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spookyspaghettisundae · 10 months ago

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Time For Debriefing

Water turned pink where it circled the shower drain.

Sleek white surfaces captured a vague reflection of Chloe Grant’s silhouette. Both palms flat on the wall, she leaned against it, and closed her eyes while hot water ran down her body in a constant stream, washing away blood from bruises and scratches alike.

Though returned to climes less cold, it felt like the body armor and airlift had captured the wintry air of the Rocky Mountains. Like the shower’s heat needed to wash that away even more than the ignorable injuries she had accumulated on her first mission for Future Proof.

Steam filled the shower room. A long sigh escaped Grant.

Her mind’s inner eye flashed with memories of recent events. A crocodile from another era, a veritable dinosaur. Gazing down the jagged cliffs of the Miocene era, having jumped the jaws of death, and living to remember it. The crunching of bones every time the Purussaurus hit crags on its long way down, falling until it hit the ground.

A man she had barely known was now wiped from existence. Without an explanation. Without a trace.

The sound of bare feet tapping on hard floors cut through the stream of water blanketing Grant’s entire world.

Someone else joined her in the shower rooms.

Mischchenko’s right eye was beet-red, the skin around it discolored in a different shade. A scowl across her lips suggested she was none the happier for whatever she had suffered in the Rockies.

She hadn’t said a word for the entire ride back in the airlift, dismissing any questions about her well-being. After landing, she disappeared into the headquarters’ medical bay, and Grant hadn’t seen Mischchenko since.

Mischchenko entered a stall several booths apart from Grant’s. The short-walled separators only revealed a set of shoulders and their heads. Mischchenko waved a hand in front of the connected electronic sensor—the showers here had no handles to operate them.

Her showerhead sprang to life, unleashing another stream of hot water, soon adding to the fine mist of steam in the room.

Grant wiped water from her face and waited till Mischchenko finally spared her a sidelong glance. Then Grant said, “And here I thought Spencer woulda wanted to brief us immediately after getting back.”

Mischchenko grunted, with a fleeting hint of a grin.

She swept her long brown hair back behind her head, screwing her eyes shut, as she stepped under the stream of hot water.

Sputtering, she finally verbalized a reply, eyes still shut. “He would have, if he hadn’t been in a Zoom call with investors, or somethin’.”

That tracked better with what Grant had expected from the CEO.

She finally cracked open her shampoo bottle and soon massaged her scalp with a blue liquid.

“What did the doctor prescribe?” she asked Mischchenko.

“Concussion,” said Mischchenko with a deep sigh. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll be fine.”

That also tracked.

“You ever, uhm, have a near-death experience on this job? Dealing with dinosaurs like we just did?”

Mischchenko snorted. Laughed. Something in between, sputtering again.

She shook her head but grinned, with gritted teeth on display, and said, “All the damn time. Wouldn’t have it any other way, though. Who else in my line of work gets to say they deal with bona fide dinos?”

“Can’t complain about what Spencer’s paying, either,” Grant muttered.

“Nope, really can’t.”

Once Grant started massaging the shampoo out of her hair, suds gathered around the drain on the floor, and the shower’s water no longer spiraled down in pinkish hues. The soap no longer stung in any open scratches on her skin.

The pain was gone, as was first blood.

Grant asked her, “Got any family?”

Mischchenko shook her head again.

“Two dogs. That’s it.”

Grant flinched. She really didn’t like dogs, but the puzzle pieces fit. Of course Mischchenko was a dog person.

She considered chit-chatting some more about the generous insurance policy Future Proof LLC was granting them, but the previous night and day had been blurring into a surreal haze.

Grant desperately needed some downtime to process everything. Every strange thing. Preferably with some shuteye. But it was a lot to take in. She suspected her mind would keep spinning, keeping awake for many nights to come. Considering all the things she had known about reality, now challenged by everything she had learned of.

Of Anomalies that connected different points in time.

