Chapter 1: The Ruins

The sky had turned a sick yellow-green color that Gates would remember for the rest of his life. He stood in what used to be the main server building, though calling it a building now seemed generous. Most of the walls had vanished entirely. Steel beams jutted from concrete at angles that defied the original architecture, twisted into shapes that looked almost organic.

The tornado had carved through Microsoft headquarters with surgical precision, targeting every critical structure. Gates walked through the debris field, stepping over shattered glass and fragments of hardware that still sparked occasionally. Smoke rose from several locations where electrical fires continued to smolder. The entire campus looked like a war zone.

He pulled out his phone. The screen had cracked at some point during the chaos, spiderwebbing across the display, but it still functioned. He stared at it for a moment, trying to remember which app made phone calls. After poking at the weather widget twice, he finally found the phone icon. He dialed Richard, his chief financial advisor, though it took three tries because he kept forgetting the last digit.

"Bill, thank God you're alive. Are you injured?"

"Never mind that. What's the damage assessment? How much of our backup infrastructure survived? Also, what's backup infrastructure again?"

Silence stretched on the other end of the line. Gates could hear papers rustling.

"Richard, I asked you a question."

"Bill, I've been trying to compile the information, but the entire central server farm is gone. The backup facility in Building Seven also took a direct hit. The tornado seemed to follow a path that hit every critical—"

"What about our off-site storage? The facility in Oregon?"

More rustling. Gates kicked a piece of twisted metal out of his path. His shoe scuffed against something that might have been part of a server rack.

"The Oregon facility was decommissioned last year. You signed off on it yourself. We consolidated everything back to the main campus to cut costs."

Gates stopped walking. A piece of paper fluttered past his face, some kind of internal memo that would never be read now. He tried to remember what Oregon was. A state, probably.

"Fine. What about our liquid assets? Like water? Do we still have water? I need you to arrange temporary operations space, new equipment, everything. We'll rebuild. Can you rebuild computers?"

Richard's voice changed. It acquired a tone that Gates couldn't quite identify at first. Hesitation, maybe. Or worse.

"Bill, there's a problem with the accounts. The company's assets were heavily leveraged against the infrastructure itself. The physical servers, the proprietary systems, the custom hardware. All of it was collateral for various financial instruments that—"

"Just tell me how much cash we have available."

"Approximately fifteen dollars in immediately accessible funds. The rest is tied up in frozen accounts pending insurance assessment."

Gates laughed. The sound came out harsh in the open air. Around him, small fires continued to burn. He wondered briefly if insurance was something you ate.

"Insurance assessment. Good. When can we expect the payout? Is that like a pizza delivery situation, or longer?"

The silence returned. It lasted longer this time.

"Richard, answer me."

"There was a lapse in coverage. Three months ago, the accounting department flagged it, but with all the restructuring, nobody followed up. The policy expired, and renewal was pending approval from your office. We have documentation showing the request was sent to your assistant, but—"

Gates ended the call. His hand shook slightly as he lowered the phone. He tried to dial another number from memory, but accidentally called a pizza place he'd ordered from in 1997. After three more attempts and one confused conversation with a Walmart greeter, he finally reached Margaret.

Margaret, his lead attorney, answered on the second ring. She sounded harried.

"Bill, I've been trying to reach you for hours. We need to discuss immediate legal ramifications—"

"Can you unfreeze the accounts? Like, with a hair dryer?"

"Not without proof of insurance coverage or a comprehensive damage assessment that will take weeks to compile. The banks have already moved to protect their interests. Every line of credit is suspended pending resolution. I'm working on it, but realistically, we're looking at months of litigation before—"

He hung up on her too. His credit cards sat in his wallet. American Express, Visa, Mastercard. Pieces of plastic that he'd always assumed worked by magic. He'd never really thought about it.

The hotel he tried first was a Four Seasons downtown. He'd stayed there dozens of times before during extended work sessions that ran too late to justify the drive home. The woman at reception smiled with professional warmth that evaporated the moment his card declined.

