by A. G. Riddle
“What for?”
The guy raised up from his chair to peek over the cubicle walls. Then he whispered to Desmond, “Going off the reservation.”
“What does that mean?”
The guy sat back down. “Wait, who are you again?”
Desmond took a step back. “Forget it.”
He had spent enough time at Phaethon to have an office, and a login to the network. He opened the Oracle HR program and looked up Avery Price. A picture of her stared back at him with cold, arresting eyes. This was the woman he’d seen in the meeting, whispering in Herman’s ear. He scanned her bio. She was a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill where she’d been on the tennis team. Most recent job was at a VC firm called Rubicon Ventures, doing due diligence.
Her employment status read: Terminated for Cause. There was a footnote: theft of company time and direct insubordination. Desmond typed the address into Google Maps on his iPhone. Just as the route appeared, a figure ducked in his doorway. Lin Shaw.
“How’d it go with biostats?”
“Not well.”
“Solution?”
“Not sure.” He glanced at the directions. “I’m working on something though.”
Conner was standing in Desmond’s bedroom when he heard the first pop. Then another.
One of his men spoke over the comm. “Zero, we’re under attack. They’re shooting the tires.”
Conner pressed the mic button on his collarbone. “Back up to the garages. All units, covering fire!”
Chapter 37
The campaign signs were in every window. Hillary. Pelosi. The 2016 election seemed to get more brutal each day.
Desmond drove past them into one of the more run-down parts of San Francisco. Or formerly run-down. It was slowly changing, becoming gentrified, the cars now mostly Priuses and Teslas. The morning sun burned against his shoulder as he climbed to the second floor of the apartment building and knocked on the door.
Nothing.
He knocked again.
Still no answer.
He took out his phone and dialed the number listed in Avery’s employee profile.
A groggy voice answered. “Price.”
“Hi. It’s Desmond Hughes. We’ve never met—”
“What do you want?”
“Um. I’m on the board of Phaethon Genetics.”
Silence.
“I know you were terminated today.”
Movement in the background, like sheets rustling.
“I’d like to talk. In person. About the reports you sent this morning.”
Swooshing, like fabric being pulled across the phone’s receiver. “Where?”
“Ah. Actually… I’m at your apartment.”
A second later, the door swung open. Her hair was wild, the blond strands sticking out like Einstein’s gray mop.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.” He couldn’t help but take her in. She wore a shirt, long and tight around her body, and boxer shorts. Nothing else.
“I’m going to need your full name for the restraining order.”
His eyebrows shot up.
She released the door, letting it swing open. “Just messing with you. Come on in.” Her accent was southern, not thick, but noticeable.
The place was furnished like the apartments of practically every startup founder he knew. An IKEA couch. A flat-screen TV sat on the box it had come in. A faux distressed wood coffee table. The strange medley of magazines was different, though: TENNIS, The Economist, Time, Us Weekly, and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America’s Care Quarterly. The recycle bin was filled with empty Gatorade G2 bottles, and the necks of two wine bottles protruded from the pile, as if they had washed up on a plastic beach.
“Love what you’ve done with the place.”
“Maid’s late this morning. I usually entertain board members in the evening.”
Desmond let out a laugh. She was bold. He wondered if it was because she was recently fired or if it was simply her nature. Either way, it was refreshing. As a board member, he found that most employees spoke to him in carefully measured, mentally rehearsed words.
“Want something to drink?” She walked into the small kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and peered in. She pulled out a bottle of Cupcake chardonnay, eyed it, found it nearly empty, and took out another bottle as well, Yellow Tail. She rinsed a coffee mug in the sink, dumped in the Cupcake wine, and began unscrewing the Yellow Tail to top it off.
Desmond held up a hand to stop her. “I have a better idea.”
She didn’t look up, merely focused on the pour as if she were in a lab mixing the contents of two beakers. “You have a better idea than wine at nine a.m. on the morning I got fired?” She glanced up. “It would need to be really good.”
He walked over, took the wine bottle from her hand. “It’s pretty good.” He screwed the cap back on. “How about we go get some breakfast, talk, you get your job back, and your old boss gets put in his place.”
“Okay. But for the record, I was going to say no until that last part.”
“Noted.” He glanced at her hair again. “I can wait if you want to shower or—”
She walked past him, toward the bedroom. “I’m not really that kind of girl.”
Before he could react, she was through the door, pulling her shirt off, her back turned to him, but the profile of her bare figure in full view. His eyes lingered a second before he was able to pull them away. He turned and took a few steps into the living room. Maybe she was still a little drunk. Or an exhibitionist. Or both.
She emerged wearing gym shorts, a t-shirt that read Carolina Tennis, and a white cap over her untamed blond hair. A green plastic wrist coil wrapped around her right wrist, curling like she’d gotten caught in an old phone cord. A single key hung from it.
“Figure this will keep you from taking me anywhere too fancy.”
