We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  She breathes deeply, pushes the crying feeling away. She counts to ten, puts her hair up and clicks the file open. Someone’s set up the text-editor skin so that all her code writes hot pink on a pastel pink background. She rolls her eyes and changes it to navy and cream—still gaudy, but not pink.

  The code in the local copy is flawless. “Oh fuck yes,” she says in a relieved hiss to no one at all. She checks Github. People changed it after her—there, there in the logs. That must be what 80085 means, she thinks: accidentally garbled during edits.

  We can’t believe she doesn’t see it, say half of us.

  See what? say the other half of us. Those of us who get it make fun of those of us who don’t. But for the sake of brevity, let’s move forward.

  Chapter Three

  To: [Lewis Fleishman], [Jean-Pascale Desfrappes]

  Subject: Borked Section!

  Message: Hey guys! I noticed the comment in my section about the royal borking. It looks like the latest version got accidentally messed up during some other edits, so I reverted to a clean copy. No worries Lewis! Just emailing to make sure you don’t stay late or anything to fix the buggy version. Works fine now!

  Eliza

  PS—what does 80085 mean? Is that the number for accidentally edited? Are there other numbers I should be aware of? Let me know!

  Chapter Four

  When Jean-Pascale Desfrappes and Lewis Fleishman receive Eliza’s email, they aren’t JP and Lewis. They are Black Hole and Dr. Moriarty, and they are getting some supervillain time in before work.

  Jean-Pascale created Black Hole, Destroyer of Light. Originally, he dressed him in an all-black bodysuit and a black mask, but after working at Fancy Dog and befriending someone in art, he changed to the now-familiar silhouette with glowing orange eyes. His appearance was so popular after the switch they contemplated adding a silhouette option, standard, for everyone. Jean-Pascale badly wanted to be the only one with this kind of avatar, so he volunteered to, once yearly, turn NPC for a spell and run a server-wide evil campaign. Black Hole became a canon character, though minor and only on one server. His uniqueness was left alone.

  Most people refer to Jean-Pascale Desfrappes by his full name, but his girlfriend and co-workers occasionally call him JP for short. He has shoulder-length, curly ringlets, a little bit greasy in texture. Jean-Pascale’s height rebels against that of his parents: for some inexplicable reason, he is six feet and four inches, while every other man in his family halts at five feet and nine inches. When Jean-Pascale moved to the States, he converted this popular conversation topic out of the metric system to be better understood. Because he still thinks in the metric system, however, he makes sure to write the new, foreign numbers down in the back of his notebook, and glances at it until he has them memorized. When asked why he constantly carries a composition book, he replies “pour les idées,” which is honest, but he doesn’t mention the running list of phrases in the back. Cold shoulder. Wild goose chase. Ice breaker. A perfect storm. Royal borking.

  A note on Dr. Moriarty: We love Lewis Fleishman. He is just like us. He’s been playing so long, the sheer amount of resources at his disposal is dizzying. The gentleman can make anything happen with the power of purchase, and he never uses meatspace currency to further his digital fortune. He is an old-school gamer—everything is hard earned by fantastic strategy and finesse. Often he laments the casual iPhone games where levels and items are bought with “real-world” money. As such, their lair is spectacular.

  It could probably be said that Lewis’s character looks the least like its creator out of everyone we follow in this story, and we are of course counting Chimera and Black Hole. At least Chimera retains Suzanne’s wavy hair. At least JP matched Black Hole’s height to his own. We suspect Lewis invented Doctor Moriarty (no tagline) by selecting the diametric opposite of everything about his own physical presence. Where Lewis is short, Doctor Moriarty is tall. Where Lewis has frizzy brown hair, Moriarty has a neat blonde style, almost British schoolboy. Lewis is doughy. Moriarty is buff. Lewis dresses in tee shirts and jeans. Moriarty is never without a suit. Lewis does what other people tell him. Moriarty tells other people what to do. Lately he is striving to change this last part, to be a little more like Moriarty in his bossness—having Jean-Pascale around, someone who’s so obviously a skilled gamer and who does what he says, helps.

