“I need your advice for this next part,” I told Veazey the next day. “My spellbook is routed through Jeeves, and right now he’s running on a collection of processor blocks back at my desk, about equivalent to a G3. I’m not even carrying a full processor on me right now. This thing I’m routing commands through is barely better than a smartphone. But if I’m routing spells through this thing, if I really am going into combat, every second counts, and that means I need a serious upgrade. I also need better contacts, and maybe even ear filaments, so I can finally ditch this bone conduction shit.”
“You’re still running a G3? As a desktop? That was released when you were in high school. No wonder you have to write scripts for everything!”
“I know, I know. I’ve been putting it off because I couldn’t afford it. But even if I’ve got enough for living expenses now, I don’t want to blow all my money on one chunk of hardware. I haven’t even kept up with it. Didn’t want to be tempted, looking at stuff I couldn’t afford. Do you know where I can get used stuff? I might even be able to find a G4 in a dumpster at this point.”
“I got a place I can take you, but it’s not a store. And you should come back with me anyway, the guys would love to see you.”
“Veazey, I can’t go back to Innovex. I was a dick to everybody after I quit. Even the ones who still gamed with me, it was awkward as hell.”
“Only in your head, dipshit. You’re wrong about these guys. And anyway, it’s been years. Nobody holds a grudge, especially now that you’re not kicking their butts on leaderboards every day.”
“I’d really rather not go back there. It’s gonna be humiliating.”
“You want hardware? We got hardware. Innovex has military contracts now. And we use G9s in the bots.”
“G9s! I didn’t even think those were out!”
“They’re not out. That’s what I’m saying. I can get you shit nobody else has. And we definitely need to get you new optics. How do you even see in those shitty plastic contacts?”
“They’re fine, even if the world is a little yellow.”
“It’s 2058 and you’ve still got shit physically sitting on your eyeball? How do you not have constant eye infections? That’s fucking gross. Let me take you to the shop. And then we need to get you a gun.”
“No guns. It’s too risky. Boston’s super strict, even by corp standards, and they’ve got scanners everywhere.”
“Yeah, there are ways around that. But first thing’s first. Get cleaned up and meet me at my truck.”
* * *
I had forgotten how many different kinds of human bodies there were, until I walked back into Innovex with my visitor’s badge. The main floor was programmers of all shapes and sizes, recruited from all corners of the Earth. Most of them were skinny fat, with gamer grade AR glasses that could probably see through walls.
Most people walking around the normal world wore contacts and either used body shaping treatments or physically went to the gym to keep in shape, but the geeks on this floor had flabby, puffy bodies that had grown out over skinny frames, like they weren’t even on blockers anymore. Was Innovex so cheap now, these guys didn’t even get health insurance? Or had I been judging the whole world based on the standards of Judy’s friends, who spent half their salaries on looking beautiful?
A dozen programmers turned their heads as I walked in and matched my face with my public profile, pulling up my hobbies, job history, and criminal record in about two seconds, before they turned back to their work.
If I did have a recent criminal record, or if I was suspected of being a spy for another company, every person in the building would see me with a bright red warning tag, and a human security guard would have been summoned to kick me out or watch my every move.
But today I was just another former employee on a tour, and all my old gamer tags were for games that didn’t exist anymore. If this group had scanned me three years ago, they would have seen an elite achievement list that put me among the top two hundred Samurai players in the world. Might have even gotten a few quiet nods of respect from strangers. Now I was just another old guy walking around with the old guy from the basement.
Veazey was a fair bit older than me, and his military experience put him above and apart from the kids the company liked to recruit. Most of them were skipping college, making six figures straight out of high school. Half of them were probably on employment visas from developing countries; elite, well-connected students from Nigeria and Paraguay, sent to learn American code. The Indians and Chinese had surpassed us in old school software development, but Americans still excelled at games and robotics.
“Where is everybody?” I whispered to Veazey.
“Our boys are moving up in the world. Luther, Alex, Tony, and Josh are all on the second floor now.”
“What happened to Calvin?”
“Calvin has the corner office. He’s our first stop.”
“Calvin is management now? No fucking way.”
Calvin Harris was the best programmer I ever met, not counting the hacker crew I hung out with in high school. Calvin could have been as good as any of them, but you would never catch him breaking rules or cracking a firewall. He just needed to make money. Lots of money, as fast as possible, to help his grandparents and keep their mortgage paid.
