SHIFTR

Patricia Bray

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I shut down the condofinder app just as my tablet chimed, reminding me that the development meeting was in ten minutes.

Apartments started at $1.5M, but if you wanted something in the upper floors, with a private balcony, you needed at least $3M. And I know it’s a stereotype, but we caprids like to be up high. There’s something viscerally satisfying about being up looking down, even when we’re in our human form. If I was going to buy a place, it was going to be as close to the penthouse as I could afford. I’d spent too long sharing a cramped basement apartment in Brooklyn while we got the company off the ground. With less than two months to go before the company went public, I was looking forward to the day when I could cash in and reap my well-earned rewards.

As I went by Bob Sinclair’s office, I poked my head in. The rest of us had cubicles, but he had actual walls, the one concession to a tech startup’s supposed egality was the lack of a door.

“Bob, we need a decision on the security verification interface. Do we keep using Formbook’s external authentication? Or do we bring it in-house and do our own?”

Bob looked up from his smartphone. Odds were good he’d either been sexting or doing his own bit of online window shopping. As CEO, he was my boss, but until recently we’d rarely seen him in the office and had no idea what he did day to day. Bob liked to call himself “the idea man” and it’s true that Shiftr was originally his idea. Smart enough to recognize that he didn’t have a clue how to write an app, he’d brought me on board to develop it, then begged and borrowed enough money to get us started. While I coded, he’d been making the rounds of the party scene, convincing people to give the app a try. These days he was consumed with the lawyers and money guys, which meant the rest of us could focus on keeping the internet’s hottest app up and running.

“I’ve told you before, Tess, it’s Robert,” he said. Roe-bear, as if he’d ever been any closer to France than the bar at La Maison.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Both the company and Bob had been going through a PR makeover as we got ready to launch ourselves on Wall Street. Bob now wore tailored suits and his office featured faked vacation pics from Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. While he never outright claimed to be an ursid, he didn’t deny it either.

As a woman working in tech, I got it. Speciesism and sexism were both illegal, but also pervasive. CEOs were overwhelmingly from one of the privileged classes—canids, felids, ursids, or raptors. If the investors felt more comfortable dealing with Robert the purported ursid, then that was their problem.

“Security?” I prompted him. “I know it’s going to push back some of our other projects, but it’s the right thing to do. Using Formbook puts us at risk if their developers screw up. I’d rather invest the money to get this done right than have to do an emergency fix down the road.”

Bob shook his head. “You’re overstating the risk. I had Jamal take a look and he agrees with me. What we’ve got now works, and it’s more important to get Humr up and running so we can prove to the investors we’re not a one-app company.”

Bob was a marketing guy, not a coder. In the beginning he’d trusted my decisions, but as Shiftr grew from a niche app to a media darling, his self-confidence had risen and he’d insisted on signing off on all major development decisions. And Jamal, his eyes firmly set on my job as chief technology officer, was quick to pander to Bob’s every whim.

The job had stopped being fun a long time ago. These days it was less and less about the coding and more about office politics. I was counting the days until the stock launch, when my stake in the company would translate into a huge cash pile. If I walked away before then, I’d get only a pittance.

At this point I barely tolerated Bob, and the feeling was mutual. But until the launch, we needed each other.

From the corner of my eye I saw Alyssa Wang approaching. The Asian lioness had been assigned by Meyers, Sanchez & Ingraham to guide us through our initial stock offering, and while she had privileged access to the inner workings of the company, that didn’t mean I wanted her to see the founders fighting with one another. Not to mention that every time she and Bob got together, they generated stacks of paperwork for me to sign off on. Best to make a retreat before she got any ideas about inviting me to join them in their strategy session.

“Okay, I’ll tell the team that Humr is a go,” I said, giving in to the inevitable.

I grabbed a fresh cup of coffee before heading to the glass-walled conference room affectionately called the goldfish bowl.

“I’m telling you, he’s a Benjamite,” Paul was insisting as I walked in.

