by D. J. Bodden
“Twenty-four hours.”
“And I pull you out if something looks off.”
“Sure. I’m not looking to be a hero here.” I was absolutely looking to be a hero—impress the boss, get the girl? Yeah. I liked my brain, though. I’d settle for being Spider-Man with a safety net.
“Okay.” He shoved his hands into his pockets.
It was Dwarven gold-madness, all the way.
I STEPPED UNDER THE steaming hot water and exhaled, letting some of the tension from the morning wash away. I’d done it. Even if the full V.G.O. run failed completely and the project got downsized or delayed, I’d have earned Osmark’s respect, as long as he didn’t fire me for putting the company in legal jeopardy.
I was mostly sure he wouldn’t. Rob didn’t build Os-Tech from scratch without taking risks.
With the pressure off and the water on, it was almost tempting to call it off. Maybe Jeff was right. I could walk back in there and tell him I was wrong, and we’d bring the testers in next week. He could have done a better job of reasoning me out of it, for sure, but instead, he’d tried to stonewall, and I went for the win on principle.
It’s a character flaw. I’ve known it for years. The knowledge hasn’t helped me change the behavior.
Instead, my mind wandered back to my grandfather, and how things had fallen out between him and Mom. He’d been a strong man in the old sense of the word. He’d lived through the war in Korea, he’d kept going when his high-school sweetheart finally left him, or “Went on ahead,” as he liked to say. He’d had these big old hands with thick, flat fingernails that made me think he was a giant when I was small enough to believe in fairy tales. He never made eye contact when he gave me that bottle of olive oil for my mother, wrapped in packing paper with a three-turn twist above the neck. She never talked about it when she pulled it from my bag; she just put it on the shelf and used it for the next few months until it ran out. Looking back, I should have seen the sheen to her eyes while she cooked, but you’re so busy trying to figure out your own thoughts as a kid you don’t bother to wonder.
It made me think of missed opportunities. Of little gestures I’d ignored because I didn’t want to be wrong, to be exposed. I didn’t want to miss out on things because of that. And I didn’t want to die alone.
I shut the water off. Where did all that come from? Maybe it was the game. The nanites mapped the player’s brain and stimulated it. It wouldn’t be impossible they’d dredged up old memories, or that those neurons had caught a stray volt or two. It didn’t make those memories wrong, just... unexpected. I’d have some more thinking to do when this was done.
I toweled off, put on my damp but cleaned-off jeans and a Ms. Pac-Man T-shirt I’d borrowed from Jeff. It was the right fit around the chest, but too long, so I tucked it in. It looked every bit as dorky as you’re imagining.
I went back to check on Jeff. “Hey man, I’m heading out to grab supplies. Need anything?”
“I’m good!” Jeff said, flashing me a thumbs-up. “Feeding your test data to Kronos.”
Kronos was the AI, or “Overmind,” who governed time and physics in the game. During testing, Jeff had to tweak each of the settings one by one as best he could. In V.G.O., Kronos would do it all at once, better and faster.
“Actually, coffee and donuts?” Jeff said. “We’re going to be here a while.”
“I’m on it,” I said, and left.
As I was leaving the building, Frank snickered. “You know, I never took you for a tucker.”
“A tucker?”
“Anyone who’d tuck in a T-shirt.”
I sighed. I had to squash that kind of stuff all the time; Frank just hadn’t seemed the type. “Is that supposed to be some kind of homophobic humor, Frank?”
“Oh, no sir, perish the thought. Without getting into stereotypes, the LGBTQ community usually dresses better than that. I’m digging Ms. Pac-Man, though,” he said, pointing at the shirt. “You done for the day?”
“No, I’ll be back. Can you do me a favor?”
Frank rocked his head from side to side. “Maybe?”
“Jeff Berkowitz and I are working on a final project in testing before we shut this thing down. It’d be better if we weren’t disturbed.”
“Not a problem,” Frank said. “They’re not scheduled to touch the back room until Sunday; she’s all yours.”
