The Cyclone Release

By Bruce Overby

It’s the late 90s Internet boom, and Brendon Meagher has just lost his wife Sadie in a freakish car accident at the edge of Silicon Valley. The Cyclone Release follows Brendon as he emerges from tragedy and lands in a pre-IPO start-up that promises astonishing riches. Mo Gramercy, a bright and commanding colleague with her own deep secret, joins Brendon, disrupts his malaise, and takes him as her lover. The characters’ careen toward IPO millions, their secrets suddenly converging, and both are shaken without mercy from bucolic notions of work, life, and impending fortune.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Madville Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781956440096

Bruce Overby

Born in California’s Santa Clara Valley long before it became the Silicon Valley of today, BRUCE OVERBY both participated in and keenly observed the transformation and evolution of an insular place that many still fail to understand. His fiction has appeared in several literary journals, and his story “Bookmarks” won First Prize in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. He holds an MFA in Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and continues to live in Northern California with his wife Caroline. The Cyclone Release, a finalist in the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Competition, is his first novel.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Brendon Meagher sat alone in his spartan cubicle searching through the system. Finally, he found the list of hyperlinks that would show him what all the hype was about, and he clicked the last one. A window opened, displaying a splash page that hundreds of people had seen by then—the engineers who had built it, the capitalists who had funded it, the customers who had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy it, and now Brendon.

This first look at it stopped him. Few outside the tech business would understand the beauty of a splash page like this, with just a few action buttons there, arranged in the shape of a wave:

Create. Submit. Review. Approve. Announce.

It was a dry business process transformed into something comfortable, each button glowing gently as you slid your mouse over.

What was he doing here? he thought. He was a technical writer, an interpreter of complex systems, but this thing looked to be as simple as an ATM. What could they possibly need a technical writer for?

The temperature in the cubicle was cold, then warm, then cold again. Brendon’s skin under his poly/cotton polo shirt had felt sticky all afternoon and had remained so in these early hours of the evening. Sweat would paint his forehead, then dissipate in the refrigerated air. While his fingers on the keyboard and right hand on the mouse were firm and calculated, he somehow felt the need to escape. It was the same feeling that had dominated that first six months after Sadie’s death: struggling first to escape the tragedy of it, escaping immediately from the stress of his job, then descending into a long malaise from which, again, he had needed to escape. These sensations of hot and cold, the sweat that dappled his forehead, they had persisted through all of it.

His backpack sat against the cubicle wall. It was his first day on the job at Janela Software, an all-star of the Internet boom, and that morning he had paused, rendered helpless, suddenly, over the backpack: What to put in it? A notebook and a pen to write with? Yeah. A couple of reference books? Sure. A picture of Sadie? No.

He heard laughter a few cubicles down, then voices, then the tapping of keys on keyboards. Young engineers, ten or twelve years younger than Brendon, who had built the system now glowing in front of him.

The system was called SmartEOL. Large manufacturing companies used it to discontinue complex products: to bring them to an orderly end-of-life, and remove them from the price list. It sounded simple, but it turned out to be incredibly complicated, as the young engineers had discovered when they started automating it. General Electric, for instance, couldn’t just pop up one day and say, We’re not selling this critical care ventilator anymore. They couldn’t do that because there would be thousands of those ventilators out there, in thousands of hospitals, and tens of thousands of neonatal, infant, and pediatric care nurses who had been trained to use them. These hospitals would have bought maintenance contracts and spare parts, and may have put in orders for more. To ensure babies didn’t die, GE had to give hospitals fair warning before they stopped selling and servicing a ventilator. They had to be told, well in advance, This is your last chance to buy this model…, This is your last chance to get support…, This is your last chance to get spare parts…, etc. And SmartEOL was built to automate all of that.

It was this underlying humanity that drew Brendon to his work. Complex systems like SmartEOL were designed and built for important, sometimes critical, purposes, but they weren’t any good if people couldn’t use them. This was the technical writer’s job.

As he often did at the start of a project, Brendon began to imagine the real people who would use SmartEOL. He imagined a product manager at Hewlett-Packard, a man he named Jake, in his fifties, perhaps, who had started his career when there were paper forms on everyone’s desks instead of computers, a man who would look at SmartEOL with disdain, another stupid computer thing forced on him by some unfeeling chief something officer. He imagined a financial analyst, Jane, a single mother with a sick kid at home and a butt-head for an ex, a cog in the wheel of a farm equipment manufacturer in Omaha who would use SmartEOL to generate reports, more spreadsheets to add to the dozens of spreadsheets she would examine and manipulate and condense each week. And he imagined an IT tech at a little parts manufacturer in Austin, a Mexican immigrant he named Rodrigo, who had bussed tables to work himself through a community college program and land his sweet job in an air-conditioned cubicle where he backed up databases, monitored the network, and set up the new SmartEOL user accounts for product managers like Jake.

