A sweet-scented breeze greets you as you begin another idyllic day on your farm. The sun breaks through the clouds just long enough to warm the freckles on your skin, illuminating columns of cumulus in the process. Heaven's facade is limned with gold and red for a few breathtaking moments until the clouds cover the sun again, restoring the atmosphere to a comforting smear of azure and gray.
Today's weather is overcast. What do you do?
[[Milk the cow.]]
[[Check on the chickens.]]
[[Plant radishes.]]
Brushing your long, red hair from your shoulders, you stoop down on the stool beside Petunia, averting your gaze as you milk. You're not sure why, but you're never comfortable looking at Petunia's udders. It just seems like watching milk gush from those soft, pink, quivering organic tubes would be mildly inappropriate for somebody under the age of thirteen, so you don't do it. It's as a simple as that, really.
Pressing your ear against Petunia's warm flank, you listen to the jets of milk striking tin. A nearby butterfly, after a few desperate beats of its black and orange wings, disappears into the glare of the autumn sun striking through the clouds. Just as it always does whenever you milk Petunia. What do you do next?
[[Water your crops.]]
[[Chop some firewood.]]
[[Go fishing.]]
Downy feathers float through the sunbeams ventilating the chicken coop. A half dozen fat hens snap to attention, their cherry-red waddles quivering as they tilt their heads in curiosity at your arrival. Deeming you not a threat, they each begin to glance around the coop in their manic chicken way, ignoring you in favor of their feed.
Brushing a strand of long red hair out of your face, you stoop down to inspect the egg collector. It's a handy device, considering how further detail into the reproductive system of chickens wouldn't be appropriate for individuals under thirteen years of age. You've never seen the cloaca of any of your chickens. Frankly, you find it nauseauting that you're thinking about their cloaca at all.
The egg collector, sadly, is quite empty. What do you do next?
[[Water your crops.]]
[[Chop some firewood.]]
[[Go fishing.]]
You stoop over one of your fields, pushing tiny radish seeds into the black loam to form neat little rows. Dirt gathers underneath your fingernails, but when the task is finished your sundress is somehow still pristine. Now that you think about it, besides your fingernails of course, not a single speck of dirt has ever touched your skin for as long as you can remember.
What do you do next?
[[Water your crops.]]
[[Chop some firewood.]]
[[Go fishing.]]
You approach your irrigation system, a whimsical jumble of wooden chutes and chunky metal pipes. You pull the cord, up-ending the bucket. Water sloshes musically all throughout the apparatus before spraying out in a fine mist over your fields.
Afterward, you gather up your wheelbarrow full of collected radishes, apples, and onions. It's harvestime, after all, and it's time to take the fruits of your labor to market.
[[Go to the market and sell your goods.]]
You set a small log on the old oak stump before you. Hefting the axe into the air, you take a breath to aim before bringing it down in a perfect arc. The blade thumps into the chopping block, cleaving clean through the log. The split log clatters crisply off the stump, thumping onto the grass below.
You repeat this motion exactly, perfectly and flawlessly 78 more times before you notice the sky darkening. The sun doesn't set so much as it seems to bleed into the sky, staining it red, purple and orange.
It's sunset, and you know what that means. You have to hurry and gather your goods to sell at the market before it closes.
[[Go to the market and sell your goods.]]
You approach the fishing hole on the northeastern corner of your farm. It's a small pond of surprising depth, choked with cattails and other reeds. Your fishing pole leans against a nearby weeping willow tree, awaiting your use.
You shake your head sadly, however, realizing as soon as you arrive that you have no bait. Besides, there's work to be done. Fishing is for those who can afford to buy some bait, those who can afford to leave their fields lying fallow for a while for the slim chance of catching some fish.
That is not you. At least not today. In the meantime, you remember you have plenty of chores around the farm to occupy your time.
[[Water your crops.]]
[[Chop some firewood.]]
The market crowds around you as you trundle your wheelbarrow up to the hopper, ready to convert your radishes, milk, firewood and other goods into valuable seeds.
You upturn your wheelbarrow, sending your cornucopia tumbling into the hopper. The seed counter rises as more and more of your produce is converted into raw seeds.
And then suddenly you hear it, a familiar shriek drilling through your head. A thunderwave reverberates back and forth across your corpus collosum as you suddenly remember. You remember what you are, and the red haired girl and the market and the hopper and the seed counter all evaporate into a mist of flaying pixels.
