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Baby Talk
Let your baby side show.
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Thanks for the comment. That’s a possibility, but it would still be hard for them to have any privacy in a cabin with bunk beds. Maybe Lucas can help Saskia with something, too? We’ll find out in the next chapter. -
By Kitty Angel · Posted
5. Obedience “Music while we work?” Carter asked, a dozen forms into her pile. I was trying to get started on some other things, like preparing a custom insurance quote for Shimatoyō’s company, but I found myself keeping one eye on the intern still. “You seem like the kind of person who doesn’t work well in silence.” “I don’t think you’d like most of my tastes,” I said. It was hard to imagine her listening to anything other than cheesy love songs; maybe classic crooners, or high-energy bubblegum pop. Which was mostly good music, but not what we’d be working to if I turned on the sound system in here. “Fusion prog rock?” she asked, and then somehow managed to read my expression of surprise without even turning towards me. “You’ve got a Franklin’s Muse shirt on, and green hair. I don’t imagine you’d wear that unless you’re actually a fan.” “Most of my shirts are fake bands,” I said with a shrug. “I had a phase where I thought it was funny. But yeah, Franklin’s Muse are pretty good, it’s a shame their career was so short. But most times I’m more into speed metal. Or thrash. Thunderpone, Liquid Neon, Faraday Cage, Icon of Recurzion, Fãngsucker, stuff like that.” “I don’t know all of those,” she said. “But if you want to put something on, don’t let me hold you back. You never know what you’ll like until you try it, right?” “Yeah,” I said, and smiled. That was an attitude I could use some more of in my life; but I still didn’t put my music on. I wanted to see how she did with the work I had assigned first. I focused on my screen, until I saw that the pile of paperwork in front of her had been dealt with. Then I walked over and looked through the out trays, checking where each one was placed and whether she’d stamped across the date. I was surprised to see that there was nothing for me to correct; the intern didn’t have incredible qualifications like most of the staff here, but it seemed she was smart enough to follow instructions, and to understand what I’d asked her to do. That had to be a good sign. “Well,” I said. “No complaints there. Can you swipe your ID, and I’ll give you access?” As soon as she logged on to the computer in front of me, I could see her employee ID on my screen. That was all I needed to give her access to the online EMCR logging system, which I quickly explained was just the same as the paper forms she’d been doing. And then I picked up the piles of paper from her out trays, and carried them through to the right file cabinets in the archives. It was a regulatory requirement that we keep those for at least six years; which meant that storage was taken a lot more seriously than I thought it needed. Then I could put music on. My office had speakers hiding behind the ceiling tiles, so once I pressed play the music would be all around us without disturbing anyone in the rooms next door. I didn’t want to make my new friend uncomfortable, so I turned the volume down a little below my usual level, and then hesitated. On my computer screen was the suggestion that my most common song for this time of day was Thrust, but I really wasn’t in the mood for anything with so much growl in it. I hesitated, and then cued up Cradle of Sacred Dreams instead; more symphonic, but with energetic solos that would give me a massive boost, and drive my typing speed up in an attempt to match the pace of Gattac’s keyboard playing. It was a good choice. Seven minutes later, without any kind of discussion, we were both singing along to the iconic duet. I might have made a few typos in my report at that time, but I could clear those up quickly enough, and it seemed that the right kind of music could make it so much easier to focus on our work. Before I knew it, it was the end of the day and everyone in the next office was packing up to go home. I didn’t want to be the first to leave, but I also didn’t want Carter to feel like she had to stay until all the reports were done. With the size of the backlog, it would take a lot of overtime to clear it all in one day. But I couldn’t think of the best way to say it without sounding dismissive. “How late do you usually stay?” I asked instead. “I don’t want to keep you if there’s someone you should be getting back to, or…” “Want to know if I’ve got a girlfriend?” she asked with a smile. “I thought the office gossip when I’m not here could include a lot of guesses about my love life.” “I didn’t mean…” I stammered. “I was just thinking…” “I know. It’s a joke. But I’ll bet there’s plenty of rumours. And no, there isn’t really anybody in my life now. But I don’t want to repeat my high school experience. I’m going to make sure I’m on the right path with my work before I start thinking about anything like that.” “Sensible,” I said with a smile. “I’m happy just to have friends. I need to talk to people more, you know? But I think just about everything I’m interested in, the other people around here would just