2. Sidewinder Golf

2

Sidewinder Golf

NICOLE LAMB

Nicole Lamb waited outside the glass doors of Sidewinder Golf in the cool California April breeze, watching the skinny palm trees sway in the parking lot’s xeriscaped islands, her computer backpack heavy on her shoulders.

Any minute now.

7:29 AM.

You’d think that Sidewinder’s chief engineer would have a key to the dang building or at least the code to deactivate the alarm system that locked the place down precisely at six o’clock every weekday.

You’d think a company whose motto was “Nobody engineers golf clubs the way we do. Period.” would trust the person doing the actual engineering.

But maybe the motto was right.

To Sidewinder Golf and its owner, she was just Nobody, an interchangeable and untrustable cog in the Sidewinder machine who did the club engineering, and that’s why she was standing outside the front doors, waiting until exactly seven-thirty when the cubic building’s impregnable security system would finally ? —

Whirr, click.

The door came loose in her hand, swinging outward.

—open the dang door.

Nicole walked inside, passed the empty receptionist desk in the front office, and headed straight into the hallway to the elevator and then up to the top floor to her lab.

Her lab.

Her gleaming white and steel lab had a main room for simple proof-of-concept experiments, a clean room, and a manufacturing mock-up for production testing. The tech’s break room was in the back so they didn’t have to scrub out whenever they needed a cup of coffee or a bio break.

Tall windows surveyed her domain, or at least the parking lots and surrounding beige office buildings of the industrial park around her domain.

Nicole’s materials science lab was tiny compared to those at the big golf companies like TaylorMade or Karsten Ping. Still, she could have designed and tested a rocket ship in her research facility if she’d needed to.

But she didn’t need to.

Nicole imagined and designed golf clubs, not rocket ships.

Far more people’s lives would be improved with a better golf club than the launch of yet another billionaire’s vanity rocket ship.

As always when she got to her lab, she left her backpack in her office off the main room, dumping it in her office chair behind the desk with a giant curved screen for CAD, and shoulder-brushed one of the swords hanging on the walls and steadied it before heading to the break room to make a pot of coffee for everybody when they rolled in.

Even though it was April first, she didn’t want to fool her lab staff by denying them coffee. The pranks would start soon enough. Knowing those clowns, she hoped no one got hurt in the explosions.

Chemistry labs and mat sci labs are dangerous places on April Fool’s Day. When people can use their work materials to manufacture bombs or weapons, you’ve got to watch your back.

Nicole was pretty sure the first prank was already in motion. The HR admin had texted last night to ask if Nicole could give the new club fitter/sales guy they’d hired a tour of the office that morning.

The “new guy” would either be a complete psycho or dumb as a rock, because that was the joke.

Seriously, what kind of a stupid name was Kingston Moore, anyway? They should have come up with a better fake name like Dylan Waverly or Berkeley Tran if they were going to fool her. Nobody was named Kingston Moore in SoCal.

Nicole prattled along in her head, a list of previous years’ pranks scrolling through as she measured out the ashy-smelling grounds and spring water for the catering-size coffeemaker. Her mental chatter was a cloud of cicadas buzzing in the forest of her head: conversations about metal alloys in golf club heads replaying themselves, theories connecting dots about what was really going on in her favorite dragon-based series, and debate points coalescing for the argument with her landlord about whether she could keep that many plants on her balcony.

Hey, she hadn’t manufactured the seven-foot towers of forty-two overlapping pots each. She’d just bought ten of them.

A lot of zucchini were growing just outside her glass sliders.

It wasn’t her fault that they were sucking up a lot of water, and the apartment complex had chosen to include utilities in the rent. She was going to have home-grown tomatoes that summer.

The babble swirled in her head so thickly—would Xylan survive being turned into an evil wizard vernin, and could Zennifer find a way to turn him human again?—that Nicole didn’t notice the email icon on her phone, or the Teams notifications flashing, or even the phone call from her head tech buzzing her silenced phone across the table.

Nope, she just held three separate conversations with herself, happily analyzing and scheming and thinking up zucchini recipes, until Arvind flung open the break room door and screamed, “Why don’t you ever answer your phone because we’ve been bought!”

She looked over her shoulder at him from watching coffee stream into the glass carafe. “What?”

Spittle flew from Arvind’s mouth as he over-enunciated, “That old goat of an owner sold us to the highest bidder! And it’s venture fucking capital! We. Are. Doomed!”

The worry quivering in her heart froze into crystallized dread at the horror in Arvind’s hazel eyes, and the possible futures of Sidewinder Golf—fifty-percent layoffs, eighty-percent layoffs, liquidation —landed like boulders in the streams of thoughts in her head. “No.”

“It’s true.” Arvind pulled out a chair and collapsed into it, holding his head in his hands. “If it were TaylorMade or Titleist, we’d have a chance at keeping our jobs. But VC…holy shit. They’re going to savage us. They’re going to wring every bit of value out of the company and then sell us for parts.”

Nicole scrambled after her thoughts, trying to keep up as more and more scenarios poured through her mind until one very important thought turned and smacked her in the face, and she laughed, yelling, “April Fools!”

Arvind looked up at her, his jaw slack and one hand tangled in his graying hair. “No, Nicole. No, it’s not April Fools. We’ve been bought.”

“Of course, it’s April Fools. Look. if you want to play this out, I won’t tell anybody. But it’s obviously April Fools.”

“It’s not,” Arvind said, his voice breathless. “I know it’s April first, but this isn’t a joke. Check your damn phone.”

Nicole turned back to the coffee pot, making sure the coffee was properly draining into the carafe and not overflowing the basket. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Nicole! I’m serious! We’re in trouble, and we need a plan!”

The panicked soprano notes in Arvind’s voice despite the fact that he was six-two and over forty convinced her to pivot to face him. “You swear you’re serious.”

“I am.” He held up his right hand. “I swear to gods, I am not pulling some bullshit April Fools.”

Nicole plopped down in another chair. “Well, darn it.”

“Yeah.”

“Which venture capital firm?”

He consulted his phone. “Last Chance, Inc.”

“Sounds stupid.”

“Yeah.”

She shook her head. “This sucks.”

“Yeah, it sucks. What are we going to do?”

Nicole gritted her teeth. “Fight them until we can’t anymore.”