Story code: ST-000106
Part 1: The Dual Screens of Deception
Sarah’s left monitor glowed with the fluorescent harshness of a middle school gymnasium, while her right monitor displayed the spinning grey loading wheel of the company equity portal. On the left screen, Julian leaned into a podium microphone, his signature black turtleneck contrasting sharply with the tired, beige-suited school board members lined up behind folding tables. The livestream had a two-second delay, making Julian’s sweeping hand gestures freeze slightly before his booming voice caught up. He was pitching the exact EdTech platform Sarah had been coding until two in the morning for the last eleven months.
“We are not just a vendor, we are your partners in revolutionizing the classroom,” Julian told the board. His voice echoed through the tinny speakers of Sarah’s laptop in the completely empty open-plan office. She massaged her temples, feeling the dried glue of a spilled energy drink sticking to her wrist.
On the right monitor, the spinning wheel finally gave way to a dashboard of sterile white and corporate blue. Sarah clicked the tab labeled ‘Grant Schedule and Capitalization.’
Julian was in top form tonight. He paced the length of the gymnasium floor, projecting the effortless charisma that had convinced Sarah to leave a stable senior developer role last year. He had sat across from her at a trendy coffee shop, sliding a napkin across the table with a wildly optimistic revenue graph drawn in green marker. He had called them a startup family. He had promised her that building this software would be the defining, wealth-generating event of their lives.
Sarah navigated to the ‘Fully Diluted Shares’ column. The database took a moment to fetch the records.
“Our proprietary adaptive learning algorithm will seamlessly integrate with your district’s legacy grading software by Q3,” Julian announced to the board members.
Sarah stopped moving her mouse. The adaptive learning algorithm did not exist. The legacy integration module was currently a massive block of commented-out code that crashed the servers every time she tried to run a test environment. She rubbed her eyes, staring at Julian’s confident smile on the frozen frame of the stream. He was selling them vaporware. He was making promises that would require her to sleep under her desk for the next six months just to build a functional prototype.
She focused back on the equity portal. The numbers populated in a neat, descending row. She located her name. Sarah Jenkins, Lead Engineer. Beside her name sat the four hundred thousand shares Julian had granted her on day one. Four hundred thousand had sounded like a massive number over that coffee. It had sounded like enough to buy a house in the Bay Area, to retire her mother, to justify every missed weekend and cancelled dinner with her friends.
She clicked the ‘View Cap Table Details’ button. The total outstanding shares column appeared.
Julian’s voice drifted over from the left monitor again. “We value our educators the same way I value my internal team. We empower the builders. We give them ownership of the future.”
Sarah looked at the total outstanding shares. The number was not ten million, which was the standard pool Julian had heavily implied during their negotiations. The number was four hundred million.
She blinked hard, leaning closer to the harsh light of the screen. Her eyes darted from her grant to the total pool, doing the brutal, elementary math in her head. Her four hundred thousand shares did not equal four percent of the company. It equaled one-tenth of one percent. The strike price listed next to her grant was ninety cents.
She pulled up the most recent Series A valuation document housed in the same portal. The preferred shares issued to the venture capital firm last month were priced at ninety-five cents.
Her equity was practically worthless. She held a fraction of a fraction of the company, and the spread between her strike price and the current value would barely cover a used sedan, let alone a house. The startup family rhetoric dissolved into the cold glow of the pixelated spreadsheet. All those eighty-hour weeks, the missed holidays, the chest pains from too much caffeine and stress, had been for a mathematically insignificant slice of a pie Julian had secretly expanded without telling her.
On the livestream, a severe-looking school board member leaned into her microphone. She stated that the district required a guaranteed deployment date before authorizing the three-million-dollar contract.
Julian did not miss a beat. “My lead engineer is standing by right now, finalizing the deployment protocols as we speak. We are ready to roll out district-wide by Monday morning.”
Monday morning. It was currently Thursday night. The system architecture required a minimum of three weeks just to provision the necessary cloud servers for a deployment of that magnitude. Julian was looking directly into the camera now, his eyes locking onto the lens with absolute, terrifying sincerity.
Sarah stared at the impossible deadline echoing from the left monitor, and the mathematically worthless stock options glaring from the right. Her phone buzzed on the desk, lighting up with a text from Julian.
The message read to get the deployment servers spun up tonight.
Sarah placed her hand flat over her phone screen, blocking out the text, and slowly reached for the master power switch on the main server rack behind her desk.
