Alas, But Our Legal Department Has Reservations

A rat, held to a door by the knife of its recent demise, drips into the cracks of the wood.

“Another brilliant piece by Spencer. Can’t you just feel the eyeballs popping into your own skull? God damn, he’s the best artist this game has. Mildred, get this thing out there. Promotional material, this one. Put it on the back of every sleeve that gets made from now until the factory collapses.” As her boss talks, Mildred Greevil waits for the printer to finish replicating this painting so she can walk it down to the tech department. She was enjoying the sound of the Hewlett-Packard Laserjet 4000, translating its drone into one of her favorite modernist compositions, when the tone of her boss again rose in volume equal to the 4000.

“Oh, and could you take this card I came up with down to the boys in the design pit? I’m rather proud of it myself, I think it might be the highlight of my design career to this point,” he says.

“Sure, I-“

“You know, they’re just not open enough to new ideas a lot of the time. Same thing happened with Return, I told them ‘you know we could do that again and it’ll be a smash hit,’ and no one listened to me, but you can’t just give up when you know, when you just know, that you have a good idea.”

“That’s certainly-“

“Just can’t let people shut you up, that’s what I’ve always said, you can’t let people keep you down like that, don’t let small minds drown out big ideas.”

“They really-“

“But this one, I’m telling you, this is a special design right here, elegant, old-fashioned elegance like we used to make, but with a real current twist, it’ll blow their minds they didn’t think of it first, they’ll be listening to me after this.”

She takes the additional printed sheet that he hands her, the faded ink merging with a glittery hand-written series of addendums like bread that has cultivated an assortment of molds. The print, additions, strikethroughs, and re-additions are things something about numbers and “first strike” and “flying,” and she believes in her ability to successfully bring it to other people in the building, as assigned.

Mildred’s outfit today is simple, in a similar style to the one that her boss had referred to as being alluring but HR-appropriate, though she had set that particular outfit on fire immediately afterward. Her skirt was a slightly brighter red than the maroon of her stuffed companion Alpert the Alpaca, who inhabits her desk. Squeezing his middle section in a specific way made his little legs appear to move back and forth in a run, a great comfort on many days.

She chooses to eschew the elevator, with its lemon-scented cleaner that smells nothing like lemon but uniquely like lemon-scented cleaner, for the back staircase. Its concrete, red railing, ceilings consisting of the stairs above which become the floor below are so different in texture from the publicly-used stairs toward the front of the building, with their carpets and smooth Beleren Blue™ paint; but it serves the same practical purpose, for a different-though-overlapping audience. Here, there is ornamentation only in the omnipresent red EXIT, the one that makes a little house between the E and the X if one’s head turns to the side. See the little door, the center nub of the E, that is this door to go through: the exit, here.

She does so and is promptly knocked on her ass by the most hulking designer in the building.

“Oh jeez! Oh jeez, oh I’m so sorry,” he says. One of his folders is accessorizing her blouse.

“Ow,” concludes Mildred. She attempts a balance between lack of pain and lack of sitting on concrete just outside the second-floor door.

“Oh jeez I, um…” he motions to reach down for his folder, reconsiders the trajectory of his hands, reverses course, and goes back in for round two with the modified objective of helping her up. By this time, she has already separated his folder from her person, gathered it, gathered herself, rolled onto her hands before getting on her feet, and gotten her own papers.

“It’s okay,” she says, getting some dust out of her hair and holding out the folder. “Just didn’t see you.”

“Really sorry,” and he hurriedly takes back his offered possession and continues on his way.

She sees a crumpled paper that must have ricocheted off: it’s totally blank but for the purple text, “rejection due to Shadow.” Not wanting to pick it up, she kicks it attempting to flip it over. This doesn’t work until she kicks it into the wall, it having gained a large amount of dirt in the process, but revealing there’s nothing on the other side. She concludes that bending down for it isn’t worth the pain, so she leaves.

— — — — — — -

The next day, Midred had barely finished tolerating the office coffee before her boss comes in, sweating much earlier in the day than usual.

“Hey, so, you should go see Nick Mitchell. Upstairs. In the, um,” he looks around for a fragment of carpet to address with the rest of his statement. “Legal department. Ah, I guess you should follow…” her boss is now looking over at the legal department courier, waiting in the doorway to escort her upstairs.

