Sector administrator #354-777-EH or simply ‘sev’ to his closer coworkers awoke with a start. He scanned the room, quite literally, as the biometrics in his eyes began compiling all available information about the where he lived. Sev took his time preparing a small cup of tea. It held genuine leaves which had costed him no small amount of merit, but the taste was always worth it.
He swirled it around the cup as he made his way across the room, stopping only to adjust the mess of wires and cables he called his hair. He walked in a leisurely gait to his office, for convenience’s sake, management had put both rooms in the same building, so one small stroll later he had arrived at his workspace.
It was a small, near pitch-black room, with the only light coming from a bright, white, man-sized pod in the center. He made his way to it and neurotically told it to open. When he first received that specific implant, it was confusing, to connect his mind to a piece of technology. But he mastered it, he always perfected everything, it’s what separated him, elevated him beyond the lower classes.
He could still remember waking up and feeling that drowsiness, that sense that he had become more than before, but thoughts like that were useless. Inside, the pod was filled with a gel meant to reduce his senses as much as possible, and incorporate him fully into his work world. He lied down on it, letting the soft sensation envelop him as he sank to the bottom, a cable emerging from a hole deep within and linking itself into his brain.
When he opened his eyes, his actual, virtual office stared back, a burgundy wood desk sat there in an endless grey void. With a single thought the space enclosed on itself to be a room of small dimensions, three metres tall, seven long, and ten
wide forming a boxish rectangle. The walls and ceilings themselves were grey, of course, and there existed sparse decoration safe for a digital clock embedded in the wall and a stack of papers, the tops of the important or urgent ones being coloured red.
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With a sigh, he sat down on a chair that had just appeared from seemingly
nowhere and started his shift. Much of his job consisted of the endless repetition of signing off on documents. He rarely read them in full, only casually checking them to make sure that they contained no glaring errors or changes, and trusting in his subordinates and the system that taught them at large to perform as expected.
There was no time to truly give each request the time and care it needed, he reasoned to himself, as he had done many times before. Although the time dilation within this virtual world was high, something he had come to learn were that there would always be more problems. When he had first started, it had seemed that every small issue was a catastrophe that threatened to break his planet apart.
Nowadays, however, it became more about sorting through which issue could be delayed the longest and identifying the most pressing task at hand. He let his brain transcend into the same gooey substance he was lying in, the process at this point had become automatic.
And so he worked, signing off on projects and ideas and adjustments, barely considering their effects, trying to work through as many as possible. He
purveyed a report detailing a biohazard in sector 8 and possible solutions. What were the solutions? He held no idea, but he hoped that they were effective.
For hours on end it was endless skimming as the implants kept sending only the most necessary of information for his brain to work out. Continuous streams of pure data kept pouring and pouring in, giving him details and details about different cases and issues and problems.
It was overwhelming, it was too much at once, but it always was, and he could not show it. A haze set upon him as the hours began to slip by, document by document, signature after signature he worked and worked and worked until eventually he was down to the least important quandaries.
The minor stuff about allocations of resources towards some obscure branch of government he had never heard of before, or minor issues with vandalism and defacing of public property. He genuinely held no clue as to why they gave these
issues to him, all they had to do was send some cleaners instead of worsening his workload.
It was frustrating to say the least, but Sev persevered, past the doubts that one day they’d discover what it was he was doing and how ineffectual his administration had become. It was fine though, no one would check up on him unless he missed quota, and the way things were running that wouldn’t happen for a long, long time.