  Because Jean-Pascale plays a canon character and is, thus, always visible, we can go into The Lair when they’re not there—sure, their stuff is locked down, but we call on them like they are British aristocracy. We gawk at their things, their architectural acumen, their nefarious ideas; living vicariously is fun. Or we avoid it, a few of us. Some of us are good. Some of us play superheroes. Some of us wouldn’t be caught dead here.

  It is underground, The Lair. Three floors. The topmost, an entrance with a fountain in the middle. It is nondescript, chrome, and a little mall-like; a more expensive imitation of the rest of our houses, apartments and secret places—that is to throw people off. If those who don’t know what they’re looking for stumble in, they might stumble out just as quickly. But we know better.

  The next floor is Doctor Moriarty’s, and if he hadn’t bunked up with Black Hole, we wouldn’t get to see it. We are grateful for his sacrifice in privacy; his aesthetic is ripped from the pages of A Study in Scarlet: a perpetually lit fireplace, a springy-but-worn red rug, a stag’s head on the wall. Even a violin on the mantelpiece, strategically placed with the hunting trophies.

  “That is a little messed up,” Black Hole said when the Doctor first put it there.

  The Doctor just shrugged. “Sherlock Holmes is kind of a prick and he had it coming.”

  Off Moriarty’s floor is the treasure room—we can’t get in there, but we can see it if we maneuver ourselves up against the wall and change the camera view to third person. It is arranged with care to resemble a cross between Smaug’s cave and Scrooge McDuck’s safe. Performative; they know we are watching. Maybe not at this moment—it’s difficult for anyone to imagine, unprompted, a burning spotlight in specific moments—but in general, they’re aware.

  And then comes Black Hole’s floor, which features smooth-sliding doors and a physical (as well as chemical) laboratory. Catty-corner, an old-timey gurney that recalls the days of unfettered institutionalizations in primitive asylums. “Dude, you think my violin is messed up?” the Doctor said when he’d first noticed the gurney’s presence. He’d pointed at it. “That’s really fucking messed up.”

  Jean-Pascale had just arrived from France at the time, and Lewis was extremely welcoming so he tried some slang he’d heard around. He began his sentence with “Nah, brah,” and it felt like he’d shoved a bunch of marshmallows into his mouth. But Lewis hadn’t even laughed, so he kept going. “It is just part of the décor. The atmosphere. We are playing a game, and we are playing as villains.” The gun safe lies just beyond, and it is impressive. They have enough firepower to take over the world. We wonder why they don’t.

  We are like tourists in a museum, but it is enter-at-our-own-risk: Doctor Moriarty is so rich in-game that he’s rigged all the floors with wires that can electrocute a character with one press of a button; he carries that button with him, and uses it whenever they come home. Most of us can do a room, maybe, before we get nervous and flee. Nowhere is safe in The Lair if you aren’t one of those two.

  Case in point: Lewis says, “Ugh, shit.” He presses his button and fries two of us, forcing curses and respawns he will never hear or know about (except of course when he picks up the possessions we unwillingly leave behind). “Check your email,” he continues, as he collects the drops and double, triple checks that none of us remain in The Lair.

  There is silence, and Black Hole stops moving. Then: “Shit.” And it sounds a little like “sheet” with his accent.

  “Listen, we know that shit is fucked. I put it in myself,” Lewis says. “I bet she’s fucking lying to save face. I had no idea she was on the server.”
r />   “I thought we had to enter her patch because she wasn’t?”

  “Don’t they give her, like, orientation or something?”

  “Apparently no.” Jean-Pascale collapses Black Hole into a chair and has him turn on a jazz record. The tinny sounds of false horns signal relaxation time. Their tongues loosen accordingly. “It is frustrating,” he says. “We are not running a school.”

  “It’s got to be some quota thing,” says Lewis, kicking off his role-playing as his character kicks off his shoes, dons slippers and a smoking jacket. Normally Lewis is hardcore into role play, no job stuff or real names or anything in-game. But it is his lair. He can change the rules whenever he likes.

  “There were always two kinds of girls at my university, back in Paris.” It is strange to picture Black Hole, Destroyer of Light, going to university in Paris. Or it isn’t. “Either they were total bitches to us or they tried to trade us.”

  “Trade you?”

  “They’d have sex with us and then get us to help them with their work.”

  Lewis snorts.

