mythos pdf - last day at the office

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MYTHOS: A Silicon Valley Thriller

Copyright Information: Published by Javier Cabrera.Cover art by Carlos Cabrera

http://www.cabrerabrothers.com/

Copyright © 2012 Javier Cabrera & CabreraBrothers. All rights reserved.

Special thanks to Patrick O’Donnell for proofreading.

http://www.cabrerabrothers.com/mythos

http://www.cabrerabrothers.com/mythos



This Episode Contents

Book Cover

Copyright Information

Episode 1: Last day at the office



MYTHOS: A Silicon Valley Thriller

Episode 1 : Last day at the office

by Javier Cabrera



I knocked out five of his teeth with a fist so hard that his whole face

exploded in blood and before he collapsed into the “Star Wars Wampa” rug

his wife had got him for Christmas, I connected a second one right under

his stomach making him squeal like the pig he was. I didn’t turn back tosee, but the noises of curious chairs inside the cubicle farm and the silence

that came afterwards was enough to know everyone’s eyes were burning

holes through the Venetian blinds of Smith’s office, just like I wanted them

to.

He was still conscious when I started to kick him around. Now, I have to

admit things got out of hand for a moment there, but I had to make sure he would not go unnoticed in a crowd any more. Was hard though, ignoring all

those wet sounds he made, but when I was done his face was nothing but a

pulpy mass of flesh begging me to stop and the message was on its way.

They will hear me now. A complaint they wouldn’t be able to put in the

bottom drawer. Not this one. This one they will have to deal with because

everyone saw when I put it in the complains box.

It is fair to say no one ever saw it coming, not from me anyway. The perfect

employee. The “yes sir” guy. The big Jack Nash, Forbes Magazine’s most

influential developer of 2002, winner of the Best Hacker of the year award

and the Arkansas promise; the golden boy. The success.

But all that crap was yesterday. Today I’m pushing forty and Smith had

gotten up from his bed thinking no one at the company cared about the

press conference he had given the night before. He brushed his teeth while

listening to his wife’s compliments about how handsome he was on TV with

all those microphones pointed at his face and how her friends tweeted

about the conference all night. I’m pretty sure management called to



congratulate Smith when he was at the kitchen table having breakfast with

his two daughters. “Dad’s getting a promotion before Christmas for sure,

girls.” His wife’s panties must have been on fire when she passed him the

call. Slave of the month.

Four employees from one of the most prominent tech companies in Silicon

Valley had disappeared without leaving a single trace that the police could

use to start an investigation. It should have been pretty big news

considering they all were inside Building seven when it happened, but it

wasn’t. Management made sure of that. Smith was sent to feed garbage to

the press and there they were, eating it up like it was pie.

But the pie is a lie, and today, Smith’s office became a cemetery, and I, the

undertaker.

By the time I was done the security guards Smith’s assistant called in were

too late to do a damn thing about it. They must have thought she was

overreacting. Honestly, how many security related incidents does a web

company have? A bunch of nerds in a big office space playing with Halo

helmets and mini catapults aren’t exactly something to take the stairs for.

They weren’t late by much though, just a couple of seconds after Smith

coughed blood up all over the place and fainted, making the sounds of

defeat. You could see the deception slowly drawn onto their faces, like one

of those old Bug Bunny cartoons. The king had been executed and they

were too late to see the head roll into the basket. They almost made me feel

guilty these two -- I had put on a pretty damned good show.



No one tried to cuff me though, not after seeing Smith’s twisted body on the

floor. The handcuffs weren't part of their job description anyway -- that was

all Smith; he liked to make security look like some kind of personal guard

he was able to push people around with to feel what Capone must have felt when everyone smiled at him through their teeth. None of the other six

buildings of the Emastudios Corporation had security personnel with

handcuffs, only Building 7 where we worked. Rumors about him wanting

them to carry guns around were usual on chain mails until management

stepped forward. “We do SaaS software here, not plutonium. We’ll never

allow armed personnel within our property, and that’s final.”

Smith was mad as hell that day, he fired every security guard management

sent to Building seven and replaced them with his own; hand picked

bodybuilders from the local nightclubs he used to visit when the wife wasn’t

around. The meaner they looked, the better. Only that’s all they were good

for, their looks.

