Meanwhile, Tall pulls out his own chair—pretty standard-looking office chair, all black fabric and metal, though it has more knobs and levers than a Nautilus machine so maybe it doubles as an espresso maker or something—and sinks into it. He sets both hands flat on his desk and stays like that for a long, deep breath, and I take advantage of that to look around again.
Nope, still terrifying.
Who in the world ever thought an open office plan was a good idea?
I mean, sure, I basically have one myself these days. But the difference is that I’m the only one here, so another way of looking at it is that I have a huge private office, bounded by the glittery pink walls that make up its exterior. I like that approach better.
Look, I did the whole cube-zombie thing for years. Pretty much as soon as I left college, not counting that brief stint in a salmon cannery up north or when I tried selling used cars or when I worked fast food. The rest of the time? Yep, cube farm after cube farm after cube farm. And each one got smaller and smaller. My first cubicle was big enough that I could literally stretch both arms out and spin around and get through three whole rotations before I ran into anything, a fact I demonstrated more than once in the short time I was there. My second cube was big enough for me to lean all the way back in my chair, stretch my arms up over my head and my feet out as far as they would go, and just about touch the walls on either side, which probably would have been okay if the boss hadn’t walked up right then and harrumphed, causing me to bolt upright—and my chair to shoot out from under me, nail the boss in the shin and the Adam’s apple, flip over him, crash down on top of the company v-p right behind him, roll end over end down the hall, and take out the company president’s three kids who were waiting near the door to the lobby for their dad to finish his meetings and take them to ballet rehearsal. If it’d been in bowling, that would’ve counted as a definite strike. There, it turned out to be strike three, and my path out wasn’t a whole lot more graceful than my chair’s had been. Anyway, by the time I was at my last regular earthbound job I was in a cubicle so small I couldn’t reach my arms out to either side without punching my fist through the one wall and sticking my hand out into the corridor on the other. There was just enough room to push my chair back from my desk and squeeze past it, and that was about it. I called that my cubelet because it clearly wanted to be a real cube when it grew up.
But even with all that? I’d take my cubelet over an open-plan office any day.
Yet that’s exactly what Tall has going for him. I’m staring out at desk after desk after desk, with no walls between them, no privacy, no personal space, no solitude or silence. Each and every MiB in the place can look over and see what Tall’s doing at any point in time. The ones behind him can see exactly what’s on his computer screen. The ones all around him can hear anything he says on the phone. He can’t pick his nose, fart, play Gemstone Blitz or that garden zombie game or the one with the birds and the catapults or even check his email or call his mom back without everyone around him knowing all about it.
I would have gone insane within two days.
But not Tall. He just sits there, switches on his monitor, logs into his work account—yes, I see his password, and no, I’m not telling you—and starts pulling up a bunch of really boring-looking files and reports. If he even notices that there’re other people around, he doesn’t let it bother him—he’s sitting up straight, his typing is firm and clear and loud, he isn’t hunched over his screen trying to keep anyone else from seeing what he’s doing or who he’s emailing or some cutesy little picture his niece sent him that he’s taped up along the side. For how casual he’s handling it, he could be alone in that office.
Until someone comes straight up to his desk and stands there, waiting to be acknowledged, that is.
“Agent Thomas.” It’s Agent Smith, the guy who got me into this whole mess in the first place. He was the one who sent Tall and Potato Head to fetch me and then introduced me to the Grays and basically shanghaied me into saving the galaxy. When I met him he was whip-thin with sharp features and glossy, slicked back black hair and a suit that’d obviously been tailored. He still looks exactly the same.
“Agent Smith.” Tall shifts to face his superior.
“How fares our fine feathered friend?” It’s clear from the sharp little smile on his face that Smith says this particular phrase a lot—I’m guessing every time Tall comes back from hanging with me. I doubt repetition makes it any funnier.
“He’s fine,” Tall replies. “And the Matrix is still running smoothly, no glitches and no further signs of intrusion. It’ll all be in my regular status report.”