[[Log out.]]
The high-pitched whine continues as Eric, your supervisor, slides the connecting cable out of your cerebrum. Nausea seizes you. For a moment, you are simultaneously both yourself and the red haired girl.
And then it's over. You're free. A faint trickle of cerebrospinal lubricating solution drips from the end of your connecting cable, spattering onto the carpet below. As you gingerly scratch your dataport, Eric floats to the next cubicle to unplug your neighbor.
For a while, all you can hear is the post-logout whine, but soon you can make out the familiar sound of the shift klaxon screeching over top of it. It's time to go home.
[[Go home.]]
Onboard the subway, the corporate newscast is droning on about the latest attack by [[The Reintegrationists]]. A bombing, this time. Fifteen dead and more wounded. None of the other passengers bother to look concerned, either.
After half an hour of uneventful public transit the subway almost rumbles you to sleep, but a chirp from your phone rouses you. You thumb at the screen and read a message spit out from a company server somewhere: 100,354 seeds at today's market rate is 201 credits. Minus room and board, minus state, federal and corporate taxes, and minus public transit fare, your take-home pay is 54 corporate credits.
A grin tugs at your lips as the subway shudders to a stop. That's enough for a hot water ration.
[[Celebrate.]]
For starters, you thumb your phone's screen and transfer a centicred to the electric department. Fluorescent lighting sings to flickering life a moment later, illuminating your assigned residential.
[[Buy a hot water ration.]]
[[Donate to the Reintegrationists.]]
[[Eat something.]]
[[Just get some sleep. | Get some sleep.]]
You tear off your uniform, leaving it in a smelly heap on the laminate flooring as you turn the knob all the way to the right. You thumb at your phone, authorizing the additional charge to the utilities department before stepping into the hot stream of water.
It's uncomfortably warm, each drop almost scalding, but it's still the first shower you've had in weeks. You giggle in delight and run your hair under the sulphur-scented water, watching the lice plummet one by one into the drain.
[[Get some sleep. | Get some sleep.]]
After what you heard on the corporate newscast, you feel queasy about actually going through with this. You glance longingly at your standing shower, almost losing your nerve. But you've been saving up for months, and that report on the subway was probably just corporate propaganda. You know, probably.
You resolve to go through with it. For good or ill, you're going to do something real for once, instead of just losing eighteen hours a day to the red haired girl. You stoop down and unearth your VR unit from its hiding place in the floorboards. The hardware alone set you back a small fortune in credits and ration cards, but it's the only way you can contact the Reintegrationists. You dial in the coordinates your contact gave you and set the auto-logout timer for fifteen minutes. You make sure to curl into a safe fetal position before inserting the connector into your dataport.
[[Go to the other market.]]
Your daily nutrient drip obviates the need for solid food, but after a hard (well, technically limp) day in VR, you think you've earned a little treat.
You raid the cupboards with grand designs of preparing a meal of some kind, but you soon realize it's been a while since you've redeemed any of your food ration cards. Free liquid meals is a perk of the job, after all, and soon you settle for the only non-expired thing in the apartment.
The chocolate-flavored whey protein bar shatters into greasy chunks on your tongue. You chew it slowly, trying to remember what it was about solid food you once found so appealing.
[[Just get some sleep. | Get some sleep.]]
Though you secretly support their cause, you have to admit you’re growing increasingly leery of their methods.
[[Go back.|Go home.]]
Even after spending three fourths of the day in VR, you still need actual sleep. Curled on top of the hard mat of your mattress, your slumber is mostly dreamless.
At 6 AM the squeal of the alarm klaxon wakes you, just as it does every morning. It's a new day.
[[Go to work.]]
Unlike the farm, the digital free market escrow server you're accessing isn't meant to simulate reality. Something like gravity still exists here, and something like air fills the lungs of your shining avatar as you step into the lobby, but no other semblance of reality exists to ground you. The interior of the digital bank is an angular, endless series of corridors and platforms. Genderless, anonymous pixellated angels of commerce barter and negotiate, silent and motionless even in the throes of their telepathy-like colloquy of private messages.
You're not the red haired girl here. You're yourself, or rather a simplification of yourself, an aggregrate of bank accounts and assets and social media profiles, a radiant personification of your credit score. It's time to get down to business.
[[Meet your contact.]]
Data trails shimmer through the close and uncolored sky as you approach your contact. You recognize him intuitively, know him by sight like you would in a dream, even though he's identical to you and every other avatar in here. This is probably due to you having his contanct information pre-loaded.
