This is another of my favorite stories from Nothing To See Here. I’ve always loved the idea of writing stories about the background characters in movies, long before Mike Myers did it. It won’t take you long to figure out where this one’s going, but enjoy the ride. I just wish I’d mentioned Boeing in the second paragraph.
Bonus
June 2022
I think I lost my job yesterday. I mean, I haven’t had a formal notification from HR, and my boss hasn’t said anything to me, but under the circumstances, that’s not surprising. And somehow I don’t think I’ll be getting paid for the last few months.
Okay, so maybe it was too good to be true. There aren’t that many jobs in spaceflight engineering. NASA’s budget’s been slashed, and Lockheed’s a shadow of its former self, so the only people who have any real vision are SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin, and as you can imagine, there’s a lot of competition to get in. Having a PhD and five years of post-doc experience isn’t anywhere near enough. Unless you know someone, you probably won’t even get an interview. Not for a decent job, anyway. They’ll have you in some menial, low-grade job for several years until one of the higher-ups decides to move on. And that rarely happens.
I was getting desperate. Academia really doesn’t pay well. I mean, it’s not bad pay, compared to most other jobs, but it’s not enough to cover student loans and support a stay-at-home wife and two young kids in a city where there’s no decent housing under a million bucks and five grand a month rent is considered normal. We moved into a smaller place in a rough neighborhood, but even so, we were getting deeper and deeper into debt, and Izzy was getting more and more depressed. She never said anything to me, but it was obvious she expected me to do something about our financial situation.
I lost count of the number of jobs I applied for. I pulled in all the favors I could, went to faculty and industry networking events, and made sure all my social media profiles were professional, up to date, and engaging. Nothing. Month after month after month, nothing. Most of the time I didn’t even get a reply. I seriously considered suicide, and researched how I could fake my death to look like an accident. At least that way, Izzy and the kids could claim on my life insurance.
So, yeah, I jumped at it when I got an email from a company called Cephalos, inviting me to an interview - for a job I hadn’t even applied for. It wasn’t one of those mass-produced emails. Cephalos had obviously done plenty of research about me. They talked all about the work I’d been doing with robotic equipment deployment and why they thought I’d be suitable for the role. They didn’t say what the job was, just that it was top secret and I shouldn’t say anything to anyone, not even Izzy. Googling them turned up nothing. Clearly they took their secrecy very, very seriously. But they offered me ten grand plus expenses just for going to the interview. So of course I went.
It was the weirdest interview ever. They put me in a moderate-quality hotel in Boise, Idaho, and told me to wait in my room. At 2pm, room service brought me a package. Inside was an iPad. I switched it on, and a video conference popped up. The image quality was terrible. The people at the other end looked pixelated and blurry. The audio wasn’t much better.
We barely talked about the job. It was clear they knew all about me and had already made their decision. All they would tell me is that I’d be heading up a team of ten to twelve people, and budget wouldn’t be a problem. Our job was to design and build a system that would remotely unpack, assemble, and initialize a variety of equipment in space, and it had to be fully operational, tested, and ready for launch within eighteen months. I tried pushing for more information, about the project and about Cephalos, but they wouldn’t say anything else unless I took the job. So of course, I said yes.
The offer they made me was unusual. Like the rest of the team, I’d be required to live at their development and testing facility for the duration of the project. No family, no visitors, no visits home, not even a cell phone or internet. We’d be allowed to send a letter home once a month, but it would be checked by the company legal team to make sure we weren’t breaching confidentiality. Cephalos would provide our families with a hotline to send us messages or ask for assistance in emergencies. It sounded grim.
But in return, they were offering a sign-on bonus that was nothing short of miraculous. Enough cash to pay off all our loans, debts, and past due bills, and fifty grand left over. A lovely house for Izzy and the kids, in a gorgeous neighborhood, rent-free, with all utilities included, for the duration of the project. And she got a Lexus. Not top of the range, but more than good enough. Way better than our beat-up Camry. Then every six months, another hundred grand if we hit our milestones, with a million dollar completion bonus on launch date. And we’d get to keep the house and the car. Plus health insurance, sick pay, the whole nine yards.
“When do I start?” I asked.
I can’t say Izzy was thrilled with the idea of me going away for a year and half. I’m not sure whether she was upset about missing me or worried I’d have an affair. But when I showed her the six-figure sum in our bank account and the photos of her new home and her new car, she mellowed.
It was a short farewell. It didn’t take long to pack. All I was allowed to bring was one change of clothes and a few small personal items. Cephalos would be providing everything we needed, clothing, books, videogames, food, whatever we wanted. So I hugged Izzy and the kids, left a letter for my mom, and climbed into a black Hummer with blacked-out windows. There were already two other guys in the back. I vaguely recognized one of them from a conference a year ago, and smiled at him. Jeff? Jerry? Something like that. The other looked like a mercenary. Think Jesse Ventura in Predator, and you’d be about right, except with more tattoos. None of us said a word.
