The director arrived. She introduced herself. Martin immediately forgot her name. He was terrible with names. She looked them all over appraisingly, like a farmer inspecting a herd of dairy cattle she considered purchasing. She did not sit in the comfy chair but stood over them. Perhaps if the throne were up on a large enough dais for her to tower over them, she would have sat. “Let’s get this out of the way first. According to the contract, you have been offered at will employment with Ameritsource. You will begin at your current salary. You will find that our benefits are comparable to your current employer. You will be receiving an email with details and HR contacts who can answer any questions you have.”
Joe from the billing system development team raised his hand.
The director didn’t even glance in Joe’s direction. “I will not be answering any questions. I am here to talk, and you are here to listen.”
Joe dropped his hand and his jaw.
“I assume you understand what at will employment means. If you don’t, look it up. You have been offered a job. That doesn’t mean you get to keep it.” She paused and glared at them. Daring them to say something. No one did. “You will be assigned to one of our existing supervisors. Initially, you will be performing your current duties. The duties of project members who were not offered positions will be distributed to yourselves and other resources as we see fit. You will remain in your current seating arrangements until such time as we can find office space that does not require cohabitation.”
Like a bunch of bad rooky poker players, his fellow resources did their best to suppress reaction, while furtively glancing around to see everyone else’s reaction to the deal.
She continued, “Things will be different.” She let that sink in. “You may do the same work, but that is where the similarity ends. We are sub-contractors, not employees, and your current objectives concerning what you do will be irrelevant. The contract specifies certain standards. We will not talk about those because the only thing that matters is the financials. We are paid by billable hours. The more hours you bill, the more valuable you are to the company.” She swept her gaze across their faces to see if the cattle understood. “Our salaried employees are required to work a minimum of 50 hours a week of which only 10% can be non-billable.”
There was uncomfortable shifting in the room.
“Currently our US salaried employees log an average of 64 hours per week.”
Someone groaned under his breath.
“Things will be different,” she said and headed toward the elevators.
After she was safely out of earshot, Joe ran both hands through his thinning hair and said, “Oh my God.”
The frazzled man and young lady with the bindi began folding up the chairs. He was tempted to ask them if that was for real or if they had just witnessed an avant-garde performance art piece. Had they been punked? But the two were giving off a definite don’t talk to me vibe, so he didn’t. He sat there until his was the only chair left. He wondered if they would snatch it out from under him. They pointedly ignored him and went about other business, folding up tables.
Martin got up and headed for his Sanctum of Solo Reflection. The sanctity of his sanctum had been violated. There were two men standing at the sinks using the soap and towels he had brought up. Nothing was sacred. They were talking as he came in the door, but the conversation cut off when they heard him. He couldn’t turn around and leave now; that would be awkward. He didn’t need to use the restroom, so he just went into a stall and sat to think.
The more he thought about the two meetings, the angrier he got. The surplused employees could attempt to find another job in the company. Something he would have had no problem doing. The chosen ones get to work for these jerks, if they can stand it. Finding a new job in the middle of The Great Recession wouldn’t be easy. Things certainly are different. His boss could hide in California, but his director was in the building.
Fuming, he strode through the labyrinth to the director’s office. Normally he would avoid talking to anyone if he was angry, but he was beyond caring. He wanted answers, or to vent, or something.
He knocked on the doorframe of the director’s office and asked if they could speak, polite habits overriding rage for the moment. The director sat in his high back I’m a big shot chair behind a large metal desk strategically situated to act as a bulwark against any assault coming through the door. Over his desk, a dead tree limb was mounted to the wall like a prized possession. Martin had heard the story of the limb. The director was fond of emerging from his office after quitting time to regale any of “his boys” that were still around with tales of the good old days. On one such occasion long ago he had told Martin the well-rehearsed tail of the limb. It involved a bullshit motivational aphorism he couldn’t remember.
The director folded his hands on the desk and looked at Martin with perhaps a touch of sadness in his eyes. “What can I do for you, Martin?”
He had to give him that, he knew the names of everyone in the organization; Martin couldn’t say the same. He hadn’t thought through what he was going to say, so he floundered, “Uh… um, do you know I was outsourced?” Of course he did. It was foolish to think he didn’t know about it and a ridiculously futile hope that once he did he would rise to the defense of “one of his boys” and set the whole thing right. But it started the conversation.
The director sighed. “Yes I do,” he said and then waited for Martin to drive the next point of discussion with an uh oh, here it comes look replacing the sadness in his eyes.
Martin didn’t think he was getting anything from his new sense about the man’s mood. Perhaps this was due to too much emotion and too many thoughts racing through his mind. Or maybe he had imagined the whole business and had finally returned to his senses. The struggle between fury and his innate need to keep things civil made speech difficult. He managed to say, “Why?”