He smiled. “I’m not really that kind of guy.”
The breakfast place was filled with hung-over Stanford students, a few professors, and locals on their way to work. Desmond and Avery fit right in.
Avery ordered half the menu—eggs, hash browns, pancakes, and toast. Desmond wondered if she had a hollow leg.
“What happened?” he asked.
She folded the toast, lathered it with strawberry jelly, and mauled it. “Pulled an all-nighter, did my job, got a call at eight a.m. telling me not to come in—indefinitely. Fired, just like that.”
“Why were you fired?”
“Paranoia.”
She was finally slowing down. The pancakes seemed to be a hill she couldn’t climb. Nevertheless, she was applying butter and syrup, as if greasing the path.
“I don’t understand.”
“What’s happening at Phaethon happens to every company. We saw it all the time at Rubicon at the companies we invested in. The founders and first hires are people with a ‘can do’ attitude. Everybody’s on the same page. ‘Get ’er done’ mentality.”
Desmond laughed.
“It’s a popular saying back home in North Carolina.”
“I know it.”
Avery looked skeptical.
“I grew up in Oklahoma.”
“Really.” She took another bite of pancakes, yawned without covering her mouth. The all-nighter was catching up to her.
“So what’s the real problem at Phaethon?” Desmond asked.
“People have different priorities now. Like Herman. He’s upper-middle management. His priority is keeping his job, maybe moving up a bit. Making himself more indispensable to the company. Increasing his power. Adding to his head count—and thus justifying a higher salary. He wants—needs—the other units to rely on him.”
“And if we replaced him?”
She shrugged, put the fork down. “Things would improve for a while. But you’d get more of the same. People adapt to their environment.”
“So we change the environment.”
“That’s right.”
“How?”
&nb
sp; Avery exhaled. “For one, probably eighty percent of the reports requested are just variations on a few templates. You write two pieces of custom software: one for the business side, one for the scientists. Then give them a small analytics and reporting group—and train some of their staff on the system. Empower them to run their own reports.”
“And for the ones they can’t run?”
“Biostats will still have to program those.” She picked up the fork and took another run at the stack of pancakes. “But it won’t be an issue. Half the people in that group don’t need to be managed. You tell them what to do and they’ll get it done. They’re good. Might need a little help translating the requirements from their customers, is all—and the biz group and scientists are their customers, and they should start looking at it that way.” She set the fork down again and looked around for the waitress as if she were going to flag her down.
“I already paid.”
She nodded. “Wonderful. I’m recently unemployed.”
“About that.”
She squinted.
“How would you feel about being re-employed. As you say, biostats doesn’t need a manager. They need a translator for the customers’ needs.”
She leaned back. “Kind of hard to get excited about going back into the lion’s den on the day I got my head bitten off.”
“I’ll take care of the lions.”
The drive back to Avery’s apartment was less than ten minutes, but she was asleep in the passenger seat within three.
When they arrived, Desmond reached over, shook her shoulder, and waited. He tried again, but she was dead to the world. He slipped the wrist coil with the key off her hand, walked around, opened the door, and lifted her up. He carried her to the second floor, careful not to move too quickly. Inside the apartment, he considered laying her out on the IKEA couch, but he had slept on a few of those. So, although it felt like a mild invasion of her privacy, he pushed the door to the bedroom open, revealing a queen bed on rails with no headboard. Two Kindles lay on the bedside table, one charging.
As he put her down, she stirred. That made him nervous for some reason. He waited, but she didn’t move again.
He pulled the blackout curtains tight, wrote a note, and left it on the counter: Key under the mat.
In the Phaethon Genetics conference room, Desmond sat beside the CFO and Lin Shaw, who was Phaethon’s Chief Science Officer. The only other attendee was Herman. When Desmond finished describing how the division would be split into three groups, the older man looked incredulous.
“You expect me to go from managing one group to managing three—spread across three divisions, sitting on two different floors? That’s ridiculous.”
“No,” Desmond said, “we don’t. We expect you to use your PhD in biostats and your programming background to help build the more complex reports assigned to the streamlined reporting group.”
The man’s mouth fell open. “I’m being demoted? You think I’m going to go sit in a cube next to the people I used to manage and write code again?”
“If you’re not willing to sit alongside the people working for you—and do the same work you’re asking them to do—there’s no place for you here. We’re a company of doers, not managers.”
Herman huffed, glanced away. “Well, who’s going to translate the requirements? And more importantly, who’s going to prioritize the work? It’ll be chaos.”
“The customers will prioritize the work. It’s their call. Each report will be assigned an estimated time to complete.” Desmond nodded toward Lin. “Science gets seventy percent of the hours available, business the other thirty. Each group internally prioritizes their own jobs based on their own needs and time estimates.”
“And the specs?”
Desmond had been waiting for that question. “We have someone in mind for that.”
Herman leaned forward.
