The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  I jabbed his face with the sticky bun.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said.

  He opened his eyes at me slowly, dreamily, and said, “Who is this strange woman in my bed?”

  “I’m Nu-Cynthia,” I told him. “Get up. There’s a staff meeting.”

  I wasn’t sure what was going on under those curtains, and it would have been very unprofessional of me to check. But the question was moot, because Archie Bakis just lay in bed and smiled at me.

  “What happened to the old Cynthia? I want Cynthia Prime.”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “People keep asking me that.”

  “Isn’t the first question you always ask in a job interview ‘what happened to the person I’m replacing?’” asked Archie, who, God help me, was stretching now, which caused his pecs to swell to the size of eggplants.

  “I, uh…” I didn’t know what Archie was talking about, because eggplant pecs, and so I threw the clothes at him and said, “Get dressed. Also—is this underwear yours, or?”

  “It is now,” said Archie.

  I got out of there, because I had no business hanging about with shirtless dreamy boys, because my romantic situation is jacked up enough as it is. I’m not really involved in a love triangle so much as I’m involved in a “like triangle.” Which is sort of like a love triangle, but without people being idiots. And besides which, unless someone involved here is bisexual, it’s never really a triangle anyway, is it? It’s a love V. It’s not like I’m worried that Nathan Willing, sexy biologist, and Anson Shuler, inexplicably sort-of-alluring police detective were going to run off together.

  But I digress. I had one suit left, and so I went prowling around the remaining offices looking for the dapper Dan that matched up to it.

  As I combed my way through the rest of the offices, which weren’t large, I kept thinking of Gary’s Flying Dutchman metaphor. Because there were a lot of empty and abandoned workstations, and I wondered what that meant.

  Quintrell had run at the sight of me this time—who knows where suit guy was sleeping—and God knows what had happened to Christmas Elf Gary—and so I just combed through the place on my own. I felt pretty sure I had found the office of suit guy—there was an honest-to-gosh gold nameplate on the door that said “Lawrence Ussary, President.” And inside there was an absurdly lux-looking mahogany desk, a plush red chair with gold button ornamentation, and a very large glass statue of what was a very impressionistic take on a melting naked woman. But cool. The statue was modern and classy. This looked like the office of someone who would wear a suit from Burberry.

  “Hello,” I said, checking the floor behind the desk, to see if Lawrence Ussary might have been asleep behind it. Who knew how many more naked sleeping men I could rouse in a day? No dice. So I left the suit in the closet and went back to my desk.

  Quintrell and Gary were waiting there for me.

  “We have a staff meeting,” said Gary.

  “Yeah, okay,” I told them, forgetting momentarily that I, too, was staff.

  “You go in first,” said Quintrell. “Make sure Archie is dressed.”

  Usually I don’t go in for these sorts of “you go first” situations, but “see if Archie is dressed” is just the sort of risk I can endure. Even so, I asked:

  “Why can’t you check yourself?”

  “We’re not supposed to know that he sleeps in there,” said Quintrell.

  Offices were weird.

  I came in to find him dressed, dashiki and parachute pants and all, and standing on a table to get the curtains hung back up.

  “All clear,” I said, and Gary and Quintrell filed in behind me. Vanetta, who I hadn’t realized was in the room, bobbed up from her desk, apparently taking the thirty seconds of downtime as a moment to rest.

  “All right, gang,” said Vanetta. “Everyone sit down. We’ve got a lot of news to cover.”

  “Where’s Cynthia?” asked Archie.

  “Cynthia has been fired,” said Vanetta.

  “Oh no,” said Gary. “Everybody loves Cynthia. We need Cynthia.”

  “It was Lawrence, wasn’t it?” said Quintrell paling. “Lawrence has fired another one.”

  “It wasn’t Lawrence,” said Vanetta simply. “I fired her.”