think is weird. I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, you know?” “I know,” she said, and flashed another one of those smiles that made it seem like the whole world was lighting up. “Do you cook at all? I mean… it’s probably kind of forward, but my only friends since I moved here have been Vicky and Reg, really. I think it would be interesting to get out from their shadow a little bit, and find an excuse to do something outside of work.” “I get MealKit boxes,” I said, realising even as I said it just how sad that might seem. “You know, the things they keep advertising on FanLibrary? You get little tubs and jars of spices, and all the ingredients with a decent shelf life, and a recipe card that tells you how to put it all together. So like there’s a recipe that says I need to buy such and such weight of chicken and carrots, and everything else is in the box.” “That sounds like it’ll make life easier,” she said. Like she wasn’t judging me at all for taking the lazy approach to cooking. “Do they have interesting stuff? Or Is it just the same stuff my brother wanted to teach me?” “That’s one of the reasons I tried it. There’s stuff from all over the world, so I might be doing a curry one night, and a burger the next, and then some meal I never even heard of. Except… Well, I only do one or two each week, because it’s not really worth cooking a single portion. So half the time my dinner is just reheated leftovers.” “Even more reason to hang out with somebody,” she said. “Maybe we should pool our resources and try doing one together, so you don’t have to freeze stuff. It would beat having bolognese, hash, or takeout every day.” “Yeah,” I said, and I knew I was the one with the weird smile then. I had to remind myself inside my head that she wasn’t actually flirting with me. This was just two people who found it hard to make friends in the workplace for whatever reason arranging to do some stuff together. “Yeah, that would be great. And we could split all the peeling and chopping work, it’d go so much quicker. I mean, they say prep times on the cards, and most of them are about half an hour before you stick it in the oven or on the hob, but that assumes you’ve already got the ingredients chopped, shelled, drained, or whatever.” “Now you’re sounding less like an ad. You’re on.” And she locked her workstation and practically skipped out of the office. I looked, and saw that there were still people working on the other side of the door. And more than one head turned to follow her as she left. With that mood, I just knew that the office gossip would be filled with juicy stories about the things we’d supposedly been doing. When I just gave her an opportunity to do her job, and maybe offered to share a meal sometime. It wasn’t like we’d… I shook my head, as if centrifugal force could strip away all the mental images that really didn’t need to be in my head right now. She was a colleague, and becoming a friend, I told myself. Nothing else. Just a responsible, mature relationship. Nothing inappropriate. But now the images were there, I just couldn’t shake them. I tried to get my mind back into a suitable space by checking over her work from the afternoon. I was a supervisor, so of course I could look at all the forms she had categorised. I looked at the numbers, and saw that even on her first attempt she’d been processing almost as many per minute as anyone else could do. I pulled out a couple of the records to check, and it looked like she understood the task. I found one or two that would have been judgement calls, the kind of thing that someone new to the task would always struggle with. One I recognised, because she’d asked me about it when it came up. The other was correct as well, telling me that she actually understood the purpose of her work rather than just following instructions. Everything I’d seen about this girl told me that she had no qualifications; she had barely passed high school, and didn’t get into college. And then she had been hired on the instructions of someone who knew her personally high up in the company hierarchy. She’d been a cheerleader, with an unremarkable academic record, so it was natural to assume that she had used her looks or her body to get selected for this campus. But… did that necessarily mean she wasn’t smart enough to have earned her place? Apparently not, because the more of her work I double-checked, the more I saw a competent and driven employee. That turned over everything I had thought I knew about her. Could it be that perhaps she was talented, but hadn’t done well in school for some reason? Had her mysterious benefactor seen a diamond in the rough; some kind of talent that would only come out when she was properly motivated? I didn’t understand any of this, but I knew that Carter was one of the more important members of my team, in spite of what everyone else said. And I promised myself that I would find a way to ask the right questions without offending her. I wanted to understand what was going on, because curiosity was one of my defining traits. But I knew that sooner or later, I would have to decide whether the facts meant more to me than the girl’s friendship, and I really didn’t see either choice as acceptable. A shrug, and a sigh. She’d done more work this afternoon than I had. I promised myself that I wouldn’t underestimate her again, and that I would try to pay attention to the work everyone did, instead of making assumptions based on second hand life stories. If I was ever going to have a real management role, I needed to know how to deal with people, and in that Carter had already taught me more than any of the textbooks on the subject, or responsibility training seminars. As I set off to jog home, I couldn’t stop thinking about what else I could be missing out on, and how much easier my life might be if I knew the right questions to ask. -
