“…It is day one thousand of the Siege of Seattle. Sony has announced further delays on reintroducing DVD players to the consumer market. And it’s been ten years since the Cascade, but only half the country has access to electricity. It is June 23rd, 2032, and this is NPR.”
Nazgal Qureshi jolted awake by the blare of her radio. She was safely in her office in Boston, Massachusetts. She looked around the room for the person she'd spent the night there with previously—whatever they'd gotten up to, she'd let him have her couch and curled like a patient cat in her well-worn faux-leather office chair. Too flush with adrenaline after the video game she directed launched, and frankly too out of practice falling asleep in a bed to bother going home, she ended her first one-night stand at a desk, waiting for the sun. The fucking was filed gracefully into her daily routine.
She wore the other guy's dress shirt. Hazard of getting dressed in the dark. Her clothes were in a utility closet. This feels like a trope of some kind, she thought. She'd have it dry-cleaned and couriered to his address.
She leaned over her desk and buried her face in her hands. Her elbows pressed into the layer of notebooks: hundreds of pages of pointer arithmetic, memory allocations, drafted source code, doodles of characters, and games to come. Handwriting her code was something she grew up doing and wasn't likely to grow out of.
He'd been drunk, and she hadn't. Her video game had broken Acherontia Arts’ previous sales records, and she considered treating herself to something new. The sex was HR compliant because while she ran the project, she was still a mere senior developer on a work visa. She felt her glow fade. She smelled the air and felt the stickiness; it had all felt too quiet and anatomical. This was why people drank before doing these things. Drinking was haram, though, so it best she didn't do it again—
Her pager went off: It’s Qazi. "CALL ME". Her stomach dropped. She ripped her phone off the horn and tapped his speed dial button with a trembling digit. The ringing felt forever.
There was no good reason for him to page her the first thing in the morning. Warning her that the promotion they’d hinted at was a mirage? He told her to expect disappointment as if she needed reminding. The way she grew up, promises were at best guesses. Sure, Qazi's boss, the owner, had talked about making her a director, but she had no way of holding him to his promise, and both of them knew she had nowhere else to go. Yet Qazi wouldn’t have that information immediately after a successful product launch. This certainly wouldn’t be him offering praise, either. This job, the visa, and a hard time are all you're getting from me, he'd warned her, and Qazi was true to his word. The less he had to say to her, the better she was doing.
Thus: Why is he paging me? What could have already gone wrong? I did it. I did it! Is this about me hooking up with that guy? Did he find out I’d had sex in the office? Is he disgusted with me? Am I about to be sacked? Nothing seemed impossible with Qazi, who existed on a fluid continuum between mentor and tyrant.
His voice replaced the ringing. "Nazgul." Even without caller ID, he'd known it was her. "I would like you to meet me for coffee." His voice was deep, heavily accented, yet confidently clipped the English as though a native speaker.
"What's this about?"
"Shut up and listen to me.” Qazi hissed, now in Hazaragi. Not since Naz set foot in the U.S had he spoken to her in anything but English. "I’ll be at The Chestnut Tree café."
"Qazi, 'where-" she caught herself and switched to Hazaragi. It felt slippery in her mouth, slick with years' of disuse. “Where is that?”
He'd hung up.
Nazgal yanked open her office drawer, pulled out the thick yellow pages book, and let it plop onto the table with a satisfying bang. She flipped the pages to find the number and address of the cafe. It wasn't even in Boston or even the metropolitan area. Fall River. Where even was that? She yanked out a map that was an impromptu bookmark in the phone book. It was so far south.
Shower, clothes, cash, taxi.
There was a knock at her office door, and she squeezed into a pair of slacks before answering the knock. Only belatedly did she realize she was barefoot, her hair was a mess, and her shirt had the wrong proportions for a woman.
It was a courier with a box. She mindlessly signed for it—didn't even ask whom it was from—and slammed the door behind her as she laid it on her desk. Gingerly opening the package with her pocket knife and gingerly flicking off the tab on the upper lid, the package popped open and a balloon floated out and bumped on her ceiling.
It was bespoke because she didn't know many birthday balloons with the words "Congratulations On Your First Confirmed Kill" in gold embroidered Comic Sans. She tried to think of people who’d consider to be nice to her like this. She drew a blank.
