Brandon sighs, his shoulders slump forward. “That’s a huge money sink.”
“I know,” Preston sighs back. Mirroring body language, that’s a thing that works, right? We sometimes forget that Preston is twenty-eight, the same age as Eliza, and he doesn’t have a business degree or any real experience in running a company. But in these moments, where he takes tips out of CEO memoirs and Business Insider interviews, we remember. What a talented man it takes to disrupt the system like that. A wunderkind. “But look at it this way—it’s a problem that needs to be addressed—you’ve seen all this Gamergate stuff, how some people say that was the harbinger of this political mess—and we’ll be at the helm, we’ll be at the center of the conversation in a positive way, and that’s good marketing. We’ll get a woman’s photo on the leadership page, which will make articles like this”—he gestures to the “Sexist Game Company” article up on his computer, the one that had taken a screenshot of their leadership web page and used it as ammunition—“impossible to write. Plus it’ll stop the steady leak of users we’ve seen since yesterday. Have you seen this hashtag-raise-the-shield thing? The Vive was supposed to be a huge selling point, and the feminists are poking holes in it.”
“I’ve seen it. But look how many people are signing up in solidarity with us!”
“I’m not really comfortable with misogynists signing up out of spite as our business strategy. You saw the study. More than half of gamers these days are female. This is a long-term solution, I’m telling you.”
“You know, they could be signing up because of Vive. How do we know our announcement didn’t have something to do with it?” As soon as the words are out of Brandon’s mouth, Preston raises a single eyebrow. He does not even have to gesture to the several tabs open, the Twitter responses. Brandon knows he is being stupid. He knows why we are loyal. “Okay, okay. Let’s run it by the numbers guys and see what they say.”
“Now, do it now.”
Brandon sneers. Both men leave the glass office. Preston runs straight into Devonte outside the door. “You wanted to see me?” Devonte asks. “About the eye candy thing?”
Preston looks at his watch. “Oh yes, sorry, I have so many time slots dedicated to the eye candy thing, I’m sorry. I’m not keeping track very well.” Preston registers who he’s talking to. “Hey, Devonte,” he says, his voice sinking into a whisper. “Hypothetically, if I called first, do you think Eliza would be okay with seeing me again, sometime this evening? If I had good news for her?”
Devonte’s eyes deaden a bit and he shrugs. “I dunno, man. You heard her last night. You saw her last night. You might wanna try email.”
“It’s really important, though,” Preston says. “If I emailed her, I’d need to be absolutely sure she read it.”
Let’s zoom in here, slow down, shift focus—Lewis is returning from the bathroom. He passes them, and they are standing outside the office. Outside the glass. Lewis assumes it’s about the goddamn eye candy article—he’s been trying not to think about it; he can’t even look at Jean-Pascale. But when he closes in on them, he hears it: “Hypothetically, if I called first, do you think Eliza would be okay with seeing me again, sometime this evening?” And he passes; the rest of the words land as a mashed string of sounds in his left ear. He can’t control his facial expression—his lips twist up and his dark-circled eyes squint.
This is the moment, the one most of us agree on. The moment where, if he could turn back and walk away, he’d have to do it now. Some of us don’t think he can. But there’s no point in arguing agency versus destiny, because he doesn’t. He doesn’t turn back, and so we’ll never know.
But we know for sure what happens is this: Lewis goes straight to the nearest desk he has access to. It is Jean-Pascale’s, who’s been visiting the bathroom quite a bit in the last twenty-four hours. His seat is only one step closer than Lewis’s own. It’s unclear if he uses Jean-Pascale’s computer on purpose, but many of us think so. Some say no, they’re friends. He wouldn’t have done him dirty like that. But some of us know better: Lewis is a computer nerd. A programmer. He has to know what the consequences will be for JP. The photos are on his phone, after all; he could upload them directly from there and yet he chooses his best friend’s workstation. Perhaps he doesn’t have enough bars to upload that much data from his phone—does Fancy Dog allow employees to sign on to the office Wi-Fi? Or perhaps he is one of those people who finds it tedious to post on forums from a mobile device. Piss-poor excuse—far more likely, we think, that this is revenge. Revenge for what, we’re not exactly sure. But revenge for something. For clearly feeling two ways about their joke. For getting Delphine to pin it all on Lewis. For being tall and a man who women think is eye candy.
