End of Shift
I removed the VR mask.
My hands were shaking. Sweat made my mandatory white shirt cling to
my back. The thermos had been empty for hours. My coffee had grown
cold in the logo-less ceramic mug, forming a brownish film on the
surface.
[DAY 2/7
COMPLETED] [LEVEL: 4/5] [CONFORMITY: -6 POINTS]
Five days left. One
level left. And then what?
I checked the wall
clock above my partition. 18:47. Thirteen minutes before the end of
the shift. Thirteen minutes to sit there, motionless, staring at the
pale blue void of the screensaver.
Around me, the murmur
of ten thousand narrators continued. Rustling. Sighs. The clicking of
pens. A muffled cough somewhere in row 40. The hum of the fluorescent
lights. Always the lights.
18:52. I tucked the
binder into the metal drawer. Screwed the cap back on my pen. Rinsed
the mug in the small sink hidden behind a sliding panel. The water
was lukewarm. Always lukewarm. Never hot, never cold. Lukewarm.
18:57. I stood up. I
put on my jacket—black, standard, corporate issue. I slipped my
badge into my pocket.
At 18:59:30, a
synthetic voice echoed from the invisible speakers:
— Shift B completed.
— Shift C in
preparation.
— Shift B narrators,
please vacate your stations in an orderly fashion.
I stepped out of my
cubicle. The number 104, engraved on a metal plate next to the
entrance, went dark. A moment of emptiness. Then a new number lit up:
597.
A figure passed beside
me without a glance. Black suit identical to mine. Set face. Badge on
the collar: NARRATOR 597. She sat in my cubicle—well, her cubicle
now—placed her thermos exactly where I had placed mine eight hours
earlier, and pulled on the mask.
The cycle continued.
I walked toward the
exit, merging into the silent flow of Shift B narrators. A thousand
closed faces, a thousand glazed stares. No one spoke. No one looked
at each other.
The thirty-minute
afternoon break had passed too quickly. As always. Eight minutes to
get down to basement level 2. Five minutes in line at the vending
machine. Twelve minutes to bolt down something square and beige that
claimed to be chicken. And the coffee—that goddamn corporate coffee
that tasted like wet cardboard—always made me need to pee.
Two bathroom breaks
per shift. Six minutes maximum each. Watch in hand. Mental stopwatch.
Permanent tension.
No one had talked. It
was forbidden anyway, except in the canteen. And there, everyone was
eating. No time for anything else.
But still. I was in
the warm. Well, nineteen degrees isn't exactly warm. But it’s
better than the five-degree annual average of the megacity. It’s
something. You have to appreciate the small victories.
The elevator dropped
me at the locker room, one floor above the canteen. Rows of numbered
metal lockers. The smell of disinfectant and cold sweat. I grabbed my
coat—not warm enough for the season, never warm enough, but it was
all I could afford on my intern’s salary—and changed shoes.
Winter boots. Already
too old. The left sole was peeling in places. I’d have to replace
them. Soon. Maybe.
I took the elevator
reserved for the end-of-shift—priority to those leaving, flow
optimization, maximum efficiency—and reached the hall.
The hall. My god, the
hall.
A cathedral of
concrete and glass. Fifty meters high. A hundred meters wide. Dozens
of elevator doors pierced into the walls, spitting out their
continuous stream of employees. Thousands of them. All with the same
closed face, the same tension in their shoulders, the same dull
apprehension.
Because we had to
face... the wind. Damn. That wind.
A non-stop wind.
Permanent. Forty to seventy kilometers per hour. All year round.
Every day. The result of a climate catastrophe that corporate media
no longer called a "catastrophe"—just the "new
meteorological normalcy"—which had turned the megacity into a
giant wind tunnel.
With the current
temperature at minus five degrees, that wind would rip your face off
just thinking about it.
I turned up my collar.
Tightened my scarf. Mentally prepared my body for the imminent
assault.
The automatic doors
slid open. The wind slapped me like a divine punishment.
Cold. Biting.
Pitiless. It whistled between the buildings, creating wind-tunnel
corridors that threw you off balance, pushed you, manhandled you like
a child with a ragdoll.
I lowered my head and
jogged. A hundred meters. Just a hundred meters to the underground
subway entrance. A hundred meters that felt like a thousand.
Around me, hundreds of
other employees were jogging too. Same hunched posture. Same
desperate run. On the wide sidewalk—ten meters wide, designed to
handle the flow—bordering a giant avenue.
The avenue crawled
with vehicles. Cars, buses, trucks, all moving at the speed of a
dying tortoise. A permanent, eternal traffic jam, an urban thrombosis
whose beginning no one remembered.
And all around, the
buildings. Hundreds of meters high. Monolithic. Surfaces of glass and
concrete, uniform, hostile, or at best, indifferent. Towers
disappearing into the permanent grey smog. Thousands of illuminated
windows. Millions of lives stacked vertically.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
The wind howled. Fifty
meters. Twenty. Ten.
Finally, the subway
entrance. The blessed portal. The escalators. Getting there was like
a daily victory. A sense of personal glory. A heroic achievement. A
bit like clearing a special level. A dungeon completion.
Dammit. I didn't want
to think about work.
I went down the
escalators, sinking into the warm bowels of the city. The soft
underground heat was a delight. My face came back to life. My hands
too. Tingling. Prickling. Blood circulating again.
The smell of burnt
tires was almost pleasant. Familiar. Reassuring, even.
The train arrived with
a deafening crash. Screeching metal. Grinding brakes. An
unintelligible synthetic announcement.
The doors opened on
the side opposite the platform—ingenious design, the corporate
engineers said, flow optimization—allowing arrivals to rush inside
immediately to find a seat.
