Chaos Calling, page 4
You have great opportunity ahead of you, she’d told him whenever he called, offering to visit. Help your patients while you can. Anna is with me.
Self-contained to the end, he reflects. What might she have told me if I’d come home sooner? He’s self-aware enough to know that he envies Anna for all that time she spent with Chun-Mei, though his sister never speaks about it. I should have stayed in Toronto longer after the funeral. The hospital would have given me more leave if I’d asked. I could have helped Anna. She’s got her hands full with the children. And Dad never makes this stuff easy.
But if he’s being honest with himself, Anna’s grief and stress don’t explain her words tonight. He spoke to me in the garage. Kalos. I heard his voice.
Jason shivers. He has plenty of mental health terminology for what they experienced. Finding such answers had been part of what drove his own interest in medicine. If she’s spiraled into open delusion, she’ll need a therapist. I could make some calls, help her find someone good.
They’ll be thirty-five in November. As they age, Jason finds talking to Anna to be increasingly hard. They have their family in common, of course, their careers, and Dave. Yet in recent years, Anna’s real estate work has dropped from their conversations, leaving nothing but Chun-Mei’s decline, her worries for their father, and her obsession with selling their parents’ house.
His career, in contrast, is growing. Beyond the satisfaction of serving his patients, St. Paul’s busy emergency department has its own dynamic of trust. He’s found pleasure in being one of the fulcrums around which its activity hums. In med school, he remembers worrying that he didn’t share the innate calling to help people that his peers did. Somewhere along the line, however, medicine grew beyond a source of insight and Chun-Mei’s dream for his life and became the governing structure of his days.
And he has Margo, of course, his world’s undisputed sun.
On cue, his cell phone chimes. Jason takes it out of his pocket, fearing a barrage of texts from Anna or questions from Dave. Whenever they argued as teenagers, bringing Dave in as her heavy was Anna’s signature move. Just spam, he thinks, deleting the message with a twinge of disappointment. He checks the time. It’s after eleven p.m., which means it’s past two a.m. in Toronto.
Dave’s probably sound asleep for once in his life. If Anna’s smart, she’s gone to bed, too.
With no message to answer, Jason opens his photo gallery. The five most recent shots are of his wife. In the first two, Margo’s laughing over dinner at Luigi’s with the Wongs, their closest friends in the city. In the next two, she walks ahead of him on Kitsilano Beach, her black hair a banner in the wind, her figure slim against the backdrop of the waves. In the last, she’s wrapped in a pale sheet wearing only the ruby he gave her.
This is real, Jason thinks, scrolling through the images. We’ve built a beautiful life together.
Telling Margo about his unusual teens never made sense. Raised by immigrant Chinese parents in suburban Richmond, Margo Cheung studied microbiology before switching to theatre studies during her third year at the University of British Columbia. By some stroke of fortune, Jason had sat behind her in an introductory psychology class. It took him all semester to work up the nerve to ask for her number. She’d been the one to ask him out for coffee.
From the start, their mutual interest in the intersection of science and the arts built unexpected connections between them. Optimistic and ambitious, Margo was focused on the future. She’d coaxed him through his anxieties about his undergraduate program, followed by med school and a challenging residency. He’d encouraged her decision to shift from acting to directing. There seemed to be no place in their exciting, hectic lives for his weird experiences with his twin and their best friend. And after a while, he’d stopped looking for the right moment to tell her.
Jason’s beeper chimes in his other pocket. The number on the archaic screen is St. Paul’s locating office. You’re like a nineties drug dealer, Margo always jokes, but the hospital can’t afford to upgrade to something more sophisticated. Not when they’re underfunded. Jason clicks the pager’s received button, ashamed of needing to be called. He stands, taking a deep breath.
He spoke to me in the garage. Kalos. I heard his voice.
Jason pockets the pager as he walks downstairs. If Anna wants to relive that time, I can’t help her. She’ll have to work through it like I did. As he reenters the emergency department to face an indignant Clarissa, Jason’s concerns for his patients bury the last traces of his uncertainty.
