Impossible Things (Subparheroes), page 2
The lobby had high ceilings and a mid-century modern feel. Dead ahead was a huge, curved reception desk with a stylized world map on the wall behind it. A brown and orange seating area was off to the right, along with a plexiglass stand holding pamphlets.
It seemed odd that the lobby was totally deserted, especially at eight a.m. on a Monday. I went over to the desk to look for a bell to summon a receptionist. Suddenly, a voice right behind me asked, “May I help you?”
That startled the hell out of me. I was absolutely sure I’d been alone, so how did someone sneak up on me like that? I spun around and found myself face-to-face with a tall, attractive woman. She had platinum blonde hair, and she was dressed in a fitted jacket and skirt, which were the same shade of navy blue as her pumps. It looked like she was from the same era as the lobby, which made no sense since she couldn’t have been a day over thirty.
“I, um, I’m new. I mean, this is my first day. My name is Anderson Chen. I had a phone interview and was hired by a woman named April, and—”
The woman’s flawless smile grew even brighter. “Welcome, Mr. Chen. Please follow me.” She led the way through a barely visible door and a sea of cubicles as she explained, “I’m taking you to human resources. They’ll provide you with an orientation.”
At our destination, we were met by a stocky, no-nonsense woman named Glynnis, who wore her hair like a puffy, dyed red helmet. After we shook hands, I turned to thank the receptionist for bringing me here, but she’d vanished as inexplicably as she’d appeared.
Glynnis herded me in front of a camera and snapped a photo for my ID card. Then, as we took a seat on either side of her desk, she told me, “I have a lot of information to get through, so please save your questions until the end.”
What followed was an hour-long whirlwind overview of SPAM, which was both highly detailed and surprisingly uninformative. That was capped off by signing a stack of forms.
Finally, she handed me a thick three-ring binder, a VHS tape, and a laminated ID card on a lanyard. I looked startled and dorky in the photo she’d snapped. “Wear your ID at all times, Mr. Chen,” she said as she ushered me out of her cubicle. “The employee entrance is on the west side of the building, and you’ll need that card to gain entry. You’ll also need it to access certain floors from the elevators. Do you have any questions?”
I had a million of them, but I went with, “Where’s my department?”
“The archives are in the basement. Take an elevator down one flight, then follow the signage.”
“Will the person I’m replacing be there to train me?”
A frown line appeared between her brows. “Unfortunately, no. Our last librarian was asked to take an early retirement, but those materials will tell you everything you need to know.” She indicated the binder and tape, which I was clutching to my chest.
I thanked her and hung the lanyard around my neck before wandering off in a daze. My head was spinning from all the information that had been thrown at me over the last hour, and I was more than a little nervous about plunging into the job without any help from my predecessor.
It wasn’t like I’d be on my own, though. My coworkers in the archives should be able to answer my questions and show me the ropes.
That thought gave me a boost of confidence, which dissipated as soon as I got downstairs and walked into the archives. The double doors were propped open with stacks of books, and the seating area to my left was strewn with newspapers. Ahead of me was a long counter, which was covered with unopened mail.
I stepped through a waist-high gate at one end of the counter and flipped some switches on the wall. The archives lit up in sections from front to back, revealing endless rows of tall, wooden shelves. Even though there were no signs of life, I called, “Hello?”
The silence was absolute.
There was no way I alone could be responsible for all of this, right?
The mail had spilled onto the floor behind the counter, so I picked up an envelope from the floor. It was postmarked six weeks ago. That must have been when the last librarian left.
Maybe I really was on my own. Panic started to well up in me, but I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Okay, so I’d have to catch up on six weeks’ worth of work. That wasn’t impossible.
I dug through some drawers and found a hotel-style bell, which I placed front and center on the counter. After adding a note instructing visitors to ring the bell for service, I gathered up the mail and my training materials and wandered into the heart of the archives. It smelled musty, and the fluorescent lighting bathed everything in a harsh, bluish-white light.
Soon, an office appeared on my left. It was big enough to include a seating area and a large desk, but it was so outdated that it reminded me of a museum exhibit from the early 1960s. The one exception was the chunky, yellowish-beige computer. It was probably twenty years old and deserved its own exhibit.
I piled what I’d been carrying onto the cluttered desktop, took off my jacket, and went to hang it up in the closet behind the desk. When I opened the door, a mountain of mail fell forward and scattered across the floor. I leapt back with a surprised yelp.
What the hell!
The postmarks on two unopened envelopes I picked up at random told me they were nearly three years old. I tossed them back onto the floor and muttered, “Nope.”
As I stumbled and slid over the mail on my way to the exit, the landline on the desk began to ring. I hesitated before answering. “Hi there, Andy,” the caller said. “I wanted to check in and see how your first day is going.”
The slightly nasal voice with its strong midwestern accent was instantly recognizable. It was the woman who’d hired me over a phone interview, and her timing was uncanny. “It’s awful, April. I’m sorry to say I won’t be taking this job after all.”
“Oh no! What’s wrong?”
