22
Orientation Day
The car door opened for Miles.
“Mr Hector?” A yellow-band butler signaled.
“Yeah, sure.” He climbed out of the car, and pulled on his suit jacket. He puffed a breath at the sight of the doors in front of him, and looked back at the staff behind him. “Will you guys be sticking around or—“
“The chauffeur and I will be taking a meal break for now.” The servant checked his watch. “If you need us, you call us. Is that okay?”
“It’s, uh, totally fine.”
“We hope you have a nice day.”
“Mm. You too.” He slowly strolled into the doors.
Blue-shirted men walked up to the glass separating him and themselves. A dark-skinned male with one of those telephone wires sticking out of the earpiece that could easily overpower him tilted his head upward at the car outside for directions. He silently nodded and opened the door for him.
Once Miles disappeared inside the building, the yellow-band gestured for the car door to be shut, and the pedal to be pushed.
“Directly to the reception. Please, no talking with anyone.” The deep voice from the guard commanded him forward.
It was a large white hall, with a stylized circle hanging from a wire that hooked into a receptacle thirty feet from the ground. The ambience of the staff walking past him, discussing plans may or may not be bound to contractual secrecy. The entire cylindrical hall looked like it was hundreds of feet wide, with elevator music sprinkled in through the filtering speakers.
Miles took note of the people sitting on the felt benches lined up next to the giant walls that streamed in sunlight. A few of them looked a unfurled piece of paper weighted down by a few phones that glowed as though an angel hit it with her halo. All black rectangles. All too similar. He carried one in his pocket because he thought it was a neat craft. This is like a field trip to that wood making factory again.
He sampled the collective chatter that made that rectangle in his pocket possible. He whiffed in the air that allowed it to exist. He made his way to the trapezoid close to the wall in front of him.
“Sir?” The receptionist looked at him with a furrowed brow.
“Miles Hector.” He pointed at himself. “I am here to start my first day for Dimensional Tech—“
“Keep your voice down.” The receptionist immediately picked up her phone and put a hand over her mouth as she spoke. “Mm hmm.”
The minute of talking felt like a lifetime. Miles could feel his sneakers sinking into the waxed floor beneath him.
“Third floor.” The receptionist placed one hand over the microphone as the phone came away from her face. “Ask for a person named Sean.”
“I’m here to see him.”
She appear surprised, and nodded.
“To your right.”
Miles moved into the lobby cut from the arc next to the reception, and took the next elevator up.
He kept to himself inside the elevator. Pushed in by people he doesn’t know, listened to the conversations he couldn’t interject. He pictured this is what business is like in a corporation the scale of the one Kayla’s father operated. Once you let these things get too public you’re gone.
The doors open to a two-feet-long hallway with a few steps of stairs that lead him to a wide hall beyond the two glass panels’ width that restricted the stairs. He only managed to make it down the stairs before he was stopped again.
A man in a white shirt came from the left.
“Mr Hunter?”
“Sean.” He fished a card out of his left pocket, and handed it to Miles. “Did they give you any trouble?”
“They drove and they made sure I got in—“
“Ah, right.” Sean’s smile vanished. “Come with me.”
The room housed hundreds of tables, some walled off behind frosted glass doors mounted on the chrome tracks on the ground. Some were next to a machine churning out shells and units with a few staff members. The engineer led Miles away from the buzz in the center, along a narrow corridor close to the curtained full-height windows that placed water and snack machines next to tables with board games and dry-erase boards.
Eventually they made it to a medium room built into the corner with the door on the face adjacent to the wall he first came in.
There was a white table, and four chairs leaning up against the panels. There were pencils and paper, and there was a small device. Next to it are the cubes, set in a four by three formation enclosed by some paper box, given away some decades later, a few weeks ago.
The door was shut behind them. Sean clicked the lock. He moved to the water cooler and gave Miles some water.
“This isn’t a remarkable office.” Sean tried to get the employee to look at him.
“What kind of work are we doing—“
“That isn’t a focus.” He looked at the cubes. “You don’t have the skills if you tried. We looked through your papers and this isn’t internal security. We have a team that is responsible for that.”
“So you’re bringing me in—“ Miles broke into his own little laughing fit.
“Bringing you in was not my idea.”
“Well, Ryan said he wanted to find you a home.” Sean produced a bottle of juice from the fridge next to the cooler. “You are a friend of Kayla, right?”
“I suppose you knew that.”
Sean nodded while pursing his lips as he popped the cap off and drank.
“Does Kayla know about this?”
“She does.” Sean’s eyes flinched in the face of that query. “I have a feeling you should know what exactly we are going to do next.”
He pushed the red button on the device, and the green clouds took in the cubes he fed the machine.