Annotated 25-4
Title is… fine. It doesn’t really signify much beyond “the plot thickens,” though. I think today I’d go with “Remote Access.”
Carol’s no saint, even at this point. Ferris’ faith makes her happy, but so does scaring the shit out of rebellious employees by announcing her presence. She likes the trappings of power, and she likes to play games now and then (the human-interaction kind, not the Kingdoms of Arkerra kind). These traits will be more important in about two chapters.
I like the detail that Ferris actually outdoes Carol at something important to her; it makes their relationship a bit more complex and underlines that once upon a time she was just a zealous employee, not the workaholic she’s well on her way to becoming.
Spoiler warning: Ferris will not get his attendance bonus
yeah, he gets a promotion and his interaction with HR becomes even more at arm’s length.
A prize so great it’s just mind-blowing.
Carol seems to be under the delusion that she’s still working for (and de facto running) a normal company, one that is trying to make profit by making games, one that is not keeping a big terrible secret; in such a company it would indeed be a good idea to reward an employee for loyalty. However, Hurricane isn’t that company anymore; while it still needs to make enough money to stay in business, now its real purpose is just to keep the secret. Therefore, rewarding a loyal employee who doesn’t know the secret is pretty pointless, and since Ferris just said that he’d give anything to learn the secret, that should immediately mark him as someone who needs to be got rid of. While HR will take care of that problem soon enough, it would really have been better for everyone if Carol had instead been coming up with some excuse to fire Ferris.
I think at this point, there is still this hope that they will be able to successfully unplug The Five and continue/go back to being a normal company. At least, for Carol’s part. I don’t know exactly when that starts changing from something she actually believes, into a fiction that she holds desperately onto.
Later chapters will explain in a little more depth what Carol hopes the basement will actually accomplish, but for her, it was never about “just putting this ugly distraction behind us and getting back to our REAL business.” From day one, HR’s tubes were sold to her as a great leap forward for the company, and for humanity itself, comparable to the moon landing or a coronavirus cure. All the morally murky waters she’s wading into now, she does her best to justify on that basis.
Not better for HR.
Well, maybe in the long run, but in the short term, he needed his material component.
I’d say that having loyal employees rewarded _does_ serve the company because if you’re hiding a terrible secret behind their back, you’d want them not to question you too much, and be on your side if push came to shove. Also, you’d want to appear like a good company with happy employees doing good work, wouldn’t you? So it’d make sense to behave in that way, too.