Mental note. Mental note. Mental note. Never bring up Zev's past ever again! Janice buried her face in a pillow on her bed. The humiliation was overbearing.

She and Carson had a long talk after the encounter with Zev. Carson was barely able to get anything done in regards to the examination, but the two concluded that he'd be better off fudging the results by noting how the reagents affected Janice's skin, and she helped give details on Zev's perceived intelligence levels and personality.

Though nobody was hurt, Janice was still mentally berating herself. She'd forgotten to mention to Carson that running is a big no no when near an agitated volon like Zev.

She pressed the pillow against her face harder. “He wasn't hurt. It's okay. He wasn't hurt,” she repeated to herself. “Carson is fine.” She sighed.

Sleep wasn't coming easily.

Janice woke up to the same blaring lights as usual. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, not sure how much sleep she'd gotten. Probably not that much, she guessed. A proper circadian rhythm was nigh impossible in this cell.

She couldn't help but wonder what time it was. She groggily slid out of bed, keeping her gaze low to avoid the floodlights on the ceiling. There was one way to get a better sense of time; Janice walked her way over to the cell door, slid her keycard through the slot on the door, and opened it up.

Nobody in sight. Though, that wasn't totally unusual, as traffic wasn't particularly heavy near the containment chambers even on the busiest of days.

But even after walking up the stairs to the relatively prettier parts of the facility, there still wasn't anyone around, giving the hallways a glaringly different air. Rather than the oppressing, tense atmosphere Janice was used to, she felt a strange sense of freedom. She still wasn't allowed to leave, but she could freely walk around without judgment or malicious eyes leering her down.

She frowned. I miss the forest...

A nearby wall clock told her the time: 12:20am. As expected, she hadn't slept much at all.

At that moment, Janice had a whim. If there aren't many people up and about... maybe I could do a bit of snooping. She wasn't oblivious to the surveillance cameras in almost every corner of the building, but something as benign as checking a storage locker surely wouldn't arouse much suspicion... even if it did belong to a deceased co-worker.

She'd have to pass by the main lobby and cafeteria. Not a problem, but it was still a ways off.

He had to have done something, Janice told herself. If it really was intended... what could Damien have done to piss Redmond off so badly? If Damien's belongings were still in his locker, maybe she could find some answers.

Taking a quick look around to confirm the coast was clear, she then opened the door to the storage room and flicked on the light. Conveniently, each of the pristine, chrome lockers was labeled with its owner's name, thus, it hardly took ten seconds for her to find Damien Maguire's locker among all the others.

“Damn,” she muttered. The locker was locked with a generic cyrite padlock. Giving it a second thought, she didn't really know what else she was expecting.

…

She did a quick double-take at the lock. “Wait... is it...?” she whispered. Cautiously, she reached up to the lock and gently grabbed it and pulled it down.

Click. The lock disengaged.

What?! Janice was stunned. Was somebody else already in here? It was either a careless mistake by Damien, or someone had already beaten Janice to the punch and tried to make it look as if it was still locked.

She squinted. Even so... why would they have left it unlocked like that? Do they plan on returning? It didn't make sense to her. Nevertheless, the amount of convenient coincidences were piling up a bit too much at this point for her to believe this was all just an accident.

Janice slowly opened the door. There were no clear signs of anyone else rummaging around, except for the general lack of belongings still in the locker. There wasn't much of note on first glance: a few comic books, a few papers (blank, as she'd find out), and a massive pile of tangled cables. She gently searched through the contents, trying not to jostle anything too much so it wouldn't look like she'd gone through it.

...Who am I kidding? With a mess of cords this big, who in the world would notice? She got a little rougher with her search.

At the bottom of the pile was a small, black case of some sort, resting against the back wall. Far too curious, Janice slid it out and inspected it.

HSD 8PB was written on the front in small white letters.

HSD... 8PB? It took her a moment of pondering to realize what it was. Ah! A computer hard drive! Who knows what could be on here...? Did the hypothetical “other person before her” miss it because of the huge mess on top, or did they leave it on purpose? She was definitely on to something. She pocketed the hard drive along with its attached cable (luckily for her, the cord was too short to be tangled in that big mess).

She quietly shut the locker and slid the padlock back into place. She delicately tried to close the padlock just enough so it merely looked like it was locked, just like before.

Click. She accidentally locked it.

“Damn.” At the very least, she had something worth checking out. Assuming the alleged mystery person wasn't someone able to monitor surveillance cameras, she was confident she'd be fine.

Computer lab. She tapped a finger in the air. Not far from the staff dormitories on the next floor up was a small office with six computers freely accessible to any employee. She wasn't technically an employee, but she figured she counted, given her honorary status as a research assistant.

