Orientation Day
CARCANA MC’s Department of Gender-Appropriate Commination occupied a full half-floor of the eastern wing, the department’s territory marked by a hand-lettered placard reading TEAMS 7.A THROUGH 8.G and by the particular quality of its air: recycled beyond all memory of freshness, carrying notes of stale toner and carpet adhesive and, from the floor vents, something faintly sulfurous. The carpet underfoot had been worn to a greasy sheen along the traffic paths between cubicle rows. Decades of trudging feet had ground its original pattern into indeterminacy.
Mr. Rafe Scigley went along these hedging cubicles at a saunter.
Rafe approved of the place. It had the unmistakable atmosphere of a department where no one glanced up from their work. The cubicle partitions rose to roughly chest height, upholstered in some institutional fabric the color of cold porridge, and behind them sat rows of demons engaged in the steady labor of ‘Commination’. Whatsoever that labor entailed, Rafe had not troubled himself to learn.
Rafe was hunting for a Forever World. He was a demon of ‘no little distinction’, said Rafe to himself, and need not sink to the level of constructing his own Forever World. He had never commenced one. He did not, in general, dwell on matters thanatological. Yet every demon of course needed some world - every demon needs some promised afterlife - though it be someone else’s. What Rafe needed was a donor.
He paused at a T-intersection and surveyed the field. Fourth alcove, down the row to his left: a solitary demon, hunched and round-shouldered, pecking at his glyphboard with resigned rhythm. No neighbors within earshot. Rafe straightened his sport coat, adjusted his expression to one of brisk concern, and advanced.
“Good afternoon,” said Rafe as he stepped up to the cubicle, looming over the partition wall with his full height and speaking with pouncing authority. “My name is Rafe Scigley, Compliance Liaison for the Ergonomic Standards Division. I am here to conduct a cursory - though I assure you, categorically thorough - inspection.”
The demon looked up. He had matte, unblinking eyes. Behind him, a motivational broadsheet hung in a frame of mahogany wood and bronze filigree, its glass cover cracked diagonally: a sunrise over a parking garage, captioned SYNERGY - IT’S A JOURNEY. Rafe spared it a glance of artistic approval.
“I don’t recall an inspection this lunar cycle,” the demon said in a flat voice.
“Manifestly not, as it was unscheduled.” Rafe let his gaze travel over the alcove with performative concern: the curling memoranda pinned to the cubicle wall, yellowed past legibility; the CRT monitor glowing its sickly phosphor green; the demon’s posture, which was, truthfully, kyphotic. “I must observe - candidly, and with no wish to alarm - that your lumbar angle falls below the ordained physical minimum.” He reached into his jacket and produced a bonsai root hook, a curved implement with a steel tip stropped to a razorous edge, whose original purpose had been agricultural. He brandished it as one might flourish a medical instrument. The sharpened steel caught the overhead light, which hummed at a frequency just below articulation, as though the fixture were reciting something private to itself. “You perceive this instrument? No - do not touch it. It is attenuating itself to the ergonomic particularities of the space, a process that will brook no interruption.”
The demon reclined slightly. Somewhere two rows over, a telephone commenced bleating.
“What you must now do,” Rafe continued, tucking the hook away and adopting a soothing cadence, “is report to the Calibration Office on the fourth mezzanine. Room 414-C. They will administer a corrective divination - fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty. Nothing invasive, nothing to deplore. A mere amelioration.”
“Well, I never signed up for corrective divination.”
“It was declared mandatory last quarter, pursuant to the new wellness coda. I confess I find the bureaucratic apparatus as circuitous as you do - notwithstanding which, the mandate is incommensurable with personal preference. You shall wish to bring your intake scroll. They are firm about documentation.”
The demon hesitated. Around them, the cubicle garden produced its ambient music: the rain-patter of keystrokes from neighboring alcoves, rising and falling in waves, punctuated by the occasional muttered imprecation which was the music’s verse.
“Well, I don’t have an intake scroll,” the demon said. He swiveled back to the electric screen, and raised his hands to the array of glyphs on his desk.
“Then you will need to acquire one through the rite of witnessed process,” Rafe appended, permitting a note of collegial sympathy to enter his voice. “That would take place upon the third mezzanine - not the fourth - in the first, rightmost door, second corridor past the water station. I understand the inconvenience, and I deplore it wholeheartedly. But the mandate descends from above, and between the two of us, Ergonomic Compliance imprints itself into a quarterly review once it has been flouted. It signifies little to me - but to you, I should think, a great deal.”
The demon stood. He collected a binder from his desk with bovine movements, and resignedly departed. Rafe watched him go, tracking the round-shouldered figure as it shuffled down the cubicle row and turned the corner toward the stairwell.
Rafe was alone. He stepped into the alcove. The telephone two rows over continued to ring.
The terminal screen still glowed; the employee had not touched the board of glyphs before he departed. Around the terminal - just barely visible, like heat haze shimmering above summer macadam - the Salt-magic of User Authentication formed a distinct line of vapour. Rafe’s own fingers migrated to the glyphboard.
Just as Rafe was about to depress the longest, bottommost key among the glyphs, the vapour line shuddered. It guttered, dimmed, and dissolved into nothing - the session had simply timed out. The screen reset to a generic login prompt, the phosphor green characters rearranging themselves into the departmental sigil and a blinking cursor. The Forever World, whatever this employee’s world had looked like, now lay sealed behind that employee’s identity, an extraplanar layer removed from any interface, summonable once more only at the behest of the employee with the flat voice and matte pupils.
Rafe heaved a melancholy sigh. He stared sulkily at the departmental sigil.
The login prompt winked at him. Beneath it, filling the lower third of the display, an advertisement glared in block-letter font within a lurid red border:
NOW HIRING - DEPARTMENT OF GENDER-APPROPRIATE COMMINATION Teams 7.A through 8.G - All Positions - Enter Within and thus Apply
Rafe perused it twice. A considering expression settled over his angular features.
Why not apply? Rafe thought. The meagerest display of his professional qualities must secure for him a following interview. And if he then chose to botch that interview…
The Forever World was a (hopefully) far-distant concern; CARCANA and its endless architecture were now.
Rafe turned from the terminal and found, beside the glyphboard, a laminated ID card on a coffee-stained lanyard, still warm from its owner’s neck. The photograph had faded to a pinkish blur. The name read GORBEN FELCH, COMMINATION ASSOCIATE, TEAM 7.D. Rafe took it.
So quickly did Rafe discover the nearest stairwell access from the cubicle garden that Gorben Felch’s badge still shed a degree of warmth from his pocket, into his thigh. This warmth, the result of a badge’s separation from its employee, would fade gradually before the next sunrise.
