Chapter 1
A balanced diet… is a donut in each hand.
Avery’s slave-Leia-boots came to a halt outside the bakery. She could treat the team this once, couldn’t she? Given what she’d just blown at Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, this tiny splurge would do nothing more than round up the figure she owed the bank to something even more impossible.
Ten minutes later, laden with four donuts and four coffees, she pushed through the door of their basement garage in El Sereno, Eastside LA. Never was there a more wretched hive, but if a garage was good enough for Steve Jobs, it was good enough for Venuscode.
“Guys, you will not believe this. I met two VCs on the plane! Caltech brogrammers called AcidTest Ventures. They bought ten dollars of Bitcoin in ’09 and now they’re billionaires.” She handed the white Americano to Tony, sitting nearest. “After I gave them our spiel, they invited us over for a chat.”
This announcement didn’t quite get the reaction she expected. Hell, even the coffee and donuts weren’t getting a reaction. Tony’s bald head flashed and he returned his focus to his screen. Simon, lurking in his dark corner, let out a wheezing breath and stared at her through the gloom. Okay, so it was early. She marched onward, aiming her gaze at Jeremy, whose silence was starting to feel… well, hurtful.
“I know, I know, they’ll probably pass, but at least we get to spend the afternoon in an office with a shampooed carpet, right?”
“Avery—” Tony said.
“Two sugars, oat-milk, cinnamon—that’s you, Jeremy. Don’t you want a shampooed carpet?”
Jeremy accepted his coffee with a blink of bewilderment.
“Avery—” Tony said.
“Because I would.” She toed the carpet with her boot. Brown gunk oozed to the surface.
Simon rose from his workstation, blocking her way in his cute Supernatural T-shirt. He fancied himself one of the heroes—she could never remember which. She handed him his cup. “Black, no sugar.”
But something in Simon’s face registered with her. That, and the fact that he was standing up. Usually, he just swiveled his chair in an arc from desk to fridge, never rising to go to the bathroom until well past midday. She spun around, taking in the sudden hush that had descended on her three colleagues, then indicated the box on top of Tony’s Apple III. “I got donuts too.”
“Avery, sit down.” Tony sounded like his voice had been fed through a lossy compression algorithm.
All eyes settled on her. Taking a step backward, her butt found the nearest surface—a chair with the padding stripped off. “Don’t all thank me at once.”
“We got a call from Galleon Capital.” Tony twisted the cup as if he didn’t know what it was for. “While you were at Star Wars Celebration.” He said it accusingly.
“Hey, I had to go. Freaking Mark Hamill was there, and John Williams played live, and they were making announcements about—never mind, how did it go?”
“It went… well.”
She froze, then leaped up, angling her arms to hug Tony’s beer-bellied self for making her dreams come true. But his palms were up, his expression pained. “Wait—well, I don’t know how to say this, but…” He looked around.
Jeremy rose to stand beside him, shoulder to shoulder, even though body contact wasn’t something he normally did. “They just want us. Tony, Simon... me.” He winced.
Why was her name not on that list? “What?”
Simon nodded. Tony studied something on his screen, then the crack in the ceiling which had always been there. Anywhere but her. She fiddled with the back of the chair, her fingers twitching, like an early-warning system. “Jeremy, what’s going on?”
Jeremy rubbed at his eyelids behind his glasses and then trailed his hand down the side of his goatee. “It was really weird. They kind of said… um, they kind of said they only wanted us three engineers. Apparently, they’ve got tons of marketing and the visionary people. They want to team us up with some cool branding company…or something.” His voice had degenerated to an unattractive whine. “Look, I’m sorry, Avery. What can I say?”
She tried to piece together the meaning of this, like Chewbacca trying to reassemble C3-PO in Cloud City. “You could say no.”
Jeremy wrung his hands. “We owe six months’ back rent on this place. We’re a hair’s breadth from eviction and I personally cannot live another day knowing I’m going to hell if I have to visit a doctor. The other day Merv offered me a month’s grace on the rent but only…” He swallowed. “If I slept with him.”
“And Tony’s girlfriend’s pregnant,” Simon added.
She tried to picture Tony and his girlfriend even doing it, but the image of Jeremy and Merv interfered too much. A tiny voice of hope said she must be able to talk her way out of this—to appeal to their humanity and the three years of hustling, hardcore coding, and horrible pizza they’d shared. Because this couldn’t be it.
It was a bad dream or something. A joke?
Their silence and their faces told her it wasn’t. She laughed bitterly. “I swear, you guys, I go away for four days for the first time in ages, and you pull this? Why didn’t you tell them the app was my idea? That would have been nice. Didn’t they even want to meet me? Did you even mention I existed?”
