Post by jiaxpora on Aug 22, 2012 10:39:30 GMT -8
Day Two on the Job
Four in the morning hit before Jia Lin remembered that she wasn't in her own apartment. Between the music piping through her ear-covering Bose, the taste and fragrance of the coffee she'd brought in from the Chen's market on her apartment corner, and the easy, fundamentally comforting rhythm of data entry, it was as if she'd never walked out her front door.
Except for the fact that she did. She wasn't home. This wasn't her milk-carton and cinder-block desk she hunched over, this wasn't her computer—not even close, not including the obvious aesthetic differences—and the shadows pressing in around her weren't the usual harmless, companionable sort. This was Aegir Communications, the twenty-fifth floor. Not quite a ghost town, not even this early—late?—but not home. Not companionable at all. This was work. A corporation.
Which meant paperwork.
"Crap," she muttered, sliding her thick-framed glasses higher up on her nose with an absent finger. The silent office ambiance, recycled air and omniscient hush, sucked her voice out past the plain cubicle, shunted it into a muffled spin. Dimly, through double-paned windows, the never-still city thrummed. Four o'clock was just a number in a city that doesn't sleep.
She knew the feeling. Even if this hadn't been one of her more inspired decisions. She probably should have double-checked with her supervisor before she stayed so late. Early?
Crap!
Jia frowned at the heavy square watch face strapped to her wrist with pink velcro. It blinked, flashing 2:03. Two hours off. She never bothered to change it. If she died in some kind of terrible accident that short-circuited the device, the coroners would be hella confused.
"Heh." If she died.
Funny how casual over-statement had become a very real issue over the course of a few weeks. The computer screen flickered at her, a faceless judge casting an incandescent glow over the cubicle. Dave Gross crooned a bluesy rant; suddenly, Crawling the Walls wasn't just the theme song of every insomniac in New York City. The fine hairs at the back of her neck prickled, gooseflesh rippled over her skin, and Jia leaned back in her chair, shoving her fingers through her streaked hair. "Argh. Get over it, already," she told the shadows dripping from the tech department corners.
She should have been sleepy. She wasn't. The four empty bottles of 5-Hour Energy and nearly-empty pot of coffee made sure of that. The stack of data entry she'd been handed as her first "project" had been pared down from an elbow-high mountain to something she could almost measure with her fingers. She'd made progress; not enough.
"Get this done ASAP," the supervisor had said, and so Jia had tried. She really, really had. Even if the stack had intimidated her, the supervisor's smile had intimidated her, the whole floor had intimidated her.
Talking on the channel intimidated her.
Ms. Lin, was it?
Jia's shoulders slumped. Thud. Her forehead impacted the clean formica desk, sending the keyboard and monitor rattling faintly as a dull echo sank into silence.
The masculine voice, cool as ice even despite his assertion of attack, still rang in her head. How stupid could she be? Of course this company went out into the field! Hadn't she seen the data? Hadn't she spent the past however-ungodly-amount of hours entering in the aggregated information?
I'm sure you'll figure it out.
So she'd stuck her Converse in her mouth and, just for fun, gave it a thorough gnawing. Because that's totally what smart and professional people do. She groaned. Thud. Thud. Thud. The desk thunked as she banged her forehead repeatedly against the surface; plastic clattered as her glasses slid off her nose with each impact. When the dull ache centered behind her eyes made her wince, she let her head rest against the desk, shoulders hunched, hands clasped in her lap, and stared blindly and the black and white striped blur pooling on either side of her face.
"Okay," she told the desk surface, warming under her face. "Okay, enough of that. It's not the end of the world." Only, it could be. Anything could be. This was the secret world; the monsters were out there, the stories were true, so on, so forth. Bees granted mó shù and the Illuminati was for-freaking-real. Who knew?
She did, now.
"So you totally bothered somebody during a..." A, what? What did they call it? An operation? A mission? A... field case? Crap. "...An event," she amended, frowning at the desk grains beneath her nose. "It could have been worse. Way worse." Totally, never-come-back worse.
Wait... Did they come back?
She straightened, her hair falling into its usual half-mask as she squinted at the windows. The light filtering through them was more electric than daybreak; a soft blur in her bad vision.
ASAP. That was the request, right?
Setting her jaw, she plucked her abandoned glasses from the desk, slid them on and reached for the next sheet of paper. Numbers. So many numbers. Coordinates, unless she missed her guess. Not all of them, just some. She was good with patterns.
Blowing out a sigh, Jia just wished she was half as good with people.
All right. Ten more pages, and she'd get more coffee. Starbucks in the building, huh? Okay, no, she'd finish the coffee she brought first. If she got through half of what was left, she'd treat herself to a caramel macchiato, hold the whip.
