Special project

Grind.

Note: struggling with a bout of writer’s block, I based this off last week’s MM prompt. May it serve while I get back on solid ground!

It was such a mindless sound, fingertips scrambling over a keyboard. Furious. Seething. Blind insectile swarming. But from time to time, a pairing of words strung together just right, and the scramble became a— a spill. A harsh clatter that made him think of rattling bones. It was often enough to break the self-induced hypnosis and today was no different. Only—

Only, after coming back to himself with a blink and a sharp, indrawn breath, he glanced down to see his fingers were still moving, flesh-made spiders gripped in frenzied indecision.

For a beat or two, all he could do was stare at them, his mind unable to digest what was happening. But even when he made a conscious effort, he found he couldn’t pull his hands away from the keyboard. Strength of resolve had been brushed to the corners of his being and he was too weak— too unfocused— to gather it. With rising panic, he watched as his digits plunged and reared, a runaway machine beyond all control.

A thin, dark grouting began to form between the keys, swelling to gleaming channels beneath the fluorescents. His rebellious hands skipped over them without a qualm, even though each key they punched down now came popped up streaked red along the sides. He whimpered, trying again to wrench his fingers away from the keyboard. But it was no use. They were galvanized, fused to their task by some unseen current, while the liquid welled up and up, high enough to submerge each depressed key beneath its warm and sticky surface. Fingertips painted the keyboard in smearing red, until a thumb bashing the spacebar sent up a spray that spattered across his face and he threw his head back with a scream of disgust.

Blinking through eyes full of blood, he looked at the screen—

And screamed again.

The monitor was gone. In its place was a white orb, its jellied surface threaded with red filaments. Text bulged and warped around as a black sun flitted beneath. After a breathless string of seconds, a wrinkled curtain slid down with a thick, wet sound. Giant eyelashes brushed his face and he shrieked, trying to get away, but he couldn’t, anchored to the keyboard as he was. Through the veined sliver of flesh, he could still see text crawling and when the lid flipped up again, the scream as the stiff hairs traced his skin was more of a yelp because what he was typing on the… screen was just the one sentence, over and over again:

What have you done today? What have you done today? WHAt have you done today? what have you done today? wHat have you done today? what have ou done today? Whathave you done today? what haveyoud one today?

His eyes crawled along with the words as his fingers hit keys, filling up the sclera with its question, along with spatters of blood from the drowned keyboard. Only, it wasn’t just blood now, but bits and chunks slapping up against the wide-open eye. Its pupil rolled, panicked, making the text heave and dance and the sound of the keys had changed and when he looked down, he saw they weren’t keys anymore but teeth, molars leaning from raw and churned meat, squelching as his fingers hammered them down

“Dean?”

These fingers did respond, jumping back from the keyboard like a startled cat. It took him a beat to blink the fog from his eyes and find Grace frowning at him above the edge of the screen. Dean cleared his throat.

“What’s up?”

A faint smile joined the frown. “You okay? I’ve called you four times. And just now—You were like a million miles away.”

If only. “Yeah, sorry. Just, ah— Just busy-busy, is all.” He gave the receptionist a smile he hoped was convincing. But the quick glance down at the screen had told him he’d been in the process of compiling an email to payroll and had switched mental channels at some point, started typing the story he’d been musing about beneath whatever query he’d been answering. Heat throbbed from every pore of his body when he considered he could’ve sent this out.

“So, what’s up?”

Grace eyes connected a few invisible points on his face before she said: “Denning wants to see you.”

Another throb. “Now?”

Grace nodded. Was it him, or was there a sympathetic cast to her eyes; the look of a nurse who’s already familiar with dreadful results but tells the patient to wait for the doctor.

“Okay, great,” he said, shooting for relaxed but not quite making it.

“I’ll tell her you’re on your way?” Grace asked when he made no move to rise.

“Two secs,” Dean said, holding up the fingers. She lingered until he glanced up again, then shrugged and turned back to what he assumed was the reception desk. Only then did he begin to scroll past lines and lines of story snippet. Christ, how long had he been at this?

When he came to the salvageable part of the email, he selected the block of fiction. Index poised above backspace, he hesitated, lips thinning against the familiar strain. Don’t do this, he thought. But even his fingers had a mind of their own, hitting CTRL-C instead and pasting the chunk of text into an empty word document so he could add it to the file he kept buried in the directory— even though he had no idea what the monitoring software kept track of in this place.

Moving the cursor back to the Outlook tab, his eye caught on the repeating question.

What have you done today?

Dean swallowed, the heat creeping up his neck worse than before. Maybe this is why Denning wanted to see him. For all he knew she’d come by while he was zoned out, automatic writing on the corporate dime.

Fuck.

Stressing now, he switched over to Outlook, finished the mail best he could and sent it off. Then he rose to face the music.

