Chapter One
Cross Dwiers sat at the wooden deck table at the back of the executive atrium, watching a solitary maple leaf flutter its way down through the courtyard while sitting in a haze of writer's block. His fellow coworkers hovered about talking about tidbits of their days and weekend, while members of his particular team stood in a small huddle smoking their cigarettes for warmth. It helped to kill the edge of having to be at work late in the evening on a Friday. The leaf landed gently upon the table as he sat tapping his pencil on the blank notebook. He settled his head onto his arms, his semi-spiky blond and highlighted hair falling just above his eyes, and stared at the browning leaf. It was mid-fall, and while they hardly experienced daylight as the soulless minions of the nighttime OnSight Publishing Quality Assurance staff, they felt the chills of the approaching winter breezes and the perceived warmth of the nearby jet engines soaring overhead.
A disposable cup filled with that afternoon's stale coffee crushed the leaf, shattering Cross back into reality.
"Cross," blurted the short Asian man, sitting down in front of his coworker, "it's time."
Cross lifted his head, "What, Mikey?" He started looking around at the other men standing near the front tables, then sat up and folded his arms. "Was that today?"
A heavy hand landed on his shoulder, the larger man steadying himself as he sat down next to Cross. He wasn't really fatter; he was just built like a football lineman, having played the sport in high school. He was the youngest and the artist of the back table group. Cross turned to peruse the artist's notebook. It rested on the table, open to an overhead sketch of the building with several notes along the margins. Behind those pages, original sketches of superheroes graced the pages in high detail that almost seemed created digitally than hand-drawn.
"Yes, today," Mikey continued. Mikey exuded a degree of confidence that only reinforced his small stature. He spoke from behind mirrored sunglasses, his spiky hair accentuating his small frame. He insisted on standing while they all sat, to allow his height to force them to look up at him. "Did you take care of it?"
"Of what?" Cross closed his notebook and tucked away the pencil into the spiral, then turned to face another coworker that had sauntered in and taken a seat next to Mikey. His long trenchcoat, jet black sunglasses, silk Chinese dragon shirt, and overall Gothic appearance suggested that he possessed an unfeeling soul, or was trying very hard to exude this feeling.
He set down a black gym bag on the table, heavy on impact. "The building."
"Oh, yeah," Cross leaned back lazily into his chair. The artist, Jeff, began sketching a model of the third floor. Cross glanced at his watch. "It's only 4:15."
"We know that, Cross," the smooth voice of the Gothic coworker, Kieran, replied. He unzipped the bag, reached in, and tossed a small package towards Cross.
Cross grasped onto the bag and tossed it into his backpack. He lazily pushed back from the table and stood near the atrium exit. "And the rest of them?" His eyes scanned the eyes of the men standing in the atrium.
Jeff sat up, adjusting his glasses, "I'll take care of them." Cross nodded and stepped into the air-conditioned hallway. His steps creaked slightly on the high-pile office carpet as he walked through the hallways to the main elevator. He stepped out into the basement, a dimly lit room filled with meandering networks of cables hanging overhead and duct-taped to the ground, gaming consoles current and prototype, and noisy daytime QA teams. The area was a constant roar of game sounds, clacking of keyboards and controllers, and smelled heavily of semi-kempt fraternity-level young men fueled on the adrenaline and testosterone of the games and their coworkers.
He walked past several manager cubicles to a small windowed breakroom. It held a small assortment of the basics: a coffee machine, cups and generic tea, two soda machines and a vending machine that had to be refilled by the vending company at least three times in a 24-hour period. The display machines of past E3 conferences lined the far wall: an old fighting game, a retro video gaming table, and two standup arcade machines. The center of the room was largely occupied by a pool table and three tables for lunch/dinner time usage. Underneath the great window lined a row of recycling bins and trash cans. The testers generated so much waste that it was required of them to recycle all of their consumed cans of soda.
Inside, a few senior members of the nighttime QA teams played pool. The rest of the stragglers from the night shift, waiting for their shift to start, watched Cross walk into the room. Cross set down his backpack on a table and diverted away from his usual path to the generic tea packets he despised. But, since the cubicle drones were still present in the building, he wasn’t allowed to sample their exquisite stash on the second floor kitchen. But, today was different.
It was understood by the team that Cross only drank tea. They seldom paid attention to the eccentric man, but each eye in the small room fixated on his hands as he gathered up a disposable cup and walked towards the coffee machine. The pool balls were halted, wrappers silenced, leaving only the sounds of the arcade machines and the familiar pouring of coffee to fill the void. Cross held the cup up to his nose, took a deep whiff of it, and poured it down the sink. He enjoyed coffee smell, but never drank the stuff. He turned back towards the gaggle of silenced coworkers, gathered his backpack, and walked out of the breakroom disposing of the cup in the recycle bin. The breakroom dispersed.
Upstairs, Jeff stood in the main lobby of OnSight, just across from the heavy glass doors facing the main elevator, talking to the security guard. Jeff had forgotten his keycard, and needed access to the third floor. Since his project game was located in the newly remodeled Peril conference room—so named after the hit selling game OnSight had produced in its early days—there was no means of contacting that area from anywhere else in the building. The guard begrudgingly obliged, and he and Jeff walked up the main stairs to the third floor.
Once at the door card reader, the guard removed his keycard and waved it near the reader. The door unlocked. "After you, sir. I need you to vouch for my tardiness with my manager," Jeff motioned. The guard turned and fell to the ground just inside the hall. Jeff gathered the fallen guard, his keycard, and dragged the beginnings of their night into a nearby conference room.
Kieran crouched below the guard's desk, sitting with a tablet PC and rapidly hacking into the camera systems. The cubicle drones had started packing up their belongings, walking past the seemingly empty desk and out the double set of glass doors. Kieran glanced at his watch and smirked.
