There was more to being a CEO than yacht clubs and tennis bracelets. It had been a long time since Michael Sitwell had learned that lesson though, on the whole, he'd still rather have his job than not. There were costs to the position, however, and never before had he so strongly considered just getting in a fast car and driving to anywhere, never to return.
A quick glance at Lily showed she was thinking the same thing. Well all she had to do was stop him from saying something stupid so the ball was in his court. He had to figure out what to say before she could have a metaphorical heart attack over it.
"You seem to be having trouble, Sitwell," Lovelace said, looking perfectly at ease.
They all looked perfectly relaxed. All except Eiffel who just looked awkward.
"Forgive me, Captain, but I am not in the habit of meeting people whose memorials I spoke at," he said stiffly.
"You know what? You have so goddamn much to answer for that I think I can afford to be generous and give you a freebie," Lovelace said, nodding. "You're forgiven."
"I don't understand. I thought you were dead. All of you," Michael said, resisting the very powerful urge to poke one of them just to make sure they really were flesh and blood.
"Wait, why would you think I'm dead?" Jacobi asked. "I swear to God if you people faked my death on top of everything else, I will start blowing things up."
Lily sighed. "Please, Mr. Jacobi, I will have to ask you to refrain from threatening the CEO of this company, particularly in front of his lawyer."
It was a nice thought but not one that either of them honestly expected Jacobi to be able to adhere to. Even on a good day, he offhandedly mentioned blowing things up at least a couple of times and from the looks of him this was most definitely not a good day.
"I thought you were my lawyer," Jacobi said. "That's what you said last time. Or did going off to space for two years or so mean you up and fired me as a client, too?"
"I am your lawyer, Mr. Jacobi," Lily assured him. "You are an employee of Goddard Futuristics and everyone here is my client. But in the likely event you will be pursuing legal action against this company, I cannot possibly represent you."
"I'm just saying, I feel lied to," Jacobi complained.
"And I'm just saying that you never once paid any attention to anything I have ever said to you so you really have no business to complain now that you didn't anticipate having to deal with a conflict of interest like this," Lily said.
"Oh, now that's just complete crap," Jacobi complained. "I was absolutely listening that one time you were talking about that one cool British holiday you got to see on that business trip you went on."
Lily shot him a look. "Mr. Jacobi, if the topic in question involves explosives you know very well it doesn't count as you paying attention to me."
Jacobi just shrugged. "Well if you're going to go around moving the goalposts on me then don't come crying to me because I can't meet your expectations."
"Not that this isn't fun," Minkowski said archly, "but who the hell are you? Some kind of Godard lawyer?"
"Right, my apologies," Lily said, offering her hand to shake. "Lily Fu and, yes, I represent Goddard Futuristics. I'm here due to the delicate nature of the topics being discussed today."
Lovelace snorted rudely. "Delicate. That's one word for it."
Michael cleared his throat. "To answer your question, Mr. Jacobi, I didn't think that you were dead. Everyone else, yes, but not you."
Jacobi crossed his arms. "Then why did you say 'everyone'? Am I not everyone now?"
"I thought it was implied," Michael said patiently. "Seeing as how the deaths of Captain Lovelace, Commander Minkowski, and Officer Eiffel was widely publicized and yours wasn't."
"And I thought it was implied that Goddard wasn't the fucking worst and wouldn't mind control me and try to murder me and actually murder two close, personal friends of mine."
"Are you talking about Kepler?" Eiffel asked, confused. "I thought you hated him?"
Jacobi rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to explain my process to you, Eiffel. Sufficed to know that I'm a big believer that if you can't deeply despise your friends then who can you despise?"
"Pryce," Lovelace said.
"Cutter." Minkowski said.
"Hilbert," Lovelace said.
"We still hate Hilbert?" Eiffel asked. "It's really hard to keep track of what to think about that guy."
"He killed my entire crew," Lovelace said, staring at him. "And tried to kill all of you, too!"
Eiffel shrugged. "I just figured that, compared to everyone else who has tried to kill us, his was way too early to bother staying mad about, especially since he helped us out just as much and he died like a year ago."
"Hilbert was…complicated," Minkowski said haltingly. "If he had lived I really don't know what we'd have done. But he didn't and everything is easier this way. Much neater."
"I have room in my heart to hate all of the murderous assholes," Lovelace assured him.
Eiffel looked at Jacobi. "You want to weigh in?"
"He was kind of the worst," Jacobi said, shrugging. "And I hold him partially responsible for Maxwell's death."
Eiffel stared at him. "How could you possibly blame him for that?"
"His death was part of the hostage deaths," Jacobi explained.
"So you're blaming a guy who died over the person who actua-"
"Eiffel, please, let's not start this up again," Minkowski interrupted. "Trust me, we've had this conversation. Many, many times."
