Genius often came hand in hand with eccentricity, and Kyle had spent enough time in the high-tech world to understand, and tolerate, that kind of thing. There was that one guy in research and development who swore he came up with his best ideas while wearing a pirate hat, and there he’d be, in the office, the damn thing perched on his head. You half expected to see a fucking parrot sitting on his shoulder. And there was that punker—Kristy, her name was—with the rings in the nose, the spiky hair, the jeans that were more ripped openings than actual material. You figured, when she was sitting at her workstation, earbuds firmly in place, that she had to be listening to a band with a name like Suicidal Gerbil or Open Runny Sore but in fact was grooving to Lawrence Welk. She wasn’t even being ironic about it. She liked Lawrence Welk.

These were, let’s face it, not people who could have gotten a job at Lehman Brothers. But in the tech world, eccentricities were part of the deal. At Gandalf, when you summoned someone to your office, you weren’t surprised if they came scooting down the hall on a skateboard or walked in on their hands.

But with Emeril Francisco, eccentricity had slid into perversity.

You couldn’t find a nicer guy around the Gandalf headquarters. No big ego, always offered a shoulder to cry on when you were down in the dumps, had maybe three sick days over four years. Never reheated fish in the microwave. And most critical of all, he was a design wizard. Say you wanted a car’s sensors to be able to tell the difference between a ball bouncing into its path, or a small dog, and Emeril would find a way to do it, usually before the end of the day. With his help, Gandalf was at least sixteen months ahead of Arrival in their self-driving technology.

So when Rhonda Templeton said she needed to speak with Kyle privately about a personnel matter, he could not have imagined it would have had anything to do with Emeril Francisco. Rhonda, mid-thirties, a Seattle native, was the resident expert on viruses, and she had been spending her time developing ways to ensure they did not infect the Gandalf driving systems. There had been stories in the news about how, if your car was loaded with software, it could be hacked, even commandeered, by someone else. It was Rhonda’s job to make sure that could not happen, and she led the team charged with that assignment. She was also working on defensive strategies about the latest looming threat: ransomware. The last thing Gandalf needed was a bunch of Russian hackers locking up their system and demanding millions to unlock it.

Rhonda, who had phoned in sick for the previous three days, closed the door and sat down across from Kyle and said, “I hardly know where to begin.”