Titan had rounded the Horn with the Big Dumb Fleet about 45 minutes ago and basically the world was coming to an end. That was the gist of the message she read through the spider-web of cracks on the screen of her old phone. As she moved to quickly slide the thin wedge of the device back into her jeans she was startled by a sudden yet soothing series of chimes. She lost her grip on her phone and it bounced on edge with a sharp crack before settling face down on the finished concrete floor. Before picking it up, she sheepishly ran her hand through her long black hair and turned to the source of the chime. It was a small speaker mounted next to one of the surveillance cameras that were everywhere in the department store. These were more aimed at the employees than the guests.

“Noel Cross,” the speaker said, in a neutral male voice. Perhaps it was someone in a call center, somewhere, named Steve. She’d never met the guy. “You were flagged for personal phone use outside of break time.”

“Ah, sorry.” Noel said. One of the guests passing by the aisle stopped to gawk at the scene, which made her flush a deeper red. She leaned down finally to pick it up and clicked the power button on the side to check if it was still working after the fall. Dead.

“Place your personal phone in the lockbox at the front. You may retrieve it after you clock out.”

Her anger surged forward and then receded, as a wave might threaten a sandcastle that is just barely out of its reach. Corporate had moved most of the management to a central location and then, she strongly suspected, replaced most of them with razor systems. After all the image processing razors could detect her using a phone or fraternizing with her coworkers in an instant. Steve was inferior and probably didn’t exist. She was lucky to have a job, under the circumstances. In this world the sun would rise tomorrow and she’d have to fight the dull and very much un-final battles of daily life.

Her home city of Albemarle was already a bit of a wasteland by the turn of the millennium, according to her late parents. All of the commerce was moved out of the city center and onto one of those ugly mile-long strip malls that Americans love to build. As far as she knew, she and everyone in the city worked on this stretch and sold things to each other like an economic Ouroboros. It had been two hours since she had last seen a competently-dressed thin person. She dropped her brick of a phone into the lockbox and went back to work.

On her way out she was stopped by the greeter, a veteran named Mike in his late 30s. He was short enough to have been made fun of by his fellow marines, but still her eyes were only about the level of his nose. He’d lost most of his right leg in the second Pacific War. Since then he’d received an active prosthetic from the VA, but it honestly kind of sucked. It was a little embarrassing for her when he unfurled the black t-shirt she had earlier spotted in a bargain bin and decided to purchase after clocking out.

The front of the shirt had a picture of a black-haired robotic woman in a frilly black skirted costume, dynamically posed and holding a microphone. A line of canted and stylized text adjancent to her read ‘AZURE’. She actually already owned this shirt, as well as everything else Azure, but had worn a hole in this particular article in the succeeding years. Besides, given how closely Azure was associated with ACO it had to be a sign of luck that she spotted it today. Noel winced as a grimace briefly crossed the man’s lined face. He looked at least ten years older than he really was, even before adding in ugly facial expressions.

“You know she fought in the war?” Mike said, “Before becoming a pop star.”

“Really?” Noel said, feigning ignorance, “I thought Ultimate systems weren’t allowed to kill people.”

“Heard ACO was shutting down tomorrow.” he said, blatantly changing the subject, “You play that right? I used to, too.”

Noel held out her hand and he passed the shirt back to her. There were a lot of military types in that game, which was unsurprising given its history.

“Absolute Conviction Online? Yep. End of an era.” she sighed, and flashed him a smile, “It’s kind of a niche sim game, though. Only weirdos like me like it.”

“Which frame did you play?” he said. As much of a hurry as she was in, he was a nice guy and would be part of her life for longer than ACO.

“I started out in the Spider, but I mostly do naval stuff since the expansion added that.”

“No shit? I thought only progs did that.” he said.

That wasn’t true, but it was true for her. You could play any role competently on a bog standard VR set or even just a monitor. You could do that. If you were a casual.

His eyes flitted down to her neck and she helpfully lifted aside her hair and tilted her neck to show him the scars from her implant, and the flat subcutaneous pad that formed the interface. The progressive, it was called, so-named because it got progressively better with time. Even though he was an amputee, Mike didn’t really need a full progressive and as such the VA hadn’t paid for one. He just needed to move his leg back and forth. He didn’t even need to move his toes and, in fact, the prosthetic didn’t have them.

He had a simpler system offering less-than-great fidelity, which was itself a more permanent version of the non-invasive rigs available to consumers, which sold for about two months of an average person’s salary. For the price of a progressive a person could retire, if not lavishly so.

You really needed a damn good reason to have one of these at all, much less as someone working a dead end job. Noel could tell from the confusion on his face he was curious as to what that was, in her case.

“I got into a car accident when I was 18.” she said, “Total paralysis from the neck down.”

Mike whistled.

“How did you pay for that?” he said, “Gold-plated insurance?”

“I didn’t.” she said, “My parents did.”

Mike drew his thin lips into a line and nodded sadly. She had told him once, while they were both on break, about losing her parents seven years ago. From the looks of things he seemed to have understood how this price was paid.

“Ah, sorry.”

Noel smiled to reassure him, even though she really didn’t feel like it. As she was zipping up her gray fleece coat she briefly had to move the plastic zipper out of the way of her name tag, and the man raised his eyebrows suddenly in a flash of recognition. He politely held up a hand to stop her for a moment. Having followed his eyes and the course of the conversation, she suddenly sensed that she’d said too much.

ACO was a pretty small community compared to more popular MMOs. That was why it was shutting down, after all. For some reason an order of magnitude more people, derisively referred to as secondaries, preferred to appreciate it from a safe distance in the form of easily digestible clips and a decently popular online panel show. The usual explanation was that it was more fun to watch players melt down over their impenetrable non-game and to follow their frivolous soap-opera dramas than it was to play it oneself. The common wisdom was, in this case, correct. If Mike had any lingering affection for the game and followed any of this content, he only had to make a small leap—

“Wait. Noel Cross? Are you NoCro?” he said.

“Who is that?” Noel said. A brief moment of silence followed, of the sort that often does when one person in a conversation has uttered an obvious lie. The woman sagged and relented. “Alright, yes.”

“Never woulda figured. See you tomorrow.”

“Nope, I got the day off.”

Mike gave her a salute, which she returned to the best of her ability before she departed through the sliding glass doors into the cool winter evening. It was full dark at ten in the evening. The winter solstice was at 8:30 PM the following evening, with the servers scheduled to shut down at midnight Pacific time. That was roughly 28 hours away.

It had cooled down significantly since the start of her shift under the mid-afternoon sun and she had the idea to throw on the Azure shirt she had just purchased to layer up. It felt like a naughty act since she had been instructed never to wear clothes of the rack. She took her broken phone out of her pocket and gave it a solid thwack against the back of her hand. To her surprise the percussion breathed a little spirit back into it and the machine came to life shortly. She breathed a sigh of relief. Between that and the fortuitous shirt, the lucky stars were aligning.

She had 10 missed calls and half as many voicemails, to say nothing of the volume of text messages, all of which were from her ACO pals. What the hell happened? Before she could investigate further the phone blinked off, attempted to reboot itself, and then finally died. No amount of jiggling, thwacking, or pleading would awaken it again. She gripped it with white knuckles and cocked her hand back to throw it down onto the pavement, then her eye caught one of the exterior cameras intently watching her. She dropped the phone into a nearby trashcan and stalked away.