Home

AtFantasy

AtFantasy Fiction Archive

Sword's Edge

Table of Contents

Previous Issues

Author: Maria Casale

Julie wakes up at the kitchen table again. Her laptop is on and humming, her shoulders and neck are stiff from sleeping with her head on her arms. The tiny screen on the laptop is covered with black and gray and white rectangles. For a minute, it almost looks like a pattern or a picture. She blinks and there are only rectangles, like a broken TV.

She touches a key to bring back the screen saver, her favorite, the starfield simulation. The guys at work have wildlife, cartoon characters, virtual pets, but she sticks to this old one, set for warp speed and an unrealistically huge number of stars. Today the stars are moving too fast. She feels groggy and disoriented. She closes her files and breaks her connection to the company’s mainframe, the mothership of GameWorlds Inc., as her boss, Jimbo, likes to call it, and heads for the shower.

Julie hears the spit and gurgle of the coffee maker coming on as she rummages in the closet for something to wear. Her black pants are too big, even with a belt. Her new blue pants are a couple of sizes smaller, but where are they? As the first scent of the coffee wafts into the room, her stomach lurches and she heads for the bed. Only a perfectly horizontal position averts total gastric catastrophe.

Maybe she’s had too much coffee lately. And too little sleep, and too few meals, with practically no vitamins in them. She feels achy. Her skin feels hot but her insides feel cold. Maybe she’s coming down with the flu, a virus, some kind of a bug. Today, she decides, will be a day for sleeping in a real bed, maybe consuming a few nutrients later on if she feels up to it. She’ll have to call Jimbo, and he won’t be happy. It’s company policy to let the creative staff work from home whenever they want to, but as personnel director she is clearly in a different category of employee: like drudge, maybe; or peon; or soulless number cruncher. Jimbo let her know right away when he hired her that he always expects her on site, "with your people," he said, as if she were Moses. She can tell Jimbo she’ll finish up the comparison of the two new pension plan proposals this afternoon or tonight. She’s entitled to a sick day like everybody else, she tells herself firmly, and, still lying on her back, dials the phone by feel.

"GameWorlds, Jimbo here."

Julie has a brief, satisfying flash of someone else, definitely someone else, replying "Good morning, Mr. Here," but she knows it could never happen. Jimbo Feldman is too well known, too much of a legend in his field as the boy wonder who built a computer game empire in North Jersey, and his folksy style and mammoth self assurance are a major part of the legend.

"Hi, Jimbo, it’s Julie. I don’t feel so good today, so I’m not coming in, but I’ll have that pension comparison e-mailed to you later today."

"Now, Julie, you just rest and take it easy. Everybody around here is coming down with some kind of a bug, it seems like. Twelve guys called out before seven o’clock and a bunch more since then. I was just gonna check to see if they were running the first ten episodes of the X-Files back to back again, but then I went down to Toddler Division and Jason and Jared both looked terrible, so I sent them on home. I guess everybody really is sick."

"How many people are out?"

"I don’t know, maybe about twenty, and us few healthy folks sure don’t need you sickos here breathing on us, so you rest and feel better, you hear?"

Hanging up without saying goodbye is a Jimbo habit Julie is used to, but as she replaces the phone in its cradle on the bedside table she is surprised both by the absences among the creative staff and by Jimbo’s accepting attitude. Aside from the major television event Jimbo alluded to, the game designers hardly ever call out sick. Being at work is so much better than being at home. Work is a cool place with a gym and a great cafeteria and the very best and most up-to-date computer game equipment in the world; while home is either an under-furnished and poorly provisioned apartment or a house with bills and children, ruled by someone who is invariably referred to as "my old lady."

This is a corporate culture that would be vastly improved by not being ninety-nine point nine percent male, Julie thinks. Also by a moratorium on all articles about the work environments of software companies in California. The game designers read about Silicon Valley all the time, so of course they want to bring their dogs to work. They want to wear whatever they want; they want to go barefoot. They whine about how the guys in California must be, like, so inspired by that surfer environment, you know?

"The work product," Jimbo tells Julie, "is all that matters. Give them whatever toys they want as long as the work product is there."

So Julie puts up fliers for ski trips: "like surfing on snow". Everyone goes and by April, May at the latest, all the casts are off. Half the guys bring their dogs to work and the other half step, barefoot, in the dogs’ work product. So these are my people, she thinks, shutting her eyes. Not Moses’ tough, desert-hardened tribe, rebellious at times but awed by his miracles. If Moses’ people had been like this, he would have left them in the desert and gone to the Promised Land by himself. He probably would have gotten there.

She has to relax. Her stomach still feels terrible, and she really has to eat something later. Only yesterday, a ring she couldn’t get off her finger last week slid right over her knuckle and clattered against her keyboard. She is only five feet tall, but she is suddenly so thin that her arms and legs look longer than they used to, with straight narrow bones visible under the skin.

Restless and chilly, Julie can’t quite fall asleep. She gets her heavy bathrobe and looks at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes look big and dark, her face looks smaller and more pointed. Is her skin kind of gray? No, she decides, turning on the light and leaning in to the mirror, it must just be the light. Maybe she’s pale, or sallow, or something.

She drinks some water and gets her laptop and the pension proposals from the kitchen. If she works in bed, she’ll be resting, and maybe the pension stuff will put her to sleep. Maybe she should make a table comparing the two plans. Jimbo loves tables.

She wakes at five to the soft hum of the computer. Outside her window, snowflakes are swirling like a cloud of stars under the streetlight. She presses her forehead against the cold glass. She feels different somehow she thinks, but better, clearheaded and strong. The telephone rings.

"Julie? Jimbo here. Listen, I want you to just work at home for a few days. You don't need to come in. In fact, you don't need to go anywhere. If you need juice or soup or anything I can drop it off to you."

"But why? I feel better. I thought I’d come in tomorrow."

"Well, we have a kind of a situation here, a problem with the system. Seems young lamebrained Jared went to New York last weekend and brought back a virus. Kid can’t just buy drugs like everybody else, he has to go and buy some bootleg game disk called "Alien Transformation" and load it right into the mainframe, instead of onto one of the stand-alones. I’ve told them a million times. We’re trying to debug now."

"You know, I’ve had this strange design on my laptop when it’s idle for a few minutes. Is that the virus?"

"Your screen looks like bum TV reception? That’s it, all right. You must have caught it from the mainframe. Once we get that cleaned up we’ll have to check out your laptop before you log back in. Gotta take care of the mothership first, you know."

"But why can’t I come in and work in my office? Why did you say not to go out? What’s going on?"

"Like I said, it’s a situation and I can’t really discuss it. I guess it could be some kind of a liability problem for us down the road if it doesn’t get fixed, but right now we’re hoping that everybody and, uh, everything will be fine once we get rid of this virus. Now don’t you worry. I’m right here if you need anything. And, Julie? Turn off your laptop right now, okay?"

Julie hangs up and turns slowly to her computer. As she looks at the rectangles, the humming seems louder, and a picture forms in her mind. A crowd of people lifting long gray arms to the sky, singing. A ship touches down, black against the pale red sky, and blocks a million icy stars from view.

Julie looks down at her long gray hands and smiles a strong, new smile. She sees the picture clearly; she understands the song. She will be going out. On the shore of a distant sea, in the light of two dying suns, she will be with her people.

Maria Casale has been published in PMS and Bucks County Writer as well as on line in Online Journal and Nocturne Horizons. Two of her stories received honorable mentions in the Explorations 2001 contest. She is currently working on her first novel.