Steven readjusted his clock as soon as he received an email at 8:25 AM (now corrected for DST). The email read as such:
“We are happy to inform you that your reassignment to our facilities has successfully been filed and organized into our database of part-time employees. You may receive a slight pay increase after the first paycheck, where we will deduct a form of prepayment for our free meals. We expect you to be clocked in by nine o’clock on the weekdays, English Time.”
He remembered hearing of the “English Time” concept when he backpacked in Europe back in college. He heard of the jokes that the Spanish would make about English punctuality, and regarded them as compliments. He remembered the nights he spent in Europe with—
Get ready for work, you idiot.
He ran out of the house at 8:45, and was five minutes late. He was greeted by someone from the front desk and asked an assortment of questions. He obliged, knowing that this was how they signed people into their system. The email had said that it had all his information, but that simply wasn’t true. Things always get lost between servers.
The screens were projected in a radius around her, circling her as she whisked them away and brought new ones. Each new question brought a new faux screen into her field, and a small pause occurred before she filled something out in, or spoke to a few of the screens. It got so bad that he couldn’t clearly see through the haze of off-white brightness. She kept filing things away, shuffling items around her, or reorganizing the floating squares in front of her. She kept flicking, typing, deleting, resetting, flipping, switching, pinching, throwing, talking, asking—
All the rectangles pulled downward, as if vacuumed away in an instant. This startled the secretary. They both overheard an announcement buzz in over the main intercom system.
*SCHRR* MR. STEVEN PARKER IS REQUESTED IN THE RIGHT WING OF SECTOR A3. INFORMATION CAN BE STORED LATER, MS. FUTUR. *SCHRR*
Steven tried to take record of that name as well. Too many names, too little time. She pointed down the same corridor Steven had walked through before, and focused on the hall next to it. It was much wider, and better named “HALL A”.
“You’re new, so don’t forget where that hall is, alright?”
He saw that as a little patronizing, considering it was just an off-shoot of the other path that he and David took the day before. He shook that from his head and walked through that main strip, and he stopped as the hall split into two directions a full 180 degrees from each other. Looking up, he saw the numbers “1-5” on the top of the first path at his left, and the numbers “6-0” on the top of the other path. He took a left and counted down the door numbers.
Number A5.
Number A4.
Number A3.
He could here commotion from inside the room. Chaos reigned inside the room he had just entered. Cogne noticed him, and dashed up to greet him.
“Parker, you’re late, and that’s not very good, but I can punish you later! We’ve just intercepted what seems to have been a major-length letter to a political official in the western hemisphere!” Cogne was obviously rejoicing, standing out in stark contrast to his peers.
“My programmers saw that this note was in some other language. Someone on my team referred to it as ‘Tagalog’, an older language that died out only a century ago. Do you know it?”
Thank god, Mr. Parker thought to himself. I didn’t try to work on my Esperanto for shit.
Cogne regarded his silence as confusion instead of relief, and tried to apologize “I know that I prepared you for the wrong language, and I am deeply upset about this. This organization is somehow multilingual, even jumping to lesser spoken or dead languages because they know that we can only speak one.” He started smirking, “Their taunting us.”
This is fun to him, Steven thought, like a puzzle, or a game.
Even though Steven knew more Tagalog than Esperanto, his abilities in that language were sub-par. He picked apart pieces, and tried to shuffle words around – the word order still not getting to him now. He saw words for “transfer” and “young one” and concluded that they were planning on moving some unnamed object and giving it to someone new.
Cogne connected the dots, and ran to a computer. His fingers moving faster and louder than a college student who procrastinated on writing his thesis paper.
“I know what they have! It’s a flash drive called a cubic! We had been speculating this for months but I would have never—”
Steven interjected, “What’s a cubic?”
“A cubic can store data in three dimensions! Not just in ones and zeros, but in twos! We thought that they got their hands on that tech about half a year ago, and we were right! The message has a random ‘3’ in it between, err… those two words you just pointed out, and that means it has to be a reference to the cubic! That’s what we thought they did in French two months ago, but our translator…”
“Anyway, my point is that we know exactly what we’re looking for! We need to locate nearby facilities that had been developing this kind of tech, and check between the ones that had been breached!” Cogne was talking and typing near-simultaneously, “We can then look at where the few cubics that had made it to completion might have ended up! However, this last step is more of a weather prediction than an actual pin point location, if you understand.”
Cogne’s hand swept upward, and a map pulled up on an invisible screen in the wall that all the desks were radially facing. First, the whole map was covered in red; then, one by one, the color fell away as it was focusing in on other locations with a red circle. A red circle started to close around the street that Steven lived on, before encasing his building, and surrounding his loft.
The red circle glitched away as if it was forcibly torn off like a band-aid, and Cogne patted his back.
“Our services do tend to glitch occasionally” Cogne said, and Steven filled back with color.
A small woman in the corner of the room stood up. She was startled by something blue appearing on her screen. She yelled for Mr. Cogne.
“Sir, I’m getting another transmission!”
Cogne and Steven ran over to her cyan computer screen, and the small woman handed them both an earbud. Cogne couldn’t understand why there were random beeping noises, but Steven grabbed at a pen and paper.
Morse code? Seriously!? Are they trying to make this easier on me?
Cogne saw Steven write letter after letter, organizing the words as they came through. Morse Code had been long gone for many decades and replaced with a better code.
Steven had written down a page and a half of notes. Cogne read through them, and saw the Caesar cipher they had used. They covered the message by repeating random words found in alphabetical order in the dictionary. They used them as filler, and any words not in order were the next part of the message.
Cogne read aloud the new transmission:
“We are free. We are all. We are one. We will not surrender without our time of war, if it comes to that. We have delivered the 3 [cubic] to our newest associate.”
“We will win.”
The day ended, and the neon, bright lights of the city flickered through the suburbs. Steven was let go an hour earlier than originally planned.
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