And that’s exactly what they limited themselves to after I rammed Smith’s

teeth down his throat, looking mean while they walked me down to my desk

asking, very politely, to wait there until police arrived. They called Smith a

ride too, only his was an ambulance and he had to wait for it on the floor.

Later I found out that his own wife was the one who had to fill out the

assault report on me, since doctors weren’t sure about letting him walk out

of the Emergency room with all those contusions. They wanted to keep him

under observation for at least a week to see if the swelling was only

temporal or if I had broken something in that empty skull of his.



They drove me to the precinct and after a few minutes they had me booked

for assault. First time I’d ever spent a night in jail. It wasn’t half as bad as I

expected. They even set me up with a Dr. Pepper and a cheese sandwich for

dinner. Not your usual Silicon Valley snack, yeah, but at least I didn’t haveto listen some idiot talk about the latest Big Bang Theory episode while I

was having it.

The cell they put me in had a mattress that was cleaner than the one in my

own apartment but somehow, I couldn’t get to sleep that night. Not with

everything that was in my head. Instead, I laid down onto the top bunk and

tried to figure out what the score was. Four people had been reportedmissing at work. Some I knew, some I didn’t. They had nothing in common

other than the place they had been last seen was the same place they have

been working for the last couple of years and the fact that their employer

had gone through so much trouble to keep the press out of the loop.

Time was too important to waste, but sending a message upstairs was also

important. So important that ending up in jail was a price damn well worth

paying. I needed the old farts sitting at(in) the big empty room with all their

money and stocks and secretaries to see first-hand what was coming to

them when they looked at Smith’s face.

When they released me the next morning my iPhone had only one new

message. which I didn’t even bother to read, not until after I went to my

apartment, took a shower and put on clean clothes. Human Resources

wanted to have a word with me at the end of the day. There was no mention

about what I did to Smith though; these bums loved to be the ones who

dealt the cards, that’s the only way they could secure getting the best hand

for themselves. I should have called my lawyer right there and let him



handle the whole issue, but pushing forty and trying to fight for a job you

don’t enjoy any-more didn't compute for me.

Facebook had been quiet about it since most employees try not to postsomething the company could consider “inappropriate” on their walls, but

Twitter was a whole different game. The hashtag #WebDevKO had become

a trending topic overnight. Everyone had their take on what had happened

between me and Smith. Some tweets said that me and his wife had been

caught fooling around and Smith got wise about it. Others said that I was

on drugs and went crazy when he tried to fire me. A couple even agreed that

whatever the reason was behind it, Smith was an idiot and had it cominganyway, but no one got even close to why I knocked the hell out of the bum.

No one mentioned Sophia.

Management had cooked up a story about her going on a surprise vacation

to quiet her family and the press for a while until they could come up with

something better for Smith to feed them like they did with all the others

families who came to Building 7 asking for their missing mothers,

daughters, brothers, sisters and fathers. Of course they weren’t as worried

about the families suing the corporation as they were of the bad PR they

would get if the disappearances went public. The only thing a company has

in Silicon Valley is the public’s credibility, that's all. Not stocks, not money,

not big buildings. Just credibility, and if that was at stake they would do

anything in their power to avoid rumors about missing people on their

property.

It was pretty late already and since my car was still parked at the office I

just took a handful of noodles from one of the take-out boxes laying on the



sink as breakfast and was on my way. The doorman gave me a crooked look

when he saw me walking downstairs and a smile that went with it, making

sure I knew what he thought about me not coming at home last night.

“You finally hook up with that pretty lady from the office, uh Jack?”

“Nope. Was being held in custody.” The smile disappeared from his face.

“What? You? In custody? What for? Skipped a red light or something?”

“Better. I knocked the hell out of my boss. See you later Larry. Don’t push yourself too hard with that mop, okay? Remember what the doctor said.”

He was waving goodbye when I hailed a cab at the corner and hopped in.

“Where to, man?” the cabbie was trying to make something out of me

through the rear-view mirror, but he quit when I locked my eyes onto his.