He was sharp, efficient, and strangely dignified, even in the cheap distro clothes we all wore. He was wearing a ring now, after marrying his longtime partner. Veazey said Calvin was commuting from a plot of land way outside the Boston Metro, where they had like six dogs.
Calvin wasn’t wearing his suit jacket when we walked in, but he had it hanging on a hook behind him, as he checked everybody else’s work from behind a desk. He hadn’t gone completely corporate on me, but you could tell he was on his way, wearing a shirt and tie that still looked a bit baggy on him.
Calvin didn’t talk about it, but his family got hit hard during the Bump. His parents had been bankers or real estate gurus, shot by looters when the money stopped working. Calvin had eventually moved in to take care of his grandparents, but when I knew him, he was effectively homeless, sleeping on a cot in the Innovex “nap room,” too proud to move into the giant party house the other guys were renting.
All the guys on my old team had some kind of horror story to tell. Tony was a diabetic who couldn’t afford a pancreas replacement. He almost died when insulin supplies ran out.
Alex was an indie game designer who made a tongue-in-cheek humor game about being a starving street rat, based on the years he spent as an actual starving street rat.
Josh was a charming, confident workhorse, strangely charismatic and self-possessed for a coding nerd. The only true extrovert on our team. He lived with his extended family in a converted FEMA camp. His proudest moment was when he got his first bonus, and was able to move into his own trailer, next door to his stepbrother.
But Luther had the worst story. Luther’s brother had been killed in a demon attack, when Geryon unleashed a wave of Hunters inside the Red Line subway station, to punish the City Council for kicking one of his thralls off.
Luther’s brother Isaiah had been tackled on the platform and pushed onto the tracks, but he wasn’t hit by a train. He was eaten, consumed by a pack of Hunters who pulled him apart and ate him live on camera, as a warning to any other humans who might forget who was in charge.
The video went viral worldwide, but Luther’s family didn’t get any of the money it generated. Isaiah was running an errand for work, so his employer claimed the video as “work product” and gave the family one percent as a gift.
These were my guys. The guys I worked with every day and gamed with every night for two and a half years. I had been to their homes and met their parents, those who still had parents. I had done yard work for Calvin’s grandma and helped Luther’s dad make a database for his consignment store.
I had visited Josh in his fancy personal trailer and had migas with his giant family, surrounded by love and laughter and happy children. A 20c family would have called it poverty, but to me it looked like unimaginable wealth, so much like my old Texas compound, I started threatening to learn Spanish and move in.
I loved these guys, but I was ashamed to face them now, after the way I left. When I first started, I had been arrogant about my hacking and gaming skills, constantly bragging about my “real world” experience in Texas and my loose affiliation with one of the most infamous hackers in the world.
Jerry Rose was an authentic genius, so far above normal human intelligence, he might as well be from another planet. He was responsible for a dozen custom hacking tools that could cut through corporate firewalls. Rumor was, he was using some kind of custom quantum thing he developed that could pull solutions from an alternate universe, so even if he couldn’t crack your password in this world, his network could reach into another dimension where it wasn’t quite so well protected and duplicate your passkey in a few seconds.
Jerry even let me work on a few, cleaning up the interface and improving connectivity to make everything faster and easier to use. These Innovex guys may have been better at boilerplate corporate code, but I had been sidekick to a legend. I was always at the top of the bonus board, and I even had a hot girlfriend, who I loved showing off, on those rare occasions when Judy came by the office.
Maybe the rest of these losers had to go to strip clubs and pay women to like them, but I was gonna get married and buy a house, bought with money I earned from raw technical skill.
I thought I was hot shit, but when dad died, I fell apart. I started missing shifts and making dumb mistakes, lashing out at people when they corrected me. Then, on my last day, I had… let’s just call it an emotional breakdown, and there was some debate over whether I had quit or been fired.
When I first quit my job. I had so much in savings I felt like I had all the time in the world. I got my current apartment, missed my first chance at registration, and started playing a competitive samurai fighting game.
I was skipping school. I had no job. I played all day every day. The leaderboard for that game was my entire life. Some days I wouldn’t even sleep. My Innovex team played the same game, and they started to notice that I was out of control.
