Page 21 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
I glanced back at the smoking, twitching figure. “Does that happen often?”
“Often enough,” the other person replied, turning to look at mefor the first time. They were a little shorter and stockier than me, their hair shaved along the sides of their head and the rest teased straight up into a bright green mohawk. Studs and tiny rings glittered along the outside edge of both ears, and their septum was pierced by a large silver ring as well. Bright blue eyes studied me from behind a pair of black-framed glasses. “He was probably playing around with one of the artifacts and made a mistake,” they went on with a shrug. “It could have been worse, though. Two weeks ago we had someone shredded into their composite atoms. It took forever to clean her out of the carpet.”
I stared at them.
“Don’t worry about it,” the mohawked person said, giving me a bracing punch to the biceps. “Personnel will have this one healed up by the end of the week. That, or he’ll take early retirement and end up in Human Resources.”
Instinctively I ran a mental inventory of the substances HR would collect from a burn victim—screams, pain, skin, teeth—before remembering I didn’t work there anymore.
As if summoned by this attempt at reassurance, the elevator chimed softly and disgorged a pair of red-clad medics. They must have left the fourth floor at the same moment that the unfortunate person burst into flame, probably alerted by someone in Analysis and Logistics who’d foreseen this specific event. The medics moved toward the hapless victim and briskly took charge of them. Everyone else, meanwhile, had already lost interest.
“Look, I really don’t want to sit through another emergency staff meeting about workplace safety,” said the person next to me, “so I’m going to help you find whatever you’re looking for, okay?”
“Great,” I replied. “Thanks.” Watching a person burn alive had been a tad distracting, but I gave my head a shake and produced themetal disc from my pocket. “I need to know what this is,” I said as I held it out in the palm of my hand, “and where it came from.”
Leaning down to examine it more closely, the mohawked individual said, “I think we can do that. I’ll need to grab a few reference books first, though. C’mon.” They turned and started walking away, their purple Doc Martens squeaking faintly against the polished floor. “I’m Lex, by the way,” they said over their shoulder. “I use they/them pronouns.”
“I’m Colin,” I said as I hurried to catch up. “He/him. Thanks for helping me.”
“Hey, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”
Almost an hour later, Iwas leafing through a small, musty-smelling book written in a language I couldn’t read when Lex said, “Aha!”
We were sitting on opposite sides of a small table somewhere on the third level of the Repository, tomes piled around us. I had been largely useless thus far, doing little more than handing Lex whatever book they needed. At their exclamation, I asked hopefully, “Did you find something?”
“I think so.” Rotating the book they’d been reading, they pointed at a collection of symbols scrawled across both pages. The blood-smeared disc sat there, too, gleaming dully against the yellowed paper. “The sigils on the disc are from an obscure Sumerian dialect, which would make them several thousand years old. From what I’ve been able to puzzle out, they’re intended to bind whatever is represented by this symbol in the middle. I have no idea what that is, though. It looks completely different.”
“Bind,” I repeated like a dummy. “Right.”
Lex gave me a look. “This disc is a focus for the binding ritual. Or it was. Some of the sigils have been erased, presumably by whoever anointed this thing with blood.”
“Huh,” I mumbled casually, “I wonder who that could be.”
“The really interesting part is here.” Slowly, Lex traced their finger along one edge of the disc. “This, I recognized right away. It’s a collection of symbols used to denote Management in the earliest corporate mysteries.”
“Meaning what?”
Lex shrugged as they looked up at me. “Management created this. They bound…something, probably back around the time of the company’s founding.”
Silently, I considered the implications. None of them were particularly great. “So thousands of years ago, Management bound something with this disc, and now that something is free?”
“That’s my guess, yeah.” Lex lifted their arms in a brief stretch before running a hand along one side of their mohawk. “And They’re probably going to be super pissed when They find out.”
I tried not to laugh hysterically. I hadn’t just freed a hungry, homicidal entity—I’d messed with Management. I might as well step out into traffic on Madison Avenue and end it now.
Lex interrupted these bleak thoughts by asking, “Where’d you get this, anyhow?”
Taking a moment to collect myself, I said, “Oh. Um. I found it. Upstairs. On the thirteenth floor.”
Gaze narrowing behind their glasses, Lex eyed me thoughtfully. “That’s interesting.”
“Is it?”
“Sure. Sounds like office politics to me. One of the executives angling for something big, maybe. It’s cutthroat up there.” Theyshook their head. “That whole floor is full of dangerous idiots. You couldn’t pay me enough to work there.”
Shoving aside my increasingly panicked thoughts, I focused on the most implausible part of this whole conversation. “You don’t want to work on thirteen?” I demanded in disbelief.
Lex slung an arm casually over the back of their chair, gaze steady on me. “Nope. I don’t need to have a corner office or make a bazillion dollars or live forever.”