“Thanks, Frank.” I headed for my car.
I WALKED UP TO THE drugstore register and started pulling things out of the basket. Two big bottles of water, ready-to-drink coffee, a bag of generic powdered donuts—Jeff had apologized, but you have to earn Krispy Kremes—a couple Powerades, wet wipes, and a pack of adult diapers. I tried to be real casual about the last item.
The teenage clerk called my bluff. “These for you?”
“Yeah,” I said, deadpan. “I’m stalking my girlfriend, and I don’t want to miss a thing.”
He smirked. “There’s bungee cords and duct tape in the automotive section.”
I rolled my eyes. “Nice upsell. Can I pay?”
“Sure thing.” He rang me up. “So who are they for, really? Your grandfather or something?”
The memory of Pops hit me too soon after what happened in the test server. It jarred me so bad I told the truth. “I just have a project at work, and I won’t be able to leave the office.”
The kid’s mouth dropped open.
I grabbed the bag and shot him with a finger gun. “Stay in school, kid.”
I got back into the Spyder and hit the road.
FOUR
THE FIRST THING ROBERT Osmark saw when he woke up was the ceiling fan spinning. Round and round. Bright daylight streaming in through the thin strip window above and behind his bed told him it was late. He hadn’t set an alarm after last night’s debacle.
The Board had been fine; Sandra’s preparation was flawless, as always, so the Board accepted his proposal to shelve Viridian for two years without a hitch. It was after, when that pissant Wagner had pulled him aside and told him to make sure he put mothballs in the containers because “It’ll be the end of the world before I back you starting this project again.”
Asshole. If Wagner hadn’t been pushed on them by Osmark Technology’s largest shareholder, he would have been gone years ago.
Robert rubbed his eyes, then sat up and swung his legs out of bed. He finished the half-full bottle of water sitting on his nightstand, then padded his way to the kitchen.
Coffee dripped into the pot. It was an Ethiopian variety called Gesha, after the region, which had been transplanted to a small estate in Panama. Robert’s smartwatch had sensed his awakening and turned the brewer on, the perfect symbiosis of man and machine. Robert leaned against the counter with his eyes closed until the coffee maker’s last sputter, then he filled his mug and stepped out onto the balcony.
The redwood decking extended over the side of a cliff, facing the Pacific Ocean and the white sand beach below. He stood there in the rising heat, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, and watched the waves while he drank his coffee. He was in his late forties, graying, and not as slim as he’d like. It was a perfect photo op for a headline about Viridian failing. Robert both didn’t care and had a standing order for his lawyers to sue anyone they could prove had been on his property to take photos. He didn’t even review the cases anymore. It was just one of several reports he let Sandra manage.
He wasn’t sure when he’d lost control of his life. Everyone knew he was the boss. Even the newspapers he loathed said so. But while that gave him a financial freedom he couldn’t have imagined as a kid growing up in Brooklyn, it had bound him in layers of red tape and obligations so deep he didn’t know which way was out. The coffeepot had more say in his morning schedule than he did.
Part of him thought about ditching it all. He could find a CEO to replace him. They wouldn’t have his drive or programming skills, but he could find a solid leader with a strong commercial background who would make the shareholders and analyst
s happy.
Robert could carry on as a board member or as a strategic advisor. He could travel, see some of the orphanages and health clinics he’d funded, or just go sightseeing. Maybe he’d take a team and lead a project of his own—get back to the long nights and the simple pleasure of making a machine do something nobody thought it could.
He scratched his stomach. It would start small, he knew—a missed deadline, a news article, a faint catching of the gears. Then he’d be elbow deep in running the company again. He finished his first cup of coffee and got another before sitting at his desk and putting on his reading glasses.
He checked his emails, forwarding some to Sandra, putting others in folders by topic or project until only those that required his intervention remained. He left those for later. A scan of the headlines that featured his name or his company’s showed the news had already leaked. Osmark Technology’s hush-hush Viridian project was dead. Robert sent an email to Sandra to track down the leaker and fire them, then call the usual contacts and let them know why. He made a point of always following through on his threats. If he didn’t, they’d stop being effective.