Meanwhile, in the depths of the first floor cubicle land, Cross walked past the cubicle drones prepping for their departure and battle with traffic on the 405 freeway. He gently sipped from another disposable cup filled with generic green tea from the downstairs breakroom. He beeped himself into the back hallway just as the security cameras switched into a static image, and crouched near an emergency exit door in the stairwell. The building posed a great security risk, being completely surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass windows, but they had devised a remedy the week before. Cross had reluctantly accepted the notion to acquire the components to the solution, having long left that portion of his life behind, but the other members of his team had been quite persuasive. Cross unzipped a pocket on his backpack and stuck a very small cube of a pale substance and associated triggering mechanism onto the glass. He stood, and walked out of the stairwell.
Back on the first floor, he stepped out through the freight loading doors at the back of the building and gulped down the last of his tea. His fellow night crew coworkers stopped smoking their cigarettes to watch him. He crushed the cup and placed it on top of the ashtray, turning to walk back into the building. The night crew quickly followed, moving through the halls behind him and dispersing through adjacent corridors. Their backpacks weighed down with small blocks of the same pale composite substance and mechanisms.
Mikey stood in the men's room near the north basement elevator, zipping on a heavy vest below his jacket. It wasn’t much of a cover, for it increased his body mass beneath his jacket. Fortunately, the icy temperature the basement created often found several of the one hundred and twenty testers in the depths bundled up significantly.
He walked out onto the QA Floor, passed the manager cubicles, passed the Xbox test bay, passed the PS2 test bay, to the PC testing bays. He stopped in front of the nighttime project lead for Tremor VI game. They nodded at each other, as Mikey handed off a duffle bag and walked towards the breakroom.
Kieran returned to the atrium, tablet in hand, and sat at the tables watching his fellow coworkers smoke, laugh, and boast about their past weekends. Outside computers were forbidden entry into the building, due to the high level of security associated with the pre-release games being developed. They took notice when Kieran sat at the back table with a computer, and quickly extinguished their conversations and cigarettes and walked out of the atrium.
Cross appeared shortly thereafter, his backpack looking a little lighter than it had been earlier. They both glanced at their watches. "4:30, right on schedule," Cross sighed and sat down across from Kieran. "I'm sure Mikey'll be up soon."
"Don't count on it," Jeff voiced from the atrium door, his shirt slightly stained and wet. He wiped his hands on his shirt, pulling his sketchbook out from his backpack and taking his place next to Kieran. "He's still downstairs in the breakroom, but he wants us to go on."
"Really?" Kieran mumbled, tapping a few keys on the computer. In a window, the video feed from the breakroom camera revealed a cool-headed Mikey sitting at a table, sipping on a new cup of freshly brewed coffee and eating a few cookies from the vending machine. "Heh," he smirked, "I guess the boy needs a snack before we can proceed." Mikey waved up towards the camera as it turned to face him.
In the parking lot, members of the night crew and graveyard shift had gathered. They argued and debated on the happenings inside. After much debate, the group split up; half leaving the lot and the other half returning to the building. After the last committed member entered, the doors’ electromagnetic locks clanked shut. One of the QA boys placed a small cube on either door and walked away.
Cross and his crew sat silently in the freezing atrium. They watched as the last of the cubicle drones filed out of the building. Soon, the day shift would be following them. Cross’ eyes scanned the upper levels, watching as members of his shift scurried around placing sensor-rigged cubes on all the window panes. Kieran’s tablet lit up on floor plans of the building, as each sensor came online.
“Did you send out the opt-out e-mail yet?” Cross asked Kieran. He nodded.
The last of his opt-out night crewmembers stumbled through the lobby, and ran for the parking lot. One shot a thumbs-up back at the group before he jogged out of the building. The doors received their final lock notification.
Their watches beeped. Kieran closed the laptop pulling a sawed-off shotgun from the depths of his trenchcoat, "4:45PM. Let's move, boys."
Chapter Two
The gears had been forcefully set into motion weeks before. They were two months into OnSight's biggest project for that year, the videogame release to follow the biggest comic book adaptation movie of the year, "Extraordinary Fly Boy". Testing was progressing on schedule, and the night team was quickly becoming accustomed to the day crew receiving all the praise from the producers and management teams. Of course, because day crew happened to be present when the producers and managers were working, they received the brunt of the acknowledgements.
The day crew produced bugs in large quantities, leaving the vital paperwork for the more efficient night crew to handle. Night crew, on the other hand, produced bugs in quality and executed tons of paperwork in half the time it took day crew to complete. However, management only viewed results in quantity as apparent results of high productivity, and thus felt that the larger day crew was out-performing the night and graveyard crews.
Their nights were spent trolling over the same tedious checklists that only a tester could handle; the repetitiveness of checking and re-checking the same areas for eight to twelve hours at a time, trying to break the meticulous code crafted by the engineers, tediously locating and verifying individual art elements. It was enough to turn any man (or woman) into a zombie of a drone.
The project was beginning to wind down. The American version was on its way for final review before production, and the international localizations were slowly being reviewed for translation errors and any remaining functionality bugs. The producers demanded more hours from all teams, thereby instituting an overlapping 24-hour shift. Each shift lasting a lengthy twelve hours with a one-hour lunch funded by the company. Each guaranteed to provide a seven-hour split overlap between the shifts. Day crew from eight in the morning till eight in the evening, night crew from four in the afternoon till four in the morning, graveyard crew from two in the morning till two in the afternoon. Since night crew made up only half of what day crew occupied, they were forced to spend an hour in the executive atrium until day crew could be relocated to an empty conference room to spend their last shift hour.
While any other crew would have loved to spend an hour being paid to sit in a breezy and cold atrium doing nothing more than being visual stimulation for the cubicle drones, this crew felt anxious and awkward sitting in an atrium never intended for lounging use. They weren’t allowed to gather in the standard atrium due to the size and seating limitations, and smoking wasn’t really allowed, but the smokers always found ways around this.
