The Glitch_A Novel

by Elisabeth Cohen

  Chapter 11

  “Shell, can I grab you for a second?” Cullen said. A flash of the iconic smile captured so well in the portrait of him projected above the superfoods bar in the Conch cafeteria. In certain light, and certain moods, even I am not immune.

  “I’m always yours,” I said, which is truer than I’d like it to be. He’s the sun and I’m the lady in the pantsuit. I reflect his brightness; any glamour of mine is but a glint of his. On the Conch org chart, it’s like I’m his mom. I want to make it clear that even at the most technical level, I am not old enough to be his mom. (It’s kind of close, though—fortunately I was a late bloomer, menstrually.)

  “Shall we?”

  He pulled me over to his workstation, which is in the same pod as my workstation. Two chairs won’t fit side by side at the desk, but I slid over a vivid ottoman, shaped like an enormous Trivial Pursuit pie wedge, and straddled it.

  I was replaying the meeting from Cass’s perspective, trying to assess what she had observed and how she’d interpret it. “We got her out of there nicely. Willow was slick. I don’t think the reporter suspected we were booting her.”

  Cullen raised an eyebrow.

  “You think she did?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  The engineer at the next desk picked up his phone. “Yes, I’m calling about my soup. I ordered the soup and sandwich special…”

  I beamed at him and glanced at his desk, littered with lightweight bamboo servingware and cutlery from our cafeteria. “I’ve been meaning to try that. Is it any good?” To Cullen I said, “I don’t see why we keep doing these media things. They always backfire. No matter what I say.”

  “I don’t mind them,” Cullen said primly.

  “Because they love you.”

  He looked away, almost blushing, and his lips reddened as they do when he gets excited.

  “When people say good things about you it’s easy to believe they’re true,” I warned him. “Also, that the people saying them are nice people, not to mention excellent and perceptive judges. But most of the time they’re just repeating what other people have said before. They’re probably wrong, just as tons of people have been wrong before them. It’s possible everyone is wrong. If history teaches us anything—”

  “Speaking of which,” Cullen interrupted. “This guy, this river, the decision to jump in—what the hell was his Conch doing? Look at these customer service summaries. There are a few strange incidents. Like this one: a woman is going to her high school reunion, all dressed up, and just as she enters the building her Conch tells her she’s ugly and has never amounted to anything, but for five hundred bucks it can find her a more flattering dress and sexier shoes.”

  “That sounds like the Conch delivering a poorly timed ad.”

  “Could be.” He made notes in the case tracker. “User perception could be coloring that experience. Conch just wanted to deliver the ad. It wouldn’t have said ‘ugly.’ ” He paused. “Right?”

  “We have broadened the vocabulary lately. Let’s pin that down. Tell me about the river guy.”

  “Here’s another one: two Conch users who hate each other live at opposite ends of Manhattan, but thanks to Conch’s navigation they are constantly running into each other. One of them believes his Conch is planning it.”

  “Sounds like a rom-com plot.”

  “It’s kind of funny. People are crazy.” We sighed, scrolling through customer service complaints. Users are our main source of problems.

  “Ooh,” I said, looking over his shoulder. “I remember this. It’s a bad one. A guy says his Conch is telling him to bomb airports. His coworker called us about it. But he has a known history of mental illness. We’re working with law enforcement and he’s getting help. Crud, it does seem like there are more weird cases than usual.”

  “Is this weird? Here’s a device that was shipped to sell in the Asian market—look at the digits in the serial number—but the report of malfunction is coming from Indiana. Do you think that’s odd?”

  I shook my head. “It’s a global world,” I said.

  He sighed. “Definitely we’re seeing an uptick in unwanted behaviors. I don’t know why it’s happening.” He smiled ingratiatingly, as he does when things are going to shit.

  The guy next to us kept talking. “My soup is only half full today. Last time I ordered the special I got a full container. There’s less soup.” He swished the cup around in front of his eyes as he talked on the phone. It was glossy amber broth slick with fat. Twists of noodle and tiny carrot-cubes spun in the eddy. I can’t imagine investing the time during the day to eat hot soup.

  “Take it to a phone pod, Tyler!” I snapped. “People are trying to work!” To Cullen I said, “Is it a bug? When did it start? Is it a security problem?” I pulled off my Conch, wiped off a trace of sweat with the pad of my thumb, and examined it. “Is there a risk to me keeping this on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It could be that we’re just seeing this now because there are more of them out there. You think that could be it? Just some kind of glitch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We grew fast, at Conch. The typical startup time-lapse movie: cords and monitors snaking across folding tables, a couple of people at first, then more, then many. Better offices, juice fridges, inspiring sayings being painted on the walls. It looked so permanent, but I knew how fast things could go sour. I’d been at Gorvis as our huge office emptied out, witnessed the irritability and tears from employees who could not accept that cutbacks and layoffs were necessary to save the company. Not that they had. I looked across the office toward Nova. She was cutting paper at someone’s desk. This wasn’t like handing down the family department store. I couldn’t give her this and expect it to keep producing revenue for her and her children’s children. I had to give her skills for whatever the future brought.

