The Rule of Stephens Read online

  Catherine took a moment considering an answer, pouring herself a small top-up of wine, wondering if Rostock was perhaps not aware of the latest research in his own field. He was, after all, retired. But before she could even think to speak, he’d moved on.

  “But I might approve of your efforts anyway,” he said, “just knowing it was you.”

  Catherine was softened by the comment and thought she understood what it meant. Those few, those lucky or unlucky few. It was an odd bond but a real one nevertheless. And as for him having read a bit about her already, wasn’t she just that moment thinking the same thing?

  She was walking into the dining room as they spoke, to the table where her notebook was open next to a stack of financial statements and a file of legal correspondence.

  “I’ve read the profile that Fast Twitch tried to write,” Rostock said.

  That would be the profile the tech magazine tried to write without ever getting an interview with her. It was a key disagreement she’d had with Morris that signalled things going sour between them. A year out after AF801. Everything having gone pretty smoothly to that point. She’d actually been quietly pleased at her own resilience, sliding back into the DIY grooves, with so much going on to distract, to deflect negative thought. And progress being made too. Real progress, even if they were behind on the second prototype and an array of niggling problems had been pushing back the test. In the midst of all that, the first anniversary looming and Catherine seeing how it had not really been put that far behind her, how indeed the memories and nightmares had so stubbornly lingered. And Morris chose that moment to decide on her behalf how she should now engage with the world.

  “Fast Twitch. Tell your story.” Catherine couldn’t believe it.

  “This enormous thing has happened to you,” Morris had said to her. “Your survival. We need to work with this story. To talk is healthy.”

  As if this were about his concern for her personal health. She’d hardly been able to muster a response. And Morris, as if sensing her feelings, then abandoned the health angle and moved on to another, pulling levers, pushing buttons. Hoping against hope that something would work.

  “Think of it as outreach. We get people behind the scenes,” Morris was saying. Now was the time to do it. Get people into the Warehouse. Let them start to build that relationship. Begin to create that bond.

  “Let them see the human faces,” Morris was saying. They were more than a company, after all, weren’t they? They were Catherine’s company.

  “Companies don’t change your life,” Morris said. “People do. You do. So we need your story. The way you changed your life.”

  Quoting her to herself, drawing on some strategically advantageous moment before. Talking to Morris was on occasion like looking at a YouTube video of some key thing you once said played back through the mouth of what was obviously an evil, manipulative twin.

  “Morris, stop,” Catherine said. “We aren’t selling anything yet. We’re still building. We’re still testing.”

  “We are stalling,” Morris threw back, putting heat in the friction between them. If they were going to capitalize on early signs of market enthusiasm, Morris went on, they had to test soon and get a beta out there. Test. Then beta. The first prototype had come together so beautifully. What the hell was so different about the second?

  So many issues, Catherine explained. Back end, mooring tech, diagnostic modules that needed lengthy testing to get stable data.

  “What can it do now, reliably?” Morris asked.

  Vital stats, she told him. Heart and respiration rate, blood pressure and glucose levels, body temperature.

  Well build that and test it, Morris replied. Curt and sharp. He wanted meaningful results by month end. And there was an oddly punctuating quality to his stress on those words.

  Catherine immediately furious. “Since when do I work to your ultimatums?” she asked, a flash of anger passing through her, combined with a veering sense that she did not have complete and typical control over this anger either.

  “Everyone works to deadlines,” Morris said, his voice now not avuncular at all. “Sometimes people just have to be reminded.”

  There was a real hardness there. A brittle willingness to fight that she had to assume Morris had always had at his disposal, but that he’d never felt the need to deploy against her before. His lead investment. His darling. Those had been his words.

  Well, Catherine thought, two could play at that game, reaching for their tools of conflict at the moment required. So when that smirking young man showed up at the Warehouse on a Tuesday morning just about a year after AF801 went down, Catherine walked him down the street to a dingy pre-Starbucks coffee shop frequented by the trades and the truck drivers so busy in that part of town. The young man’s name was Decker and she got him a seat in the swarming room, fetched him a cup of watery joe from the serve-yourself urn on the counter, a Danish so slumped it looked like a failed pancake with a splatter of jam in the middle. Told him to enjoy and that she’d never give an interview she hadn’t arranged herself.