Hovering near him, you see more and more details of his public profile. Numerous social media accounts show countless photos of a blandly attractive man smiling, his arms slung around the shoulders of friends. Normal and sane and inconspicuous, unlike the blank template of your fresh out of the box public persona.
He extends a hand toward you. Not in a handshake, but more like a bell hop in an old 2-D movie awaiting a tip.
[[Transfer the funds.]]
[[Ask what your donation will be used for.]]
You extend a shining finger, making contact with the man's expectant palm. A cold pulse of currency travels through your limb as you transfer three hundred hard-earned corporate credits directly to your Reintegrationist contact. He immediately logs out, leaving you stranded for an awkward twelve minutes or so as you await your auto-logout to trigger.
Eventually it happens, and the glowing online escrow service fades away into the familiar darkness of your residential unit. You crawl into bed, popping your ears against the post-logout whine, and spend a few hours trying to convince yourself you did the right thing. It doesn't really work.
[[Just get some sleep. | Get some sleep.]]
Your contact's avatar tilts its blank, mannequin-like head in puzzlement at your question. "Why, for the cause, comrade," he answers. The plain black-on-white text of his private message fills your field of vision and glows once, then twice, before fading away. You sense that any further inquiry might be dangerous.
Frankly, you know it's too late to back out now.
[[Transfer the funds.]]
You get dressed in the morning chill of your assigned residential. You arrive at the station just in time to catch the last train. You never miss a shift, after all.
Well, that's not actually true. You missed a shift once in your first week, and it was torture. You felt weak and dizzy without your daily intake from the nutrient drip, and you were constantly on edge without the soothing binaural breezes of your farm. You've never missed a shift since.
The train door opens, flooding the platform with artificial light and the murmurs of the corporate newstream.
[[Board the train.]]
You doze in your chair for a few precious minutes while the supes grab coffees, set down their suitcases, and finish hooking up your neighbors. You don't even hear Eric until he's behind you, sliding something into your skull.
The familiar dropping sensation of login floods your stomach. A hot-sick-giddy-falling-upwards feeling. Your cubicle melts away into the pastel glow of the farm. Your farm.
[[Home.]]
You log in and the autumn breeze greets your nostrils, all pumpkin and crisp leaves and insinuations of ice, exactly as it always is. The sun hangs static in the sky. Beneath you are green hillocks of impossibly clean Kentucky sawgrass, pillowing your bare, freckled feet. You are her. You are [[the red haired girl]] again.
Today's weather is sunny, and it's planting season. What do you do?
[[Plant onions. | Worm!]]
[[Plant cabbages. | Worm!]]
[[Plant more radishes. | Worm!]]
[[Till a new field. | Worm!]]
She is one of the standard, free avatars you were assigned when you accepted the position. She's about four feet tall, an adorable and ageless ginger ragamuffin in a faded yellow-orange sundress.
These days, you're the red haired girl more often than you are yourself.
[[Go back. |Home.]]
You stoop down to split the earth with your spade in a motion approximating reflex. But then you stop. Something is different. Something is new this time.
And then you see it, a merry pink ribbon glistening in the dirt. It's an earthworm. Currency for the [[fishing minigame]].
This single writhing worm is worth double your usual take in seeds for a day. With a sense of detached amusement, you realize this worm is probably the most valuable thing you have ever seen.
[[Try fishing.]]
[[Sell the bait and log out early.]]
The fishing minigame is an elite sub-section of the simulator, realistically only available to premium farmers who can afford to purchase the rare bait required to play it. It functions essentially like a slot machine: insert earthworms, anchovies, and other suitable bait, and there's a chance you'll get a valuable fish in return.
You heard rumors that even free farmers could find earthworms and other bait as a random event. You've logged about three thousand hours at the farm, and this is the first time you've ever seen one.
[[Go back. | Worm!]]
You realize you will probably never have this chance ever again. While the bait alone is more valuable than your usual take, even a small fish could be worth a month of hot showers. A year of rent. Freedom.
You cast your line, and a series of musical notes bleats out of nowhere. The fishing music. You've never actually heard it in proper VR surround sound before.
Soon, your line jiggles. After a few brief moments of frantic struggle, you reel in your catch. Dangling and writhing at the end of your line is (either:"[[a rainbow trout!]]","[[a lone anchovy.]]")
