It was almost midnight on another nondescript Friday in my cube at DataTek and I was comforting myself by recalling scenes from the Tom Hanks movie Castaway. The one where the giant FedEx plane goes down in flames in some remote corner of the South Pacific, complete with waterlogged packages large and small bearing the infamous royal-blue and orange logo of the biggest "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight -- what-a-freakin’-lie-our delivery-is-really-for-crap" company in the business flanking our noble hero as a he valiantly fights for shore.
I’m not bitter. Pause. Ok. I’m bitter. Not two weeks ago, I was one of the Marketing department’s golden children, the wunderkind of the proposals section, queen of last minute saves and the darling of overly-booked and harried sales reps looking for guidance and hoping to make President’s Club with this quarter’s quota.
I was Proposal Goddess.
Then, in one swift, brutal moment of corporate neglect, it was all down the tubes. A single, unthinking moment when I put my complete trust in a company who dresses it’s employees in outfits just this side of lederhosen and stupid little caps any self-respecting man with any testosterone left would find humiliating. A company who failed to delivery My One Project of the Year "absolutely, positively" on time. I must have deforested entire acres of old growth rainforest for the all the paper utilized in that project (and probably single-handedly initiated the new Ice Age with my contribution to global warming).
But in the end, it was a half million dollar proposal project that was promptly rejected and returned by the potential customer for failing to meet the deadline.
I was hosed.
So here I sat on a Friday night wallowing in my misery, a sick, roiling, dysfunctionally emotional stew of anger and self-pity. Taking a page from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, the welcome-to-my-nightmare, drug-soaked chronicle of his climb in the culinary industry, I had begun a self-imposed exile of long, grueling work days. Self-inflicted penance for failing miserably at something, up until now, I could do in my sleep. Need a proposal response in three hours? Give it to Gwen. She can crank it out like a ferret on speed. Want that presentation in color, all packaged so slick and pretty, it turned possible customers into babbling simians dazzled by bright, shiny objects? Gwen was your gal. Or she used to be.
Never mind that friends and enemies alike around me laid the whole failed fiasco on FedEx’s doorstep. Better to use Einstein Express, as one sympathetic friend wryly emailed me. When it absolutely, positively had to be there yesterday. Never mind that the current project on which I wasting a precious Friday evening wasn’t even due for two weeks. Never mind that right now, I had a slightly bewildered husband at home probably praying I’d soon get over the sheer stupidity of this. A husband I’d lovingly berated just a few months ago for allowing his job to slowly creep in and begin to dictate his sense of self-esteem. It’s just a job, I said to him. It’s not you. Don’t start buying into that workaholic mentality, blah, blah, blah. Hah! None of that mattered. The Big FUBAR had occurred on MY watch, and I was committing psychological seppuku to atone for the lack of a do-over.
In my eyes, I could no longer be counted upon to deliver those legendary last minutes feats of legerdemain I, as well as most of my department section, was famous for. Hell, I seriously doubted any rep would trust me to mail his cable bill. My heart was broken.
I was pathetic.
To be honest, no one was brow-beating me into working this much. DataTek was almost overly-lax in allowing gearheads a flexible schedule. But every techno-geek worth his or her salt has worked at a DataTek at one point or another during a career. The tanning room just off the state-of-the-art gym; the game arcade with all the loud, garish video games perpetually on "Free Play". The obscenely generous bonuses and raises. That is, until the first bad quarter of revenues had VPs and sales reps alike doing one and a half gainers off the roof. Unfortunately, corporate headquarter buildings in suburban Southern California seldom rise over four stories. Sometimes the most you could accomplish was quadriplegia.
Tonight, the building had grown steadily quieter with each passing hour. It was date night after all. Even geeky propeller-heads had some kind of social life. If nothing else, they did have each other with whom to play paintball or just hang.