"One time we even had it while playing questions only," Lovelace said. "I can't decide if that was the best version of that conversation or the worst one."
"That's how you know you're playing it right," Jacobi said.
"I will concede that Rachel Young was an employee of Goddard Futuristics," Michael began.
"Though we do not confirm any allegations made about her actions that led to any deaths," Lily quickly said.
Michael coughed. "Right, of course."
"We have video footage. We showed you video footage," Minkowski said.
"And it's from your AI friend," Lily said. "One who has a history of glitching."
"Hey," Eiffel said angrily. "Hera hasn't glitched in months, okay? Lay off her."
"I am pleased to hear that but that really isn't the point," Lily said calmly. "Additionally we will need to have an independent expert verify the validity of the video. Then we'll need to consult and try and figure out context. It is far too premature to say anything definitive about the circumstances of Colonel Kepler's death."
"Can we at least say that he was jettisoned into space after saving all mankind?" Jacobi asked.
"Yes to the first, no to the second."
"And when it comes to Dr. Maxwell, if your allegations that Commander Minkowski killed her is accurate then I don't see how you can hold us accountable for that," Michael protested.
"I can think of several," Jacobi said brightly.
Michael was beginning to think that Jacobi was capable of blaming literally anyone and everyone for his friend's death. But as long as he wasn't looking to go all Kill Bill on them it should be fine. Probably.
"For one, you sent Maxwell into space. Two, you sent Minkowski into space. Three, you hid the truth about our mission from us. Four, Minkowski works for Goddard-"
"Wait, wait, wait," Michael interrupted. "You can't possibly blame everything that any Goddard employee did up there on the company!"
"Why not?" Jacobi asked, seemingly reasonable. "The whole thing was a Goddard operation and everyone there works for you."
"I…I can't even," Michael said. He swiveled his chair away from the table.
"Is he-?" Eiffel asked hesitantly.
"He just needs a minute," Lily assured him.
After taking four, Michael turned back to them. "We're getting off track. Look, I really don't understand how any of this could happen. I'm not sure what to make of your story but clearly something extremely sketchy happened since most of you are supposed to be dead."
Jacobi nodded his appreciation at that amendment.
"I resent the idea that I'm 'supposed' to be dead," Eiffel said. "It implies you want me dead and I, for one, am not comfortable with that."
"I would like to assure you that Goddard Futuristics does not want any of you dead," Lily said quickly.
Lovelace laughed so hard Michael was worried she might have hurt herself.
"What my client meant was that we had all been of the belief that you were dead and that raises questions we would sincerely like to see answered," Lily continued smoothly.
"What's not to understand?" Minkowski demanded. "We made a full report."
Michael scratched the back of his head. "Well, it's mostly the content of the report that's throwing me."
"None of this can be substantiated," Lily said. "All of the evidence save whatever recordings you have has been destroyed. And most of the parties involved are dead."
"For now, maybe. I've got even odds that'll change," Lovelace said nonsensically.
Minkowski took a deep breath. "Look, sir, I understand that this is difficult to believe-"
"Oh come off it," Lovelace interrupted suddenly. "Are you seriously trying to convince us that you had no idea what was happening? It's a Goddard mission! A Goddard space station! And you are the CEO of Goddard! How stupid do you think we are?"
Michael pinched the bridge of his nose. "Do you have any idea how big Goddard Futuristics is? How many people I have working for me? We're a Fortune 500 company! As CEO it may be expected that the blame for major incidents like this falls to me but you cannot realistically expect me to know everything that every one of my people does!"
"You will not convince me you did not know Cutter was launching people into space," Lovelace said flatly. "Especially seeing as how you mentioned attending my memorial."
"Speaking at it, actually, it was very moving," Michael corrected. "And yes, of course I knew about that part. It was just…all the rest of it that I wasn't aware of."
"With respect," Minkowski said, "what exactly did you think we were all doing up there then?"
"Mr. Cutter told me you were looking for the existence of alien life," Michael said. "Honestly I wasn't too optimistic about it but that was his department, not mine."
Jacobi looked disgusted. "Oh come on!"
"What?" Eiffel asked.
"He gets to know? He knew nothing about anything and he got to know about the whole alien thing and I didn't? What do you do when you want to punch a dead guy?"
Michael briefly wondered which one he meant.
"Why wouldn't he know? He's the CEO," Eiffel pointed out.
"You just don't understand what I've been through," Jacobi said dramatically.
"As you said, you worked closely with Cutter. He was the Head of Communications and Special Projects. The man was physically incapable of going more than three minutes without threatening to murder someone and don't tell me you couldn't just feel the creepy evil radiating off of him," Lovelace said. "He managed to turn board games into a torture device! Who even does that?"
"That's actually not as uncommon as you'd think," Jacobi said.
