The House That Jack Built
Jonathan Paul Isaacs
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An online fantasy game. Stolen credit card numbers. A massive money-laundering operation. When college student Megan Evans stumbles her avatar into the middle of a criminal enterprise, she’s about to learn the monsters in her game are anything but virtual.
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Act I
The Inheritance
1
Thursday would prove to be the best day of Nate Merritt’s life. It was the day he got fired.
It started normally enough. The heavy rain slowed morning traffic to such a crawl that a newborn would have been embarrassed. Nate did not handle slow well, stewing in the inertia, his voice hoarse from shouting at all the stupid people in the other cars, his conscience flaring as the dashboard clock ticked past the starting hour. Vehicles surrounded him in a staccato ballet of stop-and-go. Then the radio cut out the music in favor of commercials. He twisted the knobs only to find more. Why did all the stations do their advertisements at exactly the same time?
Nate was retrenching in his war of attrition with the DJs when an abrupt crunch shoved his car to a complete stop.
Scalding hot coffee from Nate’s open travel mug splattered onto his leg. The profanity flowed from his mouth and drowned out a commercial about hair removal, no longer needed, thank you. It took a moment before he realized he had just been in a car wreck.
Nate waited for the windshield wipers to swish aside the rain so he could see what he had hit—the back bumper of a big, dirty Chevy pickup which now occupied the middle of his hood’s personal space. The brake lights flashed a bright red before dimming, and a large, hairy man wearing a ball cap and overalls stepped out of the cab.
Nate’s first thought was, Dude, what the hell, you’re getting out of your car in stop-and-go on I-35?
His next thought was, Oh shit, this hillbilly is walking over to me.
Then: Jeez, he’s big. And carrying a tire iron.
This couldn’t end well. What was Nate supposed to do? Lock his door and call 9-1-1? Pretend to reach for a pistol hidden under his seat? Should he act like he was crazy and see if he could scare him away, under the premise that the best defense was a good offense?
The hillbilly driver inspected the hillbilly bumper of his hillbilly pickup for damage, which was amazingly unlikely since the pickup was built like a tank. Then he looked at the front of Nate’s little Altima.
“Tough luck, son.” The hillbilly shook his head and walked back to his cab.
Nate glared at him through the downpour. Then the traffic started moving again.
When he finally got to the office, the dark gray clouds puked their moisture from overhead as Nate hunted for a parking spot in the garage. He found one—on the uncovered roof. So much for the weather making everyone else late. He got out and inspected the front of his car. The bumper was fine. But the middle of the hood had a flat rectangle crimped into it, the word CHEVROLET stamped backward into the sheet metal.
“Shit.”
He shoved his hands into his overcoat and trudged down the stairs toward the lobby. The rain stopped as soon as he went indoors.
Nate worked at Orb Software, a small software studio whose flagship product was a financial suite for running businesses. Nate was a project manager in R&D. It would have been a fine job except that the products were terrible and their customers hated them. Nate didn’t have to talk to customers very often as he was usually up to his armpits in engineers. Marginally better.
But at least Orb had free coffee. James Romanowski was brewing some up in the break room as Nate walked in. James was built like a body builder and flexed his triceps. “What up, bro?” he asked.
“Hey, Ski.” Nate tossed his frozen dinner into the community refrigerator and rinsed his travel mug. Rinsed. Not washed. His mug hadn’t been washed in four years.
Ski studied him. “Rough morning?”
“Car wreck. Some big hillbilly jerk smashed the front of my hood.”
“That sucks.” Ski shook his head in sympathy. “Is your car going into the shop? You need a lift anywhere?”
“No, not yet. Let me get through this morning and I’ll let you know. I’ve got a couple critical things to get through.”
Nate tapped on his smartphone to bring up the priority items. A note from Brad about poker Friday night—Scotch, cigars, cards, and no women nagging. A slew of Facebook notifications. Hey, a kitty meme! A couple more emails from whomever about whatever. Fifteen percent off Barnes & Noble.
“Well, let me know,” Ski said. He snapped a lid onto his travel mug with his massive bodybuilder hands. “See you in the huddle.”
The morning huddle? Nate looked at his watch. Dang it. He swore some more as he realized that his lateness cost him his normal goofing off time, and rushed off.
As project manager, Nate’s job was to coordinate all the development work of multiple engineers and track it toward a committed release date. What was supposed to happen was, the product development guys wrote the specs based on what customers needed; the engineers wrote the code and delivered it; QA tested it; and the client support team pushed out the update overnight to the customer.
What actually happened was much different. The snowball began with the product team sucking at defining what the software was supposed to do, creating one or two sentence descriptions that read like Chaucer (“the window shall allow the user to enter debits”) and leaving a lot of room for interpretation. Secondly, the engineers needed their money back from whatever online crash course they took, because they sure as hell couldn’t write software let alone finish it on time. Then came the QA team, who collectively missed ninety percent of the defects because they were outside the front lobby on a continuous, eight-hour smoke break. So, Orb pretty much guaranteed that any new version would take you five steps backward, delivering one new feature and breaking everything else.
