Chimera & Company

Marion liked Joanna at first. Joanna joined on Monday when everyone worked from home and didn’t turn on her webcam, even for her intro call. Bold. Marion respected that because she too refused to put on her camera unless every single other attendee did. Marion thought Joanna had a pleasant voice—calm, slow, but not too slow, clear but not loud, and not annoyingly peppered with fry or a thick accent. Perfectly inoffensive, like a voice assistant.

Entirely unlike her blaring alarm!

Marion had set the alarm for six-thirty, but she snoozed and felt her heart race every nine minutes until quarter-to-eight when all buffer eroded away, and panic fueled her exit from the covers.

Her eyes were crusty. Sleep had evaded her most of the night but finally came close to dawn. In three hours, she was presenting a proposal to SVPs. Several leaders from New York had flown in—not for her presentation but for some customer meeting that happened to be in Seattle—and her presentation was a fortunate consequence of their desire for “face time” with the acquisition.

Marion quickly brushed her teeth and stuffed herself into office attire. She attempted to tame her curly mop of hair but settled on a bun before hurrying to the bus stop. If the bus came in the next five minutes, she could swing by her favorite cafe before work. To her delight, the bus coughed and sputtered down the road right on time.

It was Tuesday, and Joanna had mentioned she’d be onsite. Marion sipped a new coffee from the café and waited for the elevator, debating how to present herself for their mentorship meeting. Cool and tastefully cynical, like a wise peer who understood the ridiculousness of it all? Or maybe a friendly guide to remove burdens during her onboarding? Or could she strike that delicate balance of both like Andrea had been for her?

An elevator opened, and she stepped inside. The building had recently upgraded the system, so she had to preselect the floor from a kiosk in the lobby. When the carriage doors sealed, Marion stared at the stainless-steel wall where buttons once dwelled.

Andrea, her now boss, had explained that mentoring Joanna was Marion’s opportunity to gain management experience. Despite the stress of the executive presentation, Marion was eager to meet her new protégé. After exiting the elevator, she dropped her empty cup in the trash and badged in, wondering whether Joanna was an early bird.

Turns out, Joanna was an octopus.

More specifically, a Giant Pacific Octopus.

Marion stared at the bright red creature propped at the neighboring desk, a pair of tentacles tapping on a keyboard while Joanna’s inoffensive voice chatted with Andrea.

Marion made eye contact with Andrea and darted her eyes at the octopus.

Andrea announced, “Joanna, this is Marion.”

The octopus swiveled its chair to face Marion.

“Hi!” Joanna’s voice emerged from the creature as it extended a tentacle. “Nice to meet you in real life.”

Marion stared at the slimy suction cups.

“Uh, hi.” Marion withheld her hand.

The octopus blinked, then lowered its tentacle.

“No pressure to shake. I shouldn’t have put you on the spot, with flu season and everything.”

“Appreciate it.” Marion forced a toothy smile.

“I met so many people yesterday, so forgive me if I’m wrong, but you’re a senior data scientist, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” Marion withdrew her laptop. “That’s correct; great memory.”

“Joanna’s amazing with names,” Andrea said.

“I’m just one of those creatures,” Joanna laughed. “Names come easy but don’t ask me to remember dates. My husband gets mad every year when I forget our anniversary.”

Andrea laughed and stood up. “Y’all want coffee?”

“Sure!” said Joanna.

Marion watched the tentacles slither off the seat onto the floor, holding up its body like a daddy longlegs.

As they walked to the kitchen, Marion trailed slightly behind, observing her coworkers' faces. They offered soft smiles and nods, but no one gazed a moment longer at Joanna.

At the last desk before the kitchen, Marion paused. Wyatt, an engineer whose behavior prioritized directness over tact, was hunched over his laptop—ergonomics policy be damned.

“Hey.”

Wyatt looked up.

Marion nodded at the octopus walking down the aisle.

“Have you met the new…worker? Joanna?”

