The Lightcap (13 page)

“I hope this handsome man isn’t bothering you too much, Boss,” she said a little too playfully, her head leaning toward Dej’s neck.  Adam was amused by her intoxication, having never seen her in a position of such vulnerability, her entire face lit up with overt affection.  He had known her for almost two decades, but he wasn’t sure he had ever seen her teeth when she smiled before that moment.  There was a clause in their employment contracts prohibiting romantic involvement between members of the team, but Adam was not one to pry.  They both seemed drunk, and he felt no obligation to make assumptions about the nature of their relationship.  Adam was happier not knowing the details.  Plausible deniability.  He’d had over twenty meetings with Velim, and she’d never raised any protest about the performance of either Dej or Aria.  That was good enough for Adam.

Dej, however, suddenly appeared several shades lighter as the blood rushed out of his face.  He seemed tipsy, though not on the same level as Aria.  Dej was sober enough to realize she had just got very comfortable with him in front of the head of their department.  Dej froze, his mouth opening and closing a few times, his words dead at the back of his throat before his tongue and lips had a chance to cooperate.  Adam enjoyed Dej’s discomfort and Aria’s abandon for several seconds, while doing his best not to laugh aloud.  Finally, he brought his hand down to Dej’s shoulder with a muffled
thump
and responded, “No, Aria, it’s fine.  Dej and I were just having a toast in honor of Damen’s next adventure.  Not a bother at all.”  He looked to Dej, who gave a sheepish grin, his teeth still distractingly white even with the color drained from his face.  Aria’s deep green eyes filled with happiness.  Adam smiled, winked at Dej, and continued, “You’re both clearly very drunk, so I’m going to let you enjoy that, along with the hangovers in the morning.  I’m sure you won’t remember any of this.”

As Adam stepped away from the bar, a soft sound played in his ear: the notification tone to alert a user of a new message.  He noticed the conversations around the bar faltered momentarily, indicating strongly that the rest of them had received the same message.  It was from Damen.  They all started listening to it at roughly the same time, their discussions placed on hold.

The soft computer voice read the message in his ear.  “Hey, guys, sorry for leaving without saying goodbye.  I just landed in Cascadia Province and got a chance to send a message.  The position I was offered was too much to turn down, and they said they could only give it to me if I could start pronto.  It was really great working with you all, at least I think it was, from what I can remember.  Best of luck to you guys, come out and visit some time if you’re able to get a travel pass
.
”
 
Adam saw relieved expressions circle the bar, punctuated by shaken heads.  He heard small bouts of laughter and the occasional comments on the frivolity and the short-sightedness of youth, expressed with a mixture of condescension and envy.  The existing feeling of enjoyment in the room turned to outright celebration, with glasses tipped and refilled several times over.

Adam made his way around the room, stopping at each table to talk to the programmers, who were more cheerful than he had ever seen them.  He made small talk with them, an act he found difficult but necessary, especially in a leadership role.  He remembered once hearing that the higher up one was in an organization, the more diplomatic one had to be. 
Apparently LaMont missed that memo
, Adam thought, imagining a stack of memos on LaMont’s desk several times taller than the stack on Nate’s.  As they talked, he was again reminded of the lack of substance in their conversations, words traded over things as pointless as their chosen sports teams, the bitter winter weather, how the bitter winter weather affected their commute, how the bitter winter weather affected their utility bills, and the popular dramas on the vid nodes.  It had been this way at every work gathering he had attended, but the past gatherings he had attended had the added benefit of discussions of shared office experiences, experiences Adam and the other coders had been robbed of, thanks to the Lightcap.

The group lasted late into the night, nursed scotch Adam’s only constant companion as he spent the better part of the evening moving from table to table, chattered irrelevancies giving his mind time to reflect on Damen Theda and the rest of his team.  The message had been written with Damen’s style, but two aspects of the story didn’t sit well with Adam: Damen’s sudden departure and the convenient message containing much of the same language Damen used in daily conversation.  It was also signed with his passkey, which really only proved the message had been sent from his dome, not that Damen himself had sent it. 
If not Damen, then who?  And why?
Adam wondered, not sure why he even doubted Damen authored the message. 
What more proof do I need? 
Adaptech had always been good to Adam, and he had no reason to doubt what he had been told.  People changed jobs, even abruptly, all the time.

Adam felt a moment’s anger with himself for not being able to be happy for Damen, for not being able to shake his persistent thoughts that conspiratorial shadows lurked in every corner.  The last of his team departed Glass with waved goodbyes and loudly spoken admonitions for safe travels, which left Adam seated alone at a table, the city spread out before him, sparkling from his vantage point on the roof.  As he finished his drink and stood up to leave, Aria and Dej reappeared, and Adam realized he hadn’t seen them for at least the past half hour.  He had some idea of what they had been doing, but he thought it best to let it go, as the memories of their earlier awkward conversation were still fresh in his mind.  He rethought his assumption as they drew closer, based on the frown Dej wore and the puffy skin around Aria’s stark green eyes.  She had definitely been crying.

“Adam, we need to talk to you,” Dej said worriedly, looking to Aria.  “We think there might be more to the story.  About Damen, I mean.”  Dej still looked slightly drunk, but he had the sullen face of someone who had been at least partially sobered by reality.  They all sat down at Adam’s table.

Aria sniffed and said, “I was immediately suspicious.  On the first day of the project, Damen and I walked to the same subway station after work.  You know I’m not a big talker, but Damen definitely was, and he gave me the short version of his life story.  He was so excited to be working for Adaptech, especially because he mentioned dreading having to move out of the City or the Region to find work.  His mother was ill, and his family had sold almost everything they owned to keep her in a facility where she could get the care she needed.”

