By most accounts, David Carson was an average man. Five-foot-nine, one-hundred and eighty-two pounds of brown-haired, brown-eyed, average Caucasian male. But a passion for helping people, a love of machines and an eye for detail to rival the best photographers had gotten him into JCJenson's biomedical division, where he quickly became a rising star. Just four years in and he was basically the Lead Engineer! Sure, it wasn't official yet, but considering in the last year he had attended more meetings with the Heads of other departments than the ACTUAL Lead Engineer? The writing was on the wall.
But as he attended more and more of those meetings, and the other Heads started considering him one of their own, things began to get...weird.
Discussions started to shift away from projects, collaborations and hypotheses, and more towards the rumor mill. At first it was the typical water cooler gossip. Another poorly-hidden office romance to add to an ever-growing list. The possibility of "inheriting" a bunch of new staff from the latest company JCJ had devoured. Where, exactly, the jacked, six-foot-five black guy with the Winter Soldier right arm in Robotics had come from.
Then the topics got more conspiratorial. The colonization of Earth-like planets being used as a front for projects and experiments no government would ever tolerate. Owners of rival companies "disappearing" or turning up dead under suspicious circumstances, and being replaced by people so astoundingly incompetent that a JCJ buyout was a merciful end. Some of their own colleagues who had expressed misgivings about the nature of the things they were working on, went to speak to Ms. Elliott, and returned with no memory of any discontent as far as anyone could tell.
David thought they were joking. Some kind of hazing ritual for the new guy in the "Inner Circle", he figured. That was, until he noticed their expressions and tones when they spoke. Until they started pressing him to think about things he had seen and heard. Until they shared their own experiences that led them to believe what they believed. They were serious. Like, "lives are on the line"-serious.
So when they told him they suspected the big boss lady wasn't human, David couldn't just dismiss it out of hand. These were some of the smartest, most rational and observant people on ANY planet. They wouldn't even bother mentioning it if they didn't already have significant evidence. So, at their urging, he started to gather his own. And once he turned that eye for detail towards the CEO...
'Of course all this has to happen right before the quarterly report,' David thought as he rode the elevator up to the headquarters' top floor.
He very much doubted his ability to maintain a business-like facade around the woman while he was wondering if she was a "woman" at all. For once he hoped that she was feeling "silly" today so her odd mannerisms and "accidental" double-entendres would give him an obvious reason to be uncomfortable.
Then again, he and everyone else had two reasons to be massively uncomfortable any time they went to the boss lady's office.
"Good afternoon, Dr. Carson," two identical voices, reminiscent of old robo-callers, greeted him as soon as the elevator doors opened.
As he always did, David tried to steel himself for what he was about to see. And as he always did, David flinched as two pairs of bright yellow eyelights bored into him.
At the back of the room, on either side of the needlessly large double doors to the CEO's office, stood her personal guards. The robots, known simply as "The Twins", were the the brainchildren of JCJenson's top engineer and Head of Robotics, who also happened to be Ms. Elliott's sister. Created entirely in secret and unveiled as concepts for the next generation of Combat Drones, they were truly a sight to behold.
They possessed the generous curves of so-called "Companion Drones", accentuated by their "goth cocktail dresses", as others had called them, and shared the round, almost cartoony heads common to all drones, but that was where the similarities ended.
