Maxi’s brain was scrambled. There was a pile of bodies that had accumulated on the resurrection chairs from the ones who got the questions wrong, tried to cheat, the team who attempted to rush Rick, and even a person who talked during the test. Very few had gotten out of the training. All of her team had made it out as well as the PIs. When Farhad tried to wait for her to finish the test, Rick insinuated that it wouldn’t end well for him.
Now she was just waiting for him to finish grading the last few tests. There were three others scattered at the tables waiting. She was the last person to turn it in. The questions weren’t hard, but the stress of the situation and her natural lack of ability taking standardized tests made every moment painful. She wasn’t in her element.
Rick “hmmm” licked his finger and turned the page. He put the test down and locked eyes with a yellow shirt who swayed nervously back and forth. Maxi understood why the guy was nervous. She couldn’t afford the fees and penalties associated with death, and she had been a pretty successful employee for her level and rank.
One bad day and members of the Worker class would be in a debt cycle they could never escape. Players with wealth could afford to snark their way through the training, the worst penalty they’d ever face was a day in the regeneration chair and taking the class over again. People at the bottom suffered a slow death by fees, and even if they tried to get ahead there was always something whether it was a flat tire or unexpected medical expense for their NPC family or Janitorial charging them for saving their life.
“You can go,” Rick said, and the worker sighed a sigh of relief.
The man didn’t need to be told twice, he scurried to the elevator in the back leaving Maxi with two others. Rick licked his finger and arranged his reading glasses and read the other. After some grunts, “hmmms”, and general breathing noises, Rick dismissed the other.
Maxi and the last employee didn’t dare talking to each other. According to her glasses, the guy was not within 100 levels of her. From his power armor, Maxi guessed that he was higher level than her. His Tier and Class weren’t public and Maxi guessed that he was a Porter. The man’s head looked small in the helmet.
After what seemed like forever, Rick got to the last page.
“Well…” Rick said with a long drawl.
The Porter’s visor lowered and went black. Maxi got an alert in her glasses about a railgun on his arm going hot.
Rick shot him in the head, and he chuckled. The man set down the text, and picked up the body by the shoulders like it was nothing. The power armor was easily the weight of a car, and Rick grunted like he was carrying a bag of potting soil.
“They always think the armor is going to save them,” Rick said. “Now he’s gonna have to pay the repair bill on that helmet.”
Figuring that no one was taking the test, and he was between grading, Maxi risked speaking, “What kind of gun is it?”
When Rick was done moving the body and putting it in one of the oversized chairs, he pulled out his weapon and spun it like a gunslinger and said, “Colt Peacemaker.”
“You’ve fired way more than six shots,” Maxi said, eyeing the bodies he had accumulated through the training. While she didn’t know the first thing about guns, her mom had a no weapon rule in the apartment, and considering she had psychic powers that’d decimate an entire SWAT team, she didn’t need them. However, she’d seen weapons like his in movies, and she was pretty sure an important plot point revolved around how many bullets were in the gun.
“You never need to reload when you have Ever Bullets,” Rick said. “Armor Piercing Ever Bullets, in case you’re wondering. There’s always some yahoo who thinks they can avoid training because of their fancy armor. Fancier the armor, the more expensive the repair bill.”
“I better let you get back to your work,” Maxi said as he sat down.
“No can do,” Rick said and put his legs up on the desk. At the same time Maxi thought that she was about to be harassed by the guy who teaches courses about harassment, he pulled out a lunchbox from a backpack on the floor. He fished out a Turkey sandwich and took a giant bite, mayonnaise staining his mustache. “Lunch break.”
Maxi had enough. She had taken just about as much bullshit as the company could muster. “What the hell!” She snapped and jumped to her feet.
“Nothing I can do. Lunch break is in the contract. I’m obligated to take it.” He said between mouthfuls.
“I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t take it, but can you take it a few minutes late? After you grade my test!”
“Nope.” He dug back into his container. “Contract says noon to noon thirty.”