  He was completely confused, as if he couldn’t even understand the words she’d spoken. “People don’t generally turn down Fast Twitch coverage,” he said.

  “I’m people,” Catherine said. “And this is me turning it down.”

  “I won’t ask personal questions,” Decker said, sounding perfectly reasonable. “Just business.”

  The Fast Twitch blog had something like 13 million monthly readers. There was no good reason not to talk to the man about DIY. Catherine knew it as she stood there, as she caught her own reflection in the coffee shop window. She could see herself acting impulsively, emotionally, lecturing the guy about how the vision was hers and hers alone, how she would pursue it, how she would not be broken. I will not be broken. And she got quoted saying that too.

  Seven emails from Morris the morning after the article ran, which was not a hatchet job exactly but made her sound quotably weird, even in the eccentric world of start-ups. And as his messages arrived that morning, each sounding more hysterical than the last, she wondered at just how significantly the air had now changed between them. Her vision alone? Morris fumed. Hadn’t he been instrumental in shaping the thing they were doing? Hadn’t her carefully chosen and devoted team played some role? If she didn’t appreciate his leadership, if she thought he didn’t understand how a company like this had to be led, if she thought she could be so selfish as to keep her story to herself…

  “Honestly,” she told Rostock, “I never even read what Fast Twitch wrote. Someone gave me the gist of it.”

  And by the time she’d said that, she also had her computer open and Michael Rostock’s name typed in. A few keystrokes and there he was at the top of the list. Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago at the Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center. A few more clicks and she had his portrait. Sixtyish with silver hair and a square jaw, a proud and angular nose, narrow smile, a certain sharpness in the creases around his eyes. Nice-looking man. Handsome even. Tall, she guessed. And fit. Always wore leather shoes to work, Oxfords or wingtip brogues.

  “How do I know this is you?” she asked.

  “Well you don’t. Which is why I was hoping we could speak in person.” And saying this his voice trailed off in a way that signalled to Catherine that Rostock himself found it a strange and bold suggestion, and one that Catherine might reasonably decline.

  She thought about it, as well as the possibility of simply hanging up. Easy to do, and she was certain he wouldn’t call back. There was something in his tone, his manner, suggesting that if Dr. Rostock were refused, he wouldn’t press. Yet he was reaching out, this man from 70F, if that’s who he really was. And if she wanted to find out whether he was that man or not, meeting in person was surely the only way.

  “Tell me something,” she said, leaning back in her chair, staring out her front window and down Kitsilano Beach, where the waves were growing blue in the lowering light of evening, and the yellow a
ccents of Kensington Place on Beach Avenue winked at her across the water. “Are you in touch with the others?”

  “I’ve been calling around, yes,” he said.

  So that was his approach, his survival strategy. Catherine couldn’t imagine doing the same. Much better to reflect in silence, she thought. Much better to repeat the seat numbers—to be mystified, to wonder without hope of solution—but never know who occupied them. Those lucky few. Let them remain in the shadows, she thought, even while her own horizons had grown cloudy.

  “What about you?” Rostock asked.

  “No phone calls,” she said. “Not for me. But I’m doing all right. I have my days, but I’m basically back on track. True, I don’t fly. I get colds a lot, which combined with everything else going on, like psychotic dreams and agoraphobia and a business partner losing his mind now and putting the whole company under unnecessary pressure, just a whole load of bullshit, sorry, that has made things feel a little uphill at the moment. But I’m alive, right? And I see the sun rise and set and I take walks and I believe in what I’m doing. I survived. I’m not lucky. I’m not fated to do great things. I will or I won’t be a success here against the same mysterious metrics as everybody else. So I’m happy. I should be happy. I am happy. Really.”