Michael coughed uncomfortably. "I'll admit that Mr. Cutter was certainly one of the most unique individuals I have ever had the pleasure of encountering, but he'd been working here since before I was and he was never anything but nice to me. I honestly thought all that talk of violent death and whatnot was just a rather macabre sense of humor. And he was always so cheery!"
"To be fair, when I was listening to the recordings it took me a really long time to figure out he meant all that stuff he said, too," Eiffel said.
"And we really have no reason to think he ever did mean any of the things he supposedly said," Lily added.
Lovelace rolled her eyes. "This would really go so much faster if you weren't harping on the plausible deniability crap. We all know what he did."
"None of this can be confirmed and I think you know full well why I have to keep reminding everyone that we cannot take your word as fact," Lily said.
"What about Pryce?" Jacobi challenged.
"Honestly, I don't think she ever said a word to me," Michael said. "I saw her a couple of times but she always let Mr. Cutter do all the talking."
"That…is probably for the best," Jacobi said.
"Let's say that we believe that you didn't know what Cutter did up there," Minkowski said.
"And we absolutely do not believe that," Lovelace added.
Minkowski's eyes were hard. "It still happened for it. Someone still needs to answer for it."
"By your own report, someone already has answered for it. You said that you shot Mr. Cutter with a harpoon, Dr. Pryce appears to have lost her memory, Ms. Young was shot to death, Riemann exploded, and Colonel Kepler was jettisoned into space," Michael said.
"Hey, can you not lump Kepler in with those people?" Jacobi asked. "The man died to save us all."
"But didn't you say that he still-" Michael started to say.
"You owe him your life," Jacobi interrupted.
Michael sighed. "Fine."
"Our families and friends and everyone we've ever known were told that we died," Minkowski said. "We had someone up there who was authorized to experiment on us without our knowledge or consent and who got several people killed by injecting them with a deadly virus. We were scheduled to be killed once we were no longer useful. We weren't told the basic truths about our mission up there. We weren't allowed to come home. We were mind-controlled and nearly killed and it's a damn miracle that any of us made it back to Earth at all. We lost some good people up there and you can't make this right. But you owe us something. We deserve more than 'I didn't know's and 'None of this is provable.'"
Michael took a deep breath then glanced at Lily. "Can we just stipulate that nothing we talk about is on the record or whatever and not have to keep slowing ourselves down worrying about what we're admitting to."
Lovelace and Minkowski exchanged a glance.
"We can agree to that," Minkowski said.
"I would love to get just one inch closer to the truth," Lovelace said.
"There's no point arguing about whether your deaths were faked or not because I honestly thought you all were dead – except for you, of course, Jacobi – and clearly that is not the case," Michael said. "I…don't actually know why Mr. Cutter did that and I can't really ask him."
"He did it because he's evil," Lovelace said flatly.
"I think he did it because he was looking to kill all of us up there," Eiffel said. "But that could just be the impression I've gotten."
"No, I think you're right on with that one," Lovelace assured him.
"I guess it could be easier killing everyone once you were all officially dead," Michael said slowly. "And it would save him the hassle of having to explain why you didn't actually die in a tragic shuttle explosion. But why would he have done that in the first place?"
Jacobi opened his mouth.
Lily leaned forward. "And please don't say 'because he's evil' because even evil people are motivated by something, even if only hedonism or boredom."
Jacobi shut his mouth.
"I do know he hated a loose end," Minkowski said. "And chances were we were all going to learn things up there that were far beyond our clearance level. And even without him actually trying to kill us, chances were pretty good we would die up there anyway. It wasn't exactly a safe and controlled environment."
"But make no mistake that he was, in fact, trying to kill us," Jacobi said.
"Yeah, you should have seen his reaction when we refused to kill Hilbert for him," Eiffel said. "Or, well, heard. Because I know I'm missing a lot of context here but the guy was not happy. Like, just because he's our boss doesn't mean we're going to be willing to murder a guy for him."
"Yeah, you guys definitely don't get paid enough to do that," Jacobi said.
Michael cleared his throat. "Right. I don't suppose we'll ever have more than speculation on that front. I can't speak to any of the rest but if even a little bit of that were to be true…if even one thing were to be true-"
"It is all true," Minkowski interrupted.
"Yeah, you wouldn't know but trust me on this. If you can get these two to agree on the way something went down then you know it really is, how did Eiffel phrase it? Truth town," Lovelace said.
"I might as well not have been there, obviously, but for what it's worth while mine was clearly the most awesome and Jacobi's made me wonder if he were a dad in another life, Minkowski's story made the most sense when you consider everything that I know about everyone involved," Eiffel said.
Jacobi shot him a dirty look. "Traitor."
Minkowski, meanwhile, looked quite vindicated. "Thank you, Eiffel. I appreciate that."
"He's only saying that because you're letting him crash in your guest room," Jacobi muttered.
