R.T.M - Return To Mother

2 - Oseser

The office hadn't changed much since his father sat in the same old chair, nor for his grandfather before him. The leather was unlike the velvet material that had been replaced a few dozen times that clung to the cubicle walls. Bits of cobweb threaded themselves between the fuzz. The leather had nearly turned gray from its original soft brown- worn away with use. Otherwise, the nostalgia had remained there for the third in the family line, Mel'Jam Oseser, to take up the reins. He was a tall man who seemed to barely fit at his desk. In his defense, his grandfather whom it had originally been made for, was a much shorter man.

He looked down through round rimless glasses that kept sliding slowly down his long nose. For a spare moment, he glanced upwards at his deskmate, before returning to scratching his signature along the bottom line of the document on the monitor built into the desk's surface. His datapad lay broken off to the side, covered in black sticky goo that he couldn't scrub off for the life of him. So for now he had to switch to the alternative. Despite the fans running over his head, a deep sweat had permeated on his brow and made his glasses keep sliding. Out of irritation, he slid them back up again as a bead dripped off his nose and onto the screen, causing it to flicker slightly with the contact. Most people wore tiny little chips on the side of their heads to magnetically hold up their glasses if they hadn't simply gotten corrective eye surgery. He wasn't lucky enough to be a part of that medical plan.

His glasses slid down his nose, fogged with different temperatures, and absolutely did not have the data readouts that the new versions did... and for that, it was a blessing. Most data feeds were so crammed with advertisements that entire stations banned them, though Zulu-83 hadn't seen enough of the newer technology to start implementing laws for it- and the Syndicate hated getting into things publically that wasn't war-related lately. None of that stopped him from taking off the wireframes and setting them off to the side for a moment to rub his eyes.

It had been almost a ten-hour workday already and he still had a few more hours to go before he'd shuffle back home. He almost screwed the palms of his hands into his eye sockets, before putting his glasses back on.

"Alright there?" Umass Llauth asked from across the desk. Her own desk lamp illuminated her face in the low light. Her long, stringy blond hair hung halfway in her face as she looked up at him. She offered him a small smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes in crow's feet that were too old for her.

"I'm fine, but I'm considering getting something caffeinated at the moment." He muttered to himself but went back to work instead of getting up. She didn't look away from him even as he busied himself with what was in front of him.

"I'm almost done with my batch of reports if you'd like me to help with yours. Being the one running things doesn't always have its perks." She let out a breathy laugh knew that the day Oseser took her up on help with paperwork would be the day she needed to buy a ticket off of the space station.

"No thank you, Umass. I appreciate it." Her pen stopped when she looked up at him, eyes slightly wider than before. That was almost a reason enough for her to get a ticket. She shook her head at him; who knew, perhaps after two years she was starting to make a little progress with him. He wasn't entirely cold as rumors led you to believe.

Oseser finished the last piece of paper almost an hour later and Umass had started writing out the floor worker's schedules for the next week. He ran a hand through his chestnut-colored hair- threads of steel had interwoven themselves long ago despite being into his mid-thirties. He caught a glimpse of it in the window directly beside him and glanced at Umass. She was almost two years younger and she was getting them too, so at least he could find peace in that. Their office, or rather the entire clerical staff to the project, was inside a large rectangle that was suspended in a much larger chamber around them. This gave their entire office almost a full view of the floor below and all who happened to be in it. It sat more than thirty feet from the bottom of the outside room, with scaffolding, walkways, and tubes spreading out below them for another ten feet that thankfully didn't obstruct too much of the vista.