Boss’ Mate

Chapter 1

Lydia

When I first met Doctor Simon Seek, I thought he was a jerk.

I didn’t know I’d get to watch him melt later that day. If I had, I might have been less upset about the obnoxious way he introduced himself.

Right now, I am sitting in the Z-Corp waiting room, a place where they park people who don’t have clearance to enter one of the three circular towers that comprise the main building of the compound.

The big powder teal Z is prominent everywhere, as is the off-white color that isn’t quite cream, but is viciously defended by hordes of intellectual property lawyers.

I have been in the waiting room for an hour past our meeting time.

The walls here are pale blue lit with white backlights.

They’re obnoxiously medical. There is untold money going into this facility.

I’ve been scrolling on my phone the whole time, so I don’t really care too much about how late my interviewer is.

I’ve watched three dozen reels about anxious attachment styles and two dozen reels where someone says the words ‘nervous system.’ There was one with a cute dog jumping on a bed that I am sure will turn out to have been generated by a thieving robot.

I flip back to my notes app. I’ve got to stay locked in. I need this job, so I’ve done my research in what turns out to be a futile effort to be educated. Getting hired as a tech writer lately has been about as easy as getting hired to sell sand in the Sahara.

I swipe down my notes.

This is one of the companies that run the world without anybody really noticing it. There are hundreds of brands under its umbrella, from cotton swabs to Frisbees and Ouija boards, step trackers to back massagers. They really do make it all. And if they don’t make it yet, they will.

A good sixty-three minutes after my interview was supposed to start, a tall, handsome man strides into the waiting room.

He looks around, which is silly because I am the only person in the room.

I have to assume he knows the potted plant isn’t here to be interviewed for the position of technical writer slash personal scribe.

“Lydia Barnes?”

“That’s me,” I say, standing up.

“You’re late,” he says, wildly incorrectly.

“Actually, I’ve been here for…”

“We don’t have time for excuses,” he says, crisply cutting me off. “Come with me, we’ll have to do this interview while I work.”

I want to hate him, but unfortunately he is handsome in an arrogant sort of way. He is clean-cut. He has dark brows, blue eyes, and the kind of mouth that suggests sensuality and cruelty in equal measure. Okay, no, I can hate him, I think.

“You were referred by Veronica,” he says, mentioning the very efficient blonde woman who organized the in-person interview after the online round. She had an air of efficiency that made me feel like a complete mess just by merit of being in her presence.

I was surprised when I actually got a call for this meeting. I got the impression I’d not impressed her at all. But maybe that’s just how everyone here is. Haughty and better than everyone else.

I know I have a kind of mousy energy. My hair is brown, which honestly already feels like a mistake.

I tie it up in a low ponytail to keep it out of my face.

I wear round-rimmed glasses, and I’ve come to this interview in a brown cardigan and matching skirt.

I look like a librarian, and that’s okay because I’m not here to be a supermodel. I’m here to do a job.

Dr. Seek looks me up and down while we wait for the elevator he impatiently summons with a jab of his long finger.

“We don’t need a poet,” he says, apropos of sweet fuck all.

“I’m not a poet. I’m a technical writer. I’m here to document the processes you’ve been working on. At least, that’s what I was informed about when Veronica interviewed me.”

He looks disgruntled. She did warn me about him.

She made it clear how territorial he is of the whole program he’s working on.

She also made it clear that I was going to be expected to manage him as much as my work.

Babysitting a big ego isn’t my idea of a good time, but that’s how jobs are, I suppose.

“We have machines that do that now,” he says.

“And yet, it’s useful to have a human actually understand what is going on for documentation’s sake, rather than feeding slop into slop,” I say with a tight smile.

The elevator doors open. We step in. I am now in a small box with a very large man. I feel my heart skip a beat as I crane my neck to look up and maintain eye contact with him. I immediately wish I had not bothered.

“I can assure you, nothing about our process is slop, young lady,” he says. He cannot possibly be more than five years older than me at most. I am twenty-four. He might be thirty. Maybe. The ‘young lady’ feels condescending, but I suppose that too is on brand.

