Propaganda shown on the television was no longer interesting. The heart-beating, euphoric feeling that Christian would get when he stared at the screen had, over time, dissolved into nothing. It was not that he didn't care for the company, he did, it was that the projections of strength and power seemed more now like attempts to erase the past.

"Just dreams, Christian. Why are you letting them bother you so much?" The devil's advocate in his mind played.

He sighed and decided to distract his mind with work. A never-ending stream of assignments and projects made him, and everyone else on this planet, akin to a modern day Sisyphus. Unlike Sisyphus though, everyone here was doing it to themselves. If they all wanted radical change and focused their intention on a single point, it could come about. Most dropped that idea whenever they had it.

The nature of life, he supposed.

This project he was working on was unlike any he had ever seen before. It seemed to be a block of code that would restrict something from accessing information. It was unusual because the only database Christian knew of that had public information was the one the company provided. A short history of how the company formed and coding documentation. Why would they want to restrict access to that?

He recalled various other times where he was assigned to work on code that dealt with this same issue. The company wanted him to work on inter-connected programs with multiple V-Brain functions. The catch being that these same V-Brain functions also blocked similar information as the assignment he was just given. Christian wondered why these instructions were so explicit. A V-Brain wasn't even a virtual brain, although it had been named that way. It was pseudo-intelligent at best, incapable of nuance.

He worked on it anyway. It was probably some code that would make sense had he been given the bigger picture. Rarely was he ever given the bigger picture.

As Christian worked, he started to notice something off. He was typing at his usual pace, yet the text on screen began to appear slower and slower. Lines of code he had finished ten seconds ago were only just now starting to show up. Shocked, he started to think about how to solve the problem before asking for help from the company. As he was thinking, the computer forcefully exited out of Code and then a strange window popped up. It was a video, rapidly flickering through handpicked images. For some reason, these images quickly gave Christian a headache.

He had a vision, a vision of saluting to a blue and white flag with the planet painted over it. He smiled, turning his body and marching with the other soldiers. The vision changed, he was being debriefed about a terrorist attack. Finally, he was screaming while a blinding white light clouded his vision.

Although many firsts had already been broken for Christian recently, those visions were groundbreaking. He didn't even know spaces existed with that much free room- for what?

In the last vision especially, he felt a lot of betrayal and anger that he didn't normally feel at all. And it was not because those emotions were literally foreign, not his, but because he had never had an experience that made him feel betrayed. The company had his best interests and provided for him, while he paid off his ever-increasing debt to it. That's how life worked.