“Good morning, Mr. Henwick! Beautiful weather today!” The front desk lady greeted him as soon as he walked through the giant glass door. She was uncannily beautiful, a blonde with light blue eyes and perfect proportions. She was always obnoxiously cheerful, smiling as if life was a toothpaste commercial.
She had no visible mutation, but he liked to think this was something the Mayday had done to her—a perfect receptionist creature mutation. Arcen had never been able to decide if he was creeped out by her or if he wanted to ask her out. He felt the familiar tickle at his throat again when he let his eyes linger on her for a second too long. His body had picked an answer for him—the one his brain and the HR department didn’t approve of.
“Morning, Ms. Jenna,” he nodded at her, making sure not to use the word ‘good’ anywhere inside this building. It wasn’t a good morning. It wasn’t a good building. Nothing has ever been good since Mayday. He thought ‘good’ should be banned as a word, and anyone still using that should be sent to a gulag.
“We’ve resolved your issue and restored all functions to your employee dashboard,” she said, flipping her hand gracefully. Arcen’s employee dashboard materialized in his eyes.
The fuck outta my face.
He swiped it away with a flick of his eyes, like skipping an annoying ad when watching a video.
“Thanks...” he said, trying his very best to smile. This was way milder than whatever he was expecting. They’ve just solved the entire mind hack situation without involving him once. This was unusual.
I wonder why nobody’s chewing me out a bit.
She kept her bright eyes on him the whole time, trying to maintain eye contact. He reached the elevator and waved at the creepy girl. Helviter hired the best people for the job. Sometimes that just wasn’t a good thing.
The elevator took him seventeen floors down to the Fertility Department. This was his home away from home for the last few years. Employees from other departments called it the Inkhead club. He was hired because of his perfect cephalopodan mutation. That was a requirement in this department.
He had dreams before he became an employee. He used to draw, tried writing novels, and wanted to play guitar. Helviter had a way of hammering those rough edges out of an employee. No one remained the same person after eighteen rounds of interviews and the eight months of orientation.
Putting his backpack in a locker, he pinned his badge to the left side of his chest.
Mr. Arcen Henwick - Lead Sorter.
He had done well in his last three years of employment. He was employee of the month for four months, and the best performer in the most recent quarter.
The sorting items were neatly laid out for him in his office. They were inside white metallic cylinders, each about one foot long. He had a new pallet with a hundred of them. Each cylinder had a unique ID and some corresponding information in a database. He loaded the first one into the slot in his analyzer machine, and he put on a helmet that was custom made to fit him.
This was the most unpleasant part of his job. This helmet was soft and fleshy inside. It always took a little while to get used to the tickling sensations caused by its throbbing muscles. The headgear finished calibrations, and its soft meat flaps above his eyes parted after it synced with his Mind Matrix. The screen came from the corners of his vision, letters weaving into the familiar blue gradients of Helviter user interfaces.
The words appeared in his eyes when the rippling distortions gathered and changed color to blue. This was his proper employee dashboard. He selected his portrait to check his numbers. It was always a good idea to keep track of them, and he was worried about his payout because of that mind hack.
┌──═════════──???──═════════──┐
HELVITER INDUSTRIES
︾
EMPLOYEE DASHBOARD
──────────────────────────
9:03 AM
Good morning, Mr. Henwick.
You have 113 specimens today.
──────────────────────────
?INFORMATION?
──────────────────────────
ID: 1768-C
Name: Arcen Henwick
Department: Fertility
Position: Lead Sorter
──────────────────────────
?EMPLOYEE ATTRIBUTES?
──────────────────────────
Ambition: 5
Control: 7
Awareness: 5
Foresight: 16
Memory: 3
──────────────────────────
?DUALITY CONTRACT?
──────────────────────────
Category: Chronos
Title: Glimpses of the Future
Cost: $1,300 [Single Use]
Daily Quota: $130,000
──────────────────────────
?PERFORMANCE METRICS?
