by Brian Olsen
“The woman you’re looking for is Dakota Bell. She works in Marketing.”
“How did you...please, come in, sit down.” For a moment David thought maybe he should stand and let Mr. Ackerman sit behind his desk, but the older man took the seat Grace had vacated before he could do so.
“I would like you to leave Miss Bell alone, Mr. Myers. Do not contact her.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ackerman, but how did you know I was trying to find her? I only remembered her a few minutes ago.” He looked suspiciously at Grace, who had finally changed her remaining shoe and was re-entering his office.
“Don’t look at me like that, David, I didn’t say anything.” She came around behind him. “Sit forward,” she commanded. As he did so, she lifted up his suit jacket from off the back of his chair. “I splashed tea on this when I put the tray down,” she apologized, and left them again, jacket in hand. She pulled the door shut behind her.
Throughout Grace’s puttering, Ackerman had never taken his eyes off of David. “How I knew is irrelevant. Dakota Bell is a valued asset of Amalgamated Synergy. Yesterday, while my attention was elsewhere, her supervisor addressed her in an unwarranted adversarial manner that could have resulted in our losing her. I believe that if you reach out to her with your own concerns you may drive her away. I will not allow that to happen. You will cease and desist in your attempts to contact her.”
“I...” David was stunned. He had always gotten the impression that Ackerman was casual with his employees, even jovial, but his tone now was clinical and measured, his eyes cold. “I...yes, of course, sir. Whatever you say.”
“Good.” Ackerman stood and started for the door.
“Sir!” David said, rising. “Mr. Ackerman. I’m sorry, I have a question. If you have a moment.”
Ackerman stopped and turned back with an icy glare. “What is it?”
David hesitated. Screw it, he thought. I’m quitting anyway. “You mentioned my concerns...do you know about what’s been going on in Mergers and Acquisitions recently? About the kind of acquisitions we’ve been making?”
“I am aware.”
David struggled with what to say next. Ackerman was making him so anxious he felt short of breath. “May I ask why? What’s the reason behind all these random deals?”
The CEO considered for a moment. He looked David up and down slowly, as if appraising him. “You are not a highly-valued asset, David Myers. If you were, you might not need to ask that question.” Ackerman smiled suddenly, his teeth gleaming. “Perhaps if you truly dedicate yourself to the Amalgamated Synergy family, you’ll better understand our business strategies.”
David took an involuntary step back as Ackerman turned and walked out of his office. He sank back down into his chair. He felt lightheaded.
“Is everything all right?”
He looked up to see Grace standing in the doorway, a look of concern on her face. Just the sight of her made him feel a little better.
“I’m not sure. He must have been listening to our conversation. He told me to stay away from that woman.”
“Are you going to?”
“I suppose I have to,” he said. “Can you clear my calendar for the morning? I need to call the Dutton Foster people and then I think I’m going to rest for a while. I’m not feeling very well.”
“Oh, dear. Yes, you’re looking pale. I’ll get you excused from the morning staff meeting, don’t worry.”
“Thanks,” he said, as she returned to her desk. He turned to his laptop and started to look up the contact information for Dutton Foster, then stopped.
He couldn’t leave it. It just wasn’t in him to leave a mystery like this unsolved. Mr. Ackerman might be intimidating as hell, but David had a cushy job at Jensen-Keystone waiting for him so there wasn’t much the creepy CEO could do.
He had a name now. Ackerman was clearly watching him, so if he tried to reach her through her work email or phone they might be discovered. Instead, he took out his personal phone, logged in to AmSyn’s Wi-Fi network and opened Facebook. Dakota Bell – not that common a name, he thought. He could probably find her.
It only took a moment. Dakota Bell, Brooklyn, New York. The picture matched the woman he had met with a few weeks previously. He tried to give a triumphant whoop, but it came out as a cough. He wheezed heavily, trying to catch his breath. His lips and tongue were tingling.
His office door clicked shut. Most of the front wall of his office was glass, and he could see Grace on the other side. She had taken her chair and propped it under the door handle, and was now standing, watching him. Her face was blank, her expression unreadable.
He hammered the intercom on his phone. “Grace?” he rasped.
She reached behind her and switched on the speaker on her phone, then turned back to face him. “I’m here, David.”
“Grace, I think I’m...what was in that tea you gave me?”
“It was wild strawberry tea, David.”
His heart would have pounded in fear if it wasn’t already slowing. “Grace, I’m allergic to strawberries! You know I am!”
“I know, David. That’s why I also shaved some fresh strawberries into your cereal.”
He fumbled in his pockets, then in his desk drawer. “My pen, I need my...” He looked at her in horror. “My epi-pen! Grace...”
She held up his suit jacket. “It’s in here.”
“Grace, please...” He could barely get the words out. His throat was almost completely closed. He pounded at his phone, closing Facebook and bringing up the keypad. He dialed 911, pressed send, and waited, trying not to panic.
“You should have left it alone, David,” came Grace’s voice. “If you had done as you were told, I would have given you your epi-pen.”
He looked around in confusion – her voice came from both the speakerphone on his desk and the phone in his hand. He dropped it to the ground and lurched for the door to the office.