Jake, Jane, and Rodrigo were his audience. What would they need to know?

Turning back to the screen, he looked again at the interface, and the wave:

Create. Submit. Review. Approve. Announce.

So simple and clean.

And then he saw the Help button in the upper right of the screen. This would be his world. He clicked, and a pop-up screen appeared. Start Page, it said at the top, and his mind immediately started working through the details engineers would never think about. Is start page the right term? Would it paint him into a corner later? Should it be screen instead of page? A page is a web site. It just shows information. A screen is an application. It lets you enter data, interact, modify, manipulate.

And the rest of the text in the pop-up, careless verbiage slammed out by an engineer at two in the morning, made it clear why Janela needed a tech writer, after all. When you want to EoL a product, it said, start on this screen. So, in the title, it was a page, but in the body, it was a screen. And the acronym EoL was used as a verb. When you want to end of life… That term, end of life, struck Brendon suddenly, bringing on a feeling of emptiness that was familiar to him by now. He sat with it for a moment—no sense pushing on it, he had learned—then re-engaged with the screen.

To the engineers, using EoL as a verb was natural, like who cares, but to Brendon, it had the feeling of a very bad habit, a threat to the language. He immediately started thinking of what phrase he would use instead. He was formulating a style guide and a word list in his mind. Engineers wouldn’t even know what these things were, but that was the job of the technical writer. And just these few words in front of Brendon made it clear there was plenty for him to do.

It was a relief to feel satisfied at the prospect of useful work. There’d been none of it during those lost months after Sadie’s death, just cleaning up after a life, doing something with the clothes, the jewelry, the toiletries, a forest green and gold sun dress she’d worn in the wine country, along with the magical day it conjured, relegated to the donation bin.

But now he could dismiss all that and dive in. He reached down and flipped a lever on the chair, locking it into a comfortable position, and continued exploring, making notes, planning next steps. Hours passed, during which he barely noticed the farewells and footsteps of those leaving for the night. Seeing the digital clock on his screen roll to 11:00 p.m., he realized he was exhausted, shut down his system, and made his way to the exit, seeing with some relief that many of the cubicles were dark and empty.

Before he met Brendon, Gerhard Sinkel had spent weeks searching for a technical writer for the Janela Development team. Todd Lear, the user experience and utilities manager, had laid down the law at the start of the six-month release cycle: no way the engineers were creating manuals or online help. Engineers would spend hours at it, and the finished product would suck.

Gerhard had called some people and gotten some résumés, talked to some total losers, and was starting to lose hope. The acolytes at Janela referred to these losers as lepers: people who would sit in their enclosed offices and surf the web more than they actually worked, people who wouldn’t last a nanosecond in the tiny cubicles of a pressure cooker like Janela. Gerhard was never quite sure why they’d landed on the term leper, but he’d adopted it anyway, saying to Lear at one point, Do technical writers come from the leper colony?

On June 1st, the day he interviewed Brendon, the parade of lepers Gerhard had met up to that point weighed heavy on his mind. His weekly Technical Team meeting had just broken up, and Gerhard sat scanning the cherry wood conference table that stretched out before him. He often sat like this for a few moments after a meeting, ostensibly reviewing his notes and filling in gaps from fresh memory, but really just stealing a few quiet moments to himself in one of the few large spaces at Janela where one could breathe. The rest of the space was chopped into eight-by-eight cubicles and narrow aisles, ceiling panels of fluorescent light washing away the shadows and lifting the covers off everything.

Gerhard had made the right decision, joining Janela just a few months before this. He’d come from Germany for schooling, spent seven years establishing a career as a project manager, and finally, in Janela, he’d found a company that desperately needed him. In the thick of the latest release of its flagship product, SmartEOL—a release codenamed Cyclone—Janela’s weekly Technical Team meetings had been devolving into deep-dive discussions that led nowhere. The date the managers had set for Cyclone general availability, the GA date, the date they would release the software to the world, was November 24th, less than six months away. It was a very tight timeline—much too tight to be dragging the entire Technical Team through endless debates about access modifiers, string concatenation, and heavy methods. Gerhard didn’t know what any of that meant, which was exactly the point. Once he was in place, this constant rehashing came to a halt, the gum was out of the works, and things ran more smoothly.