Of a company and government organizations secretly dealing with living, breathing, dinosaurs.

And of lots, and lots of dead people. The broken, and the missing. How many had disappeared through those Anomalies? Disappeared when some change to the timeline erased them from existence? How many had been eaten or mauled by dinosaurs?

She waved a hand in front of the sensor and the stream of water from her shower cut out.

Neither she nor Mischchenko said anything. Only the sound of water remained between them.

Grant left the shower room and dried off. The blurry haze extended. Time melted and stretched and contracted.

Still radiating heat from the shower, she sat alone in her new office in the sleek, highly technologized building of Future Proof.

The device on the desk barely resembled a computer. Her fingers tapped on the desk’s surface upon which a keyboard’s layout glowed, which took some getting used to—without the feedback of physical keys underneath each fingertip, her first few attempts at entering her password failed miserably, punctuated by annoying beeps.

The computer itself was a sleek white case clipped underneath the desktop, as invisible as most of the futuristic tech in this building. A transparent wide screen unfolded on the desk’s right half, and turned opaque upon activating the display’s projection.

This whole place felt like it came from the future.

And maybe it had?

What Singh had said—the company had dealt with threats from the future, just as much as it had been dealing with prehistoric animals coming through the Anomalies. What if Spencer and his crew had been dragging futuristic tech into the present for use in their operations?

Grant sighed as she clicked through a flood of onboarding emails.

Singh had spammed her inbox with a grotesque amount of information, ranging from itineraries of different section heads in the company, accounting, various login and authorization information, staff meeting schedules she was expected to attend, training modules, and other administrative crap.

A single mail stood out to her, addressed to her from the CEO himself.

Malachi Spencer wished Grant a good start at her new workplace. A cold and short message, like one would expect to receive through automation. Something unpersonal and generic, fitting for any new employee if you just exchanged the name addressed at the top.

And yet, it filled Grant with a strange sense of unease. She wondered if Spencer had spent the minute it took to type up those two lines and send it himself. At any rate, he didn’t seem like the type to agonize over those two quaint sentences. Even so, she couldn’t help but wonder.

Then she shook her head, clicked on a debriefing appointment scheduled for in little under an hour into the future, and wasted more minutes scouring other files and options that her new computer and office offered.

Her eyes burned. She rubbed them.

Closed the inbox.

Grant played with the smart office’s settings, increasing window opacity to one hundred percent, thus blocking out the sights of other office workers in the cubicles outside, and dimming all light to the point where she could steal away for a nap unnoticed.

Tall as she was, she barely fit onto the bright red couch in her office. Her calves rested atop one armrest and she dared to close her eyes.

Her office space did a good job at muffling the sounds of phones, chatter, and buzzing devices outside.

Thoughts of the night swirled, preventing sleep from arriving. This wasn’t like her, as her time in the military and private security had left her accustomed to effortlessly chunking up her sleep.

Then again, this wasn’t like any job she had ever worked before.

She thought back to Carter’s incessant swearing, followed by the sight of his broken leg after the dinosaur had tossed the big man aside like a toy.

She thought back to Pruitt’s dry sarcasm while piloting the airlift and coordinating while Mischchenko was MIA, and then to how Sears had vanished from existence for no explicable reason. Because something had altered the timeline. For a split-second, she dared to wonder if it was because of the—

The bright flashes of energy from their EMD weapons, and the hissing snarls of the Purussaurus, a toothy maw that could have broken her in half, and swallowed her whole.

Crunch, crack. The dinosaur’s bones broke as it fell, crashing into the canopy of trees half a mile down cliffs of the Miocene era.

The scintillating, brilliant light of the Anomaly, that wondrous sphere, a rupture in the space-time continuum, connecting two eras, millions of years apart—

Her phone’s alarm buzzed. Nap time was already over.

Grant sighed.

Time for debriefing.