It doesn’t matter: the photos of Eliza’s paperwork wind up on Jean-Pascale’s computer, and then they wind up on 4chan. Lewis drags them into the trash on the computer once he is through, but he does not even empty it. That has to be a choice too.
Chapter Forty-Three
DAleb: he wants you to come into the office
EBrig: who?
DAleb: preston
EBrig: huh…
DAleb: i think you should consider it
EBrig: i am considering it
EBrig: i mean, is it for what i think it is
DAleb: rehiring you?
DAleb: tbh idk
DAleb: it sounded like it, though
EBrig: the number of people who are using that raise the shield hashtag’s grown. i’m surprised.
EBrig: i can’t believe people have the bandwidth to fight for me
EBrig: i mean, the other stuff’s grown too
DAleb: tell me you aren’t reading that still
EBrig: its hard not to
EBrig: ive had more calls from talk shows too
DAleb: trevor noah, right?
DAleb: thats the rumor
EBrig: yeah.
Chapter Forty-Four
Eliza walks back into Fancy Dog that night, after many (but not all) employees have gone home. Suzanne is still here, answering phone calls and emails from both sides. When Eliza asks her to stay, she texts “lolololol, im here anyway! bring power bar. coffee. dinner. anything.”
She asks Devonte to stay too. He texts back, “of course.” She tries her very best to look presentable—she’s been holed up in her apartment, in her pajamas. She hasn’t showered since she was fired, but she drags her ass to the bathroom and cleans up before arriving.
Jean-Pascale and Lewis are both here too, undergoing their sensitivity training. Jean-Pascale looks worse—dark circles equal to Lewis’s, shoulders hunched, curly hair a little more greasy than usual. Lewis looks—fine? As fine as Lewis normally looks. He is speaking to Jean-Pascale again, but his words are stilted and he’s smiling like his teeth are made of broken Legos.
We know exactly what time we start, so we know that, as she crosses the threshold, she feels the phone in her pocket begin to buzz. But Preston and Brandon are in the lobby to meet her, and she doesn’t pick it up. It is definitely a phone call—the long buzzes instead of the short double Morse code that signifies a text or tweet. She decides to let it go to voicemail. That’s what voicemail boxes are for, after all.
The office seems colder than normal. “Take a seat,” Preston says. He gestures to the leather chairs, the comfy ones. She sits, pets Dog curled on the floor, and her phone begins to buzz again, loud enough to fill the room with sound. Everyone ignores it. “We have some excellent news, Eliza, truly excellent!” He looks like he really believes it. Preston is so earnest, or so good at pretending to be earnest. “We’d love to talk about rehiring you. Or more aptly, pretending we never terminated your employment in the first place—we’re the first to admit when we’ve made a terrible mistake, and, in your case—” But Preston’s eyebrow raises and Brandon’s gaze turns to the glass wall.
Eliza spins around in her cushy seat to see Devonte and Suzanne running so fast they practically tear up the carpet. Devonte get
s there first and pauses to compose himself, but Suzanne grabs his hand and propels him forward. Of course she does. Entitled. We know she thinks it’s a big deal, but can’t she see the grown-ups are talking? They burst through the door. Suzanne’s luxurious hair, once well kept and the healthy kind of puffy, is thrown into a side ponytail and looks wild, frazzled. Devonte’s sneaker is untied and his hat is askew, as though he’s been grabbing the left side of his head with his hand.
“You have to see this,” Devonte pants at the same time Suzanne says, “I’m so sorry.” Eliza’s phone begins to buzz anew.
Devonte opens his laptop, logs into his own Guild account and presses the Party button to find Circuit Breaker instantly. He turns the computer around so they can all see what we’re doing.