The hiring summons had specified a location: Sub-Level 3, Corridor 9-West, Room 1170. Rafe would present himself, answer every question incorrectly, and be escorted out through whatever service exit the department maintained for failed supplicants - and from there, the nearest parking garage.
Escape.
A serviceable gambit, Rafe thought, and I deploy it not from necessity but from largesse - the sort of maneuver that separates the professional from the mere jackanape. That others might fumble such an enterprise signifies little; I am not others.
Rafe rehearsed as he walked. The corridor narrowed, almost imperceptibly, and overhead, fluorescent tubes cast a flat, antiseptic light that hummed at a frequency just below thought. Jutting from the messenger bag riding at his hip, Rafe’s furled motivational poster, rolled around its pasteboard tube, devoured the flat light through its exposed end.
Rafe, practicing his introduction almost unconsciously, said, “I would characterize my greatest professional asset as perseverance.”
Now the ceiling tiles underwent a metamorphosis-of-hue, from midday vending-machine-mustard to late-day oatmeal. A fluorescent tube stuttered, expired, and relit in a colder register, so that the corridor’s underlying complexion - like the flush that suffuses skin with color - shifted as well, to the blue-white of an operating theater. Rafe failed to notice. He was deciding whether to affect a lisp during the rite.
Beneath his loafers, the carpet ended. Linoleum began - the variety of linoleum found in basement commissaries and disciplinary holding rooms. Gone too was the door behind him. A fire-exit sign rotated on its bracket and came to rest pointing into blank drywall. The corridor, which had run east-west, now ran along an axis which resisted cardinal description.
Rafe paused at a directory placard mounted at shoulder height. Below the enormous golden studs spelling out the company name, CARCANA MC, the department names were rearranging themselves, letters sliding behind their laminate casing with the dry, papery susurrus of a filing drawer being sorted. DEPARTMENT OF GENDER-APPROPRIATE COMMINATION dispersed, garbling like letter-soup, and coalesced back into ONBOARDING - ORIENTATION HALL C. Rafe rubbed his eyes, and consulted the new directions. Nearer than I anticipated - the edifice manifestly cooperates with those who demonstrate sufficient probity of purpose.
It was five-o’clock everywhere now. Rafe sought a place to rest.
The corridor eventually widened once more, and the ceiling rose higher, and Rafe beheld against every wall a redundancy of shelves.
They climbed in rusted iron columns from the linoleum to a height that defeated the eye, their upper reaches malforming into warped, overlapping layers. Each shelf bore its freight of office supplies in quantities beyond stockpiling: reams of copy paper, yellowed at the edges and fused by damp into solid bricks; industrial drums of binder clips, their wire mouths oxidized to a greenish patina; toner cartridges stacked in towers, their labels printed in a dead typeface. The shelves had bowed over the centuries into gentle curves, so that no two aisles ran parallel and the whole grid had settled into the organic likeness of an old-world orchard. Somewhere far above, an HVAC vent exhaled in a long, sighing pulse, then drew breath and exhaled again. The rhythm was unhurried and metronomic, and it returned in faint, overlapping echoes that rendered an inhabited silence.
Rafe had now been walking for many hours, having neither sat nor rested since leaving the cubicle hedge. His feet in his loafers had swollen to fill them precisely, and his messenger bag’s strap had gouged a chafing furrow over his clavicle. It was well past close-of-business. The fluorescent tubes in the corridor behind him had already gone dark. Ahead, the supply-forest offered no light of its own beyond a faint red glow, deep in the stacks, whose provenance he could not determine.
A forgotten stockpile. I must consider the available amenities.
Rafe was a practical demon, and practicality dictated shelter where shelter presented itself. The interview was tomorrow. His scheme required rest, composure. A demon of my caliber does not make a habit of sleeping on linoleum — yet is there not a certain probity in demonstrating one’s adaptability to circumstance? I am a resourceful creature, not an insensate one.
The deeper aisles, Rafe soon discovered, were wet.
Condensation glazed the shrink-wrapped pallets and ran in slow tributaries down the shelf supports. The linoleum had softened to a yielding, spongy texture underfoot, and in places it had split entirely, revealing a sub-layer of fibrous pulp. The stuff was ankle-deep in the wider intersections, and it gave off a faint, saccharine, papery smell.
Rafe picked his way through. The ambient red glow resolved, as he advanced, into a series of ancient EXIT signs mounted at irregular intervals along the upper shelves. Their plastic housings were cracked and yellowed, but the phosphorescent tubes within still burned with a cold, unwavering light that stained the mist a deep arterial red, so that the aisles appeared submerged in some luminous, faintly toxic fluid. By this light he navigated, and by this light he selected his bivouac: a widened junction where four aisles met, sheltered on three sides by pallets of legal-size paper and open on the fourth to a view of receding shelves that vanished into the ruddy haze.
A dozen padded manila envelopes, slit open and flattened, formed a passable pallet; a roll of bubble wrap served as a bolster. Rafe removed his sport coat and folded it with care, then settled the messenger bag against his ribs where its weight could be monitored even in sleep. The bonsai root hook he unclipped from his belt and laid within reach. Fine toner dust drifted through the junction in slow, black clouds, settling on his clothes and skin, coating his tongue with something dry and chemical. Rafe closed his eyes. The bubble wrap cracked and popped beneath his shoulders.
He woke to a voice.
“You haven’t got a writ.”
The demon whose voice had roused Rafe from ill-slumber was crouched on a low shelf three aisles over, visible through a gap where a stack of printer paper had collapsed. Small. Colorless. Fogged reading glasses. A lanyard hung from his neck bearing a badge so old the laminate had gone cloudy, and he held a clipboard in both hands and did not look up from it.
“I beg your pardon?” Rafe said, sitting up.
“Edict of writ number 11-C. Supply withdrawal, non-emergency. You have no writ on your person.” The clerk’s voice was flat and nasal and too loud. “This annex must be entered - or exited - only by one carrying writ 11-C. These are the aisle 4,000 through 6,112, the aisles of writ 11-C. Shelf coordinates are posted.”
“I am not here to requisition supplies — candidly, the notion of pilfering from this mausoleum of binder clips offends me,” Rafe said. “I am in transit. A brief and wholly authorized repose, nothing more. If there is a protocol governing the temporary occupation of a junction by a credentialed professional, I submit that I have satisfied its spirit, if not its letter.”
The clerk descended from the shelf. He landed without sound. He consulted a clipboard of particle-board lacquered in white gold, holding it at an angle that suggested Rafe’s position in the annex was a matter for astrological record. “Transit requires a Writ… let me see- 7. Overnight occupancy of this Archival Annex without Writ 7-Z is a System-Maintainer-Class infraction.” He made a mark on the clipboard. “You are in Aisle 5,004. Junction C.”
