Originally published on my substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-tech-ceo I can't figure out the formatting in this place. Part of this piece is supposed to be in italics to differentiate past from future. You guys are smart---you can figure it out.
Jude Gabriel, enigmatic CEO of the mysterious yet seemingly omnipresent software company ‘Talos’, squints as the sunset light squeezes through a few buildings in the Seattle skyline just to assault his face at the perfect angle. Whoever thought up the idea of all-glass offices should be lined up against the wall and shot—with the sun in his eyes.
The whole gang is here: CFO, COO, CPO, CSO, whoever the fuck. He’d kill them all without a second thought in exchange for a glass of whiskey and a cigar.
He rubs his nose: one of his infamous ‘migraines’ is coming on.
It started on his 25th birthday. The whole thing is branded into his memory, for better or for worse, and will be until he dies, and for all his luck after he dies, too.
Craig had been the one who officially ‘suggested’ it, but it was really inevitable, with how into psychedelics they had all been. The moment he said it, it was more like it had manifested out of the whole subconscious zeitgeist of their friend group, and no one in particular took credit for it: Ayahuasca, that is.
One thing after another, and Jude ended up in some primitive canoe, floating his way down the shit-colored waters of the Nanay, muggy-hot and slathered in skin-irritating, carcinogenic bug spray. Nonetheless, nothing short of nuclear fallout could erase his good mood. He practically hummed with adrenaline and good spirits despite the downright horrific summer conditions of backwater Peru.
At the dock, a woman with a clipboard introduced herself as Isa and asked him to put his phone in a dented metal tin.
The intake hut was cooler. A ceiling fan wobbled, slicing the humid air into manageable pieces. The curandero sat in a plastic chair with his hands on his knees, white beard surrounding his chin, wrinkled eyes squinting cheerfully. He looked exactly like Jude had imagined: wise and ready to take them on the trip of a lifetime. He spoke, a hoarse but gentle voice, and a younger man beside him translated.
“...Why here? What do you hope to see?”
They went around the room until it landed on Jude. To tell you the truth, he didn’t know. It wasn’t like the others—he didn’t want to ‘find himself’, his life was fine as it was, he had had no traumatic experiences, and he was a perfectly productive worker: at the time, he was starting up a small software company, and it had just had its first angel investor. He knew he was outgrowing these people, and it was only a matter of time before they’d grow apart.
“I want to see if there’s anything I missed.” He said, simply, not sure if they were the right words after they came out of his mouth. The curandero nodded after hearing the translation, a long, thoughtful motion.
Well, that’s exactly what he found: the thing he’d missed, or more accurately, the thing that had missed him.
If only he’d told Craig to go fuck himself.
The air conditioning beats down on Jude as the CFO, Priya, prattles on about numbers, which is what she does—that’s why we all love her.
Jude’s assistant, Ness, leans towards him.
“The demo team’s set up,” she says, ‘You want them in here, or…”
“Yeah,” says Jude,
In a few minutes, Marty, the CPO, walks over to the wall screen, which switches from spreadsheets to a map of a few high-crime blocks in Seattle, colored dots pulsing like slow heartbeats.
“This is what we’ll show the folks in Oakland,” he says, “ It’s nice, elegant, you know? Makes it look like we’re just sorting the mess, not… playing god, or whatever the press likes to say about us, you know?”
He clicks through, and a route appears through the dots.
“Two patrol cars for nine urgent calls,” he says. “The system takes the pile and says, ‘Here’s the order that gets help to the most people fastest. The car goes here first because the caller keeps hanging up, then here because the second caller is trapped in a stairwell, then this one because it’s likely a duplicate.”
Mason drums a finger. “Why aren’t we showing the cool part where it noticed the stolen Civic from last week patterns back to—”
General counsel interrupts him. “Cool’s trouble. We want ‘boring and helpful’.”
“Come on, it can be a little bit of both,” he said
“Then it wouldn’t be boring, Mason,” she replies.
Jude tunes them out. This part isn’t interesting. Besides, a familiar pressure is blooming behind his right eye, a creeping static that makes it hard to focus.
He watches as the red line from the screen somehow moves, bleeding into reality, widening, taking weight, and spreading, soon becoming a red belt crossing the city. And then he sees what it really is: crossbeams, ribs, the sketch of an inhuman skeleton, barely under the thin veneer of the corporeal world.
He blinks. The thread is small again.
