Chapter 33

Once seated at a secluded booth in the restaurant, Octavia begrudgingly yanked her laptop back out of her bag while Raemon gave a waiter their order.

The drinks were delivered in seconds, and when she had taken a few sips from the steaming mug, she began to feel a little better, a little less resentful toward the man seated across from her.

“Okay,” she said with a sigh, “whose information do you need?”

Raemon didn’t reply immediately. He had his own laptop open before him, and he was staring at the screen with that intense look of his. The Scowl of Concentration.

Finally, he spoke. “Why did you leave Alta?” he asked evenly, then looked up from his screen.

The question took Octavia by surprise.

“Um, excuse me?” she said.

“My question was pretty straightforward. Why did you leave Alta Solutions if that…that man…thought so highly of you?”

Octavia paused before she spoke. “I don’t know…it was just time to go.”

Raemon sat up straighter and focused a probing gaze on his assistant.

“You weren’t working for anyone else when I hired you. In fact, you hadn’t been working for some time. You weren’t leaving for another job, so why did you leave?”

Octavia shrugged. “I wanted the experience of unemployment.”

“Why are you avoiding my question?” Raemon said. “What did that…that…Phil do to you?”

Octavia rolled her eyes at this. “Is that what you think it is? That I was involved in some affair with my boss?”

“He seemed extremely happy to see you. And he kept singing your praises,” Raemon said bluntly.

“That’s the way Mr. Mackenzie is with everyone. And anyway, I was on the leading design team.” Octavia once more folded her arms across her chest.

“It is possible that I was as much of a valued employee as he said I was.”

The scowl on Raemon’s face slightly softened. “I wasn’t trying to offend you.”

Octavia gave a mirthless laugh. “Believe me, I’m not offended. If I got offended every time someone insinuated I slept my way to success, I’d give Twitter a run for its money.”

“So what was it then?” Raemon persisted.

Octavia stared into her cup listlessly. “I don’t know. I just couldn’t take it anymore.” She began to stir the liquid in her mug with a silver teaspoon. “I interned at Phil’s company,” Octavia said.

“And I loved working there. Back then, it was a small start-up. And Phil’s always been an idea guy. He really knew how to get his team excited for whatever concept he thought of.

“I loved my time as an intern, so I was pretty excited when I got a job offer right after college.”

Octavia paused. The wisps of steam rising from her mug had dwindled.

“At first, everything was fine,” Octavia continued. “I got to work with a team of people just like me, people who really loved programming. We worked great at turning crazy ideas into actual products.

“And it was even better when we saw the success of the things we designed. We’d come up with a concept, work our asses off on it for a couple of months, and then release it into the world.

“Then we’d go nuts over the reactions to our stuff. The hype, the sales, the company’s profit—all of that.”

“And then?” Raemon prompted.

“And then we got bigger, Alta became more well known. Lots of people were clamoring for our technology design services.”

“I don’t see the bad in that.”

“Well…Alta became a bigger thing. Phil became some tech start-up hero; Alta became the ‘fastest-growing tech company of the year.’

“And then it wasn’t about having an idea and programming it into reality. It was now create a new product that will spark the hype and spike the sales—or else.”

Octavia looked up from her drink and gazed around the restaurant.

“It was all so meaningless. All we did was come up with new and updated versions of the last thing we’d done, something with more bells and whistles to splash across advertisements.

“A camera with even MORE resolution. A battery with TEN TIMES MORE LIFE. A phone with a detachable automatic nose-hair trimmer—fucking bullshit like that.”

“A detachable nose-hair trimmer? That is impressive,” Raemon remarked dryly.

Octavia smirked. “It might as well have been something that dumb. At the end of the day, that was all we were doing.

“Creating useless shit to tack on to any available piece of tech so the hungry masses could have a new model of something to wait in line all night for.” Her eyebrows dipped into a scowl.

“All of us designers—hell, everyone who worked there—were working toward absolutely nothing.

“All our schooling, our passions, our talents, all the times we’d spent googling tags to learn our trade or searching through lines of code to pass our final projects…

“All that potential went to pushing useless products onto shelves. I couldn’t do it anymore. I just couldn’t.”

Octavia let her eyes drop back to her coffee, now lukewarm. Raemon’s eyes were still trained on her face, though his expression seemed to have taken on a look of darkness.

“I guess the short version is,” Octavia said, looking up, “I went through a quarter-life crisis and quit my job.”

Raemon asked, “And…the project of yours he mentioned?”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” Octavia said. She busied herself by tapping a few icons on her screen.

Raemon did not question her further on that but remained silent. Eventually he asked, “Why work for Icarus, then?”

Octavia looked up. “Huh?”

“If Alta wasn’t the place for you, why Icarus?” Raemon asked in his usual calm, static manner.

Something felt off; she felt a twinge of feeling in his voice that wasn’t matched by the blank expression on his face.

She shrugged. “Truthfully, I was kinda running low on cash.”

“Why not go back to Alta?”

Octavia hesitated before answering. “I don’t think I can be the person I was before.” She glanced around the restaurant, lost in thought.

“I couldn’t keep pretending anything we were doing was…meaningful.”

“But you can pretend with me?”

The question instantly brought Octavia’s gaze back to Raemon’s face. Nope, still no expression.

“I don’t need to,” Octavia said, “I only have to do what you tell me to. The whole point of my job is to be a soulless automaton.”

“You mean like me?” Raemon said.

She definitely heard a hint of bitterness in his tone.

Octavia shook her head.

“Now that’s different. We’re different. I can’t design stuff unless I’m inspired. Besides, you like being in charge, don’t you? You wouldn’t have to be a soulless automaton with the job you have.”

Raemon regarded her complacently for a moment but then let his eyes drop to his own screen.

