Vell Harlan and the Doomsday Dorms

In years past, Lee waking up to a weight on her chest usually meant she was about to be attacked by a brain parasite. Nowadays, it just meant the cat was hungry.

“Yes, good morning Lou,” Lee mumbled, as she groggily ran a hand along his fur. She forced her eyes open and looked at the clock: seven twenty-seven AM. There was an alarm set to go off in three minutes, but Lou usually got to her first. The tabby tomcat meowed happily and hopped off her chest as Lee stood to go about her day. Much to Lou’s chagrin, filling his food bowl was fairly low on the list of priorities.

After finally appeasing the lord of the apartment, Lee got her own breakfast and sat down with her tablet to peruse the day’s schedule. Today was apparently booked up with a large block of meetings.

“Ugh,” Lee groaned. “Interviews.”

The ever-growing Harlan Industries needed to grow in a new and unpleasant direction. While the expansion of their business was nice, it came with drawbacks. Lee could no longer handle their finances on her own, and nobody else they employed was capable of keeping up. They would need to hire an accountant.

The hiring process was already fraught enough, and the fact they were hiring someone to handle their finances added another layer of stress. As a general rule, Lee didn’t trust “money people”. Reducing the world to dollar values was a quick way to dehumanize people and think of them as nothing but assets. Finding someone she could actually trust to put in the position of accountant was going to be a long process.

After Lee had already been awake for a while, Harley and Kanya shambled into the dining room as well. Lou meowed at them both to feed him, but was ignored as usual. They knew his tricks. Lou even resorted to meowing at Botley, but only got a poke in the nose for his troubles.

“Mornin’, Lee,” Harley mumbled. Being out of school had done nothing to make her a morning person. “Do we have things to do today?”

“We always do,” Lee said.

“Dang it,” Harley mumbled. She asked that every day, and every day she was disappointed that they did, in fact, have things to do. She did not regret starting a company, but she did want some days off more often. Even the apocalypses back in school had taken occasional breaks.

“At least if today goes well it should lighten our workloads,” Lee said.

“Right, accountant hiring day, yeah?” Harley said. “I’ll have a fun day, then.”

“I’ll be involved as well,” Lee said. “This is an important decision. I want to be hands-on.”

Harley looked at Kanya, and the two locked eyes in mutual understanding. Despite Harley being in charge of it, Lee liked to be hands-on with a lot of hiring. Her desire to run a more ethical company than her father could make her very picky.

“You know, I could help out, if Harley needs an extra set of eyes,” Kanya said. “Automated manufacturing is going just fine, and whatever I’m not there to handle, Sarah can keep an eye on.”

For reasons (and by means) entirely unknown to them, Sarah was also apparently working at Harlan Industries. They had never formally hired her, but she had shown up on opening day and started working regardless. No one objected to her presence, and her paychecks were getting cashed so everything was legally in the clear, but Harley was still curious how and why Sarah had shown up in the first place. And where she lived when she wasn’t at work. Harley had never actually seen her enter or leave the building.

“You’re welcome to stop by, Kanya, but I’d like to review the candidates myself. I do have an eye for these things.”

“How?” Kanya asked. “There’s never actually been any fuckery going on with hiring.”

“Lee’s in charge, if she says she’s got an eye, she’s got an eye.”

Lou meowed at them from the floor.

“Lou agrees,” Harley said.

“Why don’t you ever agree with me, Lou?”

Botley raised a tiny metal hand.

“Yes, Botley, you’re a true friend,” Kanya said. “Lou is just being rude.”

Lou compounded his rudeness by walking away mid-conversation. The minute his tail swished around the corner and out of sight, Lee’s phone started to ring. The call was from Vell, so she excused herself and stepped back into her bedroom.

“Good morning Vell,” Lee said. “First loop or second?”

“Second.”

“Damn it,” Lee mumbled. “There’s some interviews today I was really hoping to avoid.”

“Yeah, about that,” Vell said. “Listen, someone you’re about to interview is a plant sent by your dad.”

“What? Who?”

“I don’t know,” Vell said. “I didn’t get a lot of details, I was in the middle of fighting some porpoise-men when you called, and one of them bit my hand off while I was still trying to talk.”

“Oh, Marine Biologists,” Lee groaned. Even when she was no longer at the school, the Marine Biology department still found ways to ruin her life. “What do you know? Tell me everything.”

“Uh, Harley told me there was a plant, and she also said, uh…”

“What?”

“Okay, keep in mind, this is coming from Harley, not me-”

“The dip has the answers?”

Harley paced back and forth around Lee’s office. Kanya had gone to her own office, allowing them to talk without suspicion for the first time that day. Harley thought about it for a second and then spun on her heels.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “You’re the one who said it!”

“I didn’t say it, some other version of me said it, I’m not the me that I was when I- gah,” Harley said. “I can see why this shit drives other people insane, trying to think about two timelines gives me a headache.”

“At least it provided us this warning,” Lee said. “Flawed as it is.”

“I’m sorry, alright,” Harley said. “Or I would be sorry, if I were the me I was when I- fuck! I’m not thinking about his any more. We’ve got our clue, what do we do with it?”

“That depends entirely on what the ‘dip’ is,” Lee said.

“I sure feel like a dip right now,” Harley grumbled.

“Maybe it’ll make more sense later,” Lee said. “Obviously it seemed liked a good idea for you to say it at the time.”

“I think you’re overestimating how smart I am,” Harley said.