“They didn’t want to offer any jobs. We made them take key employees. We were not convinced they could maintain service levels otherwise. They are required to keep you for a year.”
“Well that explains the meeting I was just in. They made it clear, without coming right out and saying so, that they don’t want any of us.”
“We can’t open that kimono.”
“So you’re saying that because I am such a valuable employee, you sold me like a piece of used furniture to a company that doesn’t want me and is perfectly willing to make life miserable until I quit.”
The director’s jaw muscles worked as he ground his teeth. “You can’t look at it that way. You have a job. The surplused employees do not.”
“They can find another job in the company. I wouldn’t have a problem with my record and skills. If not, there’s a severance package.”
The director sat back in his big shot chair, folded his arms, and said, “It is what it is,” as if that explained everything.
Martin understood that was another way of saying: Shit happens, get over it. The conversation was going nowhere, so he got up and left. So much for answers or venting improving the situation or his mood.
He strode back down the hall toward either his desk or the exit, unsure of which it would be. If he got to his office and kept going, then the exit would be his destination. As he neared E6 and the decision point, a wave of immense betrayal and helplessness washed over him like a big black oil slick. He stumbled on the smooth beige commercial carpet and nearly fell to the floor. It took supreme effort not to lay down right there and have a good cry. It was irrational to have such an overwhelming response; he wasn’t that attached to the stupid job. But that knowledge didn’t help. He trudged on, as though the stygian wave had filled his hip waders with water and the hallway was knee-deep in sludge. Collapsing into a pile here in the hallway would be embarrassing and awkward at best. He would get it together or lose it in the semi-privacy of his cubicle.
Martin staggered into his cube, dropped into his chair and turned to face the partition opposite the opening. Made it
. He took a deep breath, swallowed the sobs that attempted to burst forth, and put his head down, his forehead resting on his folded arms. This reaction was bewildering, so much stronger than when his father died or when he discovered his first girlfriend cheated on him. But telling himself he should not feel this way did not help. Anger, frustration, and helplessness were in the big stew pot of boiling emotion, but the soup base it simmered in was a sense of betrayal.
It was not rational to expect loyalty from a soulless thing like a corporation, but he must have. The Supreme Court ruled that companies enjoy some of the same rights under the First Amendment as citizens, but that didn’t make them people. They don’t enjoy anything. No court ruling or heart-shaped pocket watch could grant them a heart. But somewhere deep within him, resistant to logic, he was wired to expect that good and faithful service would be rewarded in kind, even though he knew better.
Thoughtfully considering the nonsensical source of his emotions helped him to ignore them briefly, but the burner was on high, and the soup was about to bubble up over the lip of the pot. A hand softly touched his shoulder and slid the kettle off the fire.
21
It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
—From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Martin was gone, and the living souls on the floor had filtered out of the building as the sun dipped below the horizon. Millie had no one to watch unless she expanded her view. She didn’t want to do that. What if there were more of the predatory poltergeists out there. One was enough to deal with. Besides, there wasn’t much to learn from people watching at this point. So she had only her thoughts to keep her company.
Martin would move her things to a place the beast didn’t know, so at least for a while she would be safe from it. Her stuff wouldn’t get thrown in a dumpster or divvied up among other employees. With fear subsiding she felt something new. Millie was pissed. Such an aggressive emotion was rare for her.
Why should she have to hide? Why should she live (heh) in fear? She spent her life avoiding contentious people and situations. Maybe it was time for a change. But what could she do? The thing was so much more powerful than she. How does one get rid of a ghost? She couldn’t talk it into leaving her alone. If ghosts could speak to one another, she hadn’t figured out how. Could she trick it somehow into making the choice to join the Blazing Star or the Black Hole? The depth of its aura indicated it had experienced eons. The songs themselves, whose chorus swelled and enticed her at the mere thought of them, hadn’t coaxed it into making a choice over the ages. It was doubtless too clever to be conned.
She would have Googled it if she had enough juice. It was unlikely she would find anything there that would work, and if she did, could she tell it from the fantastical garbage? But she thought it possible the ancient traditions of dealing with ghosts might have a grain of truth to them, since, as it turned out, ghosts were real.
She Googled her eidetic memory instead, recalling every bit of supernatural lore she had encountered in literature, movies and television in her life. Evaluating them in the light of what she knew, she discarded each as either ridiculous or as something she had no way to assess. Burning sage might smell nice, but she didn’t think it would bother a ghost. It seemed to her that spoken rituals were likely for the benefit of the living since ghosts couldn’t hear them; at least she couldn’t. That was something she could work on later.
She was inclined to dismiss all the religion based ghost extermination methods since she hadn’t seen any signs of gods or angels or of anything that closely tied her current world to a particular faith. But even those could contain core principles that were true. She didn’t have faith that sprinkling Holy Water would chase the beast away, but maybe a large enough body of salt water could ground out its power supply. It seemed unlikely that drawing wards on the wall or floor would somehow affect a ghost. But was there something to the notion of an angelic language or a language of the gods, which was in the tradition of many ancient religions? Since she couldn’t learn a language on her own even if there were one, she would have to leave that until later.
