The Transmuter's Daughter Page 4

  Seeing no one fitting those descriptions, he headed for the focus of the angry people. Working his way into the center of the group, he found only Steve and Mike, two of the security guards that watched Matilda’s lobby. Alarmingly, there were a bunch of other security types he’d never seen before standing behind them. Steve was trying to answer people’s questions, but Mike’d been watching Morgan work his way through the crowd. Morgan said, “Mike, what’s going on?”

  Mike, probably in his sixties, looked troubled. He shook his head sadly and said, “I surely don’t know.” He turned to the stack of cardboard file boxes behind him, slid one out, and handed it to Morgan. “This one’s yours. The envelope taped to the top of it is supposed to have an explanation.” He shook his head, “The rest of the guys haven’t been very happy about what it says.”

  Morgan stared at the box. For a moment he was tempted to refuse to take it—as if that might make all this go away. Shaking off the wishful thinking, he took the box from Mike and turned to go somewhere less crowded. Suddenly, John Marks, the guy who’d been haranguing Steve, focused on Morgan. “Hey, Djai! You’re one of the big five. Tell us what the hell’s going on.”

  Inhibited by the file box in his hands, Morgan made a clumsy shoulder shrug, then said, “I’ve got no idea. I’ve been just as blindsided as the rest of you guys. I’m going to go read my letter and see if I can catch a clue.”

  “Come on! You don’t seriously expect us to believe you didn’t know about this ahead of time, do you?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m just as clueless as everyone else. If going through this box gives me any ideas, I’ll let you guys know.”

  Morgan made his way toward the big windows at the front of the lobby. He couldn’t help notice the sullen glares directed at him, but didn’t know how to react to them.

  Though he’d never been one to demand gestures of respect, he certainly noticed their absence. First, Marks addressing him somewhat impolitely as, “Hey, Djai,” then people not moving out of his way as he crossed the room. When he reached the tastefully scattered couches and tables over near the window he found them full of angry-looking people. In the past he’d have felt a little embarrassed because people would’ve gotten up to give him a chair in such a situation. Not today though. He wound up sitting on the floor, leaning against the frame of the window.

  Tearing the tape off his box, he lifted its lid. Inside he found his picture of Arlette and Adam. He realized with some surprise that it was ten years old. The Adam in the picture was six, about the age Arlette had really started to find him annoying. Despite having the photograph sitting on his desk for all those years, he felt shaken to realize it was the last family photo Arlette had ever arranged.

  And Morgan wasn’t in it…

  There were a couple of diplomas and awards that’d been framed on the walls of his office. The only other items in the box were his Rubik’s cube and a note saying that he was expected to return his company laptop within forty-eight hours. Wow, he thought, I thought I had more personal stuff in my office… He considered for a moment. But I’m pretty sure this’s everything I had there. What’s that say about me?

  He closed the box and pulled the envelope off the front of it. Shouldn’t I be in some kind of incandescent rage? he wondered. People had always said he was surprisingly calm in a crisis. Now he wondered if he simply lacked emotion. He opened the letter and stared at it.

  Dear former employee,

  Matilda Enterprises has been purchased. For now, we’re not at liberty to divulge the name of the company who won the bid. The new owners are only interested in the hardware and software components of Matilda and have not elected to retain any of her employees. You are now free to seek employment elsewhere.

  As you know, your previous status as a shareholder was superseded by the new employee agreement you signed last month. As a reward for your service to Matilda Enterprises, you will receive the agreed upon severance bonus equal to your annual salary multiplied by the number of years you worked for Matilda.

  Thank you for all your hard work.

  Sincerely,

  Alan Frank

  CEO, Matilda Enterprises

  As he read the letter, a sick bile rose in Morgan’s stomach. They’d formed Matilda seven years ago. Seven times his annual salary was a nice chunk of change, but it was nothing compared to the expectation that he’d receive approximately a one-sixth share of a sale that everyone hoped would be over a billion dollars.

