by Camilla Monk
There were two undeniable perks to leaving for work at the crack of dawn: I was on a first-name basis with EM Tech’s morning security team, and once in a while, I actually caught glimpses of Hadrian fricking Ellingham, super billionaire, legendary stick-in-the-mud, and CEO of EM Group, our parent company. He and his brother, Maximilian, had inherited an industrial empire, of which EM Tech constituted a small but nonetheless highly profitable part.
EMT ∈ EMG. You get the idea—pretty logical.
I had in fact gotten so used to those brief encounters that when I reached Greenwich Street that morning and saw what I now recognized as his limo driving past me, I barely spared it a glance. I buried my hands in my jeans pockets and looked down at the mice on my ballet flats, imagining them gossiping about Ellingham’s love life.
I didn’t realize something was off until I was standing twenty yards or so from the entrance. In the brownish windows of EMT’s building—an architectural faux pas warranting its nickname as “the Kit Kat”—bright red and blue lights were reflected. Police car lights. My walk slowed down. Whatever was going on had to be pretty serious, as no less than four NYPD cars were stationed in the street, not far from the entrance, along with a black SUV that looked straight out of a government conspiracy. Indeed, I soon watched with increasing worry as a steady stream of policemen in uniforms and suited guys came in and out of the building, performing what could best be described as cop stuff: talking into phones and walkie-talkies, eating bagels, drinking coffee, and occasionally flashing their badges at the Kit Kat’s security officers.
In the distance, I noticed two guys I knew from HFT entering the building, so I bunched my fists and took a few cautious steps toward the revolving doors as well. Just so you know, HFT stands for “High Frequency Trading,” aka the Ninth Circle—in charge of developing those trading robots that break Wall Street entirely with a bazillion simultaneous transactions once in a while. I heard they test applicants with holy water there, to make sure they have no soul.
As I approached the doors, I was able to catch bits of the cops’ conversations. Jumper . . . west side . . . fifth floor. A suicide? Maybe it was someone important. But the fifth floor was the mainframe’s floor, basically a ten-thousand-square-foot clean room. No VIPs there, just a team of engineers maintaining EMT’s servers 24-7 in a climate- and static-controlled environment—while slowly turning into ghouls from the lack of natural light.
Right after I had passed the security gates, I had to hand my tote bag to one of the security officers for searching. I watched him fumble with little conviction into my usual mess of keys, candy wrappers, and tampons before he let me access the lobby. I barely had the time to take a few steps on the granite floor and inhale the morning bouquet of coffee and detergent when I heard a breathless call from the other end of the hall.
Sheltered behind a massive circular aluminum desk sat Prince Grimaldo, part of the Kit Kat’s morning security team, and to some extent my bro—he and I shared the sort of complicity only people whose parents named them at random can understand.
I ignored the stares from the policemen guarding the elevators, ran toward him, and slipped behind the desk, a privilege I had earned after two years of undying loyalty. Prince’s ample body was sprawled in his leather chair, squeezed into a navy-blue uniform that was anything but flattering. He combed a hand through the shoulder-length black hair he had been reminded on numerous occasions was against company policy and looked up at me, eyes wide with apparent distress. I opened my mouth to ask about the commotion around us, but before any sound could come out, Prince struggled up from his chair and pulled me into an awkward hug. He was crushing me, and I was distracted by the smell of candy clinging to his jacket.
“Thom is dead. They say he killed himself.”
I think I didn’t hear him speak, or maybe I did but the words didn’t register. There was this buzzing in my ears. I felt numb, confused.
He repeated the words, louder this time. “Island, he killed himself.”
The hall spun around me, and for a few seconds, there was nothing solid, nothing tangible to hold on to anymore. The floor under my feet, Prince’s body, it all felt like warm molasses engulfing me. I squirmed out of his embrace and staggered back.
“I need . . . I need a moment. I’ll see you later.”
