Dan Martinez is living the Silicon Valley dream. He has a great job as a project manager at social media powerhouse Theta, as well as a beautiful home, a loving wife, and a son in middle school. He spends his days eating Theta’s free food and drifting from meeting to meeting at the company’s palatial Palo Alto campus. Until one day when Theta’s CEO announces at an emergency meeting that a quarter of the company will be fired in a month’s time. Ten thousand people are going to lose their jobs. Dan is then informed by his boss that, unless he ships an important new feature within the month, he’s going to be one of the thousands of workers let go.

As if the stakes weren’t high enough, an old journalist friend soon threatens to blackmail Dan for information on the layoffs, which is something that could cost him his job even before the mass firings. Then there’s a whistleblower, who might be from his team, who has a date to appear on 60 Minutes. Worst of all, campus security begins to sniff around asking Dan uncomfortable questions about the death of an engineer who had been working on Dan’s big project. Was it an accident or was it murder, and what did Dan have to do with it? Within the span of just a few weeks, Dan’s whole life could come crashing down around him. 

Jeff Gomez has published numerous books of fiction and non-fiction. More than twenty-five years ago, Scribner published his debut novel, Our Noise. His most recent book is There Was No Alternative: Generation X, AIDS, and the Making of a Classic Nineties Record. He’s also the author of Math Rock, published in 2024 by Bloomsbury. Jeff worked at Facebook’s main Menlo Park office from 2014 to 2023, and continues to work in tech.