New in Town

[CJWrites]

Drake nodded and forced a smile. "Thanks, John" He went to the break room for a 25 cent coffee before heading for the meeting. It was shitty coffee but it nevertheless did the job. He headed towards the room the other 3 IT people shared.


He knocked and walked in to see three chairs turned away from their desks towards the center.


"That's more like it," Drake grinned. He was used to open-office concepts but could appreciate the fact that you might not want anyone looking over the shoulder of their security specialist. Yet he felt like he'd spend a lot of time doing discussions in this room.


"You met us briefly yesterday but let's go over our roles again. John is pretty hands off and we don't really have a manager. We're a pretty open bunch. I'm Miya Fuyuno. Sys Admin. If you somehow get locked out of your account or have a permissions issue. I'll be doing a lot of handover to you since it's been getting hectic lately and hopefully offer some insights into how I can do my job better."


It seemed quite natural how Miya took charge even if she seemed to be the youngest, she nodded towards Ivan who went next.


Ivan smiled widely and seemed to be like a giant man bubbling with excitement. He spoke with the hint of a Russian Accent. "I am the Infrastructure Manager. Like Miya, I hope you'll be working with me closely. "


Stephen went last and seemed to be in his 30s.


He sighed. "I'm the in-house developer . We've been trying to get more of an actual dev team going... but all of us do code maintenance in our free time. You will too probably."


Drake nodded


"For now, keep going with your audit and general improvements. We'll regroup again tomorrow morning." Miya said.


Drake smiled and left the room, presumably to go back to his office and do his job.

 

[Tugboats]

John returned to the Human Resources office. One of the benefits of being a part of H.R. was that having this meeting was more or less just everyone checking in, asking for help with anything that required it, and then getting back to work. They went around in the order they were sitting at the table generally used for teleconferences with teams abroad or anyone else not easily visited.


The first to speak was the Human Resources Director, Maria Chen. With mastery over a grand total of sixteen fluent languages and, by her own definition ten more she could "get by" in, she was unimaginably useful to a company like IntraScience with clients speaking anything from Arabic to Vietnamese. She had started her career as a translator until Philippe had seen just how valuable she would be with direct access to most of the information that he had normally had her translate. She was currently working on coordinating a partnership between IntraScience and a particularly excellent robotics company in Spain.


Next was a newer hire, a plucky young woman straight out of school by the name of Alexis Black. Philippe had apparently worked with her father, which at first made the team wonder if she was going to be the type to ride the coat-tails of her family. As it turned out, she was a hard-working and earnest girl who deserved the shot she had gotten to work within the company. At this point, she was someone that they all relied on to pick up slack as their "Jack of all Trades." Unfortunately for her, she was stuck dealing with paperwork for the last few days, since it had piled up while she had done other work.


After John himself, the last non-temporary member of the Human Resources department, Gerry, spoke. Gerry had seemingly been at IntraScience forever. He was already headed into his seventies. When John had asked him when he was planning to retire, Gerry laughed and responded with "When I'm in the ground." He was the one who ended up settling conflicts between scientists, mostly because everyone respected Gerry. When Gerry tells you to "quit being a damned fool" you quit being a damned fool. He had apparently dealt with an issue between a couple of the scientists in the Raw Materials lab over a couple grams of missing medicine.


John tossed his lot in with Alexis, making a bet that he could sign and file more of the paperwork than she could, and the H.R. Department continued to function in its usual state of organized chaos.


-------


When lunch hour hit, the Department headed out to find somewhere to eat besides the cafeteria, but John figured that it would be a nice gesture to invite the new Head of Security to join them. As an added bonus, he could continue to try wrapping his head around Drake. He knocked on Drake's door and waited for a response.

 

[CJWrites]

Drake opened the door.... "Right so the current servers are.." he trailed off as he pointed towards his desktop screen. "Oh. You're not Ivan. Hi!"


Drake grinned at John, no idea that John knew his identity. John invited him out for lunch.


"Well... I already agreed to go out with the IT Team...." He trailed off and scratched his head. "Sorry, maybe tomorrow?"


"How about we all go out together?" Miya walked up to them. "After all, Drake should get to know as many people as possible right? Security should know everything about everyone." She winked at Drake "There's a new Korean place open down the road right? Looks promising."


"I'm up for it." Drake agreed. He didn't bother to correct Miya. He was cybersecurity. That's why they stuck him in his own office. In some sort of awkward in between of security and IT.

 

[Tugboats]

(I'm not dead, but the weekend was madness, and there will be a lot more madness until I finish this semester.)


"That sounds good. I'll make sure that nobody has an issue with that."


The others had no argument about going out with IT. Before long, they were seated at a long table in the new Korean restaurant.


John found himself sitting between Alexis and Miya, sitting across from Drake. Alexis started asking Drake questions while John looked over the menu.


"If you worked at Avalon, You probably know stuff about all kinds of important people. Any juicy gossip?" John rolled his eyes. Alexis was half joking, more so using the question to get Drake talking. But John also knew that she would genuinely like to hear about celebrity gossip if Drake had any.

 

[CJWrites]

Drake grinned as he sipped his tea. "Not as much worked but had input. I wasn't paid or anything. Morgan let me fiddle with the system and occasionally I would come up with something that would make the final cut."


Anyone into celebrity gossip would know the story of how notorious party girl Morgan Bates fostered and adopted a boy who managed to expose a vulnurability in her systems. Drake wasn't the only one. She had also taken in Anya Romanova: victim of a human trafficking ring. At least that was the official story.


"I doubt picking me up was all out of pity. I think part of it was scooping me up early, you know how they're recruiting those people right out of high school? That obviously didn't work. Also the publicity probably played a part." He shrugged. "But she honestly cared, no matter what the tabloids say, she's loyal to those she loves."


He leaned in.


"You want to know a secret? She has a boyfriend and he's the most mellow guy you'll ever meet. A doctor who does reconstructive surgery. She's keeping up appearances by taking a new guy to each party but... not sleeping with them."


Drake sat back, wondering if they were impressed.

 

[Tugboats]

(Consider the hiatus over. Thank you so much for being patient with me.)


Alexis seemed intrigued. She started to rapid fire questions about Morgan until John put a hand on her shoulder. She turned to him and he smiled.


"Maybe we should ask some questions about the person right here in front of us instead," John suggested. Alexis turned a bit red and apologized. John continued. "Maybe you've got some 'juicy gossip' about yourself to share."


John doubted he'd hear anything useful for his nighttime job from him, but he figured that it would be for the best that they move the conversation and that he get any leg up that he could until he was certain of Drake's intentions. Right now, the person in front of him was a wildcard that could destabilize what little order he had managed to make in the city.