“No, he’s a monoform,” Sheila retorted and a shiver of revulsion ran around the room.

There was no question in my mind who “he” was.

Officially I had no knowledge of the betting pool development was running, trying to guess Bob’s wereform. Unofficially the guesses were a source of amusement on slow days. Jamal was the only one who had loyally plunked his money down on Alaskan grizzly bear, while most of the rest were split between various canid and felid forms. Sheila had picked rat, and doubled her bet last week.

“Paul, I hope your code is better than your logic. Benjamites believe technology is even more sinful than their wereforms. You won’t find one living in a city, let alone working here,” I pointed out.

And as for monoforms, the last supposed monoform had died in the London Zoo during Queen Victoria’s reign. Today it was commonly accepted that the poor individual had been suffering from an extreme case of Emergence Dysfunction. These days ED was easily treatable, the recognizable blue pills available at any pharmacy, but in the past it had been a virtual death sentence.

“I’m sure I’ve seen his profile in the database—BobBearXXX, looking for cross-species hookups,” Elena said.

I could see Jamal getting ready to object on Bob’s behalf, so I cut the discussion short. “Any one of us dumb enough to have a profile on Shiftr deserves what they get. That said, let’s refrain from speculation on wereforms unless you’re all looking forward to another HR seminar on workplace sensitivity.”

I took a sip of my coffee, then swiped my tablet, activating the link with the livescreen at the front of the room. “Okay folks, in the interests of not spending all day here, let’s go through the list.” A few taps brought up the open work queue. “Jamal, Humr is a go for phase two.”

“Robert told me last night, so I’ve already got my team working on the next phase,” Jamal said without looking up. “Ken’s team will be running field tests with us this weekend.”

Jamal kept typing away at his laptop, apparently too busy to pay attention to a mere staff meeting. It was such an obvious power play that it should have been laughable, but I couldn’t afford to take him lightly, not while he had Bob’s backing.

“Glad that you’re on top of this, I know Bob has high hopes for Humr.” From the look of the faces in the room, Bob and Jamal were among the few who did. The success of Shiftr was rooted in its uniqueness. People arranged hookups based on their wereforms, knowing nothing about the other than a photo and their list of kinks. You could browse profiles online and set up a meet, or run the app in cruising mode on your phone and it would beep when you were in range of a likeminded Were. What had once been confined to underground clubs and seedy backalleys—and was still illegal in several Southern states—was now just a few screentaps away.

By contrast there were already dozens of apps out there for conventional dating. Even with the best interface and matching algorithms Humr was unlikely to make much of a splash.

“And you can have Ken’s test group after the fifteenth, not before. Next time check with me first before you poach resources.”

Jamal raised his head and glared. “But Bob said—”

“The full moon is this weekend, and we all know what that does to the app usage. Ken’s team will be backing up user support. I’m sure Bob will be happy to explain why we can’t afford the bad publicity associated with any outages in our premiere app.”

I turned my attention to the opposite side of the room, making it clear he was dismissed. “Sheila, how close are we on the Kanji 2.0 launch?”

As each team member went through their status, I paid attention to not only what they said, but how they said it. A few of the long term employees, Sheila among them, were still firmly on my side. But the majority of the room spent as much time looking at Jamal and checking his reactions as they did mine. It wasn’t open revolt…yet. But it was clear the power was shifting. I couldn’t wait until Jamal screwed up, as he inevitably would. It was time to take a more active approach.

* * *

My opportunity came on Thursday, as I overheard Bob and Jamal making plans to meet up after work. Our high tech office layout offered zero privacy, so if they were plotting something, they’d need to meet somewhere else. And with the full moon occurring in the early hours of Saturday morning, this would be the last night off any us got in the next few days.

I’d heard of the place they were going to, a cigar bar down in the financial district. Yelp described it as cozy, which meant that they’d spot me long before I got close enough to eavesdrop. But where Tess wasn’t welcome, Kevin would fit right in.

