Those two came to the restaurant every odd day. One wore a cheap business suit and had immaculate haircut and goatee. Though his unruly thick brows looked kind of out of place. The other one wore plaid shirts and jeans; with his stubble, unkempt hair and bad leg he could impersonate House M.D., if he was somewhat older. “Brows” exhibited a certain... tic commonly associated with first generation antipsychotic drugs. (And don't ask me how do I know that.) “House” seemed to alternate between blank indifference and enraged determination. Other people often dined with them, sometimes as many as four, but those changed. Brows and House appeared every other workday.
I don't know what exactly made me remember them. They were not problematic clients, though they did call a manager a few times. Their tips were OK. Maybe because they constantly argued about something job-related — and I couldn't understand half of it.
That day they brought a friend I haven't seen yet. About twice their age, unruly greying hair and thick moustache fused with sideburns, clean, but worn three-piece suit, and very loud voice. He reminded me of an illustration from some nineteenth century novel. I called him “Braggart”.
I was passing their table, when Braggart was finishing his expressive speech:
“—Your new interface is counter-intuitive! Can you understand it!? Counter-intuitive!”
“The study indicates that the old users need several days to adjust, but by next week their productivity increases,” replied Brows. Calm and collected.
“Hallway usability test?” House interjected. As usual he was wolfing his food seemingly oblivious to everything, yet carried on the conversation as if his mouth wasn't busy.
“Why not?” Braggart obviously liked the idea, whatever “hallway usability” meant. “Excuse me, miss,” he addressed me, “would you like to make some quick money tonight?”
This didn't sound quite right as his friends' faces indicated. Both chuckled.
“What he's trying to say, is that we need an unfamiliar tester for our new programs. ‘The first one we've met in a hallway’ as they say,” House explained.
“Have you ever heard of QWERTY Research?” Braggart asked.
“I've seen the signboards with the name, I know they are somewhere in the med school buildings, but nothing beyond that,” I said.
“Excellent. Can you use a computer?”
“Of course.” I mean, who doesn't these days?
“How familiar with medical laboratory are you?”
“Somewhat familiar.”
“Don't be too modest,” House interjected again. “You are a med school freshman, aren't you? Or what's the right word... freshwoman?..” he trailed off.
“H-how did you know?” I stuttered.
“You started working here in September. Most part-time waiters in this restaurant are from the med school. Your age looks about right. And you still have the youthful enthusiasm of someone who just enrolled.”
“Her previous knowledge would contaminate the experiment, but she'll learn faster. And as a student she won't need the extra paperwork to get a med-school pass. She'll do nicely,” Brows summarized.
“Now that we are in agreement, could you come here before 19:55 tonight?” Braggart gave me a business card with the address. Building 4, sub-basement 1, room 12.
“Wait a minute. Are you going to pay for that? Or do you expect me to work for free?”
He started typing something on his phone calculator, divided several times, then showed me the result.
“Per hour,” he said. “I hope to finish before midnight.”
I made some mental calculations. I made about as much waiting the tables. But this job seemed more interesting.
“Do you have any permanent positions open?”
“We'll see after tonight.”
I took it as a hesitant “no”. Well, something might open later.
* * *
I reached room twelve at ten to eight. There were House with some older woman, their HR. She gave me an NDA to sign, scanned my fingerprints and hurried away. House muttered something about her being late to a soap opera.
Then he led me down the hallway to another room where Braggart and Brows waited. The room was full of old computers — literally, stacks upon stacks of those. I swear, I even saw an ancient all-in-one workstation with a portrait monitor, like in that Billy Idol song video where a woman seduces a nerd. Brows stood up, motioning me to take his place at the workstation, thankfully brand new. I sat down and testing began.
“Are you familiar with magnetic resonance imaging?” House asked.
“Well, I've seen other people working with...”
“Good enough. On the disk C in the folder ‘Official Examples’ backslash ‘MRI’ open any project and turn it into a beautiful report.”
The task proved simple. The images were of high quality, I've seen an associate professor doing something like that, built-in manual was brief, but to the point, and the spectators behind my back kept saying encouraging words like "Yes, this button”. All in all, it took me half an hour to make some poor epileptic's brain look good in a PDF file.
“That's enough," Braggart said. “Now open the server ‘storage458’, folder ‘drug screening’, any file that starts with ‘blood’. And use the built-in spectral database to determine if there are any common narcotics in this urine.”
“Urine,” I said.
“Yes, urine. What's your problem?”
“Why is it called ‘blood’ then?”
“Ah... We... I mislabelled them, and now the automated tests need them under this name. We were kinda in a hurry last year...” This seemed to embarrass him.
