It was a Very Hot Day in Sunnyvale

What Golem didn’t realize was that Candy Car in research and development was a hardheaded woman. She was diligent and enjoyed her work so much that her husband Shaun sometimes wondered if he would ever see her more than thirty minutes a day while she was awake. Lately, she had taken to analyzing these highly secret mixtures that Golem had been adding to all sorts of gadgets. Today she was going to spray a sample of the mixture on a video capture card and plug it into a running PC. It was a very hot day in Sunnyvale. It would soon get hotter. What concerned Candy was that she had identified a cyanide derivative in the lacquer. As long as the lacquer remained a solid it would not pose a significant health hazard. What Candy wanted to know was at what temperature the lacquer covering would start to melt. She was concerned that the level of cyanide in the surrounding air might reach dangerous levels. She had sent Golem an email the day before and had received assurances that the cyanide would be bound by other elements in the lacquer formula. Golem told her he had tested it himself. The problem for Candy was that she couldn’t get the chemistry straight in her mind. It bothered her that she couldn’t identify a chemical compound that would bind with the cyanide. It was odd that he had come to her office and insisted on knowing what she was working on, he was bald and the corner of his mouth had an uncontrollable twitch that was matched by her shaking arms. She was lucky to have gotten out of his house without getting caught. Why had he chosen that day to introduce himself? He never introduced himself to an employee.
She wanted to test the melting point of the lacquer or at least bring it up to a fairly high temperature to see if the chemistry changed as the material got hotter. What she didn’t know was that Golem had arranged to have the melting point lowered considerably without informing all of the concerned departments. Candy plugged the open USB unit into a computer. She had an analysis probe in her hands. In approximately 25 minutes she would be dead. Her death would remain a mystery for many years. Now that was a hot second date.
Golem was informed of the lab mishap about 30 minutes after Candy was dead. He grinned at himself in his office mirror on his way to “personally investigate” the tragedy. He knew she was dead when the pc she was working with registered a defective video TV tuner capture card; Golem watched from his webcam as she fell lifeless to the floor. Watching employees covertly with their webcams was just a little something Golem did for fun. Sort of like peeking into the neighbor’s window when the woman next door was undressing. He demanded a full company safety investigation into the incident and strongly lamented the loss of a great person and faithful lab tech. Heart attacks unfortunately take some of us at unusual moments. They are usually not planned. One doesn’t say “Today, I think I will have a heart attack and die at one forty-five.”

Golem wondered now if he could think someone dead. He had fantasized about killing this woman who killed his dog, but in actuality he probably would have fired her or reported her to the police if he could. He chuckled when he thought that somehow Candy had gotten her hands on an infected modem. It appeared to be a really big cloud of gas and Golem was a bit perplexed. The amount of cyanide on the main boards was not enough to be so visible—not much more visible, in fact, than a puff of exhaled smoke from a cigarette. Candy must have fucked something up bad. She must have really fried that modem somehow.

Somewhere Charlie was watching Golem now in another window and he fell off his chair in hysterics and rolled on the office floor. He probably could have been heard in heaven.