The Door
April 7, 2011 12:34 am StoriesHe sat at his desk, sifting as usual.
Data, data and more data. Nothing but piles of code to sift through, stacks of people’s personal lives that at one point he thought would be interesting and exciting. Two straight years or seeing that everyone else was just an human as he was. Two straight years of peeking behind the curtain to see a naked overweight fifty year old woman with serious allergies to whey, an addiction to QVC and an unhealthy obsession for Dancing with the Stars.
The sifter was the lowest of the low on the digital totem pole. Associates sat squarely on top of them, pushing and hounding them for certain patterns and asking out-of-left-field questions.
“Any spikes in the apple market today?”
“Do you mean Apple Computers or apple, like in… apples you eat?”
“Apples you eat!”
Questions like this were common. He had to sit and think back on the Record, truly considering if he had really seen what the Associates were looking for.
Had I seen anything relating to apples? I know that overall food prices spiked again, but that’s ordinary considering the state of things o’er yonder. Nothing out of the ordinary I suppose. Nothing my algorithms hadn’t alerted me of.
“Nope, nothing major.”
The Associate stared at him for a moment.
“Alright, well let me know if you do.”
The Associate wandered off. There was an implicit trust between the Sifter and The Associate. There had to be, or else the system didn’t work.
But what if the Associate ever did question the Trust of the Sifter?
More data scrolled by in front of him at a rapid pace. He wasn’t paying attention to any of it of course; that was for his programs to do. No, he kept the windows open because it made him feel good. He could keep his desktop completely clean if he wanted. He could simply script alerts pop up when the results were in. But why? Text flying by made him appear busy.
What if all of the Sifters decided to minimize all of their progress bars and hide all of their screens of scrolling text? An Associate might come by and suspect the Associates of being lazy. Untrustworthy. How would they react?
Better to keep it professional. But isn’t pretending to be busy being dishonest anyway? Is that breaking the Trust?
Just then, an IM rolled in from a fellow Sifter.
“Check this out… I’ve never seen anything like it.”
A link popped up. It was simply labeled, “The Door.”
He waited a moment before clicking it. This could be a set up. A trust test from one of the Associates, or worse yet, one of the Managers.
“Oh yeah? How do I know you’re not a bot right now.”
“Come on, you know those apples aren’t going to spike.”
He looked over his shoulder and saw her out of the corner of his eye. Their gazes locked for a moment. She smiled. He turned back down to his monitor.
“Okay, what is it exactly?”
“It’s a game. Some of the other Sifters have been playing it to kill some time between compiles. But, this isn’t just any game.”
“Yeah? So whats the big deal?”
“It’s one of the riskiest games you can possibly play online.”
Riskiest? What could possibly be so risky about an online game? He was on a protected network anyway.
“Risky? Why would I want to play something risky at work?”
“Because it’s fun.”
A few seconds went by.
“Just say it’s work related.“
His mouse hovered over the link, his finger a millimeter of motion away from the decision. At worst, he’d get some virus that would be identified, quarantined and destroyed by any one of ten programs running at the moment.
He clicked the link without another thought.
His life finally became interesting.