Leda and the Giants

LEDA LEVINE’S PARENTS were in an unannounced competition to see who could pay less of her college expenses. It was only really an issue when Leda ran out of money and didn’t have anything to eat for a week.

“I paid your rent, as per our agreement,” her father said, using robot language like he did when he didn’t want to deal with someone’s emotions. “Your mother is on food and bills, and her portion is already significantly less than mine.” 

“You can tell your father I don’t have any more money,” her mother said. “I’ve got Freddy’s braces. I’m still paying my own student loans. Your father makes twice as much as I do and he doesn’t have any debt.” 

Leda bought a bag of potatoes for three dollars at Safeway. For five days, she ate potatoes for every meal: boiled and mashed, first with butter, then with soy sauce when she ran out of butter. She supplemented with free candy from the jar in the tutorial center. It was crappy candy, little packets of jelly beans that no one wanted, but at least it kept her stomach from growling during class. 

On Saturday, Alisha took her out to lunch. They went to the place with the giant salads, Alisha’s treat. Leda ate until she thought her stomach would explode. 

“So, like, why are you starving again?” Alisha asked. “Your parents can’t just send you some money?”

“They’re…” Leda tried to figure out some quick way to explain, but her mouth was full of salad and she didn’t want to make her parents sound like assholes. Alisha thought they were assholes already. 

“You could try interning at Giantcom,” Alisha said. “You don’t have class on Friday, right? They don’t pay at first, but if they like you, they’ll hire you after a month.” 

Giantcom was where Alisha worked, some kind of tech company in San Francisco. She had started there as a summer job, but by August she was making so much money that she decided to take a year off college to work full time. The way she described it was like an amazing golden paradise in the sky.

“But I need money now,” Leda said. “I can’t work for free for a month.” 

“They have awesome snacks.” Alisha raised her thick eyebrows and bit into a breadstick. “All you can eat.” 

“Okay,” said Leda. 


“What do they do again?” Leda asked Alisha. 

They were riding in the elevator together, up, up, up to the twenty-third floor. The building had a security guard, and Leda wasn’t technically allowed in without an escort, so she had to show up with Alisha, even though Alisha stayed later than her at the end of the day. Alisha had told her to wear a hoodie and jeans instead of business clothes. A relief since Leda didn’t have any business clothes, though it did seem oddly specific. She wore her newest pair of jeans and the one hoodie she owned that didn’t have holes in it. No briefcase or fancy bag, just her wallet and phone tucked inside the small backpack she carried instead of purse. 

“We’re the global leader in scalability,” Alisha said. “We consult with tech companies that want to scale properly as they grow.” 

Leda wanted to ask what scale properly meant—it sounded familiar, like maybe Alisha had explained it sometime before and Leda hadn’t paid attention—but the elevator door opened and three guys got on. They were wearing jeans and hoodies, but their hoodies weren’t like Leda’s. They were fitted and sleek and seemed to be made of double-thick fabric, not baggy or frayed at the elbows. They kept talking right over Leda and Alisha’s heads, like Leda and Alisha were so far below them that they didn’t exist. 

Leda’s stomach was growling as she started her morning work. She’d eaten half a potato for breakfast and an apple her roommate hadn’t wanted, and she hadn’t brought anything for lunch. She sat in an empty cubicle, beige and undecorated except a laptop and a small motivational poster that looked like it had been ripped out of a calendar. Go big or go home, it said, over a picture of a huge sweaty guy lifting weights. Her job was entering numbers from the DataPrime system to the Telnext system. She tried scrolling down in the DataPrime window to see how many numbers there were, but they just went down, down, down, seemingly forever. 

After an hour, Josh dropped by to check on her. He was the manager of data entry. He was so tall, when Leda stood up, she was face to face with the strings of his grass-green hoodie. He wore it with tailored black jeans and gray wool sneakers.  

“Speeding along with those numbers?” he asked. 

“Yes, sir,” Leda said, trying to sound like a cheerful worker. 

“Good girl,” he said. 


Alisha came to get her for lunch at eleven. 

“Before the crowds,” Alisha said. “It’ll be quieter.” 

They walked down the hall, between cubicles occupied by important people having loud, important conversations. Everyone they passed wore jeans, sneakers and a hoodie.