  All around me people were clicking through their email, checking their phones, popping open cans of seltzer, expecting their weeks to unfold exactly as their calendars predicted, with zero thought to the precariousness of it all. That’s my job, to worry for them. The customer service intranet site reloaded itself, the queue lengthening. New tickets for new problems. I felt a little sick.

  “Shelley, you haven’t had any weird experiences as a user, have you? Have you noticed any discrepancies, any new behaviors?”

  I hesitated, Conch in the palm of my hand, pulling a lock of hair taut and smoothing the cuticle with my fingers. This gave me a reason not to look at him. “Why, have you?”

  He scratched behind his ear and made a funny, guilty face. “I haven’t been wearing mine as much as I should. I don’t like the direction we’ve been taking it.”

  “Cullen!” I said, genuinely shocked. “What if someone noticed?” I pulled a gold-and-white ripple-patterned box from the shelves and unboxed the Conch, scattering our attentively crafted packaging all over his desk.

  He left it there. “I’ve noticed that Conch was getting more…aggressive.”

  I nodded. “All data is actionable,” I reminded him. “Conch is encouraging people to take on more risk. To live more fully. To open doors! We just have some edge cases where we have to refine the behavior and calibrate the risk.”

  “When I invented it I saw it more as an entertainment device. Brad wanted to pivot into time management. I thought the Conch would just be for fun.”

  “It can be so much more.”

  He made a face.

  “Well, either way we need to fix it.”

  Cullen buried his face in the crook of his elbow, on his desk. “Ugh. Why is it doing this? When we migrated from the old system we racked up a shitload of technical debt. All this junk needs to be cleaned up…wait.” He straightened up and typed very quickly, long runs followed by lots of long, frustrated backspacing, and then paused, his fingers jittery above the keyboard, diving for another attack.

  “How many more of these kinds of customer service reports are there?” I ask
ed. “How long ago did they start? A week or two? What have we done differently since then? Anything with the software?”

  “We ship all the time, but…” He shook his head.

  “Could the Conch be hacked?”

  He shrugged. “I kind of think it’s something I did.”

  “With the code?” I could tell he thought I was being slow, needing all this explanation.

  “That’s not it.” He sighed, throwing himself against the back of his chair so the momentum rolled it away from his desk. He clicked his pen over and over, in accelerating cadences. I resisted the urge to take it away from him.

  “I let this European contractor do some spec work on a new module…I just wanted to see what he could do. It was this guy who got in touch. He had some intriguing ideas and I let him have part of the codebase. I shouldn’t have done that, though it’s not like he could have done anything with it.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last week?”

  “You didn’t know this person?”

  “It’s a friend of yours.” We looked each other in the eye. “With my personal cell. I was told you gave it.”

  I nodded, slowly. Oh, crud, I thought. Had I? I had.

  “You gave away the Conch code?”

  “The ideas were interesting. I just gave him some. Just to play with. He couldn’t do anything with it.”

  “But why would he want the code at all?”

  “Because it’s fascinating.” Cullen looked hurt.

  The thought of that day with Enrique was almost unbearable, and I longed to take hold of the memory, all of it, and drag it straight into the mental Trash folder. “Don’t worry,” I said, though I was becoming extremely worried. “We’ll fix this. All of this stuff is so diffuse. It might be a glitch that we’re only seeing now that we have a larger userbase. It doesn’t mean every Conch is going to malfunction.” I also believe you have to have confidence you’ll be able to do what the moment requires—you don’t get assurances in advance.

  We went to the microkitchen and I peeled a banana, one of the many healthy snacks we provide free of charge to Conch employees, and I broke off half and gave it to him. “Good source of potassium,” I said. We gnawed our bananas contemplatively, watching several marketing people microwave oatmeal.

  Back at my desk I began searching online for more accounts of Conch deviance. There’d been sporadic incidents stretching back for months. I was worried about the product malfunction, but even more disappointed in myself. That it had taken this long to uncover it was a failure of leadership. If things don’t get reported up the chain, I don’t hear about them. I understand why nobody wants to bring me bad news, but that’s my own failure as CEO: I have to be receptive and construct a culture of transparency that invites my employees to confide in me and share both their successes and their challenges. I have to offer them approachability by saying things like “I invite you to be candid” and “I would rather have helpful feedback than ‘niceness.’ ”

  I breathed deeply.

  I searched the web and looked at help desk transcripts. People were tweeting about Conch. It still seemed speculative—nobody had a really damning story of Conch urging them into risky behavior. Nobody who had a platform, that is. But I could see the problem gathering force offshore.

  “Silly Valley just weighed in,” Willow said, rushing toward my desk.

  “Send it to me!”

  Just at that moment my Conch buzzed. Great news! You’ve been mentioned in…the Silly Valley blog. It played three notes, rising, cheerfully inane.

  “Send me the link,” I yelled, and she ran back to her computer, her ballet flats slapping off her heels and against the floor—shooka-shooka—as she ran.

