You hastily go back down the hallway you came from, "No way out? Maybe that upset guy from earlier wrote it. There's always a way out. How else do people get home?" You wonder if the janitor had gotten to that bathroom yet. You pass by the office you were in previously and think for a moment about when you first woke up here, "There was a window in my office. It looked down to a street!" You stop and turn around to return to that office and look for a window. And sure enough, as you walk in you see the window and it's covered with cheap white blinds. A small bit of light pokes through and you grab the string to pull them back. A wave of relief washes over you as you see a street, it's a busy midday and people are walking about and drivers stop at the red light. You sigh and think about it for a moment as you look for a street sign. Something must indicate where you are. The cars are too far away to read a state on the license plate and there aren't any billboards in sight either. In fact, the city looks spectacular, spotless and clean. You've never seen such a polite street full of pedestrians and dog walkers.
Something dawns on you, "I'm on floor 3016!" From the view of the window you seem to only be 20 floors up in the building, "This can't be right. What if I just open this window and take a look down below" You think. And you look for some kind of window latch, or a lock. You run your eyes around the window frame and see nothing that will help. Some windows just weren't meant to be opened. But at the last moment your eye catches something, a little switch lays flat on the top rim of the window. You hesitate thinking about what it might do. It wouldn't be the light switch, you already flipped that one. What's the worst that could happen? You raise your arm up to its full expansion to reach the top and you flip it.
What happens stuns you, the switch is flipped and it turns out the window was only a monitor playing an ongoing scene. It shuts off like a television to reveal what's really outside of the office. A janitor's closet, "What?" You flip the switch on, and off again, "It's just a screen? And there's a room back there?" You see some mop buckets and cleaning supplies all on a shelf. There's a washing machine and a dryer as well, "Is someone being spied on?" You figure you really don't have time for this, so you slip the switch back on and close the blinds, "I guess those screens stay on all hours of the day." And you leave the office, closing the door behind you. God knows how many floors this place has, you can't imagine what the electric bill is for the windows alone.
Back at the elevator, you press the button and wait. Looking down each side of the deep hallway you don't see anything out of the ordinary and you press the button again in eagerness, "It's only been a few minutes. How far could it have gone?" You look around at your feet and think about the window. Do they all have switches? Did yours have a switch too? The curiosity in you grows and you look down the hallways to your right and see a window at the far end, "That boss on the phone can shove it." And you start walking down the aisle. It almost reminds you of a hospital with its tile floor and white walls. There's even some pictures hanging up as you pass, one of a little house on a hill and another one that is an abstract painting. None of them really catch your attention.
The path to the end was long and you passed a few unmarked doors, "Is there a map I don't know about? There must be something I'm missing." You walk for a few more minutes and one of the doors was left cracked open, just barely. You stop outside of the door and look at the window, you are just 20 feet from it. You decide to take a little peek into the room and you nudge the door open just enough to fit your head in. Your curiosity really does get the best of you. There's no one around and you look down in front of you to see a few cubicles with computers at each of them giving off a dim light.
You feel like you are trespassing, but you enter anyway. The door creaks and you make sure not to close it behind you. It's a straight and narrow path with a low ceiling overhead and cubicles on either side. You inch forward, barely picking up your feet and trying to be quiet. You can't help but feel like something is hidden here. The eeriness of it all is almost overwhelming. You pass by file cabinets and see a computer at the end with an illuminated screen. There's a bowl of fruit sitting on the desk in front of it. Oddly enough the screen is blank, "It's definitely on, but the screen is black." There are bananas in the bowl and you reach for one, "It's fake. All the fruit is fake." You notice how everything in this room was gray besides this bowl of fruit. The desk, the chair, the carpet, and you try to open one of the drawers of the desk to find out it's locked, "Nothing makes sense." You imagine dark shadows looming in the corners of your eyes and you can't help but let the intrusive thoughts in and you worry someone is watching you.
Then you hear something outside the room and you bolt for the door, it's still open and you grab the door knob and get out to see a man standing in front of you. He stands there and looks at you, "Excuse me." And you move out of his way as he enters the room and shuts the door behind him.
"Oh, sorry." you say as he shuts it. He was a little rude, but after all, you were in his office, "What could he possibly be doing in there?" You wonder and head over to the window. It's another street similar to the one you saw before and you look down towards the ground. The video seems so real you almost can't believe it as the perspective shifts with your position to the window. You stand to the left of it, then you jump to the right, "It's just so real." The only difference with this street is the layout of the road and the buildings here seem to have swapped places with each other.
"There must be a camera hidden in the window tracking my movement so it can adjust the image." You're no expert, but it's the best explanation you could come up with. There's a switch above the frame, just like before and you raise your arm to flip it. Now the screen turns off and you stand there with confusion, "Did it turn off?" You look out of the window to see a desert scene like no other and you flip the switch on and off again as if something would be different this time. And again you see the strange desert. Sand as far as you can see lays under a white sky without a cloud in sight. Not a single feature stands out except for its vastness, "This can't be right. This must be another setting on the screen." And you look for any other buttons, but you don't find any. You sigh and look outside, "Sand? Just sand." You try to look down over the window as far as you could, but you see nothing. You can't even tell how far the ground is from you. You are so high up in this building that you can't make out any texture of the outside ground, "At least I think it's sand. It looks like a desert." You stand there for a few minutes just waiting to see something of interest and flip the switch a few more times as you think.
The man from the office behind you walks out and sees you, "Enjoying the view?" he says sarcastically.
You turn in surprise and blurt out a question, "Where are we!"
He looks at you and sighs, "You must be new." He says, "This is it. We are all here. This is all there is."
YOU ARE READING
First Day At Work
Mystery / ThrillerYou suddenly realize you work in an office. You aren't sure what you do there and you don't remember being hired. For some reason you get your own office with a view. Something isn't right. You look around yourself and try to make sense of it all.
