head at one time. She was also very tired, very suddenly. So Kalmar let her go and she rode the elevator up the floors of a different tower to face the bankers. It happened in a big boardroom this time that had never had been a dining room. It had old leather chairs and a high view of the harbour. Three jowly men in dark suits entered. They came in and lined up opposite her, one, two, three. She guessed the middle one would speak first and she was right.

  “You’re kind of my hero, Ms. Bach,” he said.

  Not this, not now, she thought. But it was their boardroom and it was their money she was asking to borrow. So she did the AF801 dance again for a while, only this time with no sense that they were curious about her survival. All they wanted to know was what made that plane go down.

  “Gentlemen, listen,” Catherine said, after ten minutes of speculation about electrical fires in the mainframe, the misfiring of a new Russian space-based laser, ISIS, the Levant, Haqqani fringe groups. “9/11 was an inside job, right? That’s what they say. You do the math.”

  They went quiet and sober and their brows arched and wrinkled and furrowed.

  “I’m joking,” she said. “Or is two years too soon after my own accident for me to joke about it?”

  Which had the intended effect of getting them to open the files in front of them, including her PowerPoint deck with the summary of proposed Red Pill 3.0 changes and improvements, the financials and projections, the market rollout plan. They talked about that for one minute. Two, tops. Then the one on the left cleared his throat. The junior, sandy hair, French cuffs with links that appeared to be tiny ceramic T-bone steaks. He went on to say quite a lot, in fact, much of which could have been mistaken for high and complimentary praise. Great to hear the second prototype tested so well and that all the projections were strong. Awesome rollout plan, he was sure they were going to benefit from a lot of buzz.