By Kitty Angel · Posted
106. My Big Responsibility I kept glancing nervously at my computer all of that morning. Watching what was going on in my house. I didn’t expect to see anything yet; the little creep was coming over for dinner, not lunch. But I could see how nervous Tess was. I wanted to pick her up and hug her, tell her that she wasn’t required to entertain him. That she didn’t need to do everything for herself. That was why she needed to be a little, after all, and the sooner she accepted that the easier it would be to take away all of the adult worries plaguing her. I would probably have taken every opportunity to see what was happening at home through the day, but I had a lot more work than usual. Almost everyone on my little team – which had grown to thirty people now – was rushed off their feet, and it was getting rare that I could even take two minutes to look at my computer. It turned out that despite SYL being the leaseholder for almost every business in Upper Ashfields, this corporate town still had a lot of moving parts that got stuck as soon as we started taking direct control of anything. That didn’t entirely surprise me; the local residents might have liked the presence of such a large corporation to manage the town, but a lot of the shop owners still liked to think of themselves as independents; and they had their own ways of organising things. Even if everyone had been briefed weeks in advance, and all the contracts signed, it was too much to expect those businesses to change all their routines to fit around the event. For one store early morning delivery might mean some time before ten, for another it might be before they opened. And yet another might have their delivery routes blocked out in ten minute chunks so they would know exactly when they would be at a given place. Everyone was trying their best. I could be sure of that, but there were a whole bunch of different organisations working together, and they didn’t have much prior experience of working as a team. It was my job to make sure that all the gears meshed smoothly, and turn this whole town into a well oiled machine. Of course, the representatives from Claughton were here too, but they had some more specialised experience for this particular conference. A dozen men in navy suits, most of whom I still couldn’t remember the names of, were tasked with making sure that nobody found out exactly how many celebrities might be here, or what the purpose of this meeting was. It shouldn’t be too difficult; a good portion of the guests had brought their own trailers and recreational vehicles, and after a lot of searching I’d been able to mark out a section of some of the many parks in Ashfields that were surrounded entirely by buildings I could take control of. Their improvised camping space was surrounded by our offices, so that the identities of the people staying there could be kept on a need-to-know basis. “Does anybody know where the peacock is?” an irate voice screeched from the radio on my belt. I didn’t recognise who was calling, but they were clearly upset about something, and I knew that a good part of my job this week would be ensuring that none of the creatives had any reason to get mad. I knew who the peacock was, as well, having picked up a lot of the nicknames that the studio’s technical staff used for their more glamorous coworkers. And I knew where he should have been; I’d done my best to memorise the important parts of the schedules for each day, so that I wouldn’t need to delegate quite so much. “He should be in auditions?” I hazarded. As a former A-list star, Tyler Walthamstone had been able to demand some unusual terms on his contract, like being able to watch the auditions for his character’s close relations. I seriously hoped that he wasn’t going to insist on a vapid blonde, like he had allegedly done on the teen vampire movie that catapulted him to stardom. I remembered when that movie had come out, during my college days, and I was sure that it would have been better if the leading lady had been picked for more than her looks. Tags 2 deserved better. But that clause was in the peacock’s contract, and so he should have been sticking his nose into auditions for his girlfriend and other cast members. “He’s not here,” the voice snapped. “Tell me he’s not off searching for random fans to expose himself to again?” But I had already returned the radio to my belt, and was tapping at one of the in-house apps on my phone. I could check the last time the security swipe cards had been used, and I had been very careful in checking all the hoardings to ensure that getting from one part of the conference grounds to another