Unsurprisingly, the mood in the huddle room was its typically bleak standard.
“You. Don’t. Understand.” Stan Plink was staring down a product manager and mashing a sausage-like finger into the palm of his hand. “What you put in that spec can’t be done. It’ll take months of development time to pull it off, and then it’s anyone’s guess as to how well it’s gonna work.”
“It’s what the customer wants.”
“The customer wants the defect fixed. Your interpretation of how to do that is unrealistic.”
“That’s your problem,” said the product manager. “You’re Dev.”
“No, it’s your problem,” Stan growled. “Write something feasible.”
Nate stood at the front of the team room and cleared his throat. The team leads ignored him.
The product manager, a twenty-something girl with glasses, had her arms folded across her chest. “So I suppose you have a better idea on how to fix 11636?”
“Yeah, I do. It sucks, and it’s not elegant, but it’ll fix the problem in a lot less time.”
Nate took a step forward in an effort to exert his presence. “What defect are you all talking about?”
Ski dipped his head toward him. “Ticket 11636. The Y2K issue.”
“We have a Y2K issue?”
“Yeah.”
“But it’s 2016.”
“Yeah.”
Nate looked at his watch to make sure he hadn’t fallen into s
ome kind of Star Trek time warp. “Can you … elaborate?”
Stan swiveled his gaze around like the turret gun of a tank. “What’s going on is that our software is a pile of crap.”
“But you’re Dev. Have some pride of ownership. How can you say that?”
“I didn’t write this bullshit. I’ve been here six months. And it’s crap. I hope whoever programmed this module is locked up and rotting in prison.”
“Okay,” Nate conceded, trying to defuse what was obviously a tense situation. “Let’s assume our software is crap. How is it we’re talking about a Y2K bug?”
“Because,” Stan said, “we have shortcuts on top of shortcuts here. Most people updated their code so that the two-digit years got changed to four-digit variables. That way you have 1985 or 2005. No confusion. But did we do that? Noooooooo. We apparently wrote some convoluted logic box that computes everything from air temperature to shoe size in order to figure out whether to make the two leading digits a 19 or a 20. And now it’s fucking broken.”
Nate turned to the product manager. “And what is it you put in the spec?”
“I said we should go back and make everything four digits.” She pursed her lips in defiance as she glared at Stan.
“Well, that certainly sounds like the real way to make this go away once and for all. Right?”
Stan narrowed his eyes. “Forget it. The previous jackasses in Development copied blocks of code like it was going out of style. They didn’t document shit. We’re so far behind on everything else that there’s no way my team can go through all this spaghetti. We’re fucked.”
Nate straightened up. He knew how to resolve this. Diplomatically.
“Now look, Stan. Obviously, we’ve got a challenge here. The fact that someone took a shortcut a long time ago is exactly the reason we’re having to deal with the issue again.” Nate held his hands out to appeal to the others in the room. “We need to do this the right way. And Stan, I know you’re on board with standing behind your own work, right? That’s what we need to tap into. You wouldn’t be happy just patching a patch, would you? We need to resolve the root cause of the problem. Problems are a part of life. What we need to do is to think of solutions. That’s why we’re all here. You need to ask yourself, how can you make a difference today? What is it that you can do to help make the situation better?”
Nate smiled his can-do smile. He was proud of his little speech. “Stan. How would you solve this?”
Stan stared long and hard at Nate.
“I’ll tell you what I would do,” he said in a grave voice.
“What, Stan?”
“I would build a time machine. I would go back in time. And I would shoot the motherfucker that wrote this code. Because. We’re. Fucked.”
Okay. Maybe Nate would need to retrench.
For emphasis, a scowling Stan made a circle with one hand and profanely jammed his index finger back and forth into it.
The door to the team room swung open and Patricia, the CEO’s administrative assistant, stuck her head in. “Nate?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Chalmers is calling a meeting and he wants all his managers there right away. It’s in the Megatron room.”
“Oh.” Nate looked around the room and lamented his unfinished business. But when the CEO said he wanted everyone to jump, they jumped. “To be continued,” he said lamely and left.
Megatron was on the second floor at the very far end of the building, near the corner with the executive offices. It took a couple minutes for Nate to wind his way there. When he finally pushed open the door to the conference room, the entire management staff turned to face him from their seated positions around the big oval table. Mr. Chalmers sat at the end with a pleasantly bland smile.
“Ah, Nate. Please have a seat.”
The only open chairs were to Mr. Chalmers’s immediate left and right. Nate picked the one on the left.
“Now that we’re all here, we can begin.” Still smiling, Mr. Chalmers removed his glasses and began to clean them. “As many of you know, sales have been disappointing the past few quarters. It’s a competitive world out there and we’re just not hanging. Add on top of that the recent developments around product quality … the crushing support ticket volume … the class action lawsuit … well, we’re in for some rough times ahead. It’s important that we hunker down to weather the storm. That means cutting expenses.”
