I read back through the email I had received as I made my way through the winding halls of the arcology, working my way to the elevators which would take me up to the office level. It was not really something I had been expecting, and I was having trouble reading the tone of it.

Hey there Will!

I’m John Jillian, your new manager on the Dreamshards Testing team! I saw that you missed the all hands meeting this morning, where we met with Mr. Roberts, the exec in charge of this project. Luckily, I saw you had already submitted your report, and a quick scan of your vid showed that you were having a rough time of it last night, so I let him know that you had already completed your work for the day and had requested a checkup at medical. He seemed unhappy to not have you there today, but I don’t think it will be a big deal.

Anyway, I will still need you to come in today, once you’re feeling better. We’ve got some admin stuff to go over, and I wanted you to meet some of the other testers. I look forward to meeting you later!

Best,

John

The exclamation points were in all the wrong places, and I could detect only the vaguest of implied threats if I didn’t comply. Something was clearly wrong here. Middle managers were piranhas. Viscous things that had somehow sunk their teeth into some meat and would never let it go until there was nothing left. Management families rose and fell with the success of their respective projects, generally over the course of decades, but the majority that I had had the misfortune of working under had been petty tyrants who handed out crumbs to their sycophants, and misery to everyone else. If the executives were the distant and aloof gods, the managers were the kings who ruled by divine mandate and taxed their peasants into destitution. That is to say, I do not like managers. And this one was trying something I had never seen before, so I was doubly on my guard.

The elevator chimed, informing me that I had arrived on the 66th floor. The trip had been so smooth, I wouldn’t have been able to tell I was moving at all, very much unlike the older elevators I was used to from the lower floors and my old apartments. I stepped out and followed the AR guide to the cluster which contained the Dreamshards Testing offices. I had never been this high in the arcology before, my previous office being on the lower levels near the commuter access points.

I arrived at the entrance, the entire outward facing wall of the office was made of transparent smartscreens. The workspace was quite open, probably larger than the imaginary office Lindsey and I explored the night before, but with a much more realistic layout. There were tables clustered around the center for large collaborative projects, with a few smaller smartscreens that could be moved around and shared. Around that, there were a number of smaller tables with only one or two chairs nearby, for individual work. Dividing the space were movable transparent partitions, which were likely themselves smartscreens. All the furniture was either white, grey, or white with blue highlights. At the far side of the office were a few spaces, separated from the main space by yet more transparent walls. There was a meeting area where most of the workers still lingered, and next to that was the manager’s office which had a nice desk, a potted plant, and a window facing the outside. I stepped up to the entrance, the security system recognized my augs after a quick scan, and the doors slid open for me.

I made my way across the floor, and a man peeled away from the group to meet me. He was average height, with dusty blond hair and light skin. He was about half my age, if I had to guess I’d say early 20s, maybe just out of the first tier management course. He had a big grin on his face, which shifted some of the irritation I felt at having to come into the office into bewilderment.

“Will! Hi, I’m John. I didn’t expect you so soon.”

So this was my new manager. He was cheerful. Too cheerful. He must be up to something.

“Hi John. Look, I am happy to come in and get all the one-off stuff taken care of, but I really should let you know that my contract doesn’t have any office time in it.” I started.

“Oh!” John said, and he ran back toward the meeting room, leaving me standing by myself, increasingly vexed by the interaction. He returned a moment later holding a disposable coffee cup with a logo that I did not recognize, which he offered to me. I took it, feeling more and more apprehensive.

“Mr. Roberts brought coffee for everyone from one of the places on the upper floors! It’s great. And since you got here so quickly it’s still warm! Give it a try!” he practically chirped at me. I was having trouble maintaining the mental image of a piranha. It kept slipping towards ‘small bird’ or ‘puppy’ instead. I took a sip, and it was definitely better than any coffee I had tasted up to that point.

“Anyway,” he continued, “now that our hero unit is here we can talk strategy!”

Ugh, some managers did this. Talked in game terms as a matter of team-building or work unit pride or whatever. I guess John’s background was in Real Time Strategy or something similar.

“Can we please not refer to me that way?” I asked. His face fell at that, and I felt like I was clubbing a baby seal. I continued, “uh, it’s just that I don’t want to build up some unrealistic image. I’m just a normal guy, you know?”

“And humble too!” His grin had returned. “Sure Will, I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable. Come on, let’s go get you introduced to the rest of the team.” He turned and motioned for me to follow.

I kept pace behind him as we made our way into the meeting area, and towards the head of the large table which occupied the central portion of it. There were around twenty people present, even one who I recognized from my time as a Senior Tester, back before I got fired.

