We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  Eliza pushes her chair back and stands. “Wait!” Preston says. “Where are you going? I’ll treat you to dinner, obviously. Consider this the hazard pay for the day.” Let’s pause here to wonder at something—why is he trying to get her to stay? She’s terribly annoying and he won. Is her strange enchantment bleeding into his personal feelings for her? We trust JP and Lewis, and even though we haven’t truly imagined it until now, it could be that Preston hasn’t won at all. Perhaps he’s already lost. Aw fuck, they’re totally boning. She’s got him entirely under her control.

  Eliza looks past Preston’s shoulder, and the light in her eyes switches off for the second time that day. Dead shark eyes. Preston visibly recoils; so do we. It is scary, in person, and much scarier for Preston who is seeing the veil ripped off his girlfriend for the first time and realizing there is something grotesque underneath. “I’m going back to work. You said it yourself—I’m part of a well-paid group of people who are launching a premium product this week. Tonight was always going to be an all-nighter. I suppose I should be grateful that I won’t be able to sleep anyway.”

  “Actually,” Preston corrects, “I said ‘team.’ Part of a well-paid team.”

  “I know what you said.” She walks out of the restaurant, passing their very confused waiter, passing us. Her head is buzzing. Electric. She leaves her coat hanging on the back of her chair.

  “Wait,” we hear Preston say. “Your coat! Your coat!” But she continues anyhow. She doesn’t want her coat. She needs the cool night air on her skin or she might spark and catch fire.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  To: [Cara Smith]

  Subject: Sexism at Fancy Dog

  Message:

  Ms. Smith,

  Due to your recent tweets regarding digital harassment perpetrated by alt-right men’s rights activists and Trump supporters, I thought you might be interested in a situation that’s progressing at Fancy Dog right now (I am employed there). I am reaching out to you because you are a journalist at re/Code. Please shoot me an email if you’re interested in chatting. I am fine with being quoted.

  Eliza Bright

  Developer at Fancy Dog Games

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  He begins his day the usual way, loosely knotting Dog’s leash to the bike rack outside Starbucks. He buys his venti soy latte, steamed to one hundred thirty degrees exactly. They mangle his name on the side of the cup: Princeton. He smirks and takes a photo, uploads it to Instagram. We see the hashtags: #whydobaristasmisspell? #justtofuckwithus. We tap the photo twice; we like the photo.

  He reclaims Dog and ascends the glass tower. His glass tower. It is sunny and crisp. The hard outlines on benches, sidewalk seams and garbage cans prove what his mother calls “winter sparkle.” He smiles, remembering her theory—in winter it’s drier; less moisture makes everything pop. He’s never looked it up; he doesn’t want to ruin the magic of winter sparkle. His employees are working away in the tower when the elevator doors part to let him in—he sees excitement and determination on every face. He’d gone home and slept for four solid hours; he isn’t nervous in the slightest about the public announcement later this afternoon. In short, it is a good day.

  Preston just about spits out his coffee when he sees it. The headline. “It’s Everywhere: Sexist Culture at Fancy Dog,” posted one minute ago. And the copy. It doesn’t help that this one is so puntastic. “Fancy Dog proves they’re not so fancy—they’re just dogs.” Lewis is attributed: “feminazi whore.” How dare she. How fucking dare she. It’s Preston’s big day and here she is, forcing the spotlight to turn. His good mood replaced with alarm bells. And all to send the fucking elite media people after us? His phone rings so continuously that, due to its vibrate function, it threatens to waddle right off his glass desk. He is as mad as we are. Let it shatter, he thinks. Let the whole thing shatter.

  Chapter Thirty

  LFleis: HOLY SHIT THAT CUNT PUBLISHED OUR NAMES

  JPDes: ??????

  LFleis: LOOK ON RECODE

  JPDes: what?

  JPDes: where?

  LFleis: ITS ON THE GODDAMN FRONT PAGE ASSHOLE LOOK AT IT

  JPDes: oh my god

  JPDes: OH MY GOD

  JPDes: we are never showing our faces again

  LFleis: no, wait, look

  LFleis: read the comments.