“Perhaps you might direct me to the onboarding annex. Department of Gender-Appropriate Commination. I have an interview, and I would rather arrive in a timely fashion as stand here debating the finer points of writ taxonomy.”
The clerk lowered his clipboard a fraction. He touched the edge of his badge with one finger, then turned back to his clipboard. “There is no hiring annex in this wing. Not anymore.”
“It was on the directory. Has this institution simply misplaced an entire department?”
The clerk crossed the junction to a stanchion at its center and pointed with his clipboard at a laminated sheet bolted to its face. Rafe had not noticed it in the dark. The grid of shelf coordinates had been overlaid with hand-drawn routes in red marker: winding paths through the stacks, annotated in a crabbed hand with notes like flooded past Q3 and ceiling collapse, use detour and DO NOT OPEN.
“Onboarding is that way,” the clerk said, and indicated down an aisle Rafe had not yet explored. He tore a slip of paper from his clipboard and placed it on the nearest shelf, tucked his clipboard under his armpit, wrung the wrist of his left hand with his right thumb and forefinger in a ceremonial sort of way, and stepped back. Rafe took the slip. It was a shelf-coordinate chit, stamped with a routing number and a date from a quarter predating the Red Year of Consolidation.
“Follow the red line,” continued the clerk. He paused and glanced toward the deeper aisles, where the red murk thickened. “Do not take anything. When you hear the hum, you are close to Onboarding. If you hear it and you are not close - if the shelves are still full and the tiles are still sagging - turn around.”
“Be so good as to specify — what precisely hums, and at what distance ought I to find this humming reassuring rather than alarming?”
But the clerk had already retreated into the shelves. Only the receding scratch of graphite on clipboard confirmed he had been there at all.
Rafe dressed, collected his things, and followed the red line.
It wound through the stacks in long, deliberate curves that avoided certain aisles entirely: aisles crossed out on the map with annotations too water-damaged to read. He walked for the better part of an hour. The fluorescent tubes began to fire as he walked, humming to life in sequence ahead of him. The red murk retreated before this yellow institutional light, and the paper mulch underfoot gave way to clean linoleum. The ceiling lowered, and the sagging tiles gave way to exposed ductwork, and the ductwork gave onto bare concrete. The orchard-shelves shrank; the shelves became merely shelves again.
Rafe found himself standing at the edge of things.
A set of double doors waited at the aisle’s terminus. Their frosted-glass fanlights were half-obscured by stacked boxes, but he could make out lettering etched into the glass: ONBOARDING - ORIENTATION HALL C. A low sound reached him. Not the HVAC. A hum. Steady and warm. It seemed to emanate from behind the doors, or from the walls themselves.
Precisely on schedule.
When the single door of tall ovular bronze behind the ebony receiving counter opened - opened of its own accord, no muscle having applied to it any force - the creature that entered through the portal did not step with any brisk secretarial gait - did not walk at all in fact, but rather, hovered above the polished tile.
The Aychar was a swollen mass of malformed bureaucratic tissues, limbs, and organs suspended at desk-height, bulging lips perpetually parted, a distended throat that rippled when it spoke. Its eyes were two filled-in checkboxes, perfect black squares pressed into the doughy expanse of its physiognomy.
“Mr. Scigley,” it said. The voice was tepid and procedural. “You are tardy.”
Rafe had not given his name; for an hour he had waited, and no clerk had there been to which he might present it. He now applied his most affable smile, and placed his palms on the ebony counter, leaning forward in a manner of familiarity.
“A minor navigational discrepancy - the signage in this establishment would confound a cartographer, though I do not say so by way of complaint. I trust the interview can still proceed on schedule.”
“Interview,” it repeated. The word came out taxonomic.
Behind Rafe, three other applicants waited in the hiring vestibule. The first was a small demon folding and refolding a crumpled resume with hands that never ceased moving. Across from this fidgeter sprawled an enormous demon, corpulent with hideous quantities of skin, filling his waiting-room chair entirely. From his mouth came an unaccountable, short chuckling laugh - some kind of tic, for no one had spoken in the silence following the Aychar’s last word. The third applicant was a she-demon of composed beauty.
“There is no interview, Mr. Scigley.” said the Aychar after a moment. It drifted sideways along the desk, consulting a form that had materialized in the bloated digits of one of its several mismatched limbs. “Your interview was conducted and passed on the fourteenth. You were expected on the fifteenth for your Rites of Integration. It is now… the fifteenth.”
Rafe maintained the smile, though behind it his mind worked with frantic mercantile precision. He had applied only yesterday, which had surely been the thirteenth - hours before he discovered the supply-forest. The fourteenth had not yet occurred when he submitted the application. The fifteenth, by any reasonable lunar reckoning, was tomorrow. Unless temporal discrepancies had been introduced during a traversal-by-elevator? But even then, he had manifestly never passed any interview; he had not suffered an interview in years. He resolved not to raise the point. Temporal disputes with processing departments were, in his considerable experience, incommensurable with victory.
“A clerical misunderstanding, nothing more - the sort of thing one deplores but cannot remedy from this side of the counter. I shall arrange a fresh appointment for some near future date. Be so good as to direct me to the nearest scheduling alcove, and I will trouble you no further.”
“You are already on the correct date, Mr. Scigley.” The Aychar drifted two inches nearer, so that Rafe could smell the adhesive breath misting from its shining lips. “Your onboarding cohort has been waiting.”
Rafe could feel the three applicants at his back, watching. He straightened to his full height, assuming an air of magnanimous disclosure. “I am compelled, in the spirit of probity, to make a confession that does me no particular credit - though I trust it reflects well upon my forthrightness. I applied for the position with no fixed intention of filling it. My references are, in part, considerably more optimistic than the underlying facts would sustain. My qualifications are, let us say, syncretic - assembled from disparate sources of varying authenticity. Candidly, my entire candidacy is a sustained act of creative improvisation, and I would not wish to deprive this department of a genuinely qualified candidate by occupying a post I obtained through what I can only characterize as largesse of imagination.”
“Yes,” said the Aychar. “Fabricated qualifications are not disqualifying. Fictional references are accepted in lieu of actual ones, provided they are fictitiously consistent. You have been hired, Mr. Scigley. You may proceed to the Onboarding Annex for your Rites of Integration.”
Behind the Aychar and the table, an org chart hung high upon the wall. So many revision stickers had been applied over so many fiscal quarters that the chart had become three-dimensional: a topographic map of departmental restructurings, whole divisions entombed beneath layers of revision. Rafe stared at it. His name was already on that chart. Somewhere, under something.
“I categorically decline,” said Rafe, and turned for the door through which he had entered. It was shut. Two demons stood in front of it: squat, grey-skinned creatures in ill-fitting blazers, heavy steel salvers strapped to their forearms like bucklers - for catering purposes. Their eyes were disinterested; their identity-badges, without names.