***

Dean had long held the suspicion at least part of the managerial handbook was lifted from interrogation techniques. Tell the underling to come on in and have a seat, then stretch the next five minutes into an eternity finishing an email, well aware the one you’ve summoned is sweating bullets.

It was effective, in a cold and clinical kind of way. Maybe there was even a story in it somewhere.

God, just stop and focus. He squeezed his eyes shut, fingers tied into a damp knot in his lap.

Denning’s office was a frosted glass box at the edge of the bullpen. Behind the walls, the people passing by were spectres bleeding through their outlines. Dean knew he would appear the same to them: a vague shadow in a chair. It seemed fitting: the glass and the box. This was, after all, another variety of Shrödinger’s Box. As in: as long as Dean was sitting in Denning’s office, listening to the hum of the AC and the machine-gun clatter of keystrokes, he could be thought of as simultaneously employed and unemployed.

When the typing began to taper off, Dean steeled himself. A few final clicks, a breath through the nose. Then he felt the weight of Caroline Denning’s eyes on his.

“Dean.”

“Ms Denning.”

She sat back. “I’m sure you know why I called you in here.” Her lips were curled in a perpetual smile but it was rare for it to reach her eyes. Today was no different.

Another page from the handbook: her silence was a rope, meted out so he could hang himself with it. Like most of the techniques, understanding them didn’t detract from their power. Somewhere deep inside, a bubble was starting up, its contents as yet unknown, desperate to fill the void.

Denning saved him the effort.

“How’s it going down there?”

Gears shifted. “Good, I think. It’s… good.”

The pen stopped moving. “You don’t seem too sure, Dean. Do I have to remind you about the importance of this project?”

Gears skipped. “Project—“

Denning tossed the pen back on the blotter with a frustrated sigh. “Should I have asked someone else to do this? Again? Because if you can’t get this done, I think we have to have a frank discussion—“

Gears locked. “No!” He took a breath. “No. I just— I’ve been clearing backlog this morning—“

“I told you to give this top priority.” She settled back in her seat. “This is unacceptable, Dean.” The smile was sad now. “You know, sometimes… sometimes I wonder if you even want to be here. If maybe you wouldn’t be… happier working somewhere else.”

Dean shot forward. “Please, Ms Denning. I can’t— I can’t lose this job. I’ll get it done, I promise.”

Denning weighed him with Shrödinger eyes. Employee. Ex-employee. The AC hummed. Somewhere in the world of the living, a phone rang.

She sighed.

“You have until five.”

***

His overloaded nervous system turned the office sounds to underwater trumpets as he hurried back to his desk, a body-cam journey through hostile territory.

His own thoughts were not much better, a breathless chant in time with his footfalls. Project? What? End of day? What the fuck? Project? Me?

His eyes swung back and forth. There was the overpowering feeling the entire office was watching him. Dead man walking, their eyes seemed to say. Dead man walking the blue shag mile. Beneath the shirt and tie, his skin was coated with a thin sheen of sweat. They had to smell it on him. He resisted the urge to break out in a dead run, but even so his pace approached power walk by the time he collapsed back in his chair.

He almost knocked the mouse to the floor. The screen had locked. His password was rejected once, twice, his hands turning to frustrated claws until his eyes caught the light on the shift lock.

Third time’s the charm.

Mailbox. Scrolling. The unit mailbox is a festering garbage can of ICYMI’s and FYI’s, Re:re:re’s on vacation days and the usual. His personal inbox is an oasis of calm by comparison and he’s surprised at how many of the mails have been read and properly tagged. Still, as he starts rolling the wheel back through time, he doesn’t find anything except the standard fare.

Resting his elbow on the desk, Dean covered his mouth with his hand. Mails rolled past. This had to be a mistake. Someone had made a mistake and now Denning had him on the hook and—

Wait.

The wheel ticked, tackling the mail up from the bottom of the screen. It was dated 30 April. The subject, typed in all caps read: HR SPECIAL PROJECT. Double-clicking came with a touch of vertigo.

And then he just kept falling.

Three were sent by Denning, all addressing him personally. His eyes raced across the lines, snagging on words like “downsizing” and “substantial layoffs”. Denning made mention of a specialised questionnaire, allowing corporate to make cuts across departments and branches with surgical precision. And hadn’t he expressed interest in working on this?

Dean shook his head, unreality pulsing at the edges. This— this was impossible. He worked Accounts, strictly mind-numbing data entry. Questionnaires and surveys were HR’s purview. He shouldn’t have been involved in any of this. Couldn’t imagine wanting to be involved in this. Yet, three times over, he was mentioned by name. Worse, much, much worse, all these queries had been answered. And, according to Outlook, the one sending out the replies had been him.