"Can I have a word with you?" the trite receptionist for OnSight called out to Cross one afternoon as he made his way to the atrium. He was tired that afternoon from the forty-five minute drive on the only freeway that almost rivaled a parking lot. He wandered towards her remembering how rude and unprofessional she had been the first day he had arrived for the job interview.
"This," she pointed towards the atrium, specifically at the huddled group of smoking coworkers, "is the executive atrium. It is not a smoking parlor. The CEO, whom has a corner office overlooking the atrium, would like the smoking to stop. And, if you move the tables and chairs, please move them back afterward."
Cross nodded, “I am not the keeper of my team or my coworkers. We are all adults here, and information can be communicated to others as thus. I will inform my team members, but you will have to follow hierarchy and inform our management teams. We are probably not the only teams to use this area for smoking purposes, so I may be safe in assuming that we are being picked on as usual.” Cross turned to walk out to the atrium leaving a stunned receptionist mouth agape at her desk. She immediately picked up her phone as Cross disappeared into the atrium.
The most secluded of the night crew huddled themselves at a back table near the atrium north door. The managers and leads referred to this table as the Reject Table. It welcomed the eccentric, the bitter by reality and those lacking punctuality. Cross, the writer, governed the chair facing the front with his back to the atrium north door. Bitter with life and mildly amused by the name his parents bestowed upon him, he spent free moments sipping on the prized green tea he routinely "borrowed" from the second floor kitchen and converting the world around him into a tapestry of words.
The remaining members of the table varied in expertise, experience and creativity. Kieran Byrne, the darkened soul and graphic artist, sat diagonally from Cross always with his back to the leads and managers during the briefing meetings and always facing the north atrium door. His regular wardrobe of Asian-inspired shirts in every shade of black and silver accentuated the constant presence of his sunglasses and soul to match.
Jeff Saenz, the artist, placed himself next to Cross with a sketch pad in hand ready to transfer his mental visions to the awaiting canvas. He seemed innocent enough and out of place at the table, but his lack of punctuality welcomed his place at the table. Finally, the mastermind of the group possessed a large degree of ingenuity, class and manipulation, Mikey Ngai. Sitting across from Cross, always with a cup of fresh-brewed coffee in hand, he stared at Cross' sunglassed eyes from behind his own metallic sunglasses.
After spending several months in the dim depths of the basement watching the bright 21" screens for several hours a day, select members of the crew had begun to suffer from headaches brought on by optical fatigue. Brandon, the tall Klingon-looking, bitterest of them all, was the first to don the deep black sunglasses. He was ridiculed at first, but after a few weeks, the others followed suit. And, by doing so, they found liberation to be genuinely bitter without the aid of a headache.
A few days after the smoking incident, Mikey and Kieran sat at the table as Cross waddled in with his cup of tea. It was Jeff's night off, so the extra place remained unoccupied. Cross carefully placed his cup on the table and watched Mikey and Kieran talk about a game soon-to-be-debuting from a rival game company. The steam rising from the cup gently fogged Cross’ sunglasses. He glanced at his watch and leaned back in his chair. 4:15PM.
Cross stared at the darkening sky above through his sunglasses, about to drift back into an afternoon nap when a hand tapped his arm.
"Cross, settle a dispute for us, will you?” Mikey smirked.
Cross folded his arms and nodded, still leaning back in the chair, balancing himself just above the thorny bushes lining the edges of the atrium.
“Mikey here says you’re ex-CIA, while I think you’re just some other kind of ex-Government,” Kieran leaned forward eagerly. Passing members of the night team settled in around the Reject Table, waiting for Cross’ answer.
“Hmm, interesting. What makes you think I’m ex-CIA, Mikey?” Cross started noticing the growing crowd of interested coworkers, watching them assemble around the table. He leaned slightly forward, pushed back his chair against the bushes and leaned back again.
Mikey scratched his head for a bit, stood from his chair and stared through the atrium windows to a hot little number walking past, “You’re a bit too calm sometimes, despite your moments of odd hyper-active weird. I think it’s a cover, you know?”
“I think you’ve been playing too many games,” Cross felt around for his cup, bringing it slowly to his lips. He caught sight of the female intern in Mikey’s sunglasses. “Distracted, Mikey?”
“I told you,” Kieran blurted. He scooted his chair closer to Cross’, “so, what government branch were you? We all know it was something, but Steve won’t tell us.”
Steve was the nighttime QA Manager; a husky man about the size and dimensions of Jeff but less on the serious side. He joked with all members of his teams, and kept the night shift running ship-shape, despite the animosity his teams harbored for the day crew. He also valued the privacy of all of his employees, no matter how mysterious they all seemed to be.
Cross dropped his seat, “Where is Steve? It’s almost time for us to go downstairs, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be working on.”
“Well, he’s definitely not CIA, then. You lose,” Kieran concluded.
“Bullshit, he’s definitely CIA. Why the fuck else would he cover it up, let alone have this piss-ant job. He’s working some angle here. What is it, Cross? Corruption? Scandal? Sweatshop?”
“He’s ex-TSA, now lay off and shut up for the meeting,” Steve pushed past the group of testers that had gathered to watch the one-sided debate and walked to the front of the atrium. The other testers settled into their chairs and opened their notebooks.
“Guess my secret’s spilled.”
“Ex-TSA? Fuck that,” Mikey leaned forward again, whispering over Cross’ cup, the rising steam fogging his sunglasses, “you’re something, and I’m not going to rest until I find out.”
“I don’t understand why this is so important to you, Mikey.”
“It’s not, really. Just something to do.”
Steve wasn’t in his usual upbeat mood throughout the meeting. He was hiding something, and desperately trying to hold the attention of his crew from watching the windows as the day shifters slowly filed out of the building. He failed in motivating either Mikey or Kieran to face him as he spoke. They were the first to notice before Steve even announced it to his dejected team.