Wyatt blinked.

Marion studied his face. “And?”

“What?”

“What do you think of her?”

Wyatt shrugged. “Seems nice.”

Marion squinted at him, and his empty eyes stared back before returning to his computer.

“Nice chatting with you.”

Marion followed Andrea and the octopus into the kitchen.

“Wow, so many snacks.” Joanna pointed a tentacle toward the wall where bulk dispensers of nuts and cereals hung.

“I eat too many goldfish.” Andrea laughed, putting a hand on her hip.

“They got rid of the almonds; did you notice that?” Marion said.

“Was that your favorite snack?” Joanna asked.

“I liked the pistachios more, but those disappeared months ago.”

“Oh…”

“Corporate cost-cutting.” Marion pointed to the locked glass shelves across the room. “We used to have a whole liquor cabinet.”

Framed prints of the Pegasys corporate values now lined the mirrored shelves—Trust, Security, Diversity, Customers, Intention, Commitment, and Teamwork. On the walls of the “Great Room,” where they used to have all-hands meetings, she could discern a faint outline of the old EchiDNA values through the white paint: Serve, Own, Lead, Invent, and Do. The actions were too solid for Pegasys.

“How do you like your coffee, Joanna?” Andrea glared at Marion as she pulled mugs from a shelf. The mugs were a relic of pre-acquisition branding: a double helix composed of zeros and ones against orange ceramic.

“This might seem weird, but do you have any honey?”

Marion opened a cabinet and withdrew a honey bear.

As the machine whirred and clunked, they stared at the digital signage, announcing a new password policy rolling out next month. Last quarter, they installed TVs every twenty feet around the perimeter but never displayed anything except the company logo. Nobody seemed to notice the enormous flatscreens dangling over their heads, nor did they blink when a maintenance team installed heat sensors beneath their desks one day. Marion raised the question in a town hall but didn’t get an answer until she talked to HR—or People, as they now called themselves.

Looking at Joanna, Marion figured neither “HR” nor “People” was appropriate.

Marion eventually discovered that the heat sensors supported a new open desk policy in which all workstations were no longer assigned to individuals. The sensors would indicate which desks were occupied on the TVs so people could check if a desk was free.

“Here you go,” Andrea handed a mug to Joanna.

“What about you?” the octopus asked Marion, its suction cups adhering to the mug.

“Oh, I’m good,” Marion grimaced. “I got my fix from the place across the street.”

The octopus dipped the coffee between its legs and slurped loudly. Marion noticed it wore gold hoop earrings at the base of its bulbous mantle.

“What’s the coffee place?” Joanna asked. “I’ve spent most of my life around Hood Canal but recently moved near Alki Beach, so I’m not used to downtown.”

“Chimera.” Marion looked past Joanna at a freighter ship out the window in Elliott Bay.

“Maybe you can take her there sometime?” Andrea raised an eyebrow at Marion.

Marion felt her face redden—her cynicism wasn’t the right energy for a mentor.

“Yeah, totally. The mushroom macchiato is surprisingly caffeinated, which one could say defeats the appeal, but—”

Marion pinched her forehead as it began to throb.

“—It’s, uh, unique. All their blends are good, whatever you’re into.”

Andrea narrowed her eyes and turned to Joanna. “C’mon, I’ll give you a quick tour.”

Marion stared at her reflection in the window as Joanna and Andrea walked past. In the glass, an octopus turned the corner with a calico horse.

Marion blinked twice, and the reflection evaporated.

Marion withdrew her work phone. She mostly used it at bedtime to check the time of her first meeting so she knew when to wake up. On remote days, Marion opened a call with herself so her screen wouldn’t lock itself after five minutes of inactivity and her status icon wouldn’t turn yellow and away. She vacillated between setting her status green and available or red and busy. If it was always red, coworkers might get suspicious. But if it was green and they messaged her and she didn’t respond promptly, she couldn’t apologize for being busy. Regardless of the day’s mood, the extremes were always better than the middle.