“Orientation is mandatory,” said the Aychar behind him.
The chair-filler demon applicant rose. He stood and stretched, rolling his enormous shoulders, and the motion placed him squarely between Rafe and the corridor to the left. He smiled at Rafe with genial indifference and belched another short, purposeless chuckle.
Rafe struck the first hiring demon with a straight palm to the salver, driving the steel edge into its chin. The demon staggered. The second swung its tray in a lateral arc that caught Rafe across the ear. He stumbled, braced himself on the water cooler, and kicked the second demon in the knee. It kept its footing. With surprising speed it adjusted its stance and swung, shield-bashing Rafe.
Rafe seized and hurled a waiting-room chair. Swiftly he produced his bonsai root hook and slashed a line across one demon’s blazer, cutting a red mark through the grey flesh beneath.
The small applicant had retreated to the far corner. The she-demon had not stirred. She had produced a visitor badge from her portfolio and was clipping it to her lapel, smoothing the lanyard flat with two fingers, unhurried, as though filing the violence away as a minor notation.
The melee lasted perhaps ninety seconds. Relative size and a one-sided numeric superiority rendered the outcome inevitable. The hiring demons worked with clerical efficiency: one pinned Rafe’s arms, the other stamped a form, and together they bore him, struggling, past the Aychar’s desk and through the far door.
The corridor beyond was long. When they had passed through the doors at its far end, the hiring demons deposited Rafe on his feet and stepped back.
His bonsai root hook was gone. He registered its absence before anything else. One lapel of his sport coat was torn. His ear rang.
The three applicants filed through behind him, herded by a creature Rafe had not yet seen: a gaunt, towering figure in a threadbare custodial robe that brushed the floor. The figure was vaguely masculine, and left a faint track in the carpet’s industrial pile. His face was a ledger of deep creases and hollows, eyes set far back in the cranium. Ancient. He carried a ring of iron keys and a clipboard of black leather, and moved with digestive torpor.
“I am the Facilities Coordinator,” He said. His voice was parched and precise. “You will follow me. There are three chambers, three rites, and each must be entered, and each must be executed.”
As the facilities coordinator led the group on, the narrow corridor of cuffed linoleum gave way to older stone, and the fluorescent tubes overhead, some dead, some flickering at mismatched intervals, cast a stuttering light across walls that predated the department by centuries.
Rafe had heard of places like this. Every corporate office of sufficient age developed them: trap-vaults sunk into the lower levels, designed in an earlier epoch to process alien demons. Demons who wandered in from adjacent offices, daily commute vagrants, the random trespassers and the merely lost, were drawn by some promise, and tested. Those who failed were terminated. Those who endured were made compliant, entered into permanent employment. This was a corporate immune system. It required no executive oversight, no annual review, no budget allocation. Only a custodian.
The Coordinator walked ahead, iron keys tolling at his hip. He had not looked back once. Rafe’s ribs ached where the hiring demons had struck him, and the absence of his root hook, hooked now on some lesser functionary’s lanyard, felt like a heavy nakedness - all four candidates seemed naked; for a dis-armed demon walks without protection against hostile elements. Ahead of Rafe, the she-demon with the crisp visitor-badge dogged the Coordinator’s heel. She had been eager from the beginning, and Rafe suspected she lacked a full appreciation for the realities of corporate welcoming rites.
The group emerged into a wider space, a junction, or what had once been one. A heavy door stood along the far wall, fitted with a brass numeral plate: I. The metal had gone green with age. Dust lay undisturbed on two decommissioned card readers bolted beside sealed secondary egresses. A faded evacuation map, with routes leading to rooms that no longer existed, hung crooked in its frame.
Mounted above the junction’s numbered door, angled slightly downward, was the Performance Panel of Ringing Sunrise.
Rafe studied the panel. It was cracked and parchment-colored, its backing LEDs burned and blurred beyond legibility, but it still hummed, a low, warm, promising vibration that bypassed the ears and settled directly in the teeth. A comprehensive benefits package. Competitive compensation. Room to grow. The other three applicants had, doubtless, followed that hum into the mouth of CARCANA
The Coordinator stopped before the first door and consulted his black leather clipboard, the pages stiff with age, the ink faded to the color of old rust. He ran one finger down a column of entries, paused, and tapped twice. “Three chambers,” he announced, still reading. “Each offers two outcomes: integration or termination.”
The small demon peered up from his crumpled resume. “Termination?” he asked.
The Coordinator did not clarify. He produced an iron key from the ring at his belt and crossed to the first door.
The corpulent demon rose from his place along the wall and unfolded to his full height. “Sporting,” he said. “Hahaha. Let’s crack our knuckles then my small fellow. Come now, one must show a little more enthusiasm on one’s first day. Hahaha.”
The first door swung inward. From somewhere deeper in the annex, past corridors Rafe could not yet discern, a faint jingle echoed back: tinny, distorted. The Coordinator stepped aside and gestured with his clipboard. “First the chamber of Identity,” he said.
Rafe, recognizing well the futility of resistance, and the potential advantage of initiative, proceeded through first.
The chamber beyond was smaller than Rafe expected. Filing cabinets lined the walls in decommissioned rows, their drawers half-open, stuffed with yellowed forms from other processing rites, other ages.
At the center of the room stood a printer.
The machine was institutional in every dimension, tall as a lectern, radiating heat. Beside it, a terminal shone with amber text on a black screen. The cursor blinked.
NEW HIRE ID <> RETURNING EMPLOYEE ID
The other three candidates followed Rafe through. The fat demon filled the doorway for a prolonged moment before easing himself through. He surveyed the printer, then the terminal, then the Coordinator’s key ring, cataloguing the room’s geometry with huge, patient eyes. The smaller nervous candidate slipped in behind him, his beetling eyes darting from the terminal to the printer and back again, folding and refolding his crumpled resume with fingers that had not been still since the waiting chamber. Last came the she-demon, sliding the door softly shut behind her. She positioned herself in the far corner, and said nothing.
“I hold in this skinny hand the Body Justification,” said the Coordinator. He detached and held up a yellowed paper from his clipboard. “‘Tis signed. One body is then justified, and must scan at the terminal. That machine will commence your integration rites upon receipt of valid identification, but those who do not scan will be alternatively integrated.”
Rafe remembered the ID badge in his coat pocket, the one he had liberated from the demon in the Department of Gender-Appropriate Commination. What had been the demon’s name again? Something with an ‘F’? Flea? Fart? Rafe approached the terminal. The two options of amber-colored light glared him in the eye. He drew the badge from his pocket, taking care to angle the photo away from the watching Coordinator, and pressed the magnetic strip to the scanner.
“You will observe I do not hesitate,” Rafe declared aloud. “There is nothing so tiresome as a candidate who dithers at the threshold of his own legitimacy.”
