Chapter 239: Book 4 Chapter 13.2: Work Life Imbalance

“Okay, Kelly, Anish, and Brad are the only ones that seem suspicious to me,” Harley said. “The rest of them could be the mole, but there’s nothing that really stands out about them to make me think so. Just totally normal accountant guys.”

“I see.”

“Also, on a totally business related note, I think we can pass on these two right away,” Harley said. She held up two resumes and separated them from the rest she had in her folder. “Not a good fit for the company.”

“If you say so,” Lee said. “Maybe we should simply dismiss this entire batch, start over again…”

“Nah, Lee, if we do that your dad’ll just send another spy in the next group,” Harley said. “We’ve got to kick some ass and make sure he knows we’re not letting anything get past us.”

“Right. Then I suppose we’ll just have to continue on,” Lee said. “Maybe something in the facilities- oh! The facilities tour!”

“What about it?”

“On the catwalk overseeing the production floor,” Lee said. “There’s that lowered area right in the middle!”

“A ‘dip’,” Harley said. “Maybe whoever we took on a tour after hiring showed their hand in that dip. So if we bring them there on this loop-”

“History will repeat itself, exactly. I have a spell that should alert us if any covert magical effects activate,” Lee said. “Anything you can do to keep an eye out for cameras?”

“Not me, but Disway the Tourbot does.”

“Ugh, Disway,” Lee said. “Do we have to use him?”

“You want to hire a human to do the tours? No?” Harley said. “Then we use Disway.”

“One of these days I’m going to make you overwrite his personality,” Harley said.

“He’s a friendly little guy and he’s doing his best,” Harley said. “Don’t hurt his feelings!”

“What feelings? He’s not Botley,” Lee said.

“Just be nice to the robot,” Harley said. She tabbed through her phone and found the app to activate Disway. What looked like a filing cabinet in her office opened up, revealing the dock and charging station for Disway. The lights of his perpetually smiling face beamed on as his treads started to whir. With a wide base and a long, narrow upper body, Disway looked a bit like a robotic broomstick, as did the long, noodly arms extending from his narrow central stalk.

“Hello! I’m Disway, your automated tour guide companion,” Disway said, his synthetic voice crackling with programmed cheer.

“We know, Disway, we own you,” Lee sighed.

“Please indicate my guided tour group,” Disway said.

“Let’s go meet today’s lucky contestants,” Harley said. She opened the door to her office and let Disway wheel out first. The interviewees looked surprised to see a robot wheeling out ahead of Lee and Harley.

“Everyone, this is Disway, he handles the tours,” Harley said. “Disway, say hi to our twelve candidates.”

“Hi, our twelve candidates,” Disway said. His synthetic smile never wavered as he turned to scan the hallway. “Targets identified.”

“Targets?”

“Disway also comes with security features,” Harley said. “Don’t even worry about it.”

“Biometric signatures locked,” Disway said. “Alrighty, let’s start the tour! Disway says this way!”

Disway waved a hand down the hall, and Lee rolled her eyes as the robot led a procession down the hall. The candidates looked confused that they were going on tour together like a group of schoolkids, but they followed along in silence until Kelly realized that Lee and Harley were trailing along at the end of the group.

“Are you, uh, also coming on the tour?”

“Yes,” Lee said. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I, uh, just wondered,” Kelly said. Anish looked over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow at the two executives accompanying them. “If you’re coming with, why do we need the robot?”

“Disway’s better at giving the tour than we are,” Harley said.

“Slightly,” Lee added. Not only were they not good at giving the tour, they both hated it. A robot was the most sensible solution.

“Our starting position is right in front of the offices of our C-suite,” Disway said. “See? Sweet!”

Lee rolled her eyes. Brad scanned the row of offices.

“Why is one of them empty?”

“Because it…”

Disway’s face froze, as did the rest of his body. Kelly poked the robot in the shoulder.

“Sorry, we didn’t program that knowledge into him,” Harley said. “That third office is a storage room for now. It’ll be for the head of our research department when he’s ready to start working.”

That answer did not seem to satisfy Brad, who was no doubt upset by the rule of three being broken. He didn’t have much time to linger on his distaste.