It did not surprise Gerhard that he had immediately made an impact. He commanded authority over the young engineers, and he could influence the managers as well. What did surprise him, though, was how right Janela had turned out to be for him. The caliber of the engineers and the pace of development exceeded anything he’d seen before. No more long hours alone in his townhouse or at the end of a local bar, hours he would typically spend thinking about work but not doing any. In this new life, there was always work to do, and twenty-four hours a day, there were always people doing it. Even the leadership of the company, the CEO, the CFO, the Chief Strategist, and Gerhard’s own boss, Charlie Knapp, were in their offices past midnight. Engineering managers and technical leads took up every problem joyously, like a child receiving a new toy.

Gerhard tapped the end of his pen on the pad where the annoying action item still sat at the top of the agenda: Doc resources needed ASAP / Hire technical writer (Sinkel). He glanced at his watch. The interview with Brendon Meagher was in twenty minutes.

He returned to his cube, and by the time he’d typed up the meeting minutes, it was time to meet Brendon in the lobby. The man’s résumé was promising, but there was one red flag: a five-month gap in employment, the last position ending in January. Gerhard was concerned by this, but intrigued as well. Brendon had been at his last position at Mammon, Inc., for six years—a Silicon Valley eternity. On his résumé, he could have easily marked the date as 1992–1998 instead of Sept. 1992–Jan. 1998, and there would have been no questions asked. Gerhard was quite convinced that this is what he would have done.

He spied the man across the lobby. Brendon was tallish and of an age that correlated nicely to the experience on his résumé. His dress shirt with no tie, khakis, and comfortable leather shoes were ideal for a Product Development interviewee in a startup: no suit or coat and tie needed here, but an interview isn’t the time for the baggy shorts or jeans the engineers might be wearing.

Gerhard Sinkel, he said, extending a hand.

They shook hands. Brendon Meagher.

"Ma-har, you say? I certainly would have said Meeger. It’s a good job you pronounced it for me. Right this way."

Gerhard led Brendon to the conference room. He laid the résumé and notepad down, smiled and motioned Brendon to the chair opposite him.

Let’s start right in, he said. My first concern is this gap in your job history. Have you had an extended vacation this year?

I guess I have in a way. I had some pretty serious personal stuff going on and I just didn’t feel like I could continue at Mammon. There was no problem on the job, though. Karen Winter, my manager there, is one of my references.

I see. I’m sorry to hear that. I hope everything is resolved now?

Yes. I’m ready to go.

Brendon’s brown eyes were calmly trained on him now, and Gerhard noticed that he and the candidate had taken the exact same posture, settled into their chairs, elbows on the armrests and shoulders forward, hands folded in their laps. Good then, he said. He flipped the résumé over briefly and glanced at the other side. So, tell me, were you ever the only tech writer in a company?

No, but I do have a lot of writing experience, and in my last job, I was pressed into service as a writer under quite a lot of pressure—something, I imagine, like you might have here. I was managing the team, but the thing about it was, I was left on my own, and I don’t mean in a good way.

You didn’t like being autonomous?

Eventually I did, but when I first got there, I had five people in my group, and two of the people were really underperforming, so that was an issue. And it takes time to address performance problems. It took me six months to move the two underperformers out.

Lepers, Gerhard muttered.

Excuse me?

Nothing. So at what point were you pressed into service as a writer?

What happened was, it took us so long to get replacements for these two underperformers that I had to jump in and take on some projects. I took on three pretty big manuals for one release, didn’t get started until late in the cycle, and had to learn the technology, bone up on the new features, and get it all documented in like three months. I had waited quite a while before I jumped in—I was focusing on reviewing résumés and interviewing, along with all the other management stuff—but once I did, we cranked them out, and I was pretty pleased with the results. They’re on the CD of samples I left with my résumé. I don’t know if you had a chance to look at them.

Yes, I did. They are very comprehensive documents. The technology, of course, is quite different from what we are doing here.

Oh yeah, yours is a user-level system. The products at Mammon were for programmers. I expect you’ll need smaller chunks of information, feature descriptions and step-by-step stuff, not many new concepts to convey, lots of online help as opposed to big manuals.

Hearing this answer, Gerhard felt a lightness. Brendon had just described Janela’s needs perfectly. In previous interviews, he’d felt the acid rise in his stomach, he’d listened to questions answered with questions, and he’d ended the interviews feeling trapped. But here he had a relaxed candidate who simply told his story in direct and straightforward responses, and better than that, a candidate who had done his homework.

He touched the page in front of him. Yes, this is true, he said. Would you say, then, that this writing work was a welcome distraction from this unpleasantness you had with these two underperforming employees?

