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D-Y-N-E—”
“Van Dyne?” she heard a voice ask from behind her. Nadia spun—
—and found herself face-to-face with Margaret Hoff.
“Oh! Hi!” Nadia said, half surprised and half not. Sometimes things like this just seemed to work out for her. She was naturally lucky, on occasion!
On other occasions, she was born into a secret espionage child-training camp.
But you really had to focus on the bright side of things, Nadia felt.
“Margie, should we—” One of the girls from the elevator paused by the lobby’s front doors.
Margaret waved her on. “I’ll catch up with you.” She turned her smile back to Nadia, and Nadia immediately understood how this woman—still in her twenties—could have taken the
tech world so by storm. She was tall and willowy, but not imposing—Nadia thought she looked like someone who had grown up riding horses. Her shoulder-length brown hair was pulled up into a hasty ponytail, but some strands had escaped, framing her face completely unintentionally. Her plain white T-shirt, light jeans, and white tennis shoes were so carefully casual that Nadia was certain they probably cost enough to fund G.I.R.L. for at least a month. A maroon HoffTech-branded hoodie had made Margaret almost indistinguishable from the rest of her colleagues.
Except for her eyes. There was something unsettlingly penetrating about Margaret’s eyes. It hadn’t been the hologram; they really were a startling shade of icy blue-gray, like a rock whittled away by glacial waters. Calm and clear and bright. Nadia was immediately enthralled.
“I’m so sorry,” Margaret was saying, holding up her hands apologetically. “We don’t know each other, but I think I know your family—”
“Pym Labs!” Nadia interrupted. “You were an intern.”
Margaret laughed. “I was! I was. Hank Pym gave me my first job in tech, and I’m forever indebted to him. And you look…You must be…” Margaret gave Nadia an appraising look, like a puzzle she was trying to solve.
“Nadia Van Dyne,” Nadia said again, VERA at her back this time. “His daughter.”
“Oh my gosh.” Margaret darted forward and enveloped Nadia in a huge hug. Nadia returned it enthusiastically. She was a hugger, too! “Oh my gosh,” Margaret repeated, pulling away. She kept her hands on Nadia’s shoulders. “Hank was like a father to me for so many years. I feel like that makes us, like…sisters, basically.”
Nadia smiled. She could always stand to adopt another family member.
“I actually never met him,” Nadia clarified. “But Janet Van Dyne is my stepmother, and I’ve continued with some of his work.”
“No!” Margaret looked taken aback. “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Not about Janet and the work, about not knowing Hank.” Margaret talked quickly, her voice a clear tenor—deeper than Nadia expected. It was nice to listen to. “We should talk. Were you here to see someone? Are you here from Pym Labs? Are you recruiting? Our interns actually don’t finish work for another month, but—”
“I came to see you, actually.” Nadia laughed. Usually people had to interrupt her. Maybe she and Margaret really were similar. Did they both get that from Hank? “Janet bought me a VERA for my name day and it is already changing my life. But the AI is so impressive and you are so impressive and really, I was in the neighborhood eating soup dumplings, so I thought—”
“VERA,” Margaret said around Nadia’s head. “Am I clear right now?”
“You have four different meetings right now,” VERA responded steadily. “A stand-up with Core, the scoping discussion, lunch with Karyn’s team, and the funding—”
“Right, right, right.” Margaret nodded. “Nadia, show VERA your ID. How would you like a personalized tour of HoffTech HQ?”
Nadia already had her learner’s permit halfway out of its holster on her cell phone. See? she thought. Sometimes things really do just work out!
“So, we have one studio here and the other is out in the Bay area,” Margaret told Nadia as they wandered the HoffTech halls. Nadia had consented to a facial ID scan by the VERA at the front desk and signed rights to her firstborn child away should she violate the extremely stringent NDA she’d just committed to, but she understood how careful companies had to be about their proprietary tech. VERA was HoffTech’s lifeblood; if someone were to walk away with her secrets, it would destroy the company from the inside out. “San Francisco is fine, but I always wanted to come back and open a campus in New York. I’m too type-A for the West Coast. We don’t jibe.”
Nadia bobbed her head in understanding while craning her neck left and right, trying to take everything in. The office décor matched the lobby: plants everywhere, white-and-birch standing desks, floor-to-ceiling glass windows to let as much natural light in as possible. Like a greenhouse for computer scientists, Nadia thought. You can’t know a person through their things, but if Nadia had to try, she would say that Margaret’s office made her look focused and driven and goal-oriented.
“This is Programming.…” Margaret waved at a group of fashionable cubicles staffed by more people in ponytails, jeans, and hoodies. “And this is Core; they develop the toolset we use to design VERA. Her actual servers are down a floor, sealed and temperature-controlled. Those are the writers.” She waved into a dismal corner with all the blinds pulled down over the windows. “They don’t talk much, but they have a lot to say,” Margaret whispered to Nadia conspiratorially. Nadia laughed, the sound echoing across the quiet space.
Margaret tugged Nadia into a glass-enclosed office and settled into one of the gold-and-acrylic chairs surrounding the wooden table at its center. She gestured for Nadia to grab a spot, too. The massive flat-screen TV at one end of the table was on, a screen full of code visible with a bright red section—an error, a bug in the code that someone must have been working on. Nadia was so in awe of this place that Margaret had managed to build so quickly, and all on her own. She had a vision, and she’d executed it.
While Margaret fiddled with the VERA in the center of the table, Nadia indulged herself in a brief fantasy: G.I.R.L., completely and carefully redesigned in tasteful shades of gold and white and wood. The plants would be easy; Priya could handle that no problem. Taina probably wouldn’t want them in her space, but Nadia could deal with that issue when it came up.…
“Here, I’ll give you the spiel,” Margaret said, bringing Nadia back to reality. The VERA cascaded in all its pixelated glory, and Margaret started what sounded like a talk she’d given hundreds if not thousands of times before, her tenor only betraying her slightly. “HoffTech is at the intersection of people and technology, a company designed around the core concept that we all deserve to—”
“‘Do less, and experience more!’” Nadia interrupted, enthusiastically.