She slipped into her flats and struggled to find her way. Then she bumped into Singh while looking for the conference room—for which they had to ride the elevator to the top floor, and he showed her the way again, chewing her ear off with more administrative busywork—she couldn’t tell if he was repeating the Cliff’s notes of whatever he had already spammed her in mails with, or if this was more information he expected her to absorb.

Grant hoped not to break out into a cold sweat over the thought that she was about to forget everything he was blabbing about.

Instead, she tuned him out, nodded strategically in intervals, and considered how she would phrase future apologies.

They pushed inside glass doors.

Stark white, sleek, and reflecting surfaces awaited them. Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, the conference room permitted them to overlook Austin’s skyline, mirroring the imposing and dizzying architecture of Spencer’s own office.

The CEO himself, garbed in a different, but no less sharp-looking three-piece suit, sat at the head of a long, oval table. Mischchenko and Pruitt also already awaited when Grant and Singh entered.

Pruitt, whom she now saw for the first time without a helmet, turned out to be a man of what she assumed to be Native American descent, probably in his fifties. He shot Grant a weary smile, and twirled a silvery pen between his fingers, clicking it fluidly after every other spin.

Carter joined them, limping inside on crutches. The young, burly man had a scruffy blond beard to match his grumpy demeanor. A doctor in medical had encased his leg in a thick cast.

As more people poured into the conference room, Spencer made introductions with Chloe Grant and them, one by one.

Marcus Stantz, public relations, had joined them. Grant caught herself staring at him repeatedly because he bore an uncanny resemblance to Ben Affleck. The main difference were the black rings of exhaustion under his eyes, like he had been up all night, just like the field agents. And given he was their spin doctor, he likely slept even less than the operatives.

Danielle Bennett, head of IT and data processing, quickly avoided eye contact and buried her attention in a thin black laptop without a brand label on its case. She tip-tapped away at the keys while introductory chatter filled the room. Barely spared Grant a glance, like she didn’t expect her to stick around for long, or avoided getting close to anybody. Carter grumbled something and shook his head.

The science division also took part in the debrief session.

Alisha Burch, the company’s paleontologist, was a mousy black woman around Grant’s age, yielding a timid and nervous smile in their introduction. Then she spent the rest of her time staring at a blank spot on the table, only parting with some words when addressed directly.

Doctor Solomon, whose acquaintance Grant had made in Containment underground, showed up in the same white lab coat. He, too, looked like he hadn’t slept all night. Once the debriefing commenced, he looked bored, and kept checking his wristwatch like he had somewhere else to be.

Two women, several decades Grant’s senior, entered the conference room with Solomon—Lucille Trémaux, a quantum physicist with long gray hair; and Rebecca Chao, head of specimen containment and animal control. Both of them dressed quite chic and in different tones of blue, replete with scarves around their necks.

Grant fidgeted when the presence of their scarves reminded her that it was indeed somewhat chilly in most rooms of Future Proof LLC’s headquarters.

And Malachi Spencer, once more looking like a knife in human shape, folded his hands on the table in front of him, and cast a glance in the round.

“That would be everybody for this meeting. Let us begin,” he said with strong rhythm.

Carter raised a hand and grumbled his ask, “Where the hell’s Ruiz?”

Like a gargoyle, Spencer’s entire form stayed statuesque, while only his eyes moved and his unblinking gaze drilled into Carter.

Grant felt like it was not a good idea to ever interrupt Spencer.

“Agent Ruiz is excused. He filed a written report in full and resumed his vacation leave,” Spencer replied.

Carter’s eyebrows raised in visible frustration. He swallowed a remark. Unlike with the rest of the team, he likely kept his mouth shut in front of the CEO.

In fact, Valentìn Ruiz was sitting at a table outside a café at the other end of the city, tucked away behind the shining skyline of Austin, Texas, far out of sight from that conference room.

The outdoor section of the locale shone in soft pastel colors of pink and blue, courtesy of tasteful lighting and decoration.