  He did a quick calculation and realized the regular employees wouldn’t be getting nearly as much as they’d have expected from the shares they owned either.

  He was thinking, There must be some mistake… when his mind’s eye flashed back to an evening when, working late, he’d stopped by Alan’s office. He’d found Norm Cox, the CFO, and Terrence Henry, their legal beagle, in with Alan. They were all huddled over some paperwork. He hadn’t been worried to find that three of the five original owners were meeting without him or Roger Knowles, their marketing guru. He’d asked those guys to join him in forming the company precisely because he hated dealing with paperwork and organizational issues.

  But now, as he thought back on it, he remembered that they’d looked startled. More startled than he’d have expected to have their door opened after hours. He’d kidded them about working too hard and they’d laughed along, but it’d been strained. In hindsight, he thought they may have looked guilty. They could’ve been planning this way back then!

  He felt pretty sure that it’d been sometime after that that Terrence Henry’d had him sign an “updated employment contract.” A contract Terrence claimed they had to have in order to negotiate the sale. Morgan hadn’t read the contract. After all, he’d trusted Terrence for legal advice since they graduated college.

  And I guess I shouldn’t have, he thought. Shit!

  Getting out his cell phone, he scrolled through his contacts and called Alan. He got a message, “Mr. Frank’s unable to take calls at this time.” Not even calls from me… Morgan thought, his suspicions gelling.

  Morgan tried calling Norm Cox, then Terrence Henry. Both of them had the exact same “unable to take calls at this time” message.

  He dialed Roger, thinking about the times that he and Roger’d joked that Morgan created their product and Roger sold it. They’d thought that Alan, Norm, and Terrence were riding their coattails. Roger answered quietly, “Hey Morgan, I’m in a room at my doctor’s office. If he comes in I might have to hang up on you.”

  Roger doesn’t have a clue either, Morgan thought. “I’m guessing you don’t know anything about what’s going on at Matilda this morning.”

  “No,” Roger said anticipation showing in his voice, “did the sale go through?”

  “Yeah—” Morgan said, trailing off as he wondered how to explain what he thought’d just happened. Explain it to someone he thought might be his only remaining true friend.

  Roger’d apparently heard the unhappiness in Morgan’s voice. Sounding apprehensive, he said, “Did something go wrong?”

  Morgan sighed, then explained the situation in the building lobby, told him about the letter, and described his suspicions. “Did you sign an updated employment contract too?”

  Bleakly, Roger said, “Yeah.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “No, I trusted Terrence—” Neither of them said anything for at least a minute, then Roger almost whispered, “What are we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we should talk to a lawyer,” Morgan said, despair folding around him. Maybe Roger and I could start another company…

  Abruptly sounding firmer, Roger said, “I’ve got some ideas, but I don’t think we should talk about them over the phone. Wanna have waffles?”

  “I already had breakfast—” Morgan paused when he realized he’d completely missed the point of the question. “But, a waffle does sound really good right now.”

  “Um, don’t turn in your company laptop yet, okay?”

&nbs
p; “Okay, when do you want to meet?”

  “Thirty minutes.”

  “What about your doctor’s visit?”

  “It wasn’t urgent. This is. I’m already out in his parking lot. See you at our usual place.”

  Putting away his phone, Morgan stood, leaving his box on the floor. He looked around at the people in the lobby. Most of them already had some attention focused on him so he only cleared his throat, “The letter attached to my box said I’m getting laid off, with a severance fee amounting to my annual salary multiplied by the number of years I worked for Matilda. I’m betting you got much the same thing, right?”

  An angry affirmative growl arose from the men and women in the lobby.