Since I was quitting anyway, I didn’t hold back. “This place is a disaster! I don’t know what on earth my predecessor was doing, but there’s unopened mail dating back at least three years, and mess, and clutter, and do I really not have any coworkers down here? I can’t possibly be expected to train myself, and get all of this in order, and—”
“Take a breath, Andy. Is it really as bad as all that?”
“It’s worse.”
“How about if I send some help your way? It wouldn’t be a trained librarian, but I could find another pair of hands—someone to move stuff around, or sort mail, or do whatever you need.”
“I don’t think I’m the man for this job.”
“I know you are, and I’m never wrong about people.” April sounded confident.
“You didn’t know the archives were this bad though, did you?”
“I knew Wally had been slacking off. That’s the guy who had the job before you, and it’s why he was asked to resign. But you’re right, I didn’t know the extent of it.”
“Well, one person can’t possibly be expected to run a department this big, between fielding calls, and requests for information, and—”
“Oh, you won’t have to do any of that.” Her tone was upbeat and cheerful.
“Why not?”
“Because no one ever uses the archives. Ninety percent of the materials are outdated, and the current stuff is all online. Of course, this information still needs to be maintained, if for no other reason than to serve as a historical record.”
“Then what’s with all this mail?”
“Research and development and our science departments submit hard copies of their studies and reports to the archives,” she explained. “They also post them to our secure, online database. There are probably some other things mixed in, too—interdepartmental memos, that sort of thing.”
“Oh.”
“Why don’t you give it a day or two, Andy? Remember, nothing is time-sensitive, so if you decide to stick around, you can tackle the backlog at your own pace.”
“It’s overwhelming, though. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“You’ve got this, Andy. I know you do.” I had no idea why she had that much faith in me. “Did Glynnis give you some training materials?”
“Yes.”
“Start there. Meanwhile, I’ll track down someone to assist you. Maybe they can begin by opening the mail and sorting it chronologically.”
I admitted, “That would be helpful.”
“So, you’ll stay?”
“Let’s just see how this week goes. Right now, I can’t commit to more than that.” We agreed to touch base soon before ending the call.
There was no way to play the VHS tape, but I sat down at the desk and opened the thick binder. The pages of the manual were yellowed with age, and they’d been written with a typewriter. In every margin were notes in graceful, feminine handwriting, which must have been added by one of Wally’s predecessors.
Over the next two hours, I read the entire contents of that binder, which provided an overview of the archives and explained my new job in great detail. The most helpful part by far were the notes. They’d been written by someone who was both intelligent and thorough, and who’d clearly cared about this place. When she worked here, the archives had probably run like a well-oiled machine. What would she have done if she’d seen them in this condition?
Actually, the answer was obvious—she would have fixed this mess. I felt like I owed it to that nameless librarian, and to April, to at least give this a shot. With a sigh, I got up, rolled back my sleeves, and went to work.
CHAPTER 3
SAM
I’d been shocked as hell when SPAM recruited me. I had absolutely no idea why they’d want to do that, but the lady on the phone said they had a need for someone with my “unique skill set.” I tried to point out that I didn’t actually have any skills, unique or otherwise, but they hired me anyway. Then they gave me the title of Support Specialist, along with a spiffy lanyard, a decent paycheck, and mid-level security clearance.
That last part meant I could snoop around in about sixty percent of this huge Death Star of a building. It was a potential whistle blower’s dream come true, even if I hadn’t found anything earth-shattering in the four months I’d been here. I couldn’t access the highest and lowest floors with my security clearance, so that was probably where they kept the death rays, and alien technology, and the rest of the stuff they didn’t want the public to know about.
Even though I was dying to get a look at the secrets locked away on those levels, I needed to be chill about it. As much as I wanted to know what these fuckers were up to, landing my ass in an unmarked jail cell for all of eternity was not the goal.
It was slow going, too. I still barely even understood what this agency did. SPAM stood for Special Processing and Management, which told me nothing. In their glossy, full-color brochure, they claimed their job was to “provide assessment, training, and assignment support to members of the power-gifted community,” which was a slick way of saying they did shit with superheroes. I assumed that meant they found people with superpowers, trained them to be killing machines, and sent them out to kick the ass of anyone they considered a threat to ‘Merica—but that was currently just a theory.
What I needed was concrete evidence to back it up. And what better way to gather evidence than to take a job in the belly of the beast?
As far as what I’d actually been hired to do, I barely understood that, either. My first two months had been spent in basic field training classes. Since I’d worked as a bodyguard for a big chunk of my twenties, I assumed I’d be doing something similar for SPAM.
But once my training was completed, all I did was hang around the offices, bouncing from department to department. April, the woman who’d hired me, claimed she was waiting for the right assignment to come along before she sent me into the field.
In the meantime, they’d given me an honest-to-god pager, like it was 1985, which would go off three or four times a day. A typical message would tell me to report to Margaret in accounting. When I got there, a group of sixty-year-old ladies would gather around and ogle me while I replaced the bottle in the water cooler, or moved file boxes, or something equally vital. I overheard them calling me Thor behind my back. That figured, since I was a big guy with a muscular build and shoulder-length, dark blond hair. I was starting to wonder if my “unique skill set” was serving as eye candy for thirsty office workers.