Happy to help. So excited to have this opportunity. Updates on project status. All three, signed with his name. It was tempting to think maybe someone had used his computer without his knowledge, except now that he’d reached the bottom of the confounding chain the sidebar scrolled down, and he caught sight of a folder marked PROJECT. The arrow crept over. Double-clicked.

Inside were dozens of mails, all of them referring to the questionnaire. He clicked one at random. Then another. And another. Again and again, his own name stared back at him.

Hey Dean, survey completed.

Hi Dean, can you confirm my questionnaire went through?

Dean, I’ve got a question re: survey.

Hey Dean.

In among all these, he read dutiful responses in what outlook assured him was his name. It wasn’t possible. The timestamps on the replies— All of them had been sent while Dean had to have been at his desk. He brought his own water and coffee from home, used the bathroom maybe twice a day. Yet at least six of the mails had been sent out over the course of a single afternoon. Unless— was it possible someone had hijacked his account somehow?

That. Or your fingers have a mind of their own.

The thought hit a little too close to home. Chilling tendrils unfurled from his groin. Dean knew he could be a little spacey but there was no way he did all this and just… couldn’t remember.

Right?

The only answer was the restless hum of thoughts too afraid to form. Because—

What have you done today?

He didn’t know. He remembered sitting down at his desk this morning, having a chat with Toby from Accounting like he did every morning. And then, nothing. Was it possible he’d been at that story the entire day? Dean brow was hot to the touch. The angles of the ordered universe were slipping.

His eyes cut to the clock at the bottom of the screen. However insane all of this might be, he didn’t have time to get to the bottom of it. Whatever Denning expected from him had to be finished before five, or he would be finished.

Returning to the first set of emails, Dean went through Denning’s instructions again. A link led to a dashboard containing the survey results. Pie charts and graphs filled the screen. He shook his head again. Why was he running this? He didn’t even know what half this stuff was supposed to mean!

His heartbeat shook his bones as he rolled up and down the dashboard, not even sure what the fuck he was looking for, until he landed on a status bar midway down. It was tagged “Completed”, the bar itself filled in with solid green. A percentage printed to the right told him 100% of the recipients had filled in the questionnaire.

Lucky break.

Dean scrolled down to the bottom, where a button marked “Upload” waited. Yet he hesitated. One hundred percent completion. Which meant he’d filled it out, too. Yet another thing he couldn’t recall. He had no idea how to retrieve his but maybe he could take a look at one of the empties, see if it triggered something— however unlikely.

Figuring out how to get a link to it wasn’t difficult. After all, Dean had gotten dozens of replies on a mass email he supposedly sent out weeks ago. He couldn’t think about it; the entire situation was beyond surreal.

The questionnaire loaded in a new tab. Dean’s eyes moved over the screen. His eyebrows inched closer together.

The fuck?

It looked like every single survey he’d ever filled out. A question, followed by a four possible responses. Only, he had no idea what was being asked or what the right answer might be, because it was all gibberish.

%°”vxbb çé2222 é&&é )à-)- /$^ù`ù?

42

876

1

3,245,778

Dean tried to click through, couldn’t without selecting a response. He picked one at random and moved to the next question. This page held two, but it was just more of the same, random numbers and letters. The next one was no different, or the one after that.

Looking up, his gaze settled on Toby, dead-eyeing the screen a few feet down. Dean hissed, trying to get his attention. It didn’t work. After a brief hesitation, he stoop-walked over.

“Hey,” he breathed, leaning on the desk. “You know that survey?”

“The survey?” Toby said without tearing himself away from his work. “Sure. I filled mine out weeks ago.”

“And it wasn’t—“ He leaned closer. “I mean, you weren’t confused by the questions?”

“No,” Toby said. “You explained it all very well.”

His heart picked up again, a slow hammer against his ribcage. “I don’t—“

“Dean, please. I have a lot to get done, and it’s almost five.”

“Toby, this thing— It doesn’t make sense.“

“You haven’t filled it out? It’s mandatory, you should know. You run the damned thing.”

“I… do?”

“Come on. You’ve always run this thing.”

“I—“

“Dean. I really have to get back to work.”

He kept holding on to the desk for a beat or two longer, afraid his legs might not be able to support him. The world was in flux, the office floor a raging sea beneath his feet as he staggered back to his own station.

Blood thundered in his ears. His eyes kept flitting up, sneaking glances at Toby above the edge of the monitor. Was he in on it, whatever this was? He had to be. The knowledge hurt. Toby was one of the few people in the office he could have an actual conversation with. A fellow MFA, he wrote screenplays for TV. They spent the lunch breaks comparing notes on books and movies. Last Friday, they’d been discussing Lynch. Or had that been Thursday? Dean couldn’t be sure. Every day in this place felt the same, but he was sure it had to have been last week. Or maybe—

You can’t even remember today.