He pulled up the security log for the Viridian building and saw that the movers were thirty-six percent done with the common areas. Jeff Berkowitz, the hardware lead, was currently logged into the main server. Robert would ask him about that Monday, but the article had been heavy on design and light on technical details, and Jeff didn’t have the balls. The man was probably just making a last attempt to save the project, and Robert wished him well, even if nothing short of a miracle would do the trick.
Alan had come and gone already; he could be the leak. Robert considered it, then rejected it out of hand. Alan was a good kid, a decent manager, and conscientious to a fault. He needed some technical training so he wouldn’t say stupid things, like “saying goodbye” to the AIs. Robert thought of a few courses he knew of on Deep Learning and Neural Networks while he drained his second cup of coffee. Keep him busy for a few months, build his credibility, stop him from joining the competition. It fit together nicely. Tick tock.
He took his glasses off, put on shorts and running shoes, then went out the front door for his morning loop around the Devereux Slough. After that, emails and phone calls until lunchtime. Round and round.
FIVE
I PULLED MY JEANS UP around the diaper in the employee bathroom. I knew that if I spent twenty-four hours in V.G.O., I was going to end up loading my pants. No sense in not giving my body one more chance at dignity on my way in, though. It had been an interesting experience; I’d done everything while trying hard to look away. VERIDIAN v0.01.16a still floated in black letters at the edge of my vision. I didn’t think Jeff was the type to watch another guy taking a crap, and I hadn’t even stopped to think about it in the shower, but the nanites had turned me into a walking webcam, and I was well within signal range.
So I’d stared at the brown-and-tan porcelain floor tiles. They’d been custom laid by one of the writers who’d started life as a union carpenter. The one at my feet looked like an abstract version of Europe and the beginnings of Russia, if Sweden, Norway, and Finland had been sunk into the Norwegian Sea, Atlantis style. It was a funny little detail, but it was also part of what had made the last two years working for Os-Tech so different from other jobs. Even the buildings had their little eccentricities.
I flushed, washed my hands, and headed for Alpha Testing.
Jeff was so focused on his monitors he didn’t hear me walk in. He was squeezing a stress ball that looked like Jupiter at two beats per second.
“Nervous?” I asked, setting the bottled coffee and donuts on his desk.
“Yeah. Aren’t you?”
“A little. Kronos crunch all the numbers?”
He nodded. “We’re all set. I was just checking it over, took some notes, made sure it didn’t do anything crazy like flip the world upside down.” He set the stress ball down and unscrewed one of the coffee bottles, chugging half of it.
“Can I change a few things? I was too tall last time.”
Jeff wiped his mouth with his forearm. “This one’s the real thing, dude. Character creation, intro video, everything. Tell you what though...” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and snapped a picture. “I’ll upload that to your profile to make it easier.”
“Cool.”
He finally noticed the bulge around my hips. “You get fat on the way to the shower or something?”
I lifted the shirt he’d lent me, showing off the diaper waistband.
He laughed.
“Yup, yuk it up. You might have to change me.”
Jeff choked. “What?”
“This thing’s fine for a little incontinence, but I just chugged two bottles of water, and I had pizza last night. I did what I could.”
“I’ll take a hard pass on that, buddy.”
“I’ll chafe.”
“Yeppers. That’s going to suck.”
“It’s going to stink. You want to sit there with a full diaper wafting your way? Call it the incidental cost of glory.”
Jeff stared at me. He scratched his right arm. The reality of the situation was sinking in. Operation Big Baby was happening.
I sighed. “Come on, man. You have kids, right? How hard can it be?”
“I just have to change it?”
“And wipe me off,” I said, dropping the wipes on his desk.
His face turned pale. “We will never speak of this. To anyone.”
“I couldn’t agree more. Are we doing this?”
“I guess we are.” Jeff sighed. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” I said, forcing a grin. I turned to walk to the hospital bed.