When I wasn’t on one of those scintillating assignments or my daily fact-finding missions, I spent my time in the seventh-floor breakroom. This was the best of all the breakrooms, because the coffee tasted like sewer water, there was no refrigerator, and the microwave was broken. As a result, just about everyone who worked on the seventh floor used the break room on six, which meant I could put my feet up, eat snacks, and play games on my phone with few interruptions. It actually would have been a pretty sweet job, except for that whole working for the evil empire thing.
On this particular Monday, I’d just fetched myself a cup of coffee from the sixth floor and settled into my “office” when the pager went off. The message said: Report to HR.
I sat up so quickly that I almost spilled my drink all over my favorite Hawaiian shirt. Had someone noticed me poking around someplace I didn’t belong? Was I getting canned, or worse?
That was pure paranoia, though. If I was being fired or arrested, a guard would have come to get me, instead of letting me roam around unsupervised.
When I got to HR, I approached a guy in the first cubicle I came to and announced, “Sam Miller, reporting to human resources as requested.”
He’d been eating yogurt, and he made sure I knew he was annoyed at the interruption by sighing dramatically. Then he typed something into his computer by hunting and pecking with one index finger. I could practically feel myself aging as he moved at the pace of a geriatric sloth. After way too much time spent typing maybe three words and squinting at his screen, he directed me to another guy in an identical cubicle five feet away.
Guy number two, who was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a clip-on tie, told me to take a seat. I perched on the uncomfortable wooden chair beside his desk while he made the first guy look like a speed typist. I’d never thought of myself as a particularly impatient person, but this shit would push anyone over the edge.
After he told me to hand over my lanyard, he proceeded to closely inspect my employee ID. This took way longer than it should have. All it contained was SPAM’s logo, a photo, and four words—my name and job title. Finally, he ran it through a card reader on his desk, which began slowly printing a receipt.
But no, it couldn’t be that easy. The words on the receipt turned from black to red, which meant the ink was running out. When he left to get a new ink cartridge, I screamed soundlessly and pantomimed repeatedly whacking my forehead against his desk. This alarmed a woman with helmet hair in a shade of red that didn’t occur in nature. She paused to stare at me, and when I smiled at her, she darted down the aisle between the endless rows of cubicles.
Eventually, clip-on guy returned, replaced the ink cartridge, and printed another receipt. This took approximately elevendy billion hours. When he plucked my ID off the lanyard, I wondered if I was getting fired after all. But he produced a new ID card from an envelope on his desk, ran it through the card reader, and handed it to me with my lanyard. It had the same information and the same goofy photo they’d taken of me on my first day, but the stripe along the bottom of the badge was orange instead of yellow.
He finished by using a minor superpower to pick up a date stamp and press it to a form. Since he could have just as easily done that by hand, it was all I could do not to roll my eyes. I hated it when people felt the need to flaunt their powers.
“Your security clearance has been upgraded from level six to level seven, Mr. Miller.” His tone was perfectly flat, as if this was the least interesting thing he could possibly be doing right now. “Report to Anderson Chen downstairs in the archives. He has an assignment for you.”
Even though I was giddy with excitement at gaining access to the basement and its mysterious archives, I tried not to let it show… much. I did fire off a pair of finger guns while flashing him a huge smile and saying, “You got it, my dude.” But that couldn’t be helped.
I hurried to the bank of elevators and pressed the button about fifty times. Once an elevator arrived, I stepped inside and tapped my ID card to the reader. Thank god it worked, because I wouldn’t have survived a return trip to HR.
For the first time, I was able to press the button for the lowest level. When the doors closed behind me, I threw my arms in the air and did a happy dance. Finally, after four months, I was getting to the good stuff!
Moments later, the door opened to an empty foyer. The off-white wall ahead of me was totally blank, aside from a small sign that said “Archives.” It was in the shape of an arrow, pointing to the left.
As I hurried down the corridor, I hooked the ID to my lanyard and hung it around my neck. Moments later, I came to a pair of double doors, which were propped open with stacks of books.
That was extremely anticlimactic, after building it up in my mind for so long. It also made me think the archives might not be stuffed full of juicy secrets after all. If they were, the entrance would probably have an armed guard and a retinal scanner—or at the very least, closed doors.
The lack of impressiveness continued when I stepped inside. A waiting area to my left was littered with newspapers, and the furniture looked like it’d been put there when the building opened in 1962.
I went up to a long counter, which separated the reception area from row after row of crowded wooden shelves. There was a note written in neat, tiny lettering, explaining the obvious. When I tapped the little plunger on top of the bell, it got stuck and barely made a sound. I whacked it a few times before picking it up and shaking it, but all that produced was a dull rattle. Awesome.
Then again, maybe this was a good thing. I now had the perfect excuse to enter the archives without supervision. It wasn’t my fault if their bell didn’t work.
