Maxi stood at the door with her sword at the ready. She gripped her blade and Dalek snarled. She kicked the door open and roared as she rushed into the dissection room, hoping to get the jump on whatever was there.
Belinda screamed and several clockwork critters skittered towards Maxi and broke off their attack at the last minute. The creatures weren’t exactly clockwork, but they were such a hodgepodge of parts that resembled animals like cats, raccoons, and squirrels, they reminded Maxi of the clockwork beasts from Steampunk comics, that the Office Pool started calling them Belinda’s clockwork critters.
“I coulda killed you,” Maxi said.
“Meow, meow.” Belinda purred. “I didn’t die.”
“Clearly,” Maxi said. “Glad you’re alright. How are the others?”
Belinda explained in a rather circuitous fashion about the locations of the rest of the Office Pool. Maxi was relieved that none of them had gone the way of Von Patrick.
“The whole building is on lockdown,” Belinda said. “So I decided to look for clues.”
“For a quest?”
“For Meow Crunch. When you open a bag of Meow Crunch, cats from all over the neighborhood come running. But I opened a bag of Meow Crunch, nary a cat. Something is wrong, very very wrong.”
“You do know that’s a commercial,” Maxi said, recalling an ad for Meow Crunch where a guy is inundated with cats when he opens a bag of the cat treats.
“Maybe you’re right. Perhaps the guy in the ad has all the cats? Do you think he is using Meow Crunch to kidnap the world’s cats?” Belinda said.
“How about we look for our friends?” Maxi said.
“Okay,” Belinda said, and tapped a few commands on her remote. Her clockwork critters whirred and clattered as they folded into little cubes and hopped into slots on a vest that carried them an ammo belt.
Maxi called Daisuke, and he said that he had located the stairs that ran the entire length of the building, which was somewhere near infinity. To the outside world, the company was located somewhere in the financial district of New York in a nondescript tower where a loan security guard sat at the front desk of the lobby.
The interior was modular, and infinite as far as Maxi could tell. Bathrooms were always there when a person needed one. Offices shifted in size to accommodate new employees or downsized when the need arrived. Floors were larger than what a person could reasonably expect from the outside.
Maxi worked and lived in a TARDIS, just without the time travel part. A person could spend their entire life in the building as there were restaurants, entertainment complexes, bars, shops, swimming pools, and just about anything a human could want for work and leisure.
But it all had a catch. Everything cost money from using too much soap to wanting something more than the three free menu items at the cafeteria. She had to pay back into the system if she didn’t want to live like an automaton. The place had all the trappings of a Vegas casino complex where money was never intended to leave the system.
Hotels in Vegas learned pretty quickly that fancy stores and five-star restaurants were the key to keeping all the money. Even the people who won big had plenty of opportunities to spend it all just as quickly as they had won it. The company felt the same way, promises of big paydays through quests, and plenty of ways to blow the money just as quickly.
Maxi could play video games while she healed in her chair rather than work, if she wanted to pay a fee. She’d blow through quest rewards pretty quickly if she lived for her impulses.
However, she was like her parents. She could deny herself the now in promise for a better future. For her, that better future was paying off terminated employees contracts, so they wouldn’t get murdered for a bad month. The alternative was multideminsionals scooping up the terminated contracts and doing who knows what to the employees.
“What day is it?” Maxi said, realizing she didn’t quite know anymore. Her life had been a whirlwind of activity. When she wasn’t questing, she was training. When she wasn’t training, she was sleeping, and when she’d wake up she’d do it all over again.
“October 30th,” Terry said in her ear.
“End of the month already?” Maxi said. “Do we know the next raid boss? Is the lockdown a part of it?”
“Multidimensional law prevents raids from happening more frequently than 6 times a year, which for our purposes conveniently works out every other month.”
“A year seems subjective, you know, with a multiverse of different time streams out there.” Maxi said.
“A year is defined in multidimensional law as a fiscal year.”
“Great, let’s get a fiscal year defined as a century, and we won’t have to worry about something coming to kick our ass in two days after the building goes on lockdown because some idiot opened the cages at the monster zoo.”
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Trust me when I say a raid boss is better than the multidimensional regulatory agency coming down on you for fraud.”
Maxi and Belinda continued through the IT corridors. The place was still in the same aftermath stages of the battle, dead creatures, people, and wreckage from the trashed office littered the pathways. On more than one occasion, they had to climb through a barricade or take an alternate route. There resurrection chairs stacked in defense and cubicle walls configured to make a barrier.
When they encountered a person who wasn’t past the point of resurrection, they’d haul them to the nearest chair with a note guiding them to the stairwell, assuming it would also guide them out of the building. It was a function of time and how much over their life points they were when they died that decided if they could be resurrected. Damage significantly beyond a person’s life total was just as back as not being able to get to the chair in time.
Maxi and Belinda helped where they could, and left the rest for Janitorial. It was eerie in itself, not seeing the clean up crew. They usually sprang into action almost immediately after an incident was contained. Maxi had run into them on more than one occasion looting post battle and helping employees to their resurrection chairs when the attack happened to fellow employees.