“Hey, Alan?” Jeff said. He’d stood up and was holding his hand out to me. “Good luck in there.”
I shook his hand. “Thanks.” I turned away. I didn’t think we’d ever be best friends—and I was pretty okay with that—but it was good he’d dialed back the jerkness once he realized I was there to help.
Call me an optimist, but I’ve always believed people are basically decent under ideal conditions. It’s just that conditions are never ideal.
I took my shoes and jeans off—the shirt covered me down to mid-thigh—and climbed in, pulling the sheet over my legs. I lay back, thinking of all the ways this could go wrong, from embarrassment to death and what the hell do the troops call a nanite aneurysm? Isn’t “nanite aneurysm” bad enough?
“You ready, man?”
“Hell, yes!” I said, smiling manically.
The world went white, and a deep male voice boomed from that infinite whiteness. “Traveler! Prepare to enter Viridian Gate Online!”
THE WHITENESS DISSOLVED and cold air flooded into my lungs. It had that dry, aching freshness to it you only got at altitude, far from the city. I was standing on a sharp gray jag of rock that seemed to be trying its best to stab the sky from the top of an already tall mountain. I could feel the chill of the smooth, hard stone through the flimsy wraps on my feet. I spun slowly, taking in the steep rock faces covered in snow and ice, broken by lone, scraggly pines and spurs of angular slate. A loud crack echoed from somewhere downslope, in the shadows of a gorge. I was so high up, the sky’s blue had turned indigo, and the horizon was a blurred band of white.
A gust of freezing wind made me hunch over, and I turned my back to it. I was wearing a thin, roughly stitched tunic and ripped trousers that felt like they were made of burlap and did nothing to protect me from the weather. I grabbed at my shoulders, hands shaking from the cold. Tears froze on my cheeks. I was going to die up here if I didn’t find shelter or a way down.
As soon as I thought of getting off the peak, I was snatched back and spun out into the wind, my soul free and aloft. I was flying. Not floating, or pulled into the air by the force and lift of wings, but riding the air currents by my whim, effortless and free. It was the most sublime feeling I’d ever experienced.
I looked down and saw a man fall to his knees, breath fogging, his
whole body shivering, and he looked a lot like me. A translucent interface popped up next to him, with sliders to adjust each of his features. There was a tab on the interface called “Race,” and looking at it brought down a list of names like Hvitalfar, Dokkalfar, Svartalfar... your basic high elves, murk elves, and dwarves. Seeing how sick I’d been from minute physical differences in the test server, I put those down as a solid “No.” The Accipiter, a bird-winged race of desert dwellers, tugged at my heartstrings, but while I was enjoying the current sensation of flight, I didn’t think learning to move an extra set of limbs would make my job easier. The Risi reminded me of the orcs in The Ancient Rolls, but wider and with a severe, toothy underbite. I bet their dental bills were horrendous. They were neither like me nor anything I wanted to become.
The two types of human were known as Wodes and Imperials. Wodes were your basic barbarian, all wild, tattooed, and thickly muscled. Selecting the Imperial race kept my character close to my real appearance, and the interface informed me that choosing it would allow me to pick any unrestricted class, which suited me just fine. I wondered if “Corporate Hitman” was an option.
With my race picked, I focused on my looks. Short brown hair, honey-brown skin, thick eyebrows, and hazel eyes stayed the way they were. My teeth were straight, but had never been as perfectly white as I would have liked; I fixed that now with a thought and a few ticks of the “Teeth Color” slider. I had a slim but athletic build and... Oh my God, my hips.
I looked like a pear. Or a bong. Kronos hadn’t figured out that the extra girth was from the diaper, or maybe our conversations had taught it more than I expected, and it thought this was funny. I knew appearances shouldn’t matter, but they did, and I was as vain as anyone who’d ever gotten away with more than they should because they were pretty. I tidied that up and tried to forget what seemed like a horrifying look into middle age.
The inseam I left alone because let’s face it, why fix what doesn’t need fixing? I floated back to admire my work.