Coffee cups and spoons clinked, in symphony with the shuffling of a waitress, a smooth texture of inoffensive music, and idle chatter from other tables.

Across the table from Ruiz sat a woman with red hair and features as strikingly symmetrical as his own. While Valentìn Ruiz was dressed casually in earthy brown tones of a leather jacket, a comfortable olive sweater, stonewashed dark jeans, and a beige beanie on his head; the woman was dressed in a snazzy black business suit, rivaling Spencer’s taste in expensive attire.

Ruiz didn’t know her name. Not her real name, anyway. He didn’t need to, or want to, for that matter.

He slid a USB thumb drive across the table towards the mystery woman.

The sleek black surface of that tiny object featured the logo of Future Proof: half a clock, connected in its linework to half a shield.

The drive contained a copy of his report and debriefing on the Rocky Mountains incursion, originally written to Spencer in full.

The drive also contained other data he was putting up for illicit sale.

The woman in black shook her head with a wide smile, and asked, “How do you get those out of your FOB unnoticed?”

Ruiz reciprocated with a crooked smile of his own. He said, “I got a couple o’ tricks up my sleeve.”

With an adroit flick of his index finger, he sent the USB drive sliding the rest of the way across the table, barely caught by the woman in black before it slid right off the edge of her side. Then Ruiz splayed his fingers, wiggling them in a hypnotic pattern until a poker card—the Jack of Hearts—appeared out of thin air, clinched between two fingers.

“My, my,” she said. Seductively. “Look at you, Mister Magician.”

“Maybe I should charge extra for my performance,” he said. His smile widened until his perfectly straight teeth were on display again. His dark eyes flashed with mischief. “You do need me more than I need you, after all. Or am I wrong?”

“You know—”

He raised his other hand to stop her, and it worked. The card vanished from his right hand and he shook his head, chuckling.

“Please, I don’t think we’ll ever be more than friends, if even that. Just wire me the payment, and I’ll be on my way again.”

The woman in black’s face fell. Serious. Eyes cold, blue, piercing, like a shark’s. A killer.

Trained on Ruiz’ dark eyes, she said, “Already done. You keep delivering this kind of excellence in intelligence, and our… professional relationship will continue to flourish, Mister Magician.”

His smile faded. Ruiz tapped the table’s surface twice. He left tattered dollar bills on the table next to his empty cup of coffee while he rose from his seat.

Wagging a finger at her, he asked, “Did the signal beacon I left you work? Newbie on our team fried me pretty hard with an EMD. Had no idea if it would still work.”

The red-headed woman narrowed her eyes.

“Yes, it worked. A bit late, and we’re still observing while Future Proof is mopping up the mess, waiting to scour the premises for scraps once they clear out. No thanks to you. Maybe if you—”

Ruiz’s stone-cold gaze met hers. Burned, icy cold.

Silenced her without a word. Neither of them smiled at each other.

Two sharks, recognizing the danger they both exuded.

“Maybe,” he said, licking his lips in the pause, “if you doubled your efforts in replicating the Anomaly detection system, you wouldn’t be lagging behind, and they’d be picking up your scraps—not the other way around.”

The smile returned to her red-painted lips. Cold and calculating, this smirk did not reach her eyes, though she radiated a calm confidence.

“I assure you, Mister Magician. In due time. I, too, have some tricks up my sleeve.”

Unsettled by that, Ruiz nevertheless kept his composure. With his back turned to her, he raised a hand for a motionless wave. Didn’t even bother to look at her when he said his parting words.

“Well, I have some vacay days to enjoy. Bye.”

He left. Crossed the street, weaving between traffic, until he mounted his motorcycle and drove off.

The mystery woman watched him leave, still smirking. She sipped her coffee. Then she grabbed her phone.

The sun rose high over Austin. It was going to be a beautiful day.

And it wouldn’t be long before Future Proof’s next mission in the field.

The Anomalies were occurring more frequently.