  Catherine had by this point forgotten what question she was answering and wondered what she thought her falsely brisk tone might communicate. That she didn’t feel the weight, the slowing down, the sense of the grade steepening? Maybe she wanted him to believe that, but Rostock wouldn’t. Nope, she thought. Dr. Rostock would not buy that story at all. And Catherine had to admit to herself that it was a secret pleasure to realize that. At last, by at least this one person, her bluster would not be believed.

  “Listen, Catherine,” Rostock said. “More to the point of my call…”

  And so they came to where they both knew they’d been heading all along, strangers in the midst of their busy, separate lives. Rostock hadn’t just called to check on her health, to congratulate her on the success of DIY. His voice was soft at the edges, pulled back. He was himself losing ground in some way. And while they’d said hardly a word about the accident directly, as they’d brushed by the topic of memories earlier, she could not forget the words she had heard, Rostock at the very crest of the fall, trembling in the last seconds of the before. And then the sensations of falling: the feeling of being pressed out, flattened, squeezed in two. Rostock remembered those seconds, he said, as if from within a cloud of sensory nothingness, no smells or sights or sounds to speak of, only that blankness, a white beyond, the idea that he was being driven out of himself and into himself. Separated and co-joined, as if in the same impossible instant.

  Catherine listened and wondered briefly. Michael Rostock and Catherine Bach. Had they had exactly the same experience at exactly the same time and in the exact same position above the earth? Did they share something that rare? She wasn’t yet entirely sure. But a sliver of uncertainty was perhaps enough for her, for them, hanging as they were in shared phone space, waiting for some final important thing to be said. The real reason he was calling.

  He got to that next. The real reason he was calling. He wasn’t suggesting they meet just because the conversation might provide comfort, but because he had something urgent to tell her. He would come to her. It was that important.

  “I’ve learned something about what happened to us,” Rostock said. “And, Catherine, this is information that you really need. Let me come to you. Let me come to Vancouver. You survived one anniversary of this thing. What I know might help both of us survive many more.”

  Yet another challenging moment for her. The one course of action was plain. Catherine was by herself in her apartment with a cat she loved, surrounded otherwise by nothing but challenges. A second anniversary approaching and urgent information now struck Catherine as something that she did, in fact, critically need.

  The other course of action, simpler, cleaner, altogether more ineffably her. Move on, leave well enough alone. And she heard herself answering Rostock to that effect before she might have guessed her brain synapses had even the chance to fire.

  iPhone calendar open, ready for her to enter the date.

  Then closed. With an electronic winkle, a xylophone trill, a blink of vanishing light.

  UNBREAKABLE

  SHE DIDN’T CELEBRATE THAT FIRST ANNIVERSARY. You didn’t do that kind of thing. You didn’t light candles or say prayers, not if you were Catherine Bach. She might have looked over that wrinkled seat plan, traced a finger across the highlighted numbers. Perhaps she even whispered them aloud, though she didn’t remember specifically. Year one was passed. My Annus OK-bilis, she quipped to Phil. And if the trajectory of things began to bend southwards after the Fast Twitch spat with Morris—over the slightly unhinged portrait that the magazine had given of her standing in a coffee shop talking about her vision, about diving the depths of those oceans within—well, then Catherine did not immediately sense it.

  They missed Morris’s test date ultimatum. The trick was they had to load the device with its diagnostic modules as these came available, which was happening, but not quickly. The diabetes and malaria markers had great data. Most of the others were way behind. Even with those tested, though, they had to get the device to moor properly so that the whole package could be tested over time. Here was the bigger challenge they were as yet failing to meet, a detail Catherine didn’t want Morris to know. So she sent him the revised timeline in an email with no reference to mooring, and Morris didn’t even bother responding.

  He was in Thailand, she heard. Investing in something there. She hoped it would distract him.

  Of course, she didn’t tell Rostock any of these year one details. She didn’t ask him how he might have celebrated surviving that year, or if after doing so he’d begun to see an incremental lengthening of the shadows. She didn’t tell him how after the anniversary, after that article ran, her cred with the geeks and the code-jockeys seemed even to lift a little. Sideways glances from those privately impressed with her poor media skills, her in-print weirdness. I will not be broken.