…
She took an expensive taxi to the cafe. She met with Qazi for five minutes. Qazi told her that Acherontia Arts was being sold to a larger company. Naz reacted. Qazi promised to destroy her utterly if she repeated a word of it to anyone. Naz needed a minute to compose herself. She found Qazi had already arranged for and paid for her taxi back to Boston.
Serious conversations with Qazi were always endured in front of him and suffered in hindsight.
She had accepted an invitation to a panel on game design and development at Northeastern University. She'd said 'yes' because they’d invited her but didn't feel good about it. The American students were mostly white and affluent. The foreign students looked like affluent versions of herself. Also, she didn't even have a diploma, let alone a degree. Naz was technically underqualified for her job, and Qazi had never missed an opportunity to remind her of that. They filled the audience. They lined the panel. Her imposter syndrome was terminal. She had nothing to give these people they weren’t already getting.
Thus, the panel: five industry professionals seated behind a hollow-feeling folding table. She was seated next to the Anankosoft representative, an industry professional who looked at and conversed with every other panelist except her. He was tall, his dark hair peppered with gray, and his voice boomed like every sentence from his mouth was a declaration of fact. Naz felt squeezed out of the picture at the far end of the table. She kept to herself.
One member of the audience drew Naz's attention. Of the few women present. A neat arrangement of braids, most pulled back to show and frame the severe expression on her face. Some were swept slightly to one side, flowing like a ponytail down her back. Her almond-shaped eyes were large, deep-set, and aggravated by her thick eyebrows. Her lips had a natural downward curve—both intrigued and judgmental. Naz was sure the girl had only looked at her during the panel. Naz would have been surprised if the girl had blinked more than twice in the past half-hour.
[Stub: need to plan and write scene where Samantha asks a question only Naz can answer. She and Samantha get into a technical discussion that escalates into a public argument when Samantha outright insults Naz’s game. This is gonna take some research to a) make it authentic and b) make it interesting to the layperson.]
The panel discussion continued on autopilot since everyone on the panel or the audience did not know what to make of the spat. Naz wasn’t worried about personal blowback. Everyone would forget about the drama in another day or so. This was one of the ways the solar death of the Information Age was a blessing: mistakes more frequently died in darkness. Word of mouth could still screw you, of course. Still, Naz was a nobody whose singular recent accomplishment wasn’t even directly attributed to her and whose only reason for being there was Qazi insisted she go in his place.
Samantha left the auditorium rather than return to her seat.
When the panel ended, Naz took a break from catastrophizing for a smoke break, leaning against the flagpole where she’d told Samantha to meet her. Samantha shouldn’t show up. It was preposterous. She’d all but threatened Samantha, and Samantha apparently disliked her enough to challenge her in public. Only an idiot would go to the trouble of disrespecting someone with no industry profile and then waste their time trying to take that person up on an offer to square up after the fact.
She blew a cloud of floral-scented smoke into the air to watch the way the light played in the wispy haze. The light breeze tickled goosebumps on her skin she hadn’t realized were there. Naz always grew feverish when enraged or saddened, and Samantha had made her both. She threw her cigarette on the ground and felt the dead grass crackle beneath her heel, ready to resume her day from hell.
A low, careful voice chirped behind her: “Ms. Qureshi.”
Naz whipped around. Samantha. She sounded much less forceful without a microphone and a crowd. Her eyes were more nervous now, avoiding Naz’s own as if they shared magnetic polarities. How old was she? Her warm brown skin glowed in the sunlight and said nineteen, her pensive stare felt much older. Now that they were face to face, the rents in Samantha’s jeans looked self-inflicted or even accidental, and her shirt looked a size too large for her.
Naz didn’t answer her, but smiled and waited to see what Samantha would do next. Thought you said you wanted to see me, not stare at me.
“We got off on the wrong foot,” Samantha extended her hand towards Naz. “I shouldn’t have mouthed off like that.”
“Yeah. No.” Naz stared at Samantha’s hand for a moment. “I’d be more worried about what the other guys thought.”
Samantha didn’t withdraw her hand. “Nah,” she said, “You stole the spotlight there, I think.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Stupid college students are a dime a dozen. Outspoken panelists are a novelty.”