"Perhaps another card, Mr. Gates?"

He tried three more. Each one produced the same apologetic beep from the card reader. He also tried inserting one upside down, then sideways. He asked if she could "make the card reader happier" by talking to it nicely.

"I'm sorry, sir, but without a valid payment method, I can't authorize a room."

Gates left. The valet brought his car around without asking for a tip. The Mercedes still ran, though a branch had punched through the back windshield at some point. Glass covered the rear seats. Gates stared at the branch for a solid minute, wondering how trees worked.

He drove aimlessly for a while, watching the city pass by through windows he'd never really looked through before. He got lost twice in his own neighborhood, mistaking a fire hydrant for a landmark he should recognize. Seattle at night had a quality he'd never noticed. The streetlights reflected off wet pavement. People walked dogs. Restaurants served food to customers who probably made in a year what Gates used to spend on a watch.

The car became his bedroom that first night. He parked in a residential area where nobody would bother him, reclined the driver's seat as far as it would go, and stared at the torn headliner. Someone's lawn sprinkler system activated at eleven PM, the sound rhythmic and vaguely soothing.

Day two brought hunger. Gates discovered he had thirty-seven dollars in his wallet. Physical cash that hadn't existed in his daily life for years. He stared at the bills, trying to remember which president was worth more. He bought coffee and a sandwich at a convenience store, watching the total climb on a digital display that seemed to move faster than it should. When it reached $8.47, he asked the cashier why the numbers kept changing. She explained tax. He nodded as if he understood.

The cashier looked bored. She handed him change without making eye contact.

"Bag?"

"What?"

"Do you want a bag for that?"

Gates stared at her blankly. "A bag of what?" He took the sandwich and coffee without answering, then walked into a display of chips because he was looking at the sandwich instead of where he was going. Back in the car, he ate mechanically, tasting nothing. The coffee had gone lukewarm already.

He made more calls throughout the day. Every conversation followed the same pattern. Sympathetic voices explaining why they couldn't help. Legal complications. Frozen assets. Pending investigations. The word "pending" appeared in every discussion, always followed by timeframes measured in months.

His phone battery died that evening. The charging cable was somewhere in the rubble of his office. Gates sat in the driver's seat, watching the screen go black, and considered his options.

Day three started with rain. Water dripped through the broken back window, soaking the leather seats. Gates woke up stiff, his neck cramped from the angle he'd slept at. His clothes smelled like smoke from the fires at headquarters. Or maybe that was just him. He couldn't tell. He sniffed his shirt experimentally, then sniffed the car seat, then forgot which smell was which.

The remaining cash had dwindled to twelve dollars. He'd bought more coffee, another sandwich, and a cheap prepaid phone charger that barely worked. He'd also accidentally bought a lottery ticket thinking it was a receipt. The mathematics of poverty revealed themselves with brutal clarity, though Gates kept trying to work them out on his fingers and getting confused after reaching ten.

He drove without destination, following traffic patterns. The city looked different now. Billboards advertised products he'd never considered. Bus stops sheltered people waiting for transportation he'd never used. The whole infrastructure of ordinary life had been invisible to him before.

The McDonald's appeared on a corner he must have driven past a thousand times. The building looked exactly like every other McDonald's in existence. Red and yellow signage. A parking lot with faded line markings. Drive-through lane wrapping around the side. Gates briefly wondered if all McDonald's were the same building that moved around at night.

The sign in the window read "Now Hiring" in letters that had faded from repeated sun exposure. Gates sat in the parking lot, looking at those words while rain hammered on the roof of his car. It took him almost five minutes to sound out the word "Hiring." He'd seen it before but never really needed to read it.

He'd run out of alternatives. The hotel had been his first choice, but that required money. Friends and colleagues had expressed sympathy but stopped short of offering concrete assistance. Everyone seemed to think Microsoft would recover, that this was temporary, that insurance and lawyers would eventually sort everything out. Nobody offered to actually help in the immediate term.