Sarah’s left monitor glowed with the fluorescent harshness of a middle school gymnasium, while her right monitor displayed the spinning grey loading wheel of the company equity portal. On the left screen, Julian leaned into a podium microphone, his signature black turtleneck contrasting sharply with the tired, beige-suited school board members lined up behind folding tables. The livestream had a two-second delay, making Julian’s sweeping hand gestures freeze slightly before his booming voice caught up. He was pitching the exact EdTech platform Sarah had been coding until two in the morning for the last eleven months.
“We are not just a vendor, we are your partners in revolutionizing the classroom,” Julian told the board. His voice echoed through the tinny speakers of Sarah’s laptop in the completely empty open-plan office. She massaged her temples, feeling the dried glue of a spilled energy drink sticking to her wrist.
On the right monitor, the spinning wheel finally gave way to a dashboard of sterile white and corporate blue. Sarah clicked the tab labeled ‘Grant Schedule and Capitalization.’
Julian was in top form tonight. He paced the length of the gymnasium floor, projecting the effortless charisma that had convinced Sarah to leave a stable senior developer role last year. He had sat across from her at a trendy coffee shop, sliding a napkin across the table with a wildly optimistic revenue graph drawn in green marker. He had called them a startup family. He had promised her that building this software would be the defining, wealth-generating event of their lives.
Sarah navigated to the ‘Fully Diluted Shares’ column. The database took a moment to fetch the records.
“Our proprietary adaptive learning algorithm will seamlessly integrate with your district’s legacy grading software by Q3,” Julian announced to the board members.
Sarah stopped moving her mouse. The adaptive learning algorithm did not exist. The legacy integration module was currently a massive block of commented-out code that crashed the servers every time she tried to run a test environment. She rubbed her eyes, staring at Julian’s confident smile on the frozen frame of the stream. He was selling them vaporware. He was making promises that would require her to sleep under her desk for the next six months just to build a functional prototype.
She focused back on the equity portal. The numbers populated in a neat, descending row. She located her name. Sarah Jenkins, Lead Engineer. Beside her name sat the four hundred thousand shares Julian had granted her on day one. Four hundred thousand had sounded like a massive number over that coffee. It had sounded like enough to buy a house in the Bay Area, to retire her mother, to justify every missed weekend and cancelled dinner with her friends.
She clicked the ‘View Cap Table Details’ button. The total outstanding shares column appeared.
Julian’s voice drifted over from the left monitor again. “We value our educators the same way I value my internal team. We empower the builders. We give them ownership of the future.”
Sarah looked at the total outstanding shares. The number was not ten million, which was the standard pool Julian had heavily implied during their negotiations. The number was four hundred million.
She blinked hard, leaning closer to the harsh light of the screen. Her eyes darted from her grant to the total pool, doing the brutal, elementary math in her head. Her four hundred thousand shares did not equal four percent of the company. It equaled one-tenth of one percent. The strike price listed next to her grant was ninety cents.
She pulled up the most recent Series A valuation document housed in the same portal. The preferred shares issued to the venture capital firm last month were priced at ninety-five cents.
Her equity was practically worthless. She held a fraction of a fraction of the company, and the spread between her strike price and the current value would barely cover a used sedan, let alone a house. The startup family rhetoric dissolved into the cold glow of the pixelated spreadsheet. All those eighty-hour weeks, the missed holidays, the chest pains from too much caffeine and stress, had been for a mathematically insignificant slice of a pie Julian had secretly expanded without telling her.
On the livestream, a severe-looking school board member leaned into her microphone. She stated that the district required a guaranteed deployment date before authorizing the three-million-dollar contract.
Julian did not miss a beat. “My lead engineer is standing by right now, finalizing the deployment protocols as we speak. We are ready to roll out district-wide by Monday morning.”
Monday morning. It was currently Thursday night. The system architecture required a minimum of three weeks just to provision the necessary cloud servers for a deployment of that magnitude. Julian was looking directly into the camera now, his eyes locking onto the lens with absolute, terrifying sincerity.
Sarah stared at the impossible deadline echoing from the left monitor, and the mathematically worthless stock options glaring from the right. Her phone buzzed on the desk, lighting up with a text from Julian.
The message read to get the deployment servers spun up tonight.
Sarah placed her hand flat over her phone screen, blocking out the text, and slowly reached for the master power switch on the main server rack behind her desk.