Sasha Kovach: Our First Day

It was finally the day. I had been recruited out of a practically unknown fucking engineering program to this enormous office. I wasn’t the top of my class or nothing, but that’s mostly because us trips got too much shit on our hands to deal with that. When they accepted my application, they sent along an enormous packet of requirements and requests. A ruthlessly airtight NDA, as it were. But I wasn’t getting any better offers, and I didn’t care so much about the secrecy bits, so I was more than happy to sign it. The boss-man, a Marcellus Messalinus, was just the ideal boss in my opinion. He was super young, very analytical, hyper focused, and interested in people not just for their science backgrounds, but also the other things they brought to the table. He also insisted on calling me “Miss Kovach,” which just makes me sound so professional-like. So, come graduation, I moved the fuck outta Richmond and over into the Shenandoah valley, where Messalinus’s research lab was. I knew it would be a trip. That’s what made it so interesting.

I brought my signed packet in with me and dropped it off at the front desk. I was relatively early, so only two other recent grads were standing around waiting. I wandered over there and mingled with them. They were from all over, though neither were from the same school. One, a dude named Bill, from Norfolk. Another, some guy called Zheng from Mary-Wash. I introduced myself to them and ignored Bill’s incredibly awkward flirtation. Two others showed up before we were shoved into an elevator. I caught the first one’s name, Inez. As the fifth member of our posse showed up and we were shoved into the elevator, I began to wonder if I’d made the wrong choice. These people seemed to be real normal types, and I was far from fucking regular. I was a goddamned prodigy, and if this was the level of talent they wanted, I’d soar through the ranks like the kid who hired me himself.

The doors opened on some odd sub-level, and Mister Messalinus was standing before us in a lab coat. “Hello,” he said in his normal, somewhat cold but enrapturing voice, “Sorry about all of the secrecy, but what we are doing is revolutionary, potentially dangerous, and much of it would get you thrown into an asylum. The simplest option is to not question it too much. You all know me, I’m Marcellus. You may call me sir, boss, or Mister Messalinus.”

He turned abruptly and started walking down the hall. We nervously followed. As he walked, a young woman, maybe thirty, joined us, walking beside him. The boss turned to us, without breaking stride, and said, “This is Lilith. Forgive the name, her parents were Satanists. She will be your direct boss. You will do everything she says, within reason. If it does not make sense, you will ask me.” With a nod as though that explained everything, he opened a door to a large room.

The room was covered in desks and monitors, with a few people sitting and working. The walls were slanted and made of glass, overlooking several different chambers. Each chamber seemed to house a different set up. People strapped to beds, with others examining them intently, though rarely touching the individuals. The boss-man cleared his throat. “This here is the workroom,” he said, his voice piercing through the relative silence, “Until you get promoted, you will be in and out of here often, but likely will not be working in here.”

A scream punctuated that statement, cutting off the end of the word ‘here’. I looked at the wall it came from. Inside, a man was fighting against the industrial grade restraints, and winning. Only, it wasn’t a man. It was something halfway between a human being and a crocodile. My mouth opened slightly. “What the fuck?” I murmured. I could tell my four compatriots had much the same reaction. I’d heard tall tales about shapeshifters and shit like that, but that was creepypasta. Everyone knew it was fake.

The boss-man, who I was starting to realize wasn’t exaggerating when he said that this shit would get us thrown into a nuthouse, waved it off dismissively. “I apologize for our guest, we are attempting to determine how much control a beast such as himself has over the transformative process. That is not the project you will be working on, mostly because you are all far too valuable to lose, and I have less killable individuals aiding me. Come now.”

We, even more nervous than before, continued to follow our new boss. The guy next to me, the one I didn’t know anything about, shook his head. “This is not what I signed up for,” he whispered.

I looked confused at the guy. “Isn’t it?” I asked.

“Huh,” he blurted out, looking at me.

I continued in a hushed tone that I still suspected wasn’t quiet enough to escape the boss’s notice, “I mean, did you see that NDA? No way this shit wasn’t gonna be disturbing. It had several pages devoted to therapy.”

He paused a moment, then nodded. “I suppose you’re right,” he said, calming down a bit. “River, by the way.” He extended his hand as he said it, as though that was his name.

“Nice to meet you, River?” I said, making the name a question to be sure it was actually his name, “Sasha.” I didn’t shake his hand, mostly because we were entering the next room.

“This is the Hub,” the boss said confidently, “Now, I have important work to do in the basement. It seems Dillon is successfully in midtransition. Miss Ibsen, you can finish the tour on your own, can you not?”

Lilith nodded. “Of course, sir,” she said, then turning to the rest of us, she began to talk, “The Hub is where your primary workspaces will be located. You will be assigned projects that will take you down each of the branches, however as you are entry-level employees, you will not be permitted anywhere in the sublevels but the Hub and the Workspace without direct supervision.” As she spoke, the boss slipped through a doorway and vanished from sight.

