Jack paced in front of the door to Tara's office. Every part of his first genuine task for this job, six weeks into his tenure, was weird. In his hands he held a surprisingly expensive bottle containing a mix of natural juices. The liquid inside looked radiant like the sun itself. Complicating the matter was its size. Clearly it was for Tara's enjoyment, but that meant it was nearly seven liters worth of the stuff, more than a little difficult for Jack to carry from where it had been inexplicably stored on floor Minus 11 back up to Tara's office on the thirtieth floor.
Making it worse was Tara's e-mail. Jack paused his pacing for a brief moment and pulled the company phone from his pocket to review his instructions, it took effort to rest the giant bottle in one arm while doing so. He looked over the extremely brief e-mail, trying to discern from the very few words in it some kind of relevance or hidden meaning. But nothing could be gleaned from the e-mail. As in person, Tara had been brief, to the point, and utterly bereft of anything resembling a sense of humor. Just one sentence; Bring me the bottle of Mélangés from the break room on Minus 11 at exactly 2:00PM, not before and not after. That was it. No explanation, no exposition, nothing.
While elevators made the trips between floors relatively quick, it was still a trip of down almost twenty floors, get to the break room on Minus 11 and retrieve a bottle that seemed to contain more juice than he had blood, and then back to the elevator for another trip of up more than forty floors, to arrive at Tara's office at precisely 2:00PM. Jack had made it, and fortunately with a couple of minutes to spare, but it hadn't been fun or easy. He could feel his heart racing, and his adrenaline still pumping, the effects of the physical exertion only exacerbated by the fact that, with the exception of his walks with Paz, this had been his first task in the new job. As humiliating as fetching a bottle of drink was, Jack's natural paranoia and deep seated desire to prove that as a baseline he could be useful, even valuable to his coworkers and his boss, shoved his resentment at the menial nature of the task deep into his subconscious, but it still caused him to be on edge, nonetheless. The phone's display showed the time as well; 1:59PM.
Jack slipped the phone back into his pants pocket and approached the office door, a pair of, to Jack, excessively large industrial affairs. The entire Static Storage Division was built around cold solid state data storage, and so nothing had any of the normal trappings of an office space, at least not on the exterior. Jack adjusted the massive bottle in his left arm while he brought a fist up to the door set to knock. He almost dropped the bottle out of shock when the office's intercom cut in and pre-empted his knocking on the door.
"You may enter." Tara said, unseen.
Although entering a door built for a Titan-Mod wasn't challenging physically, it was always a reminder of what the company, the government, and society as a whole considered to be a disability, as he reached just above his head to the hooked handle and pulled it down, struggling a bit against the robust mechanisms that facilitated the door's latch opening. The door swung inward easily enough and Jack stepped inside.
Jack had been in Tara's office plenty of times, but it was always a bit of a shock. The room had been, as all the rooms that the Static Storage Division controlled on the arcology, a storage room, and had been converted to Tara's office. This meant that the scenic forest visible outside of the truly massive windows wasn't real, and in fact, the windows weren't windows but screens, but it also meant that the office itself was on a scale that was overly large, even for Tara. The ceiling disappeared into the twelve meter range, and the whole office was large enough to accomodate Tara's Titan-Mod desk, two chairs facing it (one of which was Jack's humiliating high chair), Tara's own chaise lounge, a fixture next to Tara's desk that Jack suspected was a Titan-mod drink cabinet, and still had enough empty space on the dark-stained concrete floor to facilitate a non-mod game of half court basketball. It was intimidating at the best of times, but now, with bottle in hand, and the door slamming shut behind him of its own accord, it was a little overwhelming.
"Just a moment." Tara said, without looking away from her typing.
Jack wasn't sure how to handle that. It sounded like an implied command, and with Tara, everything was a command. Without further input from his boss, Jack stayed standing in front of the doors, fifteen meters from where she sat, typing away at her screen. Offset as her computer monitor was at her desk, Jack could see Tara the whole time, her face never turning to him from her screen as she worked. The keyboard she worked on, ancient by modern standards, sent clacking noises echoing throughout her office, each of the tens of thousands of keystrokes per minute sending a small clicking sound out to bounce around as Jack waited, all them coming together into a solid stream of noise, each indistinguishable from the whole. It was another subtle reminder that height and strength were not the only thing denied to him by his bank account's incompatibility with modification.
Jack wanted to check his phone, to see how long had passed since he'd entered Tara's office, but Jack also wanted no part of Tara's ire. Jack wanted to set the bottle down, the strength in his arms was waning and the cold and condensation were beginning to seep in through his shirt as he held the bottle, but Jack also wanted no part of Tara's ire. Jack wanted to walk out of the office, spouting off about how inane the task was, and to call when she needed something of merit, but Jack also wanted no part of Tara's ire, and he needed the job.
After what seemed like an eternity, Tara sighed, closed her eyes, and rubbed her temples under her augmentative glasses. It was the most frustrated Jack had ever seen Tara, and in truth, the most human reaction he'd ever seen out of her as well. She stood up from her desk with a kind of deliberate slowness, and made her way over to the cabinet by her desk. When opened it revealed exactly what Jack had suspected, and from the dizzying array of drinkware available therein, she produced a lowball glass before making her leisurely way to the front of her desk. In a display of loosened appearance standards that Jack couldn't believe he was witnessing, Tara relaxed against the front of her desk, not quite sitting on it with the heels of her palms supporting her as she semi-reclined against it. Her right hand, sporting the lowball glass, extended just a bit in front of her, and rocked the glass just a bit, from side to side.