They took us to a tiny airstrip. I guess there were maybe eighty of us there, some old, some young, every shape, size and color. They divided us into separate groups, male and female, confiscated our phones and watches, then told us to strip and put on our uniforms. Jumpsuits, if you can believe it. With an octopus logo on the back. The big buff guys got red. Us scientists got white. Managers got gold, and the maintenance staff got brown. One small group had blue. We never worked out what they did. We looked like a Star Trek convention.
We all had nametags. Mine said Martin, which was confusing.
“Uh, I think there’s been a mistake,” said Jeff/Jerry. “My name tag says Murray. That’s not my name.”
“It is now,” answered the guy handing out the uniforms. “Get used to it.”
We boarded a black C-130, which was noisy, cramped and uncomfortable. Nobody told us where we were going, and of course there were no windows, but with a plane full of scientists, it wasn’t hard to work out where we ended up. It was a small island somewhere near Vanuatu.
“Beach time!” someone yelled as we got off the plane. “Gonna get me some sun, some margaritas, do some surfing! This place rocks!” We were all excited.
None of us knew that would be the last time we’d see the sun for over a year. For some of us, of course, it was the last time ever. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
There was nothing at the airstrip except a concrete blockhouse, covered in vines and leaves. Camouflage, obviously. We filed in, according to our color groups. Gold first, then blue, then it was us. The door slammed shut behind us, and the floor began to lower away. Down, down, down, for what seemed like ages.
At the bottom was a windowless subway train with no driver. We sat silently as it took us off into the darkness. We were all thinking the same thing. The island was tiny. Wherever we were, we weren’t under the island any more. We had to be five, ten, maybe twenty miles out to sea, and who knew how far down.
And then…
“It’s a city,” whispered Jeff/Jerry/Murray. “A goddamn underwater city.”
He wasn’t wrong. The place was huge. There must have been close to a thousand people living and working there, all wearing those damn jumpsuits. We each had a good sized private room, there were common areas for eating, socializing, exercising, and relaxing. And the labs… oh, man, those poor suckers at SpaceX would have shit themselves. They had everything. Way more advanced than anything up there on the surface. There were whole teams of people whose sole job it was to make sure we had anything we wanted. It was a scientist’s dream.
We learned fast not to ask questions. Who or what was Cephalos? Were they a government agency? If so, which government? What was the project all about? Why was it so secret? We didn’t know, and told ourselves we didn’t care. All we thought about, night and day, was how to build a system that would assemble a massive microwave array in orbit without any human intervention. It had to locate containers of parts floating in space, put the bits together, and get the machine working. When it was completed, the array would collect solar power and beam it down to Earth. If it sounds like something out of Isaac Asimov, that’s because it is. Reason, in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1941, if you want to look it up. But it was real. I don’t even pretend to understand how it works. That was a whole different team. All my team had to do was put the thing together.
We were one hell of a team. We made our first two milestones easily, thanks to some ingenious work from Ryan, Cassidy and McKenna. Honestly, McKenna should probably have been running the team, not me. She was smart, motivated, single-minded, and everybody loved her. I offered to step down, but Cephalos said they wanted her focused on the engineering, not project management, so she wrote code while I wrote reports and spreadsheets.
We got used to having armed redshirts everywhere we went. They never got in our way, just stood in the corner of the labs or by the doorways, bored out of their brains and looking menacing. They all wore body cameras, which meant that somebody, somewhere, was probably watching our every move and listening to our every word. Our rooms were probably bugged too. Yeah, it was weird, but hey, there was already close to a quarter million bucks in our joint bank account, and that final million was getting closer by the day.
And that’s when it all went to hell.
It was the day before the first complete test. I’d gone to bed early, confident we’d done everything we needed to do. Ryan and McKenna said they wanted to stay in the lab and run some more checks. We all knew there was something between them, even though we feigned ignorance.
I woke to the sound of klaxons. The room light snapped on. Breach, I thought immediately, pulling on my clothes. We’d trained for this. Down the hall, turn left, head for the safety room, keep the door shut, and wait. If we were in real danger, the second alarm would sound, telling us to use the emergency evacuation pods. Get in, press the button, float to the surface, and wait for rescue.
There were twenty of us, all blues and whites. “What’s going on?” asked Riley. We shrugged.
And then we heard gunfire. And screaming. And explosions. And then the klaxon stopped.
“Oh, Jesus,” whispered Parker.
The door slid open. Three guys, head to toe in black, with goggles, breathing apparatus, and guns. Big guns. Pointed at us.
“Get the fuck out,” yelled the leader, pointing at the lifepods. “Now. Go!”
One of the blues swung a punch. They shot him. The rest of us got the fuck out.
As we lay in the pods, waiting for someone to pick us up, there was a huge crump from somewhere far below us, as the guys in black blew up the lab, the city, and my million dollars.
“Well, crap,” I said. “I guess it’s time to file for unemployment.”
Nobody laughed.
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I'm not sure which film you had in mind but this is so much fun.