“Avery—”
“Oh no. You go and sell off my brainchild to the first assholes that come knocking.”
“Not just your idea, Avery,” Tony butted in. “We all brainstormed. The design emerged with the coding. Don’t be so dramatic.”
“You’d have done the same,” Jeremy said. “Had you been in our shoes.”
No, I freaking wouldn’t.
“For what it’s worth, they thought the biometric app had merit and they liked the color of the website, but they want to take it in a different direction,” Simon added, already sounding like one of the middle manager types that infested Corporate America.
She snorted in a furious breath. “You can’t do this without me. Their due diligence will prove I’m a key player. I coded the abstraction layer none of you wanted to dirty your hands with. Forgotten all about that, huh?”
The men shifted their eyes from her back to each other in stolid complicity.
“Jeremy?” she pleaded.
His head shake was cowardly, and final.
“We decided—well, together with AcidTest—on a severance package for you,” Tony said.
“Twenty thousand dollars,” Jeremy said.
Her mind went blank. “What? Pay me off? Is this true?”
She let their pathetic nods sink in for a moment.
“Good grief, I hate you all. I’m getting a lawyer!”
She yanked open the box of donuts and tossed them onto the carpet. The pink-frosted one she’d chosen for herself rolled against her boot. She stamped on it, mashing it into the carpet, storming a path to the door. “You can all go to hell, you know that?”
She stuck her head back in. “And that includes you, Jeremy. Especially you.”
*
A week later, sitting in a sweltering Starbucks on Circle Drive, nursing an empty latte cup and thinking she really could do with a donut, Avery still fizzled with rage. Of course she couldn’t afford a lawyer. Of course she had taken the cash. But it was the principle of the thing. They all knew something like this could happen when they rubbed noses with investors. Bargaining. Keeping the headcount down. Getting rid of fluff. But she wasn’t fluff. She really wasn’t.
But she wouldn’t whine. If there was no trust, and there clearly wasn’t, there was nothing. Venuscode was dead to her.
Tony, she understood. Father-to-be hormones, whatever. Simon was a little shit and always had been. But Jeremy. Jeremy? Lovable, hipster Jeremy who’d always stood by her ever since the day, straight out of college, they’d bumped into each other at a Start Your Own Business event where nobody had a clue what they were doing, and they’d spent the evening stuffing themselves on the free canapés and BSing? That Jeremy? They’d been friends, or so she’d thought.
And the really pathetic thing? Not only had she lost her job, but also her main source of social life in LA—if you could call Friday night slumming and playing games until the wee hours in Jeremy’s place a social life. She had lots of other friends, but they were all on the internet. Not face-to-face, know-what-they-actually-smell-like friends.
Yeah, she should have refused their payoff, but the minus six figures in her bank account left no room for the moral high ground. Actually, it was only minus five figures now, because her debt was down to $89,300. So that was nice, in a depressing kind of way.
Fuck them.
She’d make her own ideas work, by herself. She had skills. She didn’t need the likes of Simon wanting every app to be multi-platform and everything-compliant. She’d make an app that people actually wanted to use.
And there was an app she was itching to make. At Star Wars Celebration she’d been struck by a new idea, inspired by the sight of her idol, Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker himself. She took a reverential minute to replay the glorious moment where she’d attended his panel after a 17 hour wait.
Recovering from euphoria in the bar afterward, someone had mentioned, “I went to Tunisia. But when I got there, I just couldn’t get into the Tatooine mindset, you know? I’d paid two thousand dollars to get to that point and… something was missing.” And this was a die-hard Star Wars fan speaking.
That had got her brain ticking over like crazy. I could solve that! She could superimpose the movie scenes onto the landscape with virtual reality. She could craft a beautiful companion app that accompanied you all the way, telling you what you were seeing and the significance of each shooting location to the Star Wars canon.
But Tunisia scared her. Her Celtic skin would frazzle in nanoseconds under the sun’s deadly laser. She needed a cooler location for this pilot. The splendid Villa del Balbianello in Italy? Nope, basing a pilot on Attack of the Clones was asking for trouble.
What about Ireland? The thought of those wild, Atlantic cliffs made her heart beat faster, the thrilling pathos of Luke’s shadowy figure, perched at the edge of oblivion, pulling back his hood to reveal his time-ravaged face as Rey handed him back his lightsaber. Skellig Michael was crème de la crème of Star Wars locations.
Yes. She was so doing this. She could see it now. The definitive Star Wars tourist guide app. The fans would love it.
Ireland, here I come.