“Emastudios, Building 7. Know the way?”

“Mountain View? Isn’t that next to that Google-thing or something?”

“Googleplex, that’s right.”

“Yeah sure, I can take you, but don’t you people have the shoreline shuttle

for that? I mean--”

“Here, they gave us all one of these taxi cards at work. Never used mine

before, see if you can make it work and you got yourself a tip.” He ran the



yellow card through the system and punched down the numbers on the tiny

keypad attached to his wireless dispatch monitor.

After a few seconds a message came in on the screen. “Looks like it’s stillactive... we’re pretty far though, it’s not going to be a cheap ride, man.”

“I’m counting on that.”

He was about to say something when he caught my grin. The guy let out a

short laugh and turned the cab around the corner. The streets were

crowded with your usual hipster flock coming in and out from the hundredstartups located along the Valley as if nothing had ever happened, as if

there wasn’t four of their own missing without a trace. It should have been

pretty big news around here with Twitter and Facebook around, but

Emastudios had managed to quiet things down to a rumor somehow. They

had the muscle for it anyway. Seven buildings filled with SEO professionals,

programmers of all kind, software engineers and sys admins made a hell of

an army to defeat online.

Past Amphitheater Parkway, behind Google and the cabbie made a motion

with the head towards the massive buildings on the right.

“Remember those? You should, you’re about my age aren’t you? Silicon

Graphics built these! I know because a friend of mine used to work there

when they were kings, man. Can you believe that?”

“You’re talking history now...” I pulled out my iPhone to check if there was

another email from work but there was none.



“Yeah, it’s ancient history.” Funny he said that just as we drove past the

Computer History Museum with all the tourists trying not to get caught

stepping over the grass while taking the famous group photo in front of the

sign.

I slid my thumb across the tiny glass screen of my phone until Sophia

showed, posing for the same silly photo as the tourists did. It had been

taken just a couple of weeks ago before she went missing and my heart

skipped a beat when I saw her standing next to me with that short brunette

hair of hers and those thick red framed glasses women use when trying to

look sexy, only that Sophia wasn’t trying at all.

Exquisite, gorgeous face with the classic loveliness of a modern Lizabeth

Scott and long solid legs you could stare for an hour without blinking and

still feel like you need to look some more. Breathtaking curves that ought to

belong on a highway and beautiful breasts that shamelessly fought to free

themselves through the prison of her blouse. Clothes are not enough to hide

women like her, not when they have a body like Sophia’s. I felt like going to

the hospital to pay Smith a “courtesy” visit and not leave until he had

spilled every little dirty detail about the disappearances and what the hell

was going on, but it was likely to be under surveillance and I wasn't going to

be of any use in the slammer again.

Outside Emastudios’ office, the driver charged my taxi card for the meter

fare and I threw in a pretty good tip since the guy had driven all the way to

Mountain View with his mouth shut.

“Two hundred? Are you sure your boss will be okay with this?”



“I don’t think he is in the mood to disagree with me right now.” A grin

twisted the corner of my mouth.

The driver nodded and gave me the card back after Emastudios approvedthe payment. A confirmation email got sent to my iPhone since it was not

only the first time I had used the card, but was also an excessive amount for

a taxi ride, but it cleared in the end.

I was about to open the door when the cabbie gave me his business card in

case I ever felt like giving out generous tips again. I pocketed it and looked

through the window. Eight security guards waited for me outside the building and when they caught my face through the glass they went stiff.

“All that’s for you, man? Who'd you kill?” the cabbie looked at me like one

would look a caged animal.

“No one yet, but the day is young.”

Smith’s soldiers began walking towards the little taxi like a group of highly

trained bodyguards, or at least that’s what they thought they looked like.

They were nothing but a bunch of losers who had been lucky enough to get

an easy job to go along with their pension.

“Should we go before they get here?” his finger was on the central lock

when he said that and his eyes couldn’t focus on anything for long. The guy

was scared as hell, but driving a cab had taught him how to handle himself

out there.



I felt my lips going into on a big smile as I said, “Hell no, I want to see how

they play it.”

