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Chapter 1 – TGIF
🕑 Added 2024-02-03 10:55:03 +0000 UTCLuke leaned back in his office chair and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until spots of light blossomed in his vision.
He couldn’t wait to escape the office. Just a few more boring hours, and he would be free. Every week started and ended like this, with Friday being the worst day of them all.
He suppressed a groan. The open office plan made sure that Johnathan Case, Luke’s pseudo boss-slash-mentor, would come around to see if he could help Luke out with whatever his problem was.
At least Janet Hendricks left him to stress in peace. She was hired a year before Luke and knew enough about what Luke would be going through to be more hands-off.
Which was a shame, because Luke rather liked her. He wished she could take the role of John. He’d be fine being treated like a little kid walking through his first “Hello World” script if it was by her.
You didn’t get many women in this field, and fewer still who were as gorgeous as she was and single.
Unfortunately for Luke, he was so plain that you could lose track of him in a crowd of two.
It was a superpower of sorts, or so his mother had always joked. He could get away with just about any sort of shenanigan because most people forgot who he was the moment he stopped talking to them.
Neither handsome nor ugly, the only thing he had going for him was his physique. He used the office’s gym religiously. It was the only edge he had over the genetically gifted Johnathan Case’s of the world.
Luke glanced back at his screen, decided he could refactor the code on Monday, and began to pack it in. He’d been hammering away at his task, bringing the ancient, creaking codebase up to snuff for the last few months. It was boring, grueling, and frustrating work, but at least he was making progress.
Since he was ambidextrous, it was quick and easy to put his things away with one hand while writing down a note for himself with the other.
There was a solid rap of knuckles on his glass desk as the imposing figure of Dexter Banks from IT leaned into his view with a friendly smile. “Luke, I am your father. You must come out for drinks with us!”
As he turned to face Dexter, plastering a smile he hoped looked decently genuine on his face, Luke took a moment to run through his list of canned excuses. He liked Dexter, but the jokes he told Luke were old hat by the time he had been out of grade school.
At least it wasn’t May 4th.
Luke didn’t have much back at his apartment, but he wanted to be anywhere else other than around his coworkers at the end of the workweek. Luke had always been a loner, and after not just one, but two girlfriends walked out on him in the last year, he preferred to be on his own more than ever.
Even though all he had back at his small apartment was a stack of fliers for places to order from and a depressingly quiet and empty home. It would be generous to call it sterile.
Dexter raised a cautionary finger. “You’re done working. Jonathan said we can knock off early. He’s got the okay from the Big Man, and we’re all going out to do a little team building exercise. You don’t have any appointments, your grandmother can’t die again, and–” here he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper “–I have it on good authority that Janet is going to do karaoke.”
The deadpan look on Luke’s face must have given something away, because Dexter continued, giving him a slight smack on the arm as if he was slow. “C’mon, dude! Singing! Girls love that stuff. You’d get in with her like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.
Several heads in the open plan office looked around. Dexter had the wherewithal to look slightly abashed. “Come on, say you’ll come.”
“He giving you a hard time, Luke?” Johnathan asked.
You could dress the guy up in a burlap sack and roll him in the mud and girls would be tearing each other’s hair out to get at him. Sometimes life wasn’t very fair.
Johnathan Case, the senior developer on the team, was the exact sort of person that you’d want to help you out if you were a junior developer in need of handholding.
The problem was, Luke had been here for a few years, and John still thought of him as the “wet behind the years kid” fresh out of school with a shiny CompSci degree and no experience to speak of.
It didn’t help that he was unfailingly kind, brilliant in a way that made you wonder why he wasn’t working for one of the Big 4, and could have been George Clooney’s younger brother.
More than a few women in the office were constantly giving him moon-eyes, which he politely seemed not to notice. He was married to the job.
Before he realized what he was doing, Luke heard himself saying, “Sure, why not?”
I must have gone temporarily insane, he groaned internally. John could have that effect on people.
John clapped his hands theatrically and rubbed them together briskly. He turned to the office at large, realizing that he didn’t need to get their attention.
Open plan offices with beanbag chairs, foosball tables, and a host of video game consoles were notoriously distracting. A man standing up and clapping worked wonders.
Especially if that man was the golden boy, Johnathan Case.
“All right peeps,” he called out, flashing his pearly white teeth, “we’re going out for some ‘team building’ which is code for drinks, food, and some karaoke! We’ve already rented a limo for the night, so drink–responsibly, please–without worry of needing to snag a ride home! Everybody meet in the lobby in fifteen!”
A series of whoops and cheers went up. Several people who were pretending to do work got up from their suddenly cold computers and began to line up toward the glass-fronted door that led into the hallway.
Dexter waggled his eyebrows at Luke. How did I let myself get talked into this? he thought.
Maybe it’d be okay this time. It wasn’t like Marcy would be there. She transferred to another department after the whole drama bomb exploded in HR’s lap.
