Chapter 2: The Last Evening
The last evening of my former life was a Thursday in June. The twenty-fourth. I can look up the day of the week now, of course, but I knew it then too, because it was the evening of the engagement dinner my mother had spent two months planning, and I had spent two months trying to delegate.
The Bartletts had flown out from Boston. Edward's parents, his aunt, his cousin Miranda who was going to be a bridesmaid and who smiled at everything with a ferocity that suggested she'd been coached. My parents had come up from Newton the day before. My father, in his quiet way, had already irritated Edward's mother by asking too many questions about the wine, and my mother had irritated everyone by insisting on visiting the restaurant in advance to discuss the lighting.
We were at a place in Pacific Heights called Alcyone. White tablecloths, candlelight, the kind of restaurant where the servers describe each dish as though they're introducing a minor character in a novel. I remember the sunset that evening: enormous, operatic, the sky going from copper to violet over the Golden Gate. San Francisco was good at sunsets. The city had many flaws, but it knew how to end a day.
I was not fully present. I want to be honest about this, because it matters to what happened next. Edward sat beside me, his hand occasionally finding mine under the table, and I squeezed back each time with a warmth that was genuine but distracted, the way you might pet a cat while reading an email. I was reading emails. Not literally — my phone was in my clutch, where I'd promised Edward it would stay — but in my mind I was cycling through the three things I needed to handle before tomorrow's board meeting, and the two things I should have handled yesterday, and the one thing that was slowly, silently becoming a crisis.
That one thing was Freid Huffman.
Freid was sixty-three years old, the founder and CEO of Inconnect, and he had been trying to buy my company for eleven months. What made him a crisis was not his persistence — I could handle persistent. It was that my own board was starting to listen. Two of my investors had taken calls from his people. My lead board member had used the phrase 'fiduciary duty' in our last meeting, which in startup language is the sound of a door being unlocked from the outside. Inconnect had dominated professional networking for twenty years. It was the platform where every white-collar worker in America maintained a profile, collected connections like baseball cards, and performed their employability for the algorithm. It was also, by 2027, visibly dying. The interface was cluttered, the algorithm was stale, the feed was a graveyard of humble-brags and congratulatory posts that nobody read. Young professionals had started to joke that having an Inconnect profile was like having a fax number. Lumen was eating its lunch.
Freid did not accept this gracefully. He had come to my office in January with an acquisition offer that was, I'll admit, extraordinary: a figure with enough zeros that I'd had to count them twice. I turned it down. He came again in March with a higher number. I turned it down again. In April he proposed a merger, which was really an acquisition wearing a disguise. In May he called me directly and spoke for forty minutes about "vision alignment" and "the future of human capital" while I made faces at Sawyer across the room. Sawyer, my executive assistant, kept a running tally of his calls on a whiteboard behind her desk. By June it read: FREID — 14.
What I didn't understand then — what I was too young and too sheltered and too in love with my own narrative to understand — was that Freid Huffman was not merely a competitor making business overtures. He was a man watching his empire collapse. Inconnect's stock had fallen forty percent in a year. His board was pressuring him to make a move, any move, that would stop the bleeding. The financial press had begun writing the kind of articles about him that used words like "legacy" and "twilight," which in Silicon Valley were synonyms for death. He needed Lumen not as an addition to his portfolio but as proof that he still mattered, and my repeated refusals, combined with the growing restlessness of my own investors, meant the pressure was closing in from both sides.
I didn't see any of this. I saw a persistent old man making offers I didn't want, and I dealt with him the way I dealt with everything that interfered with my plans: I noted it, filed it, and returned my attention to the thing that mattered, which was Lumen, which was always Lumen.
Except that tonight, at this dinner, with the sunset dying over the bridge and Edward's mother launching into a detailed account of the floral arrangements she had commissioned from a Noe Valley boutique florist, I felt my phone buzz in my clutch. I did not look at it. It buzzed again. And again. I excused myself — "just need to use the restroom" — and in the corridor outside the dining room, I read the messages.
Three texts from Freid Huffman.
I know you're at dinner. I'm sorry to interrupt.
I've decided to accept your answer. I won't pursue the acquisition. I want you to hear it from me directly.
I'm at home tonight. Would you come by for one drink? I'd like to end this as friends. I won't ask again.