“So take it from twelve o’three to twelve thirty-three. It’s a few minutes.”
“Can’t. Contract says noon to noon thirty.”
“Why are you punishing me because the company can’t staff a fucking training properly!”
“Why are you so eager to die?” He said while poking a straw into a juice box.
“I’m asking you to grade my test.”
“In my experience,” The man said in the same slow drawl. He ate a chip, and switched back to the sandwich. “The people who turn in the test last don’t always do so well.”
“That’s a stereotype!”
“Never said it wasn’t.”
Maxi sat down in a huff. There could be worse situations where Maxi could have to wait for thirty minutes. She could be waiting with a sick kid in a mega store for the pharmacy to open. A soup line with a dwindling supply of food when she was starving... People on death row had to wait.
But it was all subjective, a death row killer may have some damage in their brain where waiting for their own demise felt no more important than brushing their teeth in the morning. A person waiting for the bank to open on their way to work could feel like they were being tortured if they put their mind to it.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The feelings Maxi was experiencing was less the wait, but more the accumulation of all the bullshit she had endured since working for the company, from having to set a timer when she showered to sleeping in a pod to bigger concerns like how many people she’d be able to save at the end of the month who were cut out to be company workers, it finally burst.
Not to mention that she wasn’t sure if she would pass the test. It was easy, but her head wasn’t clear. Frayed nerves, test anxiety, and her mind that never stopped working didn’t leave much room for taking tests. While she had died before and been brought back before, it didn’t change the fact that she may be shot in the head in thirty minutes. She checked the time, less now.
No matter how many times she died, and the chair brought her back, there was still the nagging fear that this time might be the last. She didn’t know if there was a limit to how many times the chairs brought someone back. The higher level players avoided death, claiming the penalties and time to regenerate made death not worth it. However, was there a limit being revived?
Terry had told her that there was nothing in his database about a revival limit, but that wasn’t the same as not being one. How would she know if an employee reached their limit and was marked as terminated when it had nothing to do with job performance?
Rick munched his chips and made harumph noises. “If it’s all the same,” He said after a while between mouthfuls of chips and turkey. “Most of my training is bullshit. It’s about common decency. You treat your coworkers right, and they treat you right. If someone turns out to be an asshole… then we have ways of dealing with assholes.”
“One person’s asshole is another’s freedom fighter,” Maxi said.
“What?” Rick said.
“Nothing, it was something my dad used to say,” Maxi said.
“Henry was a good man, despite what they say.”
“You knew my father?”
“Sure, Power Twelve, who wouldn’t?”
Maxi had a flash of memory. Looking through her father’s file, there was a signature on his employee evaluations, a receipt by HR. While she couldn’t decipher the name, she remembered a giant R.
“You signed my father’s employee evaluations.”
“I see his file is no longer private after what happened, god rest his soul.”
“You were there during his disciplinary hearing, the one for unauthorized transit to a quarantined world.”
Rick winced and set down the remains of his lunch. The man changed to the expression he got right before he was about to shoot someone. Maxi had seen it enough times to know what it looked like. She left her hands where they were right before she asked the question, she didn’t even ready a psychic attack.
She figured he was high enough level, maybe even a Tier 2 or 3, that she wouldn’t have a chance against him. Fighting back only risked him using more force than necessary and risked permadeath. The far better option was to see what he did next.
“That was a hit on your father’s character, but who am I to argue with Upper Management?” Rick said to Maxi’s relief. “I didn’t think we needed to go that route, but when you’re in HR, sometimes you do what you’re told.”
Maxi wasn’t sure if he knew that the file had been heavily redacted, so she decided to pretend that she knew more than she did. “Yeah, it was a crappy situation. He was doing what he thought was best.”
“There weren’t even any grutomaton outbreaks. The whole thing was political if you ask me.”
Maxi wished she had some time to look through his personal files before having the conversation, so she could bullshit more, but she had to assume it was about the Printer of Never Jamming. However, she didn’t want to reveal more than she thought he would know.
