The calm before "it's on"

I pack up a few things at work today; stuff I don’t want to get destroyed. My GameBoy. A picture of Colin and I when we were kids. Some CDs. This really expensive pen that I never use. I throw all the crap into a box and walk it out to my car.

As I’m walking down the main hallway in the secure area on The Ninth Floor, the one with the alien potted plants, I pass Ted Bradbury in the hall. He just gives me a look; no smart-ass comments from Big Ted today. Fine, I’m not in the mood to play footsy with supervillains today.

I pass through the security doors and out into the offices where all the Normal People work. Here, people are working on payroll, or taxes, or R&D, or marketing, or whatever. They’re gossiping about that bitch in accounts payable, or who’s sleeping with whom, or maybe they’re passing dumb joke emails around or talking about last night’s game. Normal stuff. Office stuff. The kind of stuff I used to do every day when I worked downstairs with Fred Schneider and Corine and Wookie and all those guys. Hundreds and hundreds of people work in The Company’s main office, and 99% of them have nothing whatsoever to do with the QuantumWorks project and the weird behind-the-scenes supervillain games that have been going on.

And if I’m successful this weekend, I’ll bet most of them are going to lose their jobs. The Company is going to blow up Enron-style.