curie

I had thought, for awhile, that Lancelot was barely paying attention to this project.

I was wrong. This has been his pet from the start.

What this means for me ... I don't even want to think about it.

There's a lot of things about this project I don't think about, just so I can somehow make it through the day.

When I'm in my office I feel like I'm in a bunker hiding from the threat of nuclear war outside. Every email I get from X or management is like a knife in my gut.

Every day I make more progress with the Cube. Every day they whittle me down as a person, more and more.

It might drive me insane, if that's possible. You couldn't manufacture a situation more perfectly designed to drive me insane, or to cause an accident I'll never quite recover from. I expect at some point I'll have a nervous breakdown to the point where I should be in the hospital, but will instead just take a couple days off and apologize about it the whole time.

There's an elephant in the room here that I'm risking my life for a company that might someday prefer that I be dead. Management only cares about my safety to the extent that if I die, I can't finish this thing. They will steal it and call it their own. They've stolen me, and called me their own.

I don't just mean X.

If anyone else here understood anything about this thing, I'd be fired already.

Lancelot is the wild card in the pack. He knows things about the Cube that I never will. And I don't know what kind of game he thinks he's playing.

But think about X and Kristi and everyone else who's been snooping without understanding a word. If X were a scientist instead of just a scion, he'd be starting to understand my data by now, and he'd be there to replace me.

One of the things I don't like to think about is the fact that X isn't an idiot. He actually understands me. That's the scary bit.

They didn't hire me to think like a scientist. They hired me to think like the asshole shouting in the back of a movie theater saying, I coulda made a much better film. They didn't hire me to cite sources and fill out the paperwork. They hired me to hit the ground running and kick the ball into the goal.

I'm basically the Sergio Aguero of the tech industry. Somebody fight me.

When X tries to screw everything up, and says human trials need to start tomorrow, he doesn't actually want that to happen. He wants to make me angry and scared and thinking I'm all out of time. So that I rush things. So that I leap ahead whether the data's there or not. So that I flip and coin and take a guess and risk my life and either I die or I figure this out way before any sane person would've.

And that is sick and fucked up and exactly how I like to work. And it'll probably kill me.

I know this, but I stay. Because I'm the cat that curiosity killed. I'm Marie Curie with the radiation. I accept the danger because of what this could mean to human progress, full stop.

I risk my life and call it fair, but I'd rather not risk yours. Or anyone else's.

Be careful. Be more careful than I'm being.