  “I think we’re all getting screwed.” He paused for a few moments to let that sink in. “It’s clearly not the deal you were told you were getting when you were hired. It isn’t what I, as one of the five founders, thought you were getting. It’s also not the expectation everyone who’s worked here has had while they helped build this company. Admittedly, it’s a much better deal than most people get when they’re laid off from a company, but such companies are failing, not going concerns like Matilda.” He shrugged, “Honestly, I don’t fully understand what’s just happened. I’ve talked to Roger Knowles and he had no idea this was going to happen either. I’ve tried to reach Frank, Cox, and Henry, but they’re not taking my calls. Perhaps that’s innocent, but it’s got me concerned that they may be doing an end run on all of us.” He took a deep breath, “I’m about to start trying to figure out what I can do about this. If you’ve got any bright ideas, please send me an email. If you, like I, got told you needed to sign a new employment contract, but that it was a mere formality related to the sale of the company. If you were given the implication that you didn’t really need to read through it—and you didn’t—please send me an email letting me know just how that went down.”

  Morgan bent over and picked up his box. As he started for the door, people surged toward him shouting questions and making suggestions. He stopped, his hip against the bar that opened the door. He raised his voice and said, “I’d like to stay and listen to what you have to say. But, I feel that there’s significant urgency that I get started doing what I can about this. Please send me emails at my personal address.” He tore the envelope with its tape off the front of his box, attached it to the glass door and wrote in his personal email address for those who didn’t know it. “I’ll want to read what you have to say after I get the ball rolling. If you have things you want to tell me that you think are confidential, I’ll work out a way for us to meet.” He pushed the door open and headed for his car.

  ***

  Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe wasn’t busy that time of the morning. Morgan found Roger sitting in one of the booths with a stranger. Morgan said, “Hi,” to Roger and turned his eyes to the other man, “Who’s this?”

  Roger said, “This’s my wife’s brother, Vic Naylor. His legal office’s two doors down from here. I thought he might give us some quick advice.”

  As Vic shook Morgan’s hand, he said, “I mostly handle family law, divorces etcetera. Corporate contract law isn’t my field, but,” he shrugged, “I know the basics.” He grinned and winked, “And, I know some people.”

  Roger said, “I’ve been explaining what I know while we waited for you.”

  Morgan turned to Vic and said, “What do you think?”

  Vic raised his eyebrows, “About the contract they had you sign? Of course, my advice would be that you should always read a contract before you sign it. In these days of exhaustive Internet user contracts for even the simplest of apps, we’ve all kind of forgotten how important reading a contract can be. But, before you signed one that might be worth millions of dollars…” He shook his head ruefully, then took a deep breath, “However, what’s done is done. It’s pretty hard to give an opinion on this particular contract because we don’t even know what it said.” He shrugged, “However, if your suspicions are correct—that the revised contract resulted in your giving up rights that your original contract provided—and, if they ‘secured execution of the document by deception or fraud,’ there may be legal remedy. However, you’re going to need more than just a pout for evidence that you were deceived.”

  “What about testimony from a hundred some odd employees? From talking to them, they were each talked into signing the same contract on reassurance that it was just legal mumbo-jumbo related to sale of the company and didn’t really affect their own situation.”

  Vic nodded, “Such testimony might be damning to some extent. Especially if you can prove it. Any evidence you could generate would really strengthen your case. It’d be awesome if you found some audio or video recordings of somebody being talked into it.”

  The three of them discussed tactics for another hour; then Vic left, saying he needed to get back to his office. He promised to find them a law firm with experience in such contractual issues and took his leave.

  Morgan started to leave when Vic did, but Roger tugged on his shirt and quietly said, “Hold on a minute, okay?”

  Morgan turned to him, “What’s up?”

  Roger was sitting back down. He patted the seat next to him in the booth and asked quietly, “You’ve still got your work laptop?”

  Morgan nodded, “Yeah, but I don’t know why I wouldn’t turn it in. It’s not as good as my personal laptop.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know that much about the programming end of things. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t give it up until we were sure we don’t need it if we wanted to do something to…” Roger subsided uncertainly.