I saw his hand reach out, perhaps to help me stand, but I turned away. I could feel eyes on me, no doubt observing my reactions. I just wanted to be alone. I walked toward the elevators like a zombie, showed my employee badge to a woman apparently in charge of making sure no one would access the clean room until the police were done. It seemed to take ages for the car to reach the ninth floor—R&D, and therefore my floor. I remember that I pressed my palms against the metal walls because the cool contact made me feel a little better. The hallway and open space were plunged in an eerie silence.
Thom should have been there to greet me, because even when I made it in before seven thirty, he was always the first to show up—when he didn’t just cheat and spend the night in his office. Attendance was one of the many games I could never beat my mentor at.
I registered movement in my field of vision at the other end of the hallway. Cops were guarding the door to his office, and there were some hushed conversations. I gathered they were searching his things. Seeing their uniforms, I felt the reality of what had happened finally seeping into me, like ice inside my bones, rocks in my stomach. My eyes were starting to water, and I could barely stand. I made a beeline for the ladies’ room. As soon as I was in one of the large stalls, I let myself fall on the toilet seat and allowed quiet sobs to shake my body, tasting salty drops on my upper lip.
It all seemed unreal. Sure, Thom had been tired last night, and we were all under pressure, but Ruby’s final development phase had been going well overall. We would have been done fixing the few minor glitches by demo day. He couldn’t possibly have killed himself over a goddamn piece of software; he had been stronger than that. Focused. Driven to the point of obstinacy sometimes.
I wondered if something could have happened in his marriage that would have led him to do such a thing. Had Emma cheated on him? Hard to believe, since Thom’s wife worshipped the very ground he walked on, as far as I had been able to tell. Like most computer-illiterate Muggles, she believed her husband to be some sort of hacker genius, capable of installing an antivirus or even filing a tax return online. Bits of conversation and scattered memories flashed in my mind, one after another. I was hyperventilating. I couldn’t process this. Couldn’t make any sense of it.
A few deep, calming breaths later, I came out of the stall and stared at my reflection in the mirror; tears had left damp stains on my teal sweater, my eyes were red, and my face looked ashen under the fluorescent lights.
My hand reached inside my bag almost like a reflex. Joy would be in court all morning; I’d need to wait at least a few hours before I could confide in her. But maybe Alex . . . I needed to tell him, to hear his voice. My stomach knotted at the first ring. Two more rings, until it all stopped. He had declined the call. I thought of texting him; I didn’t. I felt nauseated, weary, and suddenly angry at everything—at Thom for dying, at myself for having spent twelve hours a day with him and failing to detect his distress, even at Alex, who always picked up when I called, except today. I shoved my smartphone back into my bag with trembling hands and slammed my palms against the counter.
A soft tapping sound and a male voice coming from the other side of the restroom door made me jump. “Are you all right?”
Joel—fellow developer, Minecraft enthusiast—had seen me run to the bathroom, and I still looked like a zombie. I tried to tame my short curls with trembling fingers, rinsed my face, dried it with a paper towel, and stepped out.
“Yeah, sorry . . . I guess I’m just a bit shaken.” I sighed, scanning the colorful jungle pattern on his sweater. I was still in shambles, looked the part, and I didn’t feel ready to meet his eyes yet.
A forced smile crac
ked through his bushy ginger beard. “Come. We need a Dr Pepper.”
I massaged my temples with my thumbs to fight the dull throbbing that threatened to turn into a migraine later. A goddamn Dr Pepper? There it was again, that surge of pain and anger laced together, making me feel helpless, crushing my lungs.
Thom’s death was a problem no amount of Dr Pepper would solve.
FOUR
Equivalent Exchange
“No, I mean, it’s not that it was too small, or, you know . . . not up to the job. That wasn’t the problem with Hadrian.”
—Nina Rivera, Women & Styles, May 2013 issue
The first thing Joel and I found when turning on our computers was a memo Kerri Lavalle, our CEO, had sent to the entire R&D department. Tedious corporate bullshit for the most part, poorly concealing the fact that neither she nor anyone on EMT’s board knew Thom all that well. The words deeply saddened, thoughts and prayers, and immeasurable loss floated around in an improbable soup describing Thom as a cheerful and enthusiastic team leader, on top of being a visionary security expert.