  Jean-Pascale smiles; American humor is a bit different from what he is used to, and even though he’s been in the US for a while, he likes when he gets it right. “I don’t know what it is about girls who go into games. I guess they have to be a bit different from other girls, since normal girls aren’t that interested.”

  “We should have had a week without her on the server. Not just a weekend.”

  It is JP’s turn to snort. “Or a fucking warning.”

  “If they were going to let her on that fast, she could’ve done all that work. We shouldn’t have had to do it.”

  “Fancy Dog School of Coding. We are the training wheels.”

  The conversation continues as the rest of us, those who avoided the frying by clinging to the ceiling, sign off in fear of discovery.

  Chapter Five

  Eliza’s face is hot after hitting send on the email. Even the space behind her eyes is hot. It is a ridiculous thing, she thinks, to be embarrassed about, given it was not ultimately her fault. But she is embarrassed all the same. It’s a fast fix, putting the clean copy back on the server, but she internally falls down a spiral staircase, wondering if she deserves that promotion.

  Or she doesn’t find herself mortified at all; she doesn’t have any sense she even should be embarrassed for throwing the team off-kilter, for blowing a hole in the SS Fancy Dog mere days from a huge announcement. She cares only for the job title on the website, is secure in the fantasy that the borked code was perpetrated entirely by Lewis and JP. She doesn’t once think about her promotion the week prior. She simply embodies a false confidence, knowing well they need a woman because nowadays society forces us to hire them, and she can’t be fired or demoted unless something truly egregious happens. Fucking with camaraderie or code won’t matter. This, the second option, sounds more accurate to us.

  Let us break it down: Fancy Dog Games. The name of the company has an “s” at the end, but it is an aspirational plural. They only have one game: Guilds of the Protectorate, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. And honestly? One is enough to support the weight of our fandom, that’s how good a game it is.

  Guilds, as it is called by its acolytes, obsessives and creators, is similar in gameplay to World of Warcraft, but we think it’s even better. It’s got an equally (or more) devoted following. What is different, though, is the world. MMORPGs are frequently flavored with orcs, wizards and knights—largely not our thing. Guilds’ world contains superheroes and villains, high-rise buildings and underground secret layers set against the grit of Windy City, a fictionalized mashup of Chicago and New York that borrows liberally from each real-world landscape. Players can choose to be heroes or villains, but it is far more complicated than that. There is more to alignment than Good and Evil: The Lawful Good of a Superman, the Chaotic Good of a Batman; The Chaotic Evil of the Joker, the Lawful Evil of—actually, Eliza can’t place a Lawful Evil supervillain; she has trouble wrapping her brain around the paradox that is “lawful” and “evil” describing the same character. She thinks perhaps the best example is Emperor Palpatine, but hadn’t he overthrown the actual law, or found a loophole in it? Was he truly deserving of “lawful” if he didn’t adhere to the spirit of the law? Or perhaps Eliza can think of a million Lawful Evil characters. Perhaps she disdains them the most—rigid and cruel, and she doesn’t like to think of herself that way. Either way, she never chooses to put herself in their shoes. We know she’s never made a Lawful Evil villain. Not very self-aware of her.

  Though we have the opportunity to play both heroes and villains with unlimited character creations, according to the analytics, most individual players choose to play only one type of character—one moral alignment—no matter how many we make. We are part of the Protectorate in their individual shards or we are trying to shatter the world, laughing maniacally.

  The game was a surprise hit—the company started as two dudes dicking around in a university computer lab. “We just wanted to make a game that we wanted to play,” says co-founder Preston Waters in his interview on The Daily Show, from back in 2014. Eliza gets a kick out of watching it every so often—he looks so shocked, like he wants to reach out and touch Jon Stewart to make sure he isn’t made out of pixels. The once-shy coder is wide-eyed. He looks tired and energized, nervous and elated. “We didn’t know it would be this popular,” Preston continues. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re glad it is! And we’re working full speed ahead! We’re hiring more and more people even as I sit here!” He seems confident, this one. Poised. Young. The barest hint of muscle, not showy, like perhaps he’s hiding abs under his shirt but isn’t, ultimately, defined by them. A man with everything. We’ve seen him play, when he streams—it is like reading a poem, watching him shoot a gun or swing a sword or—anything, really. We would watch him play anything.

