by Sean Shake
“Uh, sir, I didn’t—”
“No point in denying it. Knew you would, you people are all the same.”
Samuel frowned. He wasn’t sure what people Osborn was talking about. Other than Samuel’s height, he and his capricious boss could be cousins. “Sir, I don’t know what—”
“I’ve got it all here. Look for yourself. But of course, you already know. You’re the one who did it. Didn’t do a very good job trying to hide your tracks.” He turned the screen briefly to Samuel, then swiftly turned it back before Samuel had a chance to catch more than that it was displaying the company’s logging dashboard.
“You logged in at eleven PM last night. Trying to play catch up, huh? Seems you have a habit of working from home during your off hours. Didn’t go so well this time, did it? Or was it intentional? Yes, wouldn’t put it past you.”
“How is doing extra work from home a bad thing? And in any case, I didn’t do any last night.”
“Tell that to the computer. Computers don’t lie.”
Samuel, being in IT, knew very well that the computer could lie. All it took was a malicious user who wanted the reality in the computer to not match the reality in, well, reality. But who would target him? Everyone here loved him.
A flash of orange filled his mind’s eye.
She wouldn’t dare risk it. Would she?
No. Plus, she was way too protective of client data to go and delete it all. There was still a lot of data that wasn’t on paper.
It couldn’t be her. Or anyone else for that matter.
It was probably just a mistake.
But then who had used his login? And why?
It didn’t make sense.
“Since this is dereliction of duty, you won’t be getting severance pay.”
Samuel didn’t think dereliction of duty was even a thing in this context, but Mr Osborn had a habit of using words and phrases that Samuel didn’t quite know the meaning of without looking up. And he never seemed to run out of them, so that no matter how many Samuel looked up, he never got ahead.
Samuel stared at him. “Severance pay?”
“Oh, right. You’re fired.”
“Sir, I—”
“No use trying to lie. Just dig yourself in deeper. Bend over and take it like a man.”
There was an awkward moment of silence.
“Right. Now, I have to read you something, about your responsibilities and such.”
“You’re firing me. What responsibilities?”
“Don’t think you get out of work just because you got fired. You still have duties. Don’t derelict them again.”
This was bullshit. He crossed his arms and listened to his boss read cheerily off several sheets of paper in the thickest legalese he’d ever heard. Was that even English?
He wasn’t going to bother trying to argue or put up a fight, though. There wasn’t much he could do. One thing he’d learned very well in his nearly two years at Heitenburg-Mara: never sue an attorney. You’ll lose.
Badly.
Then they’ll counter sue you, and probably win.
And take your dog.
And if you don’t have a dog, they’ll buy you one, file a motion of incompetence, and then sue for custody.
And win again.
After another few minutes of Samuel tuning out his soon-to-be former boss reading in a cheery and chastising tone from whatever employee-firing-procedure document Osborn was reading from, he heard the key phrase, “…escort you to get your things,” and started paying attention again.
“…and you’re prohibited from taking anything belonging to Heitenburg-Mara and not personal in nature.” He looked up, stacked the papers with a crisp tap against his desk, and, smiling, asked, “Any questions?”
4
Eva Bergen got up from bed and stretched, the hem of her T-shirt raising to her lower back, showing off the bottom of her bare butt.
She yanked open the curtains and was greeted with… darkness.
It was nighttime.
She’d done it again, slept through all the daylight and ended up on a night schedule.
It happened every break, and always played havoc when school started again.
It was even worse now, during winter, when the days were so short.
She shucked off her T-shirt and went to her small balcony—shivering as the chill air hit her skin—where she had a yoga pad set up. She stood at the railing, looking around. No one could see her on this side of the building, since she was higher than everyone else around her.
Of course, standing at the railing like this, they might be able to.
She stood there another minute, her skin covered in gooseflesh, then went to her yoga pad and did some poses and stretching.
Despite the cold, she was dripping sweat by the time she was done.
“Preheat to five-hundred,” she said back inside, as she passed her kitchen on the way to her bathroom.
“Preheating…”
She hopped in the shower, looking out her open bathroom window at the city. She had the lights off, so no one could see in, but she could see out, and get a nice breeze.
Which was good, because she hated cleaning that black stuff—that formed if it was too dark and humid—from the walls and ceiling.
She air-dried as she popped a pizza into the oven and set a timer for seven minutes.
Then she leaned against the kitchen counter to wait for the pizza to be ready. While she waited, she activated her vRing with her thumb, a display appearing above her fist, and started reading up about Nerathetan.
It was out today, and she was so excited to finally be able to play. She just had one thing to finish before she could get to it.
After her pizza finished, she took a few slices to her desk and mirrored her vRing to the wall, then brought up the project she needed to finish.
She didn’t like doing it, but she had no choice: she needed the money.