On my second to the last bathroom break, there had been about three other people still desperately pounding away at keyboards in search of that next big bonus or whatever version of carrot the company was currently dangling at us. Lorna had been there in search of some kind of financial reprieve from the IRS due to a particularly nasty divorce. Amidst the steady hum of the fluorescent lights and the printers, I could occasionally hear Eddy Chen’s whispered cursing coming from his padded-room-without-a-door-commonly-called-a-cubicle down the way. And there was the usual, steady belching from Ravi’s cube in the corner.
However, on my last bathroom trip about half an hour ago, the only other person left, other than me, seemed to be Eddy, and only because I almost ran into him as he practically sprinted to the kitchen in search of cheap, fortifying junk food from the company-subsidized vending machine, looking a little wild-eyed I thought; his thick glasses slightly askew on his pimply face, and his normally myopic gaze somewhat panicky. Which was probably a normal state in which to be after ten ours of debugging some piece of shit-for-code that was due out in next month’s product release.
I was beginning to get mildly irritated as whatever backup Tech Support was currently running slowed my manic keyboarding to a screaming halt. I cursed the network and my PC, and barely restrained myself from hurling a training manual at the monitor. "Hit any key" my ass...I had visions of a sledgehammer...
The final straw came quickly. I heard an ominous click and watched, sickened, as my monitor screen faded to black. In a few moments, it would fade back in with the reboot sequence in progress, telling me I’d just had a crash and had most likely lost all the work I’d done in the last hour. Yeah, yeah, I know--don’t even start with me about "Autosave" or how I should manually save my work every five minutes or so. Yeah, sure. I’m here to tell you that Microsoft Word’s Autosave is crap, and like you remember to save every five minutes. Up yours and shut up.
I had the phone in my hand in a nanosecond, my blistering tirade of abuse already rehearsed and ready for whatever poor soul in Tech Support had the misfortune to pull graveyard shift tonight. At that moment, Eddy chose to play a particularly loud video game in the kitchen arcade, and to make matters worse, and for some god-awful reason probably based on air-conditioning comfort, he’d decided to prop open the kitchen/arcade door, which increased the noise level emanating from the stupid video game even more.
That did it. I was tired of slow as molasses networks. I was tired of manually collating my 300 page documents because the poor excuse for a printer didn’t. Never mind that I always set it to "collate", and it would always invariably re-set itself back. Hell, I was just tired. And now Officially Pissed to boot. I slammed the phone down and headed for the kitchen. Someone was going to pay for my now out-of-control bad mood, and Eddy was just the lucky guy to do it.
When I got to the kitchen door, I only had a split second to think: "How odd, the door isn’t open" before I fell through it and my face slammed into the linoleum. Everything went black.
Actually, the kitchen was black. The lights had gone out. The next thing I knew, Eddy was half dragging, half carrying me to the corner by the water cooler and screaming something in my ear about staying down, "flat on the floor, dammit!" It took another moment for my addled brain to realize that the reason he was screaming at me was because the whole, dark room was filled with most hideous crackling and booming and thundering -- worst than the digestive rumblings and farting at the last company picnic.
As my eyes became used to the dark and began to focus, I could see strange bolts of lightning and odd vapors oozing from the Terminator 2: Judgment Day video game machine. In a daze, I looked at Eddy in utter stupidity.
"They’re coming through games!" he yelled at me. "We’re going to have to stop them!"
I chose that moment to be verbally brilliant. "Huh?"
He shoved something cold and hard into my hand. I looked down and recoiled. It was some kind of strange looking firearm.
"Uh, Eddy, I can’t...no..." I stammered.
He slapped my face gently but firmly, which was just a tad rude of him. "Snap out of it! If you want to get out of this alive, you’re going to have to pull your weight!"
By now, the strange lights and vapors were beginning to solidify into frightening-looking apparitions. I prayed the moisture in my Gap khakis was just sweat.
Eddy tapped my shoulder. "Follow me. And for god’s sakes, stay low!" He began to slide across the floor on his belly, commando-style. I realized he was trying to head for the kitchen door, now blown off its hinges and lying like a beached whale on the floor. I decided I didn’t want to be left alone and followed him, scooting along on my stomach as he was doing. Just as we reached the door, the rest of the building lights went out. Luckily, due to the recent spate of random rolling blackouts the power companies had been creating from so-called lack of resources, DataTek had installed these battery operated lights that charged themselves in various electrical outlets. When the lights went out, they went into battery-mode and offered some measure of meager but blessed lighting. In the dim red glow, I could see Eddy sweating profusely.
