Page 15 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World

Overwhelmed, I approached a trio of people standing behind an imposing desk.

Before I could ask for help, all three pointed simultaneously to a row of two dozen enormous volumes arrayed on heavy wooden stands on the far side of the atrium.

At a loss, I turned and headed in that direction, passing long, polished wooden tables where other employees, many in the dark robes of middle management, leafed through written materials or studied objects taken from the Repository’s collections.

I noticed one woman dabbing black liquid from her eyes with a cloth already streaked with the viscous fluid, careful not to let any of it drip onto the piece of crumbling parchment unrolled in front of her, probably trying to finish reading it before permanent blindness set in.

Nearby, an older man mumbled to himself as he sketched the same figure over and over again in a notebook, pressing with such force that his pen tore through the paper with every stroke.

In front of him rested a medieval reliquary in the shape of an upright arm and hand, its silver blackened with tarnish, the bones within exuding a malevolent force I could feel as I hurried past.

Examining the huge books, I realized they were the Repository’s catalog, tens of thousands of entries written in a hundred different hands.

After some thought, I began turning the five-foot-tall pages, only to discover that there wasn’t an entry for faceless shadow monsters.

Well, that sucked. I also found nothing on hungry monsters or three-piece-suit monsters.

Research is hard, I reflected bitterly as I sagged against the enormous tome in front of me.

Checking my phone, I realized that I’d been doing this for almost eight minutes.

No wonder I was exhausted. Why couldn’t the answers just pop out of some algorithm?

Why did I have to do this the old-fashioned way? It was so unfair.

A piercing shriek abruptly shattered the stillness of my surroundings.

Wheeling around, I watched as a figure engulfed in flames came running into view from one of the artifact collections, waving its arms wildly.

Everyone turned to look while a librarian unhurriedly retrieved a fire extinguisher and sprayed down the burning person with a cloud of hissing foam.

The screams gradually faded, replaced by high-pitched whimpering as the severely burned individual collapsed to the black-and-green checkerboard floor tiles.

“Another day, another immolation,” someone observed wryly, and I turned to see a person about my age watching the scene unfold with a look of faint disgust.

I glanced back at the smoking, twitching figure. “Does that happen often?”

“Often enough,” the other person replied, turning to look at me for the first time.

They were a little shorter and stockier than me, their hair shaved along the sides of their head and the rest teased straight up into a bright green mohawk.

Studs and tiny rings glittered along the outside edge of both ears, and their septum was pierced by a large silver ring as well.

Bright blue eyes studied me from behind a pair of black-framed glasses.

“He was probably playing around with one of the artifacts and made a mistake,” they went on with a shrug.

“It could have been worse, though. Two weeks ago we had someone shredded into their composite atoms. It took forever to clean her out of the carpet.”

I stared at them.

“Don’t worry about it,” the mohawked person said, giving me a bracing punch to the biceps. “Personnel will have this one healed up by the end of the week. That, or he’ll take early retirement and end up in Human Resources.”

Instinctively I ran a mental inventory of the substances HR would collect from a burn victim—screams, pain, skin, teeth—before remembering I didn’t work there anymore.

As if summoned by this attempt at reassurance, the elevator chimed softly and disgorged a pair of red-clad medics.

They must have left the fourth floor at the same moment that the unfortunate person burst into flame, probably alerted by someone in Analysis and Logistics who’d foreseen this specific event.

The medics moved toward the hapless victim and briskly took charge of them.

Everyone else, meanwhile, had already lost interest.

“Look, I really don’t want to sit through another emergency staff meeting about workplace safety,” said the person next to me, “so I’m going to help you find whatever you’re looking for, okay?”

“Great,” I replied. “Thanks.” Watching a person burn alive had been a tad distracting, but I gave my head a shake and produced the metal disc from my pocket. “I need to know what this is,” I said as I held it out in the palm of my hand, “and where it came from.”

Leaning down to examine it more closely, the mohawked individual said, “I think we can do that. I’ll need to grab a few reference books first, though.