“The uniform helps them avoid decision fatigue,” Alisha said. “So they can maximize goal- attention. Basically mindfulness. Instead of worrying about your clothes, you should keep focus on the reason you’re at work in the first place. Like, you know, why are you really here.

Leda wanted to throw the question back to Alisha: why are you really here? Her job was the just one step up the chain from Leda’s, entering the Telnext numbers that Leda took from the Dataprime list into the GC Central Server. Other than money—and it was evidently decent money—there didn’t seem to be any other reason.

They turned right, past something that was either an air purifier or an abstract sculpture, and there it was. 

The room of snacks. 

It looked more like a Whole Foods than a break-room. There were bins filled with bags of parmesan pretzels and whole wheat breadsticks. Mini-boxes of crackers, square ones and round ones and rabbit-shaped ones. Chilled cases full of individually-wrapped cheeses. One refrigerator filled with bottled smoothies, another for iced coffee drinks, another containing every possible flavor of kombucha. 

“Oh my god,” Leda said. The food of her childhood, comfort foods she only got to eat when she visited her parents, portioned into easy, single-serving containers. “It’s free?” 

“It’s for the employees,” Alisha said. “Take whatever you want.” 

Alisha set a bag down on a table and pulled out the lunch she’d brought from home: a salad, naan and a small container of dal. She took a rosemary-mint kombucha from the refrigerator, and a little bag of cookies for dessert. 

Leda took two boxes of crackers, five pieces of cheese, two bags of cookies, a smoothie and a coffee drink. She ripped open little bags, shoved salty and crunchy things into her mouth by the handful, while Alisha daintily tore her naan, complained about some glitch in the numbers in the Telnext spreadsheet.

“Someone fucked up the initial entry from Dataprime,” she said, giving Leda a warning look. 

“I’m being really careful,” Leda said. She was making a pile of discarded little bags on the table in front of her. “Is there, like, a limit on how much I can eat?”

Alisha shook her head. “It’s for while you’re working,” she said. “Take some more to your cubicle if you want.” 

Leda filled her pockets with protein bars, granola packets, foil-wrapped square of chocolate. 

Leda wasn’t starving on her second Friday at Giantcom. It was a new month, and her mother’s automated transfer had appeared in Leda’s bank account. She had gone to the thrift store, found a slightly nicer hoodie, loaded an audiobook on her phone to listen to while she entered her numbers. 

Behind the Capitalism Scam, the book was called.

“It is a fundamentally unfair system,” the book said, “that allows some workers to starve, while others accumulate giant excesses of wealth.”

During lunch, Leda found a basket of single-serving Sriracha bottles the size of her pinky finger.

“They’re so cute,” Leda said.

“Take a couple.” Alisha frowned. “I mean, you’re not supposed to take stuff home, but no one uses the Sriracha.” 

Leda put a handful into her pocket.

“In a capitalist system,” the audiobook said, “the labor class creates value for which the managerial class is compensated. The managerial class dismisses the labor class as dispensable and low-skilled, all the while reaping the rewards of their labor.” 

Leda chewed on a quinoa asiago crisp in her cubicle and thought about how unfair it was. She’d been doing data entry for ten total hours so far, and she wasn’t getting paid anything. Still, she double-checked the numbers. Go slow, make sure the numbers are right.

On the way out that day, she grabbed a handful of cheese sticks, a box of crackers, all the mini-Srirachas, and tossed them into her little backpack. 

The third Friday, Leda brought a tote bag. She folded it inside her backpack, along with an extra hoodie. 

“The proletariat must rise up,” her audiobook said, “and claim the rightful fruits of their labor.

Leda decided the audiobook was more important than the numbers she was entering. She turned her goal-attentiveness towards understanding the problems of capitalism. She’d never thought about it before, how college was basically a payment for entry into the high-payed classes, how it was training her to believe she was worth more than people who made sandwiches or cleaned bathrooms.

She might have fucked up a few of the numbers. She didn’t bother double-checking.

On her way out at 4pm, Leda stopped by the snack room. A woman was in there reading the ingredients of all the coffee drinks, trying to choose one. Leda pretended to be browsing the nuts. 