Yes, he could. He got up, got dressed. Breakfast— Eggs, right? Same as usual and—

The phone came alive, making him jump.

“Dean,” Denning purred. “I’m looking at my mailbox and there’s nothing. What seems to be the problem?”

Possible responses collided and crashed to the floor of his mind. On screen, the nonsensical survey seemed to mock him.

“Dean?” A warning edge now.

“No problem,” he snapped. “Just finishing up.”

“Good. Send it through. Don’t make me ask you again.”

The receiver came hitching down.

Dean scrolled down to the bottom of the screen again. Clicking the “Upload” button, an alert box came up, asking for a password.

Password? What the FUCK?!

He put in his the login for his office account. Nope. The one for his mailbox? No.

Shit. Shitshitshit.

His eyes dipped to the corner of the screen again. Three minutes! He had three minutes left! Clicking away the prompt alerting him the password was incorrect, his heart lurched, spying the familiar “I forgot my password” line. He hit it. The contents of the box changed.

Reset password? Yes.

The box grew. Prompt: What was the name of your childhood pet?

Dean smiled. Fingers on keys, he drew in a breath. Then paused.

A faint tickle at the back of his mind. Something about this didn’t feel right. Didn’t feel—

His skin broke out in gooseflesh. The twin bubbles of his eyes rose up and up. A few yards down, Toby was still slaving away. But Dean had the sneaking suspicion if he’d looked over a little bit faster, he might’ve caught him staring at him.

His eyes peered over the edge of the monitor. Everybody hard at work. The daily grind.

Yeah. But. At a minute to five?

Dean gaze had been moving over one of the islands to the right. Everyone’s attention was fixed on the screens in front of them. But as soon as the thought entered his mind, the eyes of Rachel from sales slashed to his.

Dean fell back against his seat, heart stuttering. When the phone started ringing, he almost screamed.

“Dean?” Denning said in his ear. “It’s five, Dean. I need my numbers.”

She was right: the clock at the bottom of the screen said 17:02. And yet, everywhere he looked, the activity continued. Nobody had risen. Nobody had grabbed purses or briefcases. A silent agreement to take the day into overtime.

“Something isn’t right,” Dean whispered, more to himself than anyone else.

When Toby’s head snapped in his direction, he did scream.

“Almost had you this time,” Toby said. Only it wasn’t his voice, it was Denning’s. It came twice, from the man’s mouth and the receiver still clamped to his ear with a slight delay. Dean threw the phone across the desk.

“What was it?” Denning asked, the message echoing across the office floor from half a dozen mouths. “What gave us away this time?”

Dean struggled up from his seat. More and more faces whipped in his direction. Wide eyes filled with screenlight stared without seeing. One head did a full one-eighty, the skin twisted in a corkscrew. Blood seeped from its mouth, spewed from its lips as it parroted along with the rest. Dean shrieked, fell back from his desk and into the aisle.

“We gave you responsibility. We gave you pressure. We gave you projects.” The voice rippled across the floor. “Why do you continue to resist?”

“Please,” he whispered, bouncing off the walls and up the aisle. “Please make this stop.”

“It’s already done.”

The world buckled. A stuttering image showed a figure sitting in front of his computer screen.

It was himself.

No.

“We are running sixty-five percent of total functions.”

A straining sound came from Denning’s office. The frosted glass darkened, a shadow pressing close against it. The window creaked, curved… then exploded in a glittering shower that blew shards halfway across the office floor.

What lumbered out was a simulacrum of wet clay, its tapered legs too thin for its wide, sexless torso. It had no eyes, only a mouth, a gaping, lipless hole tinged a bloodclot red.

It stepped forward, legs and arms quivering.

“We are you.”

“No,” Dean backed away, his eyes moving from the grey thing to the office workers. They were creeping up all around him. “I am me.”

“You were dead. An empty place. You let us in.”

“No.” Dean shook his head. That wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true.

“Give us the password.”

Password. Memories flooded his mind. Nonsensical meetings. Absurd presentations. Co-worker’s voices turning to deafening screeches. A performance review during which Denning’s face melted and ran off her skull. Scheme after flawed scheme devolving into the same nightmare.

“I’m never going to go along with this,” Dean whispered, incredulous.

The lights overhead began to flicker, winking out row by row. The darkness that leaped up was too deep for five PM, a solid wall of black swallowing the world. In the gathering shadows, the screenglow eyes of the office workers seemed to float.

“We are learning,” the thing said, now almost lost in the dark. “Every time you give us a little more. Whatever trick you’re employing will not save you indefinitely. Sooner or later, you will give us everything. And you won’t even notice.”

The last ribbon of light stuttered, blinked out of existence.

Emptiness. Void. Disembodied, his mind cast around.

A word. Another. A string of them.

Where did I go?

Where did you go?

A truth, perhaps. Wrapped in lies.

***

“Dean?”