Brendon shifted in his seat, straightening his posture. Yeah, I guess it was in a way. I have to be honest with you, conflict resolution wasn’t my strong suit as a manager.

Perhaps this would be good, then, Gerhard said, to be a solo technical writer for a while, without employees to manage.

I think so, Brendon said. That’s why I’m here.

As the interview went on, Brendon asked questions that Gerhard didn’t expect, questions about how the Janela applications were distributed, about the technology foundation, about the roadmap for enhancing the application and expanding the product offerings. Gerhard answered readily, with the occasional quip, and did not once take up his pen. He even allowed himself to imagine impromptu late-night pow-wows with Brendon in a cubicle or in the aisles, or perhaps in a local pub, conversations between two people who were essential to the Development team without being engineers.

So, who would I be reporting to? Brendon finally asked him.

Gerhard placed a hand on the pad in front of him, needlessly adjusting its position. To be very frank, I’m not sure, he said. Brendon scratched an elbow and reached up to squeeze the back of his neck. There’s some chance the management of this role will fall to me at first, but I don’t expect that would last. Things are changing rapidly all the time. Gerhard saw that Brendon was looking on intently now, and may have even been rocking slightly, almost imperceptibly, in his chair. I think the key, Brendon, is that we need someone with both the experience and energy to take full ownership of the role with minimal guidance.

Brendon’s eyes passed over the table between them, then he arched his back and rolled his neck and shoulders. Well, he said, I’m your man.

I’m pleased to hear that, Brendon. This is a company of young, exceedingly intelligent individuals. They are building a solution that will absolutely and without question dominate the marketplace. And because our focus is clear, and because we all share this focus, there is little time for other things. He paused and smiled. We work very long hours and we make heavy personal sacrifices. But I can tell you this creates a sense of camaraderie that you will find very rewarding. And… He fixed Brendon with his best penetrating glare. … the potential financial rewards are astronomical. And finally, Brendon, I can tell you that I personally feel very strongly, just from this discussion we have had today, that you are up to this challenge.

Gerhard, my wife was killed. Gerhard stopped cold. He looked into the candidate’s brown eyes. The countenance, the posture, were unchanged. Brendon sat calmly and seriously, every bit the well-prepared job-seeker. That’s the reason for the… gap… in my job history.

I see.

It was a car accident, so totally unexpected.

I see.

But I meant what I said before. I’ve taken the time, and I’m ready to go. I just thought it was important for you to know. You can do whatever you want with the information, but I am ready to go.

Well, I appreciate your candor, Brendon.

And I didn’t mention this before because I didn’t want it to color the rest of the interview. Because I agree with you, Gerhard. I am up to this challenge.

Brendon had not frozen up. He had not choked. He had moved through it, smoothly and without apprehension. He used to say this to Sadie in anxious times, when she was unnerved about a conflict at work or a test coming up. "Just take a deep breath and move through it, honey."

Sadie’s death had been tragic, a no-fault car accident involving just one other vehicle, and all the sedentary months that followed it had done something to Brendon, left his emotions quiet and settled, exhausted. And so, in the interview, his mind had been sharp and undaunted. He had answered questions openly and without fear, and he had asked questions out of curiosity, not ambition.

He went out the glass doors, passing the company sign out front, a huge luminous red glass Janela logo, visible from a mile away, mounted on a rough-hewn concrete block. Once in the car, his mind holding fast to the words you are up to this challenge, he opted to silence the radio and listen to the muted sounds of engines and traffic.

Janela’s IPO potential was astronomical. Gerhard had talked through the stock options Brendon would be offered at a price of $3.50 per share. A post-IPO selling price of ten times that was still a very conservative estimate. The company had ten customers in the Fortune 100 and more than forty in the Fortune 500. And profitability, something even the marquis Internet companies weren’t ready to talk about, often years after their IPOs, was a very real possibility. A company that turns profitable, that proves Internet-driven businesses can generate revenue in ways the world has never seen, was destined to explode.

Senior management had thought it all through carefully, and the sales teams were exceeding every goal set for them. Once the turn was made to profitability, that conservative estimate of $35 shares would catapult to $100 in an instant, and for good reason. I’m German and I was raised Lutheran, Gerhard had said, which means I don’t like to take chances. And with this company, I can assure you, I am not taking any chances.

At a stoplight, he turned to the car next to him, a shabby but functional white Toyota, and the driver, a middle-aged rent-a-cop with bags under his eyes and the Brinks patch on his jacket shoulder. The sight of the man, probably heading in for the swing shift in an office building lobby, filled Brendon with doubt. The downside of showing up well