by Jade Bitters
Peter looked through his company smartphone: he had forgotten to update his contacts to reflect that Thisbia had a new set of social media interns this summer, and Amy would be at lunch, and he knew better than to bother her during her “Me Time”, where she’d be inevitably curled up on a velvet chaise with an espresso and a fresh romance novel on her e-reader...but there was no reason he couldn’t try and figure it out on his own.
He looked through the folder as he went down to the small park down the street, between the Thisbia complex and the Pyrymyn pyramid, the former sprawled across many city blocks, the later rising above the fog line. Peter sat down at an empty table and pouring over the documents, trying to figure out what the numbers and usernames meant.
Two men leaned against the table. “I’m telling you,” said the first, a man in a pressed suit, “You can get over her if you find someone else. It’s like when you get pinched, and then you get slapped. The pinch hurts, but once you get slapped, you forget about it. Same things happen when you drink too much, you have to drink the next morning to cure your hangover. Anything, even a new heartbreak, is better than this. Find some new girl to obsess over.”
“That’s what weed’s for, right, Ben?” said the dark-haired boy with emerald eyes, blowing a lock of his straight hair out of his face. He was dressed far more casually, like a standard intern, but he was obviously the more daring of the two.
Peter looked and frowned. Stoners? In SoMa? Now he’d really heard and seen everything.
“For what, Romeo?” asked Ben, confused. Maybe Romeo did have a glitch in his system. He’d have to let Caliban know there was still something wrong with his ward.
“For when you’re in pain,” said Romeo, leaning back on the table so more and taking a seat on the free side of the bench. He’d never actually smoked marijuana but he had to try and fit in with the cooler interns at work, the ones that went to colleges surrounded by real forests, not by the concrete jungle. Besides, the one time he’d actually had a cigarette, Ben had been furious, but Romeo hadn’t felt anything from it so he hadn’t bothered to sneak any more behind Ben’s back.
Ben turned to stand, brushing off small splinters off of his suit as he sighed. Why the techies had such an obsession with rare woods, he’d have no idea, but wouldn’t oak have been a better choice than redwood, which shed everywhere? Maybe it was fine for Romeo, given that all he wore by day were dark jeans and tight start-up shirts that Pyrymyn was sent by its clients, with a teal fleece hoodie for colder days. At least it was better than what he wore before he met Ben. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Have you lost it? Do you need to be reprogrammed or something?”
“My code’s fine, but I’m still scrambled inside. It’s like I’m caught in a loop–” Romeo looked at Peter. He’d been talking to Ben since they’d left the Pyrymyn building and had forgotten there were actually people outside, in the real world, who may not want to be privy to their conversations. “Hey, bro, sorry. Didn’t see you there.”
“Good afternoon,” said Peter meekly before asking, “Excuse me...not to intrude, but, do you know what this means?” He held out the folder but Romeo had already turned away, his head in the clouds.
“I know what it means to be sad,” said Romeo, looking up at the gray San Francisco sky. Summer in San Francisco: what a scam. This was California: where were the warm beaches? Where were the palm trees? Either miles outside of the city, or surrounding some billionaire’s mansion’s heated indoor swimming pool.
“But can you tell me what certain numbers and usernames mean?” asked Peter. “I have no idea what these are for.”
“Yeah, totally,” said Romeo, turning and looking at the folder on the table. “Well, maybe. I might be able to help. I can’t promise anything.” He looked at Ben, who smiled. They both knew that Romeo had a natural way with numbers, phrases, and data mining. It was like he was made to do it.
“Oh, thanks anyway,” said Peter. He reached for his phone: he could text Amy and get this sorted out. She had to know someone in marketing.
“Wait, wait, wait, let me see,” said Romeo. He poured over the sheets quickly, flipping them so quickly that Peter thought he must have been pulling his leg. “Oh, this is easy. So easy. Anything on this first page, with ten digits? Those are phone numbers. Anything with a longer set of digits...is probably a social media profile number. The words are usernames, obviously, but just Google them and something should pop up.”