Like PIs who favored a uniform look. In the case of Janitorial, it was blue coveralls with their names stitched on the right side. Maxi could tell some of them had armor underneath, but they all wore the jumpsuits. While the PIs trenchcoat and fedora and the Janitorial uniform never came up on the Free Market, she had to assume they wore it for a bonus that was specific to their class.
Whereas Maxi wore the yellow shirt of the rank and file employee. The bottom tier, the newbies, and those who couldn’t afford anything better could at least get the yellow shirt. Hers, however, was legendary and grew with her level. Each time she would get to the point of replacing it, a new ability would unlock that would make it comparable or even better than ones she could afford at her level.
The shirt also had the benefit of people underestimating her. Since she was dressed like the ensigns that would bite it whenever Kirk went down to the planet with a crew member never seen before the episode, people who didn’t know her assumed less skill than she had.
They eventually made it to a nondescript corner of the IT floor where a door was marked “Janitorial.” She’d seen them before, and just assumed they were the closest that would hold cleaners, mops, and buckets. That’s when she realized that everytime she had gone to the supply closet to acquire cleaner for mopping their office floor, it was via elevator.
Most rooms in the building had elevator door entrances, a result of magic elevators that could go anywhere in the multiverse. Conventional doors were usually only when one wanted to partition a floor and flow traffic to and from a central point. Most of the centralized spaces had twelve elevators to alleviate the flood of traffic, or at least force all the yellow shirts to wait. Those with money and means can stroll right up to the counter at the airport while the rest waited in seemingly endless snaking lines. The elevators queues were designed in the same way with the wait getting less and less as people tiered up.
Considering everything was tied to the elevator network, even the bathrooms, it was odd that Janitorial seemed to have a door in every floor on every common space. Daisuke stood guard outside the door watching the hallways and kept his hands near the swords he kept in an invisible scabbard.
The man looked like a Japanese business tycoon by passive glance. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail, a thin mustache on his upper lip, and a piercing firm gaze. However, Maxi’s sword training gave her a deeper understanding. He was in a stance where he couldn’t be knocked down easily, his arms seemed relaxed, but he held them in a way where he could unsheath and strike with his weapons in one swift motion.
He nodded toward the door, and Maxi opened it. There was a stairwell inside. She walked over to the railing and leaned over for a look. Despite being in the basement, she saw that it stretched to infinity in either direction, or at least as far as she could see. When she used to play with two mirrors as a child, endless would just get too small to see.
There was a plaque near the threshold of the door that Belinda held open at Daisuke’s request when Maxi went inside. it said, “IT”. At least there was a way to navigate the system considering she had no way of knowing how many floors away her Office Pool was from the cafeteria. The magic elevator system had warped her sense of the size and scale of the place because no matter where she went, if it was the bathroom or Beijing or some far off dimension the elevator did not take any more time than an express to the top floors in a conventional building.
When she wasn’t in the building, she could concentrate while pressing a button to get the mundane elevators back, but considering she had a device that was the equivalent of beaming in Star Trek, she never bothered with mundane transportation anymore. Maxi hadn’t taken a train since she first attempted to run away from her destiny when fear and denial had been motivating her decisions.
Daisuke and Belinda went through the door, and it closed behind them. Maxi was about to head up the stairs when she realized that she didn’t really know where IT was located. The place could have been the basement, and she may have heard that it was in a basement once, but she wasn’t sure. The building was infinite and modular. Any direction seemed just as good as the next.
“Up or down,” she asked.
Daisuke shrugged, and Belinda said, “Let’s take a look. The Meow Crunch could be in any direction.”
Daisuke raised his eyes at Maxi, and she shrugged.
Their Inventor pulled out a tablet, and fiddled with some controls. Two small drones unfurled from her backpack and took flight. Dalek cooed and whirled its propellers at the critters. The machines were cobbled together with what looked like a blender turned helicopter and an egg beater with wings. She sent them off in opposite directions and watched a split screen on her tablet. The video feed showed them flying up and pausing to inspect the plaques on the doors.
Accounting, HR, and Mail Room were a couple that Maxi recognized while others were marked with designations that she should only guess. The drone ascending the tower, the helicopter blender, got to a door marked, “Paranormal Investigator” and the door burst open. The drone was blasted by an unseen force and toppled through the center of the shaft seconds later.
“I suggest we go down,” Maxi said, and the group didn’t need to be told twice. They took the steps, two and three at a time, circling their way down. There was a thunder above them of what sounded like an army charging down the stairs. Maxi knew the grutomatons eventually formed packs after they settled for dominance. She also heard they could form whole herds or even hordes. From the sheer number of things charging down the stairs after them, she imagined that it was a sizeable force.
She was about to lead her team into one of the doors in hopes they could find somewhere better to hide when she was struck in the back by something heavy that sent her tumbling down the stairs. Whatever hit her also knocked her companions down because she heard them fall too.
They piled on a landing that was between floors. There was another blow to her head, and she lost consciousness before she could see what was attacking.