“Fucking shit!” Mikey slammed his coffee cup onto the table, crushing it and spilling scalding coffee on his hand. He tore off his sunglasses and flung them across the atrium. Steve had long left for his meeting, leaving behind the shocked group of testers. “That’s why those fuckers were carrying those Xbox boxes.”
Day crew had received autographed Xbox 360s for their supposed hard work pulling together the project that last few weeks. The efforts and amount of defects in the database far exceeded the combined efforts of the night and graveyard crews, and with a partnership from Microsoft, they far deserved to be compensated. Cross almost dropped his cup when Steve broke the news.
Kieran stood up, "No fucking way," he removed his sunglasses and rubbed his tired eyes, "I don't believe it." A group of remaining day shifters walked past the atrium windows, smug and carrying large Xbox boxes in their hands. Kieran angrily watched them walk by. "No fucking shit. Those little bastards don’t deserve that…"
Cross tugged on the man’s trench coat, urging him to sit down. He was met with a cold stare and a swat of his hand. They couldn’t be reasoned, and it was best to let his coworkers vent however they felt necessary.
Mikey finished his new cup of coffee, crushing the disposable cup and tossing it into a nearby trash receptacle, "And, managers aren't going to do anything about it for us. Elias tried to get something for us. You know what he got us?"
"Autographed free copies?" Cross replaced his sunglasses and started heading for the door.
"Bingo. That's our reward. We give them the best bugs ever, but they receive the praise. We give them gold, and they give us shit. Does graveyard get anything? No." Mikey pushed back his chair and followed Cross.
There was already an existing level of animosity towards all day crew teams across all of OnSight's projects. They seemed to exude a combined sense of stupidity and ignorance that perpetuated across their respective teams. And, although not as intense, the feeling was mutual from day crew to the night crew. Everyone loved graveyard, though, but not many other projects had a graveyard shift. Graveyard also had the largest female-to-male ratio. Night shift for the EFB project had only two females to the project’s thirty-five males. Day crew had five females to offset their eighty males.
There were very few night crewmembers that didn't dislike day crewmembers, and vice-versa. If your name was famous at OnSight among QA, it was never a good thing. A tester could walk into a room and utter a single name, and the entire room would instantly shudder. That was the fabricated hatred of the crews. A hatred further amplified by the oblivious executive level.
Chapter Three
Cross had arrived early that night for his shift. He reclined, half asleep, in his car half-watching the crows circle above. The rain clouds moved slowly inland, and with it followed the chilling winds from the nearby beach. Leaves danced in the flowing air, rustling across the windshield of his car. His watch beeped. Time for work.
He walked lazily into the lobby, past a few teenagers awaiting the marketing department representatives for their focus group on some soon-to-be-released videogame. He tapped the down button on the elevator and waited, staring into its polished aluminum doors. After stepping into the dank air of the basement, he walked through its noise-saturated corridors. Walking past the rows of malfunctioning monitors and TVs, past the PC test rooms, past the time clock, and towards the breakroom that had become a second home. Remnants of the night crew stragglers talked and taunted each other at the two tables surrounding the pool table. Cross walked past these people to the back corner retrieving a single disposable cup before turning to walk back out of the breakroom.
The din just outside the breakroom settled to a semi-roar as he somberly walked past the day crews. Before reaching the back door, he stopped at a time clock machine. He sighed deeply, readjusted his sunglasses, and walked out the back door to the rear elevator. It had been rumored that the building housing OnSight had once been part of a hospital complex. In particular, the basement had been a morgue, and it still held remnants of the cold, polished atmosphere of a death bin. The rear elevator still big enough to house a gurney, while still possessing medical decals near its doors, moved slowly up the floors stopping at the second floor.
Cross walked through the empty hallways, generic and repeating like so many of the graphics in the same games the company produced. The cubicle and office drones had long gone from their day of drudgery; Cross ambled his way towards the second floor kitchen. The stockpile of exotic teas rested within a wooden cupboard taunting those with an exquisitely refined palate. It was clearly being wasted upon the dregs of the white collar world, and not even remotely worthy of the basement minions. Cross, on one of his many treks throughout the building, had discovered them several weeks before. He had grown accustomed to the flavors of the East, and demanded no less from his green tea.
The disposable cups failed at holding the tea at the proper temperature on their own. He had to double-up on them, and gauge the water by diffused temperature through the cups. Too hot, and it would obliterate the flavors. Not hot enough, and the steeping time would be wasted. However, all of the water dispensers in the building failed to generate a consistent hotness. He had found one, on the third floor overlooking the main atrium, that produced the closest to a just-before-boiling temperature, but the third floor was off-limits to everyone except those assigned to the Peril conference room and its secret project.
Cross pulled on the dispenser, feeling the water rise up the sides of the cup, stopping just short of the top. An ice cube dipped into the water for exactly ten seconds, and fished out brought the water back down to his desired temperature. He dropped a tea bag into the water, and walked back down to the first floor, taking the longer way across the building and avoiding the elevators. This time was just enough to achieve the perfect steep. Once he reached the executive atrium, he threw away the bag, added two pouches of sugar, and set the cup on the Reject Table. No matter how long the tea sat, it never cooled to allow avoidance of a tongue-burn.
The walk around the building was always quiet, his footsteps muffled by the office carpet flooring. Cross was always lost in his own mind, recapping events from his past and thinking about the future. On the first floor, his coworkers sat in orderly huddles of tables just beyond their leads and managers. He walked to the back of the atrium, taking his place at the Reject Table.
