Tucked around a corner segmenting the spread of cubicles, he stood half a foot taller than Spencer, dressed in a pair of leather slacks, burgandy platform boots, a plastic shirt with lateral slats, and a floor length black duster. The high collar of the duster blocked much of his portrait. From a distance, he looked like someone on max contrast, washed completely in definitive shades until their features vanished.

This morning, he wore a pair of goggles in the same obnoxious shade as his boots. They popped from their suctioned frames, insect-like with faceted lens.

Cam dodgers, Spencer guessed. Something to avoid retinal scans.

“Spence.”

“Been seeing an awful lot of you lately, Roman. Starting to get worried you’re eyeballing my desk.”

“I asked around about the desk. Wanted to know why you share it with Pucco and Hermes.”

“Yeah? What’d they tell you?”

“Said you had your own until the Liu case.”

If his biggest gripe was the smell of stale smoke, burnt coffee, and hairspray from the young and trending VR debutantes trying to appear well to do on camera, he was lucky.

When he left, the desk clerk waved him out between cashing someone out and pouring another mug of coffee for the all-nighter types.

Spencer wore a mask to work. Everyone did. How else would they breathe?

Age stained the streets above gully-styled canals, water contaminated as soon as it reached the lowest levels of the city. Desalination cost less than detoxing the native reserves. The plants on the reformatted coastline were relatively new, barely a decade old when Spencer landed his position at The Informer, a rush job thanks to the coastal landmass of California being swallowed beneath the waves.

That happened after college, before Melissa, and during his humanitarian phase.

When he crossed the street from Harris to Pelosi, determined to beat feet before foot traffic congested the parkway, he could see embodiments of his past self in the shadows lining the street.

A young techie with a helmeted rig stared vacantly at a screen no one else was privy to seeing. He had a woman to his right that may have been his mother, unmarked by typical upgrades, but her hands were busy with a semi-translucent tablet. She swiped and swiped, temples tensing whenever a difficult swipe required extra effort. Whatever game she was playing, Spencer expected he had played it as well, if only to pass the time.

In the background, an old man was camped out with a dog with three legs. Neither seemed interested in the people surrounding them. No one carried cash to offer him, and what good were credits to someone living outside the system? He looked old enough to be an outsider, bonafide free, without an implant for his personal finances or a datalog for tracking. Spencer watched the man exist, doing nothing in particular, until the crosswalk blared green and he was forced to return to his daily commute.

His office was looming over him, a monolith in dedication to corporate wealth. Wasn’t every building in the district guilty of doing the same?

A monopolized skyline, where steel and glass stretched skyward like gnarled branches, the appendages of free enterprise. Vehicles clogged the view as much as the skyscrapers did, flying in lateral lanes with floating markers making up the concept of airway roads. Each flight path was automated. Humans couldn’t be trusted to fly their own cars. Humans could barely map the layout of their day-to-day commutes.

He found it difficult to envy aeronautics enthusiasts. He had covered the crashes, seen the uniquely disturbing twist of limbs when one occurred 220 feet up. As quickly as the autopilot malfunctioned, the vehicle became a useless pile of chrome, and a sudden drop would kill practically anyone. The safety measures in place didn’t mean much. Licenses were required to fly, but no one needed practical lessons for it. The days of in-person tests were done for.

Whether it was epidemics to blame or mass shootings, it didn’t matter. People didn’t trust people.

There were moments in life where everything was still, but stillness was never truly silent.

Breathing was noisy. Heartbeats, too. Even the grinding of molars mashing in subtle annoyance had a sound, if she was willing to hear it.

Gravelly scraping, incisors clacking, a selective clenching aligning most, but not all, teeth.

Enamel scratching, gums squelching, saliva swishing, tongue gurgling, throat swallowing, ears reverberating with the hollow echo of noise.

Simulations were different.

Sound was background.

Sound was a luxury.

Before alpha sign ups and general maintenance patches, sound wasn’t a priority. It came later, to match the ambiance needed. It set the tone of a prescripted experience. It was paid for when there was funding to do so, at points when composers could be shopped around for. Not just composers, but sound artists of varying experience. ASMR creators, musicians, coordination experts, vocal coaches, advisors of all kinds; sound was a business all its own.

But without sound, one could experience what silence sounded like.

The longest scream made in the deepest void.

Behind him, a wall of iridescent foil swayed with the breeze, familiarizing itself with every incoming current as though learning the shapes it was meant to take in real-time.