“Do you recognize the names?” asked Peter. “I’m not a big social media guy.” Peter almost added, I don’t even have a Facebook, but then, he remembered what industry he was working in.
“Oh, totally,” said Romeo. “It’s half my job to know. Or at least, it feels that way. I get tested on this at work a few times a month. There’s...the mayor of Martinez, his wife, and his daughters, who are in college. There’s the CEO of Anselme and his CTO and CFO. There’s the heir to the Vitruvio fortune...oh, and the head of Placentio and his board members. Mark and Valentine Cutio...”
Romeo paused and squinted at the list. Mark got invited? That is his number...Okay, weird. Maybe not that weird, given that Mark’s Alex Escalus’s cousin, though. It was easy to forget that although Mark was an investor and a board member at Pyrymyn, he was associated with many other companies, including Thisbia. “William Stratford’s brother’s company and staff, the Tempest bottle service girls Roxanne and Eliza are invited, as are Ty and Valentio Balt, oh, and Lucian and Helena Martin. Quite the VIP list you have here. What’s the occasion?”
“They’re coming over,” said Peter, all of a sudden suspicious. How did that boy know all those people? And how come he recognized their user IDs and pseudonyms so quickly? He hadn’t even pulled out a smartphone or a laptop. Were they corporate spies? Friendly Thisbia had many enemies.
“Where? For dinner?” asked Romeo. Dinner parties were always so boring. He never met anyone that he got along with, at least not his age, and the C-level executives were busy doing real networking. They weren’t free to talk to him about algorithms and scripts.
“To the club,” said Peter, feeling his forehead bead with sweat. This was so weird. Who were these guys? It was too late to ask. He had to start getting into the habit of trading business cards with people when they met, so that he could know who they worked for ahead of time.
“Whose club?” asked Romeo. This intern was useless and wouldn’t have lasted a day at Pyrymyn. Ben stifled a laugh: this guy had no idea what the difference was between a question and an intended query. He’d be the worst search engine ever.
“My boss’s club,” said Peter, dodging the question. He knew what Romeo was trying to ask and was doing everything in his power to avoid answering him directly. He had no idea who this guy was.
“I should’ve asked who you worked for,” said Romeo with a laugh. This kid was a riot.
Peter sighed. “I’ll just tell you. My boss is William Stratford, so as long as you don’t work for Pyrymyn, it’s fine if you show up at Tempest tonight. It’s a masquerade ball this year, and masks are mandatory. See you,” he said, heading back off to the office. He should’ve just handed the paperwork off to one of the social media interns. It was only when he was back in building five that he’d realized he’d forgotten to tell the two strangers that the ball was going to be a white party, but he was sure they’d find out through someone else, given they knew all the VIPs on the list.
Ben watched the nerdy intern walk away and resisted the urge to smile. He remembered his first internship, and what an awkward kid he’d been. Did he even wear suits back then? “Roxanne’s going to be at the Thisbia party, but so are a lot of other hotties. You have to go to this party. Meet some girls, compare them to Roxanne, and I mean really compare her, every last detail. I’ll show you some girls after, too. We’ll go clubbing,” said Ben, even though he hated clubbing with every bone in his body. “You won’t think she’s so hot after you get a real taste of San Francisco’s finest.”
“If I ever think that Roxanne is anything but the most beautiful girl in the world, kill me,” said Romeo. “There’s nobody more beautiful than the one I love. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world, the most beautiful since the start of time itself.”
“As if,” said Ben. “You thought she was hot when you had nobody else to compare her to. Open your eyes, young Romeo, and we’ll find you someone even more beautiful at the party. That’ll get her out of your head.”
“Fine, we’ll go,” said Romeo. “Not because I think you’re right, but because I can see Roxanne.”
Chapter Three: Act One, Scene Three
Miranda Hathaway had less patience than she had years until retirement, but she’d had to resort to going to building five. “Amy, have you seen Juliet? I needed her in my office two hours ago,” she said. She’d always given Juliet a good amount of freedom, letting her work wherever she wanted on the Thisbia campus, because the important thing was that she completed the tasks assigned to her, regardless of where they were performed, but Thisbia’s complex was so large that sometimes, it was easy to lose the interns.