After the present, no one on night crew associated with members of the day crew. The sheer act of accepting their gifts was enough to enrage and alienate the teams from each other. It added much unnecessary strain between the management teams, all whom needed to communicate their team status between shifts. The management briefings now ran longer, and this pushed back the team briefing meetings by about half-an-hour, which in turn cut into night team’s lunch period and extended their shifts.
"Now that Cross is here, we can begin," their lead, Elias, boomed throughout the open space. As their night crew project lead, Elias was directly in charge of and responsible for all their actions. He decided what area of the game they were testing; what checklists needed completion; which defects were to be regressed that evening; to what system they would glue themselves for the night. He was a loud-spoken lead by default, not much vocal volume control came from him. The occasional nervous twitch, followed by a cracking of the neck bones usually helped him keep that mysterious leadership quality.
The briefing followed as normal, with Jeff walking in a few minutes later and settling into his spot. After the leads and managers had departed for their meeting downstairs, the remaining testers either dispersed to the breakroom downstairs or remained upstairs or fell in line outside to the smoking huddles at the front and rear of the building. The inhabitants of the Reject Table usually sat for a few moments in silence or brief conversation before dispersing throughout the building themselves.
Cross was unusually quiet that afternoon. Something had been mulling through his head ever since the announcement of the day crew's reward. Only a few days had passed, but management had succeeded in increasing the tension between the crews. Bug numbers had increased from night crew, while productivity maximized from day crew.
Mikey had been sitting at his Xbox station in the EFB "city" bay just outside the breakroom flying around the city proclaiming that the developers had added more of a certain unnecessary sign all over town just to spite him. He had a knack for writing bugs that always intelligently put down the developers and producers. But, this bug for a certain deli sign appearing at the university had irked the developers just enough to place the sign all over town.
EFB, as the project progressed, had been separated into two specialties reflecting the testers’ abilities. The larger group tested through many of the story components of the game; playing missions, cinematics, finding objectives, etc. The smaller group tested through the aspects of the cityscape; checking building textures, collision planes, shadows, etc. Cross and Mikey had been assigned to the city bay while Kieran and Jeff remained in the story section. Story team sat in a small repurposed computer room lined with rows of tables containing 21" multi-region TVs. The lights were permanently dimmed, since the TVs alone provided adequate light, and facilitated the continuation of the TV-related headaches. Development Kit Xboxes were grouped near the back of the room, closest to the database entry room, while test PS2s and test Game Cubes were scattered throughout the rest of the room. Occasionally, the AC would turn off, due to it being on a timer and with the crew inhabiting the building well past the time of the office workers, and the temperature and comfort zone in the room would greatly rise.
The city bay sat in an open space in between the manager cubicles and across from the breakroom. Two rows of multi-region TVs with two Xbox 360 development kits, two Xbox development kits, two test PS2s, and two test Game Cubes created this secluded realm from the story team. They sat bathed in light, just mere steps from the breakroom, and under the airspace for Nerf rocket attacks waged by the managers and producers on either side. The whole team was close, but the city team felt a closer bond being the only eight people in the better ventilated area of the basement. Instead of the four database entry computers the story team had within their space, the city team had all available computers along the basement’s east and south walls. Enough space to spread out and enter their bugs without the hassle of waiting testers or cramped quarters. Instead of sitting shoulder to shoulder in a darkened room, the city team had adequate lighting and room to move and shift around.
Instead of having to walk an extra ten feet down the hall to the breakroom, the city team only had a two-foot distance between the bay and the breakroom. Sure, the restrooms were farther, but it was a price they paid for the better area. Day crew cleared out faster from the city bay than it did from the story room, so that came as another plus. It also meant less interaction between the day city team and the night city team, since no single access point to the area was defined, unlike the hassles of being located inside a room.
Chapter Four
Being a writer, Cross hardly ever did anything related to his craft while he was at work. The artists would draw; the gamers would game; the tweekers and pot heads would disappear to work on their craft; Cross merely walked around the building. He, and the rest of the building, mostly looked forward to Snack Night—a night set aside every Wednesday when the managers from all projects would expense something to keep their crews happy—where he could at least indulge in some delectable delight to get him through the rest of the week.
Cross found himself heavily influenced by the behaviors of his peers when dabbling on new ideas for a short story. He captured personalities of his coworkers almost as keenly as a gifted paparazzi, and executed elaborate back stories as if plucked from the ether within his coworker’s memories. With the project winding down, several of the team members had hoped a transfer to the first person shooter project, Tremor VI, would be in their futures. Cross wasn’t much for first person shooters, but he did enjoy his paycheck, and hoped a transfer would be in his future as well.
He had spent much of the half-hour leading up to Snack Night scribbling a few lines of dialogue into his notebook. The scene unfolded before him, heavily drawing on the happenings of the days prior. When the gathering of the crews was called to the common atrium kitchen, Cross left his notebook open and sprinted across the semi-empty basement. He had a strong desire for anything sugary, particularly if it involved a form of ice cream. It fueled his ADHD, and only forced him to execute his tasks faster, albeit weirder.
The managers had grown accustomed to Cross’ behavior but would always try to find ways to keep Cross out of the first floor kitchen before the other teams arrived. No one could eat until everyone was present, but delaying Cross was a must.
He played into the deviousness of the managers, seeing it as an opportunity to refine the craft he had long deserted in favor of a more stable, less dangerous career. His Reject Table compatriots served as spies to the bounty that awaited him in that first floor kitchen.
"Cross," Kieran stepped out from behind the time clock computers, reaching out to the blur heading for the back door, his trenchcoat draped perfectly across his narrow frame, "it’s ice cream tonight. And they're guarding both the front and back hallway doors. How are you gonna get by them?" The teams had made quite a sport of the Cross-herding the managers played. It all fell into slots of time for them, and most of the pool of confidence landed squarely on Cross’ hidden abilities. Abilities that no one believed an ex-TSA man should possess.
