Joe Noone woke to painful ringing in his ears. His eyes stung and were crazy-glued shut. It felt like a team of surly Swedish furniture makers who lacked both the manual and universal handy tool were slowly rebuilding his mind. They erected shelves at gross angles that eventually came toppling down with a crash. His stomach lurched.

Joe groaned and reached out in anguish to find something to hang on to. His hand brushed over the console of his security station.

“Oh, God.” Suddenly he realized where he was. Work. Drunk. Again. Slowly he cracked his eyes open. The glow of the terminal was yet another unwelcome intrusion into his world of pain, but he managed to glance at the time. Either he had passed out for an hour or had been gone a whole day. He gently maneuvered the mouse and brought up the shift calendar. An entire day had come and gone. Where had he been?

With trembling legs he pushed off on his chair to the bank of monitors. His stash was still in place, short one bottle. Something glinted in the corner of his eye. He turned and saw the empty bottle accusing him from under his desk. It must have rolled there when he lost consciousness.

Four years on the job (three of them drinking) were staring at him in that shiny bottle. And what had he to show for it? A long walk down the path to self-destruction. Granted, he was a top-ranked Sector Chief, but in a compound the size of a city with as many Sectors as metropolises have suburbs, he was measly middle management. What had become of his promising young life after university? Dead ends, few good times and oblivion. He scratched his day-growth of beard, lost deep in thought and hangover, and then stretched his aching limbs.

Steadily, he knelt down and crawled over to the bottle. He brought it close and sniffed it, feeling half-ashamed, half-filled with desire. He tipped it upside down. Not a drop left. Sighing, he shrugged and deep-sixed it over his shoulder into the waste receptacle. Today I turn over a new leaf, he thought. Grunting as he got to his feet, Joe leaned on the keyboard of the console, which suddenly began to play strange music that only a software marketer would find catchy. He had logged himself out.

Joe cursed and wheeled his chair back to the console before sitting down. He rubbed his eyes, cracked his knuckles, entered his password and glanced up.

Access Denied: Invalid Account.

He raised an eyebrow and tried again. The same system message taunted him. Fear and suspicion seeped into his head. He had been drunk on the job, apparently passed out for a day and woke up in the last place he remembered being—still logged into the system. No one woke him or chucked him in the corporate brig. If he had been found out that’s surely where he’d be right now. There was no evidence to support that he was in any trouble.

A simple sector-to-sector call would remedy the problem. Granted, he would have to apply for a new access profile and go through an extensive inquiry. If he didn’t respond to every question correctly, they would hit him with pain sticks until he told them exactly what they wanted to hear. This was all made clear in the Employee Handbook of the New Despotism at VirCorp: Iron Fist Edition. Joe among countless other employees loathed this. But if Dante was correct, the bozo who concocted these regulations would have one bugger of a time below.

Because VirCorp was a multinational conglomerate dealing in a multitude of products and services (each allocated to its own zone of the US corporate headquarters) it was forced to adopt a meticulous organizational structure. For example, if a problem occurred in Sector A then the Sector A Chief would call for backup from the nearest proximate sector, being Sector ZZ-9. Sector B’s backup would come from QJ-3, Sector C’s backup was RR-5, and so on in that fashion. It was common belief that the Sector naming logic was accounted for by the all night kegger the company’s executive officers threw for the building managers the night before the headquarters officially began operations.

Joe worked himself up to make the call. It would be OK. While he sweated, sobriety slowly crept back in. Before he was fully aware of it, he was already punching in the emergency code to Sector RR-5. After several long seconds, a man with a hawkish nose and beady eyes hidden behind coke bottle glasses appeared on the video screen and spoke.

"VirCorp Research Compound Sector RR-5, Sector Chief Lemuel Z. Kabar speaking. State your business!"

