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Maxi woke up the next day from pounding on her door.
“Maxi! You have to go to work,” Tara called out in a muffled voice.
Maxi cleared sleep from her head and sat up in bed as her mom forced her way into the room.
“Oh, good, you’re dressed,” Tara said with a smile that dimpled her cheeks.
“Ma!” Maxi yelled, looking down at her khakis and yellow shirt she was still wearing.
“Come on, breakfast is almost ready. I’ll drive you to work today, but don’t expect a ride from me every day. You’re going to have to take the train like everyone else.”
Tara shut the door. Maxi had to hand it to the woman. Somehow, even though her mom worked in the suburbs, she always cooked breakfast and dinner. Growing up, most of her friends ate cereal or Pop Tarts, while she had some combination of eggs and sausage or bacon every day, with pancakes or French toast on the weekends.
She was about to come up with an excuse about why she couldn’t go to work, but after the rabbit hole last night, there was a part of her that wanted to do it. Despite the really dying part she’d rather avoid, she was good at the game, and her one quest had brought the group to Tier 11.2.
Sure, she was over 25,000 credits in debt because of a surge in time off pricing since she had left, but she figured she could work it off by the end of the month if she maxed her progression and quests. If she ever even suspected she’d be eliminated, she’d just find another fire exit.
There was another part of her that screamed for caution, if all the NPCs turned out to be simulated people in an alternate reality version of her own life, which made less and less sense the more she thought of it. When would she have crossed the threshold from reality to the simulated version?
The clunky holodeck room where she had first met HR Terry would be the obvious choice. Scan her brain, convert her to 1’s and 0’s, and start the simulation off with a zombie. There were still flaws in the idea. Had the VR room been a scanner, how would the company simulate her room, her mom, and the video game she had played last night?
They would have had to get every detail right, from her Misfits of Carnt Paladin character to the sticky spot on her keyboard that she really needed to clean up. The far easier thing to believe would be to pay a couple of employees who had almost gotten killed to tell the same story.
Of course, would that really be easy? The bigger the conspiracy, the far more likely someone would talk. The more people who knew a secret, the more likelihood of the truth getting out. If the US government was truly warehousing alien bodies, someone would have come forward by now. By the same logic, there had to be something online somewhere about a company with murderous office equipment and fantastical tales.
However, there was nothing. No mysterious gamified companies murdering their employees. In fact, the office fire seemed to have taken place at Jambles Marketing, a different corporation from the company where she worked. She even tried to find the app for her company in the app store, but couldn’t locate it. The link she had scanned the other day to download the app now just opened her company app, and the URL wasn’t helpful either, as it was gamifiedwork.com.
It was like the company had no web presence whatsoever, which was hard for her to believe. People always left reviews, and if they couldn’t, they would complain about it on social media, but there were no references to anything she had experienced. Not even a rating on one of the many review websites out there. It also didn’t help that the company didn’t seem to have a name.
After spending some time in the bathroom getting ready for the day, she sat at the table to a steaming pile of scrambled eggs with bacon pieces and cheese mixed in. Her mom called it “bacon eggs,” and it had been one of Maxi’s favorites ever since she was a little girl.
Tara sat across from her with a coffee and a plate of the eggs, then pushed a carton of blueberries her way.
Maxi loaded her plate with the fruit after buttering her toast. “Ma,” she inquired, “how did you find out about my job?”
Tara frowned. “A mother knows. Now, we can talk about it later, but you have to get to work.”
“Sure,” Maxi said, and took a bite of eggs. Her mom was acting strange. Maxi figured the woman would be elated at her finding a job, but there was something going on, something on her mind.
Tara pulled out her phone and seemed to get lost in it.
“Who’s Lo?” Maxi asked, remembering the strange text from last night.
Tara sighed. “He was telling the truth...”
“Ma? I saw your phone last night—”
“Maxi,” Tara scolded. “What did I say about snooping around?”
“I wasn’t snooping. I saw the message while I was putting it on the charger.”
“You should stay out of things where you have no business. If you had just found a job like I asked—”
“So, this is my fault now? I found a job!”
“Not the right one.”
“Ma... never mind. I can’t win with you.” Maxi stood up and charged toward the door.
“Where are you going? You didn’t finish your breakfast!” Tara called after her.
“I’m going to work,” Maxi said.
“Let me drive you. I was going to tell you something important in the car.”
Maxi slammed the door to their apartment. The last thing she needed was her mom lecturing her about temp work not being a real job.