The news describes a train crash and editorializes on possible Reintegrationist involvement. On the seat opposite you is a young woman in a blue dress. The almost metallic luster of her clothing stands out from the drab off-white uniforms of commuting farm technicians.
The woman in the blue dress holds a notebook, scribbling at it with a pencil in a near-manic frenzy. Analog is rare these days, and as you absent-mindedly watch her work, you try to remember the last time you saw a pencil.
She catches your gaze for a moment, her lips trembling in a smile. You avert your eyes, ashamed, though you're not sure why. Or of what.
The train comes to a stop with a pneumatic hiss. You disembark without chancing another look at the woman in the blue dress, and ride the escalator up to the farming suite.
[[Wait for your supervisor to plug you in.]]
It's another early morning at the farming suite. By now, you've nearly forgotten about the worm. Whenever you mention the incident, coworkers shout you down with jibes of disbelief. Earthworm random drops aren't real, they insist. They're just a myth to keep the free players mollified.
Soon you start to doubt you ever saw one at all.
This particular morning, the supes call a team meeting at the beginning of the shift. Bleary-eyed farm technicians line up for their complimentary caffeine pill and purified water ration as the supes take attendance.
Meetings like this are outside the usual plug-in-and-play routine of the farming suite. It's strange. It's tense. It's scary.
[[The supes cut to the chase and announce the layoffs.]]
With a triumphant splash, the red haired girl jerks her wrists and pulls her prize from the depths of the impossibly deep pond. Its belly dazzles you with scales of every conceivable color.
The novelty of the sight stuns you for a moment. You've definitely heard of rainbow trout before. You think they're valuable, but you have no idea how much they're actually worth at the current market rate. You do something you haven't done in months, extending the help menu to look up the rainbow trout's value in seeds.
[[Check the price.]]
You know not to push your tortured and tenuous luck. You rush over to the market and upend your otherwise-empty wheelbarrow. There's a strange pulsing distortion over the seed counter as it ticks up your earnings from the sale of the worm.
Over two hundred thousand seeds. Easily double what you earn in a standard day. You aren't sure if that rippling distortion is a special effect for the high sale, or simply your own greed-heightened pulse hammering through the synaptic filters.
[[Cash in.]]
Figuring you've been given a second chance, the red haired girl casts the line again. The fishing music erupts from the atmopshere once more, and after she struggles with the jerking line for a moment, the red haired girl pulls up (either:"[[a rainbow trout!]]","[[nothing. Nothing at all.]]")
The red haired girls tugs valiantly at the line before bringing up a nice, shiny hook, bereft of bait.
Nothing. There's nothing. Rage and shame wells up inside you, but the red haired girl's reflection in the still water of the pond has all the serenity of a monk.
[[A few weeks later...]]
The next thing you know, you're supine on the dirty floor of the farming suite. A look of worry creases your supervisor's face as he presses a thumb against your carotid artery, trying to check your pulse.
It turns out your heart rate spiked so quickly that the moderators of the simulator thought you were having a heart attack and forced you into an immediate safety logout.
[[Rainbow trout are worth upwards of 800 trillion seeds.]]
You survive the first round of cuts. And the second. You're a top performer and a consummate professional, after all.
It's the third one, when 80% of the remaining farm technicians are let go, that finally gets you. AR is eating our lunch, the supes say. Puzzle and quiz apps you can play on the go are the new thing. Sorry we couldn't give you more notice.
You feel numb and small on the train ride back. The corporate newscast comes through the speaker, a tinny and muttering garble to your deeply distracted ears. And then you see her.
[[The woman in the blue dress is here. Again.]]
The woman in the blue dress is still scribbling away at a notebook. This time it's a mottled red one with a plastic cover, not the classy leather-bound ledger she had before.
She catches your transfixed stare once again and smiles. As you watch, too mesmerized to look away, she tears out the page she was writing on, folds it in half, and stands up, leaving the mysterious missive on her seat.
Gaze locked with yours, she disembarks at the next stop. Your tongue is lead in your throat.
[[Pick up the paper.]]
[[Ignore it. | Head to your former apartment.]]
As soon as she leaves, you snatch up the piece of paper. Written on every inch of the stationary is the phrase "PerfectMateMatch.com" written in blocky but perfect handwriting.
Every "e" is exactly the same size and shape, every "l" and "i" uniform in length. The URL is written dozens and dozens of times in every available line and margin.
You realize what the woman in the blue dress is.