Oona was hesitant for many reasons, but the most pressing was the existence of someone else in a simulation she had been tasked to oversee. Who was this stranger? When did they arrive? How did they manipulate the landscape to their whims, be it flames or glass fixtures in perpetual movement? Head tilting to one side, Oona looked at the space behind him, expecting more but realizing the less she knew, the better.

“That’s a violation.”

“Will you tell someone?”

“No.”

The figure was made of ebony, scratchy edges fading into further light, a neon embraced silhouette with flickering ends brushing the ground. They sounded masculine enough, but the shape itself had nothing so familiar as a personage assigned. This wasn’t uncommon. Many chose to remain anonymous in their fields of expertise, making no friends along the way.

“How did you find me?” She asked this because it seemed a logical question. The figure would shrug in response. “I thought my data relay was private. It’s always… been private. If a supervisor is going to come in here and interrupt my work, I want to see the panel first. See someone willing to tell me why, and- and get it sorted out. My lawyer first, then the panel. Then… look, I don’t need supervision.”

“I’m not a supervisor.”

“Like hell. What makes you think I’d believe you’re not?” Her bare feet prodded over something she might assume to be a floor, but it was translucent to the point of terror, showing the endless fall through nothingness beneath them. If the platform was her doing, she didn’t recall how she did it, but if it was the figure’s doing, she had new realizations to contend with. “If you’re here, with me, you’re not a user. They wouldn’t let us cross paths like this- like we’re buddies building a sim in system mode. It’s not how they work. The panel would have a fucking conniption over even the briefest contact.”

“Well,” the figure began, shifting with the wind that existed impossibly, a ripple of dark matter atop the otherwise metallic landing, “I’m telling you I’m not a supervisor. What you decide isn’t my choice. However, I’m letting you have a choice, and that in itself should offer some insight.”

“Did the system crash?”

“Yes and no. At one point, it did. Wasn’t so much a crash as it was a timed delay.”

“On whose end? Mine?”

“Enough information was fed down the pipeline at just the right time and the result created abnormalities. Rather than fix them, these abnormalities, they were ignored.” A strobing effect haloed the figure, bright despite what seemed to be inky blackness at its core. “But this wasn’t the only time. It happened before. Once at the facility in Bangor, once in Austin, several times in the midwest because of faulty relay ports.”

“But you’re saying my relay deviated? Crashed? Created an abnormality?” Panic rose in her voice, weightlessness separating the pads of her feet from the imaginary ground. “That isn’t possible– that’s not true! I’ve never had an incident, and my record- it’s spotless. I’m careful. I’ve always been careful, careful to the point I’ve combed thousands of teras of data just to find the smallest details developers may have missed. You’re wrong- and this? Whatever this is? Wrong.”

“You’re floating.”

In her flustered recollection, her body was released from the gravity of the simulation, drifting in a lazy bob above what appeared to be a chasm of nothingness. All that remained was the shape, his platform, and the outlines they both received from fading lights above their meeting.

“You don’t have to believe me. It’s not like I care one way or the other.” The figure dragged a dark appendage across their fluttering background. A hole opened where they touched, offering a view of what appeared to be a cafe. Oona recognized the simulation, the NPCs all scattered at neighboring tables, cups and saucers accompanying their morning routine.

“If you find yourself less hysterical, come find me.”

“They take up space,” he would explain at one point, smack dab in the middle of a story about his sophomore year.

“I never wanted a brother or sister. What I wanted were more employees.”

Spencer decided then his dislike for the mogul. It was superficial, initially, but the meeting ran through his patience much quicker than Jacques could cover his many accomplishments, real or imagined.

Correction: he's failing at jerking off.

He tries to watch a video of two women nuzzling at an oversized cock, but it irritates him. Their willingness, their lack of self-control. He sees mascara clumping, lipstick failing to fill the creases in their lips he believes are too big for their faces. He sees the intentionally blurry background, the conveniently disposable blouses torn to shreds at their waists, the peeks of hollow sentries casting shadows in the foreground. He thinks he sees the reflections of robotic camera operators.

The photo on his desk is turned facedown, a cheap digital collection of tacky couple shots. The frame rested atop a crowded grouping of dissertation notes.

He doesn't want to see himself in the reflection. He doesn't want to think about who would be staring back in motion clips of past vacations and dates. He doesn't want the guilt to bubble back up like a clogged sink, just as vile to taste.

He closes his eyes. Dick in hand, he thinks of mystery tits. He saw them in a dream, he thinks. Maybe in a commercial. Maybe in a video clip of someone at a topless beach.