“Hey everyone, I want you all to meet Will, he’s our...” John paused and looked to me.

“Specialist” I said.

“Specialist” John repeated, “He’s our specialist. He is fully qualified not only as a forensic tester, but also for game developer and game designer roles! He will be working in a mostly independent position, investigating anything which gives the rest of you trouble, in addition to chasing any leads he deems to be a priority.” I didn’t like that phrasing. It implied that I’d be at the beck and call of everyone here, if indirectly, anytime they ran into something they couldn’t handle. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, as it is probably the best use DA has for me.

My fantasies of having my days to myself as I worked my way through Dreamshards at night were evaporating before my eyes. Much like my rosy view of the game itself, as it so happened. As interesting as it had been so far, it was also pretty brutal. Maybe I was just doing it wrong? I’d need to compare notes with the other testers, and take the time to read through the magic notes I found.

I was shaken from my thoughts by John prompting me to say something about myself, a work ritual I hated.

“Nothing much to say. The gamedev was because I wanted to switch departments, but it didn’t happen. The Design Course was approved as part of the Work Performance Enhancing Hobby program because I run tabletop games in my free time. You, uh, probably won’t be seeing much of me around the office, but feel free to email me if you need my help with something.”

Embarrassing introduction over, I stepped over toward John who was chatting with the only tester I knew from my previous employment period. Joe was the oldest active tester (a decade or two my senior), and probably the most experienced, so it made sense that they’d put him on this project. He was a holdover from the days when IT administration was done by people instead of AI, and in the end he’d opted to transfer to product testing instead of learning how to maintain the systems which had replaced him.

“Joe,” I nodded to him.

“Hello Will, fancy seeing you here,” he replied.

“Life is full of surprises,” I said. I bet he wasn’t expecting to ever see me again after how things turned out with my last position.

“Ah, you two know each other! Great!” John interjected, with such earnest cheer that retaining negative feelings toward him was becoming excruciating. I stayed the course, though.

“Joe here was also placed on Tower 11, so I was hoping to pair the two of you up starting tomorrow,” he continued.

“Wait,” I said, “I was exploring the first floor with a person I met, but we were the only two people around. Where were you if we were in the same tower?”

“Looks like we need to get you caught up. John can get you access to our report server, and then we can go over what we know as of now.”

John went over to the nearest smartscreen and set to work granting me access to our shared work product server. Once he was done, he patted me on the back.

“Glad to have you working with us, Will! I’ll let Joe bring you up to speed, and then you two can discuss strategy. Make sure to let me know if you need anything!” He vomited rainbows and rays of sunshine all over me. Then finally, mercifully, his attention was directed somewhere that wasn’t me. I felt the fight or flight reaction recede a bit, and turned to look at Joe, who already knew what I was going to ask.

“They end up like that sometimes. The young ones. They get told in their course that they’re making the world a better place. Guiding those that can’t guide themselves. Some of them take that to heart. Just let him do his thing. It’s better than it could be, and when this happens it usually doesn’t last too long anyway.”

I nodded, and said, “so, you were about to tell me how you and I are on the same tower, despite the fact that I didn’t see you anywhere.”

“Right,” Joe rumbled, “so after character creation, there were a few people around on the roof. A European, who was reasonably polite, and I think three Chinese, who wouldn’t even speak to me. I went down to the first floor, and ended up encountering something very similar to what you ran into.”

He sent me a reference to the relevant portion of his video stream, and I started playing it. From his eyes, I saw the same office layout I had encountered. He pushed forward past some desks, his point of view weirdly high off the ground. The clatter of the desks called the flocks of pigeons, but then I saw a massive scaly claw point up toward the birds. A deep, gravelly voice intoned:

“Incinerate!”

A beam of raw, red energy surged from the outstretched claw and turned the birds, a number of desks, and a substantial portion of the far wall into ash. The perspective advanced forward until it got to the pile of corpses Lindsey had left behind, now almost entirely dissolved. I couldn’t see any glowing fragments rising out of them, but the giant red patch on the carpet was still clearly present. I stopped the video there.

Not entirely sure what I had just witnessed, I took a quick look at the reports that had been compiled so far. There were nineteen individual reports, all the various video streams to go with them, and a spreadsheet labeled ‘summary’. Looking at the summary, there were neat columns for starting location, areas explored, powers… mine was listed just as ‘inventory’. Damn it, I really hope that wasn’t the full extent of my powers. And then there were level, skill, and race columns. What?

“Alright, you are definitely in the same tower, but this is all fucked up and I don’t even know where to start. What’s going on here?”

“Well, why don’t we just start from the beginning?”