──────────────────────────
Intelligence Index: 8.6
Intelligence Volatility: 7.4
Sort Consensus: 97%
──────────────────────────
?EARNINGS?
──────────────────────────
Hours: 176
Base: $10,800
Overtime: $4,800
Total: $15,600
──────────────────────────
└──═════════──???──═════════──┘
He sighed with relief when he saw his payout intact. That was the only stat that mattered to him. This employee dashboard wasn’t the one that oily kid pulled out on the train. He couldn’t remember it in detail, but there were more rows with numbers that looked like employee attributes. He didn’t have a clue why they were hidden from him here.
Well, why should I give a shit? Back to work.
It wasn’t like he could see it again even if he wanted to. This was the entire system that he had access to when wearing his headgear. There were no other buttons or links that he could press to bring up anything else. Helviter kept its interfaces clean and minimalist for maximum productivity. It was just like Karnic told him in the call. The girl had accessed the Helviter internal database through him.
He closed his dashboard and opened the first cylinder. A timer started in the top right corner, measuring his sorting time down to milliseconds. Most other employees were anxious about this, as it was the key metric in their performance reviews.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Arcen wasn’t worried at all. He was really good at his job.
┌──═════════──???──═════════──┐
HELVITER INDUSTRIES
︾
ANNOUNCEMENT
──────────────────────────
Let’s sort these fucking babies! >.<
└──═════════──???──═════════──┘
He recoiled at the notification.
What the fuck? She’s in here too?!
He reached for his phone to call Karnic, but to his surprise, Karnic was already calling him. He picked up the call, fingers trembling.
“Sir—”
“Henwick—”
They both stopped like bumper cars that crashed face-to-face. Karnic hesitated for a second longer because of the panic in Arcen’s voice. Taking the initiative, Arcen started speaking before he did.
“I’m being hacked!”
“Again?!” Karnic hissed. “Wasn’t this solved already?”
“There was a message right now! It’s still-”
“Let me check,” Karnic said, holding the line for a few seconds. “I have your activity logs. There’s nothing wrong.”
“But-”
“Henwick, nobody’s hacking anyone here at HQ,” Karnic said in a low voice. “I guess what happened on the train was too much for you. Do you need the day off?”
He wants to say I’m being a bitch.
“No! I don’t need the day off, sir!” He was collecting his paid vacation days for a trip at the end of this quarter.
Karnic stayed silent for a few seconds, only his breathing audible through the phone. He cleared his voice and started with his sharp tone. “Well…because you sound like you’re doing so well, I have something important to tell you. Meet me in my office in three hours. We have a meeting. I put your name in for an R&D thing last week. If we get it, this can be huge.”
Wait what in the world is this about?
Arcen held the phone for a second, trying to think through what he just heard. Karnic had put his name up for some research and development thing, and he wanted a meeting in the morning, of all times. Karnic never really scheduled a meeting with his employees in a way that would cut into their work hours. He always had cunning little ‘talks’ with him in the canteen at break, or urgent calls on the weekend.
If Karnic was willing to waste time, it meant something that was worth wasting time on. Arcen could almost smell the dollars.
“What is it about, sir? If you don’t mind my asking?”
“They need a Ceph for this new tower business. Huge project.”
Say what now?
Arcen loved and hated that sentence. He loved that they needed a Ceph for a huge project. He hated that it had something to do with towers.
They were places where no salaryman with a well-paying job should go. Thousands of ambitious people died all over the world every week, believing they had what it takes to meet the new gods. As far as he was concerned, these were deathtrap cylinders—far more unnecessary than climbing Everest.
Deciding that a meeting couldn’t hurt either way, he sighed quietly.
“I’ll meet you in three hours, sir.”
Having wasted about five minutes of his workday, Arcen injected his mind into the currently loaded tube. He could taste the slimy liquid inside it without actually licking it. He could smell its unborn soul, and he could see its future. For a brief moment, he became the person inside the tube.
