Terminal forty-six pinged again. Steven debated for a moment if his three strikes rule was better used for three pings in a single work hour or a ping on three consecutive work hours before realizing that forty-six fit both criteria.
He fidgeted with his glasses and cleaned them compulsively before standing up. This was the part of the job people didn't tell you about, and it was the one likely to get him to quit. When it was just routing the company server through a DNS sinkhole or turning the router off and in again, that was easy street. That was what you went to coding bootcamps for after spending a childhood lobotomizing adware you accidentally downloaded. Knowing that your parents couldn't just buy you a new personal computer taught you how to get creative with solutions and how to reduce things to their base components. It didn't prepare you to tell basically every person in the office one after the other that you could see their traffic. It didn't teach you how to have the same conversation about attempting to access pornography during work hours with a couple hundred different grown-ups.
Of course, even if he didn't know who terminal forty-six was, he could have guessed. Everybody had their own profile of infractions. Thirty-five was the middle-aged guy who kept trying to access third-party baseball streams, fifteen was the quiet guy who (judging by his forum pings) was probably using his pay to buy and modify firearms in between searching up foot pictures, and three was the sunshine and kittens secretary whose pings alternated between inane social media and highly degrading bondage. You started to create little versions of everybody in your head. Put some on a watchlist and imagined what others got up to in their free time.
Forty-six was the new girl, new-ish at least, the kind who behaved like a stereotype of a confused grandparent when it came to her tech despite being on the younger side of employees. He had assumed religious homeschooling, but she hadn't brought up faith with anybody he knew. Within the very first week of her working for the company, she'd been in the middle of a presentation when a pop-up ad appeared on her laptop. And, to the horror of everybody in the room, had then proceeded to click it. Seemingly confused and irritated when the sinkhole caused the redirection to lead to a blank page instead of her promised fortune and implied viruses.
With that in mind, he reviewed her logs to get ready to talk to her about them. It was easy with the knowledge of her practices to view any pornographic redirects as just her clicking on every single ad she saw, but that was a bit incorrect. If that was true she'd be pinging him every few seconds instead of once every few hours. The majority of them could be explained by her clicking ads that offered her a reward, but that made the one or two that seemed to have been pornographic ads more of an abberant. It was important to understand why the person was seeking out what they were for when you had "the talk" with them. The more you could convey the things they needed to do to not have it again while injuring their pride as little as possible, the less likely they were to see it as being you taking things out on them and more you doing your job. It was surprisingly easy to make enemies just by knowing the traffic people tried to make when they thought nobody was looking.
He stepped into the bathroom and checked himself in the mirror quickly. Because, despite everything, some part of him rebelled against the idea of being disheveled and gross if he was going to be the guy whose job it was to talk about pornography with his coworkers. He needed a haircut, but that was the worst of it. His skin was clean, his teeth were white, his glasses weren't covered in flakes, all of the basic things you needed to pull off the kind of nerd chic that an office expected of you if you weren't a wise old sage or didn't have the pretty hollywood kind of autism-spectrum disorder.
When he walked down the line of cubicles with their backs to the window, a couple of chairs turned. Even if you were one of the few people who hadn't been called into Mr. Yeung's office, you knew what it meant. You'd seen enough of your coworkers come back with red faces and sit at their cubicles awkwardly for the next hour. Everybody loved rubbernecking when he came out, even if they wouldn't admit it. He wasn't personally a fan. It always made him self-conscious of how he was walking. By the time he got to forty-six, he wasn't sure he even knew how any more.
Forty-six was hunched in her chair, squinting at her screen. It was hard to tell if she needed an eye exam or if it was frustration. Judging by the fact that she kept looking down at the paper near her keyboard and letting out angry little grunts, it was probably the latter. Despite how jumpy and hyper-aware she usually was, it took him clearing his throat for her to turn around and see him. It was an admirable amount of focus on your work. Or he just wasn't that noteworthy. Both could be true at the same time, but he would pretend it was entirely the first one.
"Ms. Prince?" He asked softly.
She stood up quickly and stock straight like he was a drill sergeant before slamming on a wide smile that wasn't remotely sincere. She offered her hand robotically.
"Hello, sir, I do not believe we have met before. Are you also an employee here?"
