“Pew pew pew” … “What?!” I stop mid fire and eyeball my less than impressive hand held as if I have the power to pause live action rounds. I translate daggers to my teammates, “Could you have given me something with at least thirty nano frequencies!?” It crosses my mind for a split second that maybe this was some strategy of invincibility by being purely unthreatening. I’m sure my stylin’ golf clap demeanour is reward enough for my team’s highly amused strategist. I’d better fix this quick smart.
Some scorching ammo flies by at the speed of thought and burns a micro pattern in my jacket strap. I drop the pansy plastic pistol and rush the opponent with my platinum weaved gloves that are grafted to my hands while hollering a banshee scream that could deafen a sensitive off-guard ear drum. My fist impacts a shoulder and sends fracture lines down my opponent’s arm rendering them into a silent writhe, the real damage will be in the waves of shock in the aftermath. The uncanniness of the timing couldn’t be any uncannier as my nano shield just flickered off and I’m now fully exposed from all angled dimensions. May the gods favour me in this moment, the one thing our team doesn’t need right now is a significant emotive realm hack, commonly known as SERH’s. Last time that happened everyone within a five yard radius could not see for several hours. Whenever I request a double charged frequency shield from armoury, the armour master, Pinta hits me with a “Yes SERH!” followed by a one sided grin. It’s become an in-house thing, totally at my expense.
The ground below our magnetic weighted boots started to bubble and crumble, sending spouts of hot dirt in to the atmosphere. They hung in the air long enough to distract our less than aware opponents as the heavier dirt clumps started to develop metallic wings and execute a flying vortex formation around our feet. I kept focus and took the opportunity to convert in to a somewhat shallow mirage and sleuth my way back to the ship’s hull which was behind the thin veneer of aubergine pines. I managed to rip a socket off my injured opponent’s weapon, I knew our tech department was on the hunt for -
“And have you got anything you’d like to address?” I’m instantly shocked back to the regular dimension where my meat body resides by my boss’s abrupt vocal chords, like I’ve suddenly been yanked out of REM sleep and am being asked to perform a triple somersault. “Ugh, no everything’s good” … Before my escapism, I spent what felt like forty minutes listening to a minutia of verbal diarrhoea that used to send me in a short burst of enthusiasm as I left the hard-edged glossy grey board room of smoke and mirrors, lies and self-delusion. I knew at was all a game at the time but just last month I felt I belonged in this game and I enjoyed the gameplay with my teammates. This was my home away from home and I had forged a valuable supportive role within this parasitic ecosystem.
Today as I zoned out and got carried away on the wings of a fantasy land, I realised this real life game I was playing had morphed from something like Crysis Warhead into the first version of snake on an early model brick phone, the type with no internet or calculator. It took a while to notice, but just like a forced upgrade to the graphics card on my power tower, I’ve had to upgrade my perspective on this environment as the gameplay becomes clearly obsolete and insufficiently accommodating when you’ve discovered how poorly the programming’s been written.
My extra efforts and endless days of burnout and caffeine spiked enthusiasm count for nothing at the end of this game. It doesn’t matter how fast you click or how regimented you are to the second hand on that clock, my score was always to remain the same at fin. “Yes sir, yes ma’am, I’m good, how are you, sorry, would you like, I have an idea, let me do that for you, I’ll fix it, leave it with me, I understand, click click click, tap tap tap, hello, sorry to hear that” is the bulk of my dispassionate vocabulary during the day. I’ve been observing others that hold the same work ethics as I and funny thing is nobody cares when they get sick or leave. The only thing that matters here is that the boss thrives, the boss is the only reason I play the game. When the boss is taken down, it’s game over and on to the next one like a well-oiled robot due for a service paid by itself or in exchange for other robot parts. Wtf, I’m a robot here and in fantasy land, a slave to the game. What if there was a game that evolved with it’s players and was not completely and totally hinged on the boss, a game whose goals continuity adapted to the way it’s players played.