  “Something to what?” Morgan prompted.

  “Um, maybe degrade Matilda somehow? I don’t know what you could do that they couldn’t undo, you’re the computer wizard. But I thought we might be able to bring them to the negotiating table a little faster if—”

  “Sabotage?” Morgan said dubiously. Seeing from the look in Roger’s eyes that impairing Matilda was exactly he had in mind, Morgan said, “I don’t know—” he paused, mind racing.

  “It’d only serve them right,” Roger said.

  “Um, I’ll have to think about it.”

  The two friends left the waffle place and both went to Matilda’s building. Roger needed to pick up his box of personal effects and Morgan had decided to hedge his bets. To do so he wanted to work from within Matilda’s network.

  By the time they arrived, the lobby of the building had mostly cleared out. They’d apparently decided there wasn’t anything to be accomplished by hanging around the building. Roger went over to pick up his box and Morgan sat down on one of the couches. When he powered up his work laptop it picked up Matilda’s Wi-Fi network and he was able to connect to the LAN as if he were at work. As he expected, they’d made him a persona non grata on the system, invalidating his passwords. However, the person who’d tried to lock Morgan out hadn’t considered the possibility that he might have a number of administrative identities on the system that weren’t under his actual name. They’d locked out his Administrator-1 identity but not his Testing identity. Using that identity, he created backdoors, not just into Matilda’s computer systems—where he’d already created several backdoors—but also into Matilda’s cloud servers.

  The servers that stored the enormous databases that let Matilda do what she did.

  Morgan tended to be oblivious to his surroundings when he was coding. When he came back up to normal awareness after setting up his backdoors, he found Roger sitting next to him on the couch. “Sorry,” he said, not sure how long Roger’d been sitting next to him, nor whether he might have been asking questions.

  Roger produced a little chuckle, “No problem. You’re working on my behalf, I’m sure. Doing things I sure as hell couldn’t do myself. Any luck?”

  “I haven’t…” Morgan looked around and saw nobody was near them. He spoke quietly anyhow, “I haven’t done anything, yet, at least. I’ve just made sure that I can do something in the
future if it seems… advisable.”

  Roger gave a thoughtful nod, “Good strategy.” He glanced upward where their offices had been located, then turned back to Morgan. “But, what if whoever they sold Matilda to just copies her off. You might be able to break back into the system here, but be unable to do anything to their copies.”

  “If they copy her, they’ll also be copying my way into the system.” Morgan shrugged, “Admittedly, if we’re going to disable Matilda, now’s the best time to do it, but—”

  “But what? Are you wanting to wait for them to prove their evil intent by screwing us out of our share?” Roger snorted, “Buddy, I think they already did that.”

  “Your letter said the same thing as mine, huh?”

  Roger nodded.

  Wistfully, Morgan said, “Disabling Matilda’d feel kinda like shooting my baby, you know?”

  “She’s just software.”

  “And, it’d leave all those people in the lurch. People all around the world who’ve come to depend on her. It’d devalue her brand, etcetera, right when we’re trying to sell her.”

  “We’re not trying to sell her anymore! We’ve been shut out of ownership.”

  Morgan turned searching eyes on his friend, “Do you really think Alan, Norm, and Terrence are the ones who did this?”

  Roger sighed, “Yeah. We’re just a couple of trusting saps who’ve been taken to the cleaners by cutthroat businessmen.”

  Morgan thought to himself about the many times he and Roger’d talked about how cutthroat their friends were, thinking that it was okay because the bastards were on their side. He shook his head, “it’s just hard to believe. I never dreamed they’d do something like this.”

  With a snort, Roger said, “Goddamned Alan. He was probably afraid he wouldn’t come out of this as a billionaire.” He stood up, “I’m gonna go to see what Vic’s come up with in terms of finding a firm to represent us.”

  “Don’t forget they should be representing the rest of the employees too.”