The Day Our Remote Colleague Brought Her Problems to the Office

Back in the city. Back surrounded by the constant cacophony of things and their feelings. Fortunately, fixing things is literally my job here. Unfortunately the noise is still a constant. The inhouse team is small. Hell, the whole IT team here is small. We’ve got a pair of programmers dedicated to server maintenance who work almost entirely remote, Emmy and Kyle. Kyle comes in once a month, but Emmy doesn’t anymore. Would be more upset, except she does do all her work and got into some real bad car accident earlier this year. Next we’ve got our onsite security specialist, Gavin, and our manager, Todd. Then there’s me and Mary, the glorified mechanics. I drive my beautifully vague pale grey van up, parking it in my spot under the building. It sounds like any other car on the street. I’m quite proud. One of the last things I put into it was the secondary speaker system, wedged up in the mostly defunct engine, to mimic engine noises. There are eyes in many places, and sometimes those eyes have ears. I lock my van behind me. Not that I’m too worried about it being stolen, it both looks like a shitty van and very much is not a shitty van in terms of security, but more out of habit. I walk up to the elevators and press the call button. I can feel a delay. The elevator needs to have maintenance go over it. Some of the bits and bobs aren’t quite pleased with themselves. Not the electronics, unfortunately, which means not my job. And also means the bosses aren’t going to deal with it for a while. So I get to listen to the unsettled elevator for the next couple of months.

The elevator opens up on the second floor. Head down to our office. It’s a shared space between the four of us, though Todd has a cubical space that he calls his private office. I sit down at my computer, turn it on, and sigh. Mary looks over at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Elevator this morning was giving me bad vibes,” I answer, technically honestly.

She shakes her head. “I’m sure whichever of our various bosses and or landlords is in charge of it will do a check before it falls apart,” she replies, mostly joking. I mean, she’s right. I don’t know who is in charge of elevator maintenance for the building. Because it is a part of the building, but also the building only houses our company and some kind of weird open workspace thing on the first floor.

“Doesn’t mean it’ll happen anytime soon.”

She shrugs. “Then take the stairs,” she counters.

I smile and then feign offense. “And deal with all that walking?” I joke.

Before Mary can reply wittily, or in whatever way she figured was wittily, Gavin shows up. “Todd in?” he asks brusquely. Gavin doesn’t like either of us much. I feel like he’s just a dick, but I’m sure he feels differently.

I shrug vaguely, looking over at Mary. She shakes her head. “Haven’t seen him.”

Gavin makes a grunt and checks the cubicle anyways. Because he’s a dick. Then he heads over to his desk. I sigh and gaze at my computer. It’s unhappy about some software nonsense. Software is harder for me to understand quickly than physical problems. But it is easier to understand than people. Slightly. But, ultimately, I see it’s just what always makes the computer slightly unhappy. The insanely overblown security software Gavin makes all the computers run. Unfortunately, that means yet another quiet yet still unpleasant bit of noise.

Todd does arrive soon enough. “Team, how is everything going?” he barely has time to ask before Gavin pulls him aside for a security review. I answer a call, not even having to leave my desk as I simply remote access their computer upstairs and delete the viruses they installed while watching porn on their work laptop. I tell him to start going to sites that have more rigorous standards, but I know he won’t. This is the third time this particular customer support member has had this exact problem. I make a note of that in my report to Todd. He ultimately decides when and how to tell HR about things like this, and given his general everything, I suspect he just doesn’t. Not in the sense that he doesn’t care about security, more in the sense that I think if he had an actual office not just a cubicle, he’d likely be doing something similar. I sigh. Today is going to be a long one.

Todd pokes his head out of his cubicle. “Heads up, Emmy is actually going to show her face today. Evidently her needy, wounded roommates are preventing her from finishing her work. Make sure her desk is cleaned off.”

Mary groans while I sigh. Resigned to our fate, we get up and begin to clean off ehr desk. Since she’d never been here, we use her desk mostly as a storage place for all of our crap that we don’t want on our desks but should have around. Employee manuals, other manuals, the dumb reems of security requirements Gavin shoves in our faces. With nothing more than a glance between us, we both come up with the plan. We move said random things to the floor next to her desk. We can move it back up once she’s gone.

Half an hour later, Emmy shows up. Or, more specifically, a woman shows up that I can only assume is Emmy. “What’s up with my desk?” she asks, looking at the spare desk.

“It’s very desklike,” I reply. Her phone is overworking itself. She likely is running some background nonsense. This is why I make my own. Well, that and I’m better at it than other people.

“I expected it to be piled up with random junk,” she says as she sits down and opens up her laptop.

“It was,” Mary adds this time, “Todd told us you needed a desk.”

“Okay. And you two are?”

“I’m Mary, and that annoying sack is Phil,” Mary answers the asked question.

I answer the implied one, “We’re the assholes people in the office call when they need to figure out they forgot to plug their computer in.”

“Among other things,” Mary insists. I think she might be trying to impress Emmy. Or just trying to hype herself up in her head. “But basically, yeah.”

