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.LP \& .ce .sp |4.25i .ps 12 .I Note: You can't find this shit in a handbook. .R .PP .ps 12 \(em Ice Cube, .I How To Survive In South Central .R .PP .ps 12 .CW ░ Megatokyo, Indiana. 2049. .PP .ps 12 SL was back at work. Tough interrogation, re: his furlough in West Berlin. Well, it sure as shit wasn't \fIthis\fR place, if you know what I mean. They said they knew what he meant. He was already sorry he'd come back, but at least the bandwidth here was civilized. .PP .ps 12 Most of the work he'd left behind on his desk was still there, but now it was buried beneath more of the same, sad stuff. Striated sediment accumulated through the usual organic processes during his pre\-approved absence. SL swept it all away with a single gesture, slashing at the horizon with his shimmering, black\-gloved hand. Better by half to start from inbox zero. .PP .ps 12 "Have a good summer?" SL's friend looked refreshed. First he'd heard from him since the kiss\-off in West Berlin. How long had it been, anyway? .PP .ps 12 "Shut the fuck up," SL said, and emptied his styrofoam cup of coffee onto his friend's new shoes. Nike AJV, cult classics. So\-called "Moon Boots." .PP .ps 12 Obviously counterfeit. .PP .ps 12 Multicolored tendrils snaking, now vibrating, now suddenly tilting ninety degrees to flash on a cross-sectional view of flat square sprites, arranged in an orderly patchwork of checked, fluorescent light. SL could tell because he could see some of the pixels. He moved them around with his eyes, dumbly relying on his gloves for a secondary axis. Whatever you called it. .PP .ps 12 Drilling down, he paused intermittently to evaluate a list of bullet points, loosely guided by company policy as haptic feedback intermittently failed. Some of the material he would ingest consciously, but the bulk of it was archived for later, offline perusal. Of course, he'd never get around to it. .PP .ps 12 At last he shuttered his visor and switched back to audio, bounding through the remainder at 2.5x suggested playback speed. Continuously distracted by unrelated matters, he had had to start over four times, losing his stream of consciousness at different points each time. The interruptions impacted his retention, which called into the question the whole enterprise. .PP .ps 12 The backlog was brutal. Even before he completed the mandatory six months re\-training, he'd still be expected to pick up some of the leads his people had let drop. High risk credit ratings desperate to... whatever it was they were desperate to do. The relevant factor was that in their desperation they were more likely to fall for his company's pitch\(ema high interest, unsecured line of credit that stood up pre\-charged nearly to its limit. Exceeding the cap incurred exorbitant fees, which was where the company realized its profits. Something like seventy\-eight percent of new customers immediately charged their account to just below its upper limit, which, since they had reliably failed to read the fine print, \fIactually\fR pushed them well into the red. Transactions were never denied, and thus the fees began to accrue even before the virtual ink on their virtual credit agreements had virtually dried. .PP .ps 12 SL didn't care much about the minutiae. His actual job was managing comfort counselors, who in turn serviced loan technicians, who finally interfaced directly with customers. Most of his time was spent manually transcribing their efficiency reports into spreadsheets that he later e\-mailed to his own boss. Or, increasingly, firing the loan techs for not having made their numbers that week. .PP .ps 12 Fully immersed in his computing environment, his arms were flailing around like there was something wrong with him. .PP .ps 12 Nobody approached his desk. .PP .ps 12 The stairwells were left unguarded. As far as SL could tell there was virtually no security, no countermeasures had been deployed to prevent unauthorized staff from moving freely between floors. But this couldn't have been the company's intention, so walking up and down the stairs simply wasn't done. Tacitly compliant, managers never even attempted it. .PP .ps 12 Still, Nistopher, one of SL's peers in management, was curious. One afternoon he waited until the corridor was empty, then casually Nis\-walked up to the second level. .I You'll never believe what happened next. .R It surprised him, too: a corridor identical to the one he'd left behind on the first floor. "As above, so below," Nistopher confirmed, and then silently returned to his desk, reassured by this valuable confirmation of the universe's fearful symmetry. .PP .ps 12 Unbeknownst to Nistopher, the moment he'd entered the stairwell his employment had been terminated. However, owing to a glitch in [redacted], he was not informed of the fact until fully three weeks had elapsed. No, he was not to be compensated for the shifts he had worked during the interim, either, although the company did continue to let him into the building, and he continued to do his job. .PP .ps 12 Nistopher didn't seem to mind. Once they finally got around to telling him he'd been fired, he simply stood up, left his desk and personal effects as they were, and walked silently out of the building. .PP .ps 12 .I Just like the Rapture, .R a near\-peer cracked, unhelpfully. .PP .ps 12 SL counted the days until his next vacation. As a manager his time off was subject to the needs of the business. He didn't have a contract (management were employed "at will"), so all he could do was submit his request and hope that it didn't get overtaken by events in the field. This was the price of sitting in the big chair with the .I shiatsu .R massage. .PP .ps 12 But there was always a bigger chair. SL's own boss, when she was not on vacation, wielded her limited influence with a wild and unpredictable caprice, carpet bombing from high altitude. He tried to stay off her radar, even though he was still obliged to touch base, insert his deep input, massage the numbers .I (shiatsu .R or no), and reconcile his own receipts at simultaneous, pre\-programmed intervals. He had then only to sit back and wait for her response, which, while unpredictable, was inevitably bombastic. One might say, in an utterly predictable way. .PP .ps 12 He'd better take this train of thought offline. .PP .ps 12 Megatokyo nodes were popping up all over. Zoo York, ATL, Emerald City, Texas, Michigan, and Oklahoma. "Hell," SL thought, "If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere." .PP .ps 12 Unigov, the colloquial name adopted by the city of Megatokyo \fI(né\fR Indianapolis) to describe its ever\-expanding consolidation of node cities worldwide, was finally beginning to function as intended. Better access to EMS shipping leveraged lower prices for everyone. Free press, free movement, total surveillance of same. .PP .ps 12 Besides, municipal autonomy had long ago been proven not to work. .PP .ps 12 In spite of all this, West Berlin and other points south had, so far, avoided being swallowed up into the burgeoning Yellow Belt. This circumstance afforded certain opportunities for trade. Margins could be skillfully skated to slice out a meager profit, for those unfortunate enough to be frozen out of the Unigov's legitimate economic activity. .PP .ps 12 SL had opinions about the arrangement.