That last part at least was true. Too bad they had missed everything else, the mosaic of skills and ideas that had made him so unique. I thought of Emma, and the last picture of their son she had posted on Facebook. Twelve hours ago, the biggest problem in her life had been that two-year-old Tobias had stuck her MetroCard in their Blu-ray player.
For a second, I saw my mother again, remembered the vertiginous sense of loss I had experienced in the first few days; back then I had believed the weight in my stomach would never go away. This was the kind of pain Emma was in at the moment. My eyes threatened to water again, and I wanted to call her. She was probably still speaking to the cops, though, and I didn’t know what I’d say. I decided to wait a few days. I knew from firsthand experience that nothing I could say or do would change anything until she had overcome the initial shock.
I collapsed in my chair, and my eyes fell on the last paragraph of Kerri’s e-mail.
I blinked.
I reread it and typed in my credentials to connect to our test server . . . only to get kicked out.
As Thom’s brutal disappearance significantly challenges EMT’s short- and mid-term R&D strategies, the following projects will be temporarily put on hold, pending the appointment of a new director and review from the executive board:
—Ruby Core 1.0 49, Beta
—Ruby API suite 0.1.7, Alpha
All related server access privileges will be revoked as of Tues. 2015-04-12 05:00:00.
I checked the time the e-mail had been sent—5:13 a.m. What the hell was going on here? What little I knew so far—along with this e-mail—suggested that Thom had jumped out of one of the fifth-floor windows sometime during the night. Then Lavalle had fired off her rubbish e-mail . . . and also decided to shut down the Ruby project entirely, with no clear mention of when—or if—development would resume.
That didn’t sound like her. The very reason why engineers didn’t like the woman much was her carefree personality; she was the one who had sold Ruby to several major banks before the project’s feasibility had even been assessed. In fact, this way of dealing with the incident sounded a lot more like Ellingham—opaque and ultra-cautious. Which suggested that the shockwave provoked by Thom’s death had reverberated all the way up to EMG’s board in a matter of hours.
“I’m telling you he did something. They’ve locked the fifth floor. I heard there’re cops guarding the clean room and everybody got kicked out!”
I looked up from my screen. Joel and Vishal were back from their mandatory Dr Pepper break—I had cut mine short because the knots in my stomach wouldn’t allow for anything to go down.
Joel walked toward my desk. I winced when I realized that Vishal, one of our Product Owners, was following him. The guy always showed up with a close shave and wearing impeccably cut Italian suits, but the way he’d stare at people with wide, round eyes always weirded me out. I hadn’t yet recovered from the shock of Thom’s death; I wasn’t ready for a Simpsons-eyes session.
Joel casually leaned against my desk and, God, Vishal’s gaze fell on me, black eyes widening, widening like two creepy saucers as a way to greet me.
“Feel better?” Joel began in a compassionate tone.
“Yeah, thanks. I don’t understand, though. I just don’t . . .”
“There’s been talk of corporate espionage.”
Joel and I both looked at Vishal. Apparently content that he now had our full attention, he brushed some imaginary lint off his charcoal pants and went on. “My personal theory is that he was stealing data from EMT’s servers, and he took his own life when they caught him.”
“Bullshit! Thom wasn’t like that, he—”
Vishal’s eyes bulged out until I feared they’d fall off and roll across my desk like marbles, effectively silencing my protest. “He planned everything. I heard cops saying he cut the power in the west wing so the cameras wouldn’t record what he had done.”
“But what did he do, exactly?” Joel didn’t sound convinced.
Vishal nodded to himself. “Corporate espionage.”
“Way to cook up rumors out of thin air!” I grunted.
One detail stood out in this ridiculous story, though: the power had been cut on part of the fifth floor. Did this mean no one had actually seen or recorded Thom jumping? Around us, more developers were starting to come in and sit at their desks. We greeted them and watched as they too read the memo and attempted to access Ruby’s server in vain. Soon, the entire open space was filled with an increasingly anxious hubbub. Even our managers had no idea what was going on, and from the looks of it, none of us would be working anytime soon.
