As I opened my eyes the following morning, the entire experience felt like a very lucid dream. Just for kicks, I reached out my hand to the bedside dresser to deconstruct the wood in it, but nothing happened. I smiled, but part of me was a little disappointed in reality.

As I climbed out of bed, the typical shroud of post sleep exhaustion was nowhere to be found. The normal tightness and aches in my knees and ankles were also gone. The day kept getting better and better.

Normally, I’d never be up that early, much less be useful to anyone, so my usual frantic dash to get ready for work took on a more pedestrian pace.

I actually cooked breakfast. Eggs, Bacon, even baked that can of expiring croissant rolls in my fridge.

I kept a careful eye on the clock as I ate, chewing away at the best breakfast I’d eaten in months. Typically, my breakfasts consisted of an expensive coffee from the vendor at the autocab pickup near my apartment, but the change of pace was nice. By the time I ate, showered, and got dressed, I still ended up being late, which probably tells you all you need to know about who I am as an employee.

Forgoing the coffee vendor, who waved at me like a friendly tetrameth dealer from a dark alley, I glanced at the locational glyph printed on a nearby sign and signalled that I was awaiting the first available autocab through my implant. I could have just had them pick me up outside of my apartment door, but the response time to the stop was much quicker, since the AI’s running the cab companies attempted to maximize profit. Targeting their stops meant more money per operational hour, so instead of chasing single fares down back alleys, they would send the vast majority of their cabs to predetermined pickup points which would usually have clients waiting curbside.

A cab arrived a few minutes after I’d sent out the beacon, and I was on my way to the office. Even though Harry had indicated that I really didn’t have to show up in person while working on his project, the thought of hanging out all day in my shitty apartment was just a little too much reality for me after last nights experience.

The autocab lifted from the pavement and climbed rapidly. Long ago having integrated all of my communications accounts with my implant, I began sifting through the morning notes each department head was required to issue in order to keep everyone on the same page. Harry, being a little more old fashioned than most, believed that while internal tracking software perhaps did a more efficient job of keeping work organized, the work produced would be better if everyone in the company was required to actually communicate with each other. In a larger company, this would be nearly impossible, but Harry got away with it because our entire staff numbered around forty employees total.

Water began to spatter against the side window of the AutoCab as we banked around a familiar office tower, and I knew from experience that my journey was around halfway over. The autocabs were remarkably predictable, slaves to their programming despite all the talk of sentience, so the entire operation ran like clockwork. That my own life had become equally predictable drew uncomfortable parallels that we’ve already established I'm not proud of.

The clouds overhead seemed to get a little bit closer to the ground every day, their inexorable descent taking our world a little closer to the stylized reality of UNDR all the time. The virtual dreamscape from the night before was still fresh in my mind, bringing me back to a thought that I often toyed with during my morning commute - were the writers and artists designing dystopian societies in science fiction just incredibly prescient, or were their creations so stunning that we’ve been subconsciously pushing our reality in that direction? Depending on mood, I’d found myself on either side of the fence each time I put my mind to the question.

Below, I saw the rooftop gardens, flashes of green behind pollution clouded glass. They were usually run by cooperatives in each of the buildings, but even with state of the art hydroponics and the best water and air filtration systems available with modern technology, the industrial runoff that kept us dumb and sick, that the FDA assured us were within “acceptable levels”, was still rendering the produce little better than the processed nutrition bars handed out by the government.

The only untainted goods available came from self contained biomes, owned exclusively by those with the means to ensure their purity, or from the large growing fields outside of the city. Those plants had been genetically modified for maximum yield, and cared more for sale weight than actual nutrition. Most days, I couldn’t be bothered to put in the work to buy and prepare them. I preferred to instead check in daily with the VitaDoc mounted to the wall in the men’s bathroom to fill the gaps left in my diet from whatever was on sale at the convenience store in my building.