"Hmm," Cross smirked stopping short of running into a grouping of chairs, "I always find a way. So, they think they can delay this for me, eh? Game's on, boys." He pulled out his keycard and walked to the back door. Sure enough, his EFB manager was standing near the door.
"What's up, Cross? Where are you going?" Steve crossed his arms across his thick, stocky frame and stood in front of the door.
"To the bathroom," Cross pulled out his keycard.
"There's a closer one on the other side of the building."
"I know, but I like a little privacy, so I'm using the ones on the second floor," he stepped over to reach for the door handle. Steve slid across to interfere.
"Well, the floor has just been mopped. It's dangerous to walk across it."
Cross pointed at his shoes, "Slip resistant. Even against oil. But, I guess I'll walk around."
The north elevator was being guarded by the nighttime Tremor VI lead. His broad shoulders covered a good portion of the elevator doors, his deep blue eyes watching Cross as he stepped into the hallway. “Bathroom, Cross?”
Cross nodded and walked towards the bathroom, but stopped short of the door. He turned to the lead, “You realize I can just get past you and up the main stairs.”
The lead pulled away from the elevator doors and took a stance in the hallway, “I’d like to see you try, Cross.”
Kieran poked his head out of the keycard controlled door leading to the main basement, “Cross, it’s confirmed. They’re Drumsticks. Ooh, what’s going on here?”
“Go away, Kieran.”
Cross sized up the lead quickly, perusing around his body to the door behind him. It was a standard door without any sort of electronic lock, so he only had to get it open and bound up the stairs. Beyond that, he had routes that all required an electronic lock swipe of his keycard. Either head through the locked glass doors and down the hallways to the first floor kitchen or through another locked glass door and around the cubicle farm. Beyond the cubicle farm, there were two more locked doors, each requiring access, and each increasing the time taken to get to the kitchen.
“Steve’s letting us head up in five minutes,” Kieran replied and closed the door. Cross nodded and rocked his head on his shoulders, loosening his neck muscles.
“Let’s do this,” he lunged forward, fully expecting the lead to counter with his own lunge. Cross leapt up, landed a foot on the lead’s left shoulder and propelled himself onto the far wall, running around and landing behind the fallen lead. He leaned back onto the door, opening it and bounded up the stairs before the lead had the time to figure out what had happened.
The first floor fire door clicked shut behind him. Smokers from other projects had already assembled near the front doors, huddling near each other for warmth, their breaths and exhaled smoke hanging briefly in the air like small rainclouds before dissipating into the ether of the surrounding cold.
Cross caught sight of the Tremor VI database administrator walking down the hallway leading off the double-glassed doors of the main lobby. The cubicles provided too much give to be used as bounding platforms, and the database administrator was just a bit heavier than the Tremor VI lead. Cross disliked hurting his superiors, even if it was a blow to their pride, but that caramel Drumstick was calling to him from the kitchen only several steps away. If he ran off through the executive atrium rather than around the cubicle farm, it would cut his time, but expose him to the administrator via the windows facing the atrium.
He had spent too long thinking when the familiar clunk of the door lock for the stairwell reached his ears, and a slightly irate Tremor VI lead stepped through the door. Cross smiled and ducked through the double-glass doors down the far hallway, running past the Tremor VI database administrator. He took the longer way, towards the south atrium door of the common atrium, nearest the stairwell for that atrium.
The secret project’s team members had started walking down the hallway, brushing past Cross as he sprinted past them. The wagers were simply placed, and well defined. No one was to help Cross or the management team in any sort of way aside from confirming what food product was being delivered and the possibility of who was guarding what where. Everything else was off-limits. Any help forfeited all stakes in wagers for that week.
The team members were closing in on the kitchen; Cross only had a few more minutes to arrive before the others did. He spotted a familiar silhouette ahead, coming out of the common atrium stairwell. Steve.
He halted near the end of the south cubicle farms, the team members now watching him and both the database administrator and lead closing in. Steve folded his arms and retained ground near the stairwell door, “Looks like we’ve got you this time, Cross.”
Cross turned and kick-pushed off the wall flipping into an adjacent cubicle and emerging in the adjacent hallway, “Doesn’t look like it, Steve!”
From the hallways leading to the kitchen, a small roar of cheering erupted. Cross stumbled into the kitchen, meeting the other leads and managers, a big smile across his face. He waltzed over to the box of vanilla and caramel Drumsticks and declared dibs on the first one. Steve and the others struggled with their breathing near the kitchen door, visibly irate, but accepted their demise for this week. “We’ll get you next time, Cross.”
“Not likely, but fair declaration. I’ll be right back; need tea.” There was still time before the rest of the teams ambled out of their dark rooms into the blinding fluorescent lights, so he disappeared to the second floor kitchen to get a last helping of Chai Tea before the night ended.
Content, with a vanilla and caramel Drumstick in hand, he sat watching his tea and eating his sinful treat. Steve walked up, and patted him on the back. “Nice work, Cross. Glad you keep us entertained.”
Mikey sat down next to Cross, gulping down his coffee and puffing a cigarette, “You’re CIA. Admit it. FBI doesn’t move like that. Neither does TSA.”
“What makes you think it’s our government? And that’s just entry-level parkour stuff.”
Jeff took a seat across from Cross, “That was amazing stuff in the hall, and I think Kieran won the pool.”
Kieran stumbled into the atrium, his head abuzz from a hot-boxing session in someone else’s car in the parking lot. “Dude, I didn’t catch a single thing after you left the basement, but they said you were fucking awesome! You’re not fucking TSA, man.”
Cross bit into his ice cream cone, talking out of the side of his mouth, “Right, I’m not TSA. That’s what ‘ex’ means.”
Jeff’s gaze remained fixed on his sketchbook, dimly lit by the surrounding lights of the cubicle farms and first floor kitchen, the spotty lighting from Mikey’s cigarette and Cross’ cell phone. He had spent a good ten minutes drawing Cross armed with a gun and flipping through the air out of reach from some baddies in full suits wearing earpieces and sunglasses. “So what’s this thing you said about it not being our government, Cross?”