It was almost eight-fifteen, and the rumor had reached stage two—aka “We’re all getting let go; I saw someone from HR in the hallway”—when I noticed Kelly Skepps, our HR director, near the open space entrance. She was accompanied by a thirtysomething woman in a black pantsuit with a long ponytail, and an older black guy wearing an equally black trench coat.
Kelly clapped her hands three times to gather everyone’s attention. In all fairness, she didn’t need to do that. Save for myself, the open space was exclusively populated by male engineers under forty, and Kelly stood on five-inch heels whose beige shade matched that of her tight-fitting pencil dress and sandy blonde bob. She already had the entire R&D department’s undivided attention, as always.
“Good morning, everyone. I know that this is a very difficult time and we’re all shaken by what happened last night. I really want to thank you guys for bearing with us while we sort the situation out and find someone to help EM Tech make even better R&D in the future! I’m here with Officers Murrell”—she flashed a tense smile to the man in the black trench coat—“and Di Stefano.” A gesture in Ms. Ponytail’s direction this time.
The two cops stood like wax figures, staring at us impassibly. Kelly went on, forcing a sad expression onto her doll face, because that’s how you talk to developers: like to a bunch of kids watching Dora the Explorer, and—Oh no!—Boots killed himself! “Officers Murrell and Di Stefano need to ask you guys a few questions, because it’s really important that we understand what happened and make sure everybody is safe here at EM Tech. Please keep in mind that this is a routine procedure; no one is being accused of anything!”
What happened, huh? She wouldn’t even say Thom’s name out loud. Like the cops had been called over someone spilling a can of juice on the carpet. I hated the way they seemed to have swiped Thom under the rug already, so everything would resume as usual.
Kelly took a breath and pulled out a white smartphone from the pocket of her dress. “So I’m gonna call your names in alphabetical order, and when I do so, I’ll ask you to follow Detectives Murrell and Di Stefano. Each interview will take ten minutes tops, and when you’re done, you can go home. Kerri has decided to grant you all a week of paid leave so you can get over this tragedy and take some well-deserved rest.”
A collect
ive murmur rose in the assembly. Paid leave. The magic words. I’m not gonna try to draw tears by pretending that EMT was some kind of dark, dingy mine where we’d work half-naked and be flogged daily. Still, an entire week of extra paid leave was, indeed, a considerable event, one that had me wondering just how badly our bosses were panicking, to shut down all operations for that long.
Kelly cleared her throat and called the first name in a loud voice. “Joshua Amberg.”
We all watched as Joshua left the safety of his little group of Scala enthusiasts to walk bravely toward the officers. He waved at the cops with a smile, but they didn’t react. It appeared they hadn’t come here to fraternize with young engineers who wore their checked shirts over their jeans and coded with cutting-edge languages no one understood but them.
As soon as the three of them were out of sight, I turned to Joel and Vishal. “I think I’m going to take advantage of the fact that my name starts with a C and go to the ladies’ room. I’ll see you guys later.”
Vishal’s eyes started bulging out again, but I walked away before he could give the full measure of his talent.
I worked in the “small tower” (the Kit Kat), as opposed to the “big tower”—on Broadway, and also referred to as “the Castle.” It basically went like this: EM Tech was stuck in a little brown building dating from the seventies while our mother ship, EM Group, a huge holding operating in a variety of sectors, got a sixty-story glass skyscraper, because there were only four hundred of us, and that amounted to less than 0.5 percent of EM’s total workforce worldwide.
Things weren’t that simple, though. EMT’s meager staff might have been but a drop of water among EMG’s eighty thousand employees, but it nonetheless brought in almost 11 percent of the group’s net revenue, mostly through the sale of overpriced super-high-tech financial software like Ruby. The relegation of EMT to the ignominious Kit Kat was therefore perceived as an injustice—if not a direct provocation—and the five hundred yards EMT execs had to cover in order to attend Hadrian Ellingham’s annual charity cocktail for the leper kids didn’t help.