Chapter Four: The Morning
Lucas sent three messages before seven a.m.
The first was to Renata: Push my eight and nine o’clock. I need the morning.
The second was to Marcus Kim, his lead engineer: Meridian threading issue resolved. Will send diff for review by ten. Do not ask me any questions until you’ve read it.
The third was to the agency that employed Emma: a formal inquiry about the process for directly hiring one of their contracted workers, which turned out to involve a buyout fee that Lucas agreed to by return message before the agency representative had finished typing the reply.
Emma had gone home at four-thirty with the slightly dazed quality of someone who has been fully absorbed in something for two hours and is now re-emerging into the physical world. She had her coat and her lanyard and her bag. At the door, she had stopped and said: “I hope the fix holds. I think it will, but you should test it thoroughly before you rely on it.”
“I intend to,” he said.
“Okay.” She had turned to go.
“Emma.”
She turned back.
“Thank you,” he said. Not the reflexive thank you he gave when she was cleaning, the acknowledgment of presence. Something else. “I mean that in a much larger sense than I can currently articulate at four in the morning.”
She had looked at him for a moment, and he had the sense of being very accurately assessed, and then she had said: “The Carnegie Mellon paper is publicly available. If anyone on your team wants to read it.” And walked out.
By nine-thirty, Marcus Kim had reviewed the diff and sent a message consisting entirely of: how.
By ten, Lucas had the outline of a conversation he needed to have.
