[ Spoiler ]
I call it my Morning Resurrection. What happens is that when I have to go to work after a night spent coding or sitting on my bed and staring off into my room's vaguely piss-yellow light, I look at myself in the mirror in the laboratory observation room's bathroom for maybe ten seconds and splash my face with a handful of cold sink water. The sink isn't carbon filtered, so sometimes, when the Renraku Corporation's water treatment plant screws up, the water smells of stagnant river sludge.
It's river sludge day. Not that it's much of a problem; nobody ever comes to see me here, and I get used to the smell the way I get used to everything else I have to deal with on a daily basis, like the way that everybody here either breaks off eye contact a little too quickly or unblinkingly stares at you because their eyes are cybernetic implants.
In his slow, lifelessly arrogant way, Ferguson, chief of magical research, enters the magical experimentation room. He always finds ways to oh-so-subtly denote his rank, whether it's the way he silently stands next to you while you work without looking at you, slurping his overpriced all-natural coffee, or the way he sets down his mug, letting the scent of it waft towards you for a moment before picking it up again. I think he times it so that you only get the smallest wiff before he takes it away. Nerds, even thaumaturgical nerds, for all their pontification about rationality, have their own essentially meaningless systems of status, their own ways of haphazardly expressing their neanderthal DNA.
I'm not supposed to join in any magical experiments, since I'm tasked with simply watching and judging everything they do by Renraku HQ. Renraku doesn't want me to develop any attachments to people whose careers I'm supposed to decide, not that they have much reason to fear that. It doesn't bother me that I don't really have any responsibilities; that gives me time to slack off and program random graphics demos on my portacomp. They display onto my contact lenses, so I can pretend to be watching even as I find new ways to make the image of a shiny rainbow-colored ring turn in on itself.
But today should be interesting. As far as I know, it'll be mankind's first experiment in magical teleportation. It's top-secret, since it's corporate research and it's cutting edge.
I wonder for a moment if they'll get to the point where they can send somebody into my bombproof observation room; if they do, it'll jeopardize my other duty, which is to make sure that this branch doesn't defect to another corporation and activate Code Omega if they do. You see, Code Omega is a contingency plan; if this branch tries to jump ship, then I dial a very specific 20 digit number, which cuts the power lines to the complex and activates the C4 charges planted in the walls, allowing corporate strike teams to move in, arrest all personnel for further questioning, and copy and wipe all the hard drives on site. I effectively have power of life and death over my coworkers, and they don't know it. If I ever decide to activate Code Omega, I'll probably be sitting in this room with the emergency locks on the doors, programming yet another way for sunlight to glint off a rainbow-colored ring, waiting for the corporate strike team to cut open the door once everything's died down. Who knows, maybe I'll be eating soychips when that happens. All I know is they picked the right person for the job; I don't care enough about my work to be nervously secretive about it, therefore blowing my cover to a group of people who can read your emotions and even your mind if they get suspicious, and I don't care enough about other people to worry about having them killed. Say what you will about Big Brother, he knows you like no one else.
Over the course of the next few hours, I Look at the ritual team, watching them weave beautifully intricate and yet ordered threads of... of life energy, for lack of a better word, in ways that I will probably never match, and will never care to. All that's needed for this job is that I have the Sight.
The scruffy-looking German Shepherd rises off the ground and disappears along with its bonds. In the physical plane, it looks like they're giving it a clean disappearance; in the astral plane, the plane that I use the Sight to see, the dog materializes and then implodes, kind of like pressure differences in space except in reverse. Everything's an impossible shade of gold in the astral, so there isn't any red blood, but there is a golden liquid spreading from where the dog's compressed carcass in all directions. The astral blood smudges the wards on my room, and I suppress the admittedly childish urge to get some on my finger and taste it. The experiment is a failure, and I spend the next 5 minutes recording a report telling the suits exactly that. Too bad, really. If it'd worked, I'd have been witness to the magical equivalent of the first step on the moon. Oh, well.