“I don’t think that’s possible, dear,” Lee said. She stood from her desk and gave Harley a kiss on the forehead. “Let’s go about our day and see what we see. The simple fact that we know there’s a spy among our candidates will help a lot.”

“Yeah! For sure,” Harley said. “We’ve solved weirder shit than this.”

“Precisely,” Lee said. “We could ferret out a shapeshifter hiding among our friends, we can solve this.”

“Hell yeah,” Harley said. “We don’t need any time loop cheats to fuck shit up.”

“We are still using the-”

“Don’t ruin the vibe, Lee, come on,” Harley said. “Let’s go meet our weirdos and find out which one of them is a narc.”

“They should be outside by now,” Lee said, as she checked the time. Harley’s office was right next door to Lee’s, with a third office waiting for Vell on the other side (though it was currently being used for storage). The interview candidates had been told to wait outside Harley’s office, so their potential employees (and their potential traitor) should be just outside. Harley wandered to Lee’s window and peeked through the blinds.

“Looks like most of them are there,” Harley said. She could see close to a dozen candidates waiting in the hall outside. “Damn I wish there were less of these guys.”

“Harley, you’re the one who scheduled the interviews.”

“Before I knew one of them was a mole! I wanted to get it over with,” Harley said. “Come here and peek through the windows with me.”

“Harley, eleven of those twelve are presumably normal people,” Lee said. “Don’t be weird.”

“It’s a little weird around here, our ideal candidate will be used to it,” Harley said. “But fine. I’ll start the interviews.”

“Try to ask slightly less weird questions this time,” Lee said. “We lost a very good machinist candidate because you asked what he’d want put on his tombstone.”

“Again, we’re day-to-day weird. We work with Sarah, people need to be prepared for this kind of shit,” Harley said. “But fine, I’ll keep it out of the grave.”

“How do you weigh a hippopotamus without using a scale?”

The interview candidate stared at Harley for a few seconds. His name was Anish Rattan, he was older than Harley by several years, and up until now he had answered every single question without delay and with full confidence. Harley was suspicious -he had a long career with a packed resume, plenty of time to establish himself as a corporate tool, and his answers came a little too quickly, to the point of sounding rehearsed. Maybe a sign of a practiced corporate spy, maybe just a sign he’d done a lot of interviews. Harley had a few curveballs ready to throw him off.

“I suppose I’d go with water displacement,” Anish said, after a short delay. “Hippos already spend a lot of time in the water, so it wouldn’t even be hard to get them in the pool.”

“Pragmatic,” Harley said. “Assuming they were throwing as hard as they could, would you rather have someone throw a knife or a brick at you?”

Anish’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses.

“Um...brick, I think. Worst case scenario is better,” Anish said. “Any broken bone is better than a nicked artery.”

“I see. And can you explain this gap in your resume back in 2020?”

It took Anish a few seconds to realize he’d been asked a normal question again.

“Oh, yes, just some time spent in personal development, acquiring a new certification, you can see that under my education section…”

“If you died and got reincarnated, but the only rule was you had to be reincarnated in a different country, which country would you pick?”

Harley didn’t blink while she asked the questions. Kelly blinked several time before answering it.

“Uh, I- Guyana, maybe? I went there on vacation once, uh,” Kelly stammered. “Does that count? Can it be a place I visited?”

“Only rule is it can’t be where you were born, Kelly.”

“Oh, Guyana, then, definitely,” Kelly said. “One-hundred percent.”

Harley was now on candidate number seven of twelve, and Kelly had just joined Anish among the top suspects. She was nervous, too nervous. The average candidate hemmed and hawed and shifted uncomfortably occasionally, but Kelly had stammered her way through even the normal questions, and appeared to be vibrating at a low but constant rate. On the one hand, those nerves might be a sign of a guilty conscience, but on the other, they would make her a terrible spy. Or maybe Noel Burrows just had really bad taste in spies. Harley was keeping her options open.

“Other than the ‘man in the moon’, do you see any other images in the lunar surface?”

“Uh. I’d have to look, can I do that?’

“No.”

“Oh...I, I heard that in Japan they see a rabbit? I think he’s making cake, or rice, or- or something. I guess I’d see that too if I looked at it?”

“Interesting,” Harley whispered to herself. She made an imaginary note on a piece of paper, just to see if Kelly reacted. She did. Harley made an actual note of that and moved on.

“What’s your favorite kitchen appliance?”

“Kitsuki Kitchen Tech Model 3-B Air Fryer,” Brad said. Brad Outhwaite had managed to earn his way onto the suspect list in about thirteen seconds by walking into the office and complimenting one of the knicknacks on Harley’s desk by naming not only the piece itself, but the artist who’d designed it. Apparently it was Crimson in Threes by Anne Michael Jacobs. Even Harley had not known what the little statue was called, she’d just seen a bunch of funny red blobs on the shelf at Target and bought it on impulse. Nobody knew that much about random junk unless they’d studied their target carefully -or so she had thought at first. As the interview dragged on, however, Harley was beginning to suspect Brad just liked to memorize random trivial bullshit.

“What kind of toothbrush do you use?”

“CleanTek Model 3 Mechanical, 2023 Edition,” Brad said. “Pearl gold.”

“What kind of spark plugs are in your car?”

“AL3 Laser Iridium,” Brad said. Harley noticed a pattern.

“Do you like things with the number three in them?”

“It’s my favorite number,” Brad said.

“What’s your second favorite?”

“Three point three,” Brad said.

“That tracks.”