They tried to help by posting a challenge for me. They bet me I couldn’t go a week without playing, and they put up a thousand dollars. I didn’t need it right then, but it’s the way I used to work. I did incredible things to earn bonuses, so they turned my recovery into a bonus.
Every time I cashed it in, they would double the time, and double the bonus, until finally, I just didn’t want to play anymore. It started as charity, I think. They thought I was crazy for quitting my job, and they thought I was already broke, so they were really just taking up a collection for me.
In the time they’d known me, I’d been an arrogant asshole, a game-addicted loser, and briefly, an emotionally unstable lunatic who had to be thrown out of the building. Either that record had been expunged, or Veazey had put me on the security whitelist, because I should not have been allowed through that front door.
Calvin gave me an enthusiastic handshake and smiled like someone had taught him to smile in management training. His face and mannerisms looked a lot more natural now, like he had gotten comfortable with social interactions, and a lot more comfortable inside his own skin, then I remembered from back in the day.
We made meaningless small talk for a few minutes, and Calvin asked why I was there. When I took too long to reply, Veazey said, “Timmy got powers and he’s in some deep shit. Needs a new processor, new contacts, and I need you to rubber stamp my next few inventory reports without looking too close.”
“Dammit, Veazey! You can’t just…”
But Calvin didn’t even blink. Just asked, “What kind of powers?” in the same tone he would use if I’d bought a new car.
“Timmy got magic,” Veazey answered for me, “but it came with a demon problem, and he can’t go to the cops. He needs hardware that can do realtime combat stuff, and he doesn’t have twenty thousand dollars lying around.”
Calvin nodded and said, “Show me.”
I stammered, “What?”
“Show me some magic.”
“I’m not sure that’s…”
“No cameras in here,” Calvin reassured me. “It’s fine.”
Veazey shook his head at me. “It’s Calvin, dude. He’s not gonna believe you until you show him.”
“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “Please step back from your desk.”
I levitated Calvin’s desk all the way to the ceiling, surprised at how heavy it was. He really was being groomed for upper management, if he got the company to approve a chunk of real wood like this.
A normal man might have panicked or jumped back or gaped at me like an idiot if they saw their desk levitate right in front of them, but Calvin just said, “Cool. I gotta show the guys.”
He sent some kind of group text with a gesture command and pulled a tiny briefcase from under his desk. He did two different biometric checks and opened it like he was revealing the Holy Grail. Twelve gray cylinders were sitting inside, perfectly spaced in their bed of black foam. With no preamble, he reached in, grabbed one, and handed it to me.
I took it like it was about to bite me. “Did I just see Calvin Harris break a rule?”
“Yeah,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “That’s half my job now, learning which rules I can break, and how to cover my tracks, just so my people can get work done.”
“Calvin, you just handed me five figures worth of Datacore hardware. Are you sure you can cover this?”
Calvin shrugged, “You wouldn’t believe the shit that gets lost around here, or how little they actually care, as long as we meet our targets. A lot has changed since you worked here, Tim.
“We’ve got HDI defense contracts now. We get paid from a trillion-dollar fund financed by contributions from every company on the security council. It’s supposed to be managed by a neutral third party, but there’s no such thing. The corps are constantly trying to cut corners and cheat each other, and the auditing is a joke.”
He reached in his desk drawer and pulled out a sealed plastic package. “And here’s a new set of optics that just got reported as lost during a drone drop.” He looked up at Veazey. “Can you show him how to use these?”
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Veazey nodded.
The door behind me swung open and my old teammates poured in, shaking my hand and patting me on the back. My guys were all wearing long-sleeve shirts and ties now. They all looked older, fatter, and happier than the awkward kids I remembered, like it had been ten years instead of three.
Alex yelled, “TKO!” when he shook my hand, repeating my old gamer nickname. It sounded like a compliment when strangers heard it, but it actually stood for “Timothy Kovak Online,” a joke he came up with when he saw I was always logged in to the game, any time he wanted to play, day or night.
The boys piled in, Calvin secured the doors and windows, and simply said, “Timmy got powers.”
Well, so much for my secret identity.
Then Veazey said, “Show ‘em,” while Calvin stepped back from his desk again. I levitated it to the ceiling in front of everyone, earning big smiles from the guys.