“Good.” Smith nods once, a sharp, crisp motion like cutting something with a single slice, and then turns on his heel and marches off.
Tall goes back to work, and I have the joy of watching as he files reports and turns in requisition requests and answers queries and scans logs and a whole host of other fun and exciting things. Funny, I’d always thought being a MiB would be damn cool and would involve a lot of battling aliens and chasing them through Flushing Meadows Park and rescuing people from their clutches and all that. I didn’t expect it to look an awful lot like an accountant preparing a quarterly expense report. Ugh.
I practically die of excitement when Tall pushes back from his desk and rises to his feet. Gasp, movement! And then he turns and walks away from his desk and down the hall! Astounding!
And then he goes into the john. I close my eyes. Hey, every man deserves a little privacy when he pees, okay? It’s only fair.
After—and I’m glad to see he does wash his hands, otherwise the memory of all the time we’ve both dug into a bucket of hot wings or a pizza together would make me yarf—he strides down the hall to what I quickly realize is a break room. There’re cabinets against one wall, complete with a sink and a full-sized fridge and even a stove, and several small tables along the other side, each with four chairs around it. A coffee maker and a microwave sit on the counter, and there’re actually several treats laid out there a well, including a pound cake and some homemade cookies and a bag of baby carrots—
--and several boxes of CampGirl cookies.
Crap.
I wish I could say I’m surprised when Tall zeroes in on those ChocoMints. Damn it, I knew there was no way he could withstand the lure of that chocolaty, minty goodness. Sure enough, after pouring himself a cup of coffee from the pot there, Tall opens the cookie box and shakes a handful of ChocoMints out into his hand. Then he closes the box again, which is good, at least—I can’t stand it when people open something and then just leave it out like that instead of putting it away properly because they simply can’t be bothered to take that extra few steps back to the cabinet or pantry or wherever—carries the cup and the cookies over to one of the tables, and sits down.
And no, the table isn’t empty.
“Agent Thomas.” She looks exactly as unfriendly and unappealing as she did the last time I saw her, only this time at least she isn’t so drastically out of place. Seriously, I’ve been in riots that were friendlier than this place, so surrounded by all that negativity and bottled-up hostility her barely restrained animosity toward everything with a pulse hardly stands out at all.
“Agent Jones.” Tall’s voice is perfectly level, neither friendly nor nasty, just calm and professional and utterly disinterested. Like my shrinks always started out, before the inevitable screaming and crying and cursing-in-multiple-languages stage. I always felt so bad for them, but of course offering a hug only made it worse.
“Did you hear about the Palvotian ambassador?” she asks after a moment of his sipping his coffee and her crunching on some kind of cracker or something.
“I did,” he replies. “Bad business, that, but there’s a reason we warn them about the local cuisine and about what those chemicals and vitamins and additives could do to their foreign digestion. If they would just stick to the hot dog carts they’d be fine—that’s why they’re there!” He shakes
his head. “Did they manage to get enough of him back to reconstitute him?”
“Almost enough,” Jones answers. “He’s a little shorter in one front feeler than the other, but apparently that’s a sign of sexual prowess back on Palvotia II, so he’s happy.”
“Worked out, then,” Tall says. That’s followed by a long pause only slightly less awkward then my showing up to pick up my date for the high school prom and discovering that her father was none other than my proctologist—and her mother was my dentist. So both of them knew how to get under my skin, and how to probe me painfully. Good times.
“I had best return to my duties,” Jones breaks into the silence eventually. “I’ll see you around.” How could you not, I wonder, with the open floor plan? It isn’t like you could miss him—he looks like Godzilla or King Kong if you dropped one of them into the dessert with nothing around but a few low dunes, a handful of camels, and an oasis up ahead.