I stood in the corridor and read these three times. The rational thing would have been to text back "Thank you, that's very generous, let's get coffee next week" and return to the dinner. But there was something in the phrasing — I won't ask again — that contained both a concession and a dare. And his house was only five blocks away. I was, as I have said, a person who did not like to leave things unfinished. I also, I'm ashamed to say, felt a small thrill of victory. He was conceding. He was asking to concede in person, to my face, in his own home. This was surrender, and some part of me, the Stanford part, the CEO part, the part that kept score, wanted to see it.
I went back to the table.
"I've got to run to an investor's house — it's just five blocks away. I'm so sorry, I know the timing is terrible, but it's really important." I leaned close to his ear. "Don't let them start the toast until I'm back. I'll be right back."
Edward looked at me with that expression I mentioned earlier: not anger, not disappointment, something gentler. "Jules. It's our engagement dinner."
"I know. I know. One hour. I'll be back before dessert."
"You'll miss the toasts."
"Push the toasts. Tell them I had a work emergency."
"You always have a work emergency."
This was true, and we both knew it, and the knowing hung between us for a moment like a held breath. Edward Bartlett was a patient man. He had followed me across the country. He had reorganized his life around my schedule. He had accepted, with a grace I did not deserve, that I would always be half-somewhere-else, that the other half of me belonged to a company that I loved with a fervor I could not quite bring to anything human. He accepted all of this because he loved me, and because he believed, we both believed, that it was temporary. That once Lumen reached a certain scale, or went public, or achieved some milestone that kept receding like a desert horizon, I would slow down. I would be present. I would become the person he saw in me, the person I sometimes saw in myself, the one who wanted a life and not just a trajectory.
"One hour," I said again.
He kissed my cheek. He smelled like the cedar cologne he'd worn since college, and for just a moment something in me faltered, some animal instinct, some flicker of knowledge that I was making a terrible mistake. But the flicker passed, as flickers do, and I squeezed his hand and stood up and smiled at his mother and said something about an investor she needed to see and picked up my clutch and walked out of the restaurant into the San Francisco evening.
There was absolutely no premonition in my mind, or I am sure in his, that this was more than an ordinary separation.
Ah, well.
Sawyer was waiting in the car. She always waited in the car during dinners, catching up on scheduling and correspondence on her laptop. She was the most competent person I had ever met, a woman in her mid-forties who had previously managed logistics for a three-star general and who treated my chaotic startup life with the unflappable calm of someone who had organized supply chains in Kandahar. Nothing surprised her. Nothing was too much. She was, in a sense, the person who made my life possible, and I paid her well and thanked her rarely, which is another thing I am not proud of.
"Change of plans," I said, sliding into the back seat. "Freid Huffman's place, right down the street. You know the address?"
"The one on Broadway?"
"That's the one."
She pulled away from the curb. The quiet streets of Pacific Heights slid past: dog-walkers finishing their evening loops, the grand facades of old mansions half-hidden behind hedges. The fog was coming in from the west, rolling over the Presidio in slow white waves.
"He finally giving up?" Sawyer asked.
"Says he is."
"And you believe him?"
I laughed. "I believe he wants to pour me an expensive glass of wine and make one more play. But I also believe he's running out of runway. His board meets next week."
"You want me to come in?"
"No, stay in the car. This won't take long."
She gave me a look in the rearview mirror. Sawyer had a talent for looks. She could convey an entire risk assessment in the angle of an eyebrow.
"I'll be fine," I said. "He's a sixty-three-year-old man who wears fleece vests."
"Ted Kaczynski wore fleece."
I laughed again. "If I'm not out in thirty minutes, call the police."
"I'm setting a timer," she said, and I thought she was joking, but she picked up her phone and I heard the soft beep of a countdown starting.
Freid Huffman's house was a mansion in the way that certain San Francisco houses are mansions: not sprawling, but vertical, carved into the hillside, all glass and reclaimed timber and the aggressive minimalism that very rich men mistake for taste. It occupied a lot on Broadway that would have cost more than most people's lifetime earnings just for the dirt. The view, I knew from photographs, was supposed to be extraordinary.
A woman I took to be a housekeeper opened the door and led me through a foyer of polished concrete and up a staircase that seemed to float without supports. The house was very quiet. I noticed, without thinking much about it, that there were no family photographs anywhere. No books on the shelves. The shelves held objects, sculptures, things made of brushed metal and irregular glass that looked like they'd been selected by a consultant. The air smelled faintly of cedar, real cedar, built into the walls, and something else, something chemical and cold that I couldn't identify.