Chapter Forty-Five
We stand in a ring around Circuit Breaker. Where she once wore a supersuit, she now wears nothing. Her skin is smooth and her breasts stay high of their own accord. Gravity has nothing on girls in Windy City. A man walks up behind her. He wears a black mask and a wide-brimmed hat. He carries two cutlasses, one in each hand. He slides one into a sheath and grabs Circuit Breaker’s blonde ponytail. Using the remaining cutlass, he slices into her hair slow as sipping Scotch. This is the beta server, so we are wearing the Vive; it’s so realistic. It even looks like it has tension, the way the hair is pulled taut, the way individual strands give way and snap. He holds up the blonde handful and we cheer. The women among us, they leave sneering. And we are blessedly alone again, with no one looking through the clubhouse windows, free! The masked man pushes Circuit Breaker in the shoulders and she falls to her knees. He fades into the crowd, into us. He keeps the trophy.
Another one of us steps out, differentiating himself, in front of Circuit Breaker this time. We holler out, “She wants another one. Give her another one.”
Just like that, his camouflage pants vanish and leave bare skin in their wake. One of us calls out, “It looks stupid with your shirt and your jetpack on, take it off!” He obliges and we roar with laughter.
rotflmao
rotflmao
ROTFLMAO
We do not know if he is wearing his headset. He must be. It’s a better story if he is.
“Do you want me to fuck you in the mouth,” he asks. But it is not a question.
“Yes,” Circuit Breaker says, not in her normal voice; it is altered. Impossible to tell who’s at the helm. And they begin. Nothing is blurred or pixelated out—it isn’t the fucking Sims, for fuck’s sake. It isn’t a game for children. We see his dick enter Circuit Breaker’s mouth. We watch Circuit Breaker’s head bob up and down.
We yell things. Some are typed:
“giv that bitch wat she deserves”
“best game ever”
“u no she wants it”
Some are verbal:
“You guys, stop, this is gross.”
“Is that really her? Fuck, she must be bored.”
The naked man says, “You know you want it.” It is broadcast. Everyone can hear it, hear it right in our headsets. We marvel at how big everything looks—they are the size of real people. The sky is miles above us, a blue bowl just like the real outside. And these two full-sized human beings are having sex right in front of us, even though we are in our own living rooms, our own basements. What must it be like, to be the people fucking right now? Many of us vow to try it immediately. Others of us shudder at the thought.
“I know. I want it. Yes,” Circuit Breaker says. Her voice is computerized, scrambled. Probably not even a woman. Gay, gay, gay, we think, but we don’t say it. We don’t stop to wonder how she can speak when her mouth is otherwise occupied; we don’t ask too many questions.
When each of us fucks Circuit Breaker in the mouth, it has some interesting side effects. It skews our alignment toward “good.” We take note of this. We plan our lays to be advantageous to our gameplay. Some of us become disgusted with us, with people, with the internet. Some of us are cucks.
Those of us who are left are delighted to see that we can still perform a critical hit, something usually reserved for extremely successful combat, violence. When the naked man is blessed with such a moment, we all pound our feet on the ground and clap our hands as the red banner flies over his head. CRITICAL +6. We laugh when we see what it looks like: a fountain spray of white all over Circuit Breaker’s face. It looks like the naked man pied her. It drips down in thick clumps while Circuit Breaker looks up with wide, surprised eyes. It is meant to be funny. They made it that way.
We are hysterical. We cheer.
Chapter Forty-Six
Eliza’s vision spots a little bit. She grows very queasy. The circle around Circuit Breaker is getting bigger. “Make it stop,” she says. “Someone make this stop.” Then she remembers: she knows how to shut her own account down. She is a developer and this is basic. “I’ll make it stop, give me the computer.”
But Brandon puts his arm out to stop her and she runs right into it as she tries to lift herself from the chair. “No, we don’t have paperwork from you yet, we can’t let you back into the server.” She sits back, hard. She feels like the chair is swallowing her; she’s never before noticed how small she is in comparison to furniture.