There are less subtle ways of calling me bitchy, but I’d need a better imagination to think of them. Naz nodded. “I guess I owe you the apology, then.” She grabbed Samantha’s hand and shook it. “Personality aside, you’re pretty knowledgeable for a college student.” Naz tilted her head. “Why are you pretending to be one?”
“The hell do you mean?” Samantha’s eyes narrowed. “I go here.”
“Oh, yeah?” Naz crossed her arms. “What’s your favorite class this semester?”
“Embedded Software with Professor Tyler Almstead,” Samantha rattled off.
“Uh huh.” Naz turned around. The brick walkways around Centennial Commons were inset with personalized bricks and she traced Samantha’s line of sight to the several around her. Sure enough, one read “Tyler Almstead, class of ‘14.” She raised her eyes and met Samantha’s, which widened in shock.
“How’d you know?”
“Why pretend to be a college student?” Amateur. I’d have answers fifteen questions deep.
Samantha put her hands on her hips. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“Now who’s jumping to conclusions?”
“Game sees game,” Samantha smirked. “Let me buy you a drink?”
Then Samantha’s stomach growled. Oh, habibti. Naz tried not to let her concern show.
“How about I buy you lunch, as long as you promise not to try to use your fake I.D.?”
Samantha’s lips scrunched up in a frown and Naz could tell she was trying not to react.
Definitely nineteen.
It was a short walk to Matheson’s Diner by Huntington Avenue. She’d heard the restaurant used to be an Apple store before the Cascade, but she was sure that was rumor, inspired by the diner’s black-and-white color scheme and minimalist aesthetic. Whatever its origins or its intentions, it felt, smelt, and sounded just like a diner. Samantha initially wanted to sit at the first counter seats to open up, but Naz insisted on waiting for a table. It was a habit from her childhood. She hated sitting with her back to the door of a public area. In a few minutes, they were seated.
They put in their drink orders—coffee for Samantha and lemon and water for Naz. Samantha expressed the normal pleasantries—complimenting Naz about her blazer and crop-top ensemble—and Naz immediately shook her head.
“Just chill, Sam, take a beat—”
“Samantha.”
“Fair enough.”
“Are you okay with me calling you Naz?”
“Sure.” Preferable to someone asking me about that stupid fantasy movie.
The waitress arrived and asked if they were ready to order food. Naz’s stomach was filled with her nerves, so she asked for a simple fruit salad with a side of cottage cheese.
Samantha bit her lip. “Yeah, I’ll have a Caesar salad.”
Naz raised an eyebrow. Really? “Pardon me,” Naz said, “I’ll have a cheeseburger, fries, and fried dough bites with the fruit salad, thanks.” She craned her head slightly at Samantha, who cleared her throat.
“Uh, three scrambled eggs with the homefries, an extra order of white toast, bacon, two blueberry pancakes, and a chocolate milkshake.” Even Samantha’s naturally severe face couldn’t quite wrangle the grin on her lips.
“Right away.” The waitress looked irritated by the back and forth. Naz narrowed her eyes at Samantha. She’s starving, isn’t she?
“The lunch is on my dime! What’s the point of the hospitality if you’re just going to starve yourself?”
“You think I’m going to pig out when you’re getting yourself a salad? Hell no.”
“At least get yourself some protein!” Naz chided her with a smile, then took a sip of her lemon water.
“Maybe that’s what I was trying to get you to do. Fruit salad, my ass.”
“Oof a bawa.” Naz grumbled. “Why are you like this?”
“Why are you still talking to me?” Samantha asked. Naz continued to smile but began to put the pieces together. Naz was not one to be rude or even abrupt with others. Her peers thought of her as pleasant and capable. Qazi would not even speak with her in any of their native tongues, so insistent was he on keeping their interactions professional. She did not have reason to converse with people outside of work, nor they much use for an immigrant with no past here.
“What country is that, anyways?” Samantha
“I'm Hazara.”
“Yeah, but what country.”
“I'm Hazara.” The hell do I tell her? Afghan? They didn't want us there, and I didn't want to be there! Besides, much of Central Asia was still dark after the Cascade, and Afghanistan was a failed state even before the solar flare struck. “How about you?”
“America.”
“America’s a continent. What part of America? Because Boston’s not your hometown, is it?”
“It’s not.”