If she got through all of it, she'd really go all out: whipped cream and all.
She could do this.
Four in the morning hit before Jia Lin remembered that she wasn't in her own apartment. Between the music piping through her ear-covering Bose, the taste and fragrance of the coffee she'd brought in from the Chen's market on her apartment corner, and the easy, fundamentally comforting rhythm of data entry, it was as if she'd never walked out her front door.
Except for the fact that she did. She wasn't home. This wasn't her milk-carton and cinder-block desk she hunched over, this wasn't her computer—not even close, not including the obvious aesthetic differences—and the shadows pressing in around her weren't the usual harmless, companionable sort. This was Aegir Communications, the twenty-fifth floor. Not quite a ghost town, not even this early—late?—but not home. Not companionable at all. This was work. A corporation.
Which meant paperwork.
"Crap," she muttered, sliding her thick-framed glasses higher up on her nose with an absent finger. The silent office ambiance, recycled air and omniscient hush, sucked her voice out past the plain cubicle, shunted it into a muffled spin. Dimly, through double-paned windows, the never-still city thrummed. Four o'clock was just a number in a city that doesn't sleep.
She knew the feeling. Even if this hadn't been one of her more inspired decisions. She probably should have double-checked with her supervisor before she stayed so late. Early?
Crap!
Jia frowned at the heavy square watch face strapped to her wrist with pink velcro. It blinked, flashing 2:03. Two hours off. She never bothered to change it. If she died in some kind of terrible accident that short-circuited the device, the coroners would be hella confused.
"Heh." If she died.
Funny how casual over-statement had become a very real issue over the course of a few weeks. The computer screen flickered at her, a faceless judge casting an incandescent glow over the cubicle. Dave Gross crooned a bluesy rant; suddenly, Crawling the Walls wasn't just the theme song of every insomniac in New York City. The fine hairs at the back of her neck prickled, gooseflesh rippled over her skin, and Jia leaned back in her chair, shoving her fingers through her streaked hair. "Argh. Get over it, already," she told the shadows dripping from the tech department corners.
She should have been sleepy. She wasn't. The four empty bottles of 5-Hour Energy and nearly-empty pot of coffee made sure of that. The stack of data entry she'd been handed as her first "project" had been pared down from an elbow-high mountain to something she could almost measure with her fingers. She'd made progress; not enough.
"Get this done ASAP," the supervisor had said, and so Jia had tried. She really, really had. Even if the stack had intimidated her, the supervisor's smile had intimidated her, the whole floor had intimidated her.
Talking on the channel intimidated her.
Ms. Lin, was it?
Jia's shoulders slumped. Thud. Her forehead impacted the clean formica desk, sending the keyboard and monitor rattling faintly as a dull echo sank into silence.
The masculine voice, cool as ice even despite his assertion of attack, still rang in her head. How stupid could she be? Of course this company went out into the field! Hadn't she seen the data? Hadn't she spent the past however-ungodly-amount of hours entering in the aggregated information?
I'm sure you'll figure it out.
So she'd stuck her Converse in her mouth and, just for fun, gave it a thorough gnawing. Because that's totally what smart and professional people do. She groaned. Thud. Thud. Thud. The desk thunked as she banged her forehead repeatedly against the surface; plastic clattered as her glasses slid off her nose with each impact. When the dull ache centered behind her eyes made her wince, she let her head rest against the desk, shoulders hunched, hands clasped in her lap, and stared blindly and the black and white striped blur pooling on either side of her face.
"Okay," she told the desk surface, warming under her face. "Okay, enough of that. It's not the end of the world." Only, it could be. Anything could be. This was the secret world; the monsters were out there, the stories were true, so on, so forth. Bees granted mó shù and the Illuminati was for-freaking-real. Who knew?
She did, now.
"So you totally bothered somebody during a..." A, what? What did they call it? An operation? A mission? A... field case? Crap. "...An event," she amended, frowning at the desk grains beneath her nose. "It could have been worse. Way worse." Totally, never-come-back worse.
Wait... Did they come back?
She straightened, her hair falling into its usual half-mask as she squinted at the windows. The light filtering through them was more electric than daybreak; a soft blur in her bad vision.
ASAP. That was the request, right?
Setting her jaw, she plucked her abandoned glasses from the desk, slid them on and reached for the next sheet of paper. Numbers. So many numbers. Coordinates, unless she missed her guess. Not all of them, just some. She was good with patterns.
Blowing out a sigh, Jia just wished she was half as good with people.
All right. Ten more pages, and she'd get more coffee. Starbucks in the building, huh? Okay, no, she'd finish the coffee she brought first. If she got through half of what was left, she'd treat herself to a caramel macchiato, hold the whip.
If she got through all of it, she'd really go all out: whipped cream and all.
She could do this.
))