To get your affairs in order as the new Assistant Director

You needed some time to regroup and reflect after your encounter with Dr. Brooks. You cursed yourself at letting the director dictate the tone, but that was in the past now. After you cleaned up back down on level 5, you checked to make sure Reginald actually got the gears moving for your new life and career.

The next week was a flurry of activity, as you staggered your goodbyes throughout the company. Dr. Hildebrand was the first to 'depart', after you spent a day making sure everyone would continue on with their work. You claimed that you and Dr. Walker would make sure that the incoming doctor knew everything necessary to keep the research running smoothly, something you could guarantee when every identity was you. Chloe's assistant, Amanda, was able to pose as Dr. Walker for brief moments throughout the transition period, but your shapeshifting let you make more official statements without requiring the need to possess Amanda's body. Amanda had been looking at a new position anyway, so the timing was convenient on that front.

As for Emily, you had a little goodbye party with close coworkers, you only had a handful that you really connected with so you tried to not make it a big deal. You made up a story about getting a job in Italy for a different biotech lab, but mostly everyone wanted to gossip about the strange departure of the two lead scientists, not connecting any dots between their departure and a lab technician's. Despite the Emily part of you having gained clearance to meet with them only a few days prior. You'd apparently been too good at blending in, that you just didn't generate that sort of interest. Regardless, everyone speculated whether the doctors were really retiring, or if this was some sort of big move from the higher-ups, worried that Hideki was going to change the priorities of the lab projects and their resignations were in protest.

Seems you'd have a lot of rumors to put to rest when you started your new position.

With everything handled after that week, the paperwork for Dr. Juno Ternion arrived, and it was extensive. Fortunately, your official record preserved your multiple doctorates, and your backstory wove details from your three lives anyway, so there wasn't really much memorization required for anything you didn't already know. And then came the interviews... the video calls with the CEO of Hideki Tech were challenging, but you had to pass a polygraph test in accordance to the policy for this government contract. Luckily, you had such precise control over your body with the properties of your slime and bodysuit that you had very little trouble overcoming any hurdles the test through at you. By the following Friday, you were back in Dr. Brooks office, having officially been brought on board in your new identity. He slid a manila folder towards you on his desk. You shuddered as you recall what happened at that desk, but you shook your head and took the folder to open.

"Here's the shortened version of things to bring you up to speed, Assistant Director Ternion. Most files for each floor don't leave their respective floor, that's how secretive this is, so this is all I can share with you without a live tour. But to sum up: Project Inside Out technically didn't end when Hideki Labs said it had. The experiments with Zoe and Chloe did, as you are well aware, but funding immediately shifted to some new projects, this time with military backing. The military and aerospace projects for the next Project Inside Out experiments focused on a few shortcomings, namely they wanted to solve two problems: long-term storage and the intelligence and independence of the target experiment. The three days a bodysuit and slime could survive without a host was considered too restrictive, and that you were smart enough to get doctorates made the government nervous about what they could expect for trying to keep a particular project under control if deployed. You always sort of did your own thing, clearly..."

You read quietly through the file. It didn't say much, most of the text was redacted. All you really were able to piece together is that the development in the continuation of Project Inside Out dropped the mobile medical unit aspect of things, and instead focused on a route to protect and augment soldiers and astronauts.

"So... would you like to go meet Lina and Tina?"

You weren't sure what to make of all this. It as strange to feel kept in the dark for so long about sharing the same building as your successors, even if they'd only been really developed in the past five or so years. It made it seem like Hideki Labs was less than a family to you than you'd originally considered it to be, even though some of the scientists that might be considered your parents were still around elsewhere in Hideki's sprawling corporate network, themselves not even authorized to know about the next generation of you. The mystery tugged at you, but at the same time, it felt a little overwhelming to even digest what you'd already heard.