WTF
John Mitchell stared at the text from Amelia. Three letters. No emoji. No question mark. No clarification. Pure emotion, glowing on his phone. Timestamp: 6:34 a.m.
He wondered if she was always up early on a Sunday, or whether she’d gotten some sort of alert about the article.
His phone vibrated. A call from Rajesh Kapoor, chairman of the Mysts, Inc. board. Of course.
He set it face down on his desk and let it vibrate.
To exert some control, he walked to the Nespresso machine, slid in a pod, positioned a bright red cup, and pressed the Lungo button twice.
Outside, dawn painted the clouds over Portland in soft oranges and golds. But all he could see was the Wall Street Journal homepage glowing on his laptop:
Growing Scrutiny of Mysts VR Sparks Congressional Inquiry
The buzzing stopped. Then started again.
He picked it back up. Amelia’s WTF still showed.
After three rings, he answered.
“Hey Rajesh.”
“You saw the Journal hit piece?”
“Finished the main article. Haven’t read the op-ed yet.”
“Wouldn’t bother. Same shit, just with a PhD.”
“Right.”
The article kept replaying in his head. Chronolag. A whistleblower. A father in Memphis claiming their tech was destroying his family.
Every word had landed like a slap. As he read, he regretted not replying to the reporter’s queries. PR said no. Board said no. Didn’t want to stir the pot, not with the IPO in the balance.
He hadn’t noticed the Nespresso rumbling.
“You OK, John? They’re taking a pretty big swing at us.”
It almost sounded like Rajesh actually cared. That made it worse.
“I’m OK.”
“Well, we’ve got to defend ourselves. You’ve been a great visionary, John. Big thinker, but slow mover, you know?” John said nothing.
“Now’s the time to step up to the big leagues. A lot is riding on this.”
A longer pause, long enough to feel scripted. Was he counting seconds?
One-Mississippi.
A flash of mid-’90s playgrounds in SE Portland came and went.
Two-Mississippi.
“Can you do that, John?”
The repeated use of his name made him tighten his grip on the phone. Rajesh was easily fifteen years his junior but treated him like a rookie. He suppressed a sarcastic retort. Decided to pause a second himself.
Three-Mississippi.
“I can.”
“That’s good. We’ve worked too hard to get this far only to have some idiot grandstanding congressman derail us. We’re in a revolution, John. Government is incapable of doing what we do, or even understanding where we’re going with it. We need to be the goddamned revolutionaries.”
John resisted rolling his eyes, which he imagined Rajesh would pick up even over the phone. Using “revolution” to describe Mysts, Inc. may have topped the list of Rajesh’s sayings that John would be happy to live without.
Rajesh didn’t wait for a response. “They’re asking 20th-century questions about 21st-century tools. If we let fear dictate the roadmap, we might as well go back to making search engines. Congress can’t even maintain a website.”
John cut in. “Let’s get the board together on Wednesday. I’ll put together an agenda and get the meeting scheduled.”
“Yes. Thanks. Looking forward to it. Let’s shut this down, or judo-move it to our advantage.”
Another item on the list: stupid martial arts analogies.
John wrapped up: “We’ll talk more Wednesday.” Then he pushed “End” without waiting for a “goodbye.”
He took a breath and stared at the phone. He wished it would ring again. Anything that would take his mind off the headline, the call with Rajesh, the text from Amelia. An unexpected call from Michelle? She kept odd hours. Even spam would work. But nothing came. It was Sunday morning, after all.
He set down the phone and walked the three paces to the forgotten red cup. The coffee was cold. Of course it was. He took a sip anyway.
Usually the office was a sort of sanctuary. This morning it was claustrophobic. Familiar objects pressed in: industry awards, framed prototype screenshots, old books from his MBA days. A well-worn copy of Asimov’s Foundation series that had meant a lot to him decades ago.
On top of the bookshelf, a photo of him and Amelia from the night they celebrated the EmeraldCatalyst round. That was the night Amelia told him her idea for naming the company. She was right about the name. They had adopted her suggestion. She was probably right about a lot of things.