Cross bit into the last portion of the cone and tugged on Jeff’s notebook, “Nothing. What’s this? Hey, nice likeness, Jeff. But, I’m not a superhero agent extraordinaire.”
Mikey extinguished the nub of his cigarette and flicked it into the sparse foliage surrounding the atrium and the A/C units for the basement. The other members of the team had started to dissolve back to their respective areas and to gaming machines on different floors and the basement. Mikey removed his sunglasses, even in the dead of the night, and brought himself down to Cross’ eye level. The cigarette aroma permeated his clothing and exhaled nicotine breaths as he moved. Cross wrinkled his nose and pulled back, coughing to one side then blowing into his hands for warmth. “What say we go back downstairs?”
Jeff nodded, closed his notebook and walked towards the back elevator with Kieran hazily in tow. Cross sat with Mikey for a moment, each staring into the other’s eyes. Mikey pulled another cigarette from the depths of his jacket, struck a match and flung the snuffed stick into the bushes. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket and slid it across the metal table to Cross, “I have a few friends in random places. I looked it up.”
“Looked what up, Mike?” Cross shoved the paper back towards him and downed a swig of his Chai tea.
Mikey pulled back the paper and folded it back into his jacket. He leaned forward a bit, took a deep drag on the cigarette and let the smoke waft out of his nose and mouth. “Nothing,” he whispered, replacing his sunglasses and walked back to the common atrium stairwell, extinguishing the half-lit cigarette on the glass windows.
Chapter Five
Mikey had been born into a life that he didn’t embrace. His family had grown up rough and wholesome as they could get in Korea town. Parents worked hard to keep their kids fed, clothed and safe. The boys ended up taking to lives of crime and mischief. Mikey had broken away, just slightly, by taking up a passion for cooking. He had spend a good many years as executive chef for one of Los Angeles’ better Italian restaurants. But after a bit of a burn-out he took breaks from his life of cooking to explore his other passion—gaming.
He eventually fell into quality assurance after a few of his friends got him through the interview process. He had an amazing ability to see the small details that would eventually become big issues in any game. A valuable resource to the company, he easily transferred from one project to another without any sort of worry of unemployment.
His motives for life were always that of analysis. He evaluated motives of friends, family, coworkers, and strangers. Everyone fell under some degree of scrutiny, and always in a cool secrecy that rivaled the procedures of the federal government. Despite knowledge of his value to the company, he absorbed the bitterness around him and acted out in witty remarks in his filed bug reports.
The Wednesday night when Cross had decided to run rampant through the building without first securing his notebook introduced a situation that no other tester had ever encountered with Cross—the ability to read something the man was writing. The notebook was normally a barely legible mess of notes and scribbles, character sketches and build-ups, disconnected paragraphs of highly visual passages, and lists of database bug IDs. It never left Cross’ sight, not for a trip to the restroom, let alone a romp through the building during the moments leading up to Snack Night.
But Cross had left the notebook open to a particular group of passages, all written in various directions across the page, some overlapping each other and meandering around the spaces in between the words. Mikey pulled out his iPhone and snapped a shot of the page, taking care to replace the notebook in the exact position in which it had been left.
When Cross joined the EFB team a few months back, he kept relatively to himself. Mikey, being an equal shut-in, merely observed the actions of the newcomer from afar. He was wary of the swaggering stranger, a new face to the world of QA, but with a past that delved deep into the bowels of government activities. The man carried himself with an intent air of mystery, and fell into rituals that seemed to revolve on an internal wind-up clock. He had quirks about him, and spent many of the first few nights sitting in dark isolation in the executive atrium. Sitting perfectly still, save for the wafting steam from his freshly-steeped cup of tea, eyes closed and wandering in an enveloping cold punctuated by the occasional private jet screaming its engines far overhead. For the first few weeks, the security guard didn’t even notice this statue sitting in the atrium, and when Cross first moved in the guard’s presence, he nearly caused this guard a heart attack.
Mikey took great interest in each member of the Reject Table. They had qualities that no one else seemed to pick up on. Cross had a hidden past, one that he would not divulge, and that no search engine result could draw out. Sure, he claimed ex-TSA, but no TSA agent could ever do what Cross exhibited.
When Mikey had hit his teen years, he feel into a bad crowd and forged several connections he never meant to establish. He became quickly indebted to many a powerful entity in the Asian undergrounds surrounding Los Angeles. Many of which still had the abilities necessary to trace any interesting figure. His iPhone buzzed in his hand.
“What?” he pushed through the heavy loading dock doors at the back of OnSight’s building and joined his fellow smokers huddled around an ashtray. The night was cold and unyielding, scant lights from the art school across the alleyway illuminating their smoking area. Mikey took a long drag on his cigarette, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth before forcing it out in reply, “Search deeper, dammit! I know he’s hiding something more, and the little shit didn’t even take a look at that paper. How am I supposed to gauge response if he doesn’t read the damned thing?”
He sucked down the last of the cigarette and flicked it into the alleyway, watching as it extinguished in a small plume of fire and sparks. His eyes widened, “What? That was the test? Are you sure? Fuck me.” He caught sight of Cross walking through the halls on his way to the 2nd floor kitchen.
Cross had only crossed into the adjacent hallway of the north cubicle farm when Mikey materialized out of the darkness of the cubicle walls. A smirk settled onto his face as he withdrew the same folded paper he had presented earlier, unfolded it and held it out to Cross. Cross snatched the paper from his hand; his eyes widened. He angrily crumpled the page and chucked it back at Mikey’s chest, and then grasped onto the man’s collar and drew him in close, “I don’t know how you found out or why, but you tell anyone about this and the man known as Mikey will cease to exist; you'll disappear so well, your mother will deny you were born.” He released Mikey and shoved him away, resuming his walk toward the executive atrium stairs. Mikey followed him.