Bob left the office at five, as was his habit. Soon after, Jamal began packing his things, proclaiming his intent to finish his work at home. I grabbed my bag and headed to the gym.

The ultramodern building where we had our offices included its own private gym and multiform locker rooms. While city living was designed for humans—what I liked to call the default setting—workplace rules required reasonable accommodations for wereforms. In some places that meant a single unisex stall for shifting, but our gym had two dozen private shiftrooms able to accommodate a wide variety of forms.

At five-thirty, Theresa Garan walked into a shiftroom. Fifteen minutes later, Kevin Chase walked out.

The biggest secret at Shiftr wasn’t Bob’s wereform. It was that his co-founder was a chimera.

Chimeras had been the stuff of legends, worshipped in some cultures, condemned in others. It had only been within the last decades, with the advent of DNA analysis, that scientists recognized chimerism as a legitimate biologic phenomenon. Kevin was the remnants of my unborn fraternal twin. I’d had no reason to suspect his existence until the day in my teens when I shifted to my weregoat form, then shifted back as Kevin not Tess.

Kevin was a fragment, not a whole person. He had my brain, my memories, and my skills. In either form I could type dozens of words per minute, but couldn’t carry a tune. Those similarities aside, Kevin was unmistakably male, in appearance and scent. He even had his own driver’s license, thanks to a judicious bit of hacking. Only a handful of people knew of his existence, and Bob was not among their number.

Leaving Tess’s distinctive messenger bag behind, I headed out to meet my liftshare driver. A crisp hundred dollar bill ensured that I reached The Smoker’s Den before Jamal. From there it was a simple matter of using Kevin’s height and broad shoulders to push my way into a spot at a high top table, next to where Bob was waiting.

I wrinkled my nose against the smell and vowed to shower as soon as I could.

Jamal arrived when I was still on my first scotch. As he and Bob went through the ritual of selecting their cigars, then trimming and lighting them, I edged closer.

“I don’t know why you put up with her. She never listens to what I say and belittles me in front of the others,” Jamal whined.

“She’s afraid of you,” Bob said. “She knows you’re better than she is.”

I snorted, pretending to be amused by something on my smartphone. If Jamal had been Bob’s first hire, Shiftr would never have gotten off the ground.

“I still think you should get rid of her.”

“Tess is too big a part of Shiftr—having her leave before the IPO would be a red flag for the investors. We wait until after the stock launch—”

“You mean after she realizes she’s screwed,” Jamal broke in, with an ugly laugh.

“Exactly.” Bob said. “Smart enough to code but dumb enough to sign anything put in front of her.”

I took a sudden gulp of my drink to cover my unease. I’d expected to find Bob and Jamal plotting, looking for ways to consolidate their hold over the development team. I hadn’t expected to find them declaring my downfall a fait accompli.

I thought about the stacks of documents that I’d been presented with over the past months. I’d read them all before signing—well mostly, anyway. At least skimmed them, even on the busiest days. I couldn’t have missed anything vital, right?

The sinking feeling in my stomach said otherwise.

* * *

Bob and Jamal didn’t have anything else of interest to say, so I’d gone back to the office, made copies of all the confidential-not-to-be-copied docs I’d signed and then dropped them off with a friend of a friend who specialized in business law. Something I probably should have done before signing them. By then it was Friday, and Shiftr usage started rising as the full moon approached.

It was possible to shift on any day of the month, but most of us felt that extra urge when the moon was full. Like an itch that needed to be scratched. Even at work it wasn’t uncommon for folks to shift for at least part of their day. Bob had never done so, of course. But others had. I’d done it just last month, using the opportunity to test the new voice interaction upgrade.

In the old days people had lived together in clans made up of the same wereforms. Shifting was a social bonding activity, renewing ties of family/pack/flock/herd. Even in the city, like tended to gravitate to like, and those who shifted usually did so with others of their kind. When I’d first moved to Brooklyn I’d spent full moons with my second cousin and her family.