Alice from HR still hovered around him as if he was on suicide watch or something. Using whatever thinly veiled excuse she could make up to check in on him.
In her late-30s and mother to three, she was more concerned about his love life than his own biological mother.
“Mother hen, 9 o’clock,” Dexter whispered out of the side of his mouth as Alice came into view.
Dressed smartly in a slimming pencil skirt and sharp business attire, Alice Collins managed to slide right up alongside Luke and Dexter as they headed out into the hall and toward the bank of elevators at the far end.
Dexter abandoned ship and latched onto Alden Tate’s coattails, aka the Big Man, some executive or other that was always coming down to the pit to show how personable and down-to-earth he was.
Rachel Harris, his assistant, trailed after him with a yellow legal pad and pen poised to take any notes he might spontaneously decide needed remembering.
“I’m very happy to see that you’re getting out and about,” Alice said by way of greeting. They took a turn toward the elevators at the end of the hall, passing the gym, the squash ball court, and the fencing studio. Her lips thinned as she glanced sideways at the studio. “And I must say, it shows great personal growth that you’re not hiding away under that mask.”
Luke did his best not to roll his eyes like one of her pre-teen kids, but it was hard. “I like fencing, Alice. It lets me clear my head, and working out is good for you. I’d like to live a long life and be able to enjoy it at the same time instead of being bed-bound.”
That was the most Luke had said in one sitting all day, and Alice seemed to have picked up on that. She grinned as if he had just walked into her trap, but Luke couldn’t figure out why.
“That’s good, Luke, dear. Very good. Planning for the future is what we want to instill in each of our valued team members…”
The trip down the elevators was uneventful as always. Alice kept up a stream of chatter that allowed Luke to nod along without really listening. He wished he had gone into the fencing studio now, but he hadn’t gone out in anything approaching a social outing in… well, not since Marcy.
Perhaps it was time for a change. Something to get him out of this rut and start enjoying life a little more again.
His group filtered out into the parking garage, heading towards the limo a few rows over.
Night had come down in full, but the sounds of the city were all around them. The limo gleamed under the lights of the parking garage’s fluorescent tubes.
Knots of conversation were springing up as the elevators let out more groups of office workers.
A tingle ran up Luke’s spine as he stepped out from the shadow of a concrete pillar near the elevator doors. He looked around, prompting Alice to do the same.
“What is it–” she began, just as the ground trembled slightly.
She gave a little tittering laugh. “Oh, that. We get tremors here all the time. Just part of living here, you’ll get used to it.”
As if Luke hadn’t been living here for a few years now. It was his superpower at work again. People forgot he wasn’t a new face, even those who paid close attention to him.
But the tremor didn’t subside as it should have. It intensified to the point that the parking garage began to blare with the sirens of dozens of car alarms going off.
The ground bucked and rippled, undulating like some living thing. Drifts of concrete dust rained down around them. Somewhere on a lower level, a woman was screaming.
Rolling toward them like a low Pacific tide at ankle-height, the concrete changed. Grooved concrete transformed into pitted cobblestones, rolling over each other like the scales over a snake’s body as it slithered toward its prey.
Luke’s eyes widened in shock. “What the—”
Alice grabbed onto Luke’s arm as her footing grew unsteady. He was surprised she hadn’t fallen over like some of the other women with equally high heels.
Luke braced himself, trying to keep his balance as he had learned through fencing. He cast his gaze around the suddenly bucking parking garage floor. Orient, observe, decide, act, he said the mantra in his head by reflex.
Orient, he was on the fourth floor of a parking garage. The elevators wouldn’t be safe in an earthquake of this magnitude, but the stairwells were designed to shelter against such things, right?
Observe, the cars were jumping like they had hydraulics, that clearly wasn’t normal. Luke pivoted on the balls of his feet while everybody was still panicking, pulling Alice along with him toward the stairwell next to the elevators.
He’d already skipped straight through decide and act, and was about to reach out to the metal door handle when the ground beneath his feet lifted him up and set him down so hard he could taste blood in his mouth.
Must have clipped my tongue, he thought as the door in front of him rippled like somebody slapping a water balloon.
In the space of two heartbeats, the concrete block wall was covered in moss and lichen. The steel door, once clearly marked as a stairwell, was replaced with an age-darkened oak door banded with rusted metal straps.
He hardly even noticed the loss of pressure on his hand that should have told him Alice was no longer behind him because something bright and shining appeared, written in the air with fire.
Initializing System…OK.
Initializing Language Modules…OK.
Testing Reality Matrix…FAILED.
Testing Mana Induction…FAILED.
Initializing Third Party Induction…OK.
Begin Onboarding Process…OK.
Uplift of the 17th Universe confirmed.
The Company welcomes you to the Multiverse, new hire!
Your onboarding and integration will begin momentarily.
