It's my first day of work and I want to leave. Everyone is too friendly, it's getting suspicious, not long now they will start requesting things from me.
How are you suddenly clingy to someone you just met? Doesn't make sense.
"Siah-ssi, do you drink coffee?"
The one who asked is the woman sitting diagonally from me. She asked me this already. Twenty minutes ago, when I first sat down. I said yes then too, out of politeness, and nothing came of it. So either she forgot, or this is a test, or she's the kind of person who asks questions just to have something to do with her mouth.
"Yes," I say.
She beams like I've told her something wonderful.
Her name is Im Darae. I know because there's a little nameplate on her desk and I read everyone's nameplates when I came in because that's basic situational awareness, not because I'm desperate for connection. She has a plant on her desk that looks like it's doing well. This tells me she's either attentive or she's been here long enough to figure out the light situation. Either way, competent enough at something.
"I'll show you the machine later," she says. "The second button sticks but if you know how to press it it's fine."
"Okay."
"I'll show you."
"You said."
She doesn't seem bothered by this. She turns back to her screen, still smiling, and I turn back to mine, which has a login I haven't received yet, on a system I haven't been trained on yet, at a desk that still has a small yellow sticky note from whoever sat here before me that says don't forget!!! with no further context.
Don't forget what. Don't forget who. I peeled it off when I sat down and now it's in my pocket and I don't know why I didn't just throw it away.
The office is medium-sized. Fourteen desks, ten occupied, one bathroom, one meeting room with glass walls and blinds that don't quite close all the way. A window that faces another building. The kind of fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like they're being interviewed.
I have no strong feelings about it.
I've been here for forty-seven minutes and I have no login, no assigned work, and no sense of what I'm supposed to be doing aside from existing at this desk and responding to questions about coffee.
My direct supervisor — Lee Chanwoo, fifties, the look of a man who has learned to wait things out — gave me a brief welcome this morning that lasted exactly three minutes and ended with make yourself comfortable and then he went into the meeting room and closed the blinds as much as they close and has been on a call since.
Making myself comfortable.
I look at my blank screen. I look at the sticky note outline left behind on the desk surface, a pale rectangle where the adhesive lifted some of the finish.
Don't forget.
I should have thrown it away.
My phone buzzes. I check it under the desk because I'm new and I don't know the etiquette yet and I'm not going to be the person who establishes a bad impression in the first hour.
It's a message from a number I don't have saved, which means it's one of three people. The message says: you started today right? How is it?
Hwang Jinho. Has to be. The other two would have opened with something useful.
I type back: fine.
He replies in four seconds. that's it? just fine?
Yes.
:you're already plotting something.
I put my phone away.
I'm not plotting anything. I'm sitting at a desk with no login looking at a sticky note rectangle, same as anyone. The fact that I chose this specific office for specific reasons that have nothing to do with the job description is not plotting.
Probably.
"Siah-ssi."
Im Darae again. I look up.
She's holding a coffee, extended toward me across the gap between our desks, in a paper cup from the machine down the hall that I watched her go to and come back from while I was texting. I didn't realize she was going for two.
I look at the coffee. I look at her.
"You don't have to," she says. Still smiling, but lighter now, the way people get when they're not sure if they've overstepped. "I just thought since you don't have your login yet and there's nothing to do you might as well have something warm."
I take the coffee.
I don't know why that gets me. It's a cup of coffee. It's a completely ordinary gesture that people do for each other all the time, the lowest possible bar for human kindness, and I've received it fine before without it landing anywhere particular.
"Thank you," I say.
"The machine puts too much sugar in automatically," she says, settling back into her chair. "Next time I'll show you how to override it."
"There'll be a next time?"
"I come back from every coffee run with two." She shrugs, like this is a policy she enacted a long time ago and doesn't feel the need to defend. "In case someone needs one."
I look at my screen. My blank, loginless screen. The sticky note ghost.
"That's inefficient," I say.
"Probably," she says, already looking at her own screen. "The coffee's still good though."
I drink the coffee. It's too sweet. I drink it anyway.
Forty-seven minutes in, and I still want to leave. That hasn't changed. But I update my read on Im Darae — not performing friendliness, just actually like this, which is somehow more disarming — and I file it and move on and try not to think about the fact that I chose this office for its access to a sub-level archive that nobody uses anymore, that the archive connects to a section of Haewon's infrastructure that sits directly over one of the oldest parts of the Veil, and that I have been planning this for seven months.
Don't forget.
I won't, I think. I never do.
That's usually the problem.