At some point, someone from legal walks in—a shy, mousey blonde. The way she does so, uncertain, not willing to look anyone in the eyes, tells him it’s going to be a problem before she says the words.
There’s mention of ‘Craig Hassel’. He knows right away what happened: the douchebag thinks he made the algorithm behind the route ordering that they’ll be showcasing. Idiot. He doesn’t get it, never did. No one made any of this; it was beyond that, beyond ownership. What he wanted was immaterial: we don’t get just deserts. This isn’t a fucking movie.
He closes his eyes.
His birthday happened to coincide with the first night of the retreat: everyone claims to have planned it, but it was happenstance.
The time before—the whole ‘wellness retreat’ bullshit—passed by in a blur. He remembers staring at Maya’s ass and listening to the curandero talk about mystic-sounding Mumbo jumbo: you were once pure, and culture sullied your soul, or some wacko nonsense. Jude didn’t care about any of that; he just wanted to see the world as it is, absent of everything additional, to gaze into the true reality as close as he possibly could.
Ironically, it was pretty similar to what the curandero was saying, minus the emphasis on personal growth, but he didn’t have the self-awareness to see it.
That night, they entered a featureless wood panel room with two bathrooms and a bunch of mattresses
It was strangely cold. Everyone bunched together in a circle, Maya to his right, leaning close, and Craig, who was practically vibrating with excitement, to his left. The Curandero made his last speech as he prepared the tea, and then everyone lined up to take it.
When Jude reached the end of the line, the translator asked how much he wanted. Jude suppressed a laugh and asked for the maximum amount. What was he, a pussy?
The brew tasted like burnt coffee mixed with dirt. He gulped it down as fast as he could and sat down where he’d been sitting, bracing himself for a ride.
It took an hour or two for it to actually work, during which he felt increasingly disappointed, watching people bumble around or chant like lunatics. Craig similarly didn’t feel anything. Then, it all came at once
Later, he would find out that his experience did not match most descriptions of the drug’s effects, that it was a wholly alien abomination.
Later, Craig would tell him that it had changed him for the worse, that he couldn’t stop striving towards some incomprehensible end, that it made him impossible to work with, that he was taking the company in a direction that was completely different from what they’d intended.
Later, Craig would be right.
“They intend to move ex parte for a TRO, citing emails from 2019 in which Mr. Hassel describes ‘probabilistic ordering—” begins the blonde from legal, probably because she didn’t know what else to say.
“Right, right,” says Mason, flicking his wrist. “It’s a bunch of bullshit.”
“Bullshit that could fuck us over in Oakland,” says GC.
“We can’t afford to deal with this in court,” says Priya, “any delay could punt the demonstration months, at least.”
“Sure, captain obvious,” says Mason, “What are you gonna tell us next, water is wet? The sky is blue?”
“Sorry. It’s hard to tell when you need things spelled out for you, Mason,” she shoots back.
He snorts, looking away.
“I just got a text from him,” interrupts Ness, “says he wants to ‘solve this like men’”
“The hell does that mean?” says Priya
“It means he wants to call,” says Mason,
“Should we?” a voice inevitably chimes. Jude rubs his eyes. The room goes silent.
“Put him on,” says Jude, finally.
They put him on through the speakers.
“I see you got my letter,” says Craig, the self-righteous smugness palpable in his voice.
“What do you want, Craig?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about recognition for my work, for starters?”
Jude rolls his eyes. “You wrote a few weights any freshman can get if you give them a few weekends and a public dataset. You’re not going to court over this—I know it, you know it, so let’s cut the bullshit.”
“Maybe I just wanna fuck you over,” he said, “shut down your little stint in Oakland.”
“Then file,” says Jude. “Let’s see if you can afford that fight.”
The room gets tenser. Priya gives him that stare.
“Wait—” starts GC.
He lifts a hand
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen in the next hour, if you choose that route. We’re going to file a declaratory action in Delaware seeking a ruling of non-infringement and ownership. We’ll append your emails in full to show how little they matter, and we’ll attach three pieces of prior art from 2016 to 2018 where strangers describe the same ‘probabilistic ordering’ that you claim to be yours.”
He looks at Marty. “Pull the patents, will you?”
Marty nods.
Then,” Jude continues, “we’re going to push a limited open-source module that replicates the banal one you’re fighting over. Just the skeleton. Nothing proprietary, nothing Oakland-specific. It will be clean-room documented and intentionally boring. It’ll look like we’re being magnanimous, and your TRO will look like a toddler padlock on a chain-link fence.”