Chapter 4
Dave — Strings
Miinikaa First Nation, ON: Monday, August 18
“Ready?” Dave LaRoque Montcalm waits for the dozen young people, all between twelve and fifteen, to nod before he turns to the classroom wall. On the ancient pull-up screen, he’s projected the JavaScript block maze that they’ve built together over the last two weeks of their eight-week coding workshop. In the bottom corner, their blobby red avatar blinks like a recording light.
Dave hits return. The avatar slips through the blocks, following its programmed commands. As it reaches the last section, it turns left instead of right and slams into a block wall, disintegrating to a loud chorus of boos.
“Tremendous!” Dave insists over the room’s outcry, lifting a child’s mesh net in robin’s egg blue, purchased at a dollar store for this exact purpose. “It’s bug hunting time!” Flourishing the net to dispel their collective groans, he gestures to their workstations. “Let’s get after it.”
As their groans subside, the room buzzes with the kind of energy Dave remembers from all-night hackathons during his undergraduate years as a computer science engineer at the University of Waterloo. Not bad, he thinks as the teaching assistants circulate. Carrying the net over his broad shoulder, he heads to the coat racks and shelves at the back of the room for his travel mug of green tea. Try as he might to develop a taste for the stuff, it’s a poor substitute for coffee. Especially lukewarm, he thinks, grimacing. Drink up, Davy. Better for your health.
At the nearest desk, Janessa Hart pulls her chair closer to her monitor. Her dark bangs fall into her eyes as her fingers hover over the keyboard, the delicate tattoos of hummingbirds covering both her wrists giving the impression of interrupted flight. Frowning, she studies her monitor as waves of indecision pass like clouds over her expressive face. Dave takes a half step toward her, encouraging words at the ready, and feels a gentle bump against his ribs.
“You’ve done your part,” murmurs his aunt, Leona LaRoque. “It’s their turn.”
Dave rubs his side with a mock pained expression but stays put. The idea to give back by teaching other Indigenous kids to code had been his, but Leona made it happen. From securing space in Miinikaa First Nation’s Community Centre to getting the word out through the surrounding reserves to briefing his volunteers about the differences in teaching on the reserve compared to their usual class blocks at the university, Leona has as many fingerprints on this workshop as Dave does.
Total organizational rock star, he thinks, glancing at his aunt as he takes another tepid sip of tea. What a chief operating officer she would have made.
A moment later, Leona gives him a second playful jab, making her silver bangles chime. Dave looks up in time to see the red blob race across Janessa’s screen. She leans back in her chair, sporting a smile full of braces as it successfully completes the maze. Dave glances around the room. She’s the first to finish.
“Good hunting,” Dave says, presenting Janessa with the net. She flushes as she sets it down beside her keyboard. Emma, one of the teaching assistants, ambles over to watch her demo. As she explains her steps, Janessa’s face lights up. Damn if that isn’t satisfying every time.
“Never underestimate the value in muddling through a puzzle,” Leona says as though reading his mind. Her crow’s feet—earned through years of fishing on the lake—deepen around her black eyes as she smiles at him. “Didn’t that fancy company of yours teach you anything?”
“Plenty,” Dave says, tapping his left hand against his chest. Three years after his operation, the scar from his heart surgery has healed. He points with his chin at Janessa. “She could start learning Python in the fall. She’s ready.”
Before Leona can comment, Dave’s phone chimes. He automatically reaches into his back pocket to flick it into silent mode. Beside him, Leona nods. During the early months of his convalescence, he jumped at every chance to revert to his old life. I’m not a CEO anymore, he thinks, resisting the urge to check who called. Those habits no longer serve me.
These days, the only person who regularly texts him from down south is Anna Lin. He’d missed a call from her early that morning. I’ll set up a video chat this weekend, he decides, remembering how down she’d sounded the last time they talked. Annie needs to laugh more.
