Lost

[xylie]

You're looking for a happy ending in all of this, but there isn't one. Christian did not text me the next day to laugh at me or post a video of me running for dear life on YouTube. His wife did report him missing. She didn't get on the plane to Paris.

She has three small children, so the last detail is important. I'd have understood if she went anyway. For all that Christian was there for me, Bobby, Mitch, Max, and Dave, he was a lousy husband. He never once took a day off to give her a break or help with sick kids. Occasionally we'd hear their rather heated discussions on the subject before they switched to rapid fire French.

Christian was Bobby's dream hire and my nightmare. Try calling in sick with a cough when Mr. Perfect shows up on the weekends to answer emergency calls with a 102 degree fever. He even showed up on weekends to work a few hours when there were no emergency calls to take. And Max would get his help on whatever IT issue he couldn't solve regarding Linux. Apparently all ITT still teaches is Windows.

Whatever the reason, Christian was always at work. Red forced him to take a vacation once a year so that Michelle wouldn't leave him and we'd have Christian living at the office permanently. This had more to do with the fire codes than any particular concern for Christian's well being as far as I understood.

I'm not particularly sure what caused Christian to work so much. Fear? A Bay Area mortgage on a single income while Michelle struggled through graduate school? Or perhaps he was punishing her for some unspeakable sin. There were a lot of sins in Christian's world. I'd offended the man many times by forgetting to put a brace in a code sample. He'd shut me down for days.

Still, he lived to help people solve problems, the more complex, the better. If something required his full attention, he was never happier. Perhaps it was the same at home.

It wasn't really my problem. My problem was storming down the hall at a breakneck pace. Bobby O'Rourke came from the Alex Baldwin school of looks and temper. Thankfully most of our desks were placed on the ground floor. I knew what I was getting into going to work for Bobby, I just didn't know how often.

Don't get me wrong, Bobby's a great person when he isn't angry, that just happens less and less. At Metacorp, he had a sixth story window office, here he works from a cramped desk down the hall from Max. Last week the roof leaked and destroyed his bargain laptop, one of Red's Flea Market finds. Bobby's been living for revenge on any living thing ever since.

He was three lattes into his six latte breakfast. These days he's eternally pumped full of caffeine and already chewing on us about Christian, "Red doesn't want anyone, and I mean anyone to say we didn't do all we could to help Christian. We don't know where he is or where he is going. He just disappeared after work and left his car behind."

Bobby was staring meaningfully at me. This wasn't good.

"I can't not tell the police what I saw," I argued, bracing myself for the torrent of curses that usually fall from Bobby's mouth whenever I'm bullheaded enough to argue with him. It's not the nicest of sounds, and usually I just wander away to avoid having to listen to it. He stops eventually.

As a kid I had learned to tune out my mother in much the same way. She would be in one of those moods where I could do nothing right, where every answer would result in a smack across the face. I argued back when I dared, but when I couldn't slink away, I just let my mind wander.

"Are you listening to a damn word I'm saying," Bobby stopped short, he was breathing very hard. Max had managed to wander off, and Dave and Mitch were no where to be seen. Where had I been?

"Yeah Bobby, sure," I said, trying to mimic one of the guys. Bobby never seemed to yell quite as much at them.

"Oh Goddamnit!" Bobby said, and stalked off. And he was gone.

Rosie, our razor thin beauty queen of an office assistant/executive admin came up to me and said, "Customer meeting. Red isn't going to cancel with the Big Fish today. Bobby's freaking out."

Oh right. Our first major customer to express any interest in our product. A chance to steal business away from CompuTech. No wonder Bobby was fit to be tied. We were all hoping to land this customer and the millions of dollars they promised to provide us. It would mean that we could go public, or be bought by someone important. But even more to the point, we could leave our bargain basement building and move on.

EmbeddedSys had started up when Red wanted to break free of his old mentor, Wilson Jones. Wil was a god amongst his small niche space and company after company that he made either went public or was bought by the best of the best. When MetaCorp bought Wil's last company, Bobby had come into my life along with Red, whose real name is Horatio, but you never heard that from me. Convinced that they could eat Wil's lunch, they mimicked his company. Red had had successes in the past, but there was nothing he created that Wil didn't acquire. This time he wanted to stomp Wil once and for all.

Except that Red isn't really the stomping type. Wil is. Red is more of the friendly guy who likes to talk tech and hang out at flea markets for cheap equipment. Together Wil and Red made a fair but tough executive team. Apart, Wil ran most of his people into the ground with his paranoid ways and Red wasn't getting anywhere fast. He had Bobby to get places fast.

Bobby had no one. As a first level engineering manager he'd been happy enough, as a director, he'd been a bit overwhelmed. He was shortly to be our next "VP of engineering" if he played his cards right, but nothing, absolutely nothing was going right.

For one thing, Bobby was not the head of Sales, that title belonged to Elaine, a third generation Bay Area Heiress with a lot of connections, a fondness for Red, and an inability to fire our sales people if they didn't make their quotes. Bobby was also not the Director of Marketing, that belonged to Red's good friend Yeshua Menendez, the first Orthodox Jewish person of Hispanic descent I'd ever known. Yeshua liked to give long and rather provoking speeches about our product's superiority, without much engagement. And he had yet to bring in Bobby's much desired creature, Red's Big Fish.

Sure we had several small to medium customers, 15 odd seats here, 10 there. Anyone who had dealt with Wil personally since Red broke from him usually showed up just to see what all the fuss was about. Usually they bought something to try, but renewals were hard to come by.

Then Lexington Medical came our way. We never mentioned them by name. It was bad luck to call them anything but The Big Fish. They were a major East Coast firm that produced everything from pacemakers to high tech medical electronic restraints. They even wanted us in their robots. It was a major triumph of Red over Wil.

Provided Wil's usual tactics didn't come into play.