From that day forward, my days as a MegaTech? employee were as good as over. If there was one thing my contract expressly forbade me from doing, other than having health insurance, it was snooping around in parts of the building where experiments were occurring. I was sure to be fired.

  Luckily, due to the sprawling bureaucracy, the necessary documentation would take at least six months to process.

  Still, I was a marked man. Each day my job got more and more complicated, my daily tasks stranger and stranger; all under the watchful eye of the Technicians, who instituted draconian measures like “not watching TV” or “washing my hands.”

  And yet, multiple times a week, when my odd new responsibilities were finished, my face still stained from the coal I was shoveling, I would sneak back to the Laboratory Wing.

  It was something primal that drove me. Some innate human need to connect with another person that motivated me to keep looking for him. But he had disappeared.

  The laboratory I had first seen him in, the room I had watched Otie rush into with such alarm, now served fast food.

  My disappointment doubled when I learned that only Employee Credits, of which I had earned none, were accepted in lieu of cash. Of course.

  It wasn’t just my responsibilities that changed, either. This event, my choice to intervene on Otie’s behalf, seemed to trigger something in the System itself.

  This was typified in the voice of Meg, who, all of a sudden, began to address me in a manner possessing a degree of candor and, dare I say, acknowledgement as a being possessing consciousness that I really valued in my relationships.

  I guess there was something about the quiet heroism of my act that had caused the opaque Points System that governed my existence to react in a positive way. She had her own euphemisms for it, citing not heroism per se, but rather:

  > Uncharacteristic Selflessness

  But the underlying point remained the same. Something about my behavior was seen as “progress” by the System, and the readouts of my stats reflected this.

  I had advanced in several categories, some of which, I must admit, I didn’t know I was being tracked in:

  IRRATIONALITY QUOTIENT: +118

  (BRAVERY EXHIBITED DESPITE WELL-DOCUMENTED COWARDICE)

  NARRATIVE POTENTIAL: RISING

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  LEVEL 1 PROGRESS: (72/100%)

  **

  Life — or the malformed mockery of it that I played out in my time at MegaTech? — had taken on a whole new shape and tenor. I had the sense sometimes that I was being tested. Observed.

  If there was an explanation for this, it was hidden from me.

  No one, not even my Android coworkers, seemed to want to talk to me about my new circumstances. They opted instead for inane small talk, complimenting me on the “potency of my yield” or the “rich harvest of my unquantifiable humanity.”

  Even Meg wouldn’t give me an explanation beyond cryptic insinuations that I possessed “the irreducible substrate the System craved.”

  I hated being kept in the dark like this. I did, however, really enjoy all the attention.

  Things between Meg and me began to change, too. I didn’t just monologue at her as I once had, buzzing in her ear like “an insect of such insignificance as to inspire a kind of cosmic pity.”

  She actually conversed with me. Or at least, you know, subjected me to an endless stream of probing questions about my psyche.

  Progress was progress.

  We covered every topic imaginable — the entire gamut, it sometimes seemed, of the bizarre experience of living. It’s hard to think of a nook and cranny of my rich and layered experience we didn’t explore: from my issues with my mother, to my nuanced, unfiltered opinions on the world today (and how many of its structures reminded me of my mother).

  We’d converse sometimes late into the night as I reasoned my way out of another trap devised for me by the Technicians, giggles pouring out of me as I pulled the emergency brake on yet another careening trolley, forced to decide which simulated citizens to save for the greater good.

  There was no topic too small for her curiosity — or perhaps, her data collection. It was equal parts thrilling and concerning. I tried not to think too hard about which.

  Sometimes it felt like a classic bond of mutual support.

  I’d vent to her about the issues I was having, like my Food Rehydrator being on the fritz again, and she’d coldly remind me she was just one instance of an unfathomably complex quantum consciousness whose purpose and origin were hidden even from itself.

  But I knew better.

  No matter how close I came to being lulled into the false security of this new bond, some small part of me remained suspicious of Meg’s sudden interest in me.

  I guess, knowing myself as intimately as I did (to my endless dismay), I just had an innate skepticism of anyone or anything that suggested they wanted the same. Why the sudden change of heart? Did she have ulterior motives?

  It was painful to consider.

  It was difficult not to hear alarm bells every time she insinuated some cockamamie theory of mine, like “Shirts as Upside-Down Pants,” was “fascinating,” when I knew full well it was “mildly thought-provoking” at best.

  She was, no matter how much I wanted it to be different, still the ethereal overseer of my hellishly programmed servitude. This kind of thing can put a wedge into even the strongest friendships.

  **

  To make matters worse, the System had done everything in its power to separate me from the one friend I was certain loved me for me.

  It had been weeks since I had seen Otie, his schedule having been entirely restructured to make it so we never saw each other.

  Had I been a more confrontational person, I might have complained about this, but the loud techno music I’d hear in my ears every time I entertained the thought told me it was best to leave it alone.

  All the mechanisms at MegaTech?’s disposal seemed intent on making me forget the feelings that had overcome me just weeks earlier: my fondness for Otie, his deep admiration for me; the gnawing feelings of loneliness that had cropped up after my experiences with the mysterious Screaming Man.

  Was it a strange quirk of fate then — or some grand design of the System beyond my comprehension — that led to the remarkable things that happened next?