Warehousing it

It was in her first year after college that she got the job. After graduation, there had been a period of a few months where she pretended she could get a better one; it felt like the pretense was necessary, the way saying "bless you" was necessary after somebody sneezed. Nobody believed they were really able to prevent illness and catastrophe by inducing God's blessing after a sneeze. But it would have been wrong not to say it.

And when she applied for the job, it had the inevitability of a flu coming on. All her friends were already warehousing it. Nikkita had a degree in physics. She was twenty-two.

"You can take this one," her supervisor said, steering her to a desk about three-quarters of the way down the right-hand wall of the dimly flourescent space. The computer was already on, the log-in screen already set up. Taped to the top of the monitor was a card:

Account: MXFR5609
Password: yesterday718

"Go ahead and log in..." said Boyd. "I'll hang out and make sure things are working all right."

Nikkita put in the account name and password and the game opened up. She was on top of a mountain somewhere, with a blue wyvern in front of her--

"Whoops," said Boyd, as claws flashed and the screen turned red. "The last guy didn't log out right." He leaned in front of Nikkita where she sat, reaching for the mouse. "We had to let him go. He was a little too interested in doing his own thing."

"Right," said Nikkita. "Do you want to sit here?"

"No," said Boyd. He blocked her whole view with his big body, stretching both hands in to use the keyboard. Finally he leaned back. "There you go." Her avatar was in town now, safe and sound. "Wait, let's see. You're..."

He clicked on a few info bars. The screen angle changed to show her avatar now: a leggy female with a blond ponytail and two breasts like Norman helmets. She was a fur-clad valkyrie of slaying. She had a war hammer with a massive head the size of both breasts put together with her butt thrown in. Her name was Heidihammer.

"You're a level 89 warrior. Can you do that?" asked Boyd.

"Give me a couple days, I'll figure it out," said Nikkita.

"Cool," said Boyd. "Call me if you have any issues."

Nikkita didn't break for lunch until two o'clock. She'd spent the first fifteen minutes of the morning trying to find her way back to wyvern mountain and the next four and a half hours trying to kill one. She didn't even realize she was hungry until the latest wyvern to get a kill on her began to rip open her bare valkyrie belly and stuff red strips of her flesh into its mouth in a pixellated feeding frenzy that was vastly appealing in its artificially intelligent way.

She returned from the cafe with two slices of pizza and ate with one hand while her other lazed over the mouse. She felt sufficient only to exploring the town while she ate: there was the inn, there the armorer's, there the bordello, there the punishment square...

That would be entertaining enough. She wandered closer, checking out the characters in the stocks. People were hurling tomatoes at them. "If anybody can hurl something other than a tomato," said the character on the right, "I'll give you a million gold pieces."

But there was nothing other than tomatoes. That was the way punishment square was coded.

"I can hurl insults," she said, typing with one hand.

"Do it!" said the character in the stocks. His name was Marfalcon.

Nikkita was at a loss. She took another bite of pizza and walked around the character, examining him. "Your momma dress you?" she said.

"My momma was killed by a troll! You witch! I hate you!" said Marfalcon. Nikkita had to swallow fast to let the laugh come out. Then came a private message from Marfalcon at the bottom of her screen: Are you Rubicant?

She typed back: No, I'm Procosys.

Said Marfalcon: Me too.

So he worked for Procosys too. He was somewhere in the warehouse. Typing. Nikkita resisted the urge to turn around and look. She could only see a portion of the workspace, anyway. Beyond her first row against the wall there were sixteen more double rows till the next wall. There were hundreds of players.

She typed: Know anything about hunting wyverns?

And he said: I'll let you know when I get out of this thing.

By five that evening, she had made her first gold pieces and deposited them in the Procosys account at the town bank. The players around her were logging out, some heading to the lounge where they could log in again on their own private characters. Nikkita was exhausted. It was her first day.