“The production quotes. First, Techventions Enterprises,” he said, typing away on his own device. “Their new cellular device they came out with last month. What are the stats?”

They worked. Raemon gave orders, and Octavia followed them. She soon finished her cup of coffee. Eventually, she needed the bathroom.

“I gotta go,” Octavia said, sliding out of the booth.

“We’re not done yet,” Raemon said with a warning tone.

“I’m just going to the bathroom, sheesh,” Octavia said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t take long.”

“Ha,” Octavia replied, “I just drank twelve ounces of coffee. I’ll take however long I need to get that out of my system.”

Raemon sighed.

“I know, I know,” Octavia said, “TMI. But, hey, it’s the only way to get you to stop ordering me around.” With that, she walked off.

She was able to get the coffee out of her system fast enough. No details needed to be revealed, but if someone were to arbitrarily assign her bathroom visit a number, it would NOT be a “2.”

Octavia washed her hands, then turned to the automatic paper towel dispenser behind her and waved a hand under the box attached to the wall.

Nothing happened.

She stood there, water dripping from her soaked hands and frowned at the still dispenser. She waved her hand under it again.

Still nothing.

Octavia waved her hand wildly underneath it a few times, sending water droplets all over the floor and some onto her wrinkled white shirt, then she waved both hands in front of it, around the sides, and over the top.

Still nothing.

Octavia sighed in exasperation and looked around the bathroom. There was nothing else she could use to wipe her hands on.

She looked down at her pants. They were a black polyester. Definitely not the absorbent type.

She was about to turn and leave the room, intending to shake her hands dry, when a robotic chirp sounded from the dispenser and a humming, rolling sound filled the room as a square of clean white paper slid from its lower edge.

“Yes, finally!” Octavia exclaimed, grabbing onto the sheet. She tugged, attempting to tear it off.

But the sheet did not come off. Instead, the roll of white paper kept emerging.

The small square hanging out of the dispenser grew into a rectangle as the humming machine kept on spilling the roll of paper out of its slot.

“No!” Octavia exclaimed, snatching up the expelled towels and crumpling up what she could.

The paper kept spilling out of the dispenser, faster than Octavia could catch and crumple it. She waved a free hand around the edges of the dispenser but nothing changed.

She then whacked the side of the box in desperation, hoping that would slow it down.

As if infuriated, the hum of the machine went up in frequency, and the paper started spilling out five times faster than it had been going before.

The rollers within the box sped furiously, and a scroll-like length of towel shot out of the dispenser, spilling onto the floor as Octavia desperately tried to stop its descent.

There was nothing she could do. She tried gathering up the paper as fast as it was coming out, but she was no match for the malfunctioning machine.

Soon coils of paper towel lay spread out on the floor around her in one jumbled mess, with Octavia still clutching the end of the long, crumpled line in her hands.

Abruptly, the machine stopped. Octavia watched as the end of the paper roll shot out of the slot and fell to the floor. Only then did the machine seem to turn off.

“Oh, so NOW you stop!” Octavia shouted at the box.

At any rate, at least her hands were dry.

She looked around the mess on the floor and bent over to try and scoop it up.

For a trash can, the room had a small metal panel embedded in one wall. You’d press a button, the slot would open, and you could toss a small wad of crumpled paper towel in.

You could not fit the several armfuls of paper Octavia was trying to keep bunched up in her arms.

~Shit,~ she thought to herself. What could she do? Stuff it all in one stall?

Of course, she could always just leave it there and let someone else take care of it. Or at least let one of the hotel staff know what had happened.

Still, she didn’t want to risk anyone coming in and seeing the mess of paper towels there, especially if they happened to see her come out of the bathroom first.

Octavia didn’t exactly think through how dire the consequences would be if this happened.

Certainly no one would see her leaving, see the mess of towels and jump to the vicious conclusion that she’d emptied a whole roll of paper towels to do…what? Make a fort?

Nevertheless, she scooped up as much of the mess as she could hold and made her way toward the door. She nudged the door open with her foot and peeked around the corner. There was no one there.

Even better yet, she could see a large trash can a short distance down the hall. It was disguised with a marble-like exterior, but quite evidently a trash can.

“Perfect,” Octavia said, kicking the door out of her way and attempting to zip through the opening before it swung shut.

What happened next, she couldn’t be sure. She wasn’t fast enough, and the door swung open, then swung back, whacking her in the behind.

She stumbled forward, lurching toward the trash can, and was almost able to keep herself upright—but then her foot landed on the trailing edge of the paper roll.

Somehow, her foot got tangled in it, and she went flying toward the ground. Her arms flew out, sending bunches of the paper in all directions as she braced herself for the fall.

Octavia landed with a graceless thud on the carpeted floor.

For a few minutes, she simply lay there, astounded by her new discovery on paper towels as a health hazard.

“Fuck,” she groaned to herself, attempting to stand up. She had tumbled right onto the edge of the foyer, where the passageway to the bathrooms opened up to the view of the entire hotel lobby.

And yes, everyone in the foyer had seen her fall and were now staring at the clumsy girl lying in a puddle of paper towels.

Octavia heard the sound of clicking heels coming to a stop right before her. She looked up and saw the sharp curves of two red-bottomed stilettos angled toward her.

Glancing farther up, she saw that the stilettos were fitted on slender, tanned feet, which were supporting a pair of long, slender, tanned legs, which were both supporting the slender, tanned body of a woman.

She stood over Octavia, a tight, short red dress covering the barest minimum of her torso and long, sweeping blonde hair draping over slender, tanned shoulders.

From where she lay, Octavia could only barely see the electric-blue eyes lined with dark mascara peering down at her, and the full, red lips curved into a sneer.

The woman spoke. “What the hell are you doing?”