The Return
863 Words
Stellar Path Technologies had moved.
The last time I had seen the office, it was a cramped loft in SoHo, five desks crammed together, the air smelling of solder and stale pizza. Now it occupied the fifteenth floor of a glass tower on Wall Street, the kind of building where the elevators spoke in smooth, British accents and the lobby art cost more than my apartment.
I stood in front of the glass doors, my hands sweating inside the pockets of my new blazer. I had bought it that morning, along with three pairs of slacks and two button-downs, at a department store on 34th Street. Not couture. Not Sterling-approved. Just clothes that felt like armor.
I took a breath and pushed through the doors.
The reception area was sleek and modern, all white marble and living walls. A young woman looked up from her desk, her smile professional.
"Welcome to Stellar Path Technologies. How can I help you?"
"I'm here to see Cici Brennan," I said. "My name is Luna Hartwell."
The receptionist's eyes widened. She knew the name. Of course she did. It was on the founding documents, on the early patents, on the plaque in the lobby that listed the company's original five employees.
"Of course, Ms. Hartwell," she said, her voice suddenly breathless. "Right this way."
She led me through a maze of open-plan desks, past engineers hunched over monitors, past whiteboards covered in equations that looked both familiar and alien. The energy was electric. It hummed in the air, the sound of minds at work, of problems being solved.
It was nothing like the Sterling estate.
Cici's office was at the end of the hall, a corner space with floor-to-ceiling windows. She was on the phone when I arrived, her red hair a bright flame against the gray cityscape. She looked up, saw me, and dropped the phone.
"Luna," she breathed.
She crossed the room in three strides and wrapped me in a hug that smelled of cinnamon gum and expensive perfume. Cici had always hugged like she was trying to crack ribs. I had forgotten how much I missed it.
"You came back," she said, her voice thick. "I wasn't sure you would."
"I wasn't sure either," I admitted.
She pulled back, holding my shoulders, studying me with sharp green eyes. "You look different."
"Good different or bad different?"
"Alive different," she said. "The last time I saw you, you were at the company Christmas party, three years ago. You smiled all night, but your eyes were dead."
I didn't know what to say to that.
Cici didn't wait for an answer. She turned to the open door and clapped her hands. "Everyone! Conference room. Now."
Fifteen minutes later, I sat at the head of a long table, surrounded by faces I didn't recognize. The original team was gone, replaced by younger, sharper versions of ourselves. They looked at me with expressions ranging from curiosity to suspicion.
"Team," Cici said, her voice carrying the authority of a woman who had built an empire while I was playing house. "This is Luna Hartwell. Co-founder. Original architect of our predictive engine. And your new head of AI Risk Development."
A murmur went through the room. A man at the far end—tall, bearded, wearing a hoodie with the Stellar logo—leaned forward.
"Derek Hayes," he said, his voice flat. "Head of Engineering." He looked me up and down, taking in my blazer, my neat hair, my carefully applied makeup. "No offense, Ms. Hartwell, but our stack has evolved. We're on Python 4.2, TensorFlow 9, and our neural nets are quantum-adjacent. The last code you wrote was probably in Python 2."
The room went quiet. Cici's eyes flashed, but I held up a hand.
"None taken," I said. "You're right. I've been away. But I learn fast, Mr. Hayes. And I didn't come here to rest on old laurels. I came here to work."
Derek raised an eyebrow. "We'll see."
The meeting broke up. Cici walked me to my office—a small room with a view of the Hudson—and closed the door.
"Don't mind Derek," she said. "He's brilliant and insufferable. But he's fair. Prove yourself, and he'll follow you anywhere."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you'll be the rich ex-wife who cashed in her shares and disappeared." She said it without malice. "Your call, Luna. I'm giving you the chance. What you do with it is up to you."
She left me alone.
I sat at the desk and opened the laptop. The login screen glowed, waiting. I entered my old credentials, half-expecting them to be deactivated.
They worked.
The desktop loaded, familiar and strange. I clicked on the project folder and opened the latest build of the AI risk engine.
The code sprawled across the screen, dense and complex, written in languages I barely recognized. I stared at it for a long time, feeling the old panic rise in my throat.
Then I took a breath, opened a terminal, and started to read.
Line by line.
Function by function.
I had forgotten how to be Luna Hartwell.
But I was going to remember.
- Writer