Emmy works quickly. Not just in terms of being good at her job, but also literally. She moves like she’s hyped up on caffeine, and yet I have not seen her drink any coffee. Must have had a lot before she finally gave in and took the bus here. I get one more call, this one I had to go physically upstairs for. Some executive’s computer was running slowly, so he got mad at technology and broke it. Most of the actual damage to the tower was cosmetic, though the screen was toast. After giving him a new one and putting everything back in place, I told him how the “scars” on the tower wouldn’t affect performance. Then I went through the system and deleted some programs meant to piggyback on our company-wide remote access software. Not sure what it was for, and I don’t much care, it just used a whole lot of processing power. Once that was gone, the computer ran much better and I headed back into the elevator to the IT room.

As I’m waiting in the elevator, my phone buzzes. Not a good start. My phone is almost always on do not disturb, meaning only three things get through to cause a buzz. Any of the other phones I’ve made, which would only happen if another of my fellow escapees is in trouble. It’s a phone reminder, meaning I’ve forgotten some important thing I was supposed to do. Or it’s one of my alarms, which would mean I’m under assault somewhere. I pull it out. It’s the third. My van’s proximity sensor is going off. I check the surround feed. A van I don’t recognize is downstairs. Waiting for me. But they aren’t paying attention to the van. I also don’t recognize their outfits as Company. It might not be me they’re after. I pass Gavin in the hall, he’s off to terrorize some other department. I head back into the IT room. I need to remain calm. Mary isn’t here, either. Emmy looks worried. “What’s up, new kid?” I ask.

She looks at me. “New? I’ve been here practically as long as you have.” Her reply is obstinate. Something has happened, and she’s trying to reassert control over her life, maybe? Or she really doesn’t like being called kid. Or both.

“Sorry, my sense of humor is grating, to say the least,” I joke. I then add, “But seriously, are you alright?”

She sighs. “Probably. My roommate Ally said some weird people were looking for me, that’s all.”

I glance back at my phone. Four people in the van. One with their eyes closed. One driving. One sitting in the passenger seat, and the last one pacing impatiently. It’s hard to tell details, though. Their outfits are screaming. Even from this far away, I can hear them. Their van’s power source is also almost as powerful as my own. I can feel a pressure in my mind. A pressure I recognize from my torturers. Psychics. I quickly start mentally cataloging the parts of a computer. Taking it apart and putting it back together in my head. And I continue to do so until the pressure is gone. I look over at Emmy. She doesn’t have the same training. So whatever they were trying to learn about her from down there, they probably know. I take a deep breath and slide my chair over next to Emmy. “Who are they and why are they after you?” I ask quietly.

“I don’t know,” she asks, seeming to be genuinely offended by my question.

“Sorry, again with the grating. People aren’t my strong suit. Do you have any idea why someone might be after you?”

She takes another deep breath. As though she needs it. She needs to center herself. After only taking a few seconds of quick but deep breaths to think, she says, “You’re not going to believe me if I tell you.”

“Try me,” I respond honestly.

Another surprisingly short pause. “I can’t really control it, but I can kind of slow down time.”

So either the company has changed uniform and policy a lot lately, or there’s some other group that knows about us. The suits are growing even louder. “Stay calm,” I tell her. I grab some spare computer parts and get to work. Those suits, they seem to be centrally accessing something connected directly to their van’s big battery thing, and shoving that into those people’s bodies. But the human body can only take so much, and the suit’s noise clearly powers down and up as it accesses. Not the first time I’ve done something stupid to help out another one of us.

The drone takes all of ten minutes to build. This is, after all, my talent. And, at its heart, I’ve done this before. It should allow me to access whatever this server thing they have is and overload it, send all the data to all the nodes at the same time. Hopefully it works. Emmy spent the whole ten minutes looking confused at me. She may or may not have been asking questions, I couldn’t tell you. I was listening to my drone talk to me, not the real sounds. Mary showed back up sometime during the tinkering, but she knows better than try to interrupt. As I finish, Mary muses, “Got some inspiration? What’s it do?”

I smile. “Hopefully makes the van do what I want it to do from here,” I say honestly. Mary, who knows I love tinkering with my van, assumes one thing. Emmy, who neither knows me particularly well nor knows what’s going on, is even more confused.

I send it off with a thought. And I watch on my phone as the strange van begins to shudder. The people inside begin to silently scream. Odd that the screams are silent. I can hear their outfits making quite a lot of noise, concerned about an overload of power in their operators. Then, the van itself seems to blink out of existence, in a move akin to what Norman used to be able to do. Shifting all around the three story garage leaving bits and pieces of their van scattered. I also suspect bits and pieces of them. More gruesome than I expected. Not going to tell this Emmy what I’ve done for her. She seems the sort who has never had to do that before. “Excellent. Emmy, want to head out for a drink after work?” I ask.

She looks at me, still concerned. “What about the problem?”

I smile. “We should talk about it for sure, but for the moment it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”