An hour later, she was done. She still had a bunch more to do if she wanted to make rent next month, but for now, she’d earned a break.
And so she got her NUL—which she’d spent far too much of her limited funds on—ran a bath, and lit two candles. Just enough to see by, but not enough to light up the whole room.
Then she settled in, put in her NUL, and was transported to another world.
5
She chose an animus thief, and spent a good twenty minutes customizing how her character looked.
When she was done, she spawned into the world for the first time, and took several minutes to just experience what it felt like.
Everything was so real, she couldn’t even tell she was playing a game. She could feel her fingers and toes, and any other random spot she touched. She even tried pinching the skin over her elbow, and didn’t feel it, just like in real life.
She could take a deep breath and feel the air in her lungs, she could run her tongue over her teeth, feel their planes and crenulations.
It was just like reality.
There was one difference. Two, actually.
One, were her ears and tail. Her tail just felt… strange. She could move it, even though she wasn’t sure how. It made her curious enough to wonder if she could shave her tail smooth and… experiment with it.
Her ears were odd as well. They picked up a lot of sound, and in a way she wasn’t used to.
For some reason, she also had human-style ears on the sides of her head, though she couldn’t hear through those. She hadn’t noticed them when creating her character, probably because they were hidden by her hair.
The second thing that was different, was movement. She seemed to move faster. Walking-speed was more like running, and running was like sprinting, or riding a bike.
She explored the starting town—which was incredibly busy with NPCs and other players—and went looking for a quest to do.
There was a tutorial quest, but she didn’t feel like doing that.
Instead she wandered around and stopped to talk to peo
ple until she found someone who needed a delivery made to a nearby outpost.
The path was on a main road, and so even at level 1 seemed doable.
She left town and entered the larger world, ecstatic at this new reality and the experiences she was having, unaware that in less than an hour, it would all end.
6
Walking sullenly back to his desk, White gloating behind him, arms crossed even as she walked and a big smile on her citrus-like face, Samuel ran through in his mind a list of all the other places he could work.
Let’s see, there was McDonald's, Home Depot—he heard they had good insurance—oh, or how about his local liquor store. They didn’t pay well, but the sights were to die for. An endless stream of drunk coeds on Friday and Saturday nights. They totally wouldn’t think he was a loser.
He grunted. If only he could have some time with the system to figure out what went wrong… Or who framed him.
But if Mike Woods was on it, maybe this would all be sorted out. Maybe Samuel would even get a bonus for his trouble.
This idea put a little spring in his step and boosted his mood measurably.
White was not at all pleased with this turn of events. “Don’t try to run away from me,” she snapped, as though he’d broken into a sprint instead of just lifted his chin and stopped looking so sullen. “I’m watching you.”
Samuel stopped, turned around, and frowned at her. She almost ran into him. “I’m not sure I could run.” He wasn’t a slender man.
“Are you trying to call me fat?” she asked, taking several steps back from him, her face contorted into—what had to be—false affront.
They were in the middle of the main open-floor-plan office, surrounded by desks, and several workers were now staring at them.
Samuel eyed White, who was all of a hundred pounds—even with all that orange on her skin—and shook his head. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
She scowled at him, and he resumed his walk back to his desk. No point arguing with an Orange: he didn’t have time to get past her bitter outer shell. He didn’t work here anymore, after all.
On his way back to his desk, he passed Audra, who was back with her lunch. She was unloading her food, planning to eat at her desk, like usual. “Everything OK?” she asked when she got a look at him.
He shook his head. “Someone deleted the backup server. Osborn thinks it was me.”
“That’s Mister Osborn,” White corrected, not letting him forget she was still there. Still ‘watching’ him.
“Oh no,” Audra gasped. “But it wasn’t?”
He shook his head. “If only I—”
But he stopped himself. He didn’t want to say anything in front of White.
What he said next shocked him as soon as the words left his mouth. “Want to bring that,” he said, pointing at her food, “and meet me at Panera? I’ll tell you about it.”
“Sure.”
Samuel packed up his desk in disbelief, White standing off in the corner and watching him like a hawk. His disbelief wasn’t at being fired, although that was surprising too.
No, it was at what he’d just done.
Nearly two years, and he’d never mustered up the courage to ask Audra out, and just now he’d done it so easily, without even thinking about it.
He wasn’t even sweating.
It wasn’t like he was afraid of her, or women in general. Not afraid, anyway. Leery was a better word.
Yes, leery.
And rightly so.
They were so hard to read. You think they’re flirting when they’re just being nice, think they’re just being nice when they’re flirting, and think they’re completely ignoring you when really all that’s going through their minds is “fuck me fuck me fuck me.”
They were complicated, in other words.
But Audra had made it clear many times, and not just to him, that she was focused on work and law school, and didn’t have time for romance.
This seemed to please Meredith White to no end.