  This created a lot of shock in a room so small. Gary sat down on the sofa across from Vanetta’s desk—covered with the cushions that Archie had been sleeping on earlier. Quintrell pulled up a chair. Even Archie Bakis got a little upright, leaning against the wall for support.

  “Why would you fire Cynthia?” he asked.

  “I can’t say,” said Vanetta. “But I promise you that it wasn’t done lightly.”

  “We’re all going to be fired,” said Quintrell. “Every last one of us. Ever since Digital Endeavors bought us out, we’re just living on borrowed time.”

  “Oh, buck up,” said Vanetta. “That’s not even the bombshell. If you can’t handle that, you have no hope of surviving the hard part of this.”

  “Hope,” said Gary, “is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

  “We haven’t had the hard part yet?” asked Quintrell,

  “Nietzsche,” said Gary, who couldn’t let a quote go unattributed.

  “Thank you for sharing the useful teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche with us at this time,” said Vanetta. “And nope, we haven’t hit the worst of it, Quint, because I’ve got some more bad news.”

  “This game is too far behind schedule,” said Gary. “We can’t handle any bombshells. We’re stressed out and running on fumes as it is, Vanetta.”

  Vanetta, who had been projecting an air of calculated serenity to this point, suddenly looked tired and exhausted herself. “You think I don’t know that, Gary? You think I’m not dead inside, too? You think I’m getting more sleep than you?”

  “I don’t know what you do in this room when you close the doors,” said Gary. “I don’t know.”

  “We’re all doomed,” said Quintrell, to no one at all, really. He was just speaking quietly to himself. “Peppermint Planes is never going to be complete and we’re all going to be fired.”

  “Buck up, Quintrell,” said Archie this time, and I got the impression that this was something that was said a lot. “That’s just your sleeplessness talking.”

  Everyone seemed to be getting ever more irritated, and ever more charged. I felt like I should have defused the situation, but I was out of baked goods, and I could barely follow along as it was.

  “Has the meeting started yet?” I asked. “Do you guys want to wait for Lawrence Ussary? I was never able to find him.”

  I had inadvertently stumbled upon the right thing to say, because this provoked paroxysms of laughter from the Cahaba crowd.

  “No,” said Vanetta. “We’re not going to wait on Lawrence.” She was wiping tears from her eyes. They all were. I understood that they were all dangerously tired, but even so, I didn’t get the joke.

  “Why not?” I asked. “What’s the matter with Lawrence? Is he … dead?”

  “He’s not dead,” said Gary. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  What was the matter with me was that I have participated in one murder mystery too many. When people this sleep deprived start questioning you, it’s time to check yourself.

  “Right, sorry,” I said. “So why isn’t Lawrence here?”

  “Lawrence is never here,” said Archie evenly. Archie definitely seemed like the most emotionally stable of this lot, and I don’t think that I’m grading him on a curve because of his dreaminess. “We do the work. Lawrence just comes and goes.”

  “We don’t have time to wait for him. I have some very alarming news,” Vanetta said, passing out sheets of paper to all of us. “Over the weekend—late Saturday night, in fact—the spouse of an employee here at Digital Endeavors posted this blog post to the Internet. Read it and weep.”

  Digital Endeavors Is Eating Its Employees Alive

  I am the spouse of an employee
of Digital Endeavors—husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend—I’d rather not say, because I know how much blowback I should expect for whistle-blowing on the company. But I wanted to share our family’s experiences with Digital Endeavors, which, even in an industry known for mistreating its employees, is shocking.

  My partner was hired by Digital Endeavors some time ago, when the company he/she worked for was purchased by DE. At the time we had thought this was a godsend. The studio we had worked for before was hardscrabble—good people with great ideas—just not much in the way of resources. The insurance was garbage, the dental plan the sort of thing that would make a hygienist sigh. And while the working environment was amazing, with so few staff and games in production, everyone’s job perpetually hung in the balance. If the next game, the next app failed—or even didn’t meet expectations—jobs were at risk.

  We didn’t resent anyone for this. The software world is scary—no one promises you a rose garden when you go into it—and this was just how it was.