She'd have to be quiet. To her knowledge, the walls were soundproofed quite well (understandably so, seeing as volons aren't known for being calm and quiet), but she'd rather not wake anyone up while doing sneaky tasks of a questionable nature.

More walking. Janice took a deep breath, enjoying her relatively peaceful time in the halls.

She ascended the carpeted staircase to the comfy second floor, only for her peace to be cut short. Just past the lab door on the right side of the hall was a vending machine and a coworker enjoying a refreshment.

As she approached, his face became clear: Tomo, one of the resident IT gurus. Barely acquainted.

It's fine. Act normal. Janice gave him a brief wave before abruptly breaking eye contact, and Tomo returned Janice's wave and took another sip from his drink. Not a word exchanged; Janice slipped into the computer lab before that changed. She just hoped that he wouldn't get curious about what she was doing.

Six computers were lined up in the fairly cramped room, three on each side of the table, all decked out with flashy holographic screens and keyboards built right in to the desk. Janice picked the computer in the corner, farthest from the entrance.

She powered it on and waited for it to warm up.

Janice impatiently bounced her leg up and down, idly looking around the room. Just above the door was a camera monitoring the area, occasionally looking back and forth to scan the room. She knew there were surveillance cameras on the market that could easily be cloaked or hidden into the walls for cheap, but these ones were in plain sight, hovering over everybody at all times. She figured it was an intimidation tactic.

Once the computer was showing the desktop screen, she plugged the hard drive into the port on the desk. A window popped up, revealing a huge mess of files, apparently unprotected by a password.

Time to snoop. Janice's heart raced.

Hardly anything was properly labeled, and most of the files made no sense, with gibberish names like mse.cl18502 or a_TERM22. Attempts to open them were met with a prompt asking what program to open the files with, which Janice was clueless to. However, after scrolling through enough files, she came across some names that did make sense.

Staff_Uniform_Changes

V-97_Tests

Weird_contact

Clicking on them opened up archived e-mails with subjects matching the filenames. Each one was clearly labeled, in red text, “Official Maroon Correspondence, Company archival use ONLY, Breaching clearance protocol will result in immediate termination.”

Janice felt a cold sweat creep up through her body. A gut feeling told her that Damien shouldn't have been in possession of these e-mails. Was he a hacker? Did he get caught red handed?

She then realized she was just as guilty as Damien now that she had this hard drive.

No, no... I can play it cool... I can bring it up to Carson first, or... or someone else. I'll show them proof that Damien was a mole... that would win over their good side, right? Yeah.

With her loose plan in mind, she clicked through a few more emails, taking a look into their contents for anything worthwhile.

The discovery of volons? Janice's stress began welling up. Though she hadn't heard of the Illian Cluster before, it was hardly her main concern. They talk about us like zoo animals...!

V-97! These logs are documenting Zev! Zev was on this “Illian Cluster”?! Janice minimized the emails and opened the internet browser. She typed “illian cluster” into the search bar.

“Did you mean: alien cluster,” the browser pompously suggested.

No meaningful results. Janice grumbled. If no one knows about this place... is it some secret project by Maroon?! Her curiosity only grew with every click.

But she had to make this quick. She skimmed over the remaining filenames and quickly checked the sender and recipients of the e-mails, hoping to see Damien's name somewhere.

The subject “Recent incident” captured her interest, but she was sorely disappointed to see it was unrelated to Damien's incident. She knew who Redmond was, but the name Soma was entirely foreign.

Madeakelor? Janice made another impromptu internet search. There were several relevant web links, but they all seemed to be asking the same question as Carson. Evidently, from each of the link preview blurbs, nobody had any answers. Searching for “made a kelor” with the spaces resulted in nothing worthwhile. She tucked the phrase away in the back of her head.

...What in the world is this?

Janice would've laughed if she wasn't on a mission.

The subject... TDV.

“Nothing the internet can't answer,” Janice did not say, because the net searching was incredibly unhelpful so far. Regardless, she looked up “TDV” anyways, and came up with countless results that all came up with some different answer to the supposed acronym. None of them made sense given the context, nor would she have the time to go through every single one of them.

Janice, 0. Internet, 3. She huffed.

Keeping in touch with her paranoia, she wiped the internet browser's history. She unplugged the hard drive and slipped it in her pocket, turned the computer off, and got ready to leave.

As she stepped back out into the hall, she glanced over at Tomo still standing beside the vending machine, relaxing against the wall. The two exchanged another silent wave before Janice walked down the hall, down the stairs, and back onto the tile floor of the ground level.

Ideally, she would have returned the hard drive to Damien's locker, but she ruined that opportunity by accidentally locking it. Thus, she continued back down to the containment chambers, back to cell 33, with the drive still in her pocket.

If they find out about this... worst case scenario, I guess I could just eat it.