The day was like any other—beautiful and chaotic. The city bustled with immeasurable energy. The car horns and traffic moaned as Harry rushed to work. The world was untouched, undisturbed, set in the way it had always been. It was a stunning morning—perfect for the working man.


    Sad for him.


    He wished the clouds—white and puffy—would turn smoke black. In the wake of the news he’d gotten, he would have preferred rain. That would have been a perfect representation of his state of mind. But the day was crisp and clear as if nature had decided to join in the mockery of fate.


    He climbed out of the cab, face masked in a frown that had been there since he heard the damning news. I should have stayed at home. What’s the point of being here?


    He looked up at the height of the Veridian Enterprises building. Its large holographic logo whirled slowly in a cube halfway up its cylindrical glass tower. The face of Alexander Cross, the CEO, appeared for a moment. His smile was unnervingly distracting. Harry frowned at the headshot, hating the man for the same reason everyone else in Veridian hated him.


    The face vanished, replaced by something Harry could have sworn hadn’t been there before. Someone stumbled into him and whispered an apology as they rushed past. Harry squinted at the square of dark indigo floating in front of his vision. At first, it had seemed to blend with the building like a holo-sign, but then it contracted. It sat in the bottom left corner of his vision, floating like a chat box in a video game and signalling that something was very, very wrong with Harry’s mind.


    He reached out, trying to touch the box, but finding that he was unable to make contact. His hands appeared behind the semi-transparent panel, barely visible behind its dark indigo hue.


    No… no! It can’t be happening this fast. I can’t be losing it already.


    He took a step back and the pulsing block of indigo followed him. Harry winced, hating what that meant. He moved to the left and then right. He jumped up, then tried to crouch under it.


    All futile.


    Harry looked around, digging his phone out of his pocket. He couldn’t be seeing things already. The day couldn’t get so bad this early. He placed a call for Cheddar, his best friend and colleague. The phone rang as Harry walked toward the building’s automated door. It slid open as he drew close.


    “Good morning, Harry Stone,” the company’s A.I. voice sang out, startling him.


    He muttered a curse, ignoring the look from Old Gary, the security man. Harry waved at him smiling anxiously before he saw something even more worrying. He slowed his steps, not wanting to seem like he’d gone completely cuckoo.


    Hovering a few inches above Gary’s balding head was a black rectangle like the chat box fixed to Harry’s vision. The old man’s was different in size, but it pulsed all the same. And unlike Harry’s, it was not plain. He tried not to be obvious about staring at it, but that was forgotten when a series of letters appeared on the black rectangle, illegible at first but quickly transforming into english.


    Harry gasped, taking a step back, reading the illuminated words in utter confusion.


    Level One Drone — Pre-Immersion


    None of it made sense to Harry. He blinked up to find the old guard staring at him, an unspoken question on his pinched face. Harry waved at him again, forcing a smile he couldn’t feel on his face.


    I’m going insane! That’s it, isn’t it? I’m completely nuts!


    The call to Cheddar didn’t go through, so Harry slipped his phone back into his pocket. He waved a Katlyn sitting behind the curved receptionist desk. There was no rectangular box hovering above her head, but she seemed different, strained somehow. Her smile was an inch or so wider and she didn’t make their usual joke as Harry slid his card over the detector. She stared past him as if she couldn’t really see him. Or perhaps she just wasn’t in the mood to joke.


    Harry left her, walking briskly toward the elevator. He spied Dex and Voss patrolling the foyer discreetly. Voss was Gary’s son, but he looked nothing like the old man. Tall and lanky, with thick locks of dark hair, he barely resembled the stout, thin-haired guard. The eyes were a different story, however. Put them both together and look at those eyes and you could start to see the resemblance.


    Clarice was on elevator duty. Her hands were clasped in front of her, her head slightly bowed to her chest. She looked like she was sleeping, or praying. The black rectangle pulsed over her. She didn’t move to open the elevator for Harry. She didn’t lift her head to flirt as usual either.


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Harry pushed the button frantically. He knew she wasn’t dead because she kept tapping her right fingers on the back of her left palm. Rhythmically, obsessively. Other than that though, she seemed utterly zombie-like.


    The elevator sighed open and Harry entered. Before the doors closed, someone else joined him. A girl he’d never seen before. Her ID listed her name as Sarah and suggested that she worked in the marketing department. She studiously ignored him, looking everywhere but at his face. Harry wondered whether he’d cut himself shaving or if there was some other disfiguration which prompted the woman to look away.


    You’re just being paranoid, he chided. People don’t think about other people. She’s probably just worried about a meeting or dinner with her boyfriend or something like that.