“That’s a storage room,” Disway said, repeating Harley’s words all over again. “It’ll be for our-”

“Disway, initiate tour phase two,” Harley commanded. Disway made a loud beep before skipping his newly-acquired info in favor of the next part of the tour.

“Now let’s move on to the break rooms. Disway says this way!”

The wordplay was bad enough the first time, and got worse every time it got repeated. Harley had tried to shut it down, but apparently the Pun Program was loadbearing. Any attempt to remove it resulted in Disway becoming completely nonfunctional.

After going through the break rooms (“Hit the brakes here!”), the employee offices (“Where the best place to stop off is.”), and the server room (“At your service!”), the tour finally came to the manufacturing floor. Lee readied her spell, and Harley kept an eye on Disway’s readouts.

“And here is our manufacturing area,” Disway said, as he rolled across the catwalk. “And that’s a fact, man!”

The adaptable treads that carried Disway forward started to roll down the dip in the catwalk. The curious candidates looked over the railing and watched from above as a swarm of elaborate robots, aided at times by human workers, assembled the oceanic mana harvesters that were Harlan Industries primary product. Lee kept an eye out for any signs of them making notes, casting spells, taking pictures -any sign that might clue her into the identity of the spy.

She saw no such thing. Her spell did not react at all, and Disway acted completely normally. Lee glanced towards Harley, who shrugged. This would’ve been the best possible chance for any spy to accomplish some easy espionage, but by all appearances, nothing had happened.

Disway rolled on, spouting another pun about their next destination, as Lee and Harley fell back.

“Did we miss something?”

“I don’t know, I missed it,” Lee said. “That was the dip, wasn’t it?”

“That was ‘a’ dip,” Harley said. “There’s multiple kinds of dip. We could be dealing with spinach dip, a dipstick, someone who went swimming-”

“I have swam recently.”

Lee and Harley both let out a brief gasp of surprise and looked behind them. Sarah had appeared as if from nowhere, still visibly damp from the swimming she had apparently done.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Sarah! Why were you- nevermind,” Lee said. She still didn’t answer questions. Which was a shame, because Lee really wanted to know where Sarah had been swimming. They were near the north California coastline for ease of shipping, but still several miles out from the nearest body of water. This town didn’t even have a swimming pool.

“I’d say we need to get you a bell, but we all know that wouldn’t work,” Harley said. “But alright, you took a dip. In that case, listen close: one of those people following Disway is a spy.”

Sarah leaned past Harley to look at the touring group of candidates.

“No, I do not believe one of them is espionaging,” Sarah said.

“Trust us, we know,” Harley said. “Just do us a favor, come with me to go check them out, make some small talk, see if you can identify which one is a spy.”

Sarah saluted and headed for the candidates alongside Lee and Harley. Since she didn’t answer questions, someone would need to interpret for the confused candidates. In so much as anyone could interpret anything Sarah did. That natural weirdness made her a perfect tool to disrupt any complicated schemes.

“Hello everyone, sorry to interrupt, I just wanted to introduce you all to Sarah,” Harley said. Lee waited patiently on the sidelines, as Harley was by far the more experienced Sarah-handler. “Sarah is our...she doesn’t actually have a job title, but she’s my friend and she’s super useful.”

The candidates waved awkwardly at Sarah as she appraised them from behind her ever-present sunglasses.

“If you ever need anything, please don’t ask her,” Harley continued. “Seriously, she never answers questions. Doesn’t matter if you’re bleeding out, if you ask her a question, she will not answer.”

“Why not?” Brad asked.

In response, he got thirteen seconds of absolute silence.

“Right. Forget it.”

“That’s the spirit,” Harley said. “Now, Sarah, tell us something about something.”

“Elephants are incapable of jumping due to the knee structure they possess,” Sarah said.

“Oh, right,” Kelly said. “They’re the only mammal that can’t.”

“Correct. Now tell them something about our facility.”

“There are only three people who have bled in in it,” Sarah said. “So far.”

The looks of concern were immediate and obvious, except from Brad, who was just happy to hear the number three.