Gates got out of the car. Rain soaked through his shirt before he made it to the entrance. The automatic doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss. Gates jumped back, startled by the doors' movement. After watching them close and open twice, he understood they responded to his presence. He waved at them experimentally. They opened again. "Smart doors," he muttered.

Inside, the restaurant smelled like fryer oil and cleaning solution. Gates wondered if someone was cooking oil soup. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. A few customers sat scattered among the tables, eating food from paper wrappers. Behind the counter, three employees moved through choreographed routines Gates didn't understand. One operated the register. Another assembled sandwiches at a station near the back. The third bagged orders with mechanical efficiency.

The manager stood near the drink machines, reviewing something on a clipboard. She looked up as Gates approached. Middle-aged, dark hair pulled back in a practical ponytail. Name tag reading "Denise."

"Can I help you?"

Gates pointed at the window. "The sign says you're hiring." He squinted at it again. "Or is it 'Now Hiding'? The letters are confusing."

Denise studied him for a moment. Her eyes tracked across his wrinkled shirt, his unshaven face, the general disheveled appearance he'd acquired over three days of living in a car. She pulled a laminated form from under the counter.

"Fill this out. We need two forms of ID and your social security number."

Gates accepted a pen and began writing. He chewed on the pen cap while thinking. Name, address, previous employment. The address question made him pause because he couldn't remember his ZIP code. He wrote down what he thought might be close. Previous employment felt almost absurd to document, mainly because he had to check his wallet for a business card to remember what his title had been.

CEO of Microsoft Corporation. The letters looked strange in his handwriting, partly because he'd spelled Microsoft wrong the first time and had to cross it out.

Denise took the completed form, scanning it quickly. Her expression didn't change.

"Says here you ran Microsoft."

"Yes." Gates nodded enthusiastically. "I ran it real fast. Very fast running."

"You know that got destroyed by the tornado yesterday."

"I'm aware." He paused. "Tornado is the spinny wind thing, right?"

She set the clipboard down. "Look, I don't know what your situation is, and I don't particularly care. But I need someone who can show up on time, follow instructions, and not cause problems. This isn't a career position. It's minimum wage, part-time hours, and the work is hard. You understand that?"

"I need employment." Gates said this with confidence, though he wasn't entirely sure what employment meant beyond "getting money somehow."

"That's not what I asked."

Gates met her eyes. "I understand the terms. When do I start?"

Denise glanced at a schedule posted on the wall behind her. Someone had marked shifts in different colored pens, creating a grid that seemed to track availability.

"Training starts tomorrow morning. Six AM. You show up late, you're fired. You show up drunk or high, you're fired. You steal, you're fired. You fight with customers or other employees, you're fired. Everything clear?"

"Six AM. Yes." Gates nodded, then frowned. "Wait, is that the one before seven or after five?"

"Wear black pants and a black shirt. Non-slip shoes if you have them. We'll provide the uniform shirt after your first week if you last that long. Most people don't."

Gates nodded, though he'd already forgotten most of what she'd said. Denise handed him a single photocopied sheet detailing basic employee policies. The paper quality was poor, and the text had reproduced slightly smudged.

"Read that before tomorrow. Any questions?"

A hundred questions wanted to come out. What was a hamburger made of? Did the ice cream machine use real ice? Where did the nuggets come from? Were they related to chicken nuggets? Instead, Gates just shook his head, mainly because he'd lost track of the conversation.

"No questions." He squinted at the paper. "Is this in English?"

"Fine. See you tomorrow at six."

She turned back to her clipboard, already moving on to whatever managerial task required her attention next. Gates stood there for a moment, holding the photocopied paper, trying to process what had just happened.

He'd gotten a job at McDonald's. The thought seemed to belong to someone else's life. Some parallel universe where billionaires didn't exist and tornadoes didn't selectively destroy entire corporations.

