Despite being newly unemployed, I woke up Monday morning and got ready to go into the office. I had a little family of cactuses that needed to be retrieved from my cubicle. I wasn’t going to let them die just because I quit. They hadn’t done anything wrong. Those cactuses were my one personal item at my desk, and they represented my humanity in the face of Azure Group’s oppressive corporate evil. They were my totems. They had to be rescued.

It was a thin reason for going to the office where I was no longer employed, but I’d not been unemployed since I was fifteen years old and honestly didn’t know what else to do. The alternative was sitting around in my apartment and agonizing over whether or not Lucas would show up to his closing, whether he had ever cared about me, and whether or not I’d ever see him again. I was fairly certain that the answer to the last two questions were no. I just wasn’t ready to confront them yet.

I was just about to leave the house for the office when a knock at my door made me pause. Who on earth would be here at six a.m.? I stared through the peephole warily.

“Annie?” I threw the door open and stared at her in disbelief. “You know where I live?”

Annie hugged me, and I hugged her back with more excitement than I thought I had in me. I was really, really glad to see her. I wasn’t sure if I’d get the chance to say goodbye. I was afraid to text her because I only had her corporate cell phone number, not her personal one. I didn’t want to get her in trouble for continuing to talk to me or put her in an awkward position by making her decide not to reply. Next to her on the ground, she had my cactuses in a banker’s box.

“I’ve got mad hacker skills,” she said simply. “I just looked it up in your HR file.”

I smirked. That figured. I’d always suspected that Annie’s skill set was a lot more useful than Kyle’s. Azure Group paid him more, of course. That company could go to hell.

“Thank you for bringing my cactuses. I was just on the way to go pick them up.” They were going to love getting some natural light. I already knew what window I’d put them in.

“No problem. I stopped by early this morning and I thought you might want them.”

“Come on in,” I said, beckoning her inside. “Do you want some coffee? I’ve still got some in the pot. It’s hazelnut flavored.”

She shook her head. “I have to go into work in a minute,” she replied. “But I wanted to come by first and tell you about the plan.” Annie looked excited.

I felt my eyebrows climb up my forehead. “The plan? What plan? There’s a plan?”

She nodded seriously. She raised a finger to pause me, took out her corporate cell phone from her purse and put in my microwave. My eyebrows were probably threatening my hairline they were so far up my face. Was Annie secretly Edward Snowden or something? Was Azure Group listening in?

“It’s just a precaution,” she told me. “Do you still have yours?”

I shook my head. “I dropped my phone and laptop in the mailbox right after I quit. I wanted a clean break.” I might have also given them both a good once-over with a powerful magnet just to be sure they would never work again, too.

“Good. That’s good,” she said. I half wondered if Annie was going to go all double-oh-seven and scan my kitchen for bugs, but she didn’t.

“Why is that good?” I was beginning to get seriously confused. This was not the Annie I knew. She looked determined, and not just in an ordinary way. This was a whole different level of determination. Her voice was usually soft, but today it was strong and decisive. She was even standing up straighter. “I’m so confused.”

“We don’t want them to be able to track your movements with the phone. They probably aren’t tracking me or anything, but I figured it was smart to shield the phone anyway.”

“We? Who is ‘we’?”

“Kyle and I think we know how to save Notable Match. But we need your help.”

My jaw went slack. “We can’t save it. It’s too late.” Annie’s presence in my apartment would seem to suggest otherwise, however. My inner optimist perked up her ears.

“No, it isn’t. It’s only six thirty a.m. east coast time. The deal won’t be signed until at least nine-thirty a.m. That means we still have several hours before Azure Group will own it.” She paused to evaluate my reaction.

“Ok. I’m listening.”

If they thought they knew how to save Notable Match, I was definitely listening. I was fucking all ears.

Annie smirked. “Alright, so the plan goes like this. We know that Azure Group wants to purchase Notable Match so that they can contain the technology, right?”

“Right.”

