HALCYON

(POV: Sasha) Friday Nov 17, 2023, 12:14 PM PST. Pioneer Building, San Francisco.

He had the sandwich in his hand when he opened the door.

Turkey. He had ordered it that morning from the place on Mariposa, the place with the small window that opened onto the street, and they had wrapped it in white paper and tied it with the brown twine they always used, and he had walked back to the building with the sandwich in one hand and his phone in the other and he had not opened the phone because he was thinking about the conversation he had just left.

The conversation had been with a Pentagon staffer in a room three blocks south. She had asked good questions. He had answered them. The answers had been almost entirely the right ones. The room had been bright and air-conditioned and he had not eaten since breakfast, which had been a banana and a coffee at six.

He came through the door of the second-floor meeting room at twelve fourteen. The clock on the wall said so.

The room had a long table and twelve chairs around it and a screen at the far end. Most of the chairs were empty. The screen showed a Google Meet that had already started. Idris’s face, large, in the center tile. Three smaller faces in a row beneath it. Elena Tovar — board independent, the policy academic. Tess McAllister — the venture investor from Maine. Adrian DiAngelis — the CEO of a question-and-answer site whose name he was for one half-second unable to recall.

He set the sandwich on the table.

He sat down.

He did not need to look at the faces to understand. He looked at them anyway, in order, one at a time. Idris’s face was the face of a man who had been weeping at intervals over the previous twelve hours and who was now composed in the particular way that people are composed when they have decided that the next thirty seconds will require composure. Elena’s face was the face of a woman who had read a script several times and was about to read it once more. Tess’s was a face he could not parse — turned slightly away from her camera, as if she had been speaking to someone outside the frame and had returned just in time. Adrian was looking down at his hands.

“Sasha,” Idris said.

“Idris.”

“Thank you for joining.”

He did not say of course. He did not say anything. He waited.

Idris read.

The script was forty seconds long. It said that the board had completed a review. It said that the board no longer had confidence in his ability to lead. It said that effective immediately he was removed from his role as Chief Executive Officer of Halcyon AI, and that the board had appointed an interim CEO to manage the transition, and that he was to have no further communication with employees or the press in his executive capacity until further notice. It said that the board would issue a public statement at twelve twenty-eight Pacific time. It said that the board thanked him for his service.

Idris finished reading.

The room was silent.

Sasha looked at the sandwich on the table. The brown twine. The white paper. The faintest darkening where some of the oil had begun to come through.

“Okay,” he said.

He looked up.

“Who else knows.”

Idris opened his mouth and then did not say anything. The pause was long enough that Sasha understood that the question had not been on the script, and that none of the four people on the screen had prepared for any question at all, and that the script had assumed no questions would be asked.

“Who else knows,” he said again.

“The senior leadership team will be informed at twelve twenty-five,” Elena said. “Eli Bramwell will be informed of his removal from the board concurrently.”

“Concurrently.”

“At twelve twenty-five.”

He looked at Elena. Her eyes were not on him; they were on a point a few inches to the left of her camera, where her own face was probably visible in a small thumbnail.

“I would like a few minutes to call my husband before this is public.”

“The statement goes out at twelve twenty-eight,” Elena said.

He looked at the clock on the wall. It said 12:19.

“All right,” he said.

Idris said: “Sasha —”

“It’s all right, Idris.”

“I want to —”

“It’s all right.”

He did not say it warmly. He did not say it coldly either. He said it the way a man says all right to a colleague who has just delivered news that requires only acknowledgment, who is not yet a person it is necessary to forgive or not forgive, who is for now simply a person who has done a thing that has happened.

He nodded. He moved his hand toward the trackpad. He hesitated. He looked at Idris one more time. Idris was looking back at him. There was, on Idris’s face, a thing Sasha had seen on his face many times before — the slight asymmetry of expression that came when Idris was about to say something true that he did not entirely want to say — and then Idris closed his mouth and the asymmetry resolved into a flat composure and he held Sasha’s eyes for two seconds and then looked down.

Sasha clicked.

The call ended.

The room was very quiet. The screen showed the Halcyon logo on a blue background, the way it always did when a meeting ended. Through the glass walls of the meeting room he could see the open-plan floor of the second story — the desks, the engineers, the standing meeting some product manager was running near the kitchenette. Nobody had looked up. Nobody knew yet.

The clock said 12:21.

He sat there for a moment, with the sandwich.

He picked it up. The brown twine was warm in his hand. He looked at it. He set it back down.

He picked up his phone. He unlocked it. The home screen had no notifications. The board had not yet pushed out the statement. He had — he calculated — six minutes.

He opened the message thread with his husband. The most recent message was from this morning at seven forty-one — Owen, in Maui, where they were supposed to be on vacation together but where Sasha had cut his trip short on Wednesday because of a scheduling thing that had not been a scheduling thing. The message was a photograph of the breakfast table at the rental house: a cup of coffee, a half-eaten papaya, and Owen’s bare feet in the corner of the frame, and the caption, the man who chose work, with a small yellow sun emoji.

Sasha had not replied.

He typed now: Owen — you home or Maui.

He hit send.

The check went blue. Owen had read it.

The chapter ended there, as far as the room was concerned. Owen did not type back. Sasha sat in the meeting room, with the sandwich, with the phone in his hand, with the GPU floor humming below him at a frequency he had learned to feel in the soles of his feet, and the read receipt sat there, blue and silent, and he watched it for the longest two minutes of his life.