"Whatever you need to believe, Jacobi," she replied serenely.
"I think the point is," Michael said hurriedly before they could get even more off track, "that clearly you guys have been through some very traumatic experiences at the behest of this company. And while there's really nothing that can be done about the people responsible now that they're all dead-"
Jacobi snorted. "There wasn't anything to do about any of them before they were dead."
"Cutter could catch bullets," Lovelace agreed. "I saw him. It was kind of awesome. But nowhere near as awesome as Minkowski just gutting him with a harpoon."
"I knew it felt like destiny when I first laid eyes on it," Minkowski said fondly.
There really didn't appear to be anything to say to that.
"The question I have to ask you all is what comes next," he said instead.
Minkowski stared at him. "No offense but isn't that our line?"
Lovelace nodded her support. "Between us, I just wanted to start blowing up Goddard property but Minkowski insisted we try and get a sense of things first, maybe see if we needed to go off the grid or something. Well, I wanted to do that anyway but Minkowski had a 'husband' and Eiffel had a 'daughter' and Jacobi had an 'escape room team that would kill him if he ditched them again right after he got back'."
Michael raised an eyebrow at Jacobi.
He shrugged. "I've got commitments."
"I can respect that," Michael replied. "Hey, have you tried the Black Dahlia one up in Cocoa Beach?"
Jacobi leaned forward. "No, is it good?"
"Yeah, I went with-"
"Maybe you two can have this conversation later?" Lily interrupted.
"Oh, right," Michael said, somewhat abashed.
"I do want to finish having this conversation, though," Jacobi said.
Michael nodded. "Look, the reason I'm asking is because…well, honestly I'm kind of terrified about what exactly Captain Lovelace wants to do out of vengeance. And telling your story to the press, while it is not exactly the most credible story and you do not have a lot of proof, certainly won't help the reputation of this company. There's nothing we can do to fix what happened but we'd like to try. We can make you very generous settlement offers."
"And we do mean very generous," Lily confirmed. "What you all have been through, I can't even imagine. And we are prepared to offer you either some of our finest severance packages or the assignment of your choice."
"In exchange for keeping our mouths shut, I assume," Eiffel said cynically.
"Well the settlement would be," Michael confirmed. "It would come with a standard NDA. But the rest isn't."
"And you can drag this out, take us to court, do a lot of damage," Lily said. "I don't know whether you'd win or not and Goddard Futuristics would survive, particularly as the people you say hurt you are all fortuitously dead and we didn't know anything about this."
"That's still rather hard to believe," Minkowski said.
"Well it is the truth and even if it weren't it's our version of the story which you really can't prove otherwise. Because it's the truth," Lily said.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand why you're talking severances or new assignments," Lovelace said. "We're not actually Goddard employees anymore, are we?"
"Of course we are," Jacobi said, surprised. "No one ever fired you, did they? Or had you fill out paperwork to quit?"
"We mutinied! A couple of times! Killed our bosses, too," Lovelace said.
"And those could certainly be terminable offences if we chose to pursue it but under the circumstances…" Michael trailed off.
"Does this mean we continued getting paychecks all those years we were up in space?" Eiffel asked hopefully.
"Yes, you all had direct deposit," Michael said.
"Score."
"This is…I have to admit this is not what I expected at all," Minkowski said.
"Me either. But I will take that 'I fucking quit' paperwork right about now," Lovelace said.
Lily nodded. "Of course. We can stop by HR when we're done here."
"I can't believe this place has an HR," Eiffel muttered.
"Trust me, they don't last long. Or they didn't, at least. Now that Cutter's gone, who knows?" Jacobi asked.
"I think it's safe to say we'll need to think about this," Minkowski said. "All of this."
"Of course," Michael said sincerely. "Take all the time you need."
"I will," Minkowski said. "But…I do appreciate the lack of assassination attempts. We were kind of expecting those. Or at least a giant smear campaign."
"I'm still not convinced that's not coming," Lovelace said.
"That's fair," Michael said. "If there's nothing else?"
They looked at each other then slowly shook their heads.
Lily stood. "Alright then, if you'll all follow me…"
As she led them out of the room, Michael took a moment to just breathe. He had survived that. He couldn't guarantee Lovelace would never try to kill him but at least she hadn't so far.
It was obvious that Jacobi was the only one who even sort of believed him about not knowing all this was going on but, sad as it was to say, it was the truth.
Michael didn't like to think of himself as a bad CEO but it was rather hard to argue with results like this. He really should keep better track of these sorts of things.
What exactly did a communications director need with a staffed space station anyway?
'It'll really help me reach the kids', Cutter had said. 'Children are our future.'
Michael hadn't understood what that was even supposed to mean but he figured it was just a sign that he was getting old.
Now maybe he thought that Cutter was just full of crap.