He remembered the relief. The toasts, the handshake with Rajesh. He’d finally been on track for the kind of success he’d worked toward for years.
Kathy’s voice was quiet as they left the party: “Protect Amelia.” He’d tried, hadn’t he?
He leaned back in his ancient Aeron and let his eyes wander. A vase of fresh-cut hyacinths stared at him. Kathy had been delighted by the first spring blooms. Yesterday she’d left three of them in his office, bright and violet-blue. He wished they would cheer him up. Instead, the smell was too sweet, the color too bright. He fought irritation, but couldn’t throw them out.
The whiteboard across from the desk was mostly blank. It had only one scribbled phrase, which he’d written sometime in the past week:
Temporal compression ≠ emotional containment.
He couldn’t remember what meeting that came from. Was it even from a meeting? Was it about the product, or himself? It was getting harder to tell the difference these days. Fragments of strategy and introspection tangled into the same handwriting.
He stood and moved toward the window. The sun was fully up, but the neighborhood was asleep. A still Sunday morning. Two raccoons sauntered across the backyard.
Inside, everything buzzed.
Near the window, a framed photo from their Costa Rica trip caught the light. Kathy, the kids, him. Michelle was still going by Michael then, the summer between junior and senior year. It was the end of a whitewater rafting trip as they crested the final rapid. Everyone was wet and wild-eyed. Faces were somewhere between terror and joy. He could almost hear Kathy’s laugh.
Did she still laugh like that? Unguarded?
He always told himself that image meant stability. Proof that whatever twists they went through, whatever compromises he’d made, the important things were intact. Lately, though, it seemed more like a reminder that time was always moving.
The morning’s events pressed back into his mind. A familiar dread started to take hold, one he’d had in previous ventures. The sense that something was about to fall, that some inevitable death blow was coming. Inevitable to everyone but him.
He sat at his desk and tried to meditate. The coaching cost enough. He closed his eyes, felt the weight of his body, worked to clear his mind. It lasted less than a minute. The promise of mindfulness never seemed to pay off. He could never quite achieve the requisite state of empty calm.
Just get to it. He typed a line at the top of a blank document:
March 18 Board Meeting: Draft Agenda.
He tried to remember where to begin, his mind swirling. The cursor blinked back at him, patient and dumb.
He found himself wondering about the Memphis man from the article: Tony Martinez. He wanted to know more. The internet was already dissecting the Martinez family. Cruel critiques of his wife, Cecilia, who used Mysts VR extensively. The article had only been out a couple of hours. One section from the Journal report stuck with him:
“For months, Cecilia Martinez used Mysts VR’s Temporal Acceleration feature almost daily. Referred to as TA, it allows users to experience hours of subjective time in a single session. Use often leaves behind lingering cognitive disorientation referred to as chronolag. According to Tony Martinez, her husband, Ms. Martinez eventually struggled to distinguish real memories from virtual ones.”
He closed the tab.
A distressing mental image appeared uninvited: Kathy struggling with the platform’s effects. Losing her sense of reality.
He was glad she never used it. Never wanted to.
Mysts VR was benign, he’d convinced himself. Features like Temporal Acceleration were optional. But he hadn’t been so sure lately. He knew what that felt like, the blurring of what was real. He’d felt it. And he knew about chronolag.
Fucking chronolag.
From the hallway, a door clicked. He heard soft footsteps, then the distant sound of a cabinet closing. Kathy’s Sundays were still structured. Full. His: a blank canvas these days. Which he liked. Mostly.
For a second, he considered calling out to her with a quiet “good morning.” But the moment passed, and he let it. No reason to weigh her down with this new crisis. He knew she’d come to him for a kiss before leaving. He noticed the smell of the hyacinths.
The screen had dimmed. A tap of the trackpad, and the glow returned.
March 18 Board Meeting: Draft Agenda.
Another single buzz from the phone.
From Amelia:
You doing OK?
The compassion in that message calmed him a little. He breathed. OK? Not really. But maybe, just maybe, not alone.
He answered with a thumbs-up, set the phone down, took another unsatisfying sip. Then he closed his eyes to think.