Shiftr users weren’t interested in sharing kinship or finding potential mates. They were looking for one night hookups—sometimes multiple hookups a night. Wereforms-only, the app deliberately blocked sharing of details of their human lives. If you wanted anonymous no-string-attached sex, intra- or interspecies, then Shiftr would find you a match. Usage peaked at the full-moon, when inhibitions were lower, and moon-madness made a convenient excuse for infidelity.

We got some unexpected publicity when a conservative French politician called out Shiftr as a prime example of the immorality infesting modern society. New user signups in Europe spiked, then just when we had those handled, the load sharing complex in Atlanta crashed after a lightning strike fried their main transformer. We’d managed to switch to the backup site before most users noticed the problem, but it was one thing after another all weekend.

By the time Monday came the tech team was ready to crash. Hard. We staggered in to the office like extras from a zombie film. It wasn’t till that afternoon that I had time to open my mail and look at the reply I’d received from the attorney. I read his message three times. Then, without a word to anyone, I packed my things and left.

I was three beers in by the time Sam Tate joined me at the bar at Altered States. A neighborhood bar in Brooklyn, it catered to wereforms looking to inflict serious damage on their livers. No dating, no hookups, just hardcore drinkers sharing their misery.

“Tailsmacked,” Sam told the bartender, as he took the stool next to me. He looked me over. “Is that your first?”

“Third,” I said. I had a rule when I counted beers. It was one, two, three, three, three...

Sam shook his head, knowing better than to challenge the count. We’d met through a mutual acquaintance when we were searching for cheap apartment sublets. Before meeting Sam I couldn’t have imagined living with a rodent—let alone that I’d one day call him my best friend. But the wereguineapig was a genuinely good guy, and even after he’d left to move in with his partner we still stayed friends. He was the only one outside of my family who knew about Kevin.

Sam was two drinks in, and I was still calling this number three, even as my elbow kept slipping off the bar. Ordinarily I wouldn’t let myself get this drunk in a public place, but with Sam in his biker’s leathers, I knew no one would bother us.

“You know what the worst part is? I let them do this to me. I trusted them. Him. Bob, err, fucking Roe-bearrrrrrr, the wannabe salmon muncher.”

“And you’re cut off.” Sam signaled to the bartender who swapped my pint glass for a mug of coffee before I knew what was happening.

“No—” I protested.

“I’ll listen to you whine, but I’m not dealing with you puking.”

The few brain cells that were still sober agreed that Sam had a point. Not to mention that if I puked in here I’d never be let back through the doors again.

“You still own forty percent of the company, right?” Sam asked.

“Yup,” I said. The “p” sound amused me, so I repeated it again. “Yup. But because I’m a moron, I signed papers agreeing to transfer the bulk of the assets to a shell company in Delaware. Where I own less than two percent. When the stock goes public, Bob and his friends will be worth tens of millions each, while I’ll be lucky to get a million for what they’ve left me.”

Not much to show for four years of my life spent living and breathing Shiftr, 24x7.

“You were stupid and you got screwed. Happens. You can’t kill Bob...”

There was a brief pause as we contemplated whether or not killing Bob was truly off limits. Though upon reflection Bob’s heirs would get his shares, so while it might be satisfying, it wouldn’t undo what had been done.

I shrugged, and Sam took that as a signal to continue. “There’s no point in sticking around. Go on to the next thing, and find a place that will treat you right. You know Wei’s been trying to poach you for HeritageNet for months now.”

“Still sucks.”

“Agreed,” Sam said. Then, because he was a true friend, he let me order another beer.

* * *

The next day I mainlined coffee and ibuprofen, then put in a call to Wei Chen. By noon I had a signed offer letter, blessed by my newly retained attorney.

I told the development heads first. Jamal did a poor job concealing his glee. The rest expressed various degrees of regret. Most seemed to accept my explanation that I was leaving for a smaller company where I’d get the opportunity to play with new technologies rather than being in a project management role. Sheila and a handful of other long time employees probably realized that I had decided to jump before being pushed out, though none of them pressed me on why I was leaving before the presumed stock windfall. Ironically they were in better shape than I was—their bonuses were specific dollar amounts written into their employment contracts, rather than shares of stock in a company that could be stripped of its most valuable assets.

