Chapter 19
Grief
Josh forwarded the email at twelve minutes past seven on Wednesday morning, with one line of his own above it: I haven’t replied. I don’t know what to say. Can you?
Sam’s email was short and very polite.
Dear Josh,
I’d like to resign, effective immediately if possible. I’m really sorry for the trouble this will cause the team. I know it was my change, and I don’t think it’s fair for anyone else to be blamed for it. I’ve heard my name was raised at the board and I don’t want to make things harder for you or for Meridian. Thank you for everything. I’m sorry.
Sam
Maya read it standing in her kitchen in Kentish Town with her coat half on. She tried his phone and it rang out. She tried again. She rang Marcus.
“He’s heard about the board,” she said.
“Of course he has. Somebody in Felix’s office will have told somebody, and by Tuesday evening the whole floor would know that a director wanted him gone.” Marcus sounded as though he were already walking. “Has he answered his phone?”
“No.”
“Then I know where he is,” Marcus said. “Meet me at King’s Cross. The towpath end.”
He was at the lock. He was sitting on the cold stone edge of it with his thin parka zipped to his chin, looking at the water. The heron wasn’t there. He looked round when he heard footsteps, saw them both, and looked away again quickly, as if he’d been caught doing something embarrassing.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not— I’m fine. I just wanted to walk.”
Marcus lowered himself onto the stone beside him with a small grunt, the way old men do, and said nothing. Maya stood a little way off, then sat on the lock beam on Sam’s other side.
For a while nobody spoke. A narrowboat went past slowly, with a man at the tiller in a woolly hat who nodded to them.
“I’m really sorry I didn’t answer,” Sam said eventually. “I just didn’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Marcus said.
“I sent Josh an email.”
“We read it.”
“I meant it.” Sam’s voice was tight. “I know you’re both trying to say it’s the system or whatever. And I get that, I do, I’ve been thinking about it. All the stuff with the Skill, and the cheaper model, and Ruth. I know it’s not only me. But it was me. It was my name on the PR. It was me that pressed merge.” He stopped and breathed. “Someone at the board wants me sacked, and I keep thinking, well, yeah. Fair enough. If it were the other way round, I’d want me sacked.”
“Sam—” Maya started.
“A man nearly died,” he said. It came out of him suddenly, louder than she’d ever heard him speak, and the man on the narrowboat looked back. “Do you know what I keep thinking about? Not the code. Him. Mr Hale. I looked him up. I shouldn’t have, I know, but I did. There was a thing in the local paper from years ago, when he retired from the buses, about how he’d driven the same route for thirty-one years and all the regulars clubbed together for a cake. There’s a photo of him with the cake. And he nearly died, in a hospital, because of code I shipped.” His voice cracked. “And the worst bit is it felt like nothing. That Monday. It felt like a normal afternoon. I didn’t feel like I was making a decision that mattered that much. I read it, it looked fine, I pressed the button, I went and got a sandwich. And it did matter. It mattered more than anything I’ve ever done in my life. And I didn’t even feel it.”
He put his face in his hands.
The narrowboat chugged on under the bridge and was gone.
Maya waited until his breathing had slowed. Then she spoke, carefully, because she’d been thinking about what she would say since about ten past seven and she only wanted to say it once.
“Sam, you’re right that it felt ordinary,” she said. “And you’re right that it wasn’t. But I want you to think about why it felt ordinary. It wasn’t because you didn’t care. You obviously care more than nearly anyone I’ve met in this whole investigation. It felt ordinary because Meridian had arranged things so that it would. You’d done that kind of change dozens of times, and they’d all been fine. A senior engineer approved it in four minutes, which told you it was routine. The tests went green, which told you it was safe. The Skill had been used hundreds of times, which told you it was trusted. Everything around you was telling you this was a normal Monday afternoon. Nothing anywhere in the system was built to make you feel the weight of it. The one person who’d have made you feel it was Ruth. And they’d moved her.”
Sam didn’t look up, but he was listening.
“That’s the finding, Sam,” she said. “It isn’t that you didn’t feel it. It’s that nothing at Meridian was built to make anyone feel it. Not you, not Callum, not Josh, not Felix. Most days that doesn’t matter. On the day it does, nobody notices, because it still feels exactly like every other day.”
Sam lifted his head slowly. His eyes were red.
“But I should have felt it anyway.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I should have—” He stopped. “I don’t know.”
“No,” said Marcus. “Neither do I.”
Marcus had been looking at the water for a while. Now he turned to Sam.
“I said I’d give you a better answer in a week,” he said. “It’s been eight days. Do you still want it?”
Sam swallowed. “Yes.”
“You were standing at the place where it broke. That’s still true. Your change was where the failure came out. But it was set up years before you arrived and in places you couldn’t see. Somebody wrote safety-critical code with no documentation in 2017. In 2019 someone decided the lab didn’t need to phone any more. Somebody edited the Skill eight times without testing it. Somebody moved it to a model that couldn’t see the file. Ruth’s warning was turned into a green dot, and Ruth was moved off the service for raising it. You were handed all of that on your second day, along with your laptop, and nobody told you any of it was there.” He paused. “If you resign, every one of those things will still be there, and the next person will sit down at your desk and inherit the lot. If you stay, you’re one of only two people in that building who know, in their bones, what that module can do to a patient. The other is Ruth. That’s worth more than you think.”
