For Wen, her schedule was more or less a never-ending cycle of inspections and usually-disappointing discoveries, with nothing but her own thoughts to accompany her while she walked from place to place. The botany labs and the greenhouses had two entirely different teams that had very little overlap, and neither team wanted to know what the other was doing. Except for Troy, anyway, but Wen found herself avoiding his company with increasing frequency; he was a jumpy, excitable man with little regard for her personal space, and there was nothing he needed to know about her other than the fact that she is his boss.
The greenhouse complex was one of her favorite places in Refuge. It was made with a shocking amount of care and attention to detail, and the space was divided neatly into several quadrants, with further divisions for at-risk seedlings. Although it was muggy as hell and the ceiling was a tad low, she actually looked forward to her daily inspection. The people worked diligently and quietly, and Wen thought that the mere sight of thriving plants was a sort of beacon of hope.
One of the technicians, Marlen, spotted her and goose-stepped over another kneeling on the ground to open the door. "Doctor Lai, you came right when we were moving the QVs." she said, pointing a dirty, gloved finger toward the back of the greenhouse. A beeline of technicians carrying pots were moving to a more sheltered area.
'Questionable Vegetation', when there are concerns in the speed and level of growth in engineered seedlings that have been cleared for greenhouse growth.
Wen followed the woman to the QV area, where every leaf and vine was enormous compared to its more 'natural' counterpart. It was ambitious and exciting to oversee such a potentially-dangerous project, but at the same time, it was frightening to know that the entire nursery would need to be completely destroyed should something go wrong.
She spent the next house looking over each and every row of plants, inspecting the leaves and looking over the detailed records of their growth cycles. Every now and then, she would order an entire row of plants grown from the same batch of seeds to be taken out and eradicated, much to the distress of the greenhouse workers. By the time she left the greenhouse, the sun had gone down and the QV area had a mere tenth of the plant matter that it did when the day started.
Wen returned home, empty-handed and with a pounding headache. She stopped by the labs to drop off her coat and ended up spending an extra twenty minutes listening to the repairman chatter about his kid while he fixed the security gate. "A backtalking little shit," he said. "But I love that kid, he don't know it but I do. I hope I never see him on that wall, can't shoot for shit with his BB gun..."
She yanked the clips and ties out of her hair, letting it loose. It was a relief to be at home for the night, but it was so depressingly empty that she felt heavier just looking at all of blank space. New wallpaper to replace the old, peeling one, maybe a nice little coffee table... Or better, something to put in the vase on the windowsill. Wen was determined to keep it there in the event that she could put roses in it someday. It was something she promised her mother when she was still alive, as roses were not only her favorite, but were also bizarrely the most dangerously mutated flower variety that she had seen.
The gunshots almost sounded like fireworks as Wen spent the rest of the night with a cold can of soup and a half-finished book of Sudoku puzzles.
It was straight to the labs again the next morning, and Wen was more absorbed in her work than usual. Instead of making a pointed effort to ignore Troy's "jokes", she actually feigned a laugh, which caused him to scratch his head in confusion and retreat back to his desk. Getting her annoyed was the fun part, not telling the joke on its own!
It wasn't a bad morning, all in all; there were fewer compromised samples for once, and it made filling out the papaerwork easy. A checkmark was always going to be faster than a detailed report and disposal order, and having it run through the full channel to get verified and signed-off at every step.