He saw glimpses of it. A woman looked down at him with tears in her eyes. He was chewing on a rubber toy. He was blowing out three candles on a cake. He was dancing, flexible and elegant. He was ten years old, and he knew the answers to all the questions on the exam.
He was thirteen, trying to get some attention from the boys with a bit of lipstick. He was seventeen and sad for some reason. He was twenty-two and happy with a degree in STEM.
He was twenty-eight, giving a speech to a large crowd. He was thirty-seven, driving a car with cashmere interiors. He was thirty-nine and pregnant. He was...
┌──═════════──???──═════════──┐
HELVITER INDUSTRIES
︾
──────────────────────────
?Contract Activation Successful?
──────────────────────────
Contract: Glimpses of the Future
Cost: $1,300
Remaining Daily Quota: $128,700
└──═════════──???──═════════──┘
He interrupted the analysis and looked at the notes that came with the cylinder. This was calculated from the answers on the client survey document.
’Client expects a social index score of 8.5 or above.’
The best he could give it was a 6.1 if he was being charitable and 5.2 if he was being analytical. He punched those numbers in and removed the cylinder from the slot. There were three chutes to send the cylinders through in his office. They were color-coded red, orange, and green. He placed the cylinder in orange and watched it disappear into the darkness.
The next cylinder was up to spec.
┌──═════════──???──═════════──┐
HELVITER INDUSTRIES
︾
──────────────────────────
?Contract Activation Successful?
──────────────────────────
Contract: Glimpses of the Future
Cost: $1,300
Remaining Daily Quota: $127,400
└──═════════──???──═════════──┘
’Client expects a social index score of 6 or above’
It scored a comfortable 7.2. That was lucky. The kid was going to grow up to be a decent athlete and ended up in some mid-tier sports magazines. He became a coach for a school district, got involved with politics, and ended up in the state government. That went into the green chute.
┌──═════════──???──═════════──┐
HELVITER INDUSTRIES
︾
──────────────────────────
?Contract Activation Successful?
──────────────────────────
Contract: Glimpses of the Future
Cost: $1,300
Remaining Daily Quota: $126,100
└──═════════──???──═════════──┘
He hurled the next two into the red chute. The first one didn’t meet the minimum viability score of three, and the other one was destined to die in early childhood by an incurable genetic disease.
The fourth cylinder was ridiculous.
’Client expects a social index score of 9.5 or above. Additional Note: Needs to be objectively attractive, the mother is Mrs. Jennifer D. Clinton, former B-list celebrity’
It scored 4.3. He had to throw it into the red chute. Her facial bone structure wasn’t good enough to stand out. She wasn’t the best at playing the roles she was supposed to play. She constantly failed to deliver performances, and it shattered her self-confidence before the age of fourteen. It spiraled into a drug addiction that she never recovered from, and she died from an overdose at twenty-two.
The rest was a blur. He finished 47 embryos by the time he stopped to meet Karnic, and he couldn’t tell the last ones apart. They were just numbers.
This was the best part of his job. He didn’t have to suffer through all nine hours. He was fine as soon as he hit that flow state. It was just numbers from there. He could just go off based on the feel of their futures—a predictive analysis sorting machine with unrivaled performance in the Fertility Department.
┌──═════════──???──═════════──┐
HELVITER INDUSTRIES
︾
──────────────────────────
?Contract Activation Successful?
──────────────────────────
Contract: Glimpses of the Future
Cost: $1,300
Remaining Daily Quota: $61,100
└──═════════──???──═════════──┘
He met Karnic at his office after three hours. They were the only two employees in the department on this day. This was a slow quarter in a relatively clear-weather season. Most other employees—especially those with families—were using their saved-up vacation days.
“Sit down, Henwick,” he nodded curtly, slurping from a tall iced coffee mug the size of a forearm.
“Mr. Karnic, how are you doing?” Arcen didn’t care how his bulb-headed boss was doing. It was just polite to ask.
“Fine, fine.”
