When Jonathan and Gaby walked back to their cabins, Jonathan was seething.
“He didn’t even listen,” he said.
“He’s got other priorities,” Gaby said.
“His damn arrival schedule and a bunch of entitled rich passengers!”
“And the company line,” Gaby said.
Jonathan snorted. He didn’t need to tell her what he thought about that.
When Jonathan returned to his room, he found a message from Helen.
He opened it, and immediately knew this was going to be important. The message was quite long, and he spotted words like forcefully retired.
He sat down to read it.
After a brief section asking him how he was and what he was doing now, with comments like I hear you ended up joining the Corps after all, she went on,
I worked for the Department of Robotics briefly after I finished my degree, at the time Richard Shelton was in charge of it. I hated every day of that period.
You know those cheerful lecture sessions where he’d come in to demonstrate his latest inventions to keen students tuning in from around the solar system? They were all staged.
I learned this when I started out as research assistant in his department and got a big shock about the work schedule. Often I would miss dinner because I was still working. If someone needed to leave, he would say that they weren’t a team player and that it would mean everyone else had to do more work, and he’d keep the rest of us there until late, or until the person cancelled their appointment. He would play people out against each other. Then he would call both of them in for long sessions of rage about how unprofessional they were. He never swore at people and never used any violence, but the constant stream of criticism and putting you down was relentless.
People were afraid to show weakness and afraid to talk to each other about it, because he made you feel that everyone would agree with him.
The atmosphere in the lab was so awful that one young male assistant actually attempted suicide while I was there. He ended up in the hospital and pleaded not to have to go back to Shelton’s lab. I saw him a few months later, and he said that moving elsewhere had saved his life.
This wasn’t even the only thing. Another assistant and I discovered that a lot of the data sets weren’t his to use. He was stealing information from companies, from other institutions, from his own colleagues and students, all to make himself look better.
I’d been working there for four or five months when the level of complaints prompted the university to do a review. They didn’t want to, because he was considered a semi-god and brought in a lot of students and funding, but we staged a mass walkout of the staff and barricaded ourselves into the Human Resources office until they did something.
When they investigated, everything came out. The poor treatment of his workers was a long-running issue. Several students had already complained that he had misappropriated material that was theirs for his own papers, which meant that they could no longer publish it.
They wrote a long report, which only few people got to see. The university deemed it “sensitive material” and didn’t release it publicly, but we had some moles in the department and got to see the important parts of it. All the evidence made it very clear that he had no problem selling results and concepts to parties who were prepared to pay him for it, but that his promises were ridiculous, and that he was willing to abuse his staff to deliver. Also that he didn’t apologise and didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with the way he treated his people.
Not long after, Shelton was moved to the university administration, and he quietly disappeared a few months later. No one knew exactly when, because it was kept very quiet. I found out he’d been forcefully retired.
I haven’t heard about him for a while, but to be honest, I left the university two years ago, and am not in contact with too many of those people anymore. It’s a period in my life I’d rather forget.
Holy crap.
Jonathan stared at the screen, re-reading the letter.
He’d always looked up to Professor Shelton. He was a celebrity with an easy smile and jovial manner. Jonathan had dreamed of going to the moon and attending his lectures. Professor Shelton knew everything about robotics. He made videos that were shared by many people, and his lectures were even followed by non-students.
Who knew that his famed Robotics Department had such a dirty underbelly.
He wondered… he went back to the file of the station’s internal correspondence. The analysis program that he had run earlier had made a comparison of the words that had been used a lot in correspondence before the arrival of Yolanda Chee and after.
One word that had been used a lot less often after she arrived—but Jonathan had not paid much attention to it—was the word “professional”.
He traced the internal correspondence for that word, and ended up finding it in a lot of messages that came from the account of station director Shelton.
They were peppered with statements like: I have to take into account your lack of professional behaviour and I don’t think this complies with professional requirements.
Jonathan even came across a message directed to Rachel Sinclair.
The board of Astoria Station has decided to place you in the processing unit indefinitely. This will allow the board to continue to monitor your performance and level of professional behaviour. If you have any questions, you can raise those with me.
Jonathan scrolled further back through the message trail. It seemed the discussion had started with Rachel asking to be placed in a different team because of a disagreement between her and a team member. The message was polite and didn’t mention the name of the person or subject of the disagreement.
Jonathan also came across a message from the board of Prosperity Mining at Lora Station that announced the visit of Yolanda Chee to the station. It was directed to Shelton and informed him that a full audit of work processes and employee satisfaction will be completed in the light of the unusual volume of direct correspondence from Astoria Station employees to the board.
Shelton assured the board that Yolanda Chee would have his full cooperation.
Jonathan then searched for messages sent to the board and found that a couple of people had, very wisely, sent messages that contained only photos and video material. One showed a clip from a monitoring camera. An employee was working at a table when a man came in who pulled the young man up by the ear and marched him out of view of the camera. Another picture showed a couple of names in handwriting on a board. The name at the top—someone called Dean—had been declared “goof of the week”.
Wow, it was amazing that the work environment inside the station had been that bad, while a cursory scan of the correspondence hadn’t revealed anything amiss.
But that still didn’t prove that the poisoning of all inhabitants in the auditorium was a result of a toxic work environment. Not unless he could find out how it had been done.
Jonathan went back to the map of the station. The store room was above the auditorium and underneath the recycling plant. Air circulation went from the top to the bottom, since stale air tended to accumulate on the lower floors of artificial gravity habitats. It would be possible for someone to inject a poison and have it go straight into the auditorium, especially if there was some force behind the stream of gas.
That brought him back to the store room—which had an air lock, and a recycling vat that had been dragged across the room by extraordinary force and that didn’t belong in the room, because the recycling plant was on the upper floor. The air lock’s code was EX-473C.
Crap.
That was the exact code that had been on the box that the data team company employees had carried on the shuttle.
Jonathan got up, pushed his chair back so fast that it almost fell over and went to Gaby’s room.
“Gaby!” He knocked on the door.
He had to knock a few times before she opened. It was quite dark in the room.
“It had better be important,” she said, squinting against the light.
“Sorry. Were you asleep?”
“It’s past midnight.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t noticed that.
“I have an idea. Do you want to hear about it?”
“Well, you woke me up now.”
She came into the corridor. She was wearing her pyjamas and a big floppy jumper over the top. Her hair was tied up in a messy ponytail.
“I’m sorry for being such a nerd,’ he said, feeling awkward. She needed her sleep. “I guess I’m just too keen.”
“There is a reason I don’t mind working with you.”
“‘Don’t mind?””
She grinned.
He clapped her on the shoulder. “I like working with you, too. I guess that’s why I wake you up in the middle of the night.”
In his room, Gaby took less than five minutes to read the letter he’d received from Helen Sakira and look at the other information. She sighed. “It’s pretty damning, but…”
“But what? I think the guy is hiding in the station somewhere. I think he is the one responsible.”
“We don’t know for certain and we don’t know how he did it.”
“He did do it, and I know how. And I know the company probably knows, too, and they’re trying to keep it quiet.”
“What?” she squinted at him.
“I need your help. Come on.”