Adam thought about what Aria said.  He didn’t know Damen well at all, having talked to him for the longest unbroken stretch during his hour-long interview when he was being considered for the project. 

“Well, it sounds like the offer he had was enough to get him to leave.  I understand wanting to be close to family and your parents.  If mine were still around I’d want to be able to see them too.  Maybe he decided the money was worth moving to the Cascadia Region,” Adam offered.

Aria shook her head slowly from side to side, looked down, and answered, “That’s what I thought at first, too.  Maybe it was just about the money, but I also don’t know how much more he could have possibly been offered at another company.  I don’t know what Adaptech is paying him.”  Her eyes flicked to him as she said this, non-verbal recognition that they were prohibited from talking about compensation by their employment contract.  “But I do know it’s expensive to migrate to another Region, especially a corporate one.  Expensive enough Damen would have to be making about thirty percent more than what I’m making just to make it possible, let alone worth his while.  I have over ten years of professional experience.  Damen was fresh out of university.  The math just doesn’t add up.” She clutched a glass of water and stared down into it, distressed.

Adam worked to suppress a frown.  As manager of the project, he was privy to compensation data.  He struggled with whether to tell Aria that Damen was paid slightly more than she, thanks to the racist, misogynistic LaMont, who hadn’t even wanted to bring her on board in the first place.  Adam had to negotiate with LaMont to pay her twenty-five percent more than LaMont wanted and considered it a minor miracle he had succeeded.  As it was, Aria was the lowest-paid member of the team for no reason but LaMont’s prejudice.

Aria didn’t give him the chance to divulge anything, however.  “Also, I—” She looked to Dej, who tightened his arm around her shoulder and nodded, as if to let her know she could tell Adam.  “I ran a trace on the message that supposedly came from Damen.  Sorry, I know that’s not allowed, but I couldn’t help myself.  I had to know.  It definitely came from his dome, but I couldn’t find any kind of geotag on it at all, which makes it impossible to prove where the message originated.  It seems odd that Damen would go to the trouble of hiding the origin of a simple farewell message.”  Adam was surprised Dej and Aria would trust him enough to bring their concerns to his attention, but he chalked it up to his demeanor of integrity and as a byproduct of the courage he had shown by standing up to LaMont earlier that afternoon.

They sat with the air suspended in silence between them like a crossbow pulled back, about to fire.  Adam finally said, “I appreciate you letting me know.  I’ll do my best to find some answers.  You need to be careful about who you tell, even talking about it between the two of you, especially at work.  There are ears everywhere.”  This last line was punctuated by his raised finger, circled in midair.

Being overly analytical had its downsides, and Adam was intimately familiar with the majority of them, particularly the downside of paranoia.  He spent his entire trip home lost in thought, attacking different possibilities from all angles.  Hana was gone on a business trip, not to return until the following week, which allowed him to continue his pondering uninterrupted from the comfort of his flat.  Adam went through his evening routine from muscle memory, teeth brushed and flossed without any conscious thought, sheets pulled back, bed occupied, and finally fell into a restless slumber, the scent of sweet musk stuck in the back of his nose.

Adam opened his eyes.  His hands were clasped in his lap.  He faced a screen filled with line after line of code.  He did not recognize the bare cubicle, with nothing more than a desk, a chair, and the screen in front of him.  The walls of the cubicle, beige and unremarkable, were tall and topped with a translucent white dome to let diffused light enter from above.  Disoriented, Adam reached up and felt two smooth surfaces encompassing the back of his scalp.  A third bisected the top of his head and ended in a round circle on his hairline.  The arms met in a fourth circle under his skull’s occipital bump.

This was his cube at the Lightcap project, Adam was sure of it.  He turned to look at the code on the computer screen, but it was jumbled, washed out by a glow seeming to emanate from everything around him. 
This must be a dream
, Adam thought.  He noticed a squiggled line added to the ones already on the screen. 
That’s interesting
, he thought, and another line appeared.

Adam suddenly heard cries of desperation, sounding far off and muffled like the screams of a jet engine passed through several thick walls.  He slid open the opaque door separating him from the larger room and stepped into a row of a cube farm, each cubicle like the last, their bubbled tops giving the appearance of a room full of eggs in a large, open carton.  Adam walked down the walled row.

“Hello?”  Adam called out to the seemingly empty area.  The word died shortly after it left his mouth, absorbed by the beige carpet lining the cubicle exterior walls.  He pulled open the doors of several cubes to find each one empty, save for the same types of desk, screen, and chair that had been in his own. 

Adam heard another cry, clearer and filled with pain, rather than the desperate anger of the last one.  The sound of shuffled feet truncated with a dull thud followed, coming from one of the cubes.  Adam raced to throw open door after door, finding nothing behind them but the desks, chairs, and screens displaying the same blurred chunk of code he had seen in his office.  Adam made it to the last row of cubicles, where the first door he opened revealed a man slumped against the floor, Lightcap lying next to him.

Adam turned the man over and discovered with horror the face of Damen Theda.  Dark red blood flowed from his nose and mixed with a milky fluid from his ears.  Damen, still alive, shook slightly.  More blood slid down the side of his face with each blink of his unfocused eyes.  “HELP! I need help!” shouted Adam, the sound of his voice muted against the enclosed walls of corporate solitude.  Adam heard rushed footsteps and the sound of heavy boots on thin carpet as two men rounded the corner.  Blues, uniformed with batons dangling from their hips, hands readied on the holsters of their pistols.  One rushed to Damen, the other to Adam.