“You know her actually. Avery Price.”
Avery flourished in her new role. She was hard-working, dedicated, and no-nonsense. She was all about the work. Despite her conduct at her first meeting with Desmond, he saw that she was quite professional at the office.
Several opportunities arose to promote her, but she declined each one. “I don’t want to be in charge,” she said. “I want to do the work.” She negotiated for more stock options instead of a higher salary. She reminded Desmond so much of himself at SciNet.
He spent more and more time with her. She was often his first point of contact when the board wanted special reports. She programmed a lot of them herself and never missed a deadline.
He was leaving the Phaethon office late on a Friday when he saw the task light on in her cubicle. He walked over, found her with her headphones on, hunched over, a window with a SQL server database diagram open, lines drawn between the tables listing the columns, like a family tree showing the relationships. She pulled a line across, creating a primary-foreign key relationship.
He knocked on the cube’s steel frame. She turned and pulled the headphones off. She had black bags under her eyes.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself.”
“Leaving soon?”
“Doubtful.”
“What’re you working on?”
“Report for Lin Shaw.” She motioned to some handwritten notes on a pad. Desmond recognized the names of a few genes and SNPs. The specs called for data sets by age groups, gender, race, and associated medical conditions.
“Looks intense.”
“It is. I’m almost too fried.”
“Come on.” He motioned to the conference room. “I’ll help you.”
She grinned as if he was kidding.
“I was a programmer once. I can still write a SQL query.”
They ordered Chinese food, sat at the conference table side by side, their laptops open, and split up the work. They put their datasets together, the pieces sliding into place slowly at first, then more quickly as they found a rhythm between them.
While they waited for a particularly complex query to execute, Desmond asked, “Why do you push yourself so hard?”
She didn’t look him in the eye. “I don’t know.”
“Okay. Make something up.”
She laughed and ate a piece of sweet and sour chicken, which was almost cold now. “I guess the way I grew up. Hard work was a virtue sort of thing.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
The query finished. Desmond scanned the results window. Duplicate rows. He searched the query text, then grabbed the mouse. “This left outer join needs to be an inner join—”
“I see it.” She brushed his hand off the mouse. He paused at the touch, felt his breathing accelerate. She clicked the text and typed, not making eye contact. Clearly she didn’t feel the same thing. She was determined to finish the query herself. She clicked execute again.
“So what drew you to Phaethon?”
“Money.”
Desmond shook his head. “Do you always lie when someone asks you a personal question?”
She cocked her head back in mock contemplation. “I’m detecting a circular reference in your query.”
He laughed out loud. Geek humor always got him. “No, seriously. Why do you always dodge?”
“Hard to say.”
“And why is it hard to say?”
“Data set’s too small.” She shrugged. “I don’t get many personal questions.”
“In that case, let’s try the query again. You work really hard here. But you could do that anywhere. Why here? Why this company? Come on, it won’t kill you to answer.”
She looked him in the eye. “All right. I believe in what Phaethon’s doing. Finding the genetic basis of disease. It will have a huge impact.”
“True. Is that it? There’s no… personal stakes for you?”
The query finished. It was right this time. She copied and pasted the results into an Excel spreadsheet. He thought she was going to ignore the question, but she responded, her focus firml
y on the screen.
“My dad.”
Desmond said nothing, giving her time.
“He has Alzheimer’s.”
He felt like he saw the first true piece of Avery then. It was so much more personal than seeing her apartment the morning they first met, or even when she’d pulled her shirt off and changed in plain view. And he felt a new kind of connection to her. He knew what it was like to pursue something to help a sick family member. More than anything, he wanted to tell her about the Looking Glass then, to tell her that she was indeed working on something that would help her father, and so many others.
Two weeks later, Avery walked into his office. Her demeanor was different. Gone was the humble self-confidence. She seemed… almost shy. Nervous.
“What’s up?”
“I—” She scratched behind her ear. “I’d like to ask a favor.”
“Anything.”
She inhaled. “I judge this startup competition at my alma mater.”
“UNC.”
“Right.” She swallowed. “So, there’s this startup, CityForge, it’s about helping villages in the third world become cities. Anyway, I was thinking, if you were up for it, and you had time, which you probably don’t—”
“I do.”
“It’s okay if you don’t.”
“What do you need?”
“Well, I was hoping you could, um, talk with the founders, maybe give them some pointers. I could set up a conference call—”
Desmond held up his hand. “Avery, do you have any idea how many requests for calls I get from people with the next great startup idea?”
She opened her mouth, but he cut her off.
“Just messing with you.”
She laughed, releasing some of her nervousness.
“Payback for that restraining order comment a few months ago.”
“Touché, Mr. Hughes.”
“Look, I’d be glad to. In fact, urbanization is a focus for Icarus Capital. Cities are important to what we’re doing.”
“They’re a non-profit.”
“Fine by me. I’m not that into profit these days.”