Tony said, “Is that it?” and Veazey punched me in the gut, making my aura flash visibly white as my wards absorbed the impact.
Veazey hopped backwards clutching his hand and said, “What percent was that?”
“Sixty,” I said. “This place makes me nervous.”
“Timmy is bulletproof and super strong, as long as he can keep the spells going.”
“So, you’re doing the Captain Cobalt power set?” Tony asked. “I’ve never seen a wizard try that, even on TV.”
“I don’t have time to learn a whole book full of spells, so I’m trying to pick out things that don’t require much thought. Although even the simple ones are a bitch to manage, dealing with all the weird ways your body reacts. You can really fuck yourself up, if you do levitation wrong.”
“Calvin said you got powers, but they came with some trouble. How much trouble you in?” Luther asked.
“Lots,” Veazey answered for me again. “Timmy’s gotta fight some big demon fucker, and he’s gonna need all the help he can get. We’re here because we need hardware. We got contacts and a processor, but we still need ear filaments and a ring mouse, set up so he can ditch that stupid wrist phone.”
In minutes, I had all of it, donated by my friends or appropriated from HDI.
They were so generous, embracing me like no time had passed, I almost broke down in front of them. “I feel like I should apologize for the way I treated you guys, and the way I left.”
The guys all looked at each other quizzically, then Josh said, “What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t remember anybody being pissed at you like, ever, until your last day. But the way you quit didn’t hurt us, it was fucking epic. We tell the story to all our new guys, and to any HDI exec who tries to push us around.”
“In my memory, I was an arrogant prick.”
“Nope,” Josh said. “You weren’t arrogant, you were confident. And you deserved to be. You were damn good at your job, like you owned the top of that bonus board.”
“I feel like an asshole now, the way I bragged about that.”
Josh laughed. “Yeah, you showed off, but you also helped train people and make the team better. And you didn’t just earn individual bonuses, you helped us earn team bonuses, when you worked all night and helped us get shit done.
“You remember the bonus we got for finishing that Seattle traffic project? I used that money to buy my own place. You did that, for you, and me, and everybody.”
“You’re a better person than you think you are,” Alex said. “Beating yourself up over shit that didn’t happen.”
Luther stepped up and put his hand on my shoulder. “They finally gave powers to somebody who deserves them. Remember all those nights we talked about what we would do? Well, it happened for you, so you owe us.
“You gotta keep the promise we all made and do this right. Old school hero shit, just like we always talked about. Tim, if you’re gonna fight these things, you gotta fight to win, and you gotta get it on video. You gotta show these things the human race ain’t done yet, and that we’ve still got some fight left in us.”
Then he hugged me, and I had to let my wards down to let him in.
I exchanged arms-length man hugs with everybody else and let Veazey take me down to his lair in the basement.
* * *
James Veazey’s workspace looked like a cross between a hacker den, a machine shop, a motorcycle repair garage, and a junkyard for droid parts.
He immediately cleared off a table, sprayed it with some kind of sanitizer, and told me to take my contacts off. I reluctantly complied.
“How have you survived all this time with Gen2 optics linked to a fucking desktop G3? You could have had four times the resolution and a full visual field for like forty bucks.”
“I guess I just didn’t want to spend the money. Even when I started getting Innovex bonuses, Judy was really picky about what we spent money on. It didn’t make sense to spend cash on personal stuff when I could just use everything at the office. And if I had cool stuff at home, I would spend more time plugged in at home. Then I would start working from home, and…”
“Girlfriend aggro. Yeah, I get it, but you are well overdue for an upgrade.” He threw a fresh bottle of cleaning solution on the table and told me to soak the new optics I got from Calvin.
“I’m not sure this is gonna work,” I said. “Magic runes attract heat and can actually melt plastic if you leave them displayed too long. I had to reinvent the screen saver just to keep this shit from cooking my eyeballs.”
“You really have been out of it. I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but modern lenses don’t generate heat like the old ones. Even glass lenses are permeable now, so they don’t dry your eyes out.”
I frowned. “Even if they’re better than plastic, these will still heat up. It’s a magic thing. Direct contact will dry my eyes out. Prolonged contact could blind me.”
