He rolled his eyes.
"Jesus, who's been letting Reilly name the subjects again?"
It was a relatively harmless habit, but the higher-ups found it annoying. The regional director had called the practice to a stop after discovering "Shinji", "Kaworu", and "Rei" in the nursery one morning, but Reilly had continued on the sly.
As long as nothing went on the official tags, it was considered fine to nickname the subjects. But it seemed someone was having trouble remembering his childish naming choices.
He erased "Thorn" from the SUBJECT DESIGNATION field and copied over the classification number.
"Mari Illustrious" had been only the beginning of the fad.
"Shadow Raven? Wasn't he a boss in-?"
Reilly glanced up from his clipboard. "That's Vulcan Raven. And Shadow's on your left; Raven's on supervised exercise time right now." He scribbled the time and added, "Also, no, I didn't name them."
"Because they won't let you anymore."
He leveled a cool glare at Phil over his glasses. "No, because I got bored."
(And he'd run out of names.)
"Alyssa? Koden? You're not naming kids here, or even your pet goldfish. You are assigning unoffical designations to test subjects."
"Yes sir."
"You're not in the fucking army any more. That's 'doctor' to you."
"Yes, doctor," he said, contemplating keying the living shit out of her car at the end of the day.
Wasn't like it hurt anyone to call the subjects silly names.
"Thomas. Follow me." Reilly beckoned the junior scientist towards him. "Let me show you how we do things around here."
Reilly set off for the east wing at a fair clip, leaving Thomas Pullman scrambling in his wake. For a recent amputee recovering from a wicked case of what scuttlebutt held to be space AIDS, he was nearly manic in his energy.
He rapped on the door of gamma team's bunkroom, then waved it open with his card. "Jim, Bones, Chekov, Sulu, out. Team exercises today." He scanned the room and pointed to someone Pullman couldn't see. "You too."
As the team filed out, Reilly smiled. "That's how we do things, Thomas. Even if their names are fucking stupid, you still have to call them. Gives a personal touch." He frowned and glanced back into the room.
"You! Spock, whatever your name is! Out!"
"Are you Korean?"
He shook his head meekly.
"Are they Korean?"
(No, they're human/snake crosses; indeterminate lineage on the human side, king cobra on the snake.) "No, sir."
"Then why in the living fuck did you name them Chulsoo and Younghee?"
"Thought it sounded cool." And it was too fucking hard to call them by numbers for testing.
Reilly sighed. "I can't slap you for being a fuckwit, but I can assign you to Eraser duty. Two weeks cleaning their dorms and dealing with their shit. Go have a coffee and report to Masterson."
"What's their deal over there? First the weird names, now Batchelder running off," he said to his colleague.
"There's something in the water in California, I think," replied ter Borcht. He took a sip of his coffee. "Makes them all fucking crazy."