Freid met me on the third floor. He was, as always, meticulously casual: dark jeans, a gray cashmere sweater, leather shoes that probably cost what my father earned in a week. His face had the taut, slightly waxy quality of a man who'd had work done and whose surgeon was good enough that you couldn't say exactly what. He smiled warmly and extended both hands.
"Juliana. Thank you for coming. I know this is your evening."
"It's fine. Edward understands."
"Edward. The fiance. Harvard, right? Urban planning?"
"That's him."
"Good man. I've looked him up." He said this pleasantly, as though researching your competitors' loved ones were a normal social courtesy. "Come. I want to show you something."
He led me down a hallway lined with windows that faced north, toward the bay. The fog was thicker now, erasing the far shore, but the Golden Gate still glowed in the last light, its towers rising above the white like the masts of a sinking ship. The image stayed with me afterward, the bridge disappearing, though at the time it was just a pretty view.
At the end of the hallway was a door. He opened it onto a room that was, I have to admit, breathtaking. It occupied the entire northwest corner of the house, floor-to-ceiling glass on two sides. The bay stretched below us like a dark mirror. Alcatraz sat in the middle distance, floodlit, absurdly picturesque. Beyond it, the lights of the East Bay scattered up into the hills. And directly ahead, the Golden Gate Bridge, closer than I'd ever seen it from a private home, its cables catching the last copper light as the fog rolled beneath.
"The best view in San Francisco," Freid said. "Better than the restaurant you just left. Sit."
There were two chairs, angled toward the glass. Between them, a small table with a bottle of wine already open and breathing. He poured — something dark and French — and handed me a glass and sat in the other chair with the ease of a man who had rehearsed this moment.
"I want to tell you something," he said. "Something I should have said eleven months ago."
"All right."
"You're going to win. Lumen is going to win. You're new, we're old. You're Instagram, I'm Facebook. Incumbents die slowly, but they do die. Though I'll tell you something that might surprise you — we're going to make more money than you for the next decade, maybe two. So if you're not going to let us acquire you, then at least I would like to be friends as we gradually change places. Think of it as a long, civilized handoff into my retirement. Maybe I'm flattering myself, but perhaps I could even be a mentor to you."
I sipped the wine. It was excellent.
"So I'm not here to make another offer. I'm here to congratulate you and to ask if we can be friends, or at least not enemies, because this industry is small and I'm going to be in it for a while yet and I'd rather not spend the next decade avoiding you at conferences."
I was surprised. This was more gracious than I'd expected, more honest, more vulnerable. I felt, despite myself, a flush of sympathy for him. He had built something enormous, and it was dying, and he was sitting in his beautiful house watching it happen. That was hard. I knew enough about ambition to know how hard that was.
"Of course," I said. "I've never thought of you as an enemy, Freid."
"Good. That's good." He sipped his wine. "Let me show you one more thing. Something I think you'll find interesting."
He stood and crossed the room to what I'd taken for a closet door. Behind it was not a closet but another room, smaller, windowless, lit by a cool bluish light. In the center of this room, resting on a platform of brushed steel, was a capsule.
It was beautiful, in the way that certain machines are beautiful: all curves and seams, white and silver, about the size and shape of a bathtub with a lid. It looked like something you'd see in a science fiction film, or in the lobby of a biotech company trying to impress investors. Which is essentially what it was.
"Cryonic preservation," Freid said. He ran his hand along the capsule's surface with a collector's pride. "I got this from a startup in Shenzhen. Very quiet, very secretive. They've only delivered a handful of these, mostly to top CCP and PLA officials. I went to quite some trouble to get one." He smiled. "If something happens to me — a heart attack, a stroke, an aneurysm — my household staff are trained to get me in here within four minutes. The pod cools the body to minus one hundred and ninety-six degrees Celsius in under three minutes. Vitrification, not freezing: no ice crystals, no cell damage. The preservation is, we believe, perfect."
"And the revival?"
He smiled. "That's the part we haven't solved yet. Nobody has. The technology to freeze is decades ahead of the technology to thaw. But I don't need to solve it. I just need to wait. Someone, someday, in twenty or fifty or a hundred years, will figure out how to bring me back. And when they do, I'll still be here. Still me."
"That's an extraordinary bet," I said.
"I'm an extraordinary man." He said this without irony, which should have been a warning. "Would you like a closer look?"
I stepped into the room. The capsule was open, its lid raised on silent hydraulics. Inside, the interior was lined with a material I didn't recognize: smooth, very cold to the touch when I brushed it with my fingers, like metal that had been left in a freezer. There were indentations for a body: head, shoulders, arms, legs. It looked, I thought, like a very expensive coffin.