His phone vibrates against his backside. Dave ignores it. Thirty seconds later, it buzzes again. Dave takes a deep breath, counts to ten, and exhales. Another buzz. At his side, Leona raises one salt-and-pepper eyebrow. Emma and Janessa also turn to look over their shoulders at him, their glances quizzical. Dave grins back, determined not to look at the screen.
There’s only one person it could be. And she doesn’t dictate my calendar anymore.
As his jeans continue to vibrate, more heads turn. Deep in his chest, the old volcano stirs, letting one jolt of molten frustration spike through his body. Fuck off, Hal.
“If your face freezes like that, my boy, you’ll start scaring babies,” Leona teases, but the hand on his elbow is gentle. “Find out what she wants. ‘Look after mind and body.’”
“‘And do what you know to be right,’” he finishes, echoing the teaching she’d given him during the first days of his recovery in the cardiac centre at Toronto General. He consciously forces his shoulders down into a neutral position, straightening his spine. “Excuse me, Auntie. I’ll be back in two minutes.”
Dave waits until he’s outside the community centre in the afternoon sun to pull out his phone. The six texts and five phone calls, all placed within the last nine minutes, are indeed from Halina Mendes, co-founder and chief technology officer of Rune Software. He looks at her unfamiliar number with the 617-area code as he walks over the lawn toward the reserve’s main road. Her pressures aren’t yours anymore. You had to leave Rune, but she chose to let go of you. Remember that.
Taking a bracing breath, Dave dials.
“Dave! Finally! It’s so great to hear from you. I need those papers signed, stat,” Halina says in the rapid-fire voice she adopted sometime after her development team of engineers swelled to thirty-five people. They were six years into running Rune Software at that point, with two launched products and a hundred and two staff. “The patent lawyers sent you the package on Wednesday of last week. I forwarded it again on Friday. What’s the holdup?”
“Hey, Hal.” He grimaces, unable to deny his pleasure at hearing her voice. “Miinikaa is really beautiful in summer. You should visit sometime.” He wishes they could just shoot the shit, like they did during that co-op term when they both missed out on good placements and ended up working crappy summer jobs. They used to joke it had motivated them to co-found Rune the following semester when they returned to Waterloo. “Social calls only, though.”
She snorts. “Maybe when Beakhead’s legal team isn’t halfway up my ass.”
Hearing the name of the equity firm that acquired their company tightens Dave’s throat. Keep it casual. “What’s wrong? Boston sea air isn’t everything you were promised?”
Halina chuckles. “I keep meaning to get out to Gloucester for a weekend. There’s a perfect bed-and-breakfast on the ocean I want to visit.” Her sigh is wistful. “One day. My condo view will have to do for now.”
“It’s a pretty great one,” Dave agrees, thinking of the party she’d thrown on her rooftop patio the same day Rune opened its Boston office. Dazzled by the sunset, he’d told himself to ignore the sick feeling in his gut.
Don’t get sucked into old stories. He lifts his eyes to the birch trees along the road. Wind rustles the leaves, making them flicker green-grey-green. “What do you need, Hal?”
“The intellectual property agreement back with your signature on it.”
“I read Rune-related email on Tuesdays,” Dave says. “Doctor’s orders. I’ve told you that before. So, what’s so urgent that you had to text me, like, ten times in an hour?”
He hears her short, inhaled breath. She’s marshalling herself for a fight. “We’re filing a patent continuation on the Glyph algorithm,” she says. “You’re a co-inventor. I need your sign-off.”
Dave walks a few steps before responding, scuffing the dirt shoulder beside the asphalt with his hiking boots. It could be a new application, he tells himself, coughing on the dust. They could have pivoted. With Charles running the show, they’re always pivoting. “What’s the use case?”
“Come on,” she scoffs. “Beakhead’s only got one major market. We knew that when we inked the deal.”
“When you and the board forced me to sell,” Dave corrects. On some level, Halina’s decision to swing her allegiance to Charles Larkin and their investors, thereby shifting Rune’s focus away from linguistic applications to military code cracking, still shocks him. He had believed they were a united team in full control of their capital table and, by extension, their company. “What’s he using it for? Decoding insurgent transmissions in Afghanistan?”
