“Am I to assume you’ve taken our technical writer home with you as well, along with the rest of the proprietary information that is missing?”
“You may assume that,” Simon says without a hint of guilt in his tone. He really doesn’t care. I think he’s enjoying winding her up, to be honest.
“Youmay have the option not to come into work,” Veronica says “But the company pays Lydia to be here, so I expect her to be here tomorrow morning.”
“She’s my assistant.”
“She isn’t, actually,” Veronica says. “She’s an employee of this company, and she has not been cleared for remote work, so I am going to need her to come in. You can stay AWOL for as long as you like, Dr. Seek. But Lydia belongs to the company.”
I bite my lip to stop from exclaiming that I belong to nobody.
Simon pauses for a moment. I think he is doing a similar calculation in his head. He’s trying to work out if this is a battle worth fighting, or if giving into Veronica is just easier.
“She’ll be there tomorrow,” he says, ending the call.
“I will be?”
“Sorry,” he says to me. “But she’s technically correct…”
“The best kind of correct,” I interject.
He smirks. “Right. So. Go in, play along. Let her get the sense that she’s in control somehow. She likes that. It will keep her quiet while I do what I need to do.”
I’m not going to enjoy working for Veronica.
But she’s going to enjoy me working for her even less, because I have formulated a plan.
This woman is far more dangerous than anyone gives her credit for. She has Simon off balance, and I suspect she’s been meddling, interfering, and perhaps even sabotaging him, and maybe me. She’s definitely comfortable with the way I am being used.
I am angry at Simon, but I am even more furious at her. He has a reason of sorts, a carnal one, a personal one. She doesn’t care about me at all. She just wants to see what is going to happen to me.
* * *
When I go in the next day, Veronica greets me with an expression I can only describe as smug. She thinks she’s won something. Maybe she has. Maybe I’m a prize in a contest I never wanted to be a part of.
“Simon says I have to be here,” I say, realizing for the first time how funny it actually is that his name is Simon. I should be making way more out of that.
“Simon understands his contractual obligations,” she says. “And he understands your place in this organization too.”
God, she is pushing all my buttons. It is so tempting to curse at her, or tell her I know what I’m not supposed to know, but I am not here because Simon told me to be. I am here because I have my own agenda. That would shock her, I think. It wouldprobably shock Simon too. Neither one of them realize that I have free will.
“You can make coffee, can’t you?”
“Well, I can’t grow or grind beans, but I can pour it out of a pot into a cup, if that’s what you’re asking,” I say, answering in a too-detailed manner that makes people of a normal disposition want to throttle me after a while.
My plan here is two-fold. One, be annoying and make her regret using me as some kind of sick work pawn in her even sicker game of work chess. The other fold is mostly made of vengeance.
The coffee request really plays into that last one.
“Go and get me coffee. No sugar. Plenty of creamer. If you think you’ve used enough, no, you haven’t.”
I slip away, nodding and smiling.
When I was waiting for Simon in my car, hoping that he would come back somehow, I killed a lot of time reading through my own notes and reviewing his. I learned a lot about the process that is being undertaken here. I learned things that I doubt Veronica knows because I had Simon’s handwritten scrawls on bits of paper and napkins.
I know, for instance, that one vial contains a genetic priming mixture, and another contains an activator, and depending on what is in that activator mixture, that’s what you become, or not. I think Simon’s accident was a result of too much priming and too much activator. He basically turned his body into a willing receptacle for almost any form, and I guess he encountered wolf first. Or chose wolf. It wasn’t really clear. I wondered at the time if humans and wolves just have a lot in common as a baseline.
Veronica is getting me to make coffee because she thinks I will think it is beneath me. She wants to humble me. That does not bother me. I am humble by default. The notion of being special seems weird and scary to me.