The Glitch_A Novel

by Elisabeth Cohen

  I looked blank.

  “With the”—he did a thoughtful little finger-chin stroke—“goatee? They said he smelled but they never knew why. I guess he wasn’t taking advantage of the showers on Two. Maybe they didn’t tell you about that. Never mind, it’s been taken care of.”

  “I’m not sleeping in the building. And it’s obvious I’m not in there now. Must be a glitch with the system.” God, the glitches. I’d been elected mayor of Glitch City.

  “Yeah,” he said agreeably, but the light in his eyes was guarded, as if he sided with the tablet.

  “Were you here then—at seven, when it thinks I came in?”

  He hesitated.

  “Don’t lie to me,” I said.

  “Shell, come on. I’m your guy. You think I’d lie to you? Just give me a second to think. I’m thinking. The days they do blur.” He held up his hands. “I was here. I’ve been here all morning, got in around six thirty.”

  “No breaks?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see me come in?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. What, did you see me?”

  “It’s a good point. I’m thinking.” I looked over at his desk. “Where’d you get that coffee?” It was in a Conch compostable cup. “That’s not from home.”

  His eyes moved over to it. “Oh, that. My tea. I can’t drink coffee, it irritates my throat. You know, my dad would only drink Postum, same reason. Yeah, that’s possible. I forgot about that. Just five minutes. Quick pit stop.” He hooked his thumb toward the southwest, thirty degrees up—the cafeteria. “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”

  “Doesn’t matter now. Just get me in the building,” I said. “Get my assistant. Tell her I’m coming up. Why do you think it thinks I’m already in there?”

  “Somebody else with the same eyes must’ve come in earlier. Bet it’s…” He kept talking but I couldn’t listen.

  Someone with the same eyes? I felt a flicker of nausea. It was so impossible. But I try never to say something is impossible. It stifles innovation. It is my job to solve it regardless. It’s when you move beyond the possible that you—oh, Lord.

  “Tony, get me in the door and see if you can pull the surveillance tapes. We may have an intruder. Don’t say anything to anyone yet.”

  “So I shouldn’t call security?”

  “No.”

  “You want me to come up with you?”

  “Just stay here.”

  “Shell, are you firing me? I’m sorry about the tea, it just didn’t—”

  “Just stay here in case I need you. I’ll call down.”

  “Phew, I had this feeling you were about to fire me.”

  I gave him a look. “Your supervisor would be the one to fire you, were we doing that, but that’s not on point right now.”

  * * *

  —

  I hurried in, past mostly unoccupied workstations. There were Conch-branded fleece jackets and ribbed sweaters smoothed over the backs of swivel chairs, meant to suggest their wearers had just ducked into a meeting, not gone home for the night. On the desks were monitors with bright, expectant lock screens, framed photos, insulated coffee mugs, bags of bread (our cafeteria doesn’t serve simple carbs, only quinoa and parsnips), and open boxes of every food product that can be reconstituted with hot water—instant oatmeal, soup, hot chocolate, ramen—their competing brand elements clashing with the spare Nordic futurism of Conch’s decor. Fortunately there were very few people in at this hour to see me. When their heads popped up, smiling—look, here I am, working hard so very early—I couldn’t manage even a nod, and the heads withdrew, looking worried, as if they connected my expression to some minor screwup they had made, some poor run of circumstances in which they were the central, deficient player. At the top of the steps I walked faster, almost running. My heels skimmed the carpet. Just around the bend, Willow was waiting for me, notebook pinned under her arm, her attention fixed on her cell phone. She looked up as I approached. She didn’t have to say anything. Her panicked expression told me what I needed to know. I touched her lightly on the shoulder and she recoiled.

  “Who’s here to see me?” I croaked. “My half sister?”

  Willow shook her head.

  “There’s nobody here to see me?” I asked hoarsely. I took a deep breath to steady myself. Maybe the girl was hiding somewhere, like under my desk.