“I swear to you, on my 401k, I’ve already sent her an email and a text. I have no idea where she is. Juliet! Juliet!” she called out, as if the young girl would materialize within the human resources floor. “I wonder what’s she’s doing. Where are you, Juliet?” Miranda shifted uncomfortably in her chair: this wasn’t a regulation chair, like the one in her office. This was a bright white, fluffy saucer chair, the kind found in a freshman dorm room. The chair itself was comfortable: sitting it in it was not. Like everything in Amy Button’s office, it was twee and adorable and absolutely precious, but Miranda wasn’t into “precious”: she hadn’t even altered her office and added personal touches, in her twenty years at Thisbia.
“What is it?” said Juliet, rounding the corner and drinking from a water bottle. “Who needs me?” Although all the buildings had micro-kitchens filled with snacks, Amy had petitioned for building five to get a seltzer water tap, to serve as a healthy alternative to soda, and Juliet had mixed a variety of fruit slices into her water bottle and added carbonated water. Plus, being on the engineering floor got overwhelming sometimes, and the HR building was filled with the equivalent of white noise for her. She couldn’t drown out people talking about algorithms and compression methods, stuff unrelated to her project, but discussions about health benefits and severance pay? Totally easy to block out.
“Juliet, sorry, Mrs. Hathaway is here to see you,” said Amy, distracted by her bobble heads of characters from popular shows. How she’d found matching sets of figurines from very different shows, Miranda would never know, but Amy’s gift for finding things was why she was given reign of building five. The only reason that she wasn’t given a position higher than “Head of Human Resources” was because they weren’t quite sure what that position would be called: if Amy had her way, probably, “Chief Giggles Officer”.
“Hello, Mrs. Hathaway. What do you need?” asked Juliet. Usually, she just checked in with Miranda during the daily Scrum meetings in building one, where the various dev teams met before being given free reign of the Thisbia campus, a complex they were allowed to use however they saw fit. Everything at the facility, from the resident masseuses to the gourmet cafeterias, was designed to ensure that the development teams would have all the comforts of home and more. A happy dev team was a profitable dev team.
“I need to talk to you in private,” said Miranda reflexively. “Wait, no, it’s fine, Amy can stay. Amy, you know how young Juliet is.” Amy had been known Juliet since the young intern had first come to Thisbia.
Amy smiled, her Swarovski earrings jingling. “Yes, I know her age well enough to remember which shows were on television when she was born,” said Amy with a giggle as clear as her earrings, bopping one of her figurines, which made a small metallic sound as it nodded up and down, as if agreeing with its owner.
“Well, she’s not even twenty-one,” said Miranda, shifting in her seat. The chair was comfortable, which is exactly what made her feel uncomfortable: all this touchy, feely nonsense, she’d never understand, but since Amy had started working for Thisbia, suggesting various improvements to the work place that turned to pure gold. She’d been the one who had implemented the Bee Hive program here, the program for the Thisbia interns who were now known as “Bees”, and who had pride in working at Thisbia, which had embraced a more holistic, nurturing culture. Every intern who passed though the program thought of Amy as at least an aunt, and at most a mother, including Juliet.
“I’d bet twenty-one of my own toenails – but, I’m sorry, I only have ten toenails – she’s not twenty-two. How long is it until the Fourth of July?” asked Amy. Fourth of July meant two things: fireworks, which were like glitter, but for the sky, and paperwork for vacation requests, which Amy loved approving. Helping make employees happy was what made her job worth it.
“Two weeks or so,” said Miranda.
Amy hugged her ample bosom and let out a giggle, the flower in her hair bobbing up and down as she rocked back and forth on her office chair, the back decorated with ribbons and buttons, true to her name, Amy Buttons. “Well, no matter what day of the week it falls on, on the Fourth of July, she’ll be twenty-one. She and Susan – I wonder what that girl is up to nowadays – were born the same day. Well, Susan’s graduated, and she’s too bad for this good company. She was too bad for me. But anyways, as I was saying, yes, by the Fourth of July, Juliet will be twenty-one! Yes, yes she will. I remember this so well. It was only two years ago that she started to work for us, wasn’t it? And since the earthquake? I’ll never forget that day. I’d gone to Sephora, in Union Square, and I’d tried on many perfume samples, while you and Mr. Stratford were away on a business meeting. Wow, I remember everything!”
