“What is this place?” I asked myself as I reached the bottom of the ladder, looking out over a metal balcony. The large room looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, with dozens of blue pods lining the walls.
“This is the cryo chamber, my dear Fredward,” said a voice from across the catwalk. Footsteps smacked along the metal as the man approached. “Just future-proofing the business, you see. Nothing to be concerned about.”
I took it all in, stunned, as I realised who was speaking. The boss. He approached through the darkness, and finally, I made out his form. The left side of his face was still, almost like it had been frozen in place, which I assumed made his voice sound so different.
“This is why you hired that business for window tinting?” I said. “So you could build a secret chamber and cryogenically freeze all of the employees?”
“Indeed,” said the boss. “See, kitchen appliances are a dying business. We are losing the war against smart homes. I swore the window tinting company to secrecy so that we could take the industry by surprise in a hundred years or so. By then, everyone will be over the fad that is artificial intelligence. That’s when regular kitchen appliances will make a comeback.”
His plan was insane. Of all the reasons to hire a business offering office glass tinting close to Melbourne, this was the last thing I would have expected. Why had they even agreed to install tinted window film, if this was the purpose?
“You’ll never get away with this!” I said as the boss stood before me. “I’m going to expose the truth to the whole world, and then you’ll let my co-workers go! You’ll never win.”
The boss’s laugh sent a chill down my spine. “Oh, my dear boy,” he said with a smirk, “I already have.”
Something sharp pierced my arm. I turned, as the world seemed to spin around me, to find the assistant to the manager standing beside me, injecting something into my flesh. The world faded to darkness, and I wondered why I had to investigate the cause of the tinted glass.