My Secret Santa's Secret Baby

I knew I shouldn’t get with an underling, but I couldn’t help. I was used to taking what I wanted in life and right now I wanted Skye.

But I told myself to calm down and see where fate took us, because it would be inappropriate to rush things with her being so brand new, even though, from the way she looked up at me from under her eyelashes, I had the feeling that she wanted the same thing, too.

Plus, I didn’t even know how old she was. I wanted to make sure she was of legal age, even though I assumed she was.

It was a regular day at the office, other than there being a hot new employee. With the assignments handed out and the Secret Santas chosen, there wasn’t much for me to do. I tried my best not to fall into the idle executive stereotype, being paid obscene amounts of money for doing basically nothing.

Booting up the desktop computer that came with the office I checked my emails, doing my best to look busy. The computer had come with the usual tracking software to make sure it wasn’t used for any non-business-like activities.

Fortunately, the board members were all in their 60s and most of them wouldn’t know a web server from a serving tray and all of their cunning machinations were easily thwarted with a mid-range VPN. I was far from a ‘hacker,’ but I had been employing the assistance of ‘information technology’ since the late-90s and tried to keep up as much as I could.

In the technical sense it made me an ‘early adopter’ without having had any real intention of being one. It made me both sad and relieved that the modern youth seemed to have no idea who Steve Jobs was and mostly saw Bill Gates as the guy behind the charity foundation.

The spark was bright and clear. Searching out the message, buried under piles of promotions and other spam that somehow needed up in my inbox, I found it. Skye’s original application. It took some scouring but there it was.

Her date of birth. October 10th, 2003. She’d just turned 19 two months prior. At first I felt too old for her but it was only 11 years, I reminded myself. I’d just had my birthday as well and even more recently.

I was 30 but only recently and the age gap wasn’t really that big. Not if we had things in common. Despite my reservations, mostly imposed by society, Skye was an adult, after all, so I decided to give it a try.

I would go slow and see how things went. If she was interested, wonderful. If not, I’d live, though I had no intention of pressuring her into anything.

I tried to put Skye out of my head. If there was one thing I’d learned in my time on earth, it was that obsession rarely helped anyone involved. I wouldn’t even look her way until I knew with 100% certainty that she felt the same feelings I did. At least, that was the plan.

And now it was time for the cameras. No one was supposed to know about those.

I could just imagine the sales pitch. A slick seller in a company uniform assuring the owners that the cameras were the smallest on the market. The most effective mode of unseen surveillance.

Every floor had them. Sticking to the open areas that were public anyway, to avoid any legal issues in case they were ever found, the cameras gave a bird’s eye view of the cubicle farm and reception desk from various angles.

Another feature of the system was that they were digital, beaming the footage right onto the senior editor’s computer via a closed network.

The broadcast was easy to pull up, the full color feeds streaming in real time. There were six in all. Four on the farm and two on the desk.

I saw that Inga was reading as usual. A new looking copy of History magazine. There were times I wondered about her and what depths may lay beneath her efficient demeanor.

Why would she choose to be a receptionist when she clearly knew a lot about everything from her reading adventures?

And yet, she was not the one I wanted to see, so I moved on.

There Skye was. Working her way through a manuscript, taking notes as needed. Highlighting areas of note, either good or bad. Green hi-lighter for good, red for bad, yellow for questionable.

It had to have been her own system, the company dictating no such thing. I would be interested to see the manuscript when she was finished with it.

I was somewhat aware of the author she was reading and was impressed at how well she was working her way through it, assuming his current novel was anything like his previous work.