If her father had traveled to a world that was off limits and infested with grutomatons, she’d bet everything that it was related to the printer. While she didn’t trust the man enough to let him in on the quest, considering there were people who’d destroy it, or worse use it to their own ends.
She didn’t see him as the type to use the cure to the grutomaton virus for his own profit, but she had also recently toppled a conspiracy of players who would cause the apocalypse on Earth, so they’d have a shot at being the Power Twleve on another world. Maxi had some trust issues lately, so she elected to try and squeeze as much information out of him as possible.
“I wonder what he was looking for?” She asked, figuring it was a safe enough question.
“You know damn well what he was looking for!” Rick snapped.
Maxi froze and wondered if she erred in her judgment. She had figured that the reprimand on his record wouldn’t have included any information about the Printer of Never Jamming. Her father wouldn’t have said anything, and could have given a million reasons why he was caught breaking quarantine.
Maxi hoped that she hadn’t tipped her hand about knowing very little about the incident. But after a moment, Rick seemed to relax, and Maxi felt the tension let out of her body.
“I get it,” Rick said with a more even tone in his voice. “You figure. It happened long ago. Things are probably okay now. The grutomatons have killed everyone that they are going to kill, but they don’t just form packs. They form herds. I should know. I’ve seen it. I was on the extraction team to save him. We were lucky to make it out alive. Whatever you think you are going to find there, it’s not worth it. We can’t go home again. It’s gone. Earth is our home now.”
Maxi’s eyes twitched. If Rick was a poker player, she would have just revealed to him that she had a straight flush or some other nearly unbeatable hand. Rick was from her world, like Cassidy. Out of the billions, only hundreds survived. Maxi couldn’t imagine the trauma her mom’s generation carried with them.
If her dad was willing to go back to where he had lost everything, then it must have been important. Pinocchio doesn’t climb back into the belly of the whale if it wasn’t important. No trinket or remembrance of her homeworld was worth going back other than the Printer of Never Jamming.
She wanted to get back to her computer, check the link to her father’s files. Maxi felt like she was close, the printer, her father, it was pointing to her homeworld, not that she had any connection to the place. Earth was her home. New York was the only city she had ever known.
It was hard for her to think of her parents'' world as her home. Sure, she was born on different soil, but all she had ever known was Earth. How much of her was the dimension where she was raised versus the one where she was born. She didn’t think of herself as anything else, yet here was the opportunity to go to a place, had circumstances been different, that she would have called home.
She tried to imagine if she would have been different had she been raised in a world with an extended family and couldn’t. Part of her wanted to believe she’d be the same regardless of the circumstance, but she couldn’t. She could no more undo her life than she could unscramble an egg.
Now, there was a possibility for her to see what may have been if her eggs were scrambled in a different place. She realized the ridiculous egg analogy that somehow aptly described her emotions, and laughed.
Rick frowned. “What?”
“Oh nothing,” Maxi said. “I’m just thinking about scrambled eggs. It’s 12:30, want to grade my test?”
Rick pulled out his glasses and her test. Some licking fingers and “hmms” later, he put it down and said, “You passed.”
“Great,” Maxi said. “Can I go now?”
“Yep,” Rick said. “But one more thing. Don’t try and bullshit a bullshiter. Your Emotional Intelligence is shit, and I saw through your feeble attempts to figure out what happened to your pa. They redacted most of the file for a reason.”
“You got me,” Maxi said.
“Good,” Rick said. “Cause if it gets back to me that I was the one who told you how to get back to our homeworld, I’ll put a bullet between your eyes and not the kind you come back from we clear?”
“Crystal. But you didn’t tell me how to get there.”
“Good, because if you have the right intentions when you use a particular word in those elevators, you can make it a sort of a codeword to get you to a particular destination.”
Before she couldn’t puzzle out what he said the elevator dinged, and he smiled to another group, “Come in. Come in. Welcome. It’s time for your annual HR training.”
Maxi slipped out of the room while she had the chance.