“Did I do something wrong?” Mildred is checking her recent past for anything that may have offended this department’s interpretation of the law. Maybe it’s because she wasn’t technically authorized to go to Online. It was also, slightly less technically, her job.

“I am uninformed of the current case,” says the courier. His dress shoes are far shinier than she had imagined anyone at this company wearing. His keycard grants them entry into this floor of the building that she’d never seen: mahogany and sandalwood furnishing give the floor’s foyer a darker hue, like a mobster’s private area in the back of a casino, or a very nice Instagram filter. He leads her next into the meeting room labeled Grand Coliseum.

Facing the door are three enormous desk/table/box things, resembling raised versions of witness stands, at which sit three different men in black suits nearly identical to the one worn by the courier. For her is an empty chair in front of a solid-looking carved wooden table. Jittering the table from underneath is the leg of the designer who ran into her yesterday.

“Oh! It’s, um. Hi,“ she says.

“Mildred! Please, please tell them that wasn’t my card. I don’t know where it came from, I mean you don’t have to say it was yours but was it from your papers? Like an example or something, not a design? I’d never design it, I know better,” and his blubbering continues, less audible, until the soft rumble of amplified speech fills the room.

“We have come across an issue with a design,” says the person facing her on the right, “and the designer to which its creation was presumed has relayed that it might not have been his.”

“From the stairway! We ran into… I mean our papers got mixed up,” the designer says.

Mildred feels like she is supposed to say something here. “Yes, we did,” and after a delay, “I fell down.” Several seconds pass after this before the interviewer even moves.

“Were any designs present on your person? Card designs, that is.”

“Oh, I had one to deliver to the designers, yes. I never did, that was a mistake. I was a bit rattled and forgot.”

“And is the nature of the design at all memorable to you?”

“Um.” Mildred attempts this. “I’d know the paper? I guess? There was something about ‘first strike.’ In handwriting.”

The panel in front of her confers. “This seems to be the design in question, thank you. And as for its origin: was it, by any chance, something of yours?” The panel makes no change in facial expression, but the designer looks over at her in terror.

“What? No. I’m not actually that familiar with the game.” She shrugs. “It was something my boss gave me, said to show it to them, that’s all.” More conferring in front. “I don’t really understand-“

“Thank you, Mildred,” says the middle panelist. “You’ve been a huge help. If you need anything from us, just ring and ask for me: Nick Mitchell. Could someone show Ms. Greevil back downstairs?”

Mildred decides to have a conversation with her boss about what just happened, with a goal of keeping the conversation under ten minutes. She walks up to his clean, empty desk, with a chair neatly tucked in front of it. No scattered cards as earlier in the day, not even a computer, and certainly no loud instruction-giver.

An HR person happens to be walking by. “Hey!” She asks. “Where is-“

“Well, he no longer works here,” was the smiling answer. He started to turn away, but Mildred’s protests stop him.

“But he was just-“

“You know I can’t discuss personnel matters. But between us, it was…” Mildred holds her breath for a moment. “There’s been a few harassment complaints.”

“Really.“

“Look, I’ve had a lot of training in this issue. What most people don’t know about harassment is it doesn’t just affect the person it’s directed at. It creates a toxic work environment. I advise reading up on that, let me point you toward some books sometime.”

Mildred knows that nothing in this company ever turns around that quickly. Unless someone had complained about him last year, and they’re only now getting around to it. That’s plausible. Then she realizes she didn’t have a boss any more.

“Wait!” She tries to stop the departing HR employee. “What do I do now?”

“You’ll receive a memo about updated roles and responsibilities. So until then just continue as if you had a manager?”

She vows to make lemonade out of this enormous bag of sugar. She now has that most-envied position within corporate bureaucracy: salaried freedom. There would surely come a day when people would confer amongst themselves, realize that not a single one of them knew what it was that she did, then conclude that, lacking that knowledge, the answer was that she did nothing. On this tragic day (or perhaps many weeks and months later, once knowledge somehow trickles up to the upper levels of the corporate structure), she would receive a generous compensation package for her years of service at the company. Everyone has dreams.

— — — — — — -

“What was so bad about that design, anyway?”

“Ahhh! Mildred, please don’t sneak up on me like that.” The designer couldn’t have possibly started sweating this quickly; it must have been pre-existing sweat.

“Sorry.”

