The second surprise: it looked like an office.
Not dramatically different. Not a void or a chamber of horrors or anything that the part of her brain that processed fear had been readying itself for. An office. Workstations, in rows. Monitors, on. The monitors were showing something — she could not read it from the lift doorway, the text too small, but something was running on every screen. The overhead lighting was different from the floors below — warmer, yellower, the specific quality of incandescent light in a space that had not updated its fixtures in a long time.
She stepped out. She spoke quietly, for Rajan's audio: "Floor ten. Office layout. Workstations. Maybe thirty stations. Monitors are active. I'm going to look at a monitor."
She went to the nearest workstation. The monitor was running something that looked like a call management system — the interface familiar, the structure similar to the one on floor seven. But the queue it was showing was not the Zenith Solutions queue. The account numbers were different. The caller IDs were different. The status field for each call showed not the standard statuses — Ringing, Active, On Hold, Completed — but something else. A series of descriptors she could not immediately interpret: Transmitting. Receiving. Integrating. Cataloguing.
She photographed it. Then the next monitor, which showed something that looked like a data table. Columns of information, rows of entries. She recognised the format — it was similar to the Zenith customer database. But the entries were not customer billing information. The columns were labeled with words she had not seen in a database before: Location. Geometry. Personnel Count. Temporal. Awareness Stage.
Awareness Stage. The column had values. For each entry: a number from one to five, and most of them were at two or three. Some were at four. She scrolled down — the mouse on the workstation moved, the system was live — and found one entry at five.
The entry at Awareness Stage 5: the location field read Zenith Solutions, Floor 7, Station R-07.