The screen chimed and refreshed: IDENTITY CONFIRMED - COMMENCING RITES. With a shudder and a creaking the printer surged to a heightened level of activity. It now emitted a mechanical grinding, and the warm stink of ozone and hot toner filled the chamber. Paper slid from its jaws: scroll after scroll of spreadsheets, horoscopes, death insurance forms, each stamped in variegated dyes with the badge’s ID number, and the name ‘Gorben Felch’. At the head of each page, in small serif capitals, ran the title: THE ACCORD OF THE FOUR SEASONS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF BLOODY CONFLICT.
The Coordinator’s pen scratched across his clipboard. He noted the scan without expression.
The fat demon sidled up beside Rafe. “An expedient choice,” he said. “Though I wonder, sir, if the position is now settled? Hahahaha.”
From the Coordinator came the funereal rejoinder, “While the Rite of Identity may be of predetermined outcome when the identity itself is known, in the case of fresh employment the position is determined via the secret inner divinations of the machine. Yet even now, in this rite, no outcome has yet been rendered certainly.”
Paper cascaded from the output tray. The pile grew.
Rafe lifted one of the W-4s from the pile. The form was warm, its small print dense, with Gorben Felch’s name stamped at its base, along with a signature line underscored by the word EMPLOYEE.
“Manifestly,” Rafe said, holding out the paper to the fat demon, “this document requires two strata of authority — one signature from the primary hire, one from a witness — and I would be remiss, categorically remiss, were I to permit a mere procedural deficiency to imperil the validity of the entire Accord. You will note the line is underscored. The rite demands its witness; I am merely the instrument of its demand.”
“I have served as witness in other rites,” said the demon. “Though I confess this is the first time a returning employee has asked me to verify his own paperwork.”
“I make no proposal — perish the thought. You must look upon the matter as if the Rite of Identity itself is tendering the request. The form compels; I merely present.”
From the far side of the room, a sound: the demon with the beetling eyes and wringing fingers had backed himself against a filing cabinet, and was whispering something rapid and formless. He had his eyes fixed upon the printer. The Coordinator faced the candidate with an expression as devoid of emotion as waxwork, yet with that same subconscious, horrible threat somehow conveyed.
“Sign here,” Rafe said to the fat demon, producing an antiquated marble pen from some secret pocket of his sport coat and offering it alongside the form. “I draw your attention to our esteemed Coordinator, whose patience — while doubtless oceanic in its reserves — is not, I suspect, inexhaustible. Those who are perceived as laggards in proceedings such as these are, I am given to understand, alternatively integrated. I would deplore such an outcome on your behalf.”
The demon reached for the pen, then paused, pink fingers hovering. He glanced at the Coordinator’s turned back, then back at Rafe’s face. Then he took the pen and signed.
The Coordinator’s head snapped back as if on signal. He crossed the room in three strides, lifted the W-4 from the demon’s fingers, and examined it. The Accord of the Four Season of the Department of Bloody Conflict, still printing, had produced a fresh roster page: a column of names in serif font, and at the bottom, the blank row now filled. The Coordinator reached into his custodial vestment, produced a stamp the color of dried blood, and brought it down on the document with a single, percussive crack.
PROCESSED.
“You are a demon of uncommon initiative,” said the fat demon, eyeing Rafe with a face flushed.
The printer ground onward, pages spilling without pause. The Coordinator was already turning from the nervous candidate, clipboard raised, eyes moving toward the terminal where the badge scan record waited. Rafe had thirty seconds, if that, before cross-referencing began.
He extracted from an inner pocket of his sport coat a large pad of unused bathroom tissue and fed it into the printer’s intake. The rollers caught the paper. A whine rose from somewhere deep in the arcane machinery. It surged in pitch, and then the printer seized with a shuddering cough, and went still.
The silence was enormous. The Coordinator turned, staring at the machine, then at Rafe, then at the machine again.
“A paper jam,” Rafe announced. “These institutional mechanisms are, as we all know, subject to caprice. I trust the fault will not be laid at the feet of one who has already demonstrated his probity by submitting to the rite in good order.”
The Coordinator said nothing. Then he produced again his ring of iron keys, selected one key with serrated teeth, strode across and unlocked the far door, and with one ceremonial sweep of his thin arm, ushered the candidate through; all but the fat demon, who remained behind.
They were met with a blinding radiance.
It fell in lozenges of cobalt and garnet and sulfur-yellow across the anteroom floor, thrown by stained-glass panels that covered two full walls. The glass depicted a forest of twisting decision trees, with nodes in the shape of blistered eyes. Rafe stood in the colored light and scanned the branches. But his eye caught no decision which led Out.
Then he spotted The Daily Commute.
Through the panels, dimly, past the stained geometry: other offices rising in dark columns, and below them, the Commute. Moving. And beyond it, he could hear it now - faint, but unmistakable in its arrhythmic music of horn and cough and rattle and chuckle and under all that signature hum like a fan-blade whirring through liquid rubber. Traffic.
The other two applicants moved past him into this cramped room, which was crammed with surplus office furniture: filing cabinets pushed against the walls, ergonomic chairs stacked seat-to-seat, a water cooler standing upright with no jug, its spigot dripping onto the broadloom. Beyond the clutter, set into the far stained-glass wall, was a door. Also stained glass, also leaded, fitted with an iron deadbolt and a key-reader. The reader stared with a steady, patient red eye. Rafe took closer note of the door’s pintles: heavy, spring-loaded, the kind that close themselves whether you want them to or not.
It was this door which separated the anteroom which they had entered from the chamber’s main attraction: a corner office. A single escritoire. A high-backed chair. And beyond the office, windows - real windows, clear glass - opening onto the highway. Rafe could see an on-ramp. He could perceive, with a specificity that tightened something behind his sternum, an echo of a memory forgotten by his conscious brain; a green-lit EXIT sign hanging above the merge lane.
“The Chamber of The Dragon presents a simple question of initiative,” the Coordinator said. “The office beyond the door is empty, and has lain thus for quarters uncounted, and now desires an occupant. The first among you to enter and take the seat will be recognized as the office’s rightful holder, and shall enter the Rite of Initiative, and shall receive thereafter all of the chamber attendant benefits, responsibilities, and non-compete obligations. The keycard is somewhere in this anteroom.”
The Coordinator stepped forward from the wall, positioning himself in the open space at the room’s center. He watched.
Rafe turned his attention from the far distant road to the anteroom, and his gaze settled on an ergonomic chair with a steel-tube frame and a pneumatic height cylinder thick as his forearm. Thick enough to shatter glass? He dragged the chair into a clearing between two filing cabinets, flipped it onto its back, and set to work.
