Mandatory Employment Offer (Corruption/Corporate Brainwashing)

In Krista’s line of business, asking questions would get you killed. Admittedly, when your job is infiltrating secure facilities and stealing whatever isn’t nailed down and some things that are, so can not asking questions, but at least that latter is a maybe rather than a guarantee. Still, she had to wonder what kind of game her bosses were playing. She wasn’t dumb enough to ask them, but she had to wonder.

Krista was confident in her skills. She could hack circles around any corpo techie, and could hide in an empty room given enough warning. She was damn good at her job, and her fees reflected that. But she only lasted long enough to get that good because she didn’t take suicide jobs. When the madmen told her that her job was to break into a PharmaPsych facility, the biggest name in biotech and experimental psycho-therapies and all around not a megacorp you wanted to mess with. When they said they wanted her to break into their most secure R&D facility to steal corporate secrets, she nearly spit out her drink.

When she’d doubled her price, she’d expected them to turn her down and look for some other schmuck with more greed than sense. You don’t do a job that big and walk away unscathed. From then on you’re on corporate radar, and they will track you to the ends of the earth. If she backed off then she’d ruin her rep, but if she asked for appropriate compensation and they rejected, that was on them. But the contact instead gave her exactly the price she asked for in cold hard cash. She couldn’t back out after that, and so, cursing herself for not making it triple the price instead, she had to accept the job.

The secure facility was in the sublevels of a nondescript office building. It was impressively subtle by the standards of most megacorps, who made sure to broadcast their ownership of just about anything as loud as they could with the brightest colors they could get their hands on - or at the very least, by making the tallest glass spires they could. But while the building was most definitely owned by a megacorp (like just about everything worth more than five bucks in the city), it wasn’t obvious at a glance which one it was, or even that it was a particularly important building.

Step one of the infiltration was getting past biometrics and passive scanners - it didn’t matter if she could sneak past human eyes if the computers would see her and signal the second she touched a doorknob. It was childishly easy to break into their security servers and give herself permission to be there. One of the employees had a computer issue and was discreetly looking for private consultants so they didn’t have to admit it to their boss, and they gave Krista their local net password without a thought. Someone had clearly missed a security briefing.

After making sure the building security systems recognized her as authorized personnel (and fed them a false identity to attach to that authorization), the prep was over. Compared to the criminal negligence of the main security systems, the data she was supposed to take at least was stored sensibly; it was on an entirely separate network from everything else, consisting only of the server and the computer interface for inputting new data. That meant she had to go inside, download the data to her own rig, and leave with it.

Krista waited for the day of the week when the most experienced night watchmen were on duty; the new ones were jumpy and prone to investigating any given disturbance, but the older ones had grown lazy and stuck in their routines from lack of activity over their tenures. It only took a little bit of hacking in the system she already had access to to get them all assigned to the same shift.

After all that, actually entering the building was child’s play. She simply walked in, the systems recognizing her as authorized and opening all the automatic doors. The building, while unassuming on the outside, was as sprawling as any corporate den on the inside, which gave her plenty of routes to take and ways to avoid the night watchmen - when they weren’t dozing off while standing, anyway.

Despite herself, Krista was feeling almost disappointed at the lack of challenge. She didn’t want to be caught, of course, but for all the trouble she wanted to at least have an opportunity to flex her skills. PharmaPsych must have been getting a bit too comfortable at the top.

She put those thoughts away as she entered the data vault and booted up the terminal. After making sure that doing so wouldn’t instantly trip an alarm, she jacked in and started perusing the data, looking for what her sponsors had asked her to find. It was hidden behind firewalls and false leads, and more than a couple almost-convincing dummy files, but Krista was in her element - there was nothing they could hide from her once she was at the console.

As she finished downloading the data and began to pull out, a blue light washed over the room. On instinct, she grabbed for her hidden firearm and drew it, whirling to face whoever had happened to enter the server room, but nobody was there. “Very impressive, Miss. Consider your application accepted.” A female voice said - Krista instinctively disliked it’s owner. She could hear the corpo-standard arrogance just in her tone. “You made our defenses look like baby’s first security system. We can tell we’ll like your work from here on in.”

“I didn’t submit any kind of application!” Krista snapped. There was nobody in the room, but she noticed on the console a woman’s face had appeared. Wearing a well tailored business suit, it took no guesses to figure out what kind of woman she was. “This is some kind of set up, isn’t it? Who snitched? Was it Bosco-?”

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Nobody needed to “snitch”, as you put it. Your employers are PharmaPsych executives, after all.”

It was a set up, alright. Just not by someone who she thought would bother. “The hell you want me rooting around your files for then!?” she demanded.

“Simple. There was a recent… change in management. We had to let a few valued employees go to ensure stability in the company. Unfortunately, that leaves us terribly lacking in security - a matter that must be rectified before any rivals find out about it.” the executive said. “What better way to learn our weaknesses, then, than to hire someone to exploit them? Those who know enough to make it this far will easily know how to prevent others from doing the same.”

She might have been asking the questions, but Krista didn’t want to be answered like this. The suit was being too honest and open. That meant she didn’t think that Krista could do anything with the information she was getting, which when it came to the corps, usually meant they didn’t think you were going to be walking out alive.

