Chapter One
“How’s everything going? Almost done?”
The sudden voice jerked Felix out of his train of thought. He shoved his stack of chemistry notes into a drawer, a hand quickly finding the computer mouse in front of him.
“Great! Yeah. Everything is super great! I’m just finishing up checking my code and it’ll be good to go.”
Felix’s muscles tensed as his team lead walked over to sit at the work station across from his own. His lead was a man that Felix was certain could have won an award for being the most boring man on earth. He was middle-aged, of average height, with a thin frame, and had a face that looked like it was incapable of smiling. Felix didn’t even need to see his boring face to know that there would be skepticism written all over it. Sure enough, that same skepticism edged thick into the man’s words despite the casual nature of the conversation.
“You know, Felix...” he mused offhandedly, the familiar clickity-clack sound of the keyboard picking up again. “The reason programmers like you get the nice big paycheck that they do…is because programming is a difficult job and requires long hours of work. Programming is an art. It requires skill…Ingenuity. A proper artist who can effectively produce something of beauty to put out into the world. It’s a huge responsibility and not everyone can handle that.”
“Yeah. Really huge,” Felix muttered quietly, despite the fact that come pay day, he never saw what his lead was so generously describing as a ‘nice big paycheck’.
Some idea of ‘big’. How could there be room for anything big in the company when his lead’s ego was as massive as it was? Maybe one day, Paul would wake up and find himself suffocated to death under his own self-importance. That would be a great day. The best day in fact. Felix's mind seemed happy to supply him with all the helpful commentary that he would never have the gall to say out loud. He struggled to suppress a little smile of amusement at his own internal retorts.
This fucking asshole had been making his life an absolute hell for the past six months. Not only that, but it seemed like the more that time passed, the worse it got. If there had been any way for Felix to use his programming skills for the world outside computers, he would have deleted his lead’s code a long time ago. And, what was he droning on about ‘producing something of beauty’? That was really hard for Felix to see when he was working as a programmer for a life insurance company.
“Yeah...”
Silence followed and Felix breathed. Good. That seemed to be the end of it. Or it would have been, if the weighty silence wasn’t interrupted once again by the man across from him.
“You...working on something else at the same time isn’t going to look good on your next evaluation, you know.”
All color drained from Felix's features and he could feel his stomach clench uncomfortably. “What? No, no! I was just checking some notes cause I forgot when my next doctor appointment was.”
This was a lie, but with his job on the line it was all he could think to do. There was no way he could risk this job. If he did, he would lose his income for classes, and then everything else would swiftly go down the drain after. He couldn’t let that happen. His gaze darted over to his lead, but the man’s expression was as stoic as ever.
“Yeah.” His lead’s voice broke Felix out of his panicked train of thought. “You sure have had a lot of appointments to keep track of lately...If your mind is elsewhere, maybe you’re in the wrong place, you know? There’s lots of people who would die to be in your place