  Willow looked on the verge of tears, like the least competent edition of herself. I remembered suddenly the slightly pathetic but vehement Willow who’d shown up for her job interview, her white slip hanging lower than her skirt. “It’s snowing down south” was, according to my mother, the correct way to tip off another woman about her problematic hemline. Though I just ignored it and figured that the slip-wearing would work itself out in time, which it seems to have. If anything, it had made me feel like here was a person who needed this opportunity.

  “Nobody’s here to see me?” I repeated, incredulous.

  “Brad is on his way over! Phil’s saying”—a huge sniff here, to pull back some snot that edged out of her nose—“that you misled him about the functionality of our flagship product!”

  I gazed into her eyes to restore her trust. “Powerplex wants a better deal,” I explained. “People will use anything as a negotiating point.”

  Willow’s expression melted into relief. “Oh, I forgot, you have a visitor who’s not on your calendar. She was waiting by your desk when I came in.”

  “Where is she?” The carpet-tile floor seemed to jounce, ever so slightly, under the balls of my feet. I engaged my core.

  “Is she our new intern? I sent her over to Making Waves to get breakfast.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. Although that is in fact the name of the cafeteria. The Arctic char is excellent; the zucchini fries are to die for. New hires, we joke, get Conch’s version of the freshman fifteen: ConchPaunch. However, this was not the time. Willow and I entwined ourselves in eye contact: hers curious, mine anxious.

  “What’d she look like?” I said. “This intern. What was your first thought?”

  Just then the phone in Willow’s hand rang. She answered it: “Hi, this is Willow at Conch.” It’s Powerplex, she mouthed.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Yes, she’s available. Please hold for Shelley Stone.” She silently counted off three beats and passed the phone to me.

  “Shelley, I have been trying to reach you,” Phil said, his voice sounding smushed, as though his mouth were too close to his phone. I envisioned him in his Omaha penthouse, pushing aside his plate of breakfast steak, fortified to harangue me. “I know I’m the last person on earth you want to talk to right now.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “You’re at least the second to last.” This amused him, and while he chortled I glanced around for my visitor.

  “I want to ask you a question,” Phil said. “Have you ever had a time when you’re just going in circles in your mind, plagued with doubt?”

  “Uh,” I stalled. How had this visitor, this “intern,” gotten through the iris scanner? Was it because she was the younger me after all?

  “Maybe you haven’t, but I sure have,” Phil protested.

  “Every person is unique,” I murmured. I squinted at my reflection in the glass of an inspirational poster and studied my eyes. They looked ordinary, like anyone’s eyes, but what were the chances of someone else having the same irises?

  Phil said he’d had a bad dream about the deal. He’d dreamed of a lobster going after a golden retriever. He’d woken with a sweaty pillow and guilty thoughts of his fiduciary responsibility to his shareholders. “But that’s not what bothers me most,” Phil said. “Are you aware that this person, this—”

  “User.”

  “Let’s call him by his name,” Phil insisted.

  There was a tiny pause, which grew into a medium-sized pause.

  “Mr. Lee Beckett,” Phil announced, as if he’d won a mo
ral victory. “Did you know Mr. Beckett called Conch customer service, twice, in the week before he jumped? He may only have needed a little warmth and human sympathy. Not to say the obvious…” Though Phil always said the obvious. “But Conch had an opportunity to make his life better, not worse. You guys could have cheered him up.”

  “Yes, absolutely, every day is an opportunity to show kindness and compassion, I couldn’t agree with you more.” I thought: maybe I should arm myself in case Michelle ambushes me.

  Phil went on. “He told your customer service people that his Conch wasn’t working right”—that was what his mother had told Phil’s lawyers. He’d been getting headaches ever since he started using it. Instead of sympathy, Conch’s customer service reps stonewalled him and said they couldn’t find his serial number.