“I’m going to need to ask questions, and get detailed answers,” I tell him. “For the documentation.” So don’t get your panties in a twist, I add silently.

Unfortunately for us both, his underwear is already experiencing significant rotation. I rubbed him the wrong way when I met him, and there may not be any coming back from that. I’m a technical writer, not a diplomat.

The elevator door opens, and he strides off, leaving me in his wake. I rush after him, cursing that my legs are shorter than his by a significant amount, so when he takes one step, I have to take one and a half to keep up.

He leads me into what I suppose must be his laboratory. I notice that there are eye scans and palm scans to get in, and that his name is on the door.

“Most of the experiment is being managed autonomously,” he says. “So I’m really not sure that you have much to do, if I am to be honest.”

“Does that seem like a good idea?”

He gives me another one of those irritated, jabby little glances. “Obviously,” he says. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.”

At this point, I’ve pulled out a small pad. I make a few notes about nothing in particular, mostly because it seems to annoy him, and he is definitely annoying me. Fair is fair.

This doesn’t feel like an interview at all. It feels like being dragged around by an unwilling person who doesn’t want me there. But he doesn’t tell me to leave, so I keep following.

“This is Project Chimera.” He finally says something useful. “Did Veronica fill you in?”

“A little. I have the outline.”

He looks displeased about that.

“She told me it is a top-secret, highly sensitive project and that you would have the say in deciding whether or not I was allowed to become part of it.”

That seems to mollify him a little bit. He’s still in control. I wonder why my presence seems to threaten that.

I can’t imagine him ever not being in control. He has the air of a man who has always been in charge. I shouldn’t pretend I don’t know who he is. Of course I know.

Simon Seek is the only child of Ramona and Derrick Seek, people who are known for being incredibly rich and good looking.

Ramona and Derrick live in Spain now, having inherited a castle from an aged relative.

From what I can tell, Simon’s net worth is in the high millions. He doesn’t need to work at all.

He mostly stays under the radar, so information on him as a person is relatively limited. No social media. No interviews. He’s not a fame seeker. He could be, though. He’s more than handsome enough to be.

I try to turn the conversation back to the project at hand.

I’ve been made aware that the shareholders need enough information to be able to throw more money at the place, and future researchers need to have access to detailed data sheets and such so that discoveries are not lost by being locked up in the minds of their inventors.

The corporate world of science is brutal. This man is a genius, and yet he possibly owns nothing of what he has made. That would be enough to put me in a perpetually bad mood too, I suppose.

“So, as I understand it, Project Chimera is an effort to edit genes in real time in living specimens.”

“We turned a mouse into a chicken. That was proof of concept,” he says, sounding thoroughly bored.

“Wow. Really? Do you have one here?”

“Of course I have one,” he says. “They’re quite the crowd pleaser. Makes the concept easily understandable by almost anyone. A child. Or a technical writer.”

I let the dig slide, because it’s silly, and because I want to see the chickmouse. Moushen. Chicouse. I will work on naming conventions later.

We step into the laboratory, and he gestures at a large glass cage with a mesh top for ventilation and wood shavings for bedding. The sort of cage a scientist might keep a lab rat in.

It is no rat that meets my gaze.

“Oh…” I say, surprised, though I probably shouldn’t be, because this is exactly what he said it would be.

The creature he has shown me is half-chicken, half-mouse. It is holding a piece of cheese in between surprisingly human-like hands emerging from short arms that in turn emerge from a feathered body. The little beast has a beak and pecks at the morsel quite happily.

“Well?” he says.

“It’s smaller than I would have thought,” I reply.

“Sorry my miracle isn’t large enough for your taste,” he snaps.

“I’m no size queen,” I comment, mostly under my breath. He snorts, apparently having heard it.

I am actually a virgin, not that I intend to tell him about that.

I intend to keep my personal life very private from him.

He has the air of a man who would be judgmental either way.

It is hard to please him, I think. Plus, I don’t particularly like him.

I’d understand the surliness if I had done anything to deserve it, but I am just doing my job.

Or trying to get to the point where I have a job to do.

I bet he has very little understanding of what that feels like.

* * *

Simon

I should be nicer. I am trying to be nicer.