“No one can hear us up here.”
“The walls have ears, Mikey. Look,” he spun around and cornered the short Asian man at the top of one of the stairwell landings, “that is the life I left behind. If I wanted to continue my career as a pawn, I would have stayed. I left benefits and perks of kinds you can’t possibly imagine to wander around as a mindless dreg in this horrible company. The fact that I kind of blew my own cover by participating in that stupid ritual with the managers is my fault. You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”
Mikey smirked, he had finally struck a nerve, “Your fault. You know the best cover for you is just coming clean.”
Cross’ jaw dropped. He’d only heard that phrase uttered once before, long ago while he was still in training. His tendency to embellish meant that he could essentially keep a secret by delving all knowledge because no one would ever believe him. It had saved him many times before, but he felt that OnSight had no need in knowing anything about his past beyond anything relevant to his duties.
Cross dropped back down, scooped Mikey up by his collar and pressed him against the cold of the windows, “I’m going to set you down in a moment. When I do, we’re going to a conference room somewhere upstairs and you’re explaining a few things.”
Mikey’s smirk widened, “Sure. Information exchange?”
Cross tightened his grip, “No.”
Mikey tapped his phone end over end on the polished mahogany surface of the conference table, the taps reverberating softly throughout the room, a soft hum emanating from the mini bar fridge in the corner. Cross had disappeared to grab his cup of tea, and seemed very visibly disturbed and quite irate. The notion that his past had been easily dug up by a fellow OnSight coworker shook him to the core. He thrived on living in a sea of mystery, and for once, had let his guard down by not following what he had been taught.
The door flung open, Cross toggled the switches operating the powered-blinds and locked the door behind him. He sat directly across from Mikey, placed the cup on the table and leaned back into his chair, “Talk.”
“What’s there to talk about, Cross? You were right, you are ex-TSA. There’s no question there.”
“My fault; I lowered my guard. I obviously should have done what I’m always compelled to do and check up on my peers, but I figured, ‘hey, OnSight staff? Not worth the bother’, you know?”
Mikey stood up, twirling a cigarette in his fingers, “How ‘bout we head down for a smoke instead?” Cross shrugged his shoulders, a paranoia settling in about the conference room speaker phones. Cross nodded; they stepped out into the hall and walked around towards the common atrium stairs.
Cross tugged on Mikey’s shoulder, “I’d suggest you stop searching further into my past. I like you too much to have to kill you.” Mikey laughed, Cross didn’t.
The wall of cold air slammed into them both as they exited the building. The atriums were generally shielded from the ocean blasts of wind, but the outsides of the building didn’t retain such luxuries. After several failed attempts to light his cigarette, Mikey ducked inside for a moment to covertly light the cigarette and exited back into the blustery cold. Cross covered up his neck and lower face, grasping onto the hot cup of tea with both hands for warmth.
“I found your story idea yesterday,” Mikey started taking a drag in between sentences, “and liked it much. It’s fucked up what they did to us, and I think we should take that story into fruition.”
Cross raised an eyebrow, “Fruition how?”
Mikey removed his gaze from Cross’ and stared far into the scant brightest stars, the only ones able to break through the light pollution of Southern California, “Look, when I’m suspicious of things, I look into certain people’s pasts. You weren’t exactly forthcoming with yours, so I asked for a few favors. I did the same for Jeff and Kieran.”
Cross nodded, pulled down his t-shirt and took a warm sip of his tea, feeling as the hot liquid washed and radiated through his chest, “I can see Kieran having some sort of muddled past, but Jeff seems a bit benign.”
Mikey pulled out his iPhone, tapped a bit on it and tossed it to Cross, “You’d be surprised. Maybe you should have done your own background check.”
Cross fumbled the phone and scrolled through the document. “Yeah, but everyone has a rebellious period in high school in some form or another. This means nothing. Give me a sec,” he handed his tea cup to Mikey and brought up the phone’s browser. “I hate the iPhone keyboard.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing, keep talking,” Cross dialed into a secure server and began painstakingly thumb-typing long strings into a query window. His old access credentials were apparently still active, but the spotty coverage of the 3G network was going to take its precious time in returning results.
“Kieran’s the interesting one. Did you know he’s ex-military?”
“That pothead? How is that possible? Probably discharged dishonorably. I’d mention that around if I were ex-military.”
Mikey smirked, “You would. You and your impress-someone flaws. But, nope, he’s an ex-Marines brat. Honorable discharge, and I couldn’t get too far in the chain of search. My contacts wouldn’t touch him after that discovery.”
Cross read over the results and chucked the phone back at Mikey, whom handed him back his tea cup, “Sounds about right. Your lot doesn’t like to dive too deep into anything. They’d be stepping on toes and that would be bad for business. Particularly since anything beyond local PD doesn’t care about them.”
“My lot? What are you getting at?”
“Geez, Mikey, read the damned iPhone. I’ll be back downstairs. We’re not done, but it’s fucking cold out here,” Cross retreated into the building.
“It’s colder in the morgue!” Mikey flicked his expended cigarette into the cold and read through the contents on the iPhone. Whatever connections Cross had were still active, and the information supplied was deep and thorough. Mikey had a record of which he wasn’t aware, but he figured it stemmed from his involvement with the Korean crime syndicates in Los Angeles.
He hadn’t really delved too deep into the world of crime within the Korean families, but he couldn’t avoid it either. He was more of an information man, a runner for the underbosses. Supplying and finding information as needed for whatever the task entailed. He paid careful attention not to participate in the illegalities growing up, but maintained a strictly business relationship with several cohorts he collected over the years.
The value of information became a great asset to his prying and meddling mind.
Chapter Six
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