“Of course.” Tall nods politely, judging by the way the camera bobs about. And he waits until Jones is gone before opening his hand to reveal the ChocoMints he’s been concealing all this time. I’m a little surprised they’re more than a chocolate smear along his palm but they look intact, other than a few fingerprints. He lifts the top cookie off with his other hand, holds it up and stares at it for several seconds, turning it this way and that—and then pops the entire thing right into his mouth.
I’m not actually there of course—I’m still safely at home—which is good because otherwise I’d be tempted to throttle him. Instead I can only watch as Tall seems to straighten slightly. Then he devours the other cookies, drinks the rest of his coffee, returns to the sink and rinses out his mug, and heads back down the hall toward his desk. All completely normal—
—except I’m pretty sure Tall’s now a complete and utter zombie. Again.
So much for staying awake in the workplace.
Chapter Twelve
He’s like a great big guppy—in a suit
Up to this point I’ve kept from saying anything directly to Tall, though, man, that has not been easy! I mean, let’s face it, I was born to be a color commentator—I can sit there and kibbitz and snark and question and joke with the best of ’em. Hell, when I was in college Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was still on, and we’d sit there and watch it and heckle right along with that one guy and those two wacky robots—until it got to the point where we were funnier than they were, and then we’d just turn off the sound and make up our own lines. And then we started just getting crappy movies and doing that without even turning on MST3k, and all our friends would come over to watch us eviscerate these movies, and they’d bring some of their friends, and they’d bring their friends—we started charging a buck or two a head, just to make some beer money, and wound up with enough to rent the back room in the local bar and hold the events there, with an open bar the whole time. Not too shabby for a couple of guys whose biggest talent was finding fault with everything right? Funny thing, I always wound up with the Crow T. Robot role—and he does look a bit duck-like. Just a coincidence or some kind of weird foreshadowing?
Anyway, I’d been itching to let loose with my usual snide comments, but figured this wasn’t the best time, what with me hitching a ride on Tall without his knowledge or consent and basically spying on a top-secret government installation. But now, with Tall turned cookie-zombie, I decided I didn’t really have much of a choice. I had to snap him out of it, and that meant talking to him. And, well, no time like the present.
“Yo, Tall,” I say as he’s walking down the hall. “Snap out of it, man.”
Not surprisingly, he stops and looks around. “Who said that?” he asks.
“The ghost of Christmas Past,” I answer. “No, Jiminy Cricket. No your Aunt Jemima. No, that weird-looking splotch on the wall. Who’d you think?”
He scratches the side of his nose. “DuckBob?”
“Got it in one—nice going, brainiac!” I’d slap him on the shoulder but I’m half a galaxy away—I make do with patting myself on the knee, which doesn’t really have the same effect at all but does make me kick the computer monitor. Ow. “Now, snap out of it.”
“Snap out of what? You want me to snap something?” This isn’t a good sign. Every time before now, when I’ve told Tall to snap out of it, he does. Instantly. So why isn’t it working now?
“You’ve been taken over by the evil cookie fairies again,” I tell him. Then I get sidetracked for a second, imagining that there really are evil cookie fairies who go out and steal people’s cookies or, worse yet, turn all them into those stale, dry, crumbly spice-cookie things you always find in your doddering maiden aunt’s cupboard. Ugh. I swear, they’re like sand that’s been loosely pressed into discs and wrapped just to mess with people. Or maybe the evil cookie fairies are evil fairies actually made of cookies or from cookies, so you’ve got the Dread Snickerdoodle and the Sinister Humentaschen. They sound evil! And both of them are a bit on the dry and crumbly side, now that I think of it. The good cookie fairies would be things like ladyfingers and Florentine laces and of course sugar cookies. They could have whole battles, with cookie dough and powdered sugar and frosting going everywhere.
What was I doing again?
Oh, right. Tall. Cookie zombie. Got it. “Shake it off, pal,” I order him. “You need to be your usual grumpy self again, pronto.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he answers, and starts walking again. “And how am I hearing you, anyway? I didn’t call you—I don’t even have my phone out.”
