Burning through Darity’s Honey-Do list gave Sharp added focus over the next week. He found himself wishing she had taken him seriously, though. He had imagined she’d give him the printers that mysteriously drop off the network, or the AR Decks where AR lag caused people to walk by who weren’t really there. People called the ghost images “spookies”, and Sharp knew exactly how to clear that data issue. Instead, Darity assigned him to run diagnostics on all the smart toilets in the administration building. It was slow, disgusting work, and probably Darity’s revenge because he skipped out on their weekly get-together again. He knew he shouldn’t avoid them. Novell and Darity weren’t just dear friends. They were his only friends.
There was a time where people would openly brag about being Sharp’s friend. Those were happier, ancient times. In tech years, all of twelve months ago. Sharp would have looked back upon those years fondly except he had been too busy launching a billion dollar company and plowing through people in order to change the world.
He certainly noticed when things stopped being happy. That would have been on the day he learned that his cutting edge, environmentally safe crypto mining rig, Zero Carbs, had been cloned in China and was selling for a third of the cost. That was also the day Wudgepuck, a former competitor driven out of business by Sharp’s innovative technologies, sued his company, BitStorm, for IP theft thirty minutes after the VC asked for his stake to be paid back in full. The contract called for 200% interest. Sharp was certain he could have figured out how to field the lawsuit and pay the VC without liquidating his company, but that was also the day that the CFO left town with Sharp’s girlfriend. In a completely random and coincidental string of events, they both went to work for the VC’s new business selling crypto mining rigs from China. Curiously, the non-competition clause was missing from Sharp’s copy of the contract. He would have asked his lawyer about it, but the lawyer had formally resigned that afternoon.
Then the bot assault campaign began online, there were hit pieces in the press, non-stop montages of his excesses in the media, and a somber biopic with moody music that featured crying interviews of people he had plowed through on his way to the top. Sharp was branded a crypto-fascist and locked out of his own cryptocurrency wallet as his company’s $30K coin, skllazon, broke the penny floor on its way into oblivion.
It was a busy day.
Sharp felt that this day was worse than that one. All week he had been staring at shiny white porcelain with error lights beneath acrylic layers, sometimes covered with excrement, but always blinking at a lackluster speed as if the toilet had lost the will to live. He had repaired a heating array first thing this morning that toasted the seats at a balmy 39°F. And yesterday he had argued with a smart bidet with an aggressive independence streak. Yet today’s assignment, now conquered and filed, was with the AI toilet assistants in one of the executive bathrooms that had been spouting unwanted diet advice and bowel analysis at loud volumes. Sharp knew that his life had hit a nadir.
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If this keeps going, I’ll never get another girlfriend for as long as I live.
Yet at that moment he knew his smart toilet purgatory had suddenly ended. Popping up in his virtua display was a new assignment in B2 Customer Service Dept. Two misbehaving mice. His eyebrows arched at the work order description.
─── ·⋆⋅🚪⋅⋆· ───
“I think he deserved what he got."
“Completely!”
In the background, employees openly discussed Sharp's life with great fervor and authority while treating him as if he were no different than one of the potted plants decoratively placed around the office. Their sniggers were annoying, but Sharp couldn’t be bothered to confront them. Sometimes he liked to "work" nearer to loud gossips, testing cables and monitors in their area as they talked about him, just to make them uncomfortable, but he wasn't in the mood for that at the moment either. He wanted to get home and work on his current project.
"Your mouse isn't broken. The problem is with its ownership,” Sharp said as tossed the mouse back in the CS rep’s direction. She looked slightly unnerved.
"What does that mean?”
“It’s your coworker’s. And she has yours.”
The girl took a moment to process what he told her. She looked from the AR shades on her desk to the mouse and keyboard, then to the AR deck underneath a stack of papers, then over to her puzzled coworker whose head had just peeked up over the cubicle from the other row. "Wait. This isn’t my mouse?!” The gossiping group began laughing quietly to themselves, then began loudly discussing a disastrous trip to the Bahamas Sharp had made with a celebrity who he had never met.
He gave them a baleful side eye, then turned back to the girl.
"Nope. Somebody switched them.”
“But…but isn’t it paired with my AR Deck?” Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment as she looked up at him in panic. “How did you figure it out so fast?”
“I received two reports for misbehaving mice. One of you reported that it would light up, but didn’t respond to your input, and the other reported that the mouse was haunted.” The other girl slowly ducked her head back into her cubicle. “You’re right next to each other, too, so the pairing wouldn’t be affected.”
"Right. Because while I was shaking her mouse, she was shaking mine, and it looked like it was sorta working…but not.” Her voice was deadpan as she realized she had asked for help over such a simple matter.
Sharp looked down to the left and listened in on the giggling group behind him. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened here. This was clear workplace harassment. They’d let him go through all the trouble of filling out the paperwork, then laugh it off as a harmless joke. Their boss wouldn’t want to be bothered dealing with him. The whole thing would be swept under the proverbial rug. He’d probably get blamed for it, too.
Meanwhile, he’d leave work late and have less time for his own project at home. It was going to fix everything. Put him back on the map. Bring in some much needed cash. Get him away from smart toilets. All he had to do was pretend he didn’t know what he knew.
What a pain.