  But then we had success after success and along came DE, who bought the company out.

  And the dental plan got awesome.

  After the novocaine wore off, however, we started to realize that the DE takeover was not such a great thing after all. All the people were the same, we were grateful for that, but the projects began to change. Our next app, which was supposed to be a simple and relatively straightforward update of an existing project, became ever more complicated with the company’s guidance. We were told to chase trends and pursue synergies. I could give you specific examples that are so ridiculous you’d laugh—and maybe call me a liar, or both—but I won’t because I want to keep my anonymity.

  As our game got ever more complicated—ever more on trend—and less and less recognizable from what it was supposed to be—the time needed to complete the project ballooned and ballooned. More coding, more music, more art assets, more development. And the number of staff working on the project stayed the same. Or shrunk.

  People were let go, or transferred away to work on other doomed projects by other companies DE had bought out, and our hardscrabble little company footed the bill. Forty-hour weeks became sixty-hour weeks. More people were let go, and then they became seventy-hour weeks. People complained and DE’s response was to actually add more edicts into the app.

  My spouse is now regularly pulling a ninety-hour workweek. We’re not being compensated; we’re not even being afforded comp time. We’re just being told “this is how it is.”

  Our lives are in total disarray. I’ve never seen my husband/wife like this. And from what I’m hearing, the game is getting further and further behind because exhausted programmers are making mistakes, introducing more bugs into the code even as they try to solve problems.

  And the worst of it is: I don’t think our story is unique. From what I’ve heard, it’s happening everywhere. Company wide. Digital Endeavors is destroying its human capital even as it brings home 3.6 billion dollars a year in profit.

  $3,600,000,000. Look at all those zeroes. We’re not working for a hardscrabble mom-and-pop software anymore. We’re cogs in a wheel, working for an enormous corporation. And we’re being treated worse than ever before.

  No dental plan is worth that.

  DE must be stopped. Whatever the cost.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Quintrell, whom I was beginning to associate with overreaction, punctuated my reading of this document many times with statements like: “Oh shit,” and “This is not good,” and even “Hell’s bells,” which was not a thing that I thought people actually said.

  I’m a quick reader, and tried to use my free moments to study everyone’s reactions. Quintrell, true to his interjections, looked alarmed, as though he expected this document to challenge the ground beneath us. Gary was serene, looking like a doomsayer whose predictions had finally been vindicated. Archie was just dreamy; that’s probably bad detective work, because surely something was going on behind those brown eyes of his, but my read was mostly “dreamy.”

  Vanetta, on the other hand, was doing the same exercise I was. She wasn’t just passing along this memo; she was checking for a reaction. Was this why Cynthia was fired? Probably not a question that a receptionist should ask.

  “Has it really been this bad?” I asked.

  Which was also probably a question that a receptionist shouldn’t ask.

  “It’s not been bad here at all,” said Quintrell anxiously. “It’s been a privilege to work here. Every day is a joy.”

  “It’s been hell,” said Gary.

  “Who posted this?” I asked. “Do we know that it came from here?”

  Vanetta looked surprised by this question, and I couldn’t tell if I had said something incredibly stupid or incredibly canny. But clearly I had hit one of the margins.

  “That’s an excellent question,” mused Vanetta. “Why is it that the temp secretary is asking the most salient question here?”

  “I’m in shock,” said Quintrell.

  “It’s probably because she’s slept a little,” said Gary.

  Vanetta ignored this crack. “We don’t know where it came from, who posted it. But I’ll tell you where my bosses at DE think it came from. They think it came from here.”

  “Why do they think that?” I asked.

  “It does sound like us,” said Quintrell. “Wonderful people!”

  “It sounds pretty vague to me,” said Archie. “It could be lots of places. Digital Endeavors does this to everybody. That’s their modus operandi.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” asked Gary.

  “Lots of people,” said Archie. “Don’t you ask around?”