“Your value is low,” Grace said. “You would have been allowed to resign.”
He tried the handle, but the chair on the other side kept it from opening. His vision was blurring around the edges. He collapsed to the ground, looking up at Grace, inches away on the other side of the glass.
She looked down at him. Her face was impassive, but her eyes were red with tears. She sat back down at her desk and reached into her top drawer. She took out the box cutter she kept for opening stubborn packages.
Despite what she had done to him, David was heartbroken as he watched Grace open up her wrists. He wanted to beg her to stop but he couldn’t make a sound. He watched her life drip away as he suffocated on the floor of his office. He died without answers to any of his questions.
Chapter Eight
Dakota recovering
Dakota, a cold washcloth on her forehead, was lying down on the couch in the living room of the apartment she and her roommates shared at 100 Sullivan Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The trees lining the street outside broke up the harsh midday sun streaming through the window, but she kept her aching eyes gently shut nonetheless. She plumped up the colorful thrift shop pillow to give her neck more support, and water from the washcloth ran down her cheek, dripping on the cheap generic-blue Ikea sofa that was, in that moment, the most comfortable sofa in the world.
She could hear footsteps from the floor above. It had to be either Caitlin or Alan. Mark’s irritatingly perfect body was immune to hangovers and he had risen early to go to work. The toilet in the upstairs bathroom flushed.
Their apartment took up the top two stories of a three-story home, with bathroom and four bedrooms on the upper floor, and kitchen, dining room and living room below. There was an additional apartment on the first floor and another in the basement, but these were currently vacant, meaning they hadn’t had to worry about noise when the four of them had arrived home falling-down drunk at five o’clock that morning.
Dakota’s head had been screaming when she woke up in the early afternoon, but she considered hangovers a we
akness and so had forced herself to get out of bed. After two ibuprofen and a glass of water failed to win their battle, she conceded enough ground to her headache to retreat to a horizontal position once more.
After Mark had explained about his encounter with, and invitation from, Pickle Dundersfield, the roommates’ afternoon of drinking had changed from commiseration to celebration. At first it was only Dakota who was feeling festive – Alan was still depressed about his lot in life, Mark was anxious about going to Pickle’s party, and Caitlin was bothered by an audition she never got around to telling them about. But Dakota had a plan of action, which always made her feel better. She would go to the party as Mark’s guest, ask for a private moment with her hostess, and rat out Richard. The only potential snag she saw was if Richard himself was at the party, but given that Pickle had invited Mark with the clear intention of cheating on her fiancé it seemed unlikely that she had also invited any work colleagues.
After a few rounds Dakota’s three roommates had been more than willing to be infected by her good mood, so the celebratory afternoon had turned into a drunken evening which collapsed into a debauched morning. There had been a lot of scotch and Jägermeister, a few games of pool, darts, and beer pong, and she dimly remembered doing a tequila body shot off of DJ. Dakota could hold her liquor, but there were limits, and she was paying for overstepping those limits now.
She heard one of her roommates moving around upstairs, and a moment later Alan stumbled down the stairs and into the armchair opposite the couch.
“Morning,” he mumbled, closing his eyes. He ran his fingers through his unkempt black hair, massaging his scalp firmly.
She sat up, slowly, removing the washcloth from her forehead and placing it on the coffee table. “Afternoon, sunshine,” she replied. “Sleep well?”
“Oh, yeah, blissfully,” he said. “Somebody stuck an ice pick in the back of my head, but apart from that...” He opened his eyes. “You’re not going into work, I take it?”
“Oh, hell, no,” she said. “I’m not going back in until Monday. I’m going to talk to Miss Pickle first, see how that falls out.”
“So much drama, I love it. My life is so pedestrian next to yours.”
“Why did you keep shouting ‘this doesn’t count’ last night when Mark was flashing his penis at you?”
“Because I didn’t ask to see it. If he shows me his penis on his own initiative that’s on him.”
“Okay...you know what, I’m not going to request any further explanation, I think I’m good with that.”
“That’s probably for the best,” he said. “So what are you going to do with your free day? Free two days, rather?”
“I could ask you the same question. I’m assuming your temp agency didn’t offer you another job when you told them you were quitting your current one.”
“When I told them...” He jumped to his feet. “Oh, shit.” He ran upstairs.
Dakota picked her glass of water up from their coffee table and trudged slowly into the dining room, where her laptop was charging. She ducked into the kitchen to refill her glass then took a seat at the dining room table. She opened up her laptop, logged on to Jumpa, and opened her saved game of Work It. With a hangover to nurse, tension to release and nowhere to be until the following evening, she could think of no better way to spend her forced vacation than to expand her virtual business empire and crush her main competitor.
She clicked on her Drone, BellTower, to wake her up, and checked how her company had been doing since she had last logged in on Tuesday night. Profits were holding steady, which was pretty good considering she hadn’t played in almost two days. But she had lost employees, which was strange.
Part of the appeal of Work It was its flexible gameplay. If the player wanted, it could be played as nothing more than a simple workplace simulation. This was what Alan did – he worked in one office, concentrating on building his Drone’s productivity in order to earn Jumpa Beans, the game’s form of reward token. He interacted very little with other players, and wasn’t interested in buying Career Advancements.
