What You Missed 2
Day Two of Elenia’s adventures on Grismara. The Setting: An enormous office-building in the center of the enclave Pallasova, now decayed. Just after noon.
The building was just as they had left it when the blockade was broken and they were rescued. Elenia took the stairs carefully down, gun out, and keyed in the access code for the offices. For the first time in a long time, she felt like she was at home.
She used her datachron to illuminate the quiet offices. The empty desks in the center of the room were still covered in the debris of what they had been doing. Three desks were arrayed around an office that had been torn to pieces. They had kept Leonid there. Poor Lyonya. But she had a task to do, no time to reminisce.
Down another floor to the servers, sitting dark and grey now. The transfer would take fifteen minutes. She had planned it all perfectly. The power source went in, a little box the size of her hand that started up the old servers and sent them whirring. Next, into a slot near the top, an antennae to transmit this data across the vastness of space to its new home, a server somewhere safe in Fantastic Enterprises.
They had worked so hard to transfer company data before the infrastructure collapsed, but there had been so much that… Well, the research data from Cassus, the human trials, the preliminary work for…
The antennae beeped. She had fifteen minutes. With a deep breath, Elenia Volescu walked back up to the offices and collected a photograph from the wall. She carried it back to her office, and sat in her old chair in the half-light.
In the center of the photograph, she stood holding a little placard with a date on it, her long dark hair wrapped up around her head, her high collared dress made her look severe… But she was smiling in the picture and behind her one of her partners, Peter Soveski, was smiling too. To the left was Mikhail Kessler. Misha, he had leapt from the roof on the third day, when he couldn’t taste anything. There was a date in pencil under his feet, his memorial. Renata Zabelina and Raisa Yusupova stood beside each other, linked arm in arm holding beakers. There had been a joke there, at the time,that they intended to fill the beakers a little more each year they were there. Squinting a little showed the beakers had an inch of something within them. Beneath them both, the first day of the sickness.
Arseny Sechenov had been on the team the longest. His long hair was tied back in a ponytail Elenia had often said was inappropriate, but that had been the joke. That had always been the joke. Arseny had died the first day, probably. He had left with Renata to go find Raisa, who was trapped in her little flat.
Leonid stood beside him, all beaming with excitement. He had just joined the week before, and would be the first to succumb visibly to sickness. In the front, sitting down, Vadim, who was too tall for the photograph and too goofy looking anyway. His collar was starched up like an Alchemist. Then Fedosiya, who always wore bright scarfs the moment the weather allowed it, and who had died in a fire for her sins; for those dead aurin and for all those other dreadful things, for her cruelty.
“We are two now,” Elenia said to the empty room, to Misha, who used to sit in the desk at the doorway typing notes and chewing on pencils. As she dug for a pen, she found the half-bottle of whiskey she had left behind, and a few loose cigarettes. They tasted stale, but she lit one anyway, and took a slug off the bottle.
She had been someone once, in this office. As important as anyone could be in the great cosmic scheme of things. But in those days, it had really felt like something. It had felt powerful and grand, and now, if things hadn’t gone so wrong, she would have long since retired, gone to live on the Dacha with Marko, his grey hairs making him look distinguished as he tottered around. And it wasn’t fair, was it?
Beneath Leonid and Fedosiya, she added a new date. Her pencil hovered beneath her own feet for a moment.
There was syringe in her glove. Wasn’t it better to be here? Wasn’t this where she was meant to be?
Her datachron beeped. The transmission had completed. She framed the picture once more, and collected her things. She smoked another cigarette as she walked up the dark staircase of Pallasova’s Kondrashov Building.
In an empty office, illuminated by the grey sky above, a photograph hung. Nine dead faces smiled where no one could see.