The Late Shift Interview

I've been cleaning the Emerson Grand for six years now. Nights, always nights, because I like the quiet and I don't like anybody watching me work. Sandi, forty-four, divorce was a long time ago, one brief fling with a bartender named Ray when I was forty-one and nothing since. The biography is complete, more or less.

My route starts on the second floor, the business wing, and there's this one conference room at the end of the hall, the Marston Room, that the new supervisor locked from day one. Kira. Forty-nine, transferred in from corporate security two months back, and I'd never once seen her smile until that night. I'm getting ahead of myself.

So it was a Tuesday, around eleven at night, and I'm pushing my cart down that hallway when I see it. Light. Under the door of the Marston Room. A thin gold stripe on the carpet that had never been there before.

I stopped the cart and just stood there like an idiot.

Because the Marston Room has a key characteristic. It's been empty since the renovation finished in March. The schedule says so. My own clipboard says so. Nobody books it, nobody meets in it, and yet every single night Kira goes in there at ten and comes out at midnight with the door locked behind her.

I knocked, sort of as a joke to myself. No answer. The light stayed on.

"Well, that's not creepy at all," I said to the door, and went and did the third floor bathrooms.

***

By one in the morning I'd talked myself into it, which didn't take much, because talking myself into things is basically my hobby. Kira had left at midnight sharp, same as always. I heard the elevator ding and her heels going across the lobby, and then it was just me and the hum of the ice machines.

I got out my master key, and it didn't fit. The lock had been changed. I stood there, frustrated, until I noticed the door wasn't fully latched.

I pushed it, and it swung open onto darkness except for one desk lamp in the corner, and I stepped inside and shut it behind me, and then I just stood there going, huh.

Because the conference table and chairs were gone. All of them. In the middle of the room, under the lamp, sat the strangest piece of furniture I've ever seen in my life. It looked like a recliner if a recliner went to the gym. Padded, black, reclined way back, with these mechanical arms sticking out on articulated joints like something off an assembly line. And mounted between the leg rests, pointing up at the seat, was...

Okay. It was a dildo. A big purple dildo on a chrome mount, is what it was, in a hotel conference room in a suburban office park.

"Oh my god," I said out loud, to nobody, because who else was going to say it.

There was a control panel bolted to the armrest. Buttons, a little screen, a joystick thing. And Sandi, I told myself, Sandi you have a clipboard and a master key and absolutely no business touching that.

I touched it.

One button. I pressed one button, that's my whole crime, and the chair hummed to life. The arms unfolded slow, smooth, rotating into position like they'd done it a thousand times, and the seat vibrated under the padding and something started whirring near the mount, and I yelled and jumped backward about four feet and knocked a stack of plastic cups off the window ledge with my hip.

"Crap, crap, crap," I said, hands up, like the chair could hear me apologizing.

And that's when the door opened behind me.

Kira. Still in her blazer, coat over her arm, keys in her hand, standing in the doorway she had definitely not just locked me into. I froze with my janitor badge dangling and my master key still in my fist and my heart doing about a million things I won't describe.

She looked at the chair. The arms were still moving. She looked at me. The cups were rolling around the floor.

Then she smiled.

"So. What do you think?"

I could not have been more surprised if the chair had stood up and introduced itself. "I, um," I said. "I was going to clean it."

She raised one eyebrow. "You were going to clean it."

"Yes?"

"In the dark. At one in the morning. With your master key that doesn't open the Marston Room, which I had rekeyed in April specifically so nobody could get in."

Okay, so the rekeying thing stung. "The door wasn't latched," I said, and then thought, Sandi, stop confessing to crimes she hasn't accused you of yet.

She came in, set her coat on the lamp table, and reached over and pressed the same button I had, and the chair folded its arms back down and went quiet like a dog lying down. "Sit down, Sandi."

"I really would rather not."

"It's not an order. I'm your supervisor, not your warden." She pulled one of the two actual chairs in the room, a folding one by the wall, and set it near mine. I sat on it. She sat on the folding one across from me, knees crossed, hands folded, like we were about to do a performance review. Which, I would learn, is more or less what she thought we were doing.

"You're not fired," she said first. "Let's get that out of the way. I watched the badge logs and the door logs for two months waiting for exactly this, by the way."

I blinked at her. "You wanted someone to break in?"

"I wanted to know who would break in, and what they'd do when they got here. You pressed one button, jumped back, apologized to a chair. That's about the best possible outcome." She said it completely straight. "Discreet people don't snoop, which is fine, but I need someone who snoops carefully. You snoop carefully."

"Thank you?" I said. "I think? Kira, what is that thing?"

She glanced at it with what I can only call fondness. "It's a prototype. I designed it. All of it. The arms, the mount, the control scheme, the safety cutoffs. I've been building versions of it for about eight years as a hobby and this is the first one that works the way I want."