  LFleis: at least some people see this for what it is

  LFleis: a manhating femoid just trying to get her fifteen minutes

  LFleis: or a promotion

  LFleis: or to get back at her boyfriend

  LFleis: see? like a lot of people are sticking up for us

  LFleis: JP??

  JPDes: sorry. delphine called

  LFleis: y?

  JPDes: ask if i was okay

  LFleis: delphine doesnt read recode

  JPDes: someone told her about it

  JPDes: they red it on jezebel

  LFleis: JEZEBEL HAS IT????

  JPDes: kotaku has it

  LFleis: of course they do

  JPDes: and then jezebel put it in a roundup

  JPDes: lewis, what are we going to do?

  LFleis: look, most people are with us

  LFleis: scroll down, look at the comments

  LFleis: like a lot of people think its funny

  LFleis: it was funny

  JPDes: what about this one

  JPDes: As an engineer with SpaceX, I need to speak to all of you saying no harm no foul. Harm was done here. It’s done every day when these attitudes are allowed to continue. These attitudes are what breeds the ridiculous attrition rate for women in STEM fields. It’s what leads women to be passed up for promotions. It’s what makes us quit. It’s what Dr. Ben Barres experienced after he transitioned. He used to be called Barbara. Did you know someone remembered his research from when he identified as a woman and commented that his was much better and clearer than his sister’s? Well guess what, Dr. Barres doesn’t have a sister. That was his own research from a few years back and it hadn’t changed. The only thing that changed was the perceived gender of the person presenting the information. That’s it. That’s what made the research better and clearer. So yeah, harm was done here even if she didn’t get fired or demoted or anything. It’s absolutely going to affect her career. It’s going to affect mine too. Everyone’s.

  LFleis: that person doesnt even work in games, how the fuck does she kno

  JPDes: dude. that woman is an ENGINEER for SpaceX.

  LFleis: dude.

  LFleis: its an internet comment. hands down that fuck does not work for nasa.

  JPDes: dude we fucked up so bad

  JPDes: we never shouldve written nething down

  JPDes: we said stuff in public we shouldve just said between ourselves

  LFleis: no. we didnt. we were just being people at work joking around and having a good time

  LFleis: if thats fucking up, then they r gonna ban all jokes at work

  LFleis: she fucked up

  LFleis: she drew all this attention

  LFleis: look, if were copying and pasting comments now, what about this one

  LFleis: listen, i’m pretty sure those guys were being idiots, sure. But do we really need a whole article on one of the most respected tech websites for something that’s virtually a non-issue? Literally nothing happened. This whole article is about nothing. Nothing happened.

  JPDes: that other one is a spacex engineer

  LFleis: who the fuck cares

  LFleis: look at the numbers

  LFleis: half of these just say lol, id tkae these guys out for a beer

  LFleis: my phne is ringing now too

  LFleis: blocked number

  JPDes: dont answer it

  JPDes: lets go to preston

  JPDes: there has to be some kind of protocol here

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A sample of what we find in Eliza’s G-chats:

  DAleb: you shouldn’t have done that. they’re going to come down on yo
u hard.

  SChoy: are you fucking out of your damn mind this is going to suck so bad you should never have done that

  LFleis: you shouldnt have done that

  Eliza hasn’t slept. She hasn’t even left—stayed in the office after talking to Preston. She pounds another coffee and checks her code, waits to be summoned.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Let’s pivot to Windy City, down, down, down through the hole in the ground to look at The Inspectre, who has skinned Kotaku with a rare newspaper artifact so he can read it, kicked back in the red light of his lair, without switching to meatspace. He prefers to exist here, to read the gaming headlines from inside a game itself.

  And there she is, that cunt, that fascist, spilling names and destroying men. But even in his anger, his lips curl into a smile. We know why; we know the policies. And all of us, including him, know what’s coming next. We relish the suspense and we will eat the outcome happily and messily, with ketchup dripping down our chins like blood. She will be fired, we are certain. And they will use some technicality, but we know. We know. They have our back, these men, these soldiers in the war against social “justice.” Justice for whom, we wonder? Certainly not us! Our world is being invaded, colonized, and our safety threatened. So we take up arms. Windy City is ours. It’s for us.