Sam was staring at him.
“I’m not saying you have no part in it,” Marcus said. “You do. You’ll carry it. You should carry it, a bit. People who don’t carry anything shouldn’t work on things that can kill people. But that’s different from it being your fault. It’s like the difference between a scar and a wound. You’re allowed to have one without the other.”
Sam looked down at the water.
“Can I say something?” he said. “That’s not about the incident.”
“Of course.”
“I think—” he hesitated. “I think part of why I want to quit isn’t Mr Hale. It’s what I said before. On the walk. About the chairs.” He laughed a little, wetly, and wiped his nose. “I think I’ve been looking for a reason to leave for ages, because I’m sad about the job and it feels stupid to be sad about it. Everyone else seems fine. And now there’s a real reason, and part of me is almost relieved. Isn’t that awful?”
“No,” said Marcus. “It’s honest.”
He shifted on the cold stone and was quiet for a moment.
“Sam, I want to be clear about something, because I don’t think anyone has been. What you described to us last week isn’t a problem with you. You came here expecting to learn a craft, and found it had moved while you were at university. You’re grieving something real. It’s not a symptom of being junior, or of imposter syndrome, or of not having adapted yet. It’s a real loss, and you’re allowed to grieve it. You don’t have to get over it to be good at this job.” He paused. “I’ll tell you something else. You’re not the only one. Josh feels it. He told Maya yesterday. Tariq feels it. Half the senior engineers on that floor feel it and have spent two years pretending they don’t, because nobody gave them permission. You said it out loud first, that’s all. You hadn’t been there long enough to learn not to.”
Sam turned and looked at Maya.
“Josh?”
“Josh,” she said. “Almost word for word.”
Sam took that in slowly.
“I always thought he was fine,” he said. “He always seems so—” He gestured vaguely. “On it.”
“So do you, from the outside,” said Maya.
They sat for a while. A pair of joggers went past on the towpath, and then a woman with a pram.
“The emulator,” Marcus said at last. “The Game Boy thing. Is it nearly running Tetris?”
Sam looked at him, surprised into half a laugh. “Yeah. Nearly. The audio’s broken.”
“Why do you do it?”
“I told you. I like knowing every bit.”
“Yes. But that isn’t all of it, is it?” Marcus watched him. “When you get the audio working, what will you feel?”
Sam thought about it.
“Like I solved it,” he said. “Like I worked out what was actually going on underneath, and made a decision about how to fix it, and it was the right decision. And it’ll be mine.” He frowned. “It’s not even really the typing. I mean, I like the typing. But it’s more the working out. Deciding what’s wrong. Deciding what to do about it. Knowing why.”
“Write that down somewhere,” Marcus said. “Not now. Tonight. Because I think it’s going to matter, and you’ll forget how you said it.”
“Why?”
“Because I suspect the part of the job you’re grieving is the typing, and the part you loved was the deciding,” Marcus said. “Those used to come together, so you couldn’t tell them apart. Now they’ve come apart, and the typing has gone to the machine, and it feels as if everything’s gone. But I’m not sure the deciding has gone anywhere. I think it’s just that nobody at Meridian has asked you to do any.” He got up off the stone, slowly, one hand on the lock beam. “That’s a different problem, and a much more fixable one.”
Sam sat looking up at him.
“Don’t resign today,” Marcus said. “That’s all I’m asking. Not today. Give it a week.”
“You keep saying a week.”
“I keep being right about weeks,” said Marcus.
Sam hesitated. Then he took his phone out of his pocket. Maya watched him open his email and find the message to Josh, and type, slowly, with his cold thumbs:
Josh, sorry, can you ignore that for now? Can I talk to you tomorrow? Sam.
He pressed send. Then he sat with the phone in his lap.
“Is he okay?” he asked suddenly. “Mr Hale. Do you know?”
“He came off the ventilator on Saturday,” Maya said. “He’s on a ward. He’s sitting up. Kalu says he asked for a bacon sandwich and the nurses said no.”
Sam let out a breath that was almost a laugh, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and didn’t say anything for a while.
Walking back along the towpath towards the station, Marcus said, “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Have you written it?”
“Most of it.” Maya had been up until two. The page from Shun had become eleven pages, and then four, and then, at about half past one, a single sheet with four numbered lines and two paragraphs she was less sure about. “I know what I’m going to ask for.”
“And Ruth?”
“Ruth’s coming. She said yes last night.” Maya paused. “I asked her to present the hazard herself. In her own words. Not in my report. I want the board to hear it from the person who wrote it down.”
Marcus nodded slowly.
“Good,” he said. “That’s the bit I failed to do thirty years ago.” He walked a little further. “Don’t let them make her sit by the wall.”