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15 hours earlier:

8:00 AM, Monday

I cringed as the alarm clock went off, but nonetheless got up for my first day of work: I was now an official employee of Abstergo Industries' IT department. I'd been avoiding my landlord for the past week as I desperately waited for the conformation call to come in, and it finally had the night before, mainly because of the fact that I owed at least one month's rent, if not two. I threw on some jeans and a t-shirt with my sportsjacket and started down the stairs, never realizing that I had forgotten my phone. Fifteen minutes later, I was standing in front of a rather long multistory building, featuring a giant chrome triangle on the side. Welcome to Abstergo, I thought, and stepped through the doors.

11:01 PM, Monday

"Hello?" I asked into the phone. A sigh of relief came through the line.

"Alice! Are you okay? What happened? Where are you?" asked T- no, my mom.

"Don't worry, Mom, I'm fine." I replied into the phone. "I'm fine," I replied, softer this time, but was I? I had found proof that my brother was here, but he wasn't. The shirt on my chest stung my skin where I had carved into myself the night before, and the night before that one, and every night for the past several months. My only consolation was the fact that I could defend myself if I had to, and that wasn't even an issue because I was only ever attacked verbally. I must have started crying, because on the other end of the line I could here my mother's hushed voice as she spoke to her husband.

"She... she called me Mom."

"Really?" he replied, amazed. "Where is she?"

"I don't know, she's started to sob."

I didn't hear the rest, because I hung up right then.

8:15 AM, Monday

Stepping past the receptionist in the front desk and into the elevator, I couldn't help but notice how corporate everything looked: black leather, glass, and satin silver chrome was everywhere. A potted plant that was a brighter green than naturally possible even adorned the corner. I selected the basement, where the IT office was. After a brief pause, the elevator started down, and stopped at the bottom. The doors opened to an unshakably white hallway with halls as glossy as the slick linoleum floor. The third door on the left bore a plastic black placard simply reading "IT". I opened the door, and was greeted by a whoosh of cold air vaguely reminiscent of an airlock.

This room was even cooler than the hall behind it. Several workstations were set up, all with at least two monitors, and some with up to six. All seemed to be showing system performance stats that bore peculiar resemblance to EKGs, save for a couple of the dual monitor stations that instead had several different command prompts open. It seemed that I was the only one in the department, but that couldn't be right. A company this large had to have a whole team in every building. Suddenly, a guy in his mid-twenties stepped out from a door that I hadn't noticed. From inside came the blue glow of hundreds of blade servers.

"Hey," I greeted hastily. "My name's Ty."

"Nice to meet ya Ty. My name's Dillon. Welcome to Abstergo."

11:25 PM, Monday

I looked over at Ty's phone in my other hand, and pressed the button to dial J's number. The phone rang for what seemed like hours as I scolded myself over my tears. I had gone 6 months without crying, maybe even more. Ever since he left, I had locked away my tears and replaced them with pain, and that had been working perfectly fine up until now.

"Hello?" asked J, finally picking up. "Ty? Is that you?"

"No." I replied slowly. "This is Alice... Do you know where he is?"

"Alice... who are you? Ty told me that if anything happened to him... Do you know if he's okay?"

"Do you?"

For a long time, there was silence, punctuated briefly by a beep from the other line.

"Fuck. Alice? Still there?" J asked, a little more frantic this time.

"Yeah. Where the hell is Tyres?" I asked, starting to lose my patience.

"Meet me outside the Abstergo Building downtown. I'll be wearing a white hoodie with a black undershirt. Be there as soon as humanly possible." With that, he hung up.

Fuck that "humanly" shit, I thought as I started out of the apartment and onto the street. I'm a goddamn otter.

8:15 AM, Monday

"Glad to have a new recruit here in the ol' IT department. I've been having some overheating issues with the servers back there." Dillon explained.

"Overheating? It's fuckin' 20 degrees in here. How the hell is that possible?" I asked, astounded.

"I'm afraid I can't really tell ya, Ty, but I do know that they're under extremely heavy workloads. I would have you help me with that, but I just got a call in, and a certain Miss Janice on floor eight needs a new hard drive and doesn't have the means to do it herself. Take this," Dillon said, thrusting a SATA to USB 3.0 cable and an SSD into my hands. "And get on with it!" With that Dillon patted me on the back and sent me off.

The elevator climbed slowly to the eighth floor, and when I finally exited it, I realized that I had no clue where I was going. I walked up to a fellow Abstergo employee. "Excuse me, ma'am, but could you direct me to the Janice's desk?" She stopped and opened her mouth as if to speak, but instead just walked away.

When I finally found the appropriate desk, Janice was nowhere to be seen. I switched the two hard drives and booted up, surprised to find that not only was there an operating system already on the solid-state, but that it was a custom OS made by and for Abstergo. Interesting, I thought, and got on with my work. I plugged the cable in to the old hard drive and mounted it, curious to see what was on it before I transferred all the data.

Two folders stood out above all others: one was a hidden encrypted folder named ".tmp_lr" and the other was on her desktop and labeled "passwds". Using the passwords from the appropriate folder, I decrypted .tmp_lr and viewed it's contents. Hundreds, if not thousands, of unencrypted documents regarding Templar secrets greeted me. Before anyone could see what I was doing, I closed out and began the file transfer. Not even a full day on the job, and you've already gained a wealth of information. Good job, Ty, I thought to myself. Before long, the transfer was finished, so I unplugged the hard drive and pocketed it to deliver to the Assassin's Den. It was then that I noticed that my phone was missing, but I dismissed it and went back to the IT department.

"What took you so long?" asked Dillon from the server room when I re-entered. "Lots of files, plus I couldn't find Janice's desk." I replied, maybe a bit too hastily, because Dillon stepped out and glared at me. "You didn't snoop around anywhere?" he asked.

"Only if you count getting lost as 'snooping.'" I replied.

"Not even digitally?" Dillon pressed on. It was then that I realized my mistake, recalling how I never had any proof that I was at Janice's desk, or that there even was a Janice. Dillon had every computer in Abstergo being monitored in here, there was no way he wouldn't know about my exploits.

The look on my face must have revealed that I knew, because he continued without waiting for a reply.

"I'm sorry that we can't trust you around sensitive information, Ty." Dillon said, and snapped his fingers. I felt a hand grab my shoulder and turned around to see two security guards, followed by the brief vision of a nightstick before everything went black.