I left the daily development meeting and went straight to Bob’s office, where he and Alyssa were reviewing the investors’ package. I leaned in and said, “Bob, Alyssa, sorry to interrupt. Just wanted to let you know that I’ve told the development team, and made sure Sheila and Jamal are up to speed on all the open projects. I’ll drop my badge and tech off with HR on the way out, okay?”

Bob’s jaw dropped, while Alyssa merely blinked slowly. “You’re leaving?” she asked.

“Yes, I thought Bob would have told you,” I said, with the determined cheerfulness of a woman with nothing to hide. “Shiftr is great, and I know it will go on to even better things. But I miss the startup days, and the chance to be a part of a small team. I promised Bob I would stay to lead the security upgrade, but since he decided to stick with Formbook, it was a good time for me to move on.”

“Dozens of apps use Formbook for verification, there’s no need for us to invest personnel and time in developing a replacement for something that already works,” Bob said, quick to leap upon any hint of criticism.

“And dozens of other app owners agree with you,” I said. Left unsaid was the part where the other applications were much lower risk. If someone linked your Formbook id to your MyTunes account, the worst you could expect was some ribbing over a fondness for 90s grunge. But if they found your Shiftr account, the results could be devastating.

Bob opened and closed his mouth, for once at a loss for words. It was a good look on him. I had counted on Bob’s pathological need to appear in control. He didn’t want to appear blindsided, not in front of an outsider. He had no way to keep me here—I wasn’t even required to give two weeks’ notice.

“I’m surprised that you are leaving before the stock launch,” Alyssa said.

“There’s no reason for me not to, is there?” I wanted to make it clear that I knew what the score was, even as I refused to give Bob the satisfaction of watching me beg for what I was owed. Instead I turned to Alyssa, as if hers had been an honest question rather than an attempt to find out just how much I knew. “Bob has full confidence in Jamal to run the tech side. When HeritageNet asked me to help them enter the mobile space, I couldn’t pass it up.”

At the mention of HeritageNet, Bob relaxed. The genealogy website was lightyears from Shiftr’s target population. While the investors might ask questions about my decision to leave, this wasn’t the PR disaster it would have been if I’d left to join a competitor or start my own company.

I let Bob say the expected things about how much he was going to miss working with me. He wished me well at my new job and equally insincerely I wished him and Shiftr a bright future. It helped that I didn’t have to fake my excitement, though that had as much to do with the backdoors I’d left in Shiftr as it did with my new job at HeritageNet.

* * *

As expected my departure from Shiftr made a brief ripple in the tech news, but as launch day approached and Bob and Jamal dominated the news coverage, most reporters seemed to forget that Jamal was a recent hire and not the original developer. The careful reshaping of history left no room for anyone not in Bob’s inner circle. Even Sheila—who’d pioneered Shiftr’s multi-language support, transforming it from a US-centered app into a global powerhouse—was rarely mentioned.

I did a few interviews, being careful not to criticize the Shiftr team, while at the same time mentioning that different development priorities were part of the reason why I’d left. Most interviewers didn’t even bother to print that part. But they’d remember it, when the time came.

I’d forgotten how much fun it was to be immersed in developing a new app, writing, testing, and patching modules as fast as I could type. HeritageNet had started as a place to share genealogical information and piece together family trees. The single most comprehensive repository of birth and death records available, they’d only just begun to mine the data that they’d collected over the years.

The new app would turn genealogy on its head. Enter the information for yourself and your intended partner, and it would not only trace your family trees back for generations, it would also predict your children’s wereforms. No guessing whether or not your partner was the true bred were- they claimed to be. No accusations over a child whose wereform harkened back to a long-forgotten ancestor. Simple, easy to use, it would function as both a standalone app and a plug-in for MateFinder. Better yet, I’d get a cut of the revenue. Not Shiftr level money, but enough for a down payment on that high rise apartment.