“Okay, two of those were a guy in our shipping department who gets nosebleeds a lot,” Harley said. “Third time was a guy getting his finger caught in one of the machines, he’s fine, shit happens.”

That seemed to mostly assuage the fears of their candidates, but it also did nothing to draw out any would-be traitors. The weaponized weirdness had scared the candidates, but not in the right way.

“Alright, Sarah, that’s good,” Harley said. “Go get some bagels or something.”

“Bagels are enjoyable, I think I will,” Sarah said. She wandered away again, to parts unknown (but presumably bagel-heavy). The candidates watched her go with looks of utter bewilderment on their faces.

Harley watched them closely for any signs of treachery. Sarah was leaving early, a kind of dipping. If that was the dip she was supposed to be looking for, there were no clues. Thwarted once again, Harley and Lee stepped back to regroup.

“Close to three for three on missed dips,” Harley said. “Though admittedly Sarah leaving was a stretch.”

“Maybe it’s when they leave,” Lee said, glaring at the candidates. “One of them does something as they exit that clues us in.”

“God, this was a terrible hint,” Harley said. “If I were still me I’d slap me.”

“It must have made sense at the time,” Lee said. “Maybe the problem is us. We’ve attempted to identify the problem so aggressively we’ve altered the timeline.”

“Maybe. You’re the one with the schedule, what kind of shit would we have done normally?” Harley asked. “Maybe if things go back on track we’ll get our dip back.”

“Only one way to find out,” Lee said. “Let’s see, had things gone according to plan...You would do initial interviews, identify good candidates, and then send them to me for a secondary assessment as a group.”

“Okay, so let’s roll with the secondary whatever,” Harley said. “You get them in the conference room and grill them.”

“It’s more of an explanation of company values,” Lee said. “I do have that bit of my speech where I emphasize our company’s morality-”

“As opposed to your dad being a sociopathic, self-centered bastard,” Harley said.

“As opposed to the average company’s focus on profit above all else,” Lee corrected. She saw it that way, at least. Harley still noticed a little bit of the ol’ patricidal inclinations slipping into Lee’s voice whenever she gave her big speech.

“Just hit ‘em with the fancy speech about values and see if they do anything suspicious,” Harley said. “These guys are accountants, maybe all that talk about morality over money will make them squirm.”

----------------------------------------

It did, in fact, make them squirm. Some of Lee’s final notes in the speech covered things like how the company would never go publicly traded and the caps on executive compensation, among other anti-greed measures. Lee saw a few confused looks, and some literal twitching, from the accountants. The only ones that didn’t seem to be reacting were Brad, Kelly, and Anish -Harley’s top suspects. Lee made a note of that.

“Now then, any questions?”

“Is this going to require any kind of additional contractual obligations on our part?” Anish said. “Ethics disclosures, that kind of thing?”

“There will be some additional clauses in your contract regarding our ethical expectations,” Lee said. “But it shouldn’t affect your workflow in any real sense. Provided you’re doing your work ethically to begin with.”

Lee shot a glare at the conference room full of candidates, just to add a little extra pressure. None of them cracked.

“Anything else?”

No one said anything. Lee took a seat, and had absolutely no idea what to do next. Not for the first time, she wished Vell was on hand to help untangle the threads of their problem. He had a way of piecing together complete nonsense with a few seconds of thought and one-to-four forehead wrinkles.

Lee put her head down and pressed her knuckles against her brows. Maybe she could force the forehead wrinkle phenomenon. She furrowed her brows by force and tried to concentrate on random bits of trivia. Disway the robot, Brad’s love of the number three, Sarah going swimming…

None of it made any sense.

“Damn it,” she mumbled.

“What was that?”

“Sorry, Kelly, nothing important,” Lee said. “Just...thinking about something I was discussing with Sarah earlier. She can be confusing from time to time.”

“This is a problem I am aware of.”

“Good lord,” Lee said. She whipped around in her chair to see Sarah standing behind her. “Sarah, please try to be a little louder.”

“I will not.”

“Fine. Just- you have bagels.”

Sarah was holding a small plastic tray, arrayed with several bagels, a few dried bagel chips, and a small plastic container.