  She should have seen it coming. Unbreakable read the title on the repurposed movie poster that was hung over her workstation one Monday morning, Bruce Willis’s face skilfully Photoshopped out and her own half-shadowed image ghosted in. In the weeks after the crash itself, she guessed no one would have dared. One year later, even AF801 was fair game.

  “There are two reasons why I’m looking at you like this.”

  Some wag from the back-end group. He was a database expert. He was a coder. He was a classic geek bro with his peach fuzz beard, aviator-frame glasses, untucked shirt from The Gap, bright red. He was what, twenty-three, twenty-four years old? Catherine couldn’t remember his name. Grady. Justin. But there he stood at the edge of her workstation. She could feel the others watching from the across the way.

  She looked at him with a weary smile, decided his name was Yukihiro even though he didn’t look Japanese because it was the kind of name his parents might well have given him, and for that matter maybe he was Japanese.

  “One,” he said. “Because it seems in a few minutes you will officially be the only survivor of this train wreck.”

  Long pause. Giggling in the background.

  “And two: because you don’t have a scratch on you.”

  Catherine sighed, still looking up. Same smile, unamused but tolerant. “But I did get scratched, genius,” she said. “If you’re going to quote the movie, at least pick a line that fits.”

  They laughed, those watching. And the database boy went back to his work with a backwards grin. Which Catherine returned, because you had to play nice even if the humour was mixed with a portion of garden-variety code-jockey chauvinism. Some kid just out of school making good money with the promise of stock options, testing the woman in charge. A woman in charge, imagine that.

  Catherine thought simply, Well, I am in charge. I am still in charge. So eat my shorts.<
br />
  “Need anything, Red? Let me get you something.” Kalmar now, who had an uncanny ability to read her emanations and had acquired the knack of stepping in to divert her darker moods. There he was just at the safe edge of her work zone, a hand to the edge of her desk, his fingernail touching the wood, those ice-blue eyes on her and holding her.

  I’m good. She told Kalmar so, offhand and with brightly false good humour. All good, Kali. All good. And off he went, back to work, no backwards glance. She watched him prowl away and off up between the work benches, people bent to their various tasks, stuffed animals in the rafters. Kali working his way across to the far wall where he’d set up his own station, and she caught him from time to time looking towards the window, low light lying full on his features. He’d come back later for a visit, she knew. He’d bring her a coffee or some popcorn or a Clif Bar. She wondered vaguely if the time might come when she’d have to stop the practice, office politics being what they were, perceptions of favourites, petty jealousies. But she pushed her mind off the topic, hating to think any change would ever be necessary.

  So began year two, feeling still okay. Catherine striding into the Warehouse past the bike racks. There were energized meetings in progress, whiteboards scrawled with optimism. There were people hunched at their workstations, gathered in groups at the clustered chairs and tables. There were people standing in the kitchen and dining zone, the ping-pong table, the wooden teepee in the centre of it all, soundproofed, where teleconferences were hosted or you could just go for peace, or to exchange words in private, make out illicitly with a colleague. Who thought of installing the teepee? Catherine didn’t know. A designer, one assumed. And Catherine didn’t want to know everything that the designers did or thought, or what went on in the teepee or even at every workstation. She wanted to trust people to their individual parts of the greater thing that she was envisioning and building. Change your world. She’d keep an eye on the big picture and let people do their jobs. She was still the field marshal, alone on the ridge line. And yes, as in virtually all tech settings, she was surrounded by men. Lads and brothers and bros who just had a certain way of living with each other. Like combat robots, she thought, always taking runs at each other, hacks and tricks, porn screensavers installed on a colleague’s system. They never involved her in any of it. They had ways of letting her know she stood apart, hanging their ’70s repro posters of Farrah Fawcett and Cheryl Tiegs, tuning the Warehouse jukebox in to old metal and hip hop, Iron Maiden, Metallica, once the Beastie Boys’ “Hey Ladies” on repeat until Catherine herself went over and pulled the plug.