As for Shiftr, using the backdoor I’d left in the system, I created a profile for Maskboy91, a Scottish polecat, whose id indicated he’d signed up in our first year of service. Logging in from a burner phone, from time to time I updated the profile with both positive and negative feedback from various other Shiftr users. Maskboy91 had a favorability score of sixty percent, on the low side, but enough that he was still getting meetup requests.

On the day Shiftr went public I met Sam at Altered States. I ordered a scotch, then pulled up the live coverage on my tablet. As the barman grunted, I turned off sound and turned on the closed captioning.

By the time I’d switched from scotch to counting beers, it was all over. Shiftr had gone public at just over ninety dollars a share. Not quite the hundred dollar target Bob had originally been hoping for, but still an overwhelming success story by anyone’s standards.

I raised my half-empty pint glass. “To Bob, may he get what he deserves.”

“Hear, hear!” Sam clinked his glass against mine.

That afternoon, an anonymous message highlighting one of the security vulnerabilities of Formbook appeared buried in a hackers hangout on the darknet. Twelve minutes later, a comment seemingly from a different part of the globe speculated on what that vulnerability might mean for other apps that used Formbook logins.

And then I waited. And waited. After a month I was debating whether to drop more clues or hack Formbook myself.

Nearly two months after the company went public, I woke to news alerts with such lovely titles as “What stinks at Shiftr?” and the entirely delightful “SKUNK BOY!” overlaying Bob’s DMV photo adorning the front page of the Daily News.

Shiftr’s stock lost half its value on that first day. Bob the presumed ursid had been a Wall Street darling, but investors felt betrayed when confronted with evidence that he was actually a polecat. Not only a polecat but one with a history of unsavory hookups on Shiftr.

Those who could have forgiven his form were less quick to forgive the poor judgment shown by his choice in partners.

It did no good for Bob to deny that the profile was his, not when it was demonstrably linked with his authorized Formbook account.

Attention quickly turned to Jamal, and the numerous missteps made in response to the security breach. Users signed in to Shiftr using their Formbook ids, which included true form verification using their driver’s license. While the user’s personal information and Formbook login were never publicly displayed, the linkage ensured users couldn’t run multiple profiles or falsify their wereforms.

When notified of the breach, Jamal had kept the site up and running while his team frantically tried to come up with a patch. This meant that Bob was merely the first of those exposed to the public eye. By the time he finally shut the site down, the damage was done, and a steady stream of the rich and famous found themselves issuing press releases.

As the stock continued to fall, investors clamored for action. Suddenly my name as trending in the news, along with that interview I’d done for Tech Hour, where much was made of my comment about Shiftr’s security protocols. After being ignored for months, I was now hailed as a visionary who’d been pushed out by an incompetent and greedy CEO.

Days later we launched HeritageNet’s FamilyMaker app to favorable reviews and steady downloads that outstripped marketing’s most optimistic projections. Headlines lauding me as a technical genius ran side by side with stories of Shiftr’s continuing mishaps. I had “Tess Garan, the Woman Who Gets Things Done in Tech” printed out and framed.

I moved into a high rise condo in the trendiest part of Hell’s Kitchen, and bought Sam all the top shelf vodka he could drink.

It had taken four years for Bob to climb from unemployed marketing guy to Wall Street fame and fortune. It took less than four months for it all to come crashing down around him.

The end, when it came, was swift. As I was leaving work for the day, my personal cell rang.

“Theresa Garan?”

“Speaking.” I recognized the voice, but decided to make her work for it.

“This is Alyssa Wang, I’m sure you remember me. Let me cut to the chase—I represent the investors who have taken control of Shiftr. Bob Sinclair has resigned as CEO, and we’re looking for someone to take charge. Someone with the tech savvy to restore user confidence and rebuild shareholder value.”

“Let me tell you what it will cost you,” I said. And then I smiled.