  “When,” said Gary, “would I have had time to ask around?”

  “When would any of us have had time to write a letter this cogent?” asked Archie.

  “Not you,” said Vanetta. “Spouses. Significant others. Gary, you have a wife. Archie, you have, well, various situations going.”

  “It’s not my wife,” said Gary. “Honey Badger don’t care. She didn’t even get angry that time Lawrence ‘accidentally’ drugged me.”

  “You call your wife Honey Badger?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” said Gary a bit sheepishly. “And she calls me Cobra. It’s our thing.”

  “I’m in the clear,” said Quintrell. “No love for me. Hell, at this point, if I were to take a girl to bed, I’d dump the girl and just take the bed.”

  “Don’t talk about beds,” said Gary. “Just don’t. I can’t handle it.”

  “It could be your mom or someone,” said Vanetta.

  “You don’t have to be insulting about it,” said Quintrell. “I’ve had girlfriends. Lots of girlfriends. I just don’t have one now because I never leave this building. I mean, going outside is a key component of meeting people.”

  “Not for Vanetta,” said Archie.

  “Listen,” snapped Vanetta. “I don’t want to pry into your personal lives, and I’m not going to speculate about what kinds of girlfriends or boyfriends or what you’ve got going on there—”

  “Girlfriends,” said the guys.

  “Why would you even say boyfriends?” asked Archie.

  “Solidly girlfriends,” said Gary.

  “Hey, I don’t know,” said Quintrell. “Describe the bed of this hypothetical dude.”

  “High-thread-count sheets and ergonomic pillows,” said Archie.

  This conversation was getting off track, I thought, although it struck me that any extended conversation with these three was eventually going to turn into a conversation about sleeping. I was about to try to refocus them, but Vanetta, who must have been used to this sort of work, had already spoken up.

  “I’m sorry I need to bring it up. I get that it’s intrusive. I’m just saying that DE thinks it’s us. I don’t know if they’re right; but they might be right. It could be us. Look into it, gentlemen. Ask your wives and girlfriends. Ask ex-girlfriends. Ask your family. Ask your pastor. Check with any stalkers
you have. Just because you don’t think you had anything to do with this, don’t take that for granted.”

  “And if we do have something to do with it?” asked Quintrell. Everyone’s eyes darted toward him angrily. “I mean, I’m just asking because as the lone singleton here, I thought I could pose the question.”

  This answer did not seem to mollify Vanetta.

  “Stop it immediately. Because if the brass figures it out, heads will roll. Yours, and possibly mine as well.”

  I had a question, and after having fortified so many people with baked goods, I felt I had earned the goodwill to ask it.

  “Even assuming that it was someone from Cahaba who posted this,” I asked, “how do you know that it’s not someone who left already? Somebody who got fired might be more motivated to whistle-blow.”

  There was no reason to take the letter at face value. Just because someone said they were a spouse, it didn’t actually mean that they were. It could be a parent, roommate, brother, sister, anyone. “You’re Working My Husband to Death” sounds much more compelling than “I Feel Bad for My Roommate.”

  It could also be written by the employee themselves. You write about your own conditions, and it sounds self-serving. But throw in an imaginary wife, and suddenly everyone feels sorry for you.

  “You could be right,” said Vanetta. “It could have been someone already dismissed. I don’t know. Let’s hope so.”

  “Or Lawrence,” I said, still thinking aloud. “It could be Lawrence.”

  “Lawrence would not give a fuck,” said Vanetta quite simply. “He’s the only person around here who I can say, quite definitively, did not send this letter.”

  “It would also be littered with typos,” said Gary.

  “Does Lawrence even have a girlfriend?” asked Quintrell. “I don’t know anything about him.”

  “Probably,” said Gary. “He probably has dozens of them.”

  “Forget Lawrence, forget his girlfriends,” said Vanetta. “Focus on your own houses, and get your work done. Digital Endeavors is breathing fire on me to get this to a playable state. Fight the good fight, gentlemen.”