Chapter 6
Sasha
"What do you mean shut down?” Sasha asked. She should have known her day was screwed as soon as Zack Massey arrived in a private helicopter, pulling her away from her task of managing things in Ballroom A.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Zack said, appearing annoyed at having to answer to someone so far below his station.
“Apparently, we’ve drawn a lot of scrutiny from the Mexican government, and they’re on their way here.
” He leaned back in an office chair, the same one he insisted she relinquish to him as soon as he arrived, propping his feet on a makeshift work table.
His posture and attitude weren’t what one would expect from someone worried about the chaos about to burst through the door, ending everything they’d been working toward for the last two years.
But perhaps this was normal for someone who had access to things like a private aircraft and collected government officials as faux best friends.
“You told me everything had been taken care of,” Dr. Cutchin replied while worrying his hands together.
Zack casually peeled a banana before taking a bite.
“And it had been taken care of, but bureaucrats are greedy over things like safety.” He rolled his eyes.
“What do you want me to do? Don’t they understand they’re on the cusp of helping us take part in something life-changing here?
No, their limited brains can’t even fathom it.
All they care about are regulations and liabilities and people. ”
Sasha adjusted her glasses. “How does this even happen? We were told they were in complete cooperation.”
With this question, Zack’s gaze darkened.
“I don’t need to explain anything to you.
You work for me. You don’t think I have a hundred other people biting at the bit to work for me, to be where you are.
I’m sure you’ve gotten whatever you needed.
Let’s just take this pony show to a new town. Just pack this shit up. No big deal.”
To him, it was no big deal because he wouldn’t be doing any of it. They’d only just started the process but now they’d have to start over someplace else. But good luck explaining this to Zack. “What about all the people we brought down here?” she asked.
“Does it look like I give a fuck? They can figure out how to get home. How hard is it to just travel to another country? People do it all the time.”
She opened her mouth to inform him it was their responsibility since they had made everyone sign waivers and paperwork and they couldn’t just leave everyone on their own in a foreign country, but Dr. Cutchin pulled her aside.
“You’re wasting your time. Once his mind is set, that’s all there is to it. ”
“But we haven’t even done anything. Why should we get shut down when all we’ve done is ask a bunch of informal questions and shrink an ape? An ape, may I remind you, that’s currently lost. We’d be running away with a bunch of loose ends here, and how is that right?”
“I’m telling you to drop it,” her boss said. “How long do you think it’ll take to break all your stuff down and pack up?”
She was about to answer when Zack interrupted them by saying, “I still get to push the button, right?”
“What?” She didn’t care if her answer sounded short or if he was the one signing her impressively-sized paychecks. A company this big shouldn’t be taking routes that made them seem like a fly-by-night underground science experiment. It stressed her out and created chaos. She hated chaos.
He continued to stuff the banana in his mouth, talking with his mouth full, all while focusing on the security monitor. “The whole reason I came down here was to push the button because Dr. Cutchin said I could push the button.”
There was only one button Zack would be referring to, causing him to act like a kid excited to push an elevator call button.
It was weird. She also knew Dr. Cutchin had held this one prize like an offering to their overlord, as though pushing a button gave Zack a real hand in the creation of their work.
Zack spoke of little else, telling other employees that he got to be the one who pushed the button to activate the MASS laser, shrinking their first agreed-upon human test subject.
“I thought we were in a rush to shut everything down. There isn’t even anyone in there.
There’s no point in pushing anything.” It wasn’t even a real button.
Maybe if it was a giant old-school red dial with flashing lights reading Shrink on it, she’d see the appeal.
Hell, if that was the case, she’d be excited about pushing a button too.
But this was just a finger tap selection on the tablet, and it didn’t even make a tiny click or anything.
It was very anticlimactic for such a great moment of scientific achievement.
“I’m going to do a social media poll,” Zack said, discarding the empty banana peel on her keyboard and pulling out his phone.
“Should I push the button?” he asked as he typed.
It was clear he was asking this question to his millions of followers, not even bothering to explain what the button entailed.
Not that he or his followers cared. At least half of the population would vote for unknown disruption at the expense of stability just for the hell of it.
At this announcement, Sasha couldn’t stop herself from sighing in exasperation, but she at least had enough control to turn her back when doing so.
She continued her conversation with Dr. Cutchin about the logistics of how quickly everything could be packed up and where they were heading next, when Dr. Taylor rushed in.
“The authorities are here and they want to speak to someone in charge. Who wants to talk to them?”
All eyes turned to Zack, who merely scrolled through his phone as if this was any other day and there was nothing to worry about.
He then picked up their working tablet, clicked through a few things, and before she could say anything like, What in the hell are you doing? the tablet was returned to the table.
One look at the screen revealed what he had done.
“The poll was already going strongly in favor, so I pushed the button,” Zack said before standing and zipping his hoodie.
“If I were you, I’d start packing everything up.
I found a new place to set up shop in Belize.
Dr. Cutchin, can you talk to the authorities?
I need to get back in the air.” He slipped a pair of sunglasses on and strolled out.
She threw up her hands. Whatever. The good news was that pushing the button did nothing except make Zack feel good.
Maybe it was out of his system and he’d have less of a fixation on it in the future.
It wasn’t as if anyone was in the MASS laser hub, and, at this point, the miniature ape had to be long gone or dead, probably vacuumed by housekeeping or eaten by a bug.
They were lucky Zack’s actions were inconsequential—this time.