Why are you still talking to me, then? The smile grew strained. Now is not the time to realize I have no friends. She suddenly resented the nineteen-year-old sitting in front of her. Now is not the time this teenager makes me feel inadequate.
“What is?”
“Parents were in New Orleans when the Cascade happened, I was over here. The phones were all jacked so it was just me and Auntie, then she died and I got by without her. A few years later I tried calling ‘em.”
She drifted off and stared at Naz for a minute and Naz realized she was finished talking.
“You mentioned getting by…”
“I made it work.” Her eyes acquired a faraway look. “What’s your story?”
Naz chuckled. “I just ran away from home in my teens.”
“In your teens? How old were you?”
“Honestly?” Naz squinted as she tried to do the math, then gave up. “I don’t know.” For however long she knew them, even her parents were hazy about what year she'd been born, and it wasn't as if she would approach the Taliban for her own birth certificate, assuming it survived.
“How about you becoming a game developer?”
She thought of Qazi, the Chestnut Hill Cafe, what he had to say to her, and all the other things Qazi had yelled at her over the years. Didn’t want to engage with that. “I networked.”
“You networked?”
“I networked well.” You got lucky, you mean? Naz smiled, but it felt strained. A weird, unreasonable guilt burned in her stomach. You waited the right table, and Qazi was there, and he wanted to help a fellow Hazara. What do I tell her? Get lucky?
“Where’d you go to school?”
“That’s complicated.” A bunch of libraries around Pakistan, a few internet cafes that survived the Cascade, some people’s houses, then Qazi, then Acherontia Acherontia Arts. “I moved around a lot. How’d you learn about programming?”
“I was born good at math, anything with copper, silicon, numbers. My parents sent me here because Auntie said she could get me into a magnet school. Then the Cascade took out all the tech, but I kept at it my way.”
Their orders arrived, and Naz knew better than to ask Samantha questions as she wolfed down her food, only distracting her with questions about her favorite games, either pre- or post-Cascade, to make sure she paced herself and didn’t get sick from overeating. Naz had not-so-fond memories of throwing up in front of Qazi.
Naz took a few bites of her food—she was still dizzy and winded from what had happened earlier in the day—and asked to box her sandwich when Samantha had practically licked her plate clean and killed her milkshake.
They talked more about the extent of Samantha’s technical knowledge and how she figured out a way to attain practical experience with game development, including scavenging parts from junkyards and putting together reproductions of old 90s-era consoles. Naz asked for the check and inquired into Samantha’s plans for the rest of the week before Samantha cut her off with a frigid, “What the fuck was this?”
“Excuse you?”
“What the fuck was this? A social call? You’re an industry bigshot, you ask me for an hour of my time, take me out to lunch, basically have me lay out my whole life’s story, grill me about my tech knowledge—and I’m not getting an internship or a job out of it?”
“I treated you to lunch.”
“I can get my own food. I want to work for you. Only you can make that happen.”
“You’re pretty entitled for someone with a dead hand.”
“It’s no dead hand. I managed to get as far as I did with no support, no parenting, no money, nothing—”
“The hell do you want,” Naz’s voice grew hard, “a fucking medal, or should I try to kickstarter a documentary on your life’s story?”
“You wasted my time.”
“You were starving. I felt bad for you.”
“And you were floundering at that seminar because you don’t have fangs, you coward.”
Naz chewed her tongue for a bit. “Okay, you know a lot, for an amateur. And you’d probably bullshit your way through any interview my company would give you. And I can believe you’re a hard worker.” Naz paused to measure out her next words precisely, like grains of ricin to make sure the victim consumed the poison but still succumbed to it. “But integrity is everything, and I’m not working with a fucking liar. You’re not worth the favor, kid.”
Samantha’s fists struck the table. “Fuck you.” Naz became conscious of everyone in the restaurant staring at them.
Naz grabbed a fistful of cash from her purse and slammed it on the table. “Fuck you. Have a nice life, pal.” Her skin and brain were on fire and the sound her heels made as they struck the floor each felt like the front-hand and back-hand of a petty migraine.
The fuck am I doing? Naz growled, several sets of feelings from her past and present dogpiling her senses in a tangle of memories that she felt were choking and strangling her.