Eddie Ho raised his hand a couple of chairs down from Nate. Eddie ran the support call center. He was known for being a hothead and occasionally just absolutely blowing his stack while on the phone with customers.
“Yes, Eddie?”
“Excuse me, sir. I don’t understand the logic behind what you’re saying. We’re losing sales and getting lots of support tickets because our products suck. Wouldn’t it make sense to actually invest some money in fixing them? Instead of reducing costs, I mean.”
Mr. Chalmers sat back in his chair and chewed thoughtfully on the end of his glasses. Nate smiled. Good old Mr. Chalmers. Always willing to listen to the troops.
“Normally I’d say you’d be absolutely right, Eddie. But in this case, our products are too far gone. We need to ride it out, and that, unfortunately, has led me to the decision that we need another workforce reduction. So, all of you on the …” He stretched out his hand and waved it indecisively for a moment. He seemed like he was counting. “On the left. You’re fired. Effective immediately.”
“What?” Nate gasped. His eyes darted around in panic. He was sitting on the left.
“What?!” Eddie shouted.
“We just can’t afford the carrying cost for six extra managers. We’ll be taking your teams and folding them into your immediate counterparts on the right.”
Eddie looked directly across the table. Sarah Gorfield was staring back in a wide-eyed panic.
“You’re going to give client support to her?”
“Sure,” Mr. Chalmers said. His voice remained blasé. “Why not?”
“She’s an accountant!”
The CEO shrugged. “Who better to run a team supporting financial software?”
Sarah was shrinking down in her chair. The idea of having to actually talk to real people was clearly too much for her.
“This is bullshit!” Eddie stood up red-faced. “She’s not qualified for my job. None of these assholes are. None of them have the skills I have.”
Mr. Chalmers still smiled like a father indulging a child’s tantrum. “Eddie, being pissed off is not a skill.”
“Fuck you.” Eddie kicked his chair against the wall and stormed out.
“Not a skill!” Mr. Chalmers repeated a little louder.
Silence fell momentarily over the meeting room. A violent crash sounded out from the hallway and dispelled the lull. Eddie was still protesting, something about let go of me you bastards and oh, that’s it, IT’S ON LIKE DONKEY KONG, but the words were muffled through the heavy door.
“Well, I think we’re done here,” Mr. Chalmers said. “All of you lefties, pack your offices and get out. Security is waiting and will escort you, as Eddie has discovered. We do have umbrellas with the Orb logo in the lobby for you in case the rain comes back. Don’t say I never did anything for my employees.”
People started standing up in confusion and anger. The next thing Nate knew, he was being manhandled by a brutish rent-a-cop and given exactly sixty seconds to throw the crap from his cubicle into a cardboard box. He almost forgot the photo of his girlfriend. Then he was marched down the hallway and herded out into the visitor parking area.
Nate just stood in front of the lobby, holding his box with the umbrella on top. At least the sky was holding back for now.
“What the hell just happened to me?” he said to no one in particular.
As he contemplated the whirlwind of events, the glass lobby door swung open and out strode Mr. Chalmers. He was followed by one of the new interns.
“Ah, Nate. Good to see you. I’m off to lunch. For some reaso
n, I always get hungry after stressful meetings. Best of luck with your new endeavors—whatever they may turn out to be. Snap!”
The intern, a young twenty-something kid who looked like he only had to shave once a week, snapped to attention. “Yes, sir!”
“Snap, my car. The usual drill, please.”
“Yes, sir!” The intern took the keys from Mr. Chalmers’s outstretched hand and dashed to the 8-series BMW two parking spots away.
Nate stared at his ex-boss. “Mr. Chalmers?”
“Yes, Nate?” He smiled his fatherly smile.
Snap had backed up the Beemer and was revving the engine.
Anger suddenly welled up inside of Nate. “Sir, how can you fire me like that? I’ve given you years of loyal service. I’ve gotten projects out on time, under budget, with good quality—well, good is relative here, but better than average. I don’t cost you overtime and I don’t complain. I’m one of the best employees you’ve got.”
“As I recall, you tend to cut corners to achieve all those things,” Mr. Chalmers said.
“But I cut less than everyone else,” he argued back.
Snap gunned the engine and sped right past them. As he approached the edge of the office building, the brake lights lit up and he took the corner at what could only be described as excessive velocity. The roar of the engine faded.
Curiosity interrupted Nate’s train of thought. “What is he doing?”
“He’s checking for car bombs.”
“What?”
“Car bombs. You know, anything wired up to go off when the ignition fires or the engine gets going. That other workforce reduction we had last month? You can’t be too careful with disgruntled employees.”
Nate blinked. They waited in silence for a few seconds until the roar of the Beemer emerged from the opposite side of the office. Snap stomped on the brakes and slipped into a lateral drift that belonged in a Hollywood action sequence.
“Does Snap know he’s checking for car bombs?”
“Oh, of course not. I told him I just need everything warmed up, and that if he’d do it for me he could hot dog around the parking lot. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Well, technically I guess it could, but—meh.”
The House That Jack Built: A Humorous Haunted House Fiasco Page 1