  The higher you rise in a company, the better things are going for you, the more your detractors look forward to seeing you go down in flames. They begin to see that you are a threat to their power, and they become increasingly invested in bringing you down. It is hard to realize that there are people who want only to embarrass and discredit you, and that there are an even larger number of people who, while not caring much one way or the other, are so unconsumed by personal passions that they would enjoy the mild novelty of watching you fail. It would amuse them, in the course of their day, to read in a blog about your latest fizzle or view a short video of your humiliating public breakdown. It would give them a few seconds of entertainment before they returned to fucking around and generating more mediocre work product.

  I can’t spend time worrying about what people think. You can’t build a company on Q scores. It’s the product that matters.

  But is Conch actually a good product? It can be. It will be. It doesn’t really matter because the important thing is vision.

  Willow’s email, ominously subject-line-less, arrived. I gazed at it, there at the top of my inbox, radiating blank hostility. I took a deep breath and double-clicked:

  LIGHTNING NOT STRIKING TWICE FOR CONCH’S SHELLEY STONE

  The Conch exec, known for her compelling personal story and her hard-driving leadership style at the context-aware wearables behemoth, is facing new allegations that she’s ineffective and in over her head after reports of a glitch that is causing Conch users to endanger themselves and others…

  I scrolled down. Jesus. Cass worked fast. It had to be her.

  An unnamed source familiar with Conch’s operations said that Stone, who caught lightning in a bottle during her successful stints at B2C e-commerce giants…has pushed to expand Conch’s behavior into new territory, over the objections of wunderkind founder Cullen Masur…

  He’s twenty-six, for Chrissakes! How long can you retain your wunderkindhood?

  Conch touts its bleeding-edge mix of temperature and movement readings to bioauthenticate its users, and claims its suggestions and responses are controlled by a complex proprietary algorithm…

  They quoted an “expert” I have never heard of:

  “You don’t want somebody to be able to pick up your Conch and tap into your private data. So your Conch not only reads your temperature and movements, but compares that to the you it knows, and if they differ it shuts down—that’s bioauthentication. They like to give the impression that the Conch’s suggestions draw on that same data. But what we’re seeing here suggests that they may not be using it that way, that it’s smoke and mirrors.”

  A harsh assessment. Also, false. Conch absolutely was suggesting actions using individualized data. The problem was that it’s very complicated.

  Stone, who has been criticized for being culturally out of touch after she put the kibosh on jeans for employees at Conch’s Mountain View headquarters, is rumored to be making a play to merge with Powerplex, an Omaha-based energy harvester. But unnamed sources say Stone’s icy demeanor, tone-deaf comments, and micromanagement have…

  This was total tripe. (The jeans part.) “Ew,” I said. I closed my eyes and saw reddish horizontal lines, a shadowy curve. I let the bad feeling sink through me and rise out through my skin.

  “Hey, we’re leaving now to grab lunch and make it to art class,” Melissa called. I sighed, got up, hugged Nova.

  “Thanks,” I said, barely able to summon up any expression. “That’s enough for today. I have a hard stop now or I’d walk you out. Goodbye, Nova.” I didn’t say goodbye to Melissa. We just look each other in the eye, intently, in some kind of power transference.

  “The seashell,” Nova whispered.

  “You know what, let’s not say anymore about it.” I waved her concerns away and gave her a thin-lipped smile. “See you tonight—well, tonight’s the board meeting—uh, I’ll see you soon, sweet pea, I’ll be thinking of you! Have a great day!”

  “It said it to me,” Nova remarked, quietly, as if she were talking to herself.

  “Yup,” I said. “That’s what makes it a very special seashell.”

  “The seashell said, I want to swim in the potty.”

  “Now, Nova,” Melissa said. She was holding out Nova’s qui
lted jacket, helping her put it on, and trying to change the subject. “Let’s not tell stories. What do you think we’re going to have for lunch? Do you think Jacqui will make us some celery and wheatberry salad?”

  “The seashell wants to swim in the ocean, like I did that time,” Nova said. She seemed to be addressing her comments to one of her horses. “It told me.” Melissa gave me a look over Nova’s head, but I was watching my daughter. “It told me,” Nova said, with wonder, as if she couldn’t believe it herself.

  * * *

  —

  There’s a private bathroom off one of the conference rooms on Two; hardly anyone goes there. I went in, locked the door, and did my nasal rinse. Forceful gushes of saline solution cut a path through the muck inside my skull. I breathed deeply, with pleasurable clarity, collecting myself. Then I practiced my talking points for the board meeting, making severe expressions in the mirror.

  “It’s a multilayered challenge,” I repeated. I sighed and sat down on the toilet.

  I dialed my friend Christine in New York. Her assistant answered. “She’s not available,” he said crisply.

  “I was just calling to say hi,” I said. “Not important.”

  I was skimming a book about the types of electric plugs and sockets in use around the world—surprisingly fascinating stuff—when someone rapped on the door. I sighed. “Willow?” I said. She was the only one who knew I came here.

  “Sorry!” she called through the door. “Can I come in?”

  I got up, ran the water in the sink, cranked the paper towel dispenser, and squeezed some color into my cheeks. I unlocked the door.

  “Is everything all right?” Willow asked.

  “I assume not or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Hey!” she said. She came in past me and leaned back on the edge of the sink. I sat back down on the toilet. “Wow. You look tired.”