They approached the car almost in slow motion, making their best effort toshow me this time they were ready and what had happened before was only

me getting lucky. Two stood in front, as if they could stop a car with their

hands or something, and the others took position next to my door and put

on a crappy secret service act even they had problems buying.

“Take it easy now, we are only here to escort you to your desk; we don’t

want any more incidents.” This security guard wasn’t like the others, he barely had any hair in his face and the pitch of his voice annoyed the hell

out of me. I opened the door and got up from the cab real close to his face

so he could see my eyes and everything that was in them.

“You can bet on that, kid.” I patted his shoulder and went around him

towards the big glass doors. They walked me through the lobby and inside

the elevator while keeping their distance; I even caught one of them taking

out the pepper spray just as a precaution. “Personal security? Hell, I ought

to punch that jerk in the face more often.” They had problems keeping a

straight face when the kid began laughing like a little girl and one of the

guards had to turn around so as not to get filmed by the security camera.

As the elevator arrived at the seventeenth floor, the sounds of stroking keys

on a hundred keyboards slowly increased as if we were getting close to a

hive. I got myself some pretty nasty looks from the other employees once

the doors slid open. Everyone quit doing what they were doing to see the

monster walk through the giant cubicle farm of the 17th floor surrounded

by the company’s security personnel. People whom I had worked with for



over ten years now stood there throwing disapproving, severe looks at me

like the ones from a small town jury ready to pull the lever on behalf of

public safety. They stood there in silence like a bunch of pigeons trying to

figure out who was going to be the first one to break rank and go back to work and I walked slowly enough so they could take a good look at what a

real man looks like.

Two of the guards stayed outside my cubicle so the other employees could

have the illusion of safety in a place where four people had disappeared

without explanation, and for some reason, the idiots bought it. I had still

some work to finish so I pulled my part of the code from the company’sgithub and finished the to-do list before lunch.

Close to noon I decided to grab a bite but it didn’t felt right going with the

parade to the company canteen, so I just had a day-old slice of pizza that

was sitting in my desk drawer from the last dev jam session. Wasn’t very

good, but at least it was way better than that crap they pass off as food in

tech companies these days. “Organic fruits and vegetables locally produced,

fresh and with a low calorie count.” Balls. Everyone tries to copy what

Google does, as if it was some kind of sacred guideline everyone should

follow in order to be successful. Doesn’t matter how many fruits or locally

produced vegetables you stuff into a coder’s stomach, they will never make

as much as Google spends on paper towels.

Experimenting with employees’ food to see if their work performance

improves sounded damn weird to me anyway. Each day we looked more

and more like cattle instead of highly trained professionals. They even

changed the snack machines down in the corridors to some sort of healthy

food crap not even rats dare to eat from the dumpsters behind the building,



and I’ve seen those rats eat the rubber out of tires, so what does that say?

Six different brands of milk and granola cereal bars and they all taste like

wet Chinese newspaper.

It’s a shame though; working for tech companies went from doing

something meaningful that could change the world we live in with our

creativity and technical skills to driving a Segway through the office like

some damn nine year old kid in an amusement park. I’m surprised they still

let their employees go to the bathroom like grown-ups.

By 7:30 almost everyone had left the building, there was a meet-up downon Cupertino that night and no one wanted to be caught without a parking

spot. My cubicle looked bigger without all my stuff there; the same feeling

you get when moving out from an apartment you rented for too long.

I was never like all the other coders with toys and gadgets scattered around

my workstation to show how cool and edgy I was. All I had were some

books, papers, and a couple of empty pizza boxes I told maintenance never

to throw away. There were bets going on at the office about when the pile

would reach the ceiling and I was in for a good fifty bucks with Hurley, one

of the guys from Human Resources and a close friend of mine. He had

stopped by my cubicle just a couple of hours ago to hand me the bad news

in person. We had known each other since the dot-com era and I thanked

him for sparing me the bullshit of going to his office to discuss something

that was dead obvious.

I mean, what was the point anyway? I was finished. “Dismissal by a change

of strategy in the company,” that’s what Hurley called it on paper. He

wanted me to keep a good work record in case I ever wanted to work in the



Valley again. Hurley knew people around and some of these people owed

him enough to get me out of the mess half clean and with a year’s worth in

salary.