It sounded like her reading a script that she'd gotten in trouble for straying from before. It was hard to tell if it made the rumor of her getting the job because she knew Wayne himself more or less credible.
He took her hand, "Yes, hello, I'm Steven Yeun, I'm the system's administrator in this division."
When she finished shaking his hand she pulled her arm back to her side where she kept it locked as she gave a very slight nervous bow.
"My name is Diana Prince, sir, I am a data entry clerk... in this division." She added the final section like he had just taught her a new bit of shorthand.
"Yes... I know that..." He trailed off, "I was wondering if you could come speak to me in my office, please?"
She couldn't hide the lightning flash of panic that hit her eyes before she buried it again. She looked at her terminal nervously for a second as if it was going to give her an excuse not to follow him.
"It'll just be for a minute or two, you aren't in trouble." He raised his hands soothingly, it probably didn't work.
If his promise changed how she felt, it didn't really show. After a moment she pushed in her chair and nodded stiffly.
"Okay, sir, if the boss asks why I wasn't at my terminal, you will... cover for me?" It was clearly another piece of shorthand somebody else had taught her.
"It's a conversation I've had with almost everybody else in this office," He made sure that the rubberneckers could hear him, "You don't need to worry."
"Lead the way then, sir." She raised her arm in gesture but only got halfway before the wall blocked her motion. It was like the building was too small for her.
When they walked back to the server room all of the people gawking had made a show of turning back to their computers and not looking, but he could feel them staring as soon as he and Diana were past them. There were whispers out among the sounds of typing too. Some people never mentally left high school. He was going to spend the next few days being asked what he'd had to call her in for and he was going to spend the next few days telling people that he wasn't allowed to say. At least so long as Diana didn't start threatening him like fifteen or ninety had. If you were a piece of shit to the IT guy, personal data got misplaced at a higher rate. For what it was worth, she didn't seem like the type.
When they stepped into the server room Diana looked around in what seemed like a mixture of admiration and horror at the racks. Steven slid back into his chair and gestured at the empty chair and desk where a more professional company would have had their second sysadmin working.
"You can sit down if you like, this shouldn't take long but most people prefer it."
He realized that his previous trip to the mirror had been wasted. No matter how un-shabby one made themselves look, they were going to be shabby by comparison. She was... well beautiful was kind of a useless word for it. In that she was practically flawless, it fit her. But it didn't really capture anything about her. She had hair the color of ink which seemed to swallow all light around it that reached down to the small of her back in perfect uniform straightness. Not a single stray or errant curl or split end. She was tall enough for him to notice that she was taller than him, a good few inches taller than average male height. Her face was a near-expressionless sheet of pale white marked by dark pointed eyebrows and sharp emerald eyes that seemed to be sizing up not only the people around her but even the inanimate objects for how much of a threat they posed. Tight pursed lips, seemingly naturally red without gloss or paint, seemed to constantly rest in a state of half-frown that threatened to break out into a smirk. She had an exceptionally plain white button-up blouse and black pencil skirt, both of which were tight-without being form fitting. When she reached down to pull the empty chair back from the desk, a chord of muscle seemed to stretch the fabric of her sleeves.
If he had been asked to create his mental image of a successful, attractive business woman in his mind, he probably wouldn't have dared to make her as phenomenal as Diana actually was. The distinction with her was that it only accentuated how alien she actually was. How seemingly rehearsed and foreign the small gestures of sitting in a rolling chair without causing it to move and the polite decline of a cup of coffee were. You took the most beautiful woman maybe ever born and made one thing about her just that bit out of place and suddenly everything became accentuated not for what it was but for how it seemed like it wasn't real.
Diana sat down but kept looking around, "This is... your office, sir? It looks more like a lair. Or a nest."
Steven shrugged, "It isn't really an office because I'm not really a boss. Mr. Lefebvre likes to joke that he works in the office of soft power and that this is where the actual control is. Of course, he also says that doesn't mean I can have a raise, so take his opinion for what it's worth."
She didn't laugh or smile. To be fair, it wasn't a funny joke, but he expected at least some semblance of reaction even if it was to scowl at him. Instead she kept looking around as her brain started to put things together until she finally focused on him.