When I placed my arm inside of the roughly foot deep cylinder of the VitaDoc, the machine drew a small amount of blood, ran a battery of tests, and injected any vitamins or nutrients it found me to be especially deficient in. After the health insurance crisis of the 2130’s, it was what passed for healthcare coverage in most companies now. I was under no illusions of it’s ultimate effectiveness, all of us ultimately doomed to death, but it was only a minute out of my day, an easy measure to take against the pollution and malnourishment of the modern world inexorably pushing us to an early grave.

The autocab landed on a pad halfway up the building owned by my employers parent company, which DownEast News leased through an incredibly complex web of corporate shell games that probably saved the company a fortune in loopholed taxes. Our entire operation was housed in half a floor of the gigantic building, and in the years I’d been working for Harry, I’d never been curious enough to find out what sort of corporate hijinks our neighbors got up to. Shit, I couldn’t pick out the person who lived next door to me from a police lineup. Social interactions tended to be largely handled through the asynchronous filter of software, every message a make or break hurdle to overcome in order to facilitate continued discourse. If enough hurdles were overcome, perhaps a face to face meeting might take place, but largely, most relationships outside of the workplace existed entirely online.

All of that was mainly to justify my lack of social interaction with my coworkers. Call me an introvert, call me a sociopath. I'd probably have a hard time refuting either, other than to say we're all moving in that direction. I might just be ahead of the curve.

That's not to say I don't recognize familiar faces, give what I hope to be congenial nods or gestures, but In my years at DownEast News, I'd carefully cultivated my loner mystique to the point where nobody really made attempts at anything more than that.

I stepped on to the conveyor, getting a slight jolt of nostalgia from my leap of faith the night before. It brought a smile to my face, but I hid it before anyone managed to see. I wasn't at work to make friends. That hadn't always been the case, but after being burned several times early in my career by people I trusted or thought friends either throwing me under the proverbial bus to further their own ambitions, or rotating to new departments or new companies just as we were developing a rapport, I stopped bothering out of personal necessity.

Plus, there was the implant. It still weirded most people out a little, sticking racks of hardware in their head, and while they were becoming more common, there was still a large subset of the populace that considered it a betrayal to their own bodies. I could certainly try to explain that I didn't have a choice, that my implant was there to keep my neurological demons at bay, but that would only further complicate things. No, I'd rather them just be afraid of me recording every word they said, reading their body data and using the implant to see through their clothes with my x-Ray vision. Not that I had x-Ray vision, but when people are afraid all sorts of bullshit possibilities get thrown around.

Harry's office was one of the first ones off the conveyor, a glass edifice of trust and transparency, or at least that’s how he referred to it. I could see his head uncharacteristically bobbing up and down, hands waving, obviously in the middle of an animated telephone conversation with someone. The sound deadening laminated into the glass made eavesdropping impossible, so I continued on to my desk and flicked the switch on it’s side, turning on my own reciprocal sound dampeners.

Old school desktop computers were almost nonexistent nowadays, but writing and low level coding were two of the remaining fields where the ergonomics of having physical keyboards and upright screens were still the most efficient way to get work done without developing repetitive stress injuries. For all of the technological advancements over the past few decades, the human body remained relatively unchanged. Ten fingers, two eyes, one brain.

The white noise from the sound dampeners relaxed me, as well as the knowledge that any sounds from inside my workspace would be instantly deadened on impact, as well as any sound from outside it.

I scanned my retina and fingerprint to log in to my machine, and the back edge of the flexible glass work surface rose at the back and sides, a browser window flickering to life across its surface. The surface was slanted towards me front to back, the front portion at wrist level, the back edge at eye level. Sensors at the corners continually adjusted the angle and tilt of the screen as I shifted and leaned, which was about the best our company could provide in the way of ergonomics.

Sure, I could have researched UNDR Online at home through my implant, but the data connection at work was free, uncapped, and I’d yet to bother checking to see how much I’d used last night while inside of UNDR.