C’mon.” They turned and started walking away, their purple Doc Martens squeaking faintly against the polished floor.

“I’m Lex, by the way,” they said over their shoulder. “I use they/them pronouns.”

“I’m Colin,” I said as I hurried to catch up. “He/him. Thanks for helping me.”

“Hey, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

Almost an hour later, I was leafing through a small, musty-smelling book written in a language I couldn’t read when Lex said, “Aha!”

We were sitting on opposite sides of a small table somewhere on the third level of the Repository, tomes piled around us. I had been largely useless thus far, doing little more than handing Lex whatever book they needed. At their exclamation, I asked hopefully, “Did you find something?”

“I think so.” Rotating the book they’d been reading, they pointed at a collection of symbols scrawled across both pages.

The blood-smeared disc sat there, too, gleaming dully against the yellowed paper.

“The sigils on the disc are from an obscure Sumerian dialect, which would make them several thousand years old. From what I’ve been able to puzzle out, they’re intended to bind whatever is represented by this symbol in the middle.

I have no idea what that is, though. It looks completely different. ”

“Bind,” I repeated like a dummy. “Right.”

Lex gave me a look. “This disc is a focus for the binding ritual. Or it was. Some of the sigils have been erased, presumably by whoever anointed this thing with blood.”

“Huh,” I mumbled casually, “I wonder who that could be.”

“The really interesting part is here.” Slowly, Lex traced their finger along one edge of the disc. “This, I recognized right away. It’s a collection of symbols used to denote Management in the earliest corporate mysteries.”

“Meaning what?”

Lex shrugged as they looked up at me. “Management created this. They bound…something, probably back around the time of the company’s founding.”

Silently, I considered the implications. None of them were particularly great. “So thousands of years ago, Management bound something with this disc, and now that something is free?”

“That’s my guess, yeah.” Lex lifted their arms in a brief stretch before running a hand along one side of their mohawk. “And They’re probably going to be super pissed when They find out.”

I tried not to laugh hysterically. I hadn’t just freed a hungry, homicidal entity—I’d messed with Management. I might as well step out into traffic on Madison Avenue and end it now.

Lex interrupted these bleak thoughts by asking, “Where’d you get this, anyhow?”

Taking a moment to collect myself, I said, “Oh. Um. I found it. Upstairs. On the thirteenth floor.”

Gaze narrowing behind their glasses, Lex eyed me thoughtfully. “That’s interesting.”

“Is it?”

“Sure. Sounds like office politics to me. One of the executives angling for something big, maybe. It’s cutthroat up there.” They shook their head. “That whole floor is full of dangerous idiots. You couldn’t pay me enough to work there.”

Shoving aside my increasingly panicked thoughts, I focused on the most implausible part of this whole conversation. “You don’t want to work on thirteen?” I demanded in disbelief.

Lex slung an arm casually over the back of their chair, gaze steady on me. “Nope. I don’t need to have a corner office or make a bazillion dollars or live forever.”

It had taken about five minutes for me to realize that Lex was significantly cooler than I would ever be. I envied them at the same time that I found myself craving their approval, a familiar blend of emotions I remembered from high school. “Then why are you here?” I asked with genuine bafflement.

Lex smirked. “Because I love weird shit. Plus, no one here cares what I wear to work.” They glanced down at their baggy Metallica T-shirt as if to prove their point.

I leaned my elbows on the table. “And they called you up and offered an interview because you like weird stuff?”

“Interview? Nope. I was making a ruckus in some of the more fringe online communities. Exposing secrets that the company wanted hidden. I think I made them nervous.” Lex looked smugly satisfied at that.

“What kind of secrets?”

“I spent a long time tracking down this book supposedly written by the Devil himself. Liber damnatorum, the Book of the Damned. I’ve been into freaky stuff since I was a little kid, and I fell down some crazy rabbit holes on the internet.

There’re a lot of stupid people online, a lot of ignorance and conspiracy theories, but if you ask the right questions, you start getting some interesting answers.

I didn’t want to become a Satanist or anything like that. I just…wanted to know.”

“Know what?”