Miranda resisted the urge to back away from Amy’s desk slowly. This was why she avoided HR: it was so touchy feely, not at all like dealing with the senior engineers during Kanban briefings, but she needed people like Amy, to provide a softer touch, one that was maternal and emotional in a world running on money and code. That soft touch, in a harsh world, was what kept Thisbia’s intern retention rate high, even after graduation: most of Thisbia’s interns ended up working for the company full-time after graduation.
Amy prattled on, rocking back and forth in her custom made pink and white chair. “Anywho, as I was saying, when she smelled the perfume, all muddled into a nasty mess, so Juliet had tried to avoid me all day, but then there was the earthquake, and nobody had to tell me twice to haul ass! Wow, that was at the start of the summer. But back then, she was just a lower-level intern, rather than a senior intern, but I remember she was still more skilled than the other interns, because she’d coded a cute little applet. Peter showed her around and said that the applet was neato but that once she took more classes, she’d be able to program full-fledged apps, and I swear, she said, ‘Yes, sir, yes I will!’, can you even imagine, her, of all people, calling him, of all people, ‘sir’, and now here she is, with her own program trending! I bet if I live forever, this’ll be the one set of memories I’ll keep. Yes, that was Peter, showing her around and encouraging her and she’s learned so much! ‘Yes, sir, yes I will!’”
“Let’s get to the issue at hand,” said Miranda, seeing her opportunity to interrupt the enthusiastic blonde woman before the meeting became another feelings circle.
Amy clapped her hands together and nodded her head, like one of her bobble head dolls. “Oh, of course, but I can’t help laughing, given that she’d just said, ‘Yes, sir, yes I will!’ I swear, that applet was so teeny, better than anything else anyone had made, but not at all like what Juliet’s able to make now, and she just gussied up and learned as much as she could about code!”
“Thanks, Amy,” said Juliet, embarrassed to hear Amy compliment her in front of Miranda. Amy and Miranda were like polar opposites in many ways, including the way they treated Juliet. While Amy was always encouraging her and p
raising her, Miranda was sometimes harder to read, and given Miranda’s technical background, Miranda’s standards were higher regarding what sort of code she expected from Juliet: code that wasn’t just functional, but elegant. Miranda was there to push her to do big things, and Amy was there to catch her when she fell. “But Miranda has to tell me something.”
“For sure, for sure. I’m done. May your future be forever bright, Juliet. You were the brightest-eyed, bushiest-tailed intern I’d ever taken through orientation. If I get to go to your first launch party, I couldn’t ask to have lived a happier life,” said Amy, taking Juliet’s hands in hers. Juliet looked down and then back up, blushing. Amy always made her feel so special, even when Juliet was having a hard time.
“Well, Juliet’s future is what I’m here for. Tell me, Juliet. Where do you see yourself in ten years?” asked Miranda, looking behind Amy and noting she had a new addition to her collection: three plush dragons, one in white and pale pink, another in green, and the last pitch black. Was it from a book, or a movie, or a show? She couldn’t keep up with all Amy’s interests, and not for lack of trying: she just had so many.
“If I last in tech that long? I have no idea, that’s not something I think about,” said Juliet, wrapping her hair around her index finger and twirling it out of nervousness. Maybe for some girls, it was flirtatious, but not for her. She always felt so...wrong in her body, so gawky, so out of place with her awkward figure, but whenever she was enthralled by the code on her computer, none of that mattered. When she was in the world of bits and bytes, it was like she was home.
“Last that long? Oh, honey, you’ve been hanging around me too much, I threaten to retire every year,” joked Amy, locking eyes with Miranda. Miranda shook her head: they could talk about her raise another time, but they should’ve talked about it weeks ago.