Logging into my UNDR online account, I was able to see my stats, and also research the items in my inventory. The Firewall Shard was a reasonably decent implant that protected against psychic attacks up to and including 6th level Black Hats and Psyonicists, a variation of the Cleric-like Transhumanist class branch. I’d equip it as soon as I logged back in that night, since I was allowed three shards to be equipped at any time. Similarly, the Regen Nano Mod slotted into a similar slot, though there was only one of it’s type. At first glance, it wasn’t quite clear what the box, placed to the right of the paper doll depiction of his inventory that slid out from the lower right of his HUD. A bit of research explained that it was a moderate level regeneration/healing buff, an injection of regenerating nano-bots that could heal a hit point a second, a ten fold increase over the base recovery rate of 1 hit point per ten seconds.

The Portal Gloves looked cool, with light blue tracers running down the back of each synthetic leather digit, but I wondered how they would work with my Render powers. If nothing else, I figured I could use them to cover my hands if I needed to hide my powers. The Booster Hypo was like a synthesized shot of adrenaline, giving +20 boosts to Strength, +15 to Dexterity, and +20 to resilience for a period of five minutes. It was also a one time use item, so not something I’d want to pull out unless I needed an escape hatch from a bad situation.

A flash of shadow caused me to look up, but it was just one of the overly friendly layout artists waving as they passed my office. I waved back to her so that she wouldn’t stop to wait for a response, and went back to my screen. The screen had a privacy filter, which locked down the viewing angle to around five degrees, only tolerable because the desk continually morphed to keep my eyes within the narrow window in which it was useful.

I continued to research the remaining two items, and discovered that the Rail Revolver was a cross between a large, old school revolver and rail gun. The cylinder automatically replenished it’s load, so the action was probably a heat dissipation function.

The hand cannon dealt 45 base points of damage, but by plugging my stats into a handy online calculator, I was able to lock down the damage potential more accurately. Strength (12) + Dexterity (14) x Level (1) divided by 5 gave me a modifier of 5.2, which made the gun capable of 59 DPS, or Damage per Shot/Second (Ranged/Melee). Including the 1d10 randomized damage increase per weapon level (1), each shot would ultimately cause between 60-70 DPS. Headshots were subject to a critical hit multiplier of 2.6 (calculated Dexterity (14) + Luck (12) divided by 10), meaning that if I were able to hit someone in the head with the unwieldy revolver, it was possible to do between 157-180 DPS.

My head spun with all of the numbers, but the calculations were all done in the background and I really only needed to know the ultimate potential of each shot. So, 60-70 for normal shots, 157-180 for headshots.

The final item in my inventory seemed to be some sort of pet egg, though I had no idea how to hatch it. I pulled it up on my screen, staring at the hologram like projection through the translucent black glass of my desktop, when someone spoke behind me.

“Ah, I see you got my present.”

I spun, realizing that the only way I’d have been able to hear the person, and the only way they’d have been able to see my screen, was if they were standing directly behind my chair, practically looking over my shoulder.

Harry smiled, amused that he had been able to sneak up on me without my noticing.

“Dammit, Harry, you scared the shit out of me.”

“You need to be more aware of your surroundings if you’re going to be playing UNDR Online. These gifts are about all I’ll be able to give you in the way of help, since I can’t log in without alerting the people tracking me. I’m still not sure how they’re able to do it, but I believed the man when he said it was possible.

My attention drifted back to the screen.

“So, what can you tell me about this Daemon Crystal?”

“I’m told it’s some sort of pet, but since I already have one, I wasn’t able to hatch it and find out. You’re only allowed one pet at a time, though certain classes like Shamans and Renders can manufacture minions, but those minions can’t really think for themselves until you get pretty high in level. Anyway, just leave it in the top row of your inventory, and you’ll be notified when it’s ready to hatch. I carried it for a while, so it should be due to pop any day now.”

The facets of the crystalline egg flickered as the artificial light inside the program generating the model played off it’s surface. I felt a little conflicted, unsure of how I felt about a pet that would either be a great help to me, or a severe pain in the ass to care for and train at a time that I would probably have a hard enough time keeping myself alive.