  Eliza’s been working on Guilds for the better part of a year and a half by the time we meet her, by the time our story starts. She is one of those shotgun new-hires Preston talks about on television, brought on as a quality assurance peon. She spends the year and a half we aren’t focusing on her struggling through long nights on Codecademy and Treehouse. She teaches herself how to program because what she wants more than anything in the whole damn world is to make Fancy Dog Games into a true plural. The next big hit is going to come from her own head, and to get there she has to ascend somehow. She is determined. She is cocky. That spitfire. That cunt.

  She thinks about her promotion, only three days old, imagines it in detail. She is grateful or she is smug or she is spiraling: “If that’s your goal, we’d be happy to support your journey in that direction,” Preston says, grinning. “Let’s fill out this Career Tree together.” The company is still small enough that she sees this man, this genius, on the daily. He is, miraculously, somehow right there in front of her, encased in a glass-walled office of his own design. Eliza hauls herself off the sinking couch, jostling the dog that put his head in her lap.

  True to its name, Fancy Dog is full of dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, cute dogs, ugly dogs—the office looks like a P. D. Eastman children’s book to us. By now, Eliza’s accepted the prevalence of canines, pausing only to wonder where all the dog people had worked before the age of startups. What she still doesn’t believe (and what most of us can’t believe either) is that the dogs have uniforms, issued to them by the company on the day their human checked the “I will be bringing my dog to work” box—small tee shirts in royal blue that say things like “Marketing Dog,” “Backend Dog” and “Customer Service Dog.” These spawn spoof shirts, courtesy of overinvested employees with too much money: “Yo Dog,” “(Let Me Sniff Your) Backend Dog,” and “Dog, Stop Sending Me Email.” The dog she disturbs is wearing a shirt emblazoned with the phrase “I Am Dog,” because that is, in fact, his name. Preston’s dog is just called Dog, and Dog is the original Fancy Dog. He is big and white with a curly mop of fur that covers his eyes—he is also a mi
nor internet celebrity, at least with us; we follow Preston’s Instagram, and photos of Dog garner the most likes.

  Eliza pats Dog on the head and sits down at the computer.

  She sympathizes with Preston’s Daily Show appearance more than ever—she, too, feels like perhaps this is a highly realistic hologram, a simulation, some pixels of her own invention. For a second she wants to grab his hair in her hands and is immediately revolted by that impulse.

  He is her boss! People do not touch their boss’s hair, no matter how touchable that hair might be. Instead, she clicks harder and faster, filling in radio buttons with wild abandon as she maps her goals at Fancy Dog. Or she is overcome with lust, breathes heavily, tries to focus on work and fails because women can’t keep their minds on the job. Or she sees her opportunity, begins to concoct the plan—how can she make herself the most attractive to him? How can she use her body to become indispensable?

  Eliza does have a body to use, even if she doesn’t think so. Aside from her rat mouth, we’d perhaps increase her score from a six to a seven on a day we are feeling generous or horny. Her meatspace appearance is very different from Circuit Breaker’s: Eliza is five feet four inches and skinnier than a praying mantis on a diet, though not for lack of trying. She can hoover an entire eggplant parmesan sandwich, wash it down with a milkshake, top it all off with some French fries and still she looks breakable. We think that’s dumb as fuck. What kind of girl complains about being skinny?

  She wears glasses. Big, honking glasses as thick as tar with tar-black frames. She doesn’t mind them now—she once did, and she tried all sorts of different ones. But the younger Eliza found that, due to the crazy thickness of her lenses, none of the other frames looked quite right. So back she came to the big black frames until, all at once, her unavoidable glasses became a signifier of Williamsburgitude; of the ability to purchase daily Starbucks with a simultaneous disdain for those who didn’t seek out better coffee; of cool, or coastal elitism. She is grateful and embraces the requisite uniform of lumberjack-like flannel and skinny jeans accordingly. She is whiter than an Easter lily, and she wishes she looked a bit healthier but can live with her complexion. What we’re saying is, it would be possible. Her body’s an asset, an unfair advantage. Undo a few buttons on the flannel, put contacts in, wear something besides ChapStick. It’s possible.