Rumpl3st1lsk1n

Milena’s career as a technology startup CEO had, to some degree, inured her to the bluntness of certain interactions, specifically when dealing with men who worked on the technical side of things, but the rudeness of the message on her screen, a considered, but impolite response to her simple request for help, caught her off guard, and she was already feeling emotionally fragile, because it was that time of the month. Each 15th Milena was contractually obligated to file a report for her venture capitalists, who expected some good news, about the project’s compression ratio, vertical integration, horizontal integration, data analyzation, or at least some positive feedback from the in-house beta testers.

The VCs were tired of excuses and explanations, no matter how valid. They didn’t want to hear about hardware bottlenecks and algorithmic instability. They wanted numbers indicating that their investments were being put to good use, and that development on the platform was progressing within the projections of the current burn rate. Against her better judgement, Milena was able to accomplish this ambitious request by outsourcing much of the coding grunt-work to a syndicate of Scherzogovenian programmers. She’d had a Zoom meeting with an Scherzogovenian attorney whose imperial mustache made him look like a Prussian general. He had assured her that American nondisclosure agreements and intellectual property laws were valid in his country. “And if not,” he’d said, “They will be when we join the European Union.” Then he added, “We are not in cahoots with the Russians,” though, to Milena’s knowledge, that had never been in question.

Accepting the veracity of such eggshell-thin reassurances required a certain amount of mental gymnastics, if not self-delusion. Fragile promises and brittle trust formed the mainsprings of progress, driving industry ever forward, but what was business, anyway, other than a bunch of half-deranged people shoveling bullshit until a few can climb to the top of the stinking pile? In many ways, the company was Milena’s baby. It was supposed to be a thing of beauty that, in maturity, would make the world a better place, and it seemed a shameful thing to expose it to the crass shit-slinging of the financial realm.

Milena would have never gotten the rude message from the CodeHub handle “Rumpl3st1lsk1n” if she hadn’t been required to fire Dallas as head programmer, as she wouldn’t have needed to ask for help with the data analyzer. He would have had an answer. She’d tried to feed him some apologetic bullshit about not synergizing with the new hires, which was technically correct, but he’d seen right through it. Dallas was one of her first hires, from back when the company didn’t even have an office space, but would meet in coffee shops and parks to spend the day coding.

After a successful first round of funding, the company had moved to one of those pay-by-the week communal office environments, but early breakthroughs and a rapid-fire second round had secured enough capital to lease three floors in a building downtown. The sleek workspace may have lacked the extravagant trappings of other firms, without room for a climbing wall or justification for roaming masseuses, but functioned perfectly well as corporate headquarters for a company that now had a hundred employees. Dallas had been there for that move, but was part of the vanguard of downsizing and had missed the subsequent relocation to a warehouse space on the edge of the city with unreliable plumbing, only one working elevator, and a basement that remained full of rats no matter how many exterminators the landlord sent over.

The move included about two dozen employees, including six Scherzogovenian back-end programmers who had been hired to facilitate communication with the outsourced development team. They, at least, made the transition without complaint. They seemed content enough as long as they had a place to blast the worst rock and roll of the 1980’s and smoke cigarettes with the windows open twelve months a year. For the rest of the company it was a downgrade, and along with the lack of raises and bonuses, took a toll on corporate morale. For Milena, juggling the dual responsibilities of CEO and lead programmer was largely manageable. She held advanced degrees in computer science, and in many ways felt more comfortable behind a keyboard than in a boardroom, despite daily affirmations and positive-thinking exercises.

Despite her qualifications, Milena occasionally needed help, and feeling too uncomfortable to ask Dallas, had taken to posting bits of what she was working on, too small for a casual observer to deduce the scope of the project, on CodeHub, appealing to a worldwide community of coders for input. It was after requesting help with the data analyzer that she got the message that said, “This code is garbage, like a monkey did it. I would explain where you are wrong, but you wouldn’t understand. It’s easier to just fix it for you.” This was followed by a snippet of code that even Milena had to admit was elegant, achieving what it had taken her 300 lines of struggle in 30 lines of compact efficiency. The account, “Rumpl3st1lsk1n,” with a cryptic signature reading: “We’re leaving together, but still it’s farewell,” had been created the same day she got the message.

Though put off by the insulting tone of the response, she replied with an appreciative message of thanks, ignoring the rudeness and putting it down to the lack of social graces so often found in the tech community. Once compiled, the new version improved across all benchmarks, and this was enough to ensure another month of funding without complaint from the VCs. With that off her back, Milena was relieved, but unable to relax, as she set about doing things she felt unable to ask any of the remaining employees to do, like replacing long fluorescent tubes in the hallway lights, and putting more caution tape across the elevator doors on the fourth floor, which were broken open and gaped like a missing tooth at the end of the corridor.

For some days, things progressed smoothly, and Milena was feeling good about the state of things, relying heavily on the knowledge that she’d been smart about investment structuring and still owned 59% of her company, a majority share. At the end of the day, she was in charge, though the knowledge that finding new investors as generous as the ones already on board was unlikely, did result in a nagging stress that settled in her neck and shoulders. Then the VCs reached out and said they were so impressed with the new data analyzer that they didn’t think it was too much to ask for a 5% improvement in the compression algorithm by next month. As Milena hung up the phone her neck felt like it was made of glass.

Milena’s code was excellent, but there were certain thresholds that simply couldn’t be reached without serious outside-the-box thinking, and she had out-thought all her boxes. With a great deal of resignation, she messaged Rumpl3st1lsk1n “I need help,” and received a near immediate response. Attempting to take a strong approach, she had demanded the signing of a nondisclosure agreement, which she placed as a smart contract on the blockchain. It was returned and signed “Straw2Gold, LLC,” registered in The Bahamas. Milena suspected this was as good as it was going to get. Desperate, she sent the code that needed work, thousands of lines that she’d broken into discrete parts as an attempt to obfuscate the scope of the project.

