Page 4 of What If It's You?

“That makes sense,” Drew said, nodding, the furrows in his brow slowly smoothing. “Well, I’m impressed either way. In fact…” His eyes dropped to the floor. “Would you ever run through my presentation for the board with me? I don’t have to give it for another few weeks, but if I can’t sell it to them, they might reassign my team.” Drew winced at the mere thought.

“I’m always down for a chance to see what the super geniuses are working on.”

“I’m not a—”

“Nope. Not allowed to claim you’re not a genius. Condition of my help.”

Drew’s lips quirked in a shy smile.

“I mean…the project is pretty cool. Come by over lunch? It’ll help if you get to see AltR in action.”

“It’s a date,” I said with a smile. Something flickered behind Drew’s eyes, and I immediately wished I could unsay it—Drew was my friend, and he’d never dream of crossing the line, but I suspected he’d been carrying a torch for me for years now, probably since that first exchange in the lecture hall. But drawing more attention to that simple turn of phrase would just increase the already palpable awkwardness.

“See you at noon,” I added, then turned down the hall, heading for the opposite end of the building, objectively massive, unless you compared it to the main Pixel campus out in Silicon Valley.

I didn’t have to look back to know he was watching me. And most likely wanting me. Drew was incredibly talented at many, many things, but hiding what he was thinking had never been one of them.

Even though I knew I shouldn’t—especially after this morning’s discovery—I had to admit: I liked it.

I paused outside the bank of frosted glass doors,lightningshimmering across the surface in iridescent letters. The name for the experimental division where Drew worked wasn’t particularly subtle, or encouraging. Aleksei, one of Pixel’s two founders, started it for “struck by lightning” ideas, the ones that were one in a million…coincidentally also the rough odds any of the dozens of constantly rotating projects had of ever seeing the light of day. Even most Pixel employees didn’t really know what went on behind those doors. The projects that managed to achieve proof of concept eventually got spun out into new departments. The ones that failed received unceremonious burials in the seemingly bottomless pit of Pixel money.

But any given idea could be the next frontier not just for Pixel, but for technology at large. Which was why Lightning was the only department that was completely siloed. You might stroll through a clutch of software engineers en route to the nap pods, or overhear a few tidbits about the go-to-market strategy for a new Pix feature as you passed the conference rooms, but Lightning was entirely self-contained, barricaded both intellectually—the legal team apparently saw Lightning noncompetes as their own chance to take a moon shot—and physically.

I glanced at the keypad outside the door. Worth a shot, at least. Already reaching for my phone to shoot Drew a chat message to let me in, I swiped…and the door softly clicked open. Apparently access to Pixel’s most top-secret projects was one of the benefits of my new title. I probably should have read my new contract a little more closely instead of just skimming for compensation info, both for the potential perks and to learn just how intense the fire and fury would be if I dared to leak any of Pixel’s many closely guarded secrets.

“Hello?” I called out as I stepped inside, anxiety fluttering through me. Clearly I wasallowedto be here, but the sense of crossing into some forbidden realm was practically physical.

It dissipated pretty quickly. I wasn’t sure what I had expected—everyone in cleanroom garb, moving through a space-age structure of chrome and unknowable, blinking interfaces like astronauts aboard some impossibly advanced interstellar ship, maybe? Or a straight-up Frankenstein setup, with all the computer scientists huddling around a reanimated corpse they were teaching their latest tabletop RPG obsession to?

Instead it was just…more office. In place of the Berber carpet that covered most of the rest of the building, the floors were concrete, but the swooping half-walls dividing the (currently empty) desks from one another, their surfaces covered with Funko collectibles, low-maintenance houseplants, and teetering piles of books, magazines, and snacks, were eminently familiar.

Then I saw it, tucked into a glass-walled “room” nestled in the far back corner of the larger workspace. Hanging from the two-story ceiling was a massive tangle of wires and metal, narrow tubes snaking in and out of a series of suspended gold disks, huge shiny loops of them curling at the bottom like high-tech tumbleweeds. It looked like a cross between a futuristic chandelier and a milking machine I’d seen on an elementary school field trip. My mouth dropped open a little as I took it in. In my peripheral vision, I saw Drew rise from a desk at the back of the room and approach me.

“Is that…?”

“A quantum computer?” Even his voice was grinning. “Yup. Even bigger than the one they have at the Mountain View campus.”

“How did I not know we have a quantum computer in the building?”

“It’s not exactly common knowledge outside my team.”

“Sothisis what you’re working on? Just casually rewriting the entire computing landscape?”

“This is what I workwith. Thankfully Pixel has a whole army of physicists and hardware engineers actually making the things.”

“Okay…I’m gonna need you to tell me more about AltR, Drew.”

“Let’s set up over here.” He tilted his head toward his desk and Ifollowed him across the empty room, glancing surreptitiously at each screen we passed. Only one hadn’t gone to sleep, but the jumble of code there was completely indecipherable.

“You…dohave a team, right?”

“I do. But never underestimate the power of half-price pies day at District Four. Especially when it’s on Pixel this week.” Drew gestured at one of two chairs pulled up to his double-wide desk and I sat. Multiple screens clustered above the keyboard in front of his seat, and what looked like a gaming setup had been discarded haphazardly near mine. “Since we haven’t set anyone up on the program yet who’s not on the team, I figured it’d be less awkward if we’re not being watched. So…I deployed my department bonding budget tactically.”

“See what I mean? Clearly a genius.”

“We’ll see if you still think that after you see the program.”

I leaned back in the chair, folding my hands behind my head.

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