There’s a pause at the other end of the line.
“You wouldn’t just open it,” says Craig, “this is your baby. I know you.”
“Yeah?” says Jude. “Try me.”
He laughs to himself.
“Jesus, Craig. You think this is it, that this is my ‘baby’? This is a step, moron. It’s a fucking brick. I’ll give you your goddamn brick.”
“But, the demo window…” says someone else.
“We’ll move it up,” says Jude. “Ness, call Oakland.”
“We should at least—” starts Priya.
“No,” says Jude, “I’m not dealing with this loser. If he thinks delaying my multi-generational project by another few months, or even a fucking year, is going to hurt me, then let him try.”
“Bullshit,” says Craig, “I can see right through this shitty performance—you’re scared.”
“You wanna bet?”
There’s another pause.
“I’ll make you look like a thief.”
“How’d that work for Eduardo?” says Jude,” Looks are cheap. Zuckerberg proved that.”
“Jude,” he begins, “You cut me out, and you didn’t have to. We could’ve shipped the same thing without this... cult you built around yourself.”
Jude laughs. “Craig, this was always your problem. I don’t think you’re an idiot, actually, the opposite, but you don’t have vision. You can’t see past yourself and your petty fucking problems. You can’t… You can’t see the future, Craig. The world that I see, it’s… Well, let’s just say we’re beyond ‘ownership’: a farcical idea, always has been.”
He looks back at the room. “Cut the line. I’m done talking to this idiot.”
“Wait—” says Craig.
Before he can say shit, the room dips into silence. No one says anything for a while.
“Let’s adjourn,” he says, and he’s already moving before anyone can respond. Velocity beats consensus. Ness calls after him, but he’s already in the elevator. The migraine feels like a lit coal behind his right eye.
He drives home without music, wincing at the glare from the piercing sun glancing off the windows, like a nuclear blast in the distance, stuck in the moment before the shockwave. The afternoon sky gives way to a bruised, arterial red, bleeding into the sides of the windows, the streets, everything the eye can see. The lights switch from green to red, the crosswalks blink, both playing their minute parts in a mechanical process leading to that inevitable future, streets like veins in some incomprehensible organism. He closes his eyes, but the glare still bleeds behind, omnipresent.
By the time he gets back home, it’s nearly dark.
He writes the babysitter a check. The living room smells like banana peels and markers. Jacob claims that Diego said a bad word. Naomi tries to negotiate staying up later, always the little lawyer. He puts them to bed quickly and sets up shop in the rocking chair by the window, cigar in mouth, glass of whiskey on the rocks.
The horizon stares back at him, at once the familiar city he knows and that unfamiliar landscape he saw, back in Peru, which he still sees to this day, every second a little clearer, every minute it converges closer—the landscape of the end of time, the barren plains, the arterial sky, the mechanical structures like ribs, protruding from the landscape.
He tried everything, every drug on the market: benzos, clonidine, weed, you name it. He tried Therapy, CBT, refining his sleep schedule, fixing his diet. He traveled the world, went back to Peru, begged the Curandero, who had nothing to say, signed up for experimental neurobiology trials in Israel, China, France, wherever the fuck, risked his own life so many times it stopped mattering to him. It did fuckall, none of it worked. For better or for worse, he had seen a glimpse of the future, and it hooked itself in his brain, a psychic parasite. He sees it when he closes his eyes, when he dreams—every waking moment he’s cursed to be an oracle, one foot in the future, one foot in the past.
The worst thing is that it never stops awing him.
That megastructure in the sky, a technological monster so bright it could be the sun, shines down at him, illuminating that landscape with all the more horrifying clarity. Waves of ecstasy and terror burrow through his skin: a feeling so strong that only the most spiritual experiences of his life had ever previously come close to.
The only reason he hasn’t killed himself is his unshaking certainty that eternity exists—he’s staring right at it. Death will not release him from his bond. He has been rendered a servant of the future. His only hope, a rapidly fleeting proposition, is that this horror will spare his kids.
He takes another drink—it gives him no comfort, the taste of the cigar has turned bitter in his mouth. The only thing worse would be nothing at all.
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Notes -
I enjoyed this.
I'm probably dumb but is the subtext that (spoiler:)although this is from Jude's POV the Ayahuasca one-shotted him and made him a lot more erratic and Craig is straight up being ripped off?
Yes, pretty much
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