[hider=Part Three][center][IMG]https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/e4/5a/11/e45a1100b773c20749616f6b76d22c49.jpg[/IMG][/center] 

“What’s that bitch thinking, putting us on the ex, oh, seven project? With the eight, oh, four deadline coming up? We’re getting buried in all this work, couldn’t do it with twice as many engineers on the team, let alone with what we’ve got. Not well, anyway,” she really was pissed, too. Yeah, they’d make the eight, oh, four deadline, but barely; there wasn’t a shot in hell of the twelve of them finishing the project, and getting ex, oh, seven to the point that Anne would be expecting it to be at the same time. They were already being run ragged; she hadn’t even gone home in three days. Just worked, eighteen or twenty hours in the lab, an hour in the mess hall split between four or five short breaks to shovel food down and clean up, and a few hours of sleep, usually in front of her computer though she had a fold out couch bed thing in her office, and do it all over again after waking up in a half terrified, half confused daze. The coffee ladies were giving them pills, some kind of stimulant, and you might stop and think, “oh, but isn’t it dangerous to take stimulants from random coffee ladies? Is it the same coffee lady at least?” well, kiddos, you shouldn’t take stimulants in the first place, if your work load is so heavy you actually need them you should look into an alternative form of employment, but if your referring to them being total strangers as the primary reason it might be dangerous? Those pills have a big ass, “S,” marked on the side of the capsule. 

And yes, that, “S,” means that they’re coming out of one of our labs. Not any of the ones on this property, but Scarborough Enterprises labs none the less. Anne would, of course, deny that she was giving stimulants to the coffee ladies to distribute to her engineers, for legal reasons, but it didn’t change the fact that she was at the very least in the loop, and wanted her engineers and lab techs working around the clock bad enough that she was willing to accept the, what would no doubt become, invariable lawsuit filed by the collective lab employees against their employer. It was only so long at this point before someone took a handful of the things and just coded on the floor. I mean, she dolled them out at regular intervals, and no doubt her doctors and pharmacists had told her exactly how much to direct the coffee ladies to hand out to each individual scientist on the team, but it didn’t matter; how long can anyone take this kind of workload and use this amount of drugs before someone just has an aneurysm and drops dead? And, yet, no one walked away, and no one was going to. Not yet. This was incredible, unbelievable work; everyone here would be writing books about the things they had been party to in this building, in a handful of years this work would change the world. So they all knew that Anne was working them hard enough that she had to keep them stimmed up to keep up the pace, and that at this pace someone was going to die, but it would make their careers. 

No, no one was going to walk away, not until someone dropped dead anyway, least of all Doctor Piper Hamlin. She was still young, thirty four, healthy, no family history of heart conditions. She wasn’t going to be the one who died, not a chance. Franco Rodriguez, Doctor Rodriguez, yeah, he was f#$%ing screwed. Everyone knew he had worked his family away, he didn’t even have an address anymore; his wife had left him and taken everything, he signed it all off without much of a fight. It wasn’t an uncommon thing in this line of work, no one had a happy marriage if they managed to be in something approaching a relationship in the first place, and besides, he was old and tired, had a pacemaker, yeah, these stims would put him in his grave. Hell, she couldn’t think of the last time anyone had touched her, let alone the last time she’d been on a proper date or, Science forbid, had a real boyfriend. Shit, she worked eighty hours a week in a normal setting, and on this project? It must’ve been about a hundred forty. When you can’t remember the last time you got more than a few hours of sleep at any given time, wanting sex, love, friendship with people who aren’t coworkers and don’t know a thing about advanced robotics, it all pretty much goes out the window and becomes one of those afterthoughts, best reserved for momentary contemplation in those darker moments between shoveling food down your throat when you ask yourself where things went wrong and why you didn’t just go to med school like your parents wanted you to. 

The work they were doing, though. When she got a minute to just sit back and wonder at the possibilities this held for the world, the future, the things that accomplishing this might mean. There aren’t words to describe it. The closest Piper could venture to guess would be asserting that this is how Einstein must have felt when he had the first draft of the general theory of relativity finished and stopped to consider the implications it would have on the world, both within and outside of the scientific community. This is stuff that she should have been working on at the end of her career, twenty or thirty years, maybe even fifty down the line, not anything that seemed like it should be possible given the current technological state, but the, ‘asset,’ Anne brought them was proving that not everything could be easily tabulated and stored away within the neat little corners of Piper’s mind. “Oh, there’s the coffee lady, thank Science,” it was time for another dose, she’d have another nine hours or so before she could stop and get a few hours of sleep. After all, if they were gonna fail their deadline, she may as well take the luxury of planning a few hours of sleep on the fold out couch rather than convince herself yet again that she’d work through the night this time, same shit she always told herself nowadays. This particular coffee lady seemed younger than the usual, blacker too, most of them were Puerto Rican, but she seemed smiley enough and had the standard Starbucks cardboard cup holder. Wait, what the… Was that a scythe on her belt? [/hider]