“Get your stuff by the end of the day, Jack. Sorry, but there’s nothing else I

can do for you, you really screwed things up this time.”

“You will catch the heat for this when Smith finds out how you laid me off;

you know that, don’t you?”

Hurley covered his mouth with my personal file. “Five teeth, Jack. Five.They should be giving you a raise instead of the shoe.” The photo they took

of me ten years ago didn’t do me any justice.

“Quit being funny, someone might hear you and I don’t want them firing

your ass yet.”

“What you mean?” Hurley leaned forward so we could talk.

“Later; dogs are dogs, but they have ears too.” The guards standing outside

my cubicle got offended.

“Look, I watched the press conference too and even though Smith is full of

crap that doesn’t make the company responsible for anything Jack. You

push this and you can get sued man, just think about it. You’re not a kid any

more either man, you can’t afford getting a bad reputation at your age... you

know how it is, we’re dinosaurs to these people now...”



“Still, dinosaurs have one hell of a bite last time I checked.” Hurley caught

my smile and knew what I was thinking. He got scared.

“Okay Jack, why don’t you catch up with me later at the MusicHackDay? We’ll have a couple of beers with your welfare check.”

I said something nasty and Hurley walked away laughing his ass off. Back

in the days Hurley used to be a decent programmer, one of the few who

could create tools for the rest to work with, but the doctor diagnosed him

with carpal tunnel and that was the end for him. Was a damn shame

though, he could have been a big fish around here but ended up pushinginterviews and firing people with all the other losers at human resources.

I finished packing my stuff inside a plastic file box I found lying around

behind my desk and swung on my chair for the rest of the day staring at

Sophia’s cubicle and thinking about how the hell can a person disappear

without a single person from the more than 200 working in the building

noticing something?

First one to vanish was Patrick, one of the drones from the IT department.

Family man, taxpayer, good to his friends and coworkers. A stand-up guy

for all I know. Hell, I even caught him once wrapping a present for his

daughter while wearing a big silly smile on his face. He had gotten her the

biggest doll house I’ve ever seen. Patrick wasn’t the kind of guy who could

ditch his job, wife and kids for some bimbo after turning fifty, but that’s

exactly what Smith insinuated to his wife when she came by the office

looking for him. I don’t know what Smith showed her on Patrick’s laptop,

but she burst into tears and rushed out of the building when he did.



Two weeks later it was Rob’s turn, one of the latest acquisitions from the

marketing department. Rob got swallowed by the Earth on his way to the

kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon. Smith said the kid was too green for the

job, that he got scared and fled. Maybe Rob was young enough to havedropped college, yeah, but the kid knew better than to walk away from his

job like that. I heard one of the guys from marketing saying that Rob’s

parents were desperately looking for him since Rob had a drug abuse

history and Smith had mentioned something about having caught Rob

smoking a joint in the kitchen a couple of times to the police when they

came looking for him. Son of a bitch got away with it.

The third one to disappear was Eddie, one of Emastudios’ community

managers. Most of us knew Eddie’s husband had belted her once a couple

of years ago during a Christmas party. I don’t remember Smith being there,

but he must have found out about it later somehow because the son of a

bitch used it to get the company off the hook. He told the police a cute story

about seeing Eddie cry a couple of days before she went missing on one of

the elevators. Eddie’s husband was held in custody for interrogation and

admitted they were having problems at home, but nothing to leave a nine

year old behind for.

Smith could have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for management dropping

the ball. One of the regular guys from the front desk was on sick note and

the replacement they sent wasn’t in the loop about the disappearances and

how to deal with the cops when they came asking questions. The poor guy

had his ass fired after handing over some of the security tapes from the day

Eddie went missing to one of the detectives collecting evidence. They

opened an official investigation and Smith almost went nuts when a tape

found its way to YouTube.



It turned out that Eddie wasn’t running from her husband, but was instead

taking the longest bathroom break in history: three weeks and counting.

