Chapter 6 — The Bagel and the Cat

Day seven of the apocalypse, and I'd been reduced to eating a bagel on the curb outside the company I'd founded, with the office cat as my only mourner.

His name was Alan Turing. He was a gray tabby with a missing ear and a pension for sitting on keyboards. He'd been the company's unofficial mascot since before we had a company, and when the security guard took my badge—"procedure, Ms. Mercer, I'm sorry"—Alan Turing followed me out to the loading dock and sat on my foot like he was filing for joint custody.

"It's okay," I told him, biting into the cold, sad bagel. "I had a plan."

Alan Turing blinked. He did not look convinced.

I'd come back for one reason: the source-code repositories. My email said to return "all company property," and Erin—the lawyer who'd refused my case and somehow become my unpaid advisor—had told me that anything I accessed now could be spun as "exfiltration." So I'd come empty-handed and clear-eyed, hoping to at least see the code one last time.

I didn't get past the lobby.

"Procedure," the security guard said again, holding the badge like a religious relic. "Also, uh, Ms. Mercer, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but—" he lowered his voice—"the whole lobby camera system got wiped this morning. All of it. From before your... from the past week. IT says it was a 'storage error.'"

I felt the bottom of my stomach drop out.

They'd deleted the footage. The footage of me working. The footage that could prove, with timestamps and faces and the empty coffee cups stacked like a monument to my mania, that I was the one who'd built this place.

"Storage error," I repeated.

"Yeah. Weird, right? Same thing happened at the satellite office in Austin."

I thanked him. I gave Alan Turing one last scratch behind the ear. And I walked out into the San Francisco morning with a cold bagel, a dead badge, and a new entry on my spreadsheet.

Evidence destroyed: lobby footage, weeks 1–260. Culprit: "storage error." Source: Vanessa's IT vendor.

The bagel was terrible. The cat was the only creature in the city who'd shown up for my funeral.

My phone rang. Mom again. I let it go to voicemail, because I knew what she'd say, and I wasn't strong enough to hear it twice.

"Sloane, I saw on the news—are you eating? You're not eating. I can tell from your voice. You're not eating and you're not sleeping and you're going to—"

I finished the bagel. It was the bravest thing I did that week.