We were well out of the kitchen by now and could no longer see anything inside it. Suddenly, I saw movement from the corner of my eye. Something long and sinewy was beginning to thread its way across the floor towards my foot. By now, Eddy was around the corner from me towards the restrooms, and I was frozen with fear. I began to whimper.
I could hear him shouting for me. "Gwen? Gwen! Where are you?!? Get over here now!!"
The cold, wet feel of the tentacle wound around my ankle suddenly snapped me out of my stupor. I screamed.
Eddy came crawling around the corner for me, but just then, another long tentacle came out from Kate Sonder’s cubicle and wound its way around his waist. I started scooting myself on my backside and elbows trying to pull myself off it, but for every inch I gained away from the evil thing, I lost three. Eddy wasn’t doing much better. We were being pulled away from each other as "my" tentacle grimly tried to drag me back into the kitchen and his tried to pull him into Kate’s cubicle.
"Shit! Now they’re coming from the PCs too!!" He flailed at me and began to shoot his strange firearm. At first, it looked like he was insanely trying to shoot off his own foot, but he was merely shooting at the source of the tentacle. So far, I hadn’t seen the delivery end of my tentacle yet, and I was hoping I’d never have too. "Shoot it!" he screamed at me. "Use the luminon...the gun I gave you!! Shoot the bastard now!!"
I remembered and looked down at the thing in my hand. But still my body wouldn’t respond to what was happening around me. My legs were now well back in the kitchen and I was losing ground hopelessly. As I was dragged slowly back into the smoky depths of the kitchen, I got the impression of something big and cold, wet and evil, at the end of that relentless tentacle. A gaping maw that smelled of death and mindless destruction. The fetid odor nearly made me gag. I reached out with my empty hand and found myself clutching what I realized was the bottom of the vending machine.
In a blinding flash, I realized I didn’t want to die, and began shooting into the darkness like a madwoman. My aim was wild, but I didn’t have to worry. I was so close to that monstrosity, it was as good as point blank, and I heard a sickeningly wet squelch as my ammo found its target.
The tentacle suddenly released and my backward momentum sent me sprawling out the door. But before I could get out completely, something wet, red, and sticky hit me straight on the chest. I brushed it off manically, fearing some kind of alien offspring (I’d seen Aliens seven times so I was no dummy). I felt instant relief when the saw the tattered piece of paper wrapper attached to the sticky mess. I don’t think I’m going to able to eat another Hostess cherry pie from the vending machine ever again.
By now, all I could hear was the steady staccato of Eddy’s "gun". I crawled back to where he was and found that he’d managed to extricate himself from "his" tentacle, but he was still shooting blindly into Kate’s cube. He grabbed my hand and sprinted down the hall to my boss’s office. That’s right! Keith’s office could be locked from the inside. We’d be safe there. We could call the cops and they’d come and rescue us. We’d be saved. I was sadly delusional.
He hurled me into the office and slammed the door behind us. "This isn’t going to keep them out you know. They’re not quite sure where we’ve gone, but it won’t take long for them to figure it out. It just takes them a while to become really cognoscente of their surroundings when they first hit planet-side." I didn’t feel reassured.
Eddy pulled a cell phone from his pocket and began punching numbers desperately. By now, I began to notice that his clothing and whole physical appearance was changing. Where he had been wearing a t-shirt, there was now some kind of strange body armor I’d never seen the likes of before. He seemed bigger and bulkier too, not the pimply little programming gearhead he was just a few minutes ago, back when everything I’d ever believed about the physical world was still true.
"What the hell are you doing??!" I whispered harshly to him.
"I’m calling for reinforcements. Adam Rolf and Sue Ullah!"
"The tech writers?!" I was stunned.