“Oh, uh, this is a new phone system,” I tell him. “It lets me call directly into your head. Pretty cool, huh?” Okay, no, I don’t know why I didn’t just tell him about the earpiece mike and the forehead camera. I should. This excuse just popped out instead. Sometimes I really have no control over what I’m saying. Maybe a lot of the time. Especially if I’m awake.
“It is cool,” he agrees, which only proves he’s not in his right mind. Tall just said something was cool? I’d better make sure the universe didn’t just implode from utter shock. “What do you want?”
“I want you to stop acting weird,” I answer as he reaches his desk again and sits back down. “Or weirder. Or weird in a different and unsettling way. Your normal weird would be just fine.”
“I am fine,” he declares, and starts typing on the file already open on his screen. Apparently that’s the end of that conversation. Maybe it’s because he can’t see me, and that’s why the command didn’t work? I’m not sure. But right now there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.
So I get to sit and watch Tall work some more. Whee. I’d change the channel if I could only figure out how—maybe I could tap into some reality show’s feed instead. Because this one’s dead boring.
It’s actually a relief when footsteps approach Tall’s desk and stop alongside it, because Tall turns and looks over at the owner of those feet. It’s Potato Head.
“I put up that transmission void, like you said,” he informs Tall. “Looks like it’s working—the Polarians are complaining that they can’t get a signal to upload anything, and most of ’em are actually coming up to us voluntarily in the hope we can fix the problem.” He grins. “I love dealing with stupid people.”
Tall doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t look away either, though. I think he’s just staring at Potato Head.
After a few seconds, Potato Head starts to fidget. “So, uh, you hungry?” he asks.
“I could eat,” zombie-Tall replies. If he starts chewing on PH’s head I’m gonna be sick.
“Cool.” PH shifts from foot to foot. “You wanna grab a bite? Maybe Gray’s Papaya?”
“Of course.” And just like that, Tall’s swiveling his chair around and pushing up to his feet. It’s disconcerting having my view suddenly rise by at least three and probably more like four or five feet. It’s like being in the world’s smallest, smoothest glass elevator. “What would you like?”
Now, it’s obvious from the way PH gapes at hi
m that Tall never offers to buy him lunch. Which is almost a little sad. I mean, they’re partners, right? Shouldn’t they grab lunch together all the time? And wouldn’t it make sense to trade off buying that lunch, just to make things easier and a little friendlier? Sure, Tall isn’t always big on the social niceties, but hey, he and I hang out all the time over beers and pizza—especially Fernalian singing-cheese disco pies, which are awesome and come with platform shoes and big sunglasses every tenth pie—so I know he’s capable of it. And PH doesn’t seem all that awful once you get past the crumbling-stones grimace of a smile and the way the ground shakes when he walks and his suit jacket tears every time he moves. Sure, he’s not the brightest bulb, but at least he’s trying. And he looks so pathetically pleased at the fact that Tall’s just agreed to lunch or dinner or whatever meal this is. Then Tall offers to buy him lunch? The big doughy guy’s blown over.
“Uh, a Recession Special plus two chili dogs,” he says finally. “And a diet cherry Coke.”
Tall nods and heads for the door at the far end of this massive room. It isn’t the way we first came in, I don’t think, so this is probably the way down to the outside. I try to memorize it as he starts down some steps, then cuts to one side and flattens himself against the wall, then goes a few more steps before hiding again, and so on. Either somebody’s after him or he’s just always this paranoid. Given how well I know him, I’ve gotta say—the jury’s still out on that one.
We’re a few steps shy of a landing when another MiB appears around the corner, making his way up. Average height, average build, with an impressively full head of snow-white hair over a face so unlined it could be a balloon or a teenage boy’s, he takes the stairs like an old man, slow and careful and never completely convinced they’re not just gonna drop out from under him. Hey, happened to my Uncle Ralph once, though admittedly he was balancing on a bundle of fresh-cut logs at the time. We all knew he should’ve worn his cleats.
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