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.