After work, I take the elevator to my apartment. Renraku tried offering employee housing on site years ago, but everyone decided to rent their own, everybody but me, that is. The motion-activated lights don't turn on for anybody but myself and the janitor, and I'm reminded of this every time the elevator door opens and the lights turn on down the long, open hallway one by one in perfect sequence.
I open the door to my apartment to find the wall blown open, the hole looking as if a fire giant's fist had made it. Probably some act of corporate war they didn't bother telling us about, some freelance agents escaping in a chopper or something. I already know I won't be getting any sleep, so I use magic for the first time in a month, the last time being when I healed a bruise and almost failed at it. I levitate out the hole in my wall and onto the roof; should be interesting, never thought I'd actually have an opportunity. Floating up from the middle of a crowd of jumpsuited Renraku rank-and-file tends to draw bureaucratic attention.
I sit there and watch the night skyline, and for the first time in years spent in a corporate sinecure, I wonder. I wonder why I don't care about people, why very few, if any, really care about people, why everybody takes such pains to pretend to. I dwell mostly on the first part.
People talk about the beauty of the city at night, but all I see is stasis and encapsulation. All those lights, always so distant and indistinct, being forced together by the demands of capitalism and city zoning laws. Everybody's too busy thinking it's beautiful to realize that most of those lights are offices where people work unpaid overtime, data cables plugged into their heads transmitting sheet after sheet of accounting transaction. I guess it's a better idea to focus on something I actually do want to see.
Illusions... what kind of illusion spell should I cast? How about a miniature of an impossible dream? Let's check my list of discarded fantasies... a carnival in the clouds, a nymph of the woods, a world of green and gold, always youthful, always alive...
Let's start with the carnival in the clouds. Okay... clouds, check. Mountain of wispy stone, check. Fantastically elaborate rides without lines, check. Small, happy children, loving, happy parents, cotton candy made of sugary mist...
The spell breaks as soon as I touch it. Frag, I didn't even notice that I was trying to. But for a moment there, a small, infinitely small moment, I could feel something... Something real, more real than river water, than metallic stares, that would be there for me if only I believed in it enough. Now I know why I stopped using magic and turned to punching code in my portacomp.
I lie down on the rooftop watching what little moonlight there is filter through Seattle's smog-thickened clouds. I close my eyes, not really caring if I roll off the rooftop in my sleep. I feel the stream of a tear I didn't notice cool against my cheek.
It's river sludge day. Not that it's much of a problem; nobody ever comes to see me here, and I get used to the smell the way I get used to everything else I have to deal with on a daily basis, like the way that everybody here either breaks off eye contact a little too quickly or unblinkingly stares at you because their eyes are cybernetic implants.
In his slow, lifelessly arrogant way, Ferguson, chief of magical research, enters the magical experimentation room. He always finds ways to oh-so-subtly denote his rank, whether it's the way he silently stands next to you while you work without looking at you, slurping his overpriced all-natural coffee, or the way he sets down his mug, letting the scent of it waft towards you for a moment before picking it up again. I think he times it so that you only get the smallest wiff before he takes it away. Nerds, even thaumaturgical nerds, for all their pontification about rationality, have their own essentially meaningless systems of status, their own ways of haphazardly expressing their neanderthal DNA.
I'm not supposed to join in any magical experiments, since I'm tasked with simply watching and judging everything they do by Renraku HQ. Renraku doesn't want me to develop any attachments to people whose careers I'm supposed to decide, not that they have much reason to fear that. It doesn't bother me that I don't really have any responsibilities; that gives me time to slack off and program random graphics demos on my portacomp. They display onto my contact lenses, so I can pretend to be watching even as I find new ways to make the image of a shiny rainbow-colored ring turn in on itself.
But today should be interesting. As far as I know, it'll be mankind's first experiment in magical teleportation. It's top-secret, since it's corporate research and it's cutting edge.