“That door,” she said, pointing towards where the boss just exited through, “Leads to the basement, where our volunteers are located. It requires authorization well above yours, so it will be unlikely that you go down there during your first year of working here. Even I am only permitted when my boss or the boss are with me.” She walked around the hub to the next door. “This one is to the design labs, where we’re working on physical devises based on the research the other divisions are doing.” I figured I’d be spending a bunch of time in there, seeing as how none of the others looked very engineering-school-y to me. She continued around. “This leads to our biology laboratories, where we are studying cutting edge tissue samples in fields no one outside the lab has even thought possible as of yet.” And she continued around the room, fawning over each of the doorways similarly. A particle accelerator, a hot-fusion area, an impossible physics lab, a biochemical engineering area. Yada yada. I took notes on the numbers of the hallways and the fields, but her incessant obsession with the unique nature of this place made it all feel a bit culty for my tastes. But that was pretty much what I expected, and even as I grew hesitant, she gestured towards our workspaces. “Now, you each will share a table with another. On your table, you can do whatever you feel would be most productive. You can formally request funding for individual research, in fact, it’s highly encouraged that you do. Initiative is how you’ll get promoted. The only thing is, when you’re put on a company project, all individual research is put on pause while you do the project. Also, individual research, for now, must be limited in scope to your table. So, any questions?”

No one spoke up. Inez and Zheng immediately grabbed the table closest to the Basement door. Not wanting to be stuck with Bob, I told River, “You’re stuck with me, come on.” And dragged him to the table furthest from the Workspace and the basement door. Bob, lonely Bob, wandered over to the Workspace side table and sat down, all alone. That’s what he gets for awkward flirtation.

River leaned over the table towards me. “No offense, but you know I’ve got a girlfriend, right?”

I shrugged. “Good for you,” I said.

His eyes widened. “I see. You didn’t want to be,” he stated, then mouthed, ‘Stuck with that other guy.’

I nodded. “So, River,” I said, “What do you do?”

He sighed. “Physics and a bit of history. You?”

“Overachiever. Engineering-Physics with a Nanotech focus and some programming for good luck.”

River furrowed his brow. “You don’t sound like the kind of person Mister Messalinus would hire.”

I shrugged. “Well, I also have a couple of minors that interested him.” I let that hang a bit.

“Which were?” he asked, pushing for honesty.

I was honestly ready to give him that, too. But it wouldn’t be near as fun as obfuscation. “Any particular reason?”

At that, he leaned in. “So, you know how we’re restricted in scope right now, right?” His voice was nearly too quiet for me to hear.

I nodded. “The table, right?” I said.

“Exactly. The table. Which means…” He trailed off his statement, but I knew what he meant. He wanted us to work together, or at least in sync, on larger projects, rather than apart on smaller ones.

I gave him a sideways grin. “Well,” I said, “I was a Religious studies minor with a focus on mythic and occult traditions.”

“Mythic and occult traditions?” he asked.

“You know, magicy bull, animist deities, spiritualist practices. That sorta stuff.”

He nodded. “Like whatever the heck that thing in the basement was.”

I chuckled. “Exactly,” I said, “Though I didn’t understand why he grew interested at that bit until today.”

“Listen, I don’t know what his big projects are, but he was interested in the quantum mechanical stuff I was spewing in my essays.”

I leaned in. “Wait a sec,” I whispered, “Give me a week to read up on some of my stuff before we ask for funding.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because if that shit in the basement is real, then that means magic might be too,” I whispered.

“And?” he asked, trying to seem irritatedly dismissive, ubt his fascination was growing as I spoke.

“And if magic is real, how could it be achieved? Scientifically, that is?” I posited the question, and he knew the answer immediately.

“Fields,” he said, a grin crossing his face, “You’re saying it could be ignorant people unknowingly altering one or several field states.”

“Which means people with an understanding could knowingly alter it, with precision.” I pulled out my personal notebooks and started taking notes on what books I’d need to bring from my Magic in Western Cults and my Eastern Mysticism courses that we could use to generate a theory of how to look for fluctuations in unknown quantum fields.

As I was writing, River called Lilith over. She walked over to our worktable and leaned over. “Yes, um, River, right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“And,” pointing at me this time, she added, “Sasha.”

I nodded, not turning my face from the notebook and scribbling down ideas of what topics to investigate and which books to investigate each idea in.

“So, boss,” he asked quietly, “You said we could do individual work, right? Could we theoretically do that in groups?”

She furrowed her brow and shrugged. “Sure. It’d increase the size and funding for the project, probably, but you’d be splitting the credit, so it’d need to be something real impressive to be significant.”

River nodded. “Thanks,” he said, then turning to me, he whispered, “So, tomorrow we come ready to research, right.”

“If we have our proposal by week’s end, we should be set to go before we get drawn into any more dull project.” I smiled to myself. Perhaps this whole working for a perfectly sane mad scientist would end up with its own benefits. After all, the pay was good, and we’d probably be able to get the weirdest fucking ideas funded. Oh yeah, and if we were ever promoted, we’d learn a whole lot of shit the world outside the building had no clue about.

Our first day was not eventful. It was a team-building day, where we were supposed to get to know one another. Specifically, our buddy. However, we all basically spent the day setting up our own areas, laying out where things we hadn’t brought with us that particular day would go when we eventually did bring them, and trying to decide why on earth we decided to take the insane job with the five bajillion page NDA. Inez and Bob both left partway through the day, to see the inhouse therapist about the screaming guy in the basement.

Sighing, I finished out the day silently setting up my workspace, where the books would go, where my toys would belong. I kept it confined, and made sure that everything had an ‘away’ location, just in case we needed the whole desk for our research. As the day came to a close, I headed back to my apartment, ready to tear through my shit, to find all those books I had sequestered away in the ‘Probably Won’t Need’ boxes.