Walking back to his car, Gates looked at the employee policy sheet. Bullet points detailed break procedures, uniform requirements, and conduct expectations. The language was simple, written for people who apparently needed detailed instructions on basic workplace behavior. Gates found it almost too complicated. He got stuck on the word "procedure" for a while.

The rain had intensified. Water ran in streams across the parking lot, pooling in low spots. Gates sat in the driver's seat, reading and rereading the policy sheet as if it contained hidden information that would make sense of his situation. He'd been holding it upside down for the first two read-throughs.

Six AM start time meant he needed to wake up around five-fifteen to allow for preparation and travel. Gates tried to do the math on how many hours of sleep that left him. He counted on his fingers, got confused, started over, then gave up. His last alarm had been on his phone, which no longer existed in functional form. He'd need to figure something out. Maybe the old car radio had an alarm function. He spent fifteen minutes pushing random buttons before accidentally locking himself out of the car. It took another ten minutes to remember his keys were in his pocket.

Black pants. He owned several pairs of black pants, all expensive and tailored. They were at his house, which may or may not still be accessible depending on how quickly the bank moved to secure their interests. The black shirt would be easier. He'd been wearing the same shirt for three days. It had probably started as white. Or gray. Or possibly beige. Gates couldn't remember and didn't know how to check.

Non-slip shoes. Gates looked down at his leather dress shoes. Italian leather, custom made, and probably completely inappropriate for restaurant work. He had eleven dollars left. Shoes would cost more than that. He wondered if he could just duct tape sandpaper to his current shoes to make them non-slip. That seemed like it would work.

The reality of his situation continued to reveal itself in layers. Each practical consideration exposed another gap between his previous existence and current circumstances. Money solved problems. Without money, every problem became an obstacle.

He started the car. The engine turned over smoothly. At least that still worked. Driving to his house seemed risky. If the bank had already moved to foreclose, showing up might create legal complications. But he needed clothes and shoes. The math didn't work otherwise.

The drive took twenty minutes through Seattle traffic, though it should have taken eight. Gates had forgotten which street his house was on and had to circle the neighborhood four times. His neighborhood looked undisturbed. No tornado damage here. The houses sat in their manicured perfection, sprinkler systems maintaining lawns that nobody actually walked on.

Gates pulled into his driveway. The garage door opener clipped to his visor still functioned, though he pushed it six times because he kept forgetting he'd already pushed it. The door rolled up and down repeatedly before staying up, revealing his wife's car and the accumulated storage of decades of wealth.

Inside the house, everything remained exactly as he'd left it. The security system beeped, waiting for the code he entered automatically. It took four tries because he kept typing his Microsoft login password instead. Lights activated as he moved through rooms filled with furniture and art and all the material evidence of success. Gates walked into a glass coffee table, having forgotten it was there.

He gathered clothes quickly, stuffing them into a leather overnight bag. Black pants. Black shirts. He also grabbed a red shirt because he forgot what color he needed. The non-slip shoes proved more difficult, mainly because Gates didn't know what non-slip meant. He eventually found a pair of old athletic shoes in a closet, rubber soles that might work. He tried to test if they were non-slip by throwing them at the kitchen floor. They bounced. He took that as a good sign.

His wife was visiting her sister in Portland. Gates had called her once from the ruins of Microsoft, explaining the situation in terms that sounded absurd even as he spoke them. She'd offered to come back. He'd told her not to. What could she do? Stand in the rubble with him?

He left a note on the kitchen counter. Simple message explaining that he'd taken some clothes and would be staying elsewhere temporarily. Didn't mention the car or the McDonald's job. Some humiliations were better delivered in person.

Back in the Mercedes, Gates drove away from his house without looking at it. He did clip the mailbox with his side mirror, but he didn't notice. The overnight bag sat on the passenger seat next to the employee policy paper. Everything he currently owned fit in one car.