This was entirely unlike her Friday status reports. If every project were green, leadership would get suspicious and ask critical questions. But if a project was red, stakeholders would complain they weren’t informed sooner, back when it was yellow. So, the middle was best. Yellow projected honesty, acceptance, and acknowledgment of risk without raising a business-stopping red. Her projects flipped between green and yellow—alternating on a three-week cycle of two greens per one yellow—to dispel notions of stagnation.

Marion walked past the walking desk, which employees could reserve like a meeting room, and saw Gazelle dictating an email.

“Giselle?” Marion looked again; four hooved legs galloped on the treadmill.

The gazelle slowed its cadence and turned toward Marion. It blinked with Giselle’s long, dark eyelashes.

“Hey! How was your weekend?” it spoke in Giselle’s voice.

“Uh,” Marion scanned the nearby desks. Other humans typed and talked like usual.

“Did you take that Pilates class on Sunday?” Giselle asked, hooves clomping.

“Oh, no. Ended up sleeping in.”

“Honestly, I’d kill to sleep in on weekends again. I love our fawn, don’t get me wrong—”

Marion watched an orangutan stretch its hairy arms above its head, yawn, and adjust its glasses behind Giselle.

“Enjoy your walk,” Marion murmured, half-jogging down the hall.

It’d been a minute since her heart beat like that in the office. It had the first day she’d visited—a bleak November afternoon of six back-to-back interrogations while rain rolled down the windowpanes. She watched the sun set and darkness fall before five o’clock and hadn’t realized, until that moment, how far north Seattle was. Yet, she knew she needed to be here. The quickened pulse of the office and dark evenings were far preferable to the deadened pace and dark nights of the soul she’d endured doing data entry in South Carolina.

She collapsed at her desk. Octopus Joanna was texting with one tentacle, typing with another, and taking handwritten notes with a third. To think that multitasking was a myth!

Marion needed to prep for her presentation. She opened the slide deck and stared at the paragraphs of notes she’d left for herself. So many late nights followed by early mornings, meetings over lunch, calls on vacation, and attaining inbox zero as an elusive ambition. The company didn’t require this—not directly, not even indirectly, as there was no guilt or institutional shame over seeking work-life balance. Andrea had been here five years, too, through the acquisition and all, and she never replied to emails on nights or weekends. Marion couldn’t control herself, though.

Where was Andrea?

Her desk was empty, but Marion could hear her voice nearby.

“Let’s follow up on that offline,” emanated through the frosted glass of a conference room. It was the big one—13-West, formerly known as Rainier—that Marion had booked for the meeting. In EchiDNA days, the CEO’s voice would boom out of that room at least once a week. All the voices had been louder then. Andrea’s had been one of the loudest before she traded her leather jackets for pencil skirts.

Many people left with their stock options to join other startups, create their own thing, or take a hiatus. Andrea had married, birthed a baby, and became a VP, yet remained a ranked amateur golfer and painted absolutely stunning portraits. While ownership and accountability had steadily declined, titles, bonuses, and vacation days had risen with the acquisition. Andrea had been one of the few to truly deserve the title, Marion believed.

The door squeaked open, and a calico horse stepped out—a stunning beast of white fur flecked with specks of black and brown.

“Cannot wait for budget season to end.” Andrea’s voice emerged from the horse.

“What happened?” was all Marion could say as she stared at Andrea’s polished hooves that left no stain on the carpet.

The horse shook its head and trotted to Andrea’s standing desk. “Another policy change.”

The curiosity of the change, perhaps more than the growing zoo around her, tickled Marion something fierce. She felt restless; the chair beneath her became confining.

Joanna twirled one of her hoop earrings with a stray tentacle, and the sight of it became irksome—the visual equivalent of incessant gum chewing. Energy bolted through Marion’s legs, and she was standing. The horse and octopus turned their heads.