A response came within an hour, saying “I know who you are. I know what this is. I will help you for 1% of your company.” This was accompanied by another smart contract on the blockchain. Milena felt like she’d been stabbed in the back. Technically she could make decisions like this without the board’s approval, as her shares were fully hers, but it would require an explanation. Feeling poisoned, but too desperate to do anything else, she agreed. Then she didn’t hear from Rumpl3st1lsk1n for three weeks.

Strangely, Milena passed that time with an eerie sense of calmness. She took to showing up early, with coffee and donuts that she would put on a cart and distribute through the warehouse. The remaining executives and leads on the fifth floor tended to prefer skim milk and artificial sweeteners, while the front-end team was partial to ulta-sweet mocha concoctions of the sort that had seemingly only been invented as an excuse to sell Americans milkshakes for breakfast. The Scherzogovenians took their coffee black, with enough sugar packets dumped into the brew that a crystalline sludge formed on the bottoms of their cups, attracting yellowjackets through the open windows.

The execs and front-end crew dressed for business, and though some of them had let their style slack since the move, they still sported sharp looks that mattered in Zoom meetings. The Scherzogovenians, on the other hand, dressed like hackers in hoodies, band tees, and cargo pants. One day, after three weeks of waiting for a response from Rumpl3st1lsk1n, Milena found herself walking through their smoky space, filling an increasingly heavy wastepaper basket with sludgy-bottomed coffee cups, most of which contained entombed insects. She raised her voice to be heard over Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” mentioning to them that it would be better if they left the door unlocked on Fridays so the cleaning service could get in, but one in a Dokken t-shirt just nodded and blew smoke out of his nose while the rest mostly ignored her. One of them, wearing a shirt that simply read “Europe,” stared at her intently while eating his donut. Milena thought it was an odd fashion choice, but also knew that all the Scherzogovenians were obsessed with gaining EU membership as it would result in higher wages and a better standard of living.

She was annoyed to see that they’d taped pictures of bikini girls and supercars to the walls, but decided to not make an issue of it, as no one but them ever came to the fourth floor. Leaving the Scherzogovenians, Milena passed the open elevator doors, and stuck her head between the swags of caution tape to peer down the shaft into the blackness, listening to the rats below. She’d been doing this longer than she’d realized when her phone dinged with an alert that Rumpl3st1lsk1n had messaged her. She ran back to her office to recompile the new algorithm on a test server.

With a two-thirds decrease in the codebase size, the new version outperformed the previous iteration by a significant 33%. It may have cost significantly more than Milena had ever wanted to pay, but the results were better than she had ever anticipated. In fact, they were so significant that the VCs wanted to shorten the runway to launch by three months. This was doable, but Milena knew it was impossible without Rumpl3st1lsk1n’s help. They began a negotiation whereby he would rewrite large sections of the code base in return for her shares.

The process went on for months, and Milena watched her stake in the company dwindle from 58% to 56% to 54% until, eventually, she held only the 51% required for majority control of the corporate entity. Despite the pain this caused her, the VCs were ecstatic about the progress, and this was enough to convince her that it would all be worth it. All of the benchmarks were exceeding expectations and with one month to go, it really seemed like the launch would happen on time.

Then, one warm spring morning Milena arrived at work early to discover that all traces of the program had been erased from the servers. She checked and checked, but could find no trace of the project she had dedicated years of her life to. With growing horror she unlocked the drawer in her desk where she kept the hard drive containing her personal copy of the code base, which she backed up weekly, and was only slightly surprised to find it gone. She opened the window to get some much needed air only to hear “Here I am! Rock you like a hurricane!” coming from the floor below. It seemed like at least one of the Scherzogovenians had come in early.

It was at this moment that she received a message from Rumpl3st1lsk1n. The subject line was: “I Have Your Baby.” It went on to say that the project would be returned, in perfectly elegant working order, in return for 43% of the company, enough to give whomever was on the other side of the screen majority control. Rumpl3st1lsk1n pointed out that Milena’s remaining shares would still be enough to make her rich beyond her wildest dreams once the stock went public and assured her that this was a good deal. He pointed out that having less was better than having none, and that she should be happy with the arrangement. It ended by saying that if this was unacceptable, she should simply figure out who he really was and come get her baby. This was followed, as always, by the signature: “We’re leaving together, but still it’s farewell.”

Milena hung her head out the window, inhaling deeply in an attempt to clear her head. With a final “Here I am!” Scorpions finished their song, and in the brief silence that followed, Milena’s head spun. Then a familiar, but forgotten synthesizer riff floated up from below. She lost herself in the seeming significance of the music, and when the singer started singing everything clicked into place. “We’re leaving together, but still it’s farewell,” came through the window. It was “The Final Countdown” by Europe. Milena rushed down the stairs.

The Scherzogovenian in the Europe shirt was smoking alone in their area. Plugged into his laptop was her personal hard drive. “Rumpl3st1lsk1n!” she yelled, surprised at the power in her voice, but strengthened by what was at stake. He grabbed the device and ran for the door, knocking Milena aside, but she managed to get hold of him and they struggled their way into the hallway. He said nothing as they fought over the hard drive, tussling this way and that down the hallway. Before Milena knew what was going on she realized they were wrestling by the open door of the broken elevator. With a final surge Rumpl3st1lsk1n snatched the drive away from her, but in doing so lost his balance and went crashing through the caution tape into the open elevator shaft. At the last possible moment, Milena reached out and plucked the hard drive from his hand before he fell.

Milena sat on the floor clutching her baby. She stuck her head into the shaft, listening for signs of life, but could hear only the squeaky scurrying of rats below.