“…”

“So. What was wrong with the-”

“There’s certain cards we don’t print. Okay? Well they’re cards we did print, once. But we can’t any more. They’re on the Reserved List. We can’t design cards that match them, and technically you’re not really designing them if they exist already.”

“Why are those designs reserved?”

“Because they’re old. And because we decided to reserve them.”

“Oh.”

“In 1995. So they’re reserved because back then they were reserved, and they still are.”

“And the legal department-”

“They enforce it. But please don’t ask me any more? And for god’s sake don’t ask them about it.”

It’s hard to tell if a currently-nervous man is in a constant state of nervousness (whether going on a blind date or drawing a hot bath), or if it’s a temporary condition. She did witness him getting taken up to Legal over something seemingly minor, but maybe he’s just being overly sensitive about it. Designers hate going to other floors when they’re not expecting it, nor provided pizza.

Mildred didn’t have to be afraid of Legal, though. She was her own boss, and nothing could touch her. If she wanted answers, she could just call a meeting and get them, if meetings were a thing that provided answers. Were they? She’d never actually called one. They just seemed to happen of their own accord, without anyone involved in them at any point wishing for them to occur.

“Oh one more-”

“Please, Mildred, don’t get me in trouble again.”

“No no real quick, I promise. What’s Shadow?”

“What?”

“You dropped a paper, it said something about ‘rejection due to Shadow.’”

“Oh. Um. That’s… an upcoming block. Shadow/Play. We cut a card because it didn’t work with the theme of Shadow.”

Having received specific instructions on multiple parties she couldn’t ask about the reserved list, she knows exactly what she cannot do. It’s important that rules are specific, with an exact line not to cross, so that with enough practice one can do acrobatic tricks along the line with no net below.

So she Googles the reserved list and gets a copy from a fan-made Wiki. This game has the best fans in the world.

— — — — — — -

The texture of the building has changed for her. She walks around not as a subservient worker, not as one of the bottom blocks in the corporate pyramid, but as a free person with no one directly above her. She also had no one reporting to her: she had escaped structure entirely. She was no longer of the company’s workings, but orbiting it. She had no interest in commanding others to do things, anyway; mild requests, perhaps, with sincere explanations of why, exactly, she needed help with this, and it would be up to them to decide to do it rather than being commanded to. A sort of cooperation within the workplace, driven by mutual respect and cooperation.

“What? I’ll… yeah, let me uh… I’ll let you know.”

“Please, it would be a big help, it shouldn’t take-”

“I just have a lot to do right now, okay.”

There was only one possible solution: Mildred had to call a meeting.

— — — — — — -

“And as you know, our game has a predominantly male playerbase.” Mouse click to advance slide: a chart that shows graphs of income to the company via different demographics. “The blue part of the graph represents the money made by male buyers.”

“Uhh, Mildred?” The men look around to one another, slightly smiling. “Those graphs are only one color.”

“Well…” Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. “The red part should be visible now.”

“Mildred, we’re all aware of the challenges that acquiring that demographic has posed. Bob, you led the Female Utilization Initiative, didn’t you?”

“Couldn’t make any progress at all, Bill. You remember that, Brendan?”

“Sure do, Bob, spent months on it. There’s just no way to do it.”

“Well,” Mildred continues, “that’s what I’ve been working on. But with a… different approach.” The other people in the room look at one another. “I’m sure you’re all familiar with…” The projected image shifts into that of a woman, hips to the side, her coloration a combination of purple and naked. Nods erupt around the room.

“One of our most popular characters,” Brendan interrupts his nodding to say. “And by far our most popular person to uh, dress up as? What’s the word for that, anyway I certainly appreciate when that happens.”

“Right. Well.” Mildred pivots on her heels back toward the screen to pause for a moment. “My idea wasn’t to replace this character, of course, but to…” as she sees furrowed brows in an orderly 3x3 formation. “Build on the success. So.” Slide advance.

A stylized sunburst appears behind the olive skin of the woman onscreen, its rays echoed in the symbol adorning her crown. One hand on her twirling metal staff, one hand on her hip, the sky behind her drifts into her armor.

The reaction of the room is heads pushed back on their necks, like dogs offered broccoli.

“We need to show the community that our women characters can be, um… different from what we’ve made before,” Mildred says. “I think we could make a big marketing push around her. Or some character like her, if this sparks any ideas for anyone?”