"The vitrification agent is in the lining," Freid was saying from behind me. "It perfuses through the skin on contact. The whole process takes about —"
I turned to say something — I don't remember what. A question about the chemistry, or a polite remark about the engineering. But when I turned, Freid was no longer behind me. He was standing in the doorway of the small room, and his expression had changed. The warmth was gone. The avuncular charm was gone. What was left was something I had never seen on another person's face: a blankness so complete it looked mechanical, as though the social mask had been removed and underneath was nothing but calculation.
And behind him, filling the hallway, were five robots.
I don't know what to call them. In my time we called them humanoid robots, or sometimes by their brand name, and everyone had seen them on television doing choreographed dances and flipping pancakes at trade shows. They were a novelty. A party trick. They stood about five foot ten and moved with an uncanny fluidity that was designed to be charming, to make you think of a helpful butler, or a dance partner, or a toy.
These were not charming. They were matte black, not the cheerful white of the commercial models, and they moved without the programmed hesitations that made the consumer versions seem friendly. They moved like water. They moved with an unsettling gentleness, as though they had been programmed to handle something fragile.
They came through the doorway in a single flowing movement. I screamed — I know I screamed, because I felt it tear my throat — and I tried to get past them, tried to push through the doorway into the hall, but two of them had my arms before I'd taken a step — faster than I had ever seen a humanoid form move. Their grips were firm but not painful, like padded restraints measured exactly to my body. I twisted hard, threw all my weight to one side, and felt nothing give. Not a millimeter. It was like trying to bend steel with your bare hands. It was like being held by the building itself, as though the walls had grown hands. I kicked. I twisted. I threw my weight sideways. I might as well have been fighting the tide.
"Freid!" I screamed. I was kicking, twisting, throwing my weight against the robots' grip with everything I had. It did nothing. Their arms didn't even shift. "Freid, what are you doing? Let me go! Let me —"
He watched from the doorway. His face had not changed. The blankness was total.
The third robot took my legs. The fourth placed a hand — if you can call it a hand — on either side of my head, steadying it with a precision that was almost tender, the way you'd hold a vase you were about to place on a shelf. The fifth stood at the capsule and did something to its controls.
They lifted me. I weighed nothing to them. I was an object being relocated, and the efficiency with which they carried me to the capsule and arranged my limbs inside it — right arm here, left arm there, legs straight, head centered — was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced, because it was so completely without malice. They were not angry. They were not cruel. They were executing a task. I was the task.
"Freid!" My voice was strange and high. "People know I'm here. My assistant — she's outside, she's going to —"
"Sawyer?" He spoke for the first time since the robots had appeared. His voice was conversational. "She's in the car. She set a timer for thirty minutes, which I thought was sensible." He checked his watch. "Unfortunately, she won't live to hear that timer go off."
He must have been surveilling Sawyer and I, and who knows who else in my company and my life, through some kind of device-level hack on our phones. The most competent person I had ever worked with, and Freid was talking about deleting her like a bug in some software.
The cold was starting. I felt it first in my back, where the lining of the capsule pressed against my skin through my dress. It spread upward and outward, a cold so profound it went past pain into something else, something I have no word for: a sensation of being subtracted, of the self being dimmed like a light on a dial.
"You're going to disappear," Freid said. "It will be the great mystery of 2027. The tech CEO who vanished. They'll look for you for years. They'll make podcasts about you. And Lumen, without you, will be acquired by Inconnect for a fraction of what I offered you today."
I tried to speak. My jaw was stiffening. The cold had reached my chest and was pressing the air from my lungs in slow, shallow increments, as though a great weight were being laid on me by degrees.
He sounded like a comic book villain. It didn't feel real. I remember feeling not as terrified as I should have been because the whole thing felt like it must be some kind of sick joke — a sixty-three-year-old man in a cashmere sweater standing in his Pacific Heights mansion explaining, calmly, that he was going to make me disappear using robots and a freezer. The sheer absurdity of it was a kind of anesthesia.
"I want you to know," he said, and his voice seemed to be coming from very far away now, or from underwater, "that this is not personal. You are an obstacle. I am removing an obstacle. In business, this is what we do."
The lid began to close. I saw the room narrowing to a slit: the blue light, the brushed steel, Freid's face receding into a strip and then a line and then nothing.
The last thing I heard, or think I heard, before the cold took my thoughts and the dark took my sight and seventy-three years took everything else, was the soft click of the capsule sealing shut.
And then I was gone.