  The Inspectre pops a bag of popcorn and turns on his in-game computer, engages with this mise en abyme, this recursive technology, to watch Reddit as we all read, comment, post, discuss. It is a beautiful discourse, free of censorship, a marketplace of ideas, a meritocracy. And we whip ourselves into wind, into a sandstorm, into an inferno: fire her. Fire her. FIRE HER.

  The Inspectre cackles.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Eliza is called into Preston’s office almost immediately. Her mind is filled with a sound like a million buzzing bees or clacking keyboards or humming electricity. No one notices the stress radiating from her is different from anyone else’s. Almost the entire company has been awake all night. Fancy Dog, on its face, prides itself on work-life balance. Crunching hasn’t been required of anyone. But it is common and unspoken knowledge that, no matter what is said, each employee has to stay up all night working if they want to compete with everyone else. Eliza knew she would need a lot of goodwill this morning, so she spent the night plodding through each line of code, distracted by the internal sound of anxiety perhaps. She expects to be talked to. To have a Conversation. We rub our hands together. It will be so, so much worse. How can she not know?

  Preston isn’t sitting at his desk when Eliza walks in. He stands, arms folded. The biggest thing on his plate today is supposed to be the public announcement. Everything is interrupted. Everything must be recalibrated. The situation has to be dealt with as quickly as possible. We will inflate the internet with the hot air of our constant conversation until it all floats away; it is our favorite kind of ride. And Eliza is so sleep-deprived and nervous she doesn’t remember all the details as they occur. She experiences this encounter in vignettes; dark at the edges, flashes isolated from life’s normal linear cause-and-effect pattern.

  It isn’t just Preston. It is Preston, the skinny blonde HR representative, and the other co-founder, Brandon. This is the crowd that appears when people do something majorly wrong. Now she knows. Imagining that shock, the lips parting to form a delicate “oh,” the finest her rat mouth has ever looked—oh, such a delicious moment.

  Preston grabs the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “I really, really don’t want to do this.”

  Eliza wants to say, “Then don’t.” And if it were only Preston in the room, she might have. Instead she replaces that “oh” with a grim line, lips pressing together. She inclines her head, lifts her chin like she has something to be proud of.

  Preston’s lips are tight and his words are short, small enough to escape through the tension as he continues. “But you signed an NDA. Nondisclosure Agreement. You can’t disclose anything. And now you have. And if you read the NDA—and you better have read it, you signed it—you know the price of disclosing is immediate termination of your work agreement.”

  “But I didn’t disclose the Vive support! I didn’t even talk about the software update!”

  Brandon steps into her line of sight. “It’s a Conversation with an employee on our private property. That is a business secret.”

  “What happened to Conversations? What happened to giving me the opportunity to correct my behavior?” Eliza’s voice rings small and watery. She hates the way it sounds, almost as much as how her rat mouth must look in this moment, blubbering in front of Preston, in front of everyone, like this. But what she hates most is her inability to do anything about her reaction.

  Preston places his palms together as if in prayer, but uses them to point, like aiming a Nerf gun. “This is too big for Conversations.” Preston wants to bite his own tongue when he hears the words he uses. He stops. Freezes. His eyes unfocus. We want to reach through the narrative, shake him up, tell him he didn’t lose. There is such a thing as too big for Conversations. She crossed the line when she ruined the launch.

  Brandon continues. “Why did you do this? You know we’re one of the good guys here.”

  She’s not sure how to answer exactly, so she goes with: “What would you have done, if you were me?” She pauses so long Preston thinks she will offer no more explanation. He takes a breath to speak, but she gathers herself and interrupts before he begins. “They think I’m not good at this because I’m a woman. They did something that proved that. Nothing happened. Then they refused to work with me in our meeting, and I came to you about that too. And nothing happened. What was I supposed to do? Can an employee really use the words ‘feminazi whore’ at work without consequences?”