Rafe had never been industrious. He was, by vocation and temperament, a demon who preferred to have things done for him, or otherwise, to have them done by someone else under the impression they were doing the things for themselves. But that EXIT sign had put a fever into his brain. Rafe gripped the chair’s armrest and twisted. He braced his loafer against the seat pan and pulled, harder. The metal groaned.
Across the anteroom, the nervous candidate had begun to search. He moved between the stacked furniture, pulling open filing cabinets one after another. The first was empty but for a single rubber band and a dried-out highlighter. He shut it. Opened another. His damp, crumpled resume fell from his breast pocket onto the floor. He quickly retrieved it, conking his head against the open cabinet as he rose.
Rafe wrenched the first armrest free. It came away trailing a stripped bolt, and he set it aside. He moved to the pneumatic cylinder - the piece he wanted: a steel tube, heavy, blunt at both ends, long enough and thick enough to wield like a battering ram. Gripping it and twisting, he discovered the cylinder to be coated in a layer of ancient tallow, his hands sliding along its slimy face. He changed his angle, planted his foot on the chair’s star base, and heaved. Finally the cylinder came loose with a gasp. Rafe gasped himself, then he lifted the item. He tested its weight: a solid half-meter of steel. He swung it once, experimentally. It felt substantial. Good.
“What,” said the nervous candidate, sidling up next to Rafe, “are you doing?”
Rafe did not look up. “I am conducting a cursory audit of this furniture’s structural probity. One discovers, in these older models, that the pneumatic assemblies are of a caliber no longer manufactured - a loss which I deplore.”
The nervous candidate stared at the dismantled chair, then at the locked door. “You’re not searching for the keycard at all, you’re going to break it down.”
“Your powers of observation, while intermittently functional, have led you to a conclusion I categorically reject. I am a man of resource, not of vandalism.”
But the would-be competitor had seen the stratagem now, or thought he had, and he wanted part of it. He crouched beside the overturned chair and began pulling at the seat cushion. What it yielded was a puff of ancient foam and a choking cloud of dust.
Rafe shouldered him aside. The demon stumbled against a filing cabinet; the cabinet rang, a flat metallic note.
“Please refrain from damaging company property,” said the Coordinator.
Rafe turned toward the stained-glass door.
The nervous candidate darted in front of him and planted both hands on the door frame. “If you break that door,” he hissed, “we both go through. I go first.”
“You go nowhere,” Rafe said, hefting the cylinder. “First, I hold the instrument. Second - and I say this with no malice, merely as a point of administrative clarity - you lack the constitution for sortie, as is manifestly demonstrated by the perspiration which has ruined your collar. You are welcome to search for the keycard, which I am certain lies concealed somewhere educational, perhaps lodged within that water cooler as a lesson in corporate perseverance.”
He feinted left. The nervous candidate matched him. Rafe feinted right. The nervous candidate matched him again. They faced each other, the dust still swirling between them, and for a moment neither stirred. The nervous candidate’s hands were raised, half-reaching - not quite blocking, not quite grasping. Beyond the glass, the traffic hummed.
It was during this moment - while Rafe and the little jumpy demon were thus engaged - that the she-demon executed her own gambit. From the moment they’d been introduced to the Facilities Coordinator, she had kept her attention fixed upon the ancient demon. She had awaited only a choice moment such as this, when his own attention was seemingly snared by the struggle over the chair cylinder.
Three long, swift steps. Her painted fingers dusted the Coordinator’s baldric. The iron keys - and one iron keycard which vibrated constantly with an innate electric-sorcery - came away easily as her fingers pinched open the carabiner, and by the time the Coordinator had turned his head, she had already reached the door.
She swiped the iron keycard before the reader. The indicator eye shone luridly green. The deadbolt clacked. The stained-glass door swung inward.
Rafe and the nervous demon gaped for half-a-moment. The she-demon stepped through without hesitation, without a word. The colored light from the anteroom fell across her shoulders and then she was past it, into the pristine office, moving toward the desk and the chair and the clear windows beyond.
Rafe lunged for the open door.
Something snagged him. The nervous candidate had seized the back of his sport coat with both hands and was pulling. Rafe twisted, shoved, felt the coat rip at one inside pocket.
Then from the corner office there bloomed a flash like lightning. All were momentarily blinded. Rafe heard the door slam shut - and in that same instant, from beyond the closed door, came another sound: a wet, mechanical crunch, followed by a long pneumatic noise. Like a chomp followed by a satisfied low eructation.
As their sight returned Rafe and the nervous demon, still breathing hard from their struggle, peered through the stained glass. The office looked much the same. The desk. The chair. The clear windows beyond. All were as before. Rafe could still see the highway, and the familiar EXIT sign.
The only difference was that the she-demon had vanished - abruptly terminated - and in her place were two rough spots of mashed, bloody, broken, wet ruddy demon-pulp; one great puddle on the otherwise clean carpet; one smaller stain drooling directly above it on the soffit.
The Coordinator extracted a second, identical set of keys from a pocket. He inscribed a final note on his clipboard, then moved past the remaining two candidates to a small access door.
“Let us fare to the final chamber.”
The Coordinator led them down.
Not along a corridor, nor through any passage belonging to frequented architecture, but down a steep slope into thickening gloom. The noonday light of the fluorescent tubes seemed to waver and perish as they went. The carpet gave way to bare concrete, then to stone.
“I do not care for this,” the nervous demon whispered, so close and sudden behind Rafe’s ear that the voice seemed like a thunderclap in the stillness. Rafe spun a glare on the demon and shoved him off a step, but rendered no answer.
The next chamber’s peculiar smell preceded actual sight of the room: calcium and toner ink, dry as kiln-dust, a mineral exhalation.
The corridor widened abruptly, the sloping ceased, and they found themselves standing at the verge of a mighty conference chamber. A long table of black-lacquered wood stretched from the threshold to a far end lost in shadow - and around it were ranged the dead.
They were twelve, or perhaps fourteen; the cone of light shot by a single projector mounted into the ceiling, the sole light, did not reach the table’s full length. The skeletons reclined in heavy ergonomic cathedrae carved of solid ivory and upholstered with horse leather. Before each lay a printed meeting agenda. At the head of the room, mounted against the wall and illumined in its ghastly beam, a slideshow slid riverlike through ‘Pending’ slides of curling format and fine black letters.
The Coordinator halted at the threshold. He said, “Take seats, applicants, here in the Chamber of Eternal Comradery; for the Rite of Eternal Comradery waits only upon your attendance.”
Rafe claimed the nearest empty chair. The upholstery seemed to kiss at his body like leather lips; the ivory casters were locked to the floor. The other candidate sat beside him, fingers squeezing the frigid armrests.