Rare.
I squeezed in.
Remained standing, wedged between an office worker who smelled of
cold sweat and a woman in a nurse's uniform whose eyes were already
vacant.
The train started. And
everyone entered that generalized torpor.
One scent covered the
smell of tired bodies and subway corridors. A chemical scent. Fruity.
Almost sweet. That of a pleasant gas—diffused by the ventilation
systems, officially to "improve air quality"—which
soothed.
It neutralized moods.
Smoothed out emotions like sanding a rough surface. For the duration
of a journey. And for several hours once you got home.
Everything was fine.
Maximum... satisfaction.
I closed my eyes. Let
myself be rocked by the vibrations. By the mechanical hum. By the
soft chemical anesthesia.
Seventeen stations.
Thirty-two minutes. An eternity. An instant.
My station: Sector 7,
Level 3, Gamma Residential Block.
The absolute luxury of
my life—my greatest achievement to date, seriously—is that my
station opened directly into a shopping mall. Which opened onto a
covered parking lot. Which opened onto my block of buildings.
Without ever having to
go outside. Without ever facing the wind.
Yeah. Don’t ask how
I got this residential assignment. Three years on the waiting list.
Two discreet bribes to administrators. Half of my savings.
It was worth every
fucking penny.
I walked through the
shopping mall. Aggressive neon. Synthetic music. The smell of frying
oil and new plastic.I did some shopping. Vending machines only.
The meals. The packaging. The portions. Everything is square. Square
chicken. Square vegetables. Square dessert. Efficiency above
all.Sometimes I wonder how long it will take before my body
complies. Before even the last star-shaped detail of my anatomy
rounds off into something more… compliant. Something with
corners.
Then the final
elevator. Seventy-ninth floor. The hallway that smelled of sanitized
carpet and... nothing else. Just absence. An olfactory void.
My door. Number 93. I
slid the multipass card into the slot.
Home.
I placed the card on
the small entryway table. We paid with it. We took the subway with
it. We entered our homes with it. I’m sure there was even a date
with the day of my first flirtation on it somewhere, encoded in the
chip, archived in a corporate database I would never see.
For the record. But
it’s practical. I’m not going to complain.
Past the entryway
hall—one meter fifty, just enough not to bump into anything—I
arrived in my palace.
Three meters by four.
ME.
A bed. Made. Not one
of those fold-away beds you lift to save space. No. I had a FIXED
one. A real one. Sitting on the floor. Insolent luxury.
A small table where I
ate and... did other things. Administrative work. Reading corporate
manuals. Contemplating the void.
A kitchen corner.
Integrated hotplate. Miniature fridge that hummed constantly.
A bathroom corner with
an ion dry-shower. It prickled the skin like a thousand tiny needles
but you came out clean. Technically clean. Chemically clean.
It also served as a
toilet. I won’t dwell on the process. Let’s just say it was
efficient and slightly dehumanizing.
And... the armchair.
Ah, the armchair. Synthetic. Ergonomic. Worn at the armrests. My
throne. My refuge.
I heated a square
meal. Chicken, maybe. Or beef. Hard to tell. I ate standing in front
of the heater, straight out of the plastic tray. Took my ionic
shower. Three minutes. Prickling. Clean. Slipped on corporate
pajamas—yes, even those were provided by the company, with the
discreet logo on the pocket—and let myself fall into the armchair.
Three seconds. I fell
asleep like a dog. Like every night.
Except Fridays and
Saturdays. On Fridays and Saturdays, I went into the Immerser.
A sort of life-sized
MMO. A virtual space where people met—well, their avatars met—for
a few hours of play. Under another appearance. Another identity.
Another life.
There, I was tall.
Strong. Charismatic. There, I had 81 Strength. 61 Charisma. Even 35 Luck. There, people talked to me. Smiled at me. Laughed at my jokes.
There, I existed.
But that was Friday
and Saturday only. The rest of the week, I saved the access credits.
Twenty coppers per session. No, sorry. Twenty credits. I was mixing
everything up now.
The rest of the week,
I had no other real social connections. Just Kael. Zik. Kassios. The
goblins. The rats that talked.
Ghosts in my head.
Voices I invented. Friends who would disappear in five days.
I stared at the
ceiling. Three meters above me. A crack in the left corner. Always
the same crack. I knew it by heart.
Deep down, I was sad.
Sad and alone.
But I was on the right
side of the fence, wasn't I? I had a job. An apartment. A fixed bed,
dammit. Not a fold-away. FIXED.
I was an intern
narrator in a corporation that employed ten thousand people just in
my sector. I had a future. Perspectives. If I climbed the ranks, it
would come quickly. The promotions. The salary. The larger apartment.
Maybe even... someone.
A woman. Well, already... just , you know. Someone
real. Not a Friday night avatar. Not a temporary character with a
seven-day life expectancy.
Someone.
I closed my eyes.
Tomorrow would be Day 3. Five days remaining. One level remaining.
And then?
I knew what happened
next.
[AUTOMATIC
EXTRACTION: D+7, 23:59:59]
Kael would disappear.
Zik too, probably. All temporary profiles. Erased. Recycled. Reset
for the next intern.
Did they know? Were
they afraid? Did they...
No. I brushed those
thoughts away. They weren't people. They were programs. Simulations.
Lines of code with scripted responses and random statistics.
Not people. Not real.
Sleep took me. And I
dreamed of goblins digging pits. Of rats apologizing as they bit. And
of a kid with 7 Luck who survived in spite of everything.
Against all logic.
Against all probability.
Maybe there was hope
after all. Even with 7 Luck. Even in this shitty world.