“You know I can’t talk about it,” Halina says quietly. “You were never eligible for the security clearance on those contracts.”
Dave’s free hand clenches and unclenches. When he’d met Halina in their first-year calculus class, he’d thought nothing about her being a dual US–Canadian citizen. All he’d seen was another passionate coder who was self-taught and wanted to be self-made, just like him. Back then, he’s reasonably certain that she hadn’t given it a second thought, either.
But Charles Larkin and Beakhead Capital had seen long-term leverage and exploited it. By the time he’d realized that her view of Rune had splintered from his, it was too late. “No court will let you file a continuance for military use,” he says. “We never hinted at anything like that in the original patent.”
“The original patent was a shitshow,” Halina returns. “Sandy Mercer is a sweetheart, but she didn’t have a clue what she was doing. I’ve spent oceans of cash cleaning up that mess.” She pauses, chuckling to herself. “Why am I even telling you?”
“We invented Glyph to solve translation problems and invest in Indigenous language preservation efforts,” Dave spits. “Not to weaponize it.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Halina says coolly. “I know Dean Ng in business development still sends you the financial statements out of loyalty. If you’ve opened them, you know Q3’s been shit so far.” She sighs. “I need a win, Dave.” She pauses, giving him time to feel her words. “You may not know that Geoffrey Adams just bought a house—baby two is on the way. Or that Lucy Grady’s eldest daughter starts at MIT this week. Computer science, naturally. And Parker Lesley’s dad is sick again. His lung cancer’s come back.” Her second sigh echoes in his bones. “I could run down the whole roster for the old guard, but the takeaway here is it’s just me watching their backs. And I need you to get out of our way.”
Dave laughs. “Did Charles tell you to say that?”
“Charles never lied to me,” Halina retorts. “He never told me ‘We’re in this to the end, Hal, come fortune or ruin.’”
Her mimicry is note perfect. Dave winces, remembering. “Pretty sure I’d had a few beers that night.”
“You quit on us, Dave.” Halina’s angry words slide like a dagger into his ear. “Are you really going to be a dick now about some fucking paperwork?”
I almost died! The words quiver on his tongue as, inside him, the volcano flexes. He can practically feel his blood pressure rising. “You know what? Fuck this. I don’t need your manipulation or Charles’s bullshit. Find another way. You always do.” He hangs up, wishing the gesture felt less anticlimactic on a smartphone.
We had an amazing business until you let that snake in the front door, Dave fumes, continuing to barrel up the road. He fed you a lie, you got greedy, everyone drank the Kool-Aid, and you sided with Charles and forced me out.
Says the man with nine figures in the bank, he thinks, ashamed that he’s once more in the grip of his lingering rage. He stops to roll his shoulders, imagining the tension dripping away from him like raindrops after a storm.
Objectively, he’s got no reason to be embarrassed. He and Halina founded Rune in 2003, just as tech companies in San Francisco were beginning to invest heavily in translation software. Their company’s acquisition for $468 million USD in 2011 had been a watershed moment for Toronto’s nascent artificial intelligence sector. He’d walked away with sixteen percent of the total sale.
Once he was healthy, Dave took a year off to travel, sent his parents on a whirlwind vacation, traveled to Vancouver to spend time reconnecting with Jason, met up with both the Lin twins and their families in St. Lucia the next Christmas, and took Leona and her longtime boyfriend Ryan Charron to see the Grand Canyon. Dedicating time to learning Anishinaabemowin, his birth family’s language, with Leona and other elders in their community, had been the next logical step. Through that process, he’d started thinking about how best to give back on a bigger scale, which led to the workshop pilot.
Roses for everyone. All it cost me was my business partner and best friend.
“You finished sulking?” Spinning, Dave sees Leona coming up the road behind him, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. He looks around, surprised by how far he walked during the call. He can’t see the break in the trees around the community centre.
“Yeah, I’m done,” he says, so weary he could lie down in the dirt and close his eyes. “Sorry.”