Still, he couldn’t help but be excited for their meeting, even if it wasn’t a date.
Twenty minutes later and he was standing by his car, looking up at the building of his former employer, all his worldly possessions—or at least the ones he kept at work—in a box under his arm.
He somehow thought he wouldn’t be coming back, even if—when—Mike found out it wasn’t him.
He had an odd sense of… foreboding.
He loaded his belongings into his trunk, got in, and drove to Panera.
7
It felt rather anticlimactic as he parked his car in the Panera parking lot, seeing as how it was right across the street from Heitenburg-Mara.
He ordered a cheeseburger and got a window seat.
The table, as usual, was far too small for his long legs, and they bumped the underside of it. He just hoped he didn’t get any gum stuck to his pants. Stupid kids, putting gum on the underside of tables.
His cheeseburger had just arrived and he had just started to take his first bite when he saw Audra come jogging across the street toward him.
He was mesmerized by her breasts as she ran. She’d taken off her suit jacket, and the way they bounced under that tight white blouse, the way the buttons threatened to pop…
He had to shift in his seat and adjust himself.
Then he realized he’d just gotten melted cheese on his crotch.
White cheese.
He dropped his burger and quickly grabbed a napkin, dipped it in his soda—wasn’t soda supposed to get food out of clothing?—and began furiously wiping at the cheese, which was stubbornly refusing to lift, instead just shifting around. There was now a growing dark spot surrounding the bit of gooey white.
And so it was that the first sight that Audra saw upon spotting Samuel was his arm moving back and forth quickly under the table.
She stopped next to his table, on the opposite side. “Not disturbing anything am I?”
Samuel jumped, his knees hitting the too-low table, spilling his soft drink everywhere.
He jumped up trying to avoid the liquid apocalypse and just managed to miss the worst of it.
“Sorry,” she laughed. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s fine.” And it was. A fun and pretty girl like her could do pretty much anything other than trying to chop his dick off, and he’d still like her.
When the waitress finished cleaning the table, and giving Samuel multiple dirty looks, Audra took her food out—which she’d purchased not half an hour ago from this very restaurant—and looked at him. “So, what happened?” She took a bite of her sandwich. “Tell me everything,” she said, mouth full.
“Well,” Samuel said, watching her chew. Those lips, those wonderful, full lips.
He blinked, rubbed his eyes, focused on her eyes—not her chest, not that at all—and explained to her what he knew.
“That’s bullshit,” she said when he was done.
“That’s what I said.” This wasn’t entirely true. But he had thought it. So, a half-truth.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“What can I do?”
She nodded, finishing off her sandwich. Samuel had barely touched his food. “Yeah, good point. Too bad IT jobs are so hard to come by. He’ll probably have your position filled tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”
She smiled.
Everything was right with the world.
He pushed at his refilled soda. “I do wish there were fewer people in IT. You know at the turn of the century, when everyone was worried about Y2K, only 0.24% of the population worked in IT? A lot didn’t even have any kind of computer.”
“When I was your age, I had to drive my own car!” she mocked in an old man’s voice. Which somehow managed to still be sexy.
Samuel felt a stirring down below and a bit of cold wetness, which he hoped was soda, but doubted.
“Look on the bright side,” she went on, stealing one of his fries, then another
, “you have way more free time now.” She smiled and stuffed the fries into her mouth.
Her perfect mouth.
“All I know is I’m getting drunk when I get home.”
“You should play Nerathetan with me tonight after I get off.”
Another stirring at her choice of words. Get off of work, he told himself. That’s all she meant.
“Oh, that’s right. That came out today.” He’d been following it, but hadn’t planned on actually playing. With work, he didn’t have time. Now however…
She tilted her hand side to side. “Yesterday, technically. But today for most people.”
“I think Samurai—or maybe it was Torium—said they were having problems. A hack or something.”
She frowned at him.
“Those are streamers.”
She shook her head. “I know who they are. I don’t think it got hacked. If it did, it would have been shut down. They wouldn’t take any chances with the first multiplayer NU-Link game.”
“Wait,” he said, realizing something. “You’re going to play Nerathetan? I thought you didn’t have any free time. That’s gonna take up, like, a lot of time.”
She shrugged. “I’ve got some. Can’t spend all your time working. Besides, a little mindless fun keeps the mind focused when it is working.”
“Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d want to play that kind of game.”
“I was in the beta.”
“No,” he said in disbelief.
“Yep.”
“How? I applied and didn’t even hear back.”
She shrugged, took more of his fries. “Going to eat that burger?”
“It’s beef.”
She wrinkled her nose. She didn’t eat meat.
At this thought his mind made an uncouth joke which he was helpless to prevent, but which at least he managed to prevent from escaping his lips.
“You know they grow that stuff in vats,” she said with an adorable look of disgust on her face.
“Tastes good,” Samuel said, picking it up and taking a bite.