"Well?" Tara inquired, her gaze locking onto Jack.
To Jack, it was a shot from a starting pistol, and he almost tripped over himself starting toward her. Although he'd walked the distance from Tara's door to her desk a number of times, today it felt like the gulf between the two points had grown. Even as he approached Tara, and she began to grow in relation to him, from distant, to equal, to towering over him, he felt that same anxiety and winded status return to his heart and lungs.
As he finally closed the gap, to where Tara waited, he slowed, coming to a halt almost directly in front of her, only a few centimeters away. He couldn't be sure, but he thought as he trekked over, he saw her normally unmoving countenance break into the slightest of smirks, but here, almost in her shadow, she appeared as she always did, stoic without a fault.
Almost imperceptibly, she extended her hand containing the lowball glass. Again, Jack knew, with Tara it was not an idle action, but an unspoken command, but Jack's mind was adrenaline-and-anxiety-addled already, so he was so slow to respond, causing one of Tara's eyebrows to rise in question. It was all the reminder Jack needed as he fumbled with the bottle's cork and quickly, if not smoothly, opened the bottle.
Jack's next challenge, however, was more significant. Tara held the glass at the length of her arm, just about hip level for her, which, like so many things in Jack's life, made it above his own head. Carefully, like pouring wine from an amphora for some ancient pagan deity, Jack began to tip the liquid sunlight into the offered glass. Even before he had the bottle fully raised, Jack could feel his arms shaking. By the time the liquid began to flow from glass to glass, he worried he'd drop the bottle, or worse, spill some on Tara. The fear was only made worse by the fact that he realized Tara's gaze had not broken. Even as he struggled to lift, and then pour, and then steady his charge, Tara's eyes remained fixated on him, and not his task, the entire time.
Still his arms held, shakily, until Tara herself lifted her glass, tilting the bottle away, and allowing Jack to reassert his grip, and desperately re-stopper the bottle. Before she began to lift the glass up her mouth, however, Jack was dismayed to see that all his efforts and straining had barely filled a quarter of the glass. Almost immediately, however, Jack's eyes went back to Tara's who hadn't let her own gaze wander. The sight of Tara's eyes, regarding him from under the rims of her glasses, transfixed Jack as the glass rose higher toward her lips.
At first Tara simply brought the glass to her lips and let the lowest flow of liquid through. Silent sips lead into gradually more of an angle being imparted to the glass in her hand, all the while she watched Jack watching her. Then, when it had seemed almost all the bright orange-yellow liquid was gone, she closed her eyes, lifted the glass high and tilted her head back, swallowing the last of it in one loud gulp. Tara sighed through her nose, bringing the glass back down from her face, and when her head dropped back down, and her eyes refocused on Jack, her lips spread in the faintest of smiles.
"Good boy." She said.
Jack almost lost it. His breathing froze, with his lungs feeling like they had lost the ability to move. Worse still was his pulse now pounded in his ears. His legs almost gave out from under him right there, instead wobbled to keep him upright. It was all he could do to avoid squeaking in surprise, but instead immediately averted his gaze, staring at the floor instead. His legs did attempt to carry him back, his task completed, but Tara's left hand shot out, seizing his chin between her thumb and craning his head back up to meet her stare. The smile was gone.
"And what do you say?" Tara asked. Again, less a question and more a command.
Jack's face may have been caught in her hand, but his brain and his heart were caught between two syllables. ‘Good boy' ran rings around his thoughts, and he felt like his heart would explode out of his chest, it was beating so fast and so hard. Anxiety had fully given way to terror and Jack's mind couldn't focus on formulating a response through its own conflicts. He tried to find some non-verbal clue as to what Tara wanted in her expression, but in addition to her stoic countenance, Jack realized his own vision was blurred with the makings of tears. The delay didn't go unnoticed to Tara who shifted only slightly, her hand lifting up on Jack's chin, and pulling him up to the balls of his feet. It was enough of a shock to bring him back to her question.
"Th...th...thank you?" Jack offered. Unsure of what Tara wanted, but desperate for something to break the tension. Anything before he broke.
Tara's ever so slight smile returned.
"Good boy. You may go. Return the bottle to the break room you found it in, and be back at your desk within five minutes, ready and waiting for your next task." She instructed.
Jack nodded as best as he could within her grip, which let him slip free in response. His retreat out of the room, never once turning away from Tara out of sheer terror, was slow and hindered by the fact that he walked backwards with a heavy bottle in his hand. Even as he closed the door, this time preventing it from slamming shut, Tara watched him as he scuttled out of the office. That thing he saw as the crack in the door closed were her eyes watching him from where she rested on her desk.
With the door shut, and only the echo of her words ricocheting around his skull, Jack finally collapsed. His legs wobbled and though he stumbled to the wall and tried to steady himself, he was forced to set the bottle down with rushed care and fall to his hands and knees, nearly hyperventilating as he remembered to breathe for the first time in what felt like hours. Even as he failed to control his breathing, droplets of sweat fell from his face to cold ground followed by a few unleashed tears, and his thoughts, thoroughly overwhelmed by two simple words, failed to arrange into any sensible pattern. Jack didn't know how long he spent on the floor trying to recover, but the sound of Tara's voice coming from the intercom snapped him out of his reverie immediately.
"Remember, at your desk and waiting in five minutes." Tara said.
Jack's panic took over and he scooped up the bottle, bolting for the hallway and the elevator beyond it. Five minutes was not a lot of time.