“And you've got over four hundred servers organized like that?”
“Nah, we just don't reuse server names. We try to keep everything in one place. Or two. New server goes up, old one goes—” he looked around the room “—to the storage. Come on, open the file.”
There was no “blood” in that folder.
“Try ‘narcotics’ on server 455.”
The server seemed to take forever to reply. I decided to ask a few questions which were bothering me:
“Do you work with stool samples here? Will I need to work with them?” I'm not squeamish, I did not faint in the morgue, but I don't want to touch shit even with a ten-foot spattle, if I can help it. I hope to get over it... someday.
“Yes. In fact—” Braggart started, but House interrupted him:
“No!”
They looked at each other. Then House started speaking quickly, without pauses, not letting Braggart to put in a word:
“We-did-plan-for-you-to-work-with-spectra-from-a-sewer. But! We-don't-work-with-any-substances-ourselves. QWERTY-has-no-labs-of-its-own. Some-of-us-do-have-access-to-labs-elsewhere. But! In-this-building-we-only-work-with-files. On-computers! Tonight you only work with keyboard.”
By then the folder finally opened, but it was empty.
“Did anybody see the e-mail from admins this morning?” Brows said looking from his smartphone. “Disk on 455 got corrupted. They promise to restore the backup by tomorrow evening.”
“I haven't received anything like that,” replied Braggart. “Did they—”
“Spam filter.”
“Try ‘stoned’ folders,” House suggested.
Another long wait. “stoned” on 455 had two “blood” files, but they were corrupted and refused to open. “stoned” on 458 had a single file “Choucas,_put_your_files_here,_dammit.txt”.
“Try ‘CIA poisons fuel’ on server 42,” Brows suggested.
This one opened quickly. There were many “blood” files, but Braggart looked at the screen and shook his head:
“No, that won't do. ‘Two hundred’ series. Their temperature was wrong. Too hot. Let me find the files, or we won't finish 'till morning.”
I vacated the seat, and he sat down.
“It was here, I checked it an hour ago...” He clicked something and we saw a “blue screen of death”. Only it was green on black.
“Yeah, maybe we should replace this card, after all,” House muttered.
“Told ya,” Brows replied.
Braggart pressed “Reset”. For some reason the reboot was taking forever, making him more agitated by the minute. Something else was bothering him too. He sniffed the air, turning in different directions, then faced me.
“Do you smoke?” he asked me accusingly.
Well, I don't really smoke. Not much. Not every month. But today I did make an exception.
“Bad day?” House asked with a hint of sympathy.
“You have no idea.” I mean, failing a midterm is bad and being dumped is bad, but when that happens within ten minutes, you just need something to calm you down.
“Oh, yes, he has,” Brows snickered. “You don't want to meet him when he's depressed. Or smell.”
“Shut. Up. It only happened once.”
“And lasted a month,” Brows sneered.
“Ahem. If you do smoke, you are slowly killing yourself and people subjected to your smoke,” said Braggart. “At least have the decency to chew gum, or something.”
“Don't you have Tic-Tacs?” Brows asked.
Braggart fished a box with two pills out of his pocket and gave it to me.
“Wait!” House shouted, which made me swallow instinctively. The pill slid down my throat, leaving an odd chemical aftertaste in my mouth. Like that time when I was three and tried tasting grandmother's medicines for external use. I think, it was called something like “Dimexide” or “Dimecide”...
“Quick! What was there?”
Braggart was holding another box of Tic-Tacs and a piece of paper.
“Some extasy analogue from today's bust.”
“Did they all live?” asked House.
“Yes. I think.”
“Good!” He grabbed a mug from the desk and dragged me out of the room, then down the hallway to the men's room.
“We occasionally test designer drugs for police,” he explained on the way. “You know, stuff that blows your mind, but is technically legal, because nobody thought to ban it yet.”
“Yes.” I had a rough idea what he was speaking of. “Do you test them on people like me?”
“No, it was an accident. We just do computer modelling. Don't worry, he said nobody died from this one. Or went mad. But gastric lavage is advisable.”
Then he forced me to drink a lot of lukewarm water. I know this stuff should have started affecting me much later, but for some reason I felt myself drifting away. I think he tried to touch my uvula and I bit him. Did he really say all this creepy stuff to help me throw up? I vaguely remember him laundering a handkerchief in the sink then wiping my face with it. Then the three of them half-walked-half-carried me to an office with a couch. Then they started a heated discussion about “head and Fabergé”. It was all hazy and I don't know when did I pass out, what was real and what was a dream.