When the woman finally left with her drink, Leda pulled out the tote bag. Working quickly, she took three of everything: peanuts, cashews, crackers, granola bars, pretzels. Swiss cheese, Colby cheddar, mozzarella. Chocolates, licorice logs, ginger chews. Packets of almond butter and hazelnut spread. She topped the bag with two kombuchas and a smoothie, nesting them between the packages so they wouldn’t break or slosh around too much. She stuffed the extra hoodie on the top of the bag. If anyone asked, she’d say it was full of gym clothes. 

As she turned out of the snack area, she almost crashed into Josh. His hoodie was a darker green than before, forest-colored, and his wool sneakers were tan.

“Oh, hi there, Alexa’s friend,” he said, like that was Leda’s name. Leda didn’t correct him about Alisha’s name or her own. “How’s data entry?” 

“It’s good.” She watched Josh’s eyes drop from her face to her bag. “Alisha didn’t tell me it would be so much fun.” 

“Mmm-hmm,” Josh said. “I think the orientation materials you initialed mentioned that office amenities are purely for use during work hours.”

“Oh, yes, definitely.” Her voice sounded small and guilty. “That’s a very appropriate policy.”

He was still staring at the bag. Leda stood still and waited for him to walk past. 

“After you,” he said, gesturing down the hallway.

She looked up, way up to his face. She hadn’t really looked at it before; it was so high up. His eyes were blue and he had sandy freckles spattering his nose like Tom Sawyer. An aggressively friendly face, but he wasn’t smiling. His eyebrows were wrinkled, his lips pinched together.

“Oh, okay, thanks.” She hugged the bag tight under her arm, hoping there were no incriminating cracker-box shapes poking from the sides. “Time to hit the gym!” 

She started down the hallway, Josh a step behind her. With each step, her bag clinked. Three steps—clink, clink, clink.

She pressed her arm tighter over the bag, tried to silence the rogue kombuchas. Josh was right behind her-she could see his long shadow sprawled ahead of her—and her bag sounded like she was on her way home from the grocery store.

She took a sharp left out the front doors of the office suite. At the elevators, she pressed the down button, then turned to see if Josh was still following her. He hadn't left the office, but he was just inside, staring at her and talking on his phone.

She pressed the down button again, listened for signs of movement from the elevator shaft, but she couldn’t hear anything. There was a door to a staircase, emergency only, but she took a chance and opened it. She braced for an alarm, but there wasn’t one—or more likely, it was silent. She ran down the stairs, one flight down, five flights down, the bag of treats bouncing under her arm. Five more flights down. The bag dug into her shoulder, poked her ribs.

She considered abandoning it on the landing, but no: these snacks were her only compensation for the thousands of numbers she had transferred from one tiny column in one program to one tiny column in another program. She had fought for and earned these snacks. She needed these snacks. These snacks would feed her for the next week. These snacks—no matter how Giantcom had degraded her—were her victory over the oppressor, and she was keeping them. 

The staircase dumped her out near a back exit she had never seen before, a vestibule lined with recycling bins and mailboxes on the walls.

“Hey!” someone shouted. It was the security guard, the one she usually passed on the way into the building. Josh must have called him.

Leda grabbed the bag tight and ran past him. 

She ran out the door, looking over her shoulder to see if he was following. He was, slowly, yelling and waving his arm towards her.

She kept running, around the block. Down a side alley, out onto the street again. Into the BART station, just in time for the train back across the bay. As the doors slid closed, she saw someone who looked like the security guard walking quickly towards them. Or it might might have been one of the police officers who rode the train to kick homeless people off.

Either way, he was too late. The doors were closed and the train was moving, fast, into the tunnel under the bay. Usually it kind of scared Leda, but today she didn’t want anything more than to be deep in the ground, as far from the golden paradise in the sky as she could get.

Don’t come back, Alisha texted her the next morning. In case that isn’t obvious.

Leda texted an emoji of a sheepish yellow person looking extremely apologetic.

It’s okay, Alisha said. Remind me never to get you a job again.

Leda wasn’t sure she ever wanted a job again. It was possible that Giantcom had ruined her on the whole concept of jobs forever.

Want to come over for snacks? Leda texted.

They spent all Saturday watching The Office and eating Giantcom’s crackers and pretzels and cheese sticks and kombuchas. But the bag of snacks lasted longer than that. In fact, Leda didn’t finish the very last packet of cookies until one week later.

After that, she bought another bag of potatoes. She mashed them with Sriracha from finger-sized bottles, and they actually weren’t half bad. 

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