would always involve going through a building that made a record of what ID it had seen. I wasn’t entirely surprised to find that Tyler was still in the park we had been calling the campground. “Looks like he’s in his trailer,” I answered. “Or somebody’s, at any rate. I’ll go tell him you want him.” I’d started running as I was talking, and the irate voice could probably hear that I was breathing more heavily. I could only hope that was enough to stop him from claiming that our organisation was unsatisfactory in some way for allowing this to happen. Walthamstone’s trailer was one of the largest, a silver monstrosity that looked more like a blimp with a couple of wheels bolted on the bottom. I walked up to it and rapped on the door, but there was no response. I was about to set about the unenviable task of checking the other temporary residences in the vicinity, wondering which of his co-stars this perfect example of masculinity would be harassing now, when I heard movement coming from within. It was hard to make out at first, but when I rested my hand against the silver shell of the trailer, I could feel a faint movement. Not just the thrum of a generator, although that was there as well. No, the trailer was steadily rocking. I called in to the irate voice on the radio and reported what I had found. I would normally have been willing to bang loudly on the windows and yell that people were waiting for him; I didn’t need to respect a so-called star who couldn’t even show up to meetings he had demanded. But he was also very well known, and the kind of person who could kick up a big stink if us mere organisers interrupted him at an inopportune moment. I needed the approval of someone from the production team; or at least from Claughton. While I waited for them to argue about the best way forward, I checked my phone again. I had a laptop bag over my shoulder just in case I needed to check out anything on the move, but in a situation like this my phone was perfectly adequate for signing into my office computer and checking out the video recordings from home. Or it should have been, at any rate. The only message I got was ‘connection failed’, and nothing I could think of seemed to change that. After I tried a few other online resources and had no problem with any of them, I had to conclude that my home router had some kind of technical problem, and would need to be turned off and on again before I could find out anything that was happening in my house. It had happened before, but never on such a critical day. I cursed my luck, hoped that Ffrances or Tess would be able to restart the troublesome device the next time they needed to use the Internet, and rammed my phone back into the side pocket on the laptop bag. Normally I wouldn’t have been so forward. I’d been brought up to respect people’s privacy, even boys. And never to be rude, or to stick my nose in where it wasn’t welcome. But the tone of the conversation from the back offices told me that our clients were less than impressed with the situation, and their satisfaction with the conference as a whole was going downhill fast. I didn’t want them to leave with a bad impression, even from something beyond our control. I was here to make sure that everything went smoothly, from Mr Smith’s cheeses to the behaviour of a petulant star. And before I knew what I was doing, I hadn’t just banged on the door. I tugged at the handle, and found that it wasn’t actually locked. Perhaps he’d been waiting for someone, or he just never considered that somebody would march right in to discover his current taste in girls. I hesitated for just a fraction of a second as the door swung back, but then reasoned that I should finish what I had started. I stormed into the trailer, stomped through a lounge area that looked like it had come straight out of the seventies, and headed for a bedroom door with a big star on it, which was sounding out a faint tap-tap-tap in time with the movements of the trailer. I could hear heavy breathing as well now, but I couldn’t let myself be squeamish at this stage. “Mr Walthamstone!” I called, sure that he would be able to hear me from this distance. “Everybody’s waiting for you, and they aren’t going to wait much longer. My job here is to ensure that everybody is where they are supposed to be, and I intend to–” My voice trailed off again as the bedroom door swung back to reveal the scene within. I’d expected a girl, or two. Probably younger, probably someone who thought that getting involved with this creep would help get them into the business. Or maybe the younger starlets still idolised him, and could be manipulated into doing whatever he wanted. I might have considered that he would secretly have a guy in there, although it never crossed my mind for more than an instant. And what I actually saw in that room was probably the very last thing I had expected. “Hey!” he yelped, jumping to his feet and then hastily sitting down again before attempting to cover himself with the sheets and hide the object in his hands. “Look, this isn’t what it looks like! You can’t tell anyone…” It was all I could do not to laugh. -
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By kypteclifestyle · Posted
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