A new slide resolved in the beam’s cast light:
COMPULSORY NON-DISCRIMINATION OBEDIENCE INSTRUCTION - MODULE 7: ACCEPTABLE TERMINATION METHODS
A voice commenced to narrate. It emanated from nowhere identifiable - a droning, sexless recitation that seemed to rise from the floor. It spoke of the correct open-minded parlance a proper CARCANA MC employee leveraged when engaged in an act of termination: nonviolent, or highly so.
One skeleton on the middle left-end of the conference table adjusted its posture. Another turned a leaf of its meeting notes with yellowed phalanges, the tarnished ring on its fourth phalanx scraping the paper. Their gem-studded lanyards caught the light and scattered it on the wall in cold constellations. Before each stood a placard of hammered gold and polished jet, engraved with titles in a fiscal alphabet that predated ageless CARCANA MC itself.
“They are long dead,” hissed the little demon beside Rafe. “Skeleton, my confrere, what can it mean? I have heard, but never- And look, they are taking notes.”
“They are a Skeleton Crew,” said Rafe. “Observe the placards, the lanyards, the agenda before each seat. They are bound to this schedule and cannot deviate from its order, not though they lack flesh and blood and breath. Which is to say - and I speak candidly - that the schedule itself constitutes an exploitable instrument.”
Rafe stood. The Crew’s empty sockets turned toward him.
“Point of order,” Rafe said. His voice was steady, professionally pitched. “I am an external auditor, retained on contract for spectral review. I move to table item nine - that being the judgement of present-era personnel - pending a quorum confirmation of the judgement’s jurisdictional ambit.”
The nervous demon stood too. “No, no, no. We should leave,” he said. He reached for Rafe’s sleeve. Rafe wrenched his arm free.
A skeleton at the far end of the table raised one thin, dessicate digit.
“This proposal has been recognized by those in attendance,” the Coordinator said, from his position by the door. “Parliamentary procedure requires each render a vote.”
The Crew deliberated. Bone distals tapped the lacquered wood in sequence, a dry percussion that traveled the table’s length like a sterile tribal music. One tap for aye. Two for nay.
Rafe meanwhile rose from his chair, stepped behind the row of skeletons, and advanced toward the far wall, where a door was scarcely visible in the light’s peripheral glow. He tried the handle. Locked. He pressed his full weight against the jamb. The metal was cold and unyielding, and the lock had no keyhole, no card reader, no mechanism he could identify.
Behind Rafe, the tapping ceased. The plebiscite had concluded. The Skeleton Crew sat in renewed stillness along the table’s length. The nervous demon had not risen from his chair. His eyes were fixed on the screen, reflecting its cold glow.
The slideshow advanced.
Rafe stood with his back to the exit door, hands in the pockets of his sport coat, and considered. The attentions of the skeleton crew, and the Facilities Coordinator, had returned to the illumined presentation. The room offered no other exit. No windows, no ducts, no adjoining corridors. Only the door through which they had entered - blocked by the near-cadaver of the Coordinator - and the locked door at Rafe’s spine, sealed in some earlier epoch by majority accord.
“Well,” said Rafe, moving resignedly back to his ivory chair. “when ingenuity offers one no way of escape, perseverance must suffice.”
But though Rafe had spoken to no one in particular, The Chamber of Eternal Comradery itself replied.
The projector screen rippled - in the way a reflection ripples when you disturb the water casting it. The compliance training slide held for a half-second, then flickered, and behind it, bleeding through like a palimpsest, a second image surfaced: a company photograph, yellowed at the edges, curling where the screen had warped with age. A row of demons in ill-fitting business vestments stood before a gonfalon reading WELCOME TO THE TEAM. Third from the left in this lot stood a younger Rafe Scigley - the angular nose the same, but the mouth with perhaps somewhat less of the smirk about it - stared out from the screen with a cooperative expression.
Rafe did not understand what had occurred. But the photograph - that he recognized, and the slide presenting it was the slide of an older, familiar show. Rafe had persevered through this same slide once already, ten years of employment ago.
The black-lacquered conference table cracked - a hairline fracture zipped from one end to the other, following no grain, opening along fault lines that had not existed a moment before. The walls, previously lost in darkness beyond the projector’s reach, bubbled into water-stained plasterboard hung with a single motivational poster - TEAMWORK - this one a genuine oil-painting in the cubist style. The temperature plunged by twenty degrees. The overhead projector stuttered between two realities: the OBEDIENCE INSTRUCTION deck, then Rafe’s orientation photo, then both at once, layered and illegible.
The Skeleton Crew convulsed as one. Their lanyards chattered against their ribs as they began to toss and twist while remaining seated in their chairs. Their eternal routine had been, for the first time in epochs, interrupted. Tarnished rings clinked against the table’s fractured surface. The hammered-gold placards jumped about like fleas.
Ink pooled at the nib of the Coordinator’s pen, spreading into a dark blot on his clipboard. He stared at the Crew - and something in his gaunt face shifted: recognition, then the first flicker of alarm Rafe had seen cross that face which was rigid like wax.
Nevertheless, he began to intone, “By the fiscal authority vested in the third hiring body of the Entity CARCANA MC, and pursuant to the stellar articles etched upon the ebon tablets of Binding Compendium, subsection-”
The other candidate screamed.
It was the sound of a demon who had held himself rigid for too long and snapped. It rose from a wheedle and climbed until it became something beyond language - animal and raw, flooding the low-ceilinged chamber like a train whistle.
“sub- sub- section, sub-” The Coordinator stuttered. His lips stumbled as the formula lost its thread beneath him. A contractual binding required perfect precision. A sole stammer was failure.
Twelve skulls turned in unison; turned toward the little screaming demon; turned toward the Coordinator.
The dead rose. Chairs scraped back across the fractured floor. Their fingers, sticks of chalk banded in gold and bejeweled rings, closed around whatever lay nearest: placard stands, the conference soundbar, the splintered edge of the table itself.
The compliance narrator, indifferent to all of it, advanced to a new section: TERMINATION METHODS - MODERN MURDER MODES.
The Coordinator raised the clipboard between himself and the nearest approaching skull. He managed to utter a final stutter before the first bonewalker reached him.
Rafe had recognized the surge, along with a particular gleam at the table’s far end, and was already veering in that direction when the first placard stand whistled down. It caught the Coordinator across the nose-bridge with a wet, cartilaginous pop; his head snapped sidelong and the clipboard cartwheeled free. A second skeleton seized his custodial robe at the shoulder and wrenched - the fabric peeled, and something darker than cloth sloughed away with it, fibrous and slick. The Coordinator staggered, fumbling syllables no longer words, and a third bonewalker drove the blunt foot of a conference soundbar into the soft architecture of his gorge. He folded. Four more descended: chalk-fingers seized wrists and ankles, tarnished rings biting flesh, and they bent him backward over the fractured table-edge until something in his spine surrendered with a sound like a green branch splitting. His legs ceased to kick. The remaining five swarmed the little demon. He shrieked once, bovine, before two hauled him by his collar across the lacquered surface, cheek plowing through scattered foolscap and splintered wood. A third palmed his skull and hammered it into the table’s fracture-line below the orbital bone, and one eye went dark and weeping. Phalanges skittered loose like spilled dice, fingers snapped free of wrist-joints still twitching with procedural indignation. His second scream curdled to a gargle as they folded him too over the table’s lip, and when released he dropped with the particular heaviness of something no longer organizing itself against gravity.
