[WP] "So what happens if I press this button?" I asked. "Nothing." She replied. I pushed the button in, grinning. "It's when you let go that things get nasty."

I look at her, still smiling, thinking she'll laugh and say that she was joking about what she'd just said but her face remains cold and critical.

"You see," she says, placing her arms behind her in that contemplative way people like doing and starting to pace the small area in which we were. "If you'd like to join our company and start working with us, you need to realize that this is not a place for infantile games. You must realize this. This is serious business. If we allowed goofs and idiots in here, we would have gone out of business years ago. Been a joke from the moment we started."

I'm no longer smiling. I didn't think that my first job interview would go like this. I might have expected the talk about maintaining high standards within the company, but nothing like being told that I could be in actual danger.

I'd woken up today, gotten ready, still in wonder of how I'd been picked out of thousands of applicants. This job presented the opportunity of leaving the poor and dangerous life so many of us eager interns led in the Sandpits. Yesterday alone, 40 people had died from starvation or had been hunted down by the Rebellious Givehorns. No one would feed us, or protect us, except for the Zera Company. If you got a job there.

When I'd reached the splendid front doors of Zera, along with 18 others, a group of well-dressed employees had come out to greet us. They'd all taken us to separate rooms. A woman had taken me to my room, where we sat down for our interview. On the table had been this huge button that I'd kept glancing at because it was the kind you couldn't ignore. Despite my feeling small and uncivilized in such a place like Zera, coupled with my nerves on how the interview was going, I asked the interviewer, not being able to stop myself, what the button was for.

She glanced down at the button and said it didn't do anything

/r/WritingPrompts Thread