  She doesn’t hear his answer—it falls outside the faded outlines of her vignetted experience. Preston knows he doesn’t give one. At least, not a real one. Because at this moment, Preston starts to wonder what exactly she should have done and can’t think of anything to say. This is his tragic flaw. If we think of him as the hero, which we can sometimes, it is his lack of conviction, here, that leads him to his downfall. That he sits here and thinks about what she should have done instead.

  There are more words. Brandon speaks. The HR representative might be speaking too, we don’t really know. It’s not important.

  Eliza looks through the glass wall and sees Lewis and Jean-Pascale. They look like they’ve come up quickly—Lewis still has his coat on, has a coffee in his hand. He stares at her through the glass like she is a snake in a tank. His wolverine eyes in his sunken sockets fix on her as he shakes his head, lips in a thin line. The realization that his face looks rehearsed, as though he practiced it in front of a mirror, whips across Eliza’s face in the form of a twitch. Under other circumstances, it might make her laugh.

  Jean-Pascale doesn’t look rehearsed at all. His Frankenstein’s Monster height isn’t matched by any balance in his gawky limbs, appendages that seem to shoot out in all directions. Now, with his hands clasped behind his back and his nervous tick of turning his toes in toward each other, then slowly turning them away as he stares floorward, he looks like a shamed schoolboy.

  The HR representative speaks. Small, blonde and pretty; the kind of person whose photo is surely on the Careers at Fancy Dog page. We imagine up a bimbo, attach these words to a face. “We know you’ll understand we can’t permit you to return to your desk. We will send your personal effects along with Ms. Choy this evening.”

  And then Eliza is walking, the small HR bunny behind her, out the glass doors and toward the elevators. Everyone is staring. Then she is in the elevator. The doors close. She is gone.

  Lewis claps Jean-Pascale on the shoulder. JP’s face gets stuck like a frustrated Jack-in-the-box, tension about to spring—a Jean-Pascale-in-a-box. He is livid with her and himself in equal measure, strong feelings in two opposite directions. We are getting used to such contradictions in him, in everyone. Lewis says, “Well, that’s tak
en care of. We can go back to normal.” He follows up with a second clap on JP’s shoulder before turning and walking into Preston’s office. He holds his head high. He feels no fear.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Before we move on, let’s zoom in on something here: the folder in HR Barbie’s hand. All files are computerized, sure, but when dealing with someone individually, files are printed. That’s what happens when a company is full of employees who have, at least, the chance of possessing a modicum of hacking capability: HR makes a hard copy before someone can mess with the file. Their file is printed in its entirety: hiring paperwork; any agreements they might have signed—in this case, Eliza’s three nondisclosure agreements, her undoing; background check; attendance record; if they’ve needed any sensitivity training (Jean-Pascale’s and Lewis’s files both say that, along with the words “pending schedule.” Their files aren’t printed at this point, however); anything and everything with their name on it—a copy of Eliza’s Career Tree (which is by now dead and dropping its leaves); Guilds of the Protectorate account name—employees receive presents in-game for every holiday and badges next to their names so they are easily identifiable as working for Fancy Dog. It is all necessary information. Perfectly standard.

  During the whole termination, the folder is in HR Barbie’s hands. She’s bored, mostly—sad someone is getting fired, but bored all the same. She doesn’t know Eliza except by sight and has an appointment at the spa with her two best friends for the evening, so she is constantly checking her phone, watching the minutes tick by. This is the kind of woman we imagine here. So simple and so nice to look at.

  So watch what she does before she escorts Eliza to the elevator and, subsequently, out of the building. She sets the folder down, not on Preston’s desk but on the table by the window, next to which are a few squishy armchairs for more pleasant, relaxed meetings than this. On her way back up, after depositing Eliza squarely outside, she feels her phone vibrate in her pocket. When she looks, the little green speech bubble flashes “adress of spa again?” After that, “*address. sorry. also name?” And she texts her friend about the details on the way back up to her desk. She never returns to Preston’s office.