I Love You, Miss Genius novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ghost
At 2 a.m. a temp fixes a crashing platform in secret; in the morning the CEO hunts the ghost and the COO claims the fix.
At 2 a.m. the fourth floor of Helix Loop was empty, and I was the only one who saw the wall screen turn red.
I was a temp, so I had no reason to be there.
I had two boxes of old contracts to scan before the agency's eight o'clock deadline.
I also had a radiator at home that clanked all night, and a floor here that was warm and silent.
The wall screen showed the Loop dashboard, the platform that matched sick patients to clinical trials.
Every number on it had turned into the same word.
ERROR.
I set down the contract I was holding.
The funding demo was at nine.
Everyone in the building had been talking about it for a week, and the CEO had been talking about it for a month.
If Loop was down at nine, the investors walked, and forty people would be out of work by Friday.
That was not my problem.
I was a temp, and I filed things.
I told myself that for nearly a minute.
Then I walked to the glass office at the end of the floor, the one with the CEO's name on the door.
His laptop sat open on the desk with the admin session still logged in.
He had gone home at midnight, I knew, because I had brought him his last coffee.
I sat down in his chair and put my fingers on his keyboard.
I had promised myself six years ago that I would never do this again.
The error trace took only a moment to read.
Two jobs in the matching queue were waiting on each other, and neither would ever let go.
It was the kind of mistake you make when you are tired and very smart and nobody has checked your work.
I knew it the way you know your own handwriting.
I knew it, partly, because I had written the first version of that queue when I was seventeen.
I pushed the thought away and started typing.
Gus stopped at the glass door at ten past two, on his rounds with his flashlight and his thermos.
He was the night guard, sixty years old, with a walrus mustache and a bad leg.
He looked at the screen, then at me.
"I didn't see you," he said.
"Thank you," I said.
"There's a banana on your desk." He limped on.
The queue came back at 2:31.
The numbers on the wall screen turned green one at a time.
I should have logged out then.
Instead, out of a habit I could not break, I typed one line above the fix.
// fixed. go home. // g
Then I closed the laptop and put it back exactly as it had been.
I did not take the credit, and I did not leave a name.
At 8:40 I was at my desk with a tray of coffees, scanning the last contract, when the whole floor went quiet.
Dashiell Rhine, whom everyone called Dash, was walking toward me.
He was thirty-two and the founder of the company, tall and rangy.
Dark-blond hair fell in his eyes, and he wore a hoodie under his blazer.
His shoelaces were undone.
He had never once said my name.
He stopped at my desk and held up his phone.
On it was my comment line, in white on black.
"Somebody was in my admin session at 2 a.m.," he said, loud enough for the room.
"There's no login and no user. The author field is blank."
Nobody breathed.
"Whoever you are, you saved my company. Stand up."
Nobody stood.
I looked at the tray of coffees in my hands.
I looked at him, and he looked straight through me.
"Fine," he said. "Ghost it is."
He glanced down, noticed I existed, and pushed a stack of paper across my desk.
"Photocopy these. Collate them. Thanks."
He turned back to the room.
"Everybody who touched that queue last month, in my office, now."
My hands were shaking, and I made them stop.
A woman in a cream suit stepped out of the crowd.
Bettina Crowe, the COO, walked to the center of the floor and pressed a hand to her chest.
"Dash," she said. "That was me."
Every head on the floor turned.
"I didn't want a fuss," she said. "I couldn't sleep. I came in."
Dash stared at her.
Then his whole face broke open with relief, and he laughed and hugged her.
"Then you'll walk the lead investor through it at nine," he said into her hair.
Bettina's smile stayed exactly where it was.
Her eyes slid across the floor and landed on me.
I picked up the stack of paper and walked to the copier.
"Juno," she called, sweetly. "Come here a second."
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