the start of a manhunt...
CW: box boy universe, no whump just a seedy megacorporation stalking its (former) employees
Roy Himmel isn’t a real person, and disappears from this world just as quickly and quietly as he entered it.
Karl almost doesn't believe his own eyes when he takes a proper look at Himmel's file. He was hired from a career fair at Syracuse University, a university he definitely did attend and graduated from with a degree in linguistics. It has all been stored alongside his resume and onboarding paperwork. After he was hired, those files were basically forgotten and left to collect dust.
When Karl is asked to unearth Himmel's file for the first time in five years, he initially finds nothing remarkable about it. It's not until he reviews the man's emergency contact list to report if he has any relatives or significant others to worry about his sudden disappearance that Karl runs into a dead end.
The phone number listed under his emergency contact is out of service. The person he listed as his emergency contact is the owner of a bookstore in a city halfway across the country, who once communicated with Himmel over the acquisition of a rare book in Romanian and nothing more.
Karl's job is almost entirely based around facts. There is little room for speculation where he is concerned. He runs background checks and investigates potential acquisitions all day long, and he knows an anomaly when he sees one. People lie, but the records don't.
He is determined to make Roy Himmel's life make sense, but the deeper he looks, the more it begins to defy all logic.
Although he doesn’t normally leave his department, he finally accepts that he isn’t going to learn any more about the man from his personnel file. He decides to head straight to the staff room to find out what Himmel’s file can’t tell him. Himmel was apparently friendly and well-liked by his colleagues. Karl hasn’t met many people who can resist talking about themselves to their colleagues at least a little bit.
He turns to the most normal of the day shift handlers - Petersen, who isn't likely to string him along for the fun of it.
"Hannah," he starts, plastering a smile on his face. She notices him entering the room, but doesn't lift her head until he approaches the table where her lunch sits, mostly untouched. "Can I ask you a few questions?"
"Is this about Roy?" she asks, amused. A hint of derision colors her words. The handlers always make such a big production of it when one of their own "leaves" the job. Karl suspects it's out of necessity. They're a decently close-knit bunch. No one wants to be associated with the dropouts or failures.
"Yeah." Karl slides into the chair across from her, takes out a notepad. "Did he ever talk to you about his life outside work, what he did on the weekends? Any family, friends, anything?"
Hannah hums in a teasing, speculative sort of way that's entirely intentional, but her eyes wander off to the side in thought and she takes a second too long answering.
"...Well, come to think of it," she says, her brow furrowed slightly. “No. When you were talking to him, you weren’t talking at him, if that makes sense. If you told him about your girlfriend’s stupid sister getting in your face about what we do here, he’d actually listen, not just nod like he had better things to do. But, now that I think of it, he never really talked about himself.”
“Can you think of anything?” Karl presses. “He had to have mentioned something.”
Hannah picks at her nails as she thinks back to all of her previous interactions with the man. She was hired only a few months after him. Karl doesn’t believe that Himmel managed to avoid talking about himself in the five years since he started working at WRU.
“I don’t think he was very close to his family,” she says, but she doesn’t sound too confident. “He always said he didn’t have any particular plans for the holidays.”
It’s purely speculation, not a fact, and that grates on Karl’s nerves to no end.
“He wasn’t going out with anyone,” she adds.
She can’t remember him ever mentioning any hobbies, either, and he has no social media accounts. Nothing. A few stories from his college days, but Karl already knows he attended Syracuse University. That’s nothing groundbreaking.
Karl has a diploma and the tax documents to prove Roy Himmel is a person who really exists, but he’s beginning to have doubts despite the proof.
He receives more or less the same answers from the handler who mentored him when he first joined the company.
“I kinda figured he didn’t want to talk about it for a reason,” Cruz tells him with a shrug.
Karl is grasping for straws when he suggests, “Was he an internal hire?”
An internal hire is someone who was initially in the pet program, who for one reason or another makes a better handler than a trainee. They’re rare, but it happens occasionally, and some of them have already had their memories wiped by the time they transfer roles. It could explain why he never spoke about himself — he might not have remembered anything at all.
“Nah,” Cruz says. “Not as far as I know, though he’s definitely got the looks for it.”
Karl shoves his discomfort with the statement to the back of his mind. Handlers are known for being flippant and crude — it doesn’t matter that this was once a colleague.
“But he never once said anything about his past? Nothing?”
“Nope. I kind of figured he came from the Midwest, but he’s real good at languages. Can imitate any accent you name, so who really knows? If you asked him where he’s from, he’d just say ‘nowhere interesting’ and turn the question right back at you.”
Great. Nothing but more speculation. For the first time since he started working here, Karl goes home with more questions than answers.
Karl opens a much deeper investigation the next day. He worked for a private investigator for a short time before WRU hired him, so he already knows all the tips and tricks of the trade. WRU holds the certifications and licensing needed to run as thorough a check as anyone can ask for, so all he needs to do is run the queries.
When he uncovers — or, rather, what he doesn’t uncover — is at once astonishing and completely predictable based on his current progress.
Roy Himmel didn't exist prior to his enrollment in college. The high school transcripts he used to apply to the school must be fake, and needless to say, no birth certificate exists either.
Any pets that enter the system are erased as people from that point onward, but no one is denying that they once existed and had rights and a life like any other citizen. This situation with Himmel is impossible. People’s pasts don’t just disappear like this — wholly and completely.
The only reasonable conclusion is that Roy Himmel was a lie all along.
“In short…who the hell is this guy?” Karl says, flicking the file with a snort. He glances at his manager, Collier, but he seems just as perplexed. “As far as I can tell, Roy Himmel doesn’t exist. Whoever doctored his identity did a pretty good job, but they didn’t go that far back.”
“The question is why he bothered at all,” Collier says, which is a perfectly valid point. As long as there’s nothing egregious about the applicant’s history, WRU’s handler program will hire just about anyone who suits the job. According to the things his coworkers said about him, Himmel never gave off any red flags. If his past was so unsavory he had to hide behind a false identity, Karl doubts he would have been able to come across as so normal and unassuming.
There’s only one lead Karl has left, which he didn’t think to investigate initially because no one would steal company property, then proceed to hide somewhere as predictable as his home address.
“Wait…where did he live before he moved into company housing?” Karl says with a sense of urgency.
“How am I supposed to know?” Collier replies, vaguely amused as he watches Karl flip through the printouts he compiled. “That’s your job.”
“Right, right,” Karl murmurs, distracted. He pulls out the onboarding documents and searches for Himmel’s permanent address. He had to list one when he was hired. They wouldn’t have accepted a temporary address. And if he has a home address, he can track down everything.
“Here. Chicago!” Karl circles the address in triumph. Collier leans forward and whistles as Karl searches the location on the internet. “What is it?”
“That’s on Lincoln Avenue,” Collier points out. “How and why did he end up working here? If he’s from that sort of neighborhood, he should have been a client, not an employee.”
It’s a simple matter to look into the residence’s purchase history, but revealing the name on the deed to the house doesn’t tell him much at first. He already knows Roy Himmel isn’t real. He has no way of knowing if he has any relation to Morgan Seidel, the owner of the house at that address.
“Okay, not the same guy,” Karl says under his breath. He ran a quick search for one Morgan Seidel, and the results brought up the photo of a tall young man with auburn hair. Apparently, he’s the art director of an art museum in the area. Most importantly, he bears absolutely no resemblance to Himmel. Karl exhales harshly.
It seems this is a mystery that will take longer than a single afternoon to uncover. As aggravated as it makes him, it’s been so long since a challenge like this one has presented itself at his fingertips.