Oh, great, he thought. Another jerk who enjoys protocol and procedures. This guy’s just like Tanzer. Tanzer had a sixth month seniority over Joe. Because of this he had been promoted to Captain in the Corporate Police Division instead of Joe after last year’s review. Of course, he rubbed everyone’s noses in it when he left the ranks. Joe had known a few other ambitious men like this in his day, always after promotion (often off the backs of fired coworkers), but none so vile as Moritz Tanzer. Rumor had it that he really got the promotion by signing over his first-born to the company for research. Men like Tanzer knew how to talk down to any one, because they didn’t care for anyone but themselves and power. Clearly this man on the other line was well on his similar journey to the dark side. Bleary eyed, Joe stared into the monitor and found his professional voice.

“Sector Chief Kabar, this is Sector Chief Joseph Noone at Sector C requesting renewed access. My login is no longer valid.”

“Where have you been, Sector Chief Noone?” Kabar looked frustrated. “We’ve had a breach of security, or didn’t you know? Everyone’s access is reduced or revoked until we get this situation sorted.”

Joe raised an eyebrow, “What is the nature of the breach? Fire? One of the lab techs blow themselves up again? Another terrorist attack?”

“Incorrect. Several hours ago, a knife-wielding intruder broke into the labs in your sector without authorization. Surely the internal system alerted you!”

Joe was taken aback. Someone sneaked in, on his watch. His watch. The pooh was really going to impact the rotary cooling device this time. Mind racing, he tried his best to come up with an explanation.

“Well,” he rubbed his head tenderly, “I believe the assailant subdued me while I was watching the monitors. I came to just a few minutes ago with one hell of a migraine.”

“This is not going to be good at all for your next employee review, Sector Chief Noone. However, you will be pleased to know that the assailant now been detained, after he attempted to stab one of my officers. Thankfully, he did not succeed and we managed to subdue him. He is now in the Sector RR-5 brig.”

“If the situation is contained, when will access be restored?”

Kabar paused and glanced around his station on the other end of the link. He punched a few keys and then sneered. “It appears access has just been restored. Try it now.”

“Great! Will do.” Joe turned to face the terminal and keyed in his login information. It began to flash red angry letters. The whole station began to whir, click and make horrible grinding noises. “This can’t be good,” Joe muttered. Finally the whole station made the sound of a light bulb exploding and went black.

“Sector Chief Noone?” A garbled voice chriped from the blackness. Joe peered around him in the dark looking for the source.

“Yes? Who’s there?”

“It’s Sector Chief Kabar. I lost video from your end. We still have audio. This is most perplexing.”

“You’re telling me!” Joe sighed in the darkness, leaning over the comm.

“You are Joseph Orson Noone correct?”

“Yeah. Why are you asking, you know that’s me! We’ve been talking for the last five minutes.”

“Well, if you are he, then I regret to inform you that you are fired as of now for incompetence due to drunkenness of a non-executive employee while on the job.”

“What in the name of all that is holy are you talking about?”

“You’re fired! As in ‘clear out your desk’. As in ‘get lost’! I’m sorry!”

“Wait! What the—“ the expletive was cut short as Kabar terminated the link. How could he do that? How could they know he was drunk? The video feeds never left his sector. Then again, where was he for the 24 hours in between passing out and waking up to the nightmare? There were so many missing pieces of the puzzle for it to make any sense—and it was all hitting him at once. Tears of shock and confusion ran rivers down his cheeks. He felt guilty for being a drunk, but he knew that there was more going on than the garbage he had just been fed.

There was only one thing he could do. He was finally going to give Human Resources a piece of his mind. He was going to the business district and let it all out. Even though he had been a drunk, he had never missed a shift. Joe was even an effective employee when called upon. He had defused three violent protests in the course of his employment. The first time got him promoted to Chief. The other two were well known among his fellow officers. And he was serious about sobriety now. Just as he made the decision, it seemed that life was slapping him down again. Well, this time he wasn’t going to back down! This was his first gainful employment, even if he had grown cold to it. It kept him fed, clothed and sheltered and left enough money over to enjoy life a little more. He was not losing this job. This was not happening. He punched the console in anger, shattering the dash. Gathering his strength, he stood up and stormed off into the darkness towards the exit.

Meanwhile, Lawrence found himself in an even less than ideal situation.