Page 42 of Pets in Space 10

Amalena Kirilov gazed wistfully out her office window.

The vibrant green leaves of the meticulously landscaped campus and the artfully serpentine pathway leading to the shaded employee picnic area beckoned her.

The spring day promised to be comfortably warm and smell even better.

The window view was one of the perks of being located in the smaller but newer building on campus.

Her office usually felt spacious, but Pharras slouched unhappily in one of her visitor chairs, and the holoscreen displayed head-and-shoulder views of the other five members of her team.

Amalena resolutely relaxed her shoulders again and redirected her focus to the Agronomy Support team status meeting.

Rhosilann was calling in from a field consultation on the southern continent, her image occasionally jittering. Boskar was probably at home, and the others were likely connecting from client sites or vehicles.

The planned agenda — reviewing fungal blight mitigation options for a major grain producer and confirming logistics for the upcoming soil nutrient data collection program on the eastern plains — was abandoned.

Instead, the topics centered around the aftershocks of yesterday’s reorganization meeting.

“Are they expecting us to move, too?” Boskar asked from the screen, his thick eyebrows furrowed. “The main building is practically bursting already. Where would they even put us and our lab? Clear out a couple of sublevel storerooms?”

“Maybe we’ll get the HuMed space instead.” Pharras crossed her arms. “At least none of us quit yesterday.”

A couple of the remote attendees chuckled. Amalena offered a sympathetic smile. “The official reorganization plan didn’t mention specifics about office locations. I expect those details are still being worked out.”

Or, more likely, Amalena thought, Sainik and Dequer had been too busy making gaudy presentations to think about the practical side of things.

Gaerynx was right. The whole thing felt as rushed as a nonprofit funding proposal submitted three minutes before the grantor’s deadline.

The written plan they’d all received late yesterday afternoon had lots of declarative statements about innovation and very few about implementation.

“Great,” said Rhosilann grumpily. “Office moves are always such fun.”

“Fair point, but we can cross that bridge later,” Amalena said. “I’d like to focus on what we’ll be doing—”

Pharras interrupted. “If President Dequer thinks a week’s training will make us all ready to start going to HuMed conferences, she’s warped.

” Pharras’s frown deepened. “RyoGenomica hired me to work on plant pathogens, not puzzle out adverse reactions to human neuro-enhancers. My three D-level certificates are in mycology, not pharmacokinetics.”

“Mine C-level cert is in soil science,” Boskar added from the screen. “I can tell you if a patient might be iron-deficient based on their garden’s mineral profile, but that’s about my limit.” He was younger than most of the team, but his laid-back interaction style made him seem older.

Amalena sighed inwardly. Although Pharras, the team’s fungal disease expert, often peppered conversations with mentions of her impressive educational background, she was probably right to be up in arms. Her specialized knowledge was crucial for several large crop producers, clients RyoGenomica couldn’t afford to lose.

Amalena had the impression that the rest of her staff was inclined to wait and see, but Pharras had probably already sent out her quals to other companies. They’d be lucky to get her, too.

Amalena waved a placating hand. “I doubt they expect any of us to become instant medical experts. The plan mentions cross-training, but realistically, integrating all three teams will take time. For now, let’s focus on our projects and customers.”

“Is there any way to fight this?” asked Lin Tian, one of the quieter remote members, his image small but clear on the screen. “I don’t have the capacity to take on another team’s workload.”

“Well, sort of,” said Amalena. Last night, instead of joining her neighbor Iovanna at an intriguing product launch gala, she’d stayed home and read her employment contract and the dense corporate staffing handbook.

She’d even read some parts out loud to Merix, but her cat seemed singularly uninterested in boring legalese that didn’t mention tuna flakes.

“Any affected employee can file a formal request to the Governing Board for a decision review of the reorganization. Non-managerial employees have three business days from yesterday’s announcement to submit it. ”

“What about managerial employees? How much time do they get to protest?” Pharras asked, her gaze sharpening with suspicion. She sometimes chafed at the perceived privileges of line managers, whom she tended to lump in with chief levels and board members.

