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Fiction
Code of Conduct
J.C. Michaels contemplates corporate immorality and individual responsibility.
The morning is early, the café empty, tensions mounting. Shiori sets down a pot of steeping tea and takes a seat across from Kye, a routine that offers a sense of stability amidst the uncertainty. Slowly, she guides strands of long dark hair behind her shoulder. “You seem to be hiding something,” she says.
“We’re both hiding,” Kye says.
“I know what I’m hiding,” Shiori says, “your friend’s entire family in the back – and they are people I barely know. If we’re caught, everyone involved will be fined and they’ll be deported on the first plane out of the country. But I’m talking about you. What are you hiding?”
Kye looks vacantly at the teapot. “What do you mean?”
“Let it rest a few more minutes,” Shiori says, then leans forward meeting Kye’s eyes. “Before the pandemic, plenty of foreigners came to my café. I could tell which ones came to experience a new culture and which ones were running from their problems. I think you’re in the latter category.”
Kye shrugs, leans back, letting his eyes wander around the knickknacks spread about Shiori’s café.
“And the room you rent from me – with cash…” she says. “Should I be worried? Why does a programmer need to hide?”
Kye rubs his lower lip against his upper teeth. “I didn’t do anything. But I was tempted. I can’t trust myself.”
“You don’t trust yourself?”
“When no one is watching, can any of us trust ourselves?”
Shiori’s eyes widen.
“Perhaps we never choose what is right,” Kye says. “Perhaps all we ever do is succumb to the inevitable.”
“You owe me an explanation,” Shiori says.
Kye gestures toward his cup. “Fill it to the top.”
• • • • •
Stern faced, lock jawed, face flushed, Lex sits at the head of the long conference table, his rotund stomach pressing into the rounded edge as he scowls at the programmers on both sides.
“Shall we get started?” he asks, shifting his mass until part of his belly rests atop the table. Like a drill sergeant, he stares down the phalanx of developers, who open their laptops, stare forward, ready to take notes and answer questions about the latest code debacle.
“Your screens aren’t going to protect you,” Lex bellows. “Look at me. I want eye contact. I want to see your faces. I want to believe – I really do – that you’re just bumbling, incompetent fools. Why do I want to believe this? Because that little problem we had this week seems intentional. I suspect some of you are foul-fingered monkey-wrenchers, trying to put a spanner in my works.”
Lex scans, scowls, sweats.
“If any of you have a problem with this company, leave. Walk out the door. Go to HR. Sign a non-disclosure agreement. Take two months severance pay – and don’t ever show your face again.”
Kye’s hands hover above his keyboard. He contemplates starting a timer that will release his own undocumented feature. The last code update was intended to start harvesting users’ data for marketing purposes and reselling it to third parties. The programming team was informed this was ‘for the benefit of the customer,’ a platitude no one believed. For Kye, the question was simple. Why should he do to others what he would not want done to himself?
Lex glares up and down the table. “Nothing to say? Just blank-faced idiots? Fools caught with your pants down?”
Kye has never seen a man so unhappy, so uncomfortable, so close to exploding both literally and figuratively.
Like a moment of calm as the hurricane’s eye passes, Lex sighs and relaxes his shoulders. “We’re building a company,” he says, “doing our jobs, earning a living for our families. The actions of one, affect us all. I understand your concerns. You may be overthinking our last update. Keep in mind, customers have already explicitly given us permission to use their data.”
Almost imperceptibly, Kye shakes his head. Lex is hiding behind the End User License Agreement, which is filled with fine print and legalese no one reads or understands, along with ambiguities that could only be untangled after a lawsuit and a court ruling.
No one speaks. Lex drums his fingers on his belly, scowls, and shrugs. “Cancel your plans for the afternoon,” he says, calmly. “Plan on staying late. We’re going through each line of code until we find the problem. And then, we’re going to determine who wrote that problem. Then security will escort that person out of the building. No severance pay. No polite letter of dismissal. Just a civil law suit.” Lex pauses, flexes his shoulders. Volume increasing, he adds “And criminal charges will be filed for fraud and sabotage. This is your last chance to own up and leave with any form of dignity.”
Kye is unperturbed by the threats. Lex might be the Chief Technology Officer, but he’s not a programmer. The line-by-line review is the diagnostic process of an amateur. The problem is not in the code, but injected into the compiler. If a finger needs to be pointed, it will be at the software manufacturer.
“Last chance,” Lex growls.
Kye’s hands rest above his keyboard. One key will start the ransomware, masked as if from a foreign source. Another key will erase all traces from his hard drive, like a blackboard cleaned with a wet cloth.
“You know,” Lex says, glaring at each programmer, “among you fools and second-rate coders, there’s only one of you I suspect would and could pull this off.” He plants his palms on the table, pushes back, his belly flopping onto his lap. He turns toward Kye and points his finger.
Kye taps a key and closes his laptop.
• • • • •
Kye still remembers the first time he discovered he could not trust himself. He had been visiting a school friend who wanted to show off his coin collection. In a corner of the bedroom, they tipped a small box of numismatic treasures onto the floor. Like archaeologists, they scrutinized the coins with magnifying glasses, reading dates and words, trying to determine the status of the person on one side, deciphering the meaning of the image on the obverse, and speculating about the potential value of each coin.
His friend was called out of the room. Suddenly, Kye was left alone. The desire to possess one of the objects penetrated his thoughts like water seeping into dry earth. How wrong would it be to take just one? All the coins did was sit in a box. Did his friend really need all five silver dollars? Suddenly, Kye could hear his friend returning. With each footfall, the desire spread until possession felt like survival. Kye snatched a silver dollar and slipped it in his pocket. When his friend returned, Kye stood up, announced that he needed to go home, and left.