“The algorithms themselves are really the only valuable part of the company. But the algorithms are entirely incomprehensible. They were beyond bizarre. There’s no way that Azure Group could ever reverse engineer them.”

“What do the algorithms have to do with anything?” I asked.

Annie frowned at my interjection. “Well, for one, Azure Group has them. If we’re going to save them, we need to steal them back. Otherwise they could potentially use them against Lucas somehow.”

I blinked. “Well, ok. But we can steal them all we want and that won’t save Notable Match. Because if Lucas tries to pull out the deal now, that will just trigger the typical Azure Group overreaction. McKenzie personally promised the Datability people that she’d kill Notable Match. We both know how this will go. They’ll get legal involved and just bully Lucas into selling by burying him in expensive, endless litigation.”

“You’d be right, except that’s where you come in.”

“Ok. I clearly shouldn’t have interrupted. Explain it your way.”

Annie’s smirk turned into a quick grin. “Thank you. So, while Kyle and I are going in and wiping all the data that Azure Group has on Lucas’ technology—and it’s definitely a two-person job—you are going to march into McKenzie’s Monday morning board meeting and lay down the terms of your sexual harassment lawsuit that will be the lynch pin that prevents Azure Group from bullying Lucas. As a side bonus, you’ll be providing a distraction that will help Kyle and I do the stealing.”

I laughed. “I don’t have a sexual harassment lawsuit.” I shook my head and smirked, thinking of Cliff. “God knows I should, but I don’t.”

Annie smirked. “Actually, you do.” She pulled out a file folder from her briefcase and handed it to me. It was thick and heavy. Thousands of pages.

I lifted the cover to see one of the many, many emails that Cliff and other managers had sent to me that were inappropriate. This particular one was fairly mild. It was about a blouse that I’d worn to a client meeting that was slightly tighter than my usual loose-fitting, boring, button down silk blouse. In the email, Cliff was suggesting that I purchase more blouses in that style for future client meetings or consider unbuttoning my blouses so that more cleavage was on display. A particular paragraph in the email was highlighted: You have a unique set of assets that can be used to influence key client impressions. Double D’s if I’m not mistaken. They won’t stay perky and jiggly forever. You might as well put them to good use.

“Cliff really is a huge pig,” I said with a shake of my head. He stared at my tits all the time. At this point I was just used to it.

“Keep going,” Annie encouraged. “It gets better.” She was quivering with excitement.

I thumbed through the emails that Annie had somehow gotten her hands on. They weren’t all to me, or from Cliff. Some of them were to Annie, or other women we worked with. Some of them were to Kyle and other men and women of color. We’d all been harassed during our time at Azure Group. Much of it was old fashioned sexual harassment or racism, but not all of it. There was a wealth of employment related lawsuit fodder in the folder. It was diverse, too. There was even some highly inappropriate weight-related bullshit that someone sent to Annie.

I kept flipping through pages, occasionally looking up in wonder at Annie. There was even a conversation between Cliff and a client about whether Annie or I would be more likely to sleep with the client as a ‘bonus’ (apparently the client preferred Annie but Cliff thought I was more likely to put out). It was horrifying stuff, especially when presented all together. Practically every one of our senior managers had put something in writing that was illegal, immoral, or just plain old gross. Azure Group was rotten from the inside out.

It was absolutely revolting, but simultaneously fascinating. Like watching a train wreck. Just reading through all the years’ worth of bullshit that we’d each been sent filled me with anger. Bizarrely, even though I knew that it was crap that I’d received so many inappropriate messages from my coworkers and superiors, it was the messages to Annie and Kyle and others that really made me angry. I guess I’d always figured that I could just ‘take it’ but I couldn’t stomach the idea that by not speaking out, the perpetrators just got away with what they were doing, and then they did it to others.

“This could work,” I heard myself saying. “I think it could really work.”

Annie grinned. “So, are you in?”

“Are you kidding? Of course, I’m in. I think we might be able to do more than just save Notable Match. We might be able to save Azure Group from itself.”