His boss was another full Ceph with an octopus head at least five times the volume of Arcen’s. This man could never travel on any public transport. He used to come to work in a beat-up minivan until Helviter rewarded him with a shiny new Lexus SUV.
He also had an ego the size of his head because he built the department by himself. He would tell anyone who listened how he used to sort four pallets, four hundred embryos per day, in those early days when it was just him.
A head that big had better come with an advantage.
“So listen, I already had the meeting without you. They couldn’t wait. It’s exactly like I said, R&D needs a Ceph for some predictive analysis gig,” Karnic told him in his sharp tone.
“I still don’t know what this is about, sir?”
“That’s right. My apologies. Long story short, I need you on Saturday. I’m asking you now in case you have things to deal with. Before you give me an answer, consider what you’ll be getting out of it. You get OT pay, full forty-eight hours of it. I’ll even throw you a $2,000 department bonus. How about it?”
“The full forty-eight hours? What does that mean, sir?”
It was against company policy to allow overtime for more than three hours. A department head could extend it. A full forty eight hours at Arcen’s overtime rate of $150/hr would be $7,200?. That was no doubt a good deal. Combined with the bonus, it was rent made in a single weekend. More money was always good.
He knew he was going to say yes, no matter what. Karnic knew it too, which is why he phrased it the way he did—reward first, task later. Arcen wasn’t stupid.
“What should I do, sir?”
“It’s off site. In Wensik. R&D has a research station near one of the towers. You get free transport, meals, and a room to sleep. You’ll do the same things you always do. R&D has the same machines, same specs. They have until Saturday to calibrate theirs with your settings if you say yes. So, what’d you say?”
Karnic wasn’t leaving a single gap in the conversation, just brute-forcing through with urgency. Arcen would’ve said, ‘I’d think about it,’ if it wasn’t for the fact that this was a $9,200 gig.
It was a foregone conclusion the moment he heard the numbers involved. He was afraid of towers, but this wasn’t about climbing towers. It was just a gig with some tower material. That wasn’t scary enough to stand between him and rent.
“Alright, sir. Sign me up,” he replied.
“Great,” Karnic smiled. “You can have the rest of the day off.”
“R-really?”
“You just had a weird day, you can use a break. See you tomorrow, Henwick.” Karnic nudged his enormous head towards the door, dismissing him.
That wasn’t Karnic calling him a pussy. That was Karnic throwing him a bone because whatever this R&D thing was, it was going to move much larger numbers between departments. He was basically renting out his best Ceph to a very important ‘huge project.’
Arcen hurried out of Helviter HQ about five minutes later.
Having a whole half of a day to himself in the middle of the week was a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that he had the time to do something. The curse was that he had nothing to do in New Manning on a Tuesday.
Seeing the impending cloud of boredom and indecision that could waste a lot of his time, he called his sister. He needed a ride.
“Where are you?” He asked as soon as she picked up.
“I’m at NT ballroom, anything wrong, Arcie? You never call at this time?” She sounded worried immediately. This was indeed a weird time to call her. Regardless, she wasn’t far away. The NT ballroom was in New Manning, just on the other side of the city.
“When are you done with your stuff?”
“About an hour left. It’s just rehearsals. Why?”
“I got the day off. Just come pick me up when you’re going home.”
“Whoa, what did you do?!” His sister exclaimed. A day off from Helviter was basically unheard of. “You’re not sick or anything, are you?” She asked suspiciously.
“No, just good performance,” he lied.
He wasn’t going to tell her about getting mind hacked in the train because she would be making a big deal about it than it needed to be. He didn’t want to tell her about accepting a dangerous-sounding nine-thousand-dollar tower gig either. It was on Saturday. He didn’t want her to worry about it all week. That was the kind of thing he’d drop on Friday night over dinner.
“You know what, fuck rehearsals. I’m coming in five.” She sounded more than a little excited about his day off.
This worried him immediately.
Please, don’t drag me into some bullshit.