"Yeah, we came on the same skimmer together. Damn, I can’t get a signal!!"
"What do you mean you can’t get a signal? How about the regular phone lines?"
"They’ve already knocked those out. That’s the first thing they do."
"Geez, don’t you have some kind of sophisticated communication device, for crying out loud!"
"We function within the limitations of this physical plane," he said lamely. "For the most part," he added, sheepishly looking at the gun in my hand. I could’ve decked him right there. What the hell kind of interplanetary warrior was he?
"What are they, and what the on earth do they want?"
"They’re from way outside this solar system physically, but they’re able to bend space and time to enter your world in a parallel-dimensional way. And they want this planet. They’ve been hammering away at it for longer than I can remember. And I can remember a lot."
The way he said that stopped me in my tracks and I stared at him for a moment. My slug of a mind was crawling toward some kind of revelation, but I put it on ice for now.
"Well, how do we stop them?" Ever the result-oriented Type A I was.
"Well it looks like they’ve found two portals this time—the Arnie machine, and Kate’s PC. In a way, that’s not too bad. They’re close enough together that I may be able to seal them both off with one chronbomb."
"A bomb!?"
"Calm down! It doesn’t destroy anything like a normal bomb. It simply seals the portals and restores everything to the way it was before the infiltration."
"Well, what are you waiting for, for gods sakes?!"
"Well, first we want to make sure those are the only two portals open. It takes them about twenty minutes to squeeze each of their uglies through. But once there are enough of them through, they can set up bigger and better portals that can let in more of their fellow uglies in invasional numbers--like hundreds of thousands."
"Well how long have we been politely chatting here? About fifteen minutes or so? That means we’re going to get another set of red meanies here in about five minutes or less. We’ve got to move."
"Ok. I’m going to plant a couple of the chronbombs at those portals. You’re going to have to start recon all over the building immediately to make sure there aren’t any more opening up anywhere else."
"By myself?"
"Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind you. But we’ll have to work fast. There’s a bit of a time lag before full restore from the chronbies are achieved, and in the meantime, if another portal opens, we’ll have to start all over again. So to play it safe, I’m going to give you a few chronbies to set off at strategic places all over building. Make ‘em count--we don’t have that many."
So for the next hour or so, Eddy and I scoured the building, setting off chronbies and shooting whatever moved. I think the cyber-gods were smiling upon us that night and we managed not kill any DataTek employees. It didn’t look like there was anybody else working anyway. I envied them.
When we finally knocked off, I took a short trip to Tech Support to see what our graveyard shift guy Mike had been doing all this time. I finally found him snoring away in the tanning room, oblivious to all that had just happened. I envied him too.
I went back to Eddy’s desk and handed him back the firearm. The lights had come back on by then. I looked into his eyes, and just for a moment, I thought I saw what looked like the light of an ancient soul staring back out at me--the eyes from a million battles hard fought, and so far, won. Or maybe it was just a trick of the fluorescent lighting, because a few seconds later, is was just good old Eddy Chen gazing myopically at me. The armor seemed to fade back into skin and the jeans and baggy DataTek t-shirt he’d been wearing earlier. The scary luminon in his hand wavered for a moment before dissolving back into an ordinary three-hole punch. Like he’d have a reason for carrying a three-hole punch-- He put it down and touched my hand gently.
"You know you can’t tell anybody about this. But you can’t forget it either. We’re going to need you for the next one." With that, he disappeared into the men’s room.
I shuffled back to my desk in stunned silence. After all, who was going to believe me? Who was going to believe that one of our most valued R&D technical developers was actually a thousand-year-old warrior sent to protect the Earth from Them? The Bad Guys. The Aliens Who’d Chew Us Up and Spit Us Out given the chance.
Not if Eddy and his friends could help it.
But where did they come from? How did they get hired at DataTek? I had a bone to pick with HR...
Sigh. Screw it. My brain hurt. I called it a day and went home.
Bio:Elizabeth is forty, female, and married.
E-mail: kflorance@earthlink.net
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