The video showed her going into the women’s restroom ten minutes beforeeight, she must have been on her way out when nature called. You could see

already that something was going on with the camera the moment she

closed the bathroom door. The way the image flickered is quite unusual

with digital cameras.

Then the damnedest thing happened. A big dark shadow crawled slowly

towards the closed door and before it could reach it, the camera went off.For about ten seconds there was nothing but static and weird noises. When

the image finally came back, it showed the empty hallway and the door to

the women’s restroom fully open. Eddie was gone. The video is freaky as

hell and it should have gone viral, but Emastudios filed a complaint with

YouTube over copyright infringement since the video depicted the

company’s property without their written consent. They managed to take it

down before having the whole issue blow wide open.

Sophia was the fourth one to disappear; only she wasn’t alone in an empty

hallway on her way for some snacks when it happened. No. Sophia vanished

right in front of everyone, including me. She had been working all morning

on a new jQuery plugin the guys from the design department needed

running by the end of the week and I had been constantly pulling code from

her repository every couple of seconds to see how things were looking for

her.

It was a freaking mess. No way was a single person going to be able to fix all

those bugs without help by the end of the week, problem was, Sophia had



always been the kind of woman who doesn’t like to go around the office

asking for favors, so I went ahead and kicked my chair all the way back and

let her play with it for a while until I could come up with an excuse to help

her. Soon enough, the whole thing broke down into tiny pieces of unusableJavaScript only she was able to go through without getting a headache. I

was about to turn around in my chair to offer her my help when her updates

stopped coming through github.

Just like with Patrick, Rob and Eddie, Sophia had vanished into the thin

air. The whole thing stunk.

I came back to reality and night had been waiting for me at the cubicle

farm. The only lights were coming from the monitors people left turned on

to work from home via remote desktop. The constant flickering of the little

windows being dragged around changed the ambience into a binary

nightclub only me and the two guards waiting outside my station were

around to see.

“You done here mister? It’s getting kind of late.” The kid made my ears

drums hurt again.

“Don’t worry; you’ll be at home for bedtime.” The other security guard had

a smirk on his face when I said that and the kid went red from the collar up.

The building was mostly empty at this hour of the day, only some of the sys

admins were still holding the line in the workstations making little rat

noises with their maintenance tasks. Security followed me all the way down

to the lobby and outside the building as they were instructed, making sure I

was out for good, and then they turned around and went inside again,



locking the double glass doors before disappearing into the dark void of the

lobby.

I walked down to my car along with the distorted versions of myself thestreet lights silently threw over the empty parking-lot and put the plastic

file box over the roof of my heap while fishing for the keys in my pants back

pocket when the smell of rotten fish crawled up my nostrils and got stuck to

the back of my throat. I was about to get sick when I caught something with

the corner of my eye, but by then it was too late. An atomic bomb went off

on my skull. They knew exactly where to hit to make my legs go all rubbery.

I tried to look behind me to see who they were, but the nose of a .45slammed my forehead and a blinding pain made things go blurry and hard

to hold onto. A knee came up, crushing my ribs from one of the sides while

something gelatinous and cold tried to cover my mouth to keep me from

screaming. The door of my car bent with the pressure of my body while I

kept trying to get them off my back to at least put up a decent fight.

They were sloppy though, and were more worried about someone else

noticing what was going on than getting the job done. Somehow, I managed

to grab someone’s throat and yank until flesh ripped under my fingers. The

short scream that followed was nothing like I had ever heard before.

Unarticulated. Absent of life. A cruel imitation of a man’s voice. Something

hot dripped down my elbow and I felt my mouth split into a tight grin.

“Don’t you scream just yet you son of a bitch, I haven’t even started with

you!” My voice came out dry and full of hate when I said it and the short

scream transformed into a groan.

I was trying to straighten myself up when the nose of the .45 smashed down

through my face one more time and that was all for me. The pain slowly



faded away when I fell deep into that sweet spot of perfect tranquillity and

peace. Nothing hurt and I didn’t care any more. Not like it used to. The

sounds of my body being dragged inside my car were only vague whispers

in outer space and the last thing that crossed my mind before the dark void wrapped itself around me was Sophia.

mythos pdf - last day at the office

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