“These lenses don’t actually touch your eyeball. Phantom 5 lenses use a microgravity generator to float just off the surface of your eye: micro version of how cars float. They can even get closer or pull away to change focal distance.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“It’s beyond expensive. They give these to spies and shit. You don’t want to know how much these cost.”
“I appreciate all this, but I don’t want to get you guys in trouble.”
“You let us worry about that. The contracts we’ve got now, a million dollars in write-offs is nothing to these guys. This stuff is barely 40K.”
I let him talk me into it.
The applicator was a little plastic tube with a cup at the end. Even knowing the lenses wouldn’t touch me, it took an incredible act of willpower to push the tube against my eye and press the button.
I had kept the same lenses for too long because my eyes were sensitive. I had to use special hydrogel they didn’t even make anymore, forcing me to use 2-D screens and external projectors, while everybody else was lounging in pods, living their whole lives in AR. I knew guys at Innovex who could code while floating in a pool, idly twitching their fingers across a phantom keyboard.
But these new lenses could be a permanent solution, if they really did float above the eye. I just hoped magic didn’t burn them out somehow, next time a surge hit.
I flinched when I heard the button click, but Veazey was right; I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t even notice a change in vision right away. I was expecting to be blinded by a rush of advertisements and merch tags, but everything just got slowly crisper and brighter, like the whole world had suddenly been upgraded to a higher resolution. A tiny Vision Plus icon appeared in the bottom right corner of my vision, growing solid when I focused on it, sliding back invisible when I wasn’t.
“Can these things see in the dark?”
“Not in total darkness, but the amplification is good enough for starlight. Lidar in your processor will put wireframes around obstacles in pitch black.”
I immediately decided these were worth whatever they cost, if only to keep shit from creeping up on me in the dark. I did a quick clenched fist gesture to bring my vision back to true real, but nothing happened.
Veazey grinned. “Sorry man, you’ll have to learn a whole new set of gestures. It’s all wrist position and finger taps now. Focus on the icon, tap your index finger twice on your leg or any hard surface. Once you get it calibrated, you can do it without a surface.”
I did the gesture, and the world went back to baseline - a little duller, a bit murky. Faces clouded, shadows returned to corners. I turned the Vision Plus thing back on, and wondered if the real world would ever be good enough for me again.
Veazey was clearly excited for me. “You just jumped three generations in one pop! You’re gonna see a whole new world out there. And don’t worry, I set you in Boomer Mo— training mode, so you don’t get hit with too much at once. Emergency alerts, street signs, and personal contacts only. No ads, no optional tags. Just play with the layers and see what you like. Tutorial should slowly introduce you to options as you walk past stuff.”
I thanked him, feeling a weird twinge of guilt as Vision Plus came back. It felt like cheating somehow, like I was embracing something fake and dangerous, blunting my connection to reality. I guess this is how my great grandparents felt about television and the Internet, like they were surrendering their children to the corruption of the big bad world.
I summoned Jeeves in my peripheral, shocked by the fidelity of his cartoon avatar, floating in glorious 8K overkill in the corner of my eye. I was afraid the new interface would try to make him walk, or, god forbid, try to make him look human.
I told him to bind himself to the Phantom API and transfer my old gesture preferences to the new lenses.
“I’m sorry, sir. This API will not recognize gestures older than Gen4. The larger sweeps and arm movements are now considered… rude.”
“Oh, fuck that.” I didn’t have time to learn a whole new set of interface gestures. I was gonna have to fight in this thing. Retraining muscle memory could get me killed.
“Bust the API and crack the firmware. There’s got to be a patch for this.”
There was. I knew I was gonna get snickers and weird looks using waves and sweep gestures in public, but I was used to that.
Veazey handed me another tube and told me to stick it in each ear. The filaments would transfer sound to go with the optics and disintegrate every time I took a shower. Each tube was good for about a month.
“You’ll need to transfer all your old shit to the new processor when you get home. And don’t try to remote anything! Throw that fucking G3 in the trash and throw your projectors and all that ancient desk shit in the dumpster with it. You’re not doing presentations in a fucking conference room. Anybody who needs to see your display can just join your consensus.”
Lydia would still need to see visible holograms, but I would have much better control over what I shared now, and these lenses would definitely make it easier to hide shit from her.
“Hey, can I have some spare projectors? I have a weird idea.”