Salting and burning bones was likely nonsense created by TV writers. How could potions, charms and hexes scare off a ghost? She hadn’t yet noticed that any matter affected her differently than any other. She couldn’t see how different combinations of stuff in a pot or the construction of a thing out of bones and feathers would do anything.
After going through everything she found in her memories without finding anything useful, she approached it as a science problem, using what she knew of the physical laws of her existence. She lived in a realm of energy and will power. She would need a means to communicate in order to affect the monster’s choices, which she didn’t have. So she focused on the energy. Energy could be absorbed or contained. The stone and steel of the building blocked the portion of the sun’s rays that refilled her energy, but the windows did not. Millie Force energy shared that property with light, so perhaps they had other similarities. Waves could be canceled out like sounds were with noise canceling headphones. Light could be reflected or refracted. Maybe there was something to the magic mirror business. She would have to test that out sometime, but she wasn’t sure how she would use that at the moment.
Passing through materials required considerable energy. Passing through heavier matter might use more. That was something else she would have to test when she had the power to spare. Enough earth or a heavier material like the lead shielding of a reactor might take more energy than the beast carried to get through. Did the men in black have a secret salt mine somewhere in Utah that contained dangerous ghosts like the Ghost Busters? She didn’t come up with anything immediately useful. She grew tired of thinking about it and cranked her perceived passage of time up to maximum until the sun came up and the office showed signs of life.
She resumed her people watching, waiting for Martin to come in. Jill, the administrative assistant who sat outside the director’s office, was always one of the first to arrive in the morning. She saw Jill boot up her computer and check her email. Millie wasn’t learning anything about the computer she didn’t already know. She was about to search for something more interesting when the administrative assistant logged onto the banner board maintenance web page and changed the message from “Congratulations, Sales Sharks!!! Your skit takes the prize!!!” to “Quarterly earnings up 7 cents per share. To be powerful is to fly easily over the biggest obstacle.” Millie now had the URL and the password burned into her brain.
She waited until Jill closed the banner board manager and the sun’s morning rays had provided her with enough energy. Using her computer, she logged onto the web page and added a playful message to the banner board for Martin—one that only he might get and that everyone else would only think was a prank. She waited until Martin came through the doors to send her flirtatious note to the large board, replacing the one Jill had programmed. Just in case he missed it, she also left an instant message for him: “Morning! M.”
Martin stopped just inside the fire doors and read her banner board message, his dour mood lifted until he got to his desk. He had left his computer on the day before, so he only had to unlock it. As he scanned the screen, his mood became grim once more. Without reading or handling anything, he stood and headed out into the hall and up the stairs. Millie didn’t follow him from there. She had seen before that he used the restroom up there.
She lost track of Martin for a time after that. If she searched the building she could have found him, but she saw little point in watching him attend meetings she couldn’t hear. Instead she watched Kim of the Endless Personal Phone Calls, in the cubicle next to hers using Photoshop to touch up a photo for a brochure while holding her cell phone against her ear with her shoulder. She had
been so focused on learning to use the computer to communicate with Martin that she hadn’t thought about all the programs on the computer she had used to create artwork. With the meager amount of energy she was able to store, she couldn’t hope to carve stone, but she could make digital art as long as she had access to a computer. 3D printers were becoming readily available and inexpensive, so with help it was possible she could even design sculptures! She excitedly considered the possibilities of this while sitting in her chair with the sun trickle-charging her batteries, and she waited for Martin to come back to his desk to share her revelation with him.
He was furious, his aura sparking with angry shades. He went past his cubicle. At first she hoped maybe he was coming to visit her. But that hope was short lived as he continued in a line to the IT director’s office. Again, Millie did not care to see what would surely be an unpleasant exchange. She went back to people watching while waiting for Martin to return to his desk to communicate with him and to try to make him feel better.
Kim was no longer working on the computer, but she was still on the phone. Whatever personal drama she was currently embroiled in had her very agitated. She gathered her purse and headed toward the doors, switching hands and ears without hesitation in her monologue. Millie glanced around and saw others heading for the door. Must be lunchtime. Just for grins, she watched Kim and an elevator full of people descend to the ground floor. Kim’s conversation ended there only because of the lack of signal in the elevator. There were many upset and angry auras in the bunch. They joined the flow of other living souls funneling out through the doors by the guard station. While Millie’s actual presence sat sunning itself, her visual perspective moved along with them, a flawless follow shot above Kim’s left shoulder as she initiated another call. There was a disturbance ahead. Alarming flares blossomed in auras out beyond the doors at the edge of the parking lot, and then she saw it.
Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle Page 13