Dakota, on the other hand, was extremely interested in advancing her Drone’s career. Alan had been the one to introduce her to the game, so she had started out playing like him, earning rewards for successfully making copies or delivering presentations, earning new outfits for her Drone, flashier decorations for her cubicle, and faster equipment for her office. After a week or two, though, she saw the pointlessness of this style of gameplay – it was, essentially, the same game over and over, but by this point she was hooked and couldn’t stop playing. So she saved up all of her Jumpa Beans to buy a Career Advancement. And that was where the game really got interesting.
The game allowed Drones to advance through various career levels. The really interesting part, Dakota felt, was that when you were promoted to a manager other Drones were working under you – Drones which were controlled by real people. Manager Drones earned a certain number of Jumpa Beans for every Jumpa Bean their employees earned, which they could eventually use to buy more Career Advancements. The challenges required of the players changed with each promotion, becoming more complex and requiring more and more managing of actual people, who may or may not have any interest in being managed.
Dakota had worked her way up as far as she could go in the corporation she had been assigned to when she first joined the game, and had eventually jumped ship, starting her own company and bringing many of her subservient Drones with her with the promise of shared rewards. Now she was a CEO – her lifelong dream achieved at twenty-five, she thought. Such a shame it was meaningless.
She took a closer look at her company’s stats to try and figure out why her employees were abandoning her. DakotaCo’s profits wouldn’t hold steady for long at this rate of attrition. There was one particular company poaching all of her employees, one that she was very familiar with – the drably-named CorporationSimulation. Its CEO was Dakota’s virtual arch-nemesis, J84z33.
J84z33 was, of course, logged on. Since Dakota had become aware of her strongest competitor, she had never once found him or her not logged on to the game – it was like J84z33 never slept. Dakota grimaced. She put a lot of thought and effort into this game, and she was being beaten by someone who hadn’t even bothered to change the generic username the game had given him. Or her. It was absurd.
She took a swig of water and slammed the glass back on the table. She sent her rival CEO a private message – Stop stealing my employees! – but, as usual, he or she didn’t respond.
She needed to find out why her employees were quitting, so she scanned the list of usernames to see if there were any she had exchanged messages with before.
She blinked, then refreshed the list. That couldn’t be right. “Alan!” she called out, loud enough for him to hear her from upstairs. “What the fuck?”
He came running down the stairs, his phone in his hand. “What?”
“You work for ME, mister! What the hell?”
“I know, they just told me,” he responded. “I was about to ask you what the hell. I mean, I’m grateful, but when did you have a chance to call them?”
Dakota was lost. “Call who?”
“My temp agency.”
“Your...what? What does your temp agency have to do with you working for me?”
“They...everything. What? I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“I’m talking about you working for me, or no longer working for me, in Work It,” she said slowly. “Why are you talking about your temp agency?”
“You yelled at me that I work for you. I thought you were talking about my new temp assignment.”
“Your new...you’re working at AmSyn?”
“Yes. I start Monday. I called my agency to apologize for quitting and not telling them, and they said I was lucky, because that would have been my last chance but Amalgamated Synergy specifically requested me and I’m supposed to report to Dakota Bell on Monday morning. I assumed you called them a
fter our talk at the bar yesterday. Didn’t you?”
“No. I don’t hire temps. What’s the assignment?”
“Administrative assistant.”
“Weird. Derek must be going on vacation, he’s the only admin who reports to me. Maybe my boss gave my name as your supervisor so I’d have something to do?”
“Yeah. Okay. But...” He paused, then sat down at the table across from her. “They specifically requested me. Who would even know who I am besides you?”
“I...I have no idea. That’s...” She tried to think. “Nobody. Unless maybe someone knows we’re roommates somehow and is messing with me?”
“That’s disconcerting.”
“Yeah, it is. It really is. Fuck. Now there’s a conspiracy on top of assholery and laziness.”
“You’re not going to cancel the job, are you?” he asked. “I know you hate it there, but I’m kind of excited about the idea of a job where I can just surf the net and play games all day. And we can have lunch and hang out! Work buddies! Ooh, we can commute together! You can tie my tie on the train, save some time in the morning!”
She smiled back at him. “I won’t cancel it. It’ll be good to have a friend in the office, everybody else hates me. Oh!” Her smile disappeared. “Speaking of being a friend, what the hell? Why did you leave DakotaCo? I was about to name you Employee of the Month.”
“Oh, right. Last night at the bar while you and Mark were dancing I was showing Caitlin how to play Work It on her iPad, and I logged in as me, and this other CEO sent me a message offering me Jumpa Beans to come and work for him...”
“How many?”
“Five thousand.”
“Five thousand Jumpa Beans! That’s crazy money!” Dakota yelled.
“I know, I’m sorry, but I’ve probably got another two or three weeks tops before I get bored with this game and five thousand is more Beans than I can earn in that time, and it’ll get me a good start on whatever game I move on to. I might go back to that university simulation game and try and earn a PhD achievement badge. I should have said something but we were having a good time and you take this game way more seriously than you probably should...”