Humpday Blues - A Tale Of Workaday Witchery by M. K. Dreysen

Part of the job is saying no, right?

No to the screwy ideas someone really should have spent a little more time with. No, no, and then really, oh hell no.

Part of the job. Watching out for the company.

Looking out for the folks who do the real work. They're the ones who'll have to handle the shit.

Yep. Gotta learn to say no.

Gotta learn to make it stick. And now that's the kicker, right? Not enough to spot the nasty little ideas, the ones that sneak in on honeyed words and slick sales pitches. It's not enough to just say no.

You have to make it stick. Ula works that particular job at her company. The one where she's on the lookout, protecting the people up and down the ladder from the way it always rolls downhill.

In this week's free story, dear reader, let's you and me find out just how Ula makes the No stick.

Humpday Blues - A Tale of Workaday Witchery by M. K. Dreysen

A day's work shouldn't have been so screwy. That's how Ula saw it, anyway. Up and noisy, some days are just like that. Quiet, nothing doing, that too. She could deal with either one.

Days that made roller coasters seem tame, on the other hand... Ula wanted nothing more than to toss those days right in the trash can.

"You're a woman who knows how to make me appreciate my own madness," Morgan said. At her end of the phone call, Morgan stared at the ceiling. She'd had her own start to the day, and here it was only getting on lunchtime.

Ula didn't call just to vent, though. She saved that for happy hour, or the weekend. When the chances anyone in the office would overhear disappeared in the rearview mirror. "You ever have that conversation, the one where everybody else in the room wants you to do something you know will turn to shit?"

Morgan rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I get the feeling someone's not going to appreciate the way this conversation ends."

"Not if I do my job."

Morgan smiled. She enjoyed listening to Ula's office stories; listening, not being involved in them. Ula did have a tendency to calculate her blast radius only after the fact. "Do I need to catch a plane to another jurisdiction?"

"Not today. Though you might want to keep the idea ready to go, in case you need to buy a second ticket."

Morgan had tried to arrange her day gig so that it didn't hang over the real work. But then, she hadn't been at the same company for going on thirty years, the way Ula had. Rub the elbows long enough, and the little violations eventually followed you home every night.

When the office turns into a family, the drama rides for free.

Ula couldn't bin the request. Not with the head of sales, his most valuable player, and the prospect on the make sitting on the other side of the table. "They're hiding something," she told her boss after the meeting.

The meeting he hadn't been invited to. "Of course they are. That's why I didn't make their list." Head of ops, anything the bright lights came up with, Geoff would be in charge of implementing the idea. Assuming Geoff could be convinced to do it.

Which put Ula in the seat where the heat met the fanny. "So why'd they come to me first?"

Geoff chuckled. "What I want to know is, can and should we do what they want?"

Ula shelved the can question, the easy one.

The should lingered. The rest of the day, and all of the night. While she queried Google, and a few other databases. For Martain Limited, and the connections.

"What set the warning bells off?" Morgan asked, later.

"He was too good to be true. Former research scientist for BASF, and now he's working ideas of his own." Which, that much Ula could appreciate. She'd been on the receiving end of those calls, on occasion. The ones where commas and digits grew beyond the dreams of avarice.

Someone behind Robert Martain, consultant, wanted Ula, Geoff, and most of all their little operation, to take some liability off their hands.

She traced the chemical through its warnings. The labs in Italy that found mice, then rhesus monkeys, with just that extra little bit of elevated melanoma risk. The EPA and NIH trial studies.

Those initial steps spoke of twenty, maybe thirty years before the world got their shit together and banned Martain's little baby molecule. The one he'd tried to march through the ranks at BASF, until someone there had sniffed the data Martain had done his best to hide away.

The competitors weren't so reticent, it seemed. One of them, at least. Except Martain's new backers understood the downside train they'd find themselves hitched to, if they didn't cover their tracks.

Ula, among other jobs, babysat specialty blending operations. Vitamins, medications, trace minerals supplements, she and Geoff and their little crew walked the tightrope between fad and necessity. Where food and medicine and the anxieties of a planet all met.

Martain had developed his special molecule as an immune system booster. He'd spent a few years watching, reading, as the gene therapy gurus pressed their own rock up the mountain.

He'd caught an idea and ran with it. To the point where greed and ignorance, Ula found, drew down and fought in the dirt.

The sales force should have grown accustomed to the slicks. Ula had worked her ass off over the past thirty years training them to spot the warning signs. Martain slipped past the barriers because of his backers. Ula didn't bother with pointing out those backers were happy to throw front money at Trinity Blendings, just so long as Trinity signed the contracts.

The ones that assigned property rights and liabilities.

Ula had learned the hard way: when the buffalo lined up to run, she got the hell out of the way. Until the dust settled.

But then... Ula read a little further. Martain's first go 'round, he'd gone looking for that evergreen, a young professor with tenure hopes slipping into the red zone. Down in the bowels of that paper, buried in an appendix, Ula found solubility reports on Martain's molecule.

Residence times. The kind of results that cold war scientists had looked for when they wanted to develop long-acting nerve agents, the type that clung to the underside of leaves, seeped into soil.

Lingered. For generations.

Turned former manufacturing facilities into Superfund sites.

Every coin has two sides; Ula's rituals needed such symmetry. For every keystroke, a gesture over a cup of coffee.

A point, click, drag, drop, and yes to the permanent delete. Reflected by a couple dozen of Ula's cookies, oatmeal, chocolate chip, macadamia nut. "No, my grandmother would rise from the grave to disown me if I gave out the secret," she said.

Memory lingers, in computers. In the human mind. She'd liked to have said, "Oh forget their number." She'd done so in the past, and made it stick.

Too many people this time for that. So Ula deleted files, and laid the bonds of ritual across her colleagues, in the same breath. The ritual whispered, "Forget." Her computer commands did the same.

Contact information drifted into the ether, bit by bit. From phones last, because of course they didn't get plugged into the computer every week like company policy recommended. But time moved, and Ula's scripts stayed the course.

Just as the questions disappeared. Ula's suggestion, carried on sugar and coffee and the spirit of conversations lingering, nudged Martian Limited to the back burner. And then, to the "Who? Oh, right," stage.

And then, on the day Ula called Morgan and asked her to meet at the original Ninfa's for happy hour, Martain Limited, the memory of them at Trinity Blendings, anyway, was gone. Banished.

"How'd you determine they've been exorcised?" Morgan asked. Happy hour had evolved, a little. Instead of a pitcher of frozen, Morgan stirred a margarita on the rocks.

The kind the bartender still had to make by hand, rather than the by-the-bucket pre-mix.

Ula sipped from a Two Bats Dark, the mug so cold the August air frosted the sides. "I convinced I.T. to open the spam folder for me. The one that holds the stuff they flag before it even gets to us."

"And?"

"Every email Martain or his colleagues have sent for the last six weeks has gone straight to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky."

"And the phone calls?"

Ula smiled. "Same business. The company put in a spam monitor on our cell phones, back in May. Blocks all suspicious calls. Seems the company president got tired of three in the morning robocalls."

Morgan congratulated her friend; happy hour proceeded quietly, the pair concentrating on good company and the lingering heat of an August evening in Houston.

Morgan knew the threat would come again. Under a new guise, perhaps, a new name. Ula would need new rituals, would cast new protections, and cast out new threats. It all went with the territory.