I wonder for a moment if they'll get to the point where they can send somebody into my bombproof observation room; if they do, it'll jeopardize my other duty, which is to make sure that this branch doesn't defect to another corporation and activate Code Omega if they do. You see, Code Omega is a contingency plan; if this branch tries to jump ship, then I dial a very specific 20 digit number, which cuts the power lines to the complex and activates the C4 charges planted in the walls, allowing corporate strike teams to move in, arrest all personnel for further questioning, and copy and wipe all the hard drives on site. I effectively have power of life and death over my coworkers, and they don't know it. If I ever decide to activate Code Omega, I'll probably be sitting in this room with the emergency locks on the doors, programming yet another way for sunlight to glint off a rainbow-colored ring, waiting for the corporate strike team to cut open the door once everything's died down. Who knows, maybe I'll be eating soychips when that happens. All I know is they picked the right person for the job; I don't care enough about my work to be nervously secretive about it, therefore blowing my cover to a group of people who can read your emotions and even your mind if they get suspicious, and I don't care enough about other people to worry about having them killed. Say what you will about Big Brother, he knows you like no one else.
Over the course of the next few hours, I Look at the ritual team, watching them weave beautifully intricate and yet ordered threads of... of life energy, for lack of a better word, in ways that I will probably never match, and will never care to. All that's needed for this job is that I have the Sight.
The scruffy-looking German Shepherd rises off the ground and disappears along with its bonds. In the physical plane, it looks like they're giving it a clean disappearance; in the astral plane, the plane that I use the Sight to see, the dog materializes and then implodes, kind of like pressure differences in space except in reverse. Everything's an impossible shade of gold in the astral, so there isn't any red blood, but there is a golden liquid spreading from where the dog's compressed carcass in all directions. The astral blood smudges the wards on my room, and I suppress the admittedly childish urge to get some on my finger and taste it. The experiment is a failure, and I spend the next 5 minutes recording a report telling the suits exactly that. Too bad, really. If it'd worked, I'd have been witness to the magical equivalent of the first step on the moon. Oh, well.
After work, I take the elevator to my apartment. Renraku tried offering employee housing on site years ago, but everyone decided to rent their own, everybody but me, that is. The motion-activated lights don't turn on for anybody but myself and the janitor, and I'm reminded of this every time the elevator door opens and the lights turn on down the long, open hallway one by one in perfect sequence.
I open the door to my apartment to find the wall blown open, the hole looking as if a fire giant's fist had made it. Probably some act of corporate war they didn't bother telling us about, some freelance agents escaping in a chopper or something. I already know I won't be getting any sleep, so I use magic for the first time in a month, the last time being when I healed a bruise and almost failed at it. I levitate out the hole in my wall and onto the roof; should be interesting, never thought I'd actually have an opportunity. Floating up from the middle of a crowd of jumpsuited Renraku rank-and-file tends to draw bureaucratic attention.
I sit there and watch the night skyline, and for the first time in years spent in a corporate sinecure, I wonder. I wonder why I don't care about people, why very few, if any, really care about people, why everybody takes such pains to pretend to. I dwell mostly on the first part.
People talk about the beauty of the city at night, but all I see is stasis and encapsulation. All those lights, always so distant and indistinct, being forced together by the demands of capitalism and city zoning laws. Everybody's too busy thinking it's beautiful to realize that most of those lights are offices where people work unpaid overtime, data cables plugged into their heads transmitting sheet after sheet of accounting transaction. I guess it's a better idea to focus on something I actually do want to see.
Illusions... what kind of illusion spell should I cast? How about a miniature of an impossible dream? Let's check my list of discarded fantasies... a carnival in the clouds, a nymph of the woods, a world of green and gold, always youthful, always alive...
Let's start with the carnival in the clouds. Okay... clouds, check. Mountain of wispy stone, check. Fantastically elaborate rides without lines, check. Small, happy children, loving, happy parents, cotton candy made of sugary mist...
The spell breaks as soon as I touch it. Frag, I didn't even notice that I was trying to. But for a moment there, a small, infinitely small moment, I could feel something... Something real, more real than river water, than metallic stares, that would be there for me if only I believed in it enough. Now I know why I stopped using magic and turned to punching code in my portacomp.
I lie down on the rooftop watching what little moonlight there is filter through Seattle's smog-thickened clouds. I close my eyes, not really caring if I roll off the rooftop in my sleep. I feel the stream of a tear I didn't notice cool against my cheek.