Once home, Kye removed the coin from his pocket and stared at the coin. It no longer seemed as shiny or as interesting. He felt uneasy about his actions, but he was certain that if the situation were reversed, his friend would have done the same. Everyone knew everyone was a thief. If anyone were to blame, it was his friend for leaving him alone with a pile of treasure.
In college, Kye was compelled to once more reappraise his trust of himself when he came across a famous story from Greek antiquity. Plato tells of a shepherd named Gyges who discovers a mummified corpse wearing a mysterious, shiny ring. Gyges places the curious object onto his finger. Soon, he discovers that rotating the ring toward his body makes him invisible. Gyges is no longer interested in herding sheep. Instead, he begins scheming how to maximize his lot in life. Eventually, he uses his power to seduce the queen, kill the king, and seize the throne.
The question Plato was asking was, what would someone do if they could act without consequence, without punishment? Several novels and movies have been built around the premise of invisibility set forth in the tale of Gyges. In every case, power is abused. Ultimately, the protagonist becomes a threat to society and must be destroyed.
When Kye entered the workforce, he confronted the problem again, in a very real way. Since he was exceptionally talented in machine language, just one step above the direct manipulation of 0s and 1s, Kye felt the burden of having great power without oversight. In what circumstance would he employ this power? He was clearly not the only coder in such a predicament. Numerous times, he had uncovered unexpected algorithms, everything from clever Easter eggs to hidden code that could shut down a company. Each time, Kye left alone what he considered benign and dismantled what he considered malicious. He did so quietly, unknown to anyone, for he did not want others to know that he possessed such power.
Many companies were acutely aware of this vulnerability, but they would never ask programmers directly if they would retaliate if they felt slighted. Instead, companies implemented unit tests to confirm code does what it is supposed to do. But this was just code versus code. Who monitors the monitor? Companies also tried to keep programmers content with free food, flexible working hours, long vacations, employee perks, and fat paychecks. But such indulgences were no guarantee of compliance.
Photo at Pixabay. Public Domain.
For Kye, the most important question was not, What is the right thing to do? but rather, Is it possible to do the right thing? If the brain were just a computational system, maximizing some function and minimizing others, individual agency played little, if any role. Once input from the environment crossed a certain threshold – perhaps caused by a bad performance review, a pay cut, an insulting word – the resulting actions were simply determined. Perhaps he could no more prevent himself from taking down a company than he could have not stolen a coin.
Psychologists had plenty of evidence to demonstrate the conflict between what a person does when observed versus unobserved. If people had the opportunity to appear to act morally and ethically, while actually violating all such principles of propriety, they would. The vast majority of people were little more than moral hypocrites.
• • • • •
Lex turns toward Kye and points. “You. What do you think the problem is?”
Kye takes a deep breath. “Internal values,” he replies.
“What?” Lex says. “ Whose values?”
“Mine,” Kye says, pointing to himself and then gesturing around the room, “yours, the company’s, everyone’s.”
“You’re taunting me,” Lex says, wincing, tightening his lips. “Careful, or you’ll face the consequences.”
“The only consequences I face are my own,” Kye says.
Kye watches like a distant observer as Lex lifts his hand, curling his fingers into a fist. The table is about to feel the great man’s anger. Kye feels a wind of solace blow across him. He is no different from Lex, or from anyone else. Given the chance and the motivation, he would violate the company’s own privacy as readily as the company had violated users’ trust in privacy. Appearance is all that matters.
“I think you know exactly what the problem is,” Lex says.
“And so do you,” Kye replies.
Lex’s fist finally hammers the table. “Are you being rude, insubordinate, or both?”
“I’m leaving,” Kye says calmly, standing.
“The hell you are,” Lex bellows. “Sit down. I’m the boss here.”
“I’m resigning,” Kye says, sliding his laptop toward Lex.
“What the hell did you just do?” Lex bellows. “Did you just screw up the codebase? You’ll be sued and charged with criminal mischief. I swear.”
Kye shrugs. “Look as much as you want. You won’t find anything.”
“You need to sign a non-disclosure statement. You cannot just steal our code.”
“There’s nothing to steal.”
“God damn it, sign something or there’s no salary and no severance pay.”
“I don’t want the money. You can keep it.” Kye looks around the room at the other programmers. “We all know the company is doing to customers what none of us would want done to ourselves. But we can’t stop it. None of us can.”
“ Everyone is doing what we’re doing,” Lex responds.
“I agree,” Kye says. “I’m no longer sure it’s even possible to do the right thing. None of us can be trusted. Not me. Not you. Not this company. Not some other company. There’s only one solution.” The two lines of programmers arch their brows and turn toward Kye. Kye looks at their eager eyes and shrugs again. “You all know the answer – open source.”
“Open shit!” Lex screams as he stands up. He glares at Kye. “You need to sign a letter of resignation, and accept responsibility, or I’ll personally file criminal charges, today” Lex picks up a blank piece of paper and slides it across the table toward Kye. “Write it now. One sentence. Accept responsibility for the recent code problem and resign. That’s it.”
Kye pulls the paper toward him, picks up a pen, scrawls across the page, and leaves the room.
Lex snatches the paper, grips it tightly with his fingers, pursing his lips as he fumes through his nose and tosses it back onto the table. “What the hell is this?” he yells out.
The programmers crane their necks as they read the one word written on the page: Gyges.
© J.C. Michaels 2026
J.C. Michaels is an award-winning internationally published novelist, living in Taiwan, who uses literature to shine new light on great ideas. This piece is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress, The Miraculous Symposia at the Drifting Cafe.
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