  “Kill ’em with kindness,” Phil said. “That’s what I always say. You’re not literally killing them. What I mean is, be nice and then they think you’re being nice, but you’re not.” I looked around to see what I could use to defend myself against Michelle, if it came to that. Certainly not the inflatable whale. Perhaps a pen with a sharp point. You’d think I worked at a preschool, with the lack of sharp objects around.

  “Agreed,” I said. Also, rope is always good. I picked up a coiled USB cord. You can secure someone’s wrists with USB cord (I mean, I think you could).

  Phil pressed. “Mr. Beckett was part of an online community of people who believed that wearing Conch had made them sick. There are tons of them, reporting their experiences in a chat room, did you know?”

  “Of course,” I said. “If your product were more popular people would be complaining about you too.”

  “It’s tragic…”

  “Phil, they’re just looking for a scapegoat, though it’s very sad and I feel for the family,” I said. “I reached out with our condolences. But we’re making the safest, most disruptive technology ever here. It would be silly for this to make us skittish.” Delivered with the supreme, cast-iron confidence of a tanned television news anchor chatting with you at a cocktail party: whatever dumb thing you say, she or he’ll whack something friendly-smooth right back.

  “My company has an unblemished reputation in the agricultural sector, going back to the time when my grandfather Philip Milliken Furness the first, God rest his soul—”

  I broke in: “This is how we know that Conch is a life-changing product. That when it fails, it actually matters.” Willow pursed her lips and looked doubtful. I’m not sure I buy that line either; I’m just trying it out. If you say something brightly, with enough sheen on your words, it is hard for other people to find indentations to cling to, to respond to. They look helpless and relax their grip and slide right down the mountain, while you smile down at them. In general, other people are not as confident as oneself, and if you fix your gaze on them, they will look away or back down. “We’ll have the self-charging prototype at the end of the week, and I guarantee you, Conch will never be working better. We’re crossing the digital-physical divide here. That is not an easy chasm to bridge. It’s natural to expect some hiccups. But who wouldn’t trade places with you right now? We’re going to have a solution to these minor—and I’m not trivializing them by saying that, just that I want to take a big-picture view here—we’ll have a solution by the end of the week.”

  “The end of this week?”

  “A real solution, I promise you. Let’s hang up now.”

  “We’re supposed to sign this deal on Friday. That’s only a couple of days away.”

  “For sure. Let’s talk again in a few.”

  “A few what?”

  “Perfect-o,” I said, and hung up. “Willow,” I gasped. “The visitor! Go find her! Right now!”

  I logged onto my computer. It seemed, even as I did it, like a pointless activity. I lacked the appetite for work. Email was not, right then, as Greer would have put it, the nourishment my authentic self craved. To type in my password correctly took multiple attempts, fortunately not so many that the system locked me out. There was a tremor in my mouse hand that jerked the cursor around like a kite on the windiest, though not quite windy enough, day of a beach vacation. Then I heard the sound of people approaching and Willow’s upbeat voice explaining our printer codes and I turned to face the beanbag area.

  There she was.

  I took in a quick impression of her: button-down shirt a little too big, jeans a little funny-looking (but young people’s jeans often do look funny to me), the slope of her hair as it bridged her ear and skimmed her shoulder. The overall impression was nondescript. There was a patterned cloth bag over her shoulder and a babyish convexity to her belly. There was something about the curve of her spine that I recognized from store dressing rooms, when you catch sight of someone’s back in a mirror not realizing at first it is you. She looked younger than I’d remembered. I’d been thinking of her as a threat and was surprised by how unthreatening she looked. Like some neighbor’s babysitter. I put the USB cord away. I already knew this wasn’t that situation.

  But she was a threat, I reminded myself, because she did not have authorization to be in here, she was not a Conch employee, she should not have been given a badge, and yet she was here, approaching my desk, carrying a mauve cafeteria smoothie.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” Michelle said.