Every bot had at least two holographic projectors in it, since they were usually built into the eyes, so Veazey just pointed me to a pile of tiny grav panels and encouraged me to rig up what I needed. I made a dozen floating holoprojectors and made Veazey promise to bring them over after work. Can’t have a guy with a visitor badge walking out with a duffel bag full of hardware.
* * *
The interface offered me a few neat things on my way home, identifying birds, plants, and historical sites. The dull bone conduction audio had been replaced by crisp new filament voodoo, and the ancient wrist strap I wore everywhere had been replaced with a full body lidar scan that tracked every gesture from my pocket.
I squinted to see a squirrel and the damn thing zoomed, automatically adjusting to change my vision, snapping back when I looked away.
The lenses got very excited when I made it home, linking up with tags on dozens of appliances and household gadgets that were invisible to my Gen2.
The lenses informed me that every damn thing I owned was out of warranty, even the new stuff, since anything less than three years old had been cracked and hacked and pried open with a screwdriver.
My desktop synced with the new lenses immediately, trading information about my identity and preferences so quickly, it looked like a cyber warfare attack.
Turned out my shitty little apartment was capable of automation that I had never bothered to activate, as my ceiling lights, fans, and mini blinds all started blinking and moving according to some new default schedule. Even my vacuum cleaner turned on me, breaking out of its weekly pattern to clean a stain I hadn’t consciously noticed before.
Then the lenses pinged NFC tags on half a dozen pieces of borrowed museum equipment that I had forgotten about, and I had to shout for Jeeves to intercept before they could phone home.
Any other day I would have been delighted with all this, tweaking preferences and testing gadgets until dawn, but I had no time to play.
I was worried about being overwhelmed with object tags, but the lenses were smart enough to only tell me about things I was deliberately looking at. First, the object or person would start to glow, developing a color-coded outline. If I kept staring, a tag would pop up, showing name and model number. If I changed focus to the tag, I would get the option to pull up manuals or instruction videos. And they could put tags around people, too.
Most people walking around hid their names and social media info from anyone who wasn’t a personal contact or friend of a friend, unless they were actively on the job or advertising something. I could turn on translators or subtitles keyed to each person, overcoming accents or habitual mumbling. The Phantom 5 could even read lips, if you told it you were deaf.
Active corporate employees were required to display their names and job titles during work hours, and would have most of their personal preferences overriden, any time they walked into their workplace.
I wrestled with my defaults for an hour, refusing to display my own name under any circumstances, despite numerous dire warnings about legal and social consequences. God, how long had I walked around showing my ass to anybody with modern lenses, oblivious to the security risk?
Falling behind on code patches and desktop hacks was one thing, but there was no excuse for my ignorance of modern interface tech. My old team would have hazed me worse than Veazey if they’d known how far I’d fallen, how lazy and careless I’d become.
I was getting this weird urge to feed it, to go outside and look at everything through these new eyes, discovering the world again. It was a fantastic new toy, a wonder of technology that I’d denied myself, always blaming time or poverty or sensitive eyes.
Looking back on it now, I guess it was a mental block, more than anything. My father hated wearable interface tech, constantly complaining about techno zombies, with their slack jaws and glazed expressions. He made a point to interrupt me whenever he caught me using AR, teasing or slapping or thumping me on the head.
He let me wear my interface glasses “for school” but growled that I “better be learning something” every time he caught me using them in the house.
My new processor was a lumpy gray cylinder, about the size and weight of an old roll of quarters, studded with bumps and lights and weird depressions to protect the sensors inside. The hardware Calvin gave me was bare metal, not even formatted, with no data and no OS.
I tried to port my existing stuff straight over, and Jeeves had a fit, throwing up red all over my new eyes. “Error. I am detecting ninety-four conflicts with scripts that are not compatible with this processor. Continuing to run these scripts could result in OS corruption or data loss.”
“Full override,” I said, casually making one of the biggest mistakes of my life. “Keep running everything you can and remind me to troubleshoot these later.”
* * *
My old desktop setup was a series of processor cubes connected with thick fiber cables, the equivalent of six old consoles cobbled together to function like one modern computer, using an elaborate system of task and processor switching that I had been tweaking since high school.