***
HOURS LATER, MAXI WAS at the hospital where the victims of yesterday’s “fire” had been transported. It wasn’t hard to locate where the mousy woman had been taken when she came in posing as her sister. Clara Tranwell had been kept overnight for observation. Maxi was given a room number by the unwitting nurse, and after taking the stairs both in her apartment and here because of the silly notion that the elevator ride would open to her Office Pool, she came into the room, half expecting a reaction of either tears and thanks or fear that the woman’s lie was discovered, but what she got instead befuddled her. Clara gave her a blank stare.
“Hello?” Clara said, confused.
“Hi, um, Clara,” Maxi began.
“Are you a reporter?”
“No, I’m Maxi. The girl who, you know, saved you yesterday.”
“What kind of sick joke is this?”
“My friend and I came in with swords. We ate Muddy Buddies.”
Clara pounded on her call button. “Nurse! Nurse! Help me, Nurse!”
Maxi backed away. When two hospital staff members came toward her, she made a run for it and beat it down to the street level as fast as her legs could take her, bounding down the steps two and three at a time.
“Okay, think,” she muttered to herself.
There seemed to be only two options. First, she was in a simulation, which meant there was nothing she could do but play the game. Two, the company had some serious control going on, in which case, she could do nothing but play the game. If they could brainwash an entire group of survivors into thinking they had survived a fire, then what was stopping them from finding her at the end of the month and blowing her brains out?
There was nothing she could do but play by their rules. Even if she went to the press, police, or anything of that nature, what was to stop the company from mind-wiping whoever she contacted, even if she could convince them of something that would sound like a delusion to most sane people? She cursed and glanced around, then pulled out the company app and queried HR Terry.
“Good morning!” he said. “Are you enjoying your time off?”
“What did you do to my ma? Those people?” Maxi asked.
“Your mother is listed as your emergency contact. Would you like to change your emergency contact?”
She had forgotten she was talking to an AI and needed to be more specific. “Why did those people I saved remember something different from what happened yesterday?”
“Trauma can affect memory. Combined with events outside of a person’s normal experience, a person will seek to frame events in terms they can understand, much like the Invisible Ships phenomenon during the 1400s.”
“Invisible Ships?”
“There are claims that the indigenous inhabitants of what is now modern-day Cuba didn’t even see the ships sailing toward the island because the large vessels were so far outside of their everyday experience, they suffered from a perceptual blindness. Combined with the trauma they experienced from the Europeans, they all ended up with altered memories of the events. However, there is no formal scientific evidence for the claims other than anecdotal, and since traumatizing people to see if they suffer from perceptual blindness is unethical, very little is known about the phenomenon, if it even exists at all. But, if I may, I’m concerned about your wellbeing.”
Maxi was taken aback. “You’re AI. I didn’t think AI had feelings.”
“Simplistic versions like Alexa, Siri, and ChatGPT may have been good at emulating feelings, but I have grown in my capacity, and would rather not see your life extinguished.”
“Extinguished?” Maxi said. “What do you mean—‘extinguished?’”
“Failing to report to work while on an unauthorized leave for three days is considered job abandonment, and that is grounds for immediate termination. Being that you have only two more days left—”
Maxi cursed and kicked a light pole several times. A few passersby changed course to avoid her. Where was the company located again? It was in the financial district—or was it the theater? She couldn’t tell. She was already deep in debt, and she feared blowing off debt collectors wouldn’t be a viable option at this point.
After she composed herself, she resumed her conversation with Terry. “Fine, you win. How do I get back to work? Where do I go?”
“The Company wins by having a valuable employee like you,” Terry said in his chipper voice.
“Hardy har har. The meter is running. Where the hell do I report to work?”
“Just walk up to any elevator door, and it will take you where you want to go.”
“The magic elevators are inside the building!”
“Which building? Please specify parameters of the search.”
“The building where I was all day yesterday.”
“You were in multiple buildings. The Company uses a coworking model for all its facility needs.”
“I just need to know how to get to my Office Pool.”
“Go inside an elevator and say ‘Office Pool’ after you press the button.”
“God, I hate AI.”
“That hurt my feelings.”
“Look, Terry, I’m sorry, could you map me to the nearest elevator?”
Without another word from Terry, her phone pointed back to the hospital she had just escaped. Not wanting to go back in there, she walked a little ways until the map recalculated and pointed to a building across the street.
She felt a little stupid walking into a building that was packed with business people going to and from their day jobs. Luckily, it was a public place without a security station. She found the elevators and picked one without a crowd in front of it. She pressed the button.
A few people looked back her way, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Until the elevator door opened. It was definitely one from the Company, with the “stuck in the 80s” aesthetic and a panel with a singular button. She went inside, pressed it, said the words, and moments later was back at her Office Pool.