[[Viral marketing.]]
She must have one of those new simulators with entirely internal hardware. You didn't see any dataports anywhere on her pristine alabaster skin, after all. AR truly was eating VR's lunch.
You pull out your phone and thumb at the screen, tempted.
[[Visit PerfectMateMatch.com.]]
[[Forget it. | Head to your former apartment.]]
As soon as the connection slides into your dataport, you feel the sunshine on your skin, the breeze whipping at the hem of your dress. You sigh in relief as you settle into your skin.
Opening up your private messages, you're surprised to see that there's a sale on bait. Only one thousand seeds per earthworm.
You buy a writhing mass of fifty on a whim. Something like air rushes into the red haired girl's lungs as you inhale deeply, drinking in dandelions and crushed autumn leaves and other scents even your premium account can't quite accurately aggregate. It just smells like peace to you. Like home.
Perhaps today is the lucky day you see the rainbow trout again.
Curiousity piqued, you thumb your phone and navigate to PerfectMateMatch.com. A parade of faces flies across your screen, hundreds of sexy singles staring at you with glassy bedroom eyes. For a small fee, your profile would be visible to both virtual reality and augmented reality browsers. For a slightly larger fee, AR users can even recognize one another on sight.
It's slick and well-designed, but even the most minimal monthly subscription would have been well outside your former pay range. You do manage to find something of interest on the site, however.
After a few minutes of browsing, you press your thumb against the tiny "Careers" link in the lower right hand corner. AR was the wave of the future, after all, and you couldn't afford to be left behind.
You push the woman in the blue dress out of your mind. You have bigger concerns, after all. Walking upstairs to what was previously your assigned residential, you see all your belongings packed up in three little cardboard boxes, neatly stacked by someone from maintenance.
At the top of the stack is a tiny card from HR with an image of the red haired girl smiling on the front. Inside she wishes you "Good luck in greener pastures." As you read, a rectangle of plastic slips out and clatters to the cement floor of the residential hallway.
It's a gift card, good for one hundred hours of free play on Farming Simulator.
The windows from your new rental overlook the commercial district. You see pine trees shivering in the morning mist of Productivity Park. Executive assistants and accountants run through the trails of the park, their forms tiny and indistinct from your current vantage. This apartment is a bit small, but it's still a mansion compared to your old assigned residential, and the morning view is especially nice. Perfect for your needs.
You putter around your kitchen in a listless morning haze, half-heartedly checking your investments or reading the news on your phone screen.
You soon exhaust your reserves of willpower and open the door to your office. You can pick up the rest tomorrow. For now, though, you need to relax.
[[Log in.]]
Bobbing on the end of your line is the silver sliver of an anchovy. This is what gamblers call a push: the anchovy is functionally identical to the earthworm you just cast. Just like the earthworm, it also works as bait for the fishing game. And, like the worm, it's worth more than double your usual take in seeds.
It almost feels as if the capricious random number generator gods were giving you another chance. A free play. The slimy scales of the anchovy glint in the simulated sunlight, razzing you. Mocking you. Do you really dare to tempt fate further, and cast your line again?
[[Sell the bait and log out early.]]
[[Persevere.]]
The seed counter continues to pulsate, finally rolling over to the grand total: 202,348 seeds. You try to calculate that in corporate credits, but you're interrupted by the logout whine invading your perception.
The next thing you feel besides the buzzing between your ears is your supervisor's hand patting you firmly on the back. Good job, model employee, he says in so many words. Having met your sales quota so early in the day, you're free to go home. More accurately, you're obliged to; the supes can't afford to overextend their budget for commission and payroll.
You head home and enjoy an evening of hot water and liquor rations. For a few hours, at least, all is well.
[[A few weeks later...]]
You wake up and roll out of bed, the soft fibers of your carpet threading through your toes as you stand. Heading to the bathroom, you crank up the hot water, filling the air with clouds of steam. Overhead, through your ubiquitous OmniCast Media System speakers, the newscast claims they've finally taken that Reintegrationist stronghold in the east.
Dripping and steaming, you exit the bathroom and cut a slice of fresh melon and pour a cup of coffee for breakfast. Breakfast is still weird. You don't miss the nutrient drip, but eating still feels like a bit of a chore and inconvenience. You grin in embarassment as you remember how, during the first few weeks of your retirement, you had to set alarms on your phone to remind you to eat. New habits are hard.
[[Take in the view as you sip your coffee.]]