He found a parking spot near the McDonald's, reasoning that staying close to his new employment made sense. He parked across two spaces because he'd never really learned to park properly. Someone had always done it for him. The back seat was still wet from the broken window, but the front remained dry enough. He reclined the seat again, staring up at street lights filtering through the windshield.

Tomorrow he'd start training for a minimum wage job at a fast-food restaurant. The sentence played in his mind on repeat, though he kept getting distracted by trying to remember what "minimum" meant. This was temporary. Obviously temporary. The lawyers would sort out the insurance situation. Accounts would unfreeze. Assets would be released. This was just a gap period. A momentary disruption. Gates nodded to himself, confident in this assessment, despite having no understanding of how any of those processes actually worked.

Except every phone call had contradicted that optimism. Months of litigation. Pending investigations. Frozen assets that might stay frozen for a year or more. The machinery of finance and law ground slowly, and it didn't care about his immediate circumstances.

Gates pulled the employee policy sheet out again, reading it by the dome light. Report to the manager upon arrival. Wash hands thoroughly before beginning work. Follow all food safety procedures as outlined in training. Maintain professional demeanor with customers at all times.

The instructions seemed written for children. Gates appreciated that because he was having trouble with the bigger words. Or maybe for people who'd never worked in food service before. Which technically included him. Gates had never worked in food service. He'd never worked in any service capacity. His entire career had existed in boardrooms, strategy sessions and high-level decision-making, though if asked to explain what any of those actually involved, he'd draw a blank.

Operating a cash register couldn't be that difficult. People did it every day. Teenagers did it as their first job. The training would explain everything. Tomorrow he'd learn the systems, understand the procedures, and perform adequately enough to collect a paycheck. Gates was confident about this, despite not knowing what a cash register was or how money worked.

It was temporary.

The thought repeated itself like a mantra. Temporary situation. Temporary job. Temporary poverty. Everything would resolve itself once the legal machinery started functioning.

Gates closed his eyes. Rain continued to fall. Someone walked past the car, footsteps splashing through puddles. The city moved around him, indifferent to his circumstances.

At some point he slept. Dreams came in fragmented pieces. Tornadoes and declining credit cards, with registers that beeped endlessly while customers waited. He woke up several times, disoriented by the unfamiliar setting, before remembering where he was.

The alarm on his new cheap phone went off at five-fifteen AM. Gates stared at it for thirty seconds, trying to remember what the noise meant. He silenced it and sat up. His back ached. The driver's seat had not been designed for sleeping.

He changed into the black pants and black shirt, using the car's mirror to check his appearance. It took him three attempts to get the shirt on right-side-out. The clothes fit but looked wrong somehow. Too formal for fast food. Not formal enough for anything else. He'd also forgotten to take off his pajama pants first, so now he wore two pairs of pants.

The athletic shoes completed the transformation. Gates looked at himself in the rearview mirror and saw a stranger. Someone who worked minimum wage jobs and slept in cars and worried about eleven dollars. He tried to brush his teeth using his finger and some rainwater from the broken window.

He locked the car and walked toward the McDonald's. Actually, he forgot to lock it first and had to walk back. The sky had started to lighten, though sunrise was still an hour away. The restaurant's lights blazed in the predawn darkness. Through the windows, he could see employees moving around inside, beginning their morning routines. Gates wondered if they were dancing.

Gates reached for the door handle. His hand hesitated there for just a moment, mainly because he was pushing instead of pulling. Then he figured it out and walked inside, still believing this was temporary, still believing that everything would eventually return to normal, still believing that tomorrow he would wake up and discover this had all been some kind of mistake. He had no evidence for any of these beliefs, but they felt true enough.

Denise looked up from the counter as he entered. She checked the clock on the wall, then nodded once.

"You're on time. Good. Come with me. Training starts now."

Gates followed her, walking into a trash can along the way because he was watching his feet instead of where he was going.