After working overtime all night, Lin Youchun woke up to find herself sitting in an unfamiliar office. The sign on her desk read "Anomalous Employment Management Division," and the responsibilities posted on the wall said it handled complaints and mediation for "anomalous entities." A half-human, half-spider security guard wandered the halls, and Room 404 held a woman in red who had been locked up for forty-seven years because she was three minutes late.
She searched every filing cabinet and found over six hundred employment approvals, none of them signed, stamped, or numbered. Then a man in a gray suit came in and handed her an appointment document. It was dated yesterday, and the space for the drafter's signature was blank.
Just like all those approval forms.
There was something seriously wrong with this organization. The System had been down for thirty years, all the employees had been hired in violation of the rules, no one had ever signed a formal contract, and no one had done anything about forty-seven years of unpaid wages. Black mist from the Horror Production Department blocked her in the hallway and said, "If you keep investigating, someone will make you disappear."
Lin Youchun sat at her desk and wound the roll of clear tape back into the drawer. She figured it was actually simple: either leave or get the paperwork in order.
The problem was, she couldn't go back.