  Willow asserted herself between us. “This is the new intern. I don’t think you’ll be working that much with Shelley. Now, Shelley, should I move your ten o’clock out a smidge? Also, the Clitch is definitely affecting my Conch today. Every time I see her it says, ‘Say hello to Shelley Stone.’ ”

  “Put that in the bug tracker and label it high priority,” I said sharply. “Ask engineering what their time frame is for a solution. Then say nothing but look at them unhappily until they revise it downward.”

  Conch employees were streaming in, unloading their backpacks, unclicking the chinstraps of their bike helmets, preparing their elaborate microwaved breakfasts, husking off fleece quarter-zips from their ropy runners’ bodies, cheerfully greeting each other and stopping mid-greeting to surreptitiously gauge my mood. Did their Conches, every day, announce, “Say hello to Shelley Stone”? Every time I rounded the corner or approached someone’s back at their desk? How obnoxious that must be.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said to Willow. “Tell her a little about how we do things round here.”

  “Hold this notebook,” I whispered sharply to Michelle, thrusting one at her. “People are watching us. I need to shift the optics.”

  It was reassuring to be at work, in familiar surroundings, scene of a million previous less-personal disasters, most of which I’d dispatched with fairly good results. I could do it again, and I would. I was fully myself in my workplace, I brought every bit of me to bear on challenges, and I drew strength from all of it: the activity of the teams around me, the channel that opened up as I propelled myself through Conch, the enthusiasm with which everyone greeted my feedback, the vigor and whimsy of our decorating strategy.

  All I needed to do was stay loose, agile, nimble, incisive, visionary, adroit, detail-oriented, upbeat, and tastefully humorous, or, as I remind myself for short, LANIVADUTH.

  I was at my best at work, no question, my family would have said the same, and this confidence bolstered me as I hustled Michelle into Fritter.

  From inside, I examined the door. No lock. I went to close the blinds so the customer service department couldn’t see us. Willow was loitering on the other side of the window. She gave me a curious look through the glass and seemed a little crushed to be excluded. I pulled the blinds all the way closed. Sometimes there are occasions for privacy.

  “OK,” I said, not bothering to sit down. “Who are you?” My voice had so much edge I could have cut myself.

  “My name is Michelle,” she said, as if there could be no question.

  I sighed. “How’d you get in here?”

  “Into the building? Through the lobby.”


  “What about the iris scanner downstairs?”

  She shrugged. What was there to explain?

  “How?” I was steely.

  “I just went to the scanner and…did what everyone else did.” She mimed leaning forward with wide eyes and gaping mouth. Her eyes caught mine. “We have the same irises, I guess.” She said it defensively, looking uncertainly at me. She tugged down on her lower eyelid so I could assess this. There was a little goo in the corner.

  “We must,” I agreed, but I could hear the note of doubt in my voice. Be as persuasive as that time when you met with Conch’s board for the first time, I told myself, and slayed them with your acumen. Let her believe you still believe. “That’s fascinating. Of course. I’d like to see you do it. I’m very interested in how security systems work, especially in use cases like this one…especially how they’d handle you. Let’s go downstairs and try it.”

  “I’m in here, aren’t I?” She glowered.

  “I’m more than a bit curious about it.” I tried to keep my voice in the register of curiosity, not suspicion. Curiosity is one of my core leadership traits.

  “I need something from you.”

  “Money? It won’t be forthcoming.”

  “That, but first I really need the SportConch prototype. I really need it.”

  Someone rapped on the door and it swung open. “We have this room now,” a male voice said in an officious tenor. Then he saw it was me. “Oh, hey, I didn’t realize! We’re just getting together for a quick confab to talk about the SportConch product package and Holly’s great idea of making the instructions fold out like this…” It’s sweet how Conch employees always assume I am deeply interested in their minute decision-making.

  “Awesome to hear!” I said. “Can’t wait to see it when you hammer out the details. We’re having a productive meeting; hope you do too. Just give us five minutes. Sorry for sniping your room rez.” (A provocative topic on ConchKlatch.)