    Logically, he knew that there were a thousand reasons why she was avoiding him and none of them actually related to Harry. But it still cut a little, the fact that she wouldn’t even acknowledge him in any way. Some inner rebellious part of Harry wanted to clear his throat or just introduce himself and extend a hand while smiling broadly, just to throw the woman’s plans awry.


    Maybe next time, Sarah.


    The elevator ride was uneventful. Harry stopped at the third floor. He stepped out into the crisp air of the cooperate ecosystem and sighed at the near-silence on the floor.


    He took a step left, hoping the weirdness was over only to be startled by a voice that reverberated around him as though it was being blasted out of speakers on all sides.


    —One Hour Until Total Immersion—


    The words were spoken in a stuffy, male, English accent. He looked left and right, searching for the owner of the voice and suspecting either a prank or some new company invension being beta tested on the floor. This wouldn’t be the first time a Veridian R&D team decided to test some new technology out on company employees without warning.


    There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary though and, in addition to the startling voice, identical words were written on the hovering panel to the bottom left of his vision. The digital display hovered, stuck in that lower left corner and refusing to budge no matter how vigerously he shook his head or turned around.


    Harry stared at it, his heart thumping in his chest. This wasn’t what the doctors told him. He’d expected—


    He groaned. He hadn’t expected anything. Not anytime soon, anyway. This was driving him nuts.


    As he headed toward his pod the sounds of murmuring filled the floor along with the occasional shuffling of pages or a sporadic burst of laughter. Everything seemed perfectly normal and yet completely unusual. Maybe it wasn’t the office though? Maybe this was all down to Harry.


    He quickened his pace, rounding the corner and reaching his pod, finding the area mostly vacant. Aside from Jean and the discarded hoodie and satchel which suggested that Bo was also in evidence, everyone else wasn’t at their desks.


    Weird. Everyone hated the job, but they all needed the money.


    A large screen hovered in the middle of a section of pods which formed a larger cluster. It was showing a muted vision of one of Veridian’s many internal ads aimed at promoting synergies and excellence, and pumping out a dozen other buzz words that meant nothing to the average employee.


    Harry ignored it. He looked around the floor, spotting Cheddar in the next pod over, grinning like a loon as he stared up at the internal ads showing on the screen. Cheddar’s eyes were opened wide behind his lightly-tinted glasses, red spiderwebs of veins prominent around the edge of each eyeball.


    Still high. Harry shook his head as he walked over and sat down next to the other man.


    “Dude, you’re gonna get the boot soon if you keep this shit up.” His best friend grinned like he’d just been complimented, nodding to himself, glassy eyed. Harry chuckled, relieved to find that thee wasn’t a black rectangle floating above Cheddar’s head. He at least, was normal. Utterly stoned, but normal.


    “Too nice a day to clock in sober, dude,” Cheddar drawled. “I can’t survive in this shit hole otherwise.”


    “Gil seen you?” Harry asked.


    Cheddar shook his head and Harry caught his rapid glance to the left. Cheddar’s eyes stayed there for a moment and he grinned broadly as though something fantastically humerous had appeared on the other side of the floor.


    “No,” Cheddar said. “No one’s seen him. Weird flu going around, I think. That’s what Jean said anyway.”


    “Yeah, I noticed,” Harry said. “No sign of life downstairs either.”


    Cheddar shrugged, turning back to stare up at the screen once more. “You get any sleep?” He asked, grinning again. “I went out like a light the second I hit the bed.”


    Harry chuckled. “I managed to get a couple of hours. Not enough. Feel like absolute shit this morning, and I blame you for it. We should have started earlier.”


    “Dude, you’re such a frigging lightweight!” He laughed.  “Shadow of Olireth rules! Game’s too damned good to quit, that’s all. Besides, you were the one who wanted to finish the Oberon questline. Damned thing took like four hours.”


    Harry nodded. He was right, of course. It wasn’t fair to blame Cheddar for the late night considering Harry had been just as eager to continue. He knew that would mean a rough morning and a shitty day, but the news of his progressing illness had thrown him for a loop and blowing a night gaming with Cheddar seemed like a good enough remedy at the time.


    “Never doing that again,” he said, pressing a thumb and forefinger against his nose. “Feels like I’ve spent the last ten hours being thrown around a tumble dryer.”


    “That’s because you came into work without a buzz, dude. I keep telling you, you gotta level your shit out and get a buzz on. How do you think—”


    Cheddar winced at the same time as Harry. The bustler style voice he’d heard earlier cut through the air once more. This time it was less of an ear-splitting shriek and more of a calm, digitized voice, but the fact that it was coming from everywhere at once was more than a little disarming.


    —Forty-five Minutes Until Total Immersion—