RAVEN
I barely had a handle on the most direct route to the bathrooms before I was pulled into a meeting by Lonnie, the president of HR. She had been at Neuronet from the beginning, when Alexander Burke started the company out of his parents’ kitchen in Menlo Park. She probably had a few hundred million in stock options. She was six inches shorter than me and wider, but she carried herself as if she owned the joint, which—in stock options—she practically did.
“We have outside legal counsel coming in to audit the benchmarking system before implementation,” she said, shuffling down the hall, nodding at everyone she passed. “Burke wanted to have some clear-eyed oversight to make sure we hadn’t built bias into the system. Every employee, five thousand of us, all will get raises and promotions based on what’s input in this system. Since ‘Nolan’, it’s important to get it right or these guys’ legal fees are going to be peanuts compared to another settlement.”
This system was the reason I’d been hired. Neuronet was still recovering from a pay-bias lawsuit that had cost them nearly a billion dollars.
George Nolan had been fired for releasing a screed about gender roles at Neuronet on his blog. George thought women were mostly (not all) lousy coders and mostly (not all) ill-suited to power positions. He was in the process of suing for wrongful termination and Neuronet was in the process of proving his point had been moot.
It was my job to make sure the implementation was smooth. I had programming experience, thanks to Taylor, and enough HR to know how grading and compensation systems worked. I didn’t need a babysitter.
“What’s their involvement?”
“Looking over your shoulder and making you crazy.”
“We don’t have in-house legal?”
“We do, we do. But they went through it already.” She stopped before she went around the corner, facing me and speaking gently. “We brought them in to pick it apart from an adversarial vantage. We need it.”
“Of course,” I replied, deciding not to bristle. It was my first day. “I’ll make sure they have all the information they need.”
“Good, because they brought in the guy who got the Deton Industries pay-bias settlement.”
She led me down the next hall, along a bank of windows to the corner conference room. It was like all the others in stark white, glass, and chrome. One thing was different. The people at the long table.
Not all of the people. They looked like business-casual Silicon Valley lawyers. Suits-no-ties, jacket-and-sneakers, chinos-as-trousers types. One person was different. One man in a perfect gray suit and purple tie. I knew right away he dressed like that every day. He didn’t get dolled up for a meeting at Neuronet. This was his five- or six-day-a-week look and it was breathtaking. The way the shoulders looked broad but not padded and the knot of the tie was wide and thick against the spread of his white collar.
He nodded and smiled, tilting his head so the parentheses of light brown hair that escaped into our line of sight didn’t come between us.
“This is Roman Bianchi,” Lonnie introduced. “He’s the team lead.”
He held his hand out. Looked me in the eye. Green. Brown. Gray. Was that called hazel? Or had this man invented something completely new? He was proof of unfairness in the world. No one should get to look like that. I’d met good-looking men before, but when he looked at me over our clasped hands and said “Nice to meet you,” I forgot what I was supposed to say in response.
Luckily, Lonnie sent my handshake around the table. Five other lawyers. I memorized the names easily and sat down.
“So,” Lonnie said, “you’ve got five here? You’ll need space. We’ll set you up with terminals—”
“Just me,” Roman said. His voice had the flat, passionless intonation of a man relaying not just information, but the fact of every assumption surrounding that information. Just him. No questions necessary. “Jan’s staying in our office in Sunnyvale doing data analysis. The rest of the team will be in and out. You should set up a few desks, and if you can spare an office for me, I’d appreciate it.”
He smiled at Lonnie and I melted like butter on a skillet. My boss seemed unaffected.
“I can find something for you. You want to be near human resources?”
“Who’s my point person?”
“Raven’s managing implementation. Give her a few days to get on her feet.”
“First day?” he asked me as if asking if I was a virgin. As a matter of fact, when he asked me that, it was the question I heard. First day? As if the point of the question was filthy, and he was asking me just how virgin the virgin could be.
“No,” I said without thinking. He raised an eyebrow. He knew it was my first day. He’d just been making suggestive small talk. My auto-verbalization script kept running unchecked; “I mean you.” Fuck. “I mean yes. Yes, it’s my first day.”
“Well, now that that’s straightened out,” Lonnie said when everyone was done laughing.
I felt like a fool. That wasn’t going to work. Not at all.