“Don’t worry. We don’t mean to kill you. We mean to hire you.” The suit said, as if reading her mind. “You’ve already passed the test, so congratulations on your new role directing security. Refusals are not accepted.”

There wasn’t even time to respond to that - Krista was preparing to bolt, but the floor opened up beneath her, and she plunged into the depths.

She landed with a solid thump several seconds later, dazed but unharmed. “What…?” she muttered, looking around and trying to figure out where she’d ended up. The room was largely empty - pure white walls, a generic beige carpet, and no furniture beyond the single chair she was sitting in. The wall in front of her seemed to jitter for a second, and she realized it was a screen - the sign “Onboarding Room” flashed across the top of it.

Krista tried to stand, but the moment she moved iron bonds burst from hidden cavities in the chair and locked her in place. She struggled in her seat, but couldn’t break the iron locks - she momentarily wished she’d gone for the strength enhancement cybernetics instead of the hacking ones, but that was pushed from her mind as the executive appeared on the screen. “As I was saying. Welcome, new head of security. I know it might be a bit sudden, and that you weren’t expecting such a sharp rise to power. But don’t worry, the patented PharmaPsych Onboarding Procedure will prepare you fully for your new role. All you have to do is sit there and wait.”

At the last word, the woman vanished from the screen - just as Krista felt something in her restraints shift. She felt a series of pinches across her body, and suddenly relaxed. Why was she so worried, again? It was all of a sudden so very hard to remember, so hard to concern herself with ongoing events. It would be better to just lean back in the chair and relax.

The tension slid right out of her body, and she let herself relax. Why was she so worried? Wasn’t it exciting to get a new job? She should be excited instead, shouldn’t she? Something felt wrong about that, somehow. But it was hard to think about that feeling, especially as a pair of headphones slipped onto her head and the screen flared to life again.

Everywhere she looked, from the walls to the ceiling to even the floor was something out of a commercial. A dozen commercials really, playing at once. The PharmaPsych logo - a caduceus staff overlaid with a spiral and a human head - was blasted across every available surface. There were scenes of the sort of brand imaging that the megacorp wanted associated with their company; the disabled able to walk again, old age halted, the decline of mental faculties reversed, and revolutionary new therapies. It all sounded so nice. It was accompanied by the blaring of company slogans directly into Krista’s ears - platitudes about a second chance at life, new beginnings, preservation of that which in past ages would be lost, helping the troubled return to society.

It was all corporate bullcrap, of course. Krista knew this. Or she was supposed to know this. But suddenly, she wasn’t all that convinced. All those images seemed way more sensible. The words seemed so nice. A company like PharmaPsych wouldn’t do that kind of human experimentation or unethical brainwashing she’d heard about, right?

She nodded slowly in her daze. Of course not. PharmaPsych was great. It was the best. The logos were plastered across every available surface once again - and now, Krista’s very mind seemed to be one of those surfaces. It was dyed in the megacorp’s official colors, implanting a loyalty, even dependency, into the core of her being.

Krista was excited to join her idols, her icons, in the greatest company in the world. The worries had clearly just been the nerves overwhelming her, of course! Sure, she’d never been a nervous kind of person in the past, but even she would get nervous for trying to land such a prestigious job right?

Detecting she was suitably compliant, the machine moved along. A backstreet hacker and thief wouldn’t do as a high ranking member of PharmaPsych. They needed to give her a major attitude adjustment. A visor slid out from the headphones, lighting up in hypnotic spirals as it beamed information directly into her mind.

Between the drugs, the oppressive white noise in the headphones, and the hypnotic spirals in the visor, her very identity was simply putty to be molded in whatever shape was needed. Priorities came first. She wasn’t a nice person to begin with, but what compassion she had was sliced right out. An executive had to be able to make cold-hearted decisions for the good of the company, and there was no need for a nice girl there. Her morality was shifted around a bit - what was good for the company was what good for everyone. And what was good for the company was profit, profit, profit.

The next step, of course, was giving her the proper personality for a megacorp high ranking employee. After the company, her next priority was personal pleasure. A hedonistic lifestyle making use of all the wealth her position offered. She was a woman with power, and using it gave her an almost sexual gratification; she’d dominate whoever got in the way of her doing her job or getting what she wanted with a vicious grin on her face.

This flowed easily into the next core part of her new self - a desire to crush anyone who opposed her beneath her expensive high heels. As head of security, her job was to play queen bee, force the worker drones into line with whatever threats and promises it took. Then she also had to play the soldier, making sure the competition fell to the company’s increasing financial dominance. And thirdly, her job was internal security. Spies and incompetents would be rooted out without mercy - and sent down to onboarding for ‘correction’.

The onboarding process wrapped up in a whirl of metal and cloth, as the chair dressed Krista up for her new job - a well tailored black suit, sharp high heels (with daggers hidden inside, of course), hair tied back in a severe ponytail and a visor feeding her information from all the security systems in the company.

“Welcome, Head of Security. Please leave the onboarding room for briefing.” A synthetic voice said.

Krista laughed, a harsh, barking sound. “Gladly. I wonder if they’ll give me any new toys as a welcome gift~?” she said, licking her lips as she stepped into the world of megacorps without a thought for her old self.