I was looking at a series of simple economic decisions I had made over the course of ten years. Every time my system started to slow down, I could spend money on a full replacement, or I could spend a fraction of that and just add a processor block. The result was a stairstep arrangement of blocks, with a new block joining the network once every two years or so. Now this whole setup was obsolete, replaced by one cylinder in my pocket which was easily ten times more powerful.
I would let dust build up on my counters and furniture for months, but I generally kept the processor blocks clean, for air flow, if nothing else.
I grabbed an empty plastic bin from my closet and started carefully packing the cubes away, until my desk was one clean sheet of laminated plywood, with nothing on it but my drink cooler and an old mechanical keyboard. Everybody else was using tactile holograms for stuff like this, but the projectors in my ceiling were just visual. I could do most of my stuff with gestures and voice commands to Jeeves, but when it came down to actual coding, nothing could beat the feel of physical keys.
I was not prepared for the psychological impact of a clean desk, as I felt an unexpected surge of self-esteem. I stared at my vacuum cleaner until the service tags popped up, and spent a few minutes cleaning it, replacing fluids and the external dust bag. I even dug in the closet until I found the dusting tendrils and the plastic brushes that came with it.
The tendrils would let it reach up to clean surfaces and furniture, but the hoses had been sitting in my closet, unused and unattached, for three years. I always told myself I would get around to assembling the thing properly, but somehow never did.
Had I really been living in filth for three years, because I wasn’t willing to spend five minutes to plug this shit in? I downloaded new firmware for my vacuum and turned it loose, gratified to see Lydia twitch and follow it with her eyes like it was about to attack.
I grabbed a rag and some cleaning fluid and started wiping down stuff the vacuum couldn’t reach. Had this bottle really been sitting here, unopened, under the counter since the day I moved in?
I even cleaned my windows and my front door, shocked at how much dirt was caked in the grooves outside. Cleaning them made the whole room look brighter, as I removed the fog of grease and grime that had been sitting between me and the world.
I opened my blinds and watched the sun set through a clean window, for the first time in years. I felt like I had been in a coma since I quit my job and seeing my old team had finally woken me up.
I went to put the box of processor cubes away and found myself cleaning my closet, repacking boxes that I had thrown open just long enough to fetch one thing without putting them back. Some of them had been half open for so long, I had to wipe dust off the contents.
Lydia watched as I gathered my third bag of trash and asked, “Would you like some help?”
“No.” I said firmly. “I don’t want you touching shit you don’t understand, and you are not my maid. Bad enough that I’m letting you cook for me, but I’m not gonna make a demon clean my toilet, that’s just… Human or not, it’s just… wrong.”
“Are you protecting my dignity, or yours?”
“Look, I don’t know what my ancestors had you do, but you are not a servant, and you are not a goddamn housewife. No laundry, no picking up clothes, and please don’t touch anything on or around this desk.”
“You’re worried that I’ll break one of your machines?”
“I’m worried that you’ll make me comfortable with all this little stuff, until I forget what you are. But if I did try to abuse my privilege here, and use my succubus for light housekeeping, would you object? Feels like this kind of thing would be beneath you.”
Lydia shrugged. “I’d do it for a little while, then I’d demand that you summon an Imp for it, like most of your ancestors did.”
“My ancestors seriously summoned Imps to clean house for them?”
“Or just used cleaning spells to remove the dust. Much faster than your clumsy machine. Jim was the only one I cleaned for. He knew I found it humiliating, so it gave him a little thrill to see me scraping and scrubbing things.”
“Did you put on a little maid outfit?”
“No. A costume would have made it a form of play, and Jim was quite serious about keeping me in my place.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing for something you didn’t do?”
“Not every sorry is an apology. This one is just sympathy. But I’m serious about this. If I ever ask you to do anything you find demeaning, if you ever feel like I’m humiliating you, I need to know.”
“Is this kindness or caution?”
“I can’t control how your Master treats you, but I am not a goddamn slave owner. If I’m a wizard and you’re my demon, then you are a reflection of me. Anything that demeans you demeans me, so I don’t want to see you on your knees scrubbing shit. I want to see you smart and powerful and beautiful, the way you were at that party. Seeing you strong makes me feel strong and seeing you weak would make me feel weak. So, I’ll scrub my own goddamn toilet.”