She swung around, neatly pivoting on her heel, and before Samantha could say a word, slammed her business card on top of the cash. “Clean yourself up and call me.” Her voice was hoarse as she heard Qazi’s words flow through her mouth. She could hear Samantha say some things as Naz left the restaurant, but Naz chose not to listen.
She cleared the block and threw up near the shuttered husk where Berkeley College used to be.
She chose to walk the rest of the way back to her office at Suite 401 where Acherontia Arts was located, let herself into the now-bustling office full of excited activity and enthusiasm over the launch of Naz’s project The Wild Hunt. Nobody was getting anything done.
Qazi was conspicuously absent, and this should have raised red flags with people because Qazi was never absent unless the owner Robert Callow specifically needed him elsewhere. In a sense, that was the case because Callow likely wanted Qazi somewhere he wouldn’t accidentally leak.
Naz made it to her office, locked the door, grabbed her antique stuffed black cat, and used it to muffle a howl of rage and fear.
Conversations with Qazi were endured in the moment and suffered in hindsight, and the hindsight had just caught up with her.
The Chestnut Hill Cafe was crowded and noisy but Naz instantly found Qazi patiently sipping his tea while staring straight ahead into space, either meditating, or calculating or just fuming.
He had a very distinctive appearance: distinguished grey hair, high cheekbones, a weathered complexion, and a sharp, broken nose. The habitual downward tilt of his head gave him the appearance of a hawk. He was only an inch taller than Naz, but she always felt much shorter than him, especially when he was angry with her. His hands were steepled in front of his face, and the fact that he was missing his pinky finger somehow gave him an even more terrifying impression than if he had been whole.
Qazi dignified her presence with a nod and a “Good morning,” then gestured to the seat opposite his. Naz forced the tremble from her body as she sat down. Qazi took great offense to the idea Naz could be afraid of him.
“I want us to speak Hazaragi for the entirety of this conversation. And I want your word of honor that what I tell you this remains a secret.”
“Y-yes, Qazi.” There was a pause. “Is this about my performance directing Wild Hunt?”
“No, you met expectations. I had no cause for disappointment.” This was as close to a ‘Good job’ as Qazi would ever give her. “If anything, this regards another person’s defects, their…degeneracy.” Qazi hissed those last words, the syllables clicking with teeth like he wanted to gnaw the person he was talking about.
For some reason, Naz wondered if Qazi’s anger had ever truly manifested in the past, because his pallor and monotonous whisper had more repressed violence behind it than any time he’d shouted at her. Perhaps his red rages were more like the stalking fever that boiled Naz’s blood whenever her feelings broke the dam of her heart—the same disease.
“Qazi, for God’s sakes, what are we talking about here?”
“Robert is selling the company.”
“No, he’s not.” Naz giggled madly. This had to be a joke—except Qazi did not joke. But this was ridiculous. She had won! The reviews, the expected ROI, the—
“Nazgul-Jan,” it was the first time Qazi addressed her as a familiar, “Listen to me. You did well. Anankosoft got an early copy of the game, and it raised their offer price.”
“Changed their number?”
“I suspect they had wooed him for quite some time. Or he had approached them. Either way, it was behind my back.”
Naz kept her thinking practical. “Qazi, I’m not the director of the project.”
“I know.”
“It’s Robert’s name on the credits. They have no reason to keep me over someone else!”
“Yes.”
“I don't even have a diploma, Qazi, this job is all I have on my CV—”
“I’m sorry. I’ll do my best to vouch for you—”
“Your best? I could lose my job, my visa! I could get deported! Qazi, don’t you care?”
“Nazgul!” Qazi’s voice boomed, yet cracked, but Naz stiffened nonetheless. “Who do you think you are? I gave you insider knowledge. I endangered my career and reputation in the process. I owe you nothing more than that.” Qazi got to his feet. “I gave you an education, opportunity. I lifted you up. I gave you legs. That does not mean I have to carry you when the time comes for you to walk!” He grabbed his coat. “Wipe your tears before you leave.”
The taxi waited for her in front of the Cafe. Qazi had already paid the fare.
Naz looked at the balloon. Congratulations On Your First Confirmed Kill.
Who would send me this? Who would know? Who would even care? She couldn't think of a single name.
She pulled the balloon onto her desk and slammed her pocket knife into the plastic, filling the room with the sharp ‘pop.’ Somehow, her tears stopped, drying on her fevered cheeks.