“Harley instructed me to go acquire bagels,” Sarah said. “I have acquired bagels. Do you want one?”

“No, I’m fine, thank you, maybe our guests could wait stop!”

The candidates, who had been just about to eagerly dig into free bagels, were crushed with disappointment as Lee snatched the tray out of Sarah’s hands.

“Sorry, one moment, just have to check ingredients for potential allergens or dietary somethings, business regulations, you know,” Lee ranted. In reality, she had only one thing in mind -reading the label on that little container that accompanied the chips.

The dip. Lee spun the container around until she could read the front of the label, and her face broke into a wry smile. She pushed the bagel tray towards the center of the table, but the look on her face discouraged anyone from grabbing one just yet.

“One final thing before I let you all go,” Lee said. She pressed a few buttons on her phone to summon Harley, who was there in an instant. Lee nodded towards the tiny container of dip, and Harley’s face broke into a wicked grin to match Lee’s. “Now, as I was saying.”

Lee folded her hands in front of her, squared her shoulders, and sat up straight in her chair. It was, as her father had often said, the corporate power stance. She didn’t mind mimicking him on this particular issue.

“I know for a fact that one of you is working for my father as a corporate spy,” Lee said. The table of candidates froze as one. “I’d just like to give you a chance to come clean before-”

“I’m sorry it’s me!”

Kelly bowed her head so hard it nearly slammed into the table. Lee was so surprised she actually broke her power stance.

“Your dad called me this morning,” Kelly said. “I swear I hung up right away, but I know you don’t have any reason to believe me. I’m sorry, I’ll go.”

“Thank you for being so forthcoming, Kelly,” Lee said. “If you’d just wait there a moment, actually. As for the rest of you-”

Lee switched back into cool, controlling demeanor. She paused for a second and smiled.

“Get the fuck out of my building.”

Lee glared at her “candidates”, all sitting in a confused circle around the table, orbiting around a bowl labeled “Everything Dip (and Bagel Spread)”.

“Now, hold on,” Anish said. He pointed accusingly at Kelly. “She’s the one who was called-”

“All of you were called,” Lee said. Anish shrank back, and the other candidates started to exchange nervous glances. “Kelly’s just the only one with the decency to come forward about it. Now, I’ll tell you again. Leave.”

She turned to glare at Brad specifically.

“And I don’t care how much you like the number three, Brad, you will not like what happens if I have to repeat myself a third time.”

Brad really did like the number three, but he also liked not getting exploded through a wall, and historically, Lee could and would do that. He snatched his things off the table and left in a hurry, followed shortly thereafter by Anish and nine other would-be accountants. Soon, it was just Lee and Harley, alone with a very confused Kelly, a few bagels, and a bowl of revelatory dip.

“Am I still in trouble?” Kelly asked.

“Well, you’re going to have to interview again, at least,” Lee said. “But I do appreciate your honesty, even if it is a bit late.”

“I’m sorry, I really want this job, and I thought if I brought up your dad, even-”

“I understand,” Lee said. Kelly seemed like an anxious person, liable to make mistakes under pressure. Not exactly ideal in an accountant, but there were worse things to be than anxious. Lee would take honest mistakes over malevolent perfection any day.

***

“Oh, that does make sense,” Vell said. “That’s Sarah’s favorite dip.”

Lee contained a frustrated sigh. Had Vell been on hand rather than a few hundred miles away, he might’ve been able to use that knowledge, and Sarah’s off-hand comment about not thinking “one” of the candidates was a spy, to solve the problem much faster and with slightly less stress. Her heart ached for the day they’d have Vell here with them, but kept the feeling to herself. They still had about six months to go.

“I’m glad my alternate timeline hint wasn’t a total bust,” Harley said. “I don’t know why I didn’t just say ‘They’re all spies’ or something, though.”

“Maybe you thought it was funny,” Vell suggested.

“Nah. If I was trying to be funny, I could do a way better job than that,” Harley said. “Right?”

Though they were separated by a few thousand miles, Vell and Lee both made the exact same “Eh” noise at the exact same time.