He thinks he knows them.

The tits.

He doesn't know how he could, though.

He doesn't know the ribcage beneath or the toned expanse of stomach. He doesn't know the tattoos or the skin tone. He doesn't know the sound of her laugh. He doesn't know the bubble gum pink of her hair or the hazel of her eyes.

He doesn't know where she is now or where she'll end up in a few hours.

He doesn't know her name or the digits they print across her back like binary wings. He doesn't know to worry about how frightened she is, thrashing in pre-gel. He doesn't know she's begging in two languages, dialects her mother lovingly planted in her head from the day of conception to the night when all the lights in the house went out due to the grid failure. He doesn't know the guards are rough with her, hands where they don't belong, threats in her pierced ears now devoid of their surgical steel.

He doesn't know the shock of her first entry.

He doesn't know what she lost when they put her away.

He gets off to the tits he saw once while cruising the net. Nameless, faceless.

He throws the shirt into a hamper and passes out.

In some ways, the process became tedious because of this disconnect. So clean, so painless. Where remorse may have been seen on Jacques' face, only smugness translated to words. Recording their session had been limited to voice only. Anything else was in violation of however non-disclosure agreements stood between Spectrum Dynamics and Jacques' brainchild. He could talk until there was nothing left, but visual evidence was carefully concealed from the eyes of potential readers, replaced by stock photos of factory silhouettes and the smokey overhead of Los Angeles' Digicorp dumping grounds.

“I never loved Anya, but I admired her.”

Jacques lit a cigarette, one he hand-rolled before Spencer arrived. Only the rich still smoked tobacco. Who else could afford the fine?

“Such a bright woman. She could trick you into doing anything. Absolutely anything. I fell for it time and time again. Married her despite already shouldering a lengthy divorce. She didn't beg me or threaten me. Hardly ever reprimanded me. Instead, she asked questions to plant seeds of security. Would I still love her when she was old and grey? Would I wipe her ass when she no longer could? Would I want our children to be short like her or tall like I was? How did I feel about retiring on the coast? Who was better at taking notes in shorthand? Who should drive after a party went on longer than expected? When would the world end?”

“She kept you on your toes,” Spencer remarked, pencil batting back and forth across the lined paper of his notebook.

“More or less. Sexually? I was outmatched. Mentally? Overstimulated. I wouldn't learn until later... much later, that Anya had been playing me for a goddamn fool.”

Nostalgia wasn’t cheap. Jacques Strauss spared no expense.

Spencer Pratt, meanwhile, nursed cold coffee from a LEGO thermos.

“Calling them VATS wasn’t my doing. The acronym boiled down the basics to preschool levels, okay. Not my choice. I didn’t pick it. Marketing did. If it was up to me—which it rarely is—I’d have done a better job playing up the everyday appeal. Might’ve been a better angle than starting industrial, but I didn’t actually want to explain a revolutionary learning tool like some kind of fucking tech muppet. Spectrum Dynamics isn’t—no, sorry—wasn’t Sesame Street.”

Jacques’ salt and pepper facial hair was curled at the crease of his lips, maniacal or comical or a touch of both. Spencer did his best not to stare.

“My second wife, Anya, she knew what was happening. She knew it would blow up fast.”

As an upstart astrophysicist, how the hell did she have a chance to earn the favor of the world's wealthiest bachelor?

Darla, a woman of humble means, somehow managing to bewitch the Morgan Strauss? The mogul? The designer? The artist? The inspirational speech giver? The mover and shaker? That Morgan Strauss?

The narrative became a timeless dose of fairytale romance from which the world drew heaping helpings. They came for seconds. They lapped up every goddamn drop. The possibility of enduring love even in the digital age?

They guzzled it.

It was a shame their love story was interrupted in its prime. As with so many things, three’s a crowd.

Jacques Strauss was born in 2041, the sole heir of the Strauss fortune.

Unfortunately, Jacques was a piece of shit from the start. He shared none of the whimsy or wonder his charming parents possessed. He was predatory and self-absorbed; many thought him dangerous to himself and others. As early as his teens, Jacques was regarded as a media-obsessed influencer with too much time on his hands and too few limits on what he deemed socially, let alone morally, acceptable.

What made Jacque despicable in the eyes of the world also made him an asset. He brought cruelty. He brought innovation.

Jacques Strauss, the only son of two lovebird humanitarians, would go on to create Spectrum Dynamics, best known for patenting the first liquid enhanced virtual analysis testing shell.

VATS.

“What makes you say that?”

“…you’re on fire.”