“What?” Marion snapped and strode down the hall.

A lemur, sloth, and iguana watched as she marched past, shoulders wide and tall. She threw back her hair and sharply turned the corner.

She’d taken pride in her competency. She’d written narratives that influenced company strategy—that positioned them uniquely in the market for an acquisition. It was her algorithm that had attracted their current employer and—humility aside—prompted the sale. Her stock options had been lucrative, so she could’ve taken that backpacking trip across Asia or invested in her gamified privacy app. Heck, she could’ve tried dating again; she was more conventionally attractive than five years ago, after all the weightlifting. But it was that very pride that kept her here. She’d bought into the narrative of scaling up and expediting EchiDNA’s vision with “the resources” of Pegasys.

Not a single human occupied the seats she passed. A raccoon sat on Wyatt’s desk, shuffling through a trash bin.

Marion wasn’t bitter or stuck; she could leave at any time. Despite what her college friends implied, she didn’t feel shackled by golden handcuffs. One of her powerlifting friends told her she was putting too much stock into her job and that her identity shouldn’t be tied to the economic value of a corporation. Marion respected her friend—and was admittedly envious of her deadlift records—but, also admittedly, didn’t put much stock into her quotidian perspectives. Her friend didn’t have the same commitment to her email job, as her queendom was the gym, a territory Marion didn’t desire. To each lioness, her own savannah. Self-improvement was fine, but Marion needed to contribute to something bigger than herself, even if it was some random company.

She passed the digital signage before the bathroom. On it, a lamb with earrings sat beside a bespectacled wolf with the text Ranked by Business Daily as a Top 10 Living, Breathing Workplace above them.

Marion entered the bathroom, and nausea overcame her. Too much caffeine on an empty stomach. She didn’t have time to cream cheese the bagel and wouldn’t eat that crusty thing raw, so she’d left without breakfast. That little pang of hunger should fuel her ambition, right? She rolled her eyes at the thought, but the eye-rolling exacerbated the nausea, so she clutched the sink and shut her eyes.

This stupid presentation shouldn’t warrant an anxiety flare-up. Marion mourned the death of writing culture. Delivering a written narrative didn’t require the showmanship of a slide deck. Everyone would leave their nitpicky comments beforehand, so she’d know the sharp edges before entering the snake pit so she could slither around the trivialities. A shiver trickled down her spine. She felt a weight on her backside, lifting her hands from the sink.

In the mirror, a serpent’s tail flicked behind her. She turned, watching the thick, scaly appendage peeking over the top of her pants. Spinning, she clawed at the tail, but it evaded her grasp.

She’d been such a diligent advocate for process. EchiDNA had a structure for everything—data-backed methods for decision-making and well-trodden paths to avoid unnecessary confusion. There was no need for political maneuvering or perspective management because teams marched to the same mission.

The bathroom tiles clicked beneath her step. She backed up, clomping her way into a stall door. Hooves replaced her sneakers, and furry ankles emerged from her jeans.

In their defense, Pegasys hadn’t performed layoffs yet. Not that rightsizing ever worried Marion—she was the 20% that drove 80% of the value. She’d performed her stint as the beast of burden, enough to gain the competence that earned her confidence. Her level of thinking was sharper than the stuffed shirts she would present to in a few minutes. Any dissent raised, she would diffuse with diligence. She would own the room, and they’d bow to her by the end of it.

Her claws returned to the sink, and she looked up.

A lion stared back at her. This face almost scared her had she not realized she was the one behind the fangs. She wasn’t nauseous or nervous, and excited was an understatement. Marion was hungry for change; it was time she brought her whole self to work.

***

Justin Anderson lives, works, and writes in Seattle, Washington. He’s interested in how technology and humanity shape one another, so he enjoys the wild (and mild) possibilities explored in speculative fiction. His recent work has appeared in Blue Mesa Review and Quillkeepers.