Rafe circled wide and quietly along the wall through it all. At the end of the table Rafe’s hand lunged at the gleam he had spotted. He found what he had expected. Half-buried under scattered agenda papers, his bonsai root hook - the old hook, the one from his original orientation - caught the projector’s dying light; stainless steel, sharpened to a whisper. He belted it at his hip where it belonged.
The tearing-apart of the other two demons proceeded, and Rafe perceived now two of The Skeleton Crew clattering swiftly towards him. Just below the room-filling clamor of rattling bones, Rafe’s ear caught another sound - a click - he glanced over his shoulder, and behind him the exit door stood cracked ajar. No tumblers, no bolt. It had simply ceased to be locked.
Rafe leapt for the door and hauled it open. Upon his cheeks he felt the blast of cold air; on the tympana of his ears, the dusk-hour hum of distant fluorescents; at his shoulder the calcified hardness of a skeleton claw.
Rafe stepped through the door and wrenched it shut with a slam.
The desk before Rafe sprawled all the way from one stucco wall of the fifty-foot, stone-tiled office, to the glass wall opposite, the translucent panes on that end facing no exterior prospect of the highway, but rather only another corridor of CARCANA MC’s architectural intestines. The desk was built from filing cabinets crushed together under tremendous pressure until they had fused into a single geological stratum of pressed steel. Behind it, a trio of motivational posters depicted a dog chasing a kite, a cross-section of the planet mars, and a painting of Mao Zedong in the baroque style. Each bore a single word beneath: DETERMINATION, TRANSPARENCY, and DOMINATE respectively.
Behind the desk floated the Aychar.
It did not glance up at the slamming of the door. Its swollen bulk - a sphere of pale, membrane-stretched flesh - hovered above the red bolster of a high-backed executive throne.
“Ah,” said the Aychar warmly when it at last looked up. “So there you are, Rafe Scigley.”
Rafe brushed bone dust from the torn shoulder of his sport coat. “A regrettable outcome - though I hasten to clarify, not regrettable on my account, as my particular abilities aligned poorly with the integrating ceremonies, a deficiency I attribute wholly to the ceremonies themselves. Three chambers, not a single binding contract signed. I understand, no, no need to expostulate gently on the ‘unfitness of the match’. If you will but direct me to the nearest parking garage, I shall see myself out with all conceivable dispatch.”
The Aychar’s lips stretched. “Mr. Scigley, you survived. That is integration’s object. CARCANA MC twines her fingers through the tresses of such employees, those who survive to turn a company profit.”
One bloated deformation-of-limb extended itself to a glyphboard on the compressed steel surface of the desk, and depressed a key. The motivational poster of Mao Zedong slid aside to reveal a digital display, which flickered to life and began cycling through scanned pages of a benefits-enrollment scroll. Each field had been pre-filled with Rafe’s name in a typeface of otherworldly provenance.
“I categorically decline the offer,” said Rafe, stepping forward to tap his root hook upon the desk’s fused surface. “I am a man of considerable resource, and I do not recall authorizing the pre-inscription of my name upon any enrollment scroll whatsoever.”
The Aychar’s fingers raced across the glyphs in some other task now, as if it had not heard. With another limb it produced a leather manilla folio from beneath the desk and slid it forward. The folio was warm and smelled of toner. “You will find your new role assignment on page 3, sanctioned Words of Mighty Danger on page 7, and your updated seniority classification on page 11.”
Rafe opened his mouth to pursue his objection, then arrested himself mid-syllable. “Updated seniority, you say?”
“All years of prior service have been recalibrated to zero for purposes of treasure accrual, pension eligibility, etc. We find it motivates.” The Aychar’s mouth split across its orb-body.
Rafe suppressed a turn in his stomach with some difficulty. Zero seniority. Zero accumulated obligations. Years of compounding company debt, expunged by CARCANA’s own hands - manifestly a loophole of the most generous proportions.
“Well,” said Rafe at last, assuming a tone of philosophical resignation. “After all, one must accept the laws set out for all equally - I deplore inconsistency above all vices. And as this recalibration to zero must, by the iron dictates of equivalence, extend to prior financial encumbrances - small as they were in my own case, the merest trifle on the ledger - I should like to commission-”
“It does not extend. Company debts carry over in full per the ADDENDUM OF SHARES, SORROWS, AND BURDENS: All prior obligations endure, through reclassification and reorganization, yea, though the season may pass uncounted. Your balance has actually increased.”
The Aychar gestured toward the door. A collection notice hung pinned to the wall beside the frame, ink still damp:
1x Ergonomic Task Chair, Series 7, Lumbar-Adaptive: DESTROYED Replacement cost: $14,772.03 Charged to: SCIGLEY, R. Referred to: Office of Mr. P. Sinocarre, High Commissioner, January Financials
Rafe read it twice. “Infamous. I declare first that I did not destroy the chair, second that whatever force acted upon said chair was a direct consequence of CARCANA’s own integrating ceremonies, and third that fourteen thousand dollars for a single piece of lumbar-adaptive furniture bespeaks a procurement department in the grip of either madness or embezzlement.”
“Additionally,” said the Aychar, producing a second leather manilla folio from under the desk, this one textured in that prickly, fish-skin-like surface which was indicative of having been drawn from an unfillable filing cabinet, “Mr. Sinocarre has booked an immediate appointment with you. He was most specific about the timing.”
The intercom above the door crackled. A voice, bright and clerical, read from what sounded like a scheduling template: “Mr. Scigley, your appointment with Mr. Sinocarre, High Commissioner of the January Financials, has been confirmed for immediate availability. Please remain at your current location.” As the intercom clicked off, the name “Sinocarre” rang like the echo of a bell for a space of time afterwards. A glacial age seemed to suffuse the room.
Rafe quickly threaded his bonsai hook back through his belt. “Where has the company seen fit to station me?”
The Aychar pulled the laminated packet back across the desk, squared it against the terminal, and only then consulted the screen. “Gallery of the Stone Saints, 11-West. Cubicle block F, row 9.”
Rafe collected the re-orientation packet and tucked it into his messenger bag. Observing that the door to his right was open, and that the Aychar seemed to have forfeited all concern for him, he made a swift egress from the room, and the Hiring Annex altogether.