“I don’t understand,” Preston says quietly. “You have to say yes. You have to click yes, anyone can click no. Was there a bug—?”
“There’s no bug.” Eliza is talking loudly now, not quite shouting. “I wrote it, I checked it, there’s no bug, it won’t let you do it until you select yes. We tried it.” Eliza blushes red. “Not wearing the headsets. Not with our characters. With plain grey people, they didn’t even have faces.” Or perhaps things got hot when they were trying it out, and now, feeling awkward around her team, she manufactures all this “harassment” for herself.
“Someone hacked you,” Devonte states. He seems to remember that we’re still taking turns on Circuit Breaker, plain as day on the screen. He moves to sign out.
Brandon stops him: “We need to see their usernames, everyone around her, screenshot them.” Devonte starts screenshotting. The camera sound fills the silent room with computerized shutter clicks, so awkward and unnecessary. Eliza looks more and more green in the face, so he turns the monitor toward the wall and keeps going.
“Don’t bother,” says Eliza. “Turning it around, I mean. I still know it’s happening,” she says as she pulls out her phone. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. Getting her account hacked is not that bad, she thinks. It is not the worst thing that could happen to her. But then she looks down. She sees the missed call badge—it is at thirty-seven. Another call comes in. She declines it. She taps on the email icon. “An error occurred, please authenticate again,” says the prompt, and when she types her password in, she returns, in red letters, “incorrect password.” She taps on the Bank of America app—and receives the same error.
“I think.” She clears her throat and tries again. “I think.” Eliza leans over very quickly, grabs the trash can next to Preston’s desk and throws up (it’s what we would do if this happened to us). It tastes like sour milk and is, unfortunately, mostly undigested Lucky Charms. Hearts, stars and horseshoes, she can’t help thinking to herself as she tries to hide the rainbow hues and breathe normally again.
“It wouldn’t have been hard,” Suzanne says to the room. “Everyone knows our usernames.”
Devonte shakes his head. “We sign in with our emails, our personal ones.”
Preston rounds on Eliza. “Did you ever put your personal email online?” he asks. “Maybe like a blog or something, a personal website, do you freelance?”
“No, never, not the one I use for log-ins. It’s just a string of numbers at Gmail, it’s not even semantic.”
Preston’s fingers hover over the computer, but he realizes he can’t remember how to shut the account. Or that it’s changed so much, the system, that he no longer knows how to do it. “We need the sys admins,” he shouts out the door.
Leaky Joe
is the one who responds; he’s been watching very closely. “Brian is work-from-home with the flu, do you want someone to call him or—?”
“Fuck. Okay. Someone pull Lewis and JP out of training!” He remembers and shoots a look at Eliza. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m really sorry.” Devonte tries to raise his hand; he could shut off access too. He is ignored.
Eliza stares through the glass wall. “Do you think they’re actually wearing the Vive?” she asks no one in particular. “Do you think the people doing that are using virtual reality?”
Suzanne kneels down in front of Eliza and grabs her face. The lights from the city sneak in through the big glass window and look like electricity running through Suzanne’s wild hair. “Maybe. But you’re not. They can’t make you wear it. It’s not really happening. Don’t think about it, just for a few more minutes. Think about anything else.”
Eliza tries to follow the directions. “I brought you a Luna Bar,” she says, but she is starting to hyperventilate. “Suzanne, I can’t log into my bank accounts. I can’t get to my email. I think they got everything.” Brandon finally looks at Devonte; they exchange a look. Brandon sits at Preston’s desk and begins to type.
Lewis doesn’t run into the office, but Jean-Pascale does. He flies into the chair so fast it rolls and he has to pull himself back into place. “Lock it!” Preston yells. “The same way as if the player doesn’t pay us.” It takes Jean-Pascale only a few seconds, thirty at most. And then the room grows quiet.
“Just delete the account,” Eliza finally says.
We Are Watching Eliza Bright Page 12