Vignettes from a Corporate Family

[handle2]

Chapter 1 - A Gilded Cage

Where the author decides to go way more David Lynchian and fill in a world at thr same time with small random tales.

It certainly didn't seem like the place to start any sort of corporate dissent. Just a summer pool that converted into skate rink for a few weeks every winter. Somewhere in the middle were three men and a lady, seemingly enjoying the sun.

A lanky old Hispanic spoke up first. "They got you huh"
A rotund Chinese man snapped back. "You're one to talk, Rodrigo. They got you too."

"Lighten up, Francis." A Dominican built like a monk and even named Monk tweaked his sunglasses down to stare at his bickering friends. "They got us all good. And anyway where IS Chen?"

Francis (for that was what the chubby 40ish guy called himself) shrugged. "Too busy pounding the streets with Lipkinski. Some young dood he picked up from... I mean, in... logistics. Sent us his wife to apologise and accompany us again. Honestly, Monk... a corporate town this big is still hard to stay discreet in."

The brunette smiled dazedly, sloshing the waters near the edges of her swim bed. "I did think it was a good day for sunbathing. So I figured I'd come for the occasion."

Monk dropped his sunglasses and gazed upon Sheila's form... tanned Amazonian goddess.... then put his glasses back on. "Yeah, Chen was one of the first generation that put its backs into building this town up. I'd say he's entitled to that."

Rodrigo piped up. "Well, the pay is good..."

Francis yelped. "But it's in Arendtcoins! Sheila, would you kindly tell this gentleman what Arendtcoins are?"

Sheila's started whirring faintly for a few seconds... "Arendtcoins are a corporate currency used to facilitate assignments of resources within the Arendtcore family both as a corporate entity as well as within the corporate town of Little Sanctuary, Minnesota. This information is credited to Wikipedia."

Rodrigo deadpans. "Sheila, would you kindly tell this gentleman what 1000 Arendtcoins goes for currently in US dollars and where that roughly puts Arendtcore as a employer?

Sheila took a few more seconds to process this... "the current exchange rate at the Arendtcore Corporate Store for employees is 1000 Arendtcoin to 175 point 33 US dollars. Based on 2080 comparisons across the New United States of America, Arendtcore pays its employees better than 99% of other companies of similar size."

Francis stuttered "but they probably expect us to keep buying stuff from them. Isn't that the point of a corporate store?"

Rodrigo deadpanned. "Everything is designed to Lighten your wallet faster if that were the case. I'm still wearing shirts I bought decades ago and boots that still sing lullabies to my feet after years of weekend and holiday hikes. That's not cheap corporate crap is it?"

Francis whimpered. "But that Arendtcore logo from the early days was so cringe... I saw it on the corporate store when they reissued it on our free 60th anniversary kit and it looked so archaic."

Martin sighed. "Resorting to emotion when you've lost on fact is the defence of a debate loser. Besides, most of us wear ours with pride! Now can we ease up on the lookup tennis before we have to explain to Chen exactly why we're buying him dinner tonight?"

[handle2]

Chapter 2 - This much effort for jack shit?

Somewhere deep in Little Sanctuary, an interloper popped open a hatch and gently bounced into the entry lobby of a server... the hacker had scanned a few thousand Little Sanctuary servers and lucked into this particularly odd group of servers that connected deep into Arendtcore. possibly a top honcho's home workstation or external fileshares lazily added to the company's systems either behind the back of or over the heads of the IT security staff. This would be so profitable, he mused, wondering what could be had once he broke into Arendtcore proper.

the first sign he should have been more careful was when he crashed into the initial entry layer, He had sworn that the port was going to stay open... what he hadn't accounted for was how it kept randomizing across the surface he was trying to pass through. no, not just pseudorandomly... there was almost a strange sort of.... true randomness in whatever the heck was calling the shots, like an actual unbiased bingo game set.... it took several painful slams into ports closing at the last moment before he'd wiggled his way in.

What kind of devious maniac could have have done this?

===================

The butterfly was a beautiful purple and black as it fluttered across Elliot's closed eyes, his body casting ripples of shadows across the lawn alongside splashes of torn grass. On his ears, he wore a chunky pair of headphones, designed to somehow incorporate a music player within it. Mother Ammi had calmly handed him a music cartridge she had personally burnt and cracked the writeprotect tab on, along with the headphones, after their second dance practice session.