“We get five days,” Amalena replied matter-of-factly. “Executives get sixty days.”

Pharras grunted and slumped more in her chair.

A beat of silence stretched, accompanied by the faint pulse of the office air handlers. Boskar cleared his throat on screen. “So, Amalena, are you going to appeal?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m still considering options.” It was the truth, if not the whole truth.

Her intuition insisted that Sainik’s plan and whatever was driving him — greed, power, acclaim — would put the company in peril. Tikka’s dramatic resignation suggested she saw the danger and wanted no part of it.

Amalena couldn’t afford to leave her job without an exit plan.

She’d emptied out her savings to move halfway across the planet and buy her townhouse.

But more importantly, she felt like she owed the company the chance to defend itself.

RyoGenomica’s ethical core and rigorous scientific methodology made it a company she was proud to work for.

She owed it to her team to see if there was a way to navigate this chaos without abandoning the company entirely.

And she couldn’t deny a flicker of concern for the other teams and managers impacted by the same upheaval.

Especially Gaerynx, who sparked more complicated feelings she couldn’t afford to be having.

“For now,” she continued, projecting confidence she didn’t entirely feel, “let’s carry on.

Focus on what’s on our plate. Keep our commitments to our customers, finish our reports, submit our recommendations to BioChem like usual.

” She paused, then added, “I suggest catching up on your documentation. When the merger happens, I’d like us to be the shining example of how to do it right.

” She gave them a mock imperious grin. “Those other teams are probably rank amateurs.”

Her team laughed because they all knew she was a stickler for documentation and teased her about it. Even Pharras snorted with amusement. It had taken Amalena a good year to clean up the mess her predecessor had left and prove to her team that best practices made all their lives easier.

After a few minutes spent setting up another meeting to cover the agenda items they still needed to talk about, the holo images faded to black. Pharras left to go spend quality time with her beloved sub-electron microscope, leaving Amalena alone in her office to face the day.

***

The lingering, savory aroma from the Wandesi Hill takeout container on her desk was a pleasant reminder of lunch.

It was every bit as good as Gaerynx’s team said.

Amalena had ordered extra, enough for her and Merix to share for dinner.

She felt pleasantly full, though the comfortable post-lunch lull hinted she might need caffeine later to power through the afternoon.

At forty-eight, she was still young, considering people lived to age one hundred sixty and beyond, but old enough to start needing afternoon pick-me-ups.

Sighing, she wished her window actually opened.

The recirculated building air felt stale compared to the verdant green outside.

She wanted to talk to Tikka, but first, Amalena wanted a feel for their projects. The HuMed workload wouldn’t just disappear when Tikka and her senior staff walked out the door. Executives all too often assumed all those pesky operational details would simply handle themselves.

Amalena pulled up the company-wide project hypercube on her main display.

Operational transparency was another reason she liked working for RyoGenomica.

The tighter campus security measures that had been implemented after a rumored corporate espionage attempt a year ago hadn’t changed that.

Accessing cross-departmental project summaries wasn’t difficult, just time-consuming.

She waded into HuMed’s active projects. They all seemed routine except one.

“HM-8544” seemed to be taking up a lot of resources.

Plus, the project was tagged as confidential and assigned fast-track priority.

The high-level summary described it as a novel psychoactive compound with potential applications for mood regulation and cognitive process enhancement.

Plants didn’t really have brains, and animals usually didn’t need mood drugs.

She vaguely remembered an early morning university class in human pharmacokinetics.

Psychoactive human drugs were high stakes in the pharma industry casino.

Potentially massive rewards if they helped, but potentially dire consequences if anything went wrong.

Fast-tracking such a project felt inherently risky.

Even though RyoGenomica only licensed concepts and basic research results, and a dozen other unrelated companies handled the rest of the myriad steps to bring a drug to market, a truly harmful compound would generate a tsunami of liability that would engulf them all.