“Well, I’m… not really sure about this one. It just doesn’t reach out and grab me, you know? Just don’t see the appeal, personally. What do you think, Bob?”

“I’m with you, Bill. Brendan?”

“We’re on the same page, Bob. Just not really getting it. It seems like such a departure, why can’t we stick with what’s been working?”

— — — — — — -

“Of course, Ms Greevil. Wait here and I’ll get Mr. Mitchell.” Mildred skims over a magazine article about the return of pagers. Mitchell comes out a minute later.

“Great to see you again, Mildred,” he extends his hand. “We really owe you for helping us out before,” he says as they sit down in his office. The light in here is brighter than in the Grand Coliseum. There doesn’t seem to be a curved surface anywhere in the office; nothing but sleek lines of metal and wood.

“Well, I’m having difficulty gaining traction for my ideas with anyone.”

Mitchell nods solemnly in response. “I understand your frustration. This is another symptom of the larger problem in our organization: leaks.”

Mildred waits for him to continue, which he does not. “The… um… what about them? I mean, what leaks?”

Mitchell leans forward slightly, interlocking his hands and looking her dead in the eye. “Well, why did people not want to go along with what you said?”

“They didn’t understand what I was saying? I guess. It didn’t connect with them.”

“But how did they get the information to dislike what you said?”

“…”

“Leaks, Mildred. If they disliked something, it must have been because there was something else they liked better. And how did they get the information about that other thing? They probably weren’t supposed to.”

“…”

“Leaks.”

“Oh. Okay.”

— — — — — — -

“Oh, hi, Bill? Just wanted to follow up on that presentation-”

“Was a great presentation, Mildred, really was, thanks for it and all, just not what we’re looking for. You know, you did a great job, taking all that messy data and making it look really nice, you have quite the talent for that.”

“Right. Yes. Well I was just chatting with Nick. Nick Mitchell? Upstairs?”

Bill would be doing a spit-take across the room if he all the liquid in his mouth hadn’t instantly vaporized. He regains composure after only ten seconds of trembling.

“Oh, um… how’s he… doing? I mean, I know that he’s well. Always doing well, those legal- I mean, what a bunch of great guys. And girls… women! Great people. What… were you talking with him about?”

“Well.” Mildred smiles her ‘you are a preschooler’ smile that she also uses on moderately frightened dogs. “We were wondering about your previous experience with ‘the demographic,’ as you had put it.”

“Right! Yes! Great strides we’ve made, wonderful progress, trying to, um… did he say that specifically about me?”

“Actually, there was a slight, I guess you could say ‘concern’ because you’ve never actually been on one of those teams before, have you?”

In Bill’s eyes, the abyss opens. They are windows to the soul, if his soul is starting to fill up with water.

“Well, not technically, I mean, I’ve… tried to help, no I just… heard it around the- no not that, I mean, oh, no, no, no.”

Mildred brings the smile back for a brief sequel, building on the smile’s past success for any consumers that might be nostalgic for it.

“Bill. You know how seriously the company takes…” she makes a mental note of where his body is in the chair at this moment. “…leaks.” Approximately four inches downward motion. An impressive result. “So maybe, if you didn’t have authorization for the information you were consulting, you could leave decisions regarding this demographic to-”

Bill starts nodding aggressively. “Oh, definitely, of course, of course, I’m so- please go ahead with your proposal. Please. Please?”

Mildred’s genuine smile shows through for the first time in a while. She throws out one more thing on the way out the door:

“Did this have something to do with Shadow?”

She’s unsure what the sound she hears in response is, and closes the door.

— — — — — — -

Her long-held dream, which she had started pondering several days ago, was coming true. Alpert takes a triumphant gallop across her keyboard, helping her type a press release on the company’s new initiative to reach across demographics. All that was left was to deliver the summary meeting to people who would be working on the project. Her people, now.

This time, there is barely any motion throughout the room. She can take the longest pauses she wants, looking everyone in the eye one by one, without a questioning gaze returning to her. She makes sure to reinforce this helpful new attitude on the final slide.

“With the helping hand of our legal department, this new plan to engage a new, more diverse playerbase will be a phenomenal success and redefine our company. All I’m asking from your teams is not to leak any information.”

After a pause, a hand goes in the air.

“Yes, Brendan.”

“Ah, ma’am, um, Mildred. Can I ask a question about-“

“No.”