“You have an impressive resume. Other than the hiccup at Vita XGC.” The older woman’s voice arced as she peered over her bright red readers.
Alyssa knew it was a question. She knew what the woman was after. It was the story everyone wanted and, Alyssa suspected, the only reason she’d been granted her seventeen interviews in the first place. She sat silent. She had quit trying to profess ignorance to XGC’s perfidy at interview six and her innocence halfway through interview nine.
The woman tried a fresh tack. She offered a smile that only curled up on one edge as she leaned forward, inviting Alyssa into her confidence. “What do the letters stand for, anyway? XGC. I’ve always wondered.”
That was a question Alyssa could answer. “The X was for next gen and GC are Tag’s initials. His real name is Gabriel. Vita, vital good health, next gen Gabriel Connelly.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” The woman guffawed. “The great Tag, the great humanitarian, Architect of Predictive Medicine, Preserver of the People, named his company after himself. Called himself next gen and vital. That should have told us all something.”
Alyssa clamped her mouth shut, embarrassed she hadn’t peeled back more of the subtext on that one herself. Three years ago, when she had been flown out to Palo Alto and housed at the Four Seasons Hotel by that very Tag, she’d bought his whole story.
My mom died early of Korsakoff syndrome, a form of dementia, and that shouldn’t happen. We can know what’s in our genes, and that means what might be in our futures. But now we can and will make our futures better. I will never stop loving my mom or feeling fury at her loss, and I will give everything I have to stop this epidemic of chronic disease and illness from engulfing generations.
He had spun heartwarming stories of reading, fishing, building forts, and hiking with this gorgeous, almost mythical-sounding mother. By the end Alyssa had wanted to trade her mom for his, despite her early death.
And that’s what bothered Alyssa the most. She hadn’t done her due diligence—fleeing Chicago and joining Vita XGC had been a hasty and emotional decision.
Homes and moms were very emotional topics.
The woman finally stopped chortling and scrolled across her tablet to resume the interview. “Let’s track back through your experience. You left ‘XGC’”—she made air quotes with her free hand—“in December last year.”
“Yes.” Alyssa didn’t add that everyone left XGC that day, under federal escort.
“Describe your responsibilities there.”
“I worked on a team of eight that built the company’s predictive algorithms.”
“You managed the data?”
“No. We worked with scrubbed data. All departments worked that way because the amount of information made the data incredibly powerful. They were very protective about that.”
“Sure they were,” the woman scoffed. “So basically, you were responsible for all those people thinking they were headed to Alzheimer’s, lupus, MS, diabetes, or whatever else was going to kill them. Tomorrow. How convenient—can’t get sued for something that might happen.”
That sentence wasn’t a question, but the woman’s sneer demanded an answer.
“So it seems.” Alyssa tried to bank her bitterness, which had crept in at interview number ten. While she knew it was off-putting and unlikely to land her a job, she found that her anger—at the company, at the lies, even at herself—kept her from crying, which was how she’d answered that line of questioning during interviews one, two, and three. Because it always came up.
During interview number four, she’d tried for honesty . . .
“Everything that happened is being unraveled, and it was horrible. But I do think my team’s algorithms worked. Through three testing rounds we matched perfectly the reconstructed data sets . . . I don’t know what went wrong, and if our work unwittingly harmed someone, my hope is they can be notified. Some customers . . . I can’t imagine their questions and concerns. It was big stuff we were looking toward, but it was always years ahead. People can be notified, and the worry can stop. It was all predictive, not diagnostic—”
“Stop!” the interviewer had shot back. “Stop justifying yourself. No one had anything! You were playing God, for profit, and you have no idea what that lie could do to someone, to whole families.” He escorted her out of his office within thirty seconds, and she stood throwing up in the parking lot within sixty.
The underlying questions in each interview had boiled down to a caustic mix of How could you be so stupid? and Are you really that greedy and cruel? One interviewer actually used those words, and Alyssa couldn’t blame him. They were the million-dollar questions. Or in XGC’s case—the 1.2-billion-dollar questions. Everyone in Silicon Valley wanted the answers, as did the federal agents working the case. And those questions were the reason why Alyssa, and everyone else involved, remained the subject of multiple investigations, gossip, and speculation—and unhirable until answers were found.
The questions haunted Alyssa in her quieter moments as well. She tossed and turned most nights, stomach on fire with the ulcers that simmered during her final months at XGC and flamed higher during the last six unemployed.
Looking back, she could see last fall more clearly now. Tag had taken XGC’s frenzy to a whole new level.
Always cavalier and charismatic, he showed signs of cracking. At the time she believed him—it was because they were close. Now she knew the truth . . .
We are at the end. All our hard work is paying off, and testing shows that we did it. We have rolled out results from our first live test. That’s thirty thousand clients, and another boy won’t lose his mom to dementia because she’ll know in her teens how to stay healthy. A young girl, knowing MS is thirty years down the road, will take proper care of her health and happily hold her grandchildren someday. But we’ve got to push harder. The establishment doesn’t want to put healthcare and vitality in the hands of the everyday common person, so we’ve got to get out there before it can stop us. This is all hands on deck. We’re fighting for the future.
Even now, remembering that day, Alyssa felt the flush of energy that had filled her that afternoon. It was consuming and invigorating to be pursuing something pure and true and honest. And, from Alyssa’s perspective, it was the first true and honest thing she had known. The light after her own lie.
Then it all came crashing down.
That’s wrong, Alyssa reminded herself in the still darkness every night and now as she slammed the back door of her blue CRV. It never existed in the first place. In fact, if the rumors proved true, the only real business that had occurred at XGC came from Tag selling their data to pharmaceutical companies overseas.
Alyssa dropped into the driver’s seat. It was hot enough to instantly stick her T-shirt to her back and melt the tension in her shoulders. She closed her eyes in the warm quiet—until her thoughts crowded in again.
She tapped a button on her navigation system to head to the last place on earth she wanted to go, and the only option she had left.
2,175 miles away . . . Winsome, Illinois.
Home.
Chapter 2
“What does Andante even mean?”