He suddenly opened his eyes right as the butterfly flew around, right in front of his face.

The Gdanzeland people did not follow many of the scales, beats or even sensibilities of Western or African music. They had slowly come up with forms the same way they always had, just sampling from mother nature and coming as close to it as they could in their art... their music, their dance, their sculptures.

It was beautifully ethereal. It was also wickedly random. A watcher process could do terrible things eavesdropping on the motion data from a little boy doing the Y'tole Lemme basic forms for practice... seed a random number generator that breathed down the neck of true randomness, for example. And that could be used for other nefarious deeds like...

=======
He did not like it.
The server map had promised a straight short route from here into Arendtcore. So why had it come to this? He was now running on some sort of hexagonal patterned carpet that already felt all wrong just from its look, having opened a door that for some inexplicable reason had become a sort of wooden elevator door.

"No problem, I'll just turn around and choose-" the interloper paused.

The elevator call buttons were gummies. No, not the soft smooshy type of switches they used on some throwaway cheap modern consumer stuff - actual soft candy rounds of jelly carefully tossed in sugar...

As if to emphasise something or other, the interloper stared as a pair of lips appeared around then started chewing on the gummies, making a soft set of purring noises, before burping... "What are you looking at, perv? Show's over. Get going before I call the Groo on you!"

As if on cue, the other lift doors opened, revealing... something indescribable, standing in a dark hallway, lit dimly and occasionally by bursts of erratic electrical lighting.

The interloper couldn't even begin to describe what it was. What he knew was that he didn't want to be right next to it. And as the distance between the doorway and the Indescribable grew smaller with each flash of lighting, he realised he could do only one reasonable thing.

He started running. This was going to start eating at his neural coherence if he over did it and was usually just reserved for emergency... well this was an emergency.

He kept going and going... perhaps he may have gone too far. He collapsed just an inch or two from the door at the end of the hallway he'd been trying to reach. Only the safeties in his gear had cut him off before he'd burnt the last embers of his NC...

He was going to have one hell of a vacation with the proceeds of this heist. Somewhere away from the dour Scottish gloom. Provencal, perhaps... he'd always wanted to try real wine and real food from a people who hadn't ruined their own farming...

That silly thought stabilised him as he grabbed the doorknob and pushed himself through and into the next room
≈==========
The interloper blinked again. And again. No. This room had forced a monochrome filter over his eyes and for some reason it disrespected even the emergency releases these virtualizations had normally. Still, it seemed safe... just a dark room, with a warm comforting sofa in front of a older pre-Despotic Years ... television set, that was what his pawpaw had always called them was it?...

He sat down on the sofa and as if on cue the TV started playing an old toy commercial for some doll named "Build It Bailey". It was oddly comforting as the singsong cheerfully announced the special qualities of the toy: a near-authentic overalls and shirt like those worn by construction workers of the era, right down to the mud stains. Several varieties of doll hair color. A very basic AI that did two things: it dispensed random construction-themed sweets if you told Bailey he was "neat", and launched into an animated song and dance about whichever tool the doll came packed with out of a possible 7.

As the interloper stretched a little, feeling better after a few loops of the ad had given way back to white noise, he noticed three things:

1. The door he had come in through was gone.
2. There was no other obvious way out.
3. There was a brand new condition Build It Bailey doll next to where he was sitting

The interloper considered his options, slowly deciding that he would take the L it needed by getting ejected automatically by the server's own timeout detection, in about 2 minutes. He looked at the doll... then decided to just have fun anyway. "I think you're pretty neat, Mr Bailey..."

"Thanks mate, have sweet. My dear mama freshly made." The doll fished in its overalls and handed the interloper a small cake of sorts shaped like a toy screw.

The interloper eyed the cake suspiciously - everything in this system was a representation of something. This could be a trap, or it could be... delicious? He blinked as he realised his body had just bit down on it without much pause. The faint texture of cranberry sauce on buttered shortbread lingered on his breath and fingers, crumbs on the sofa.

He wept... then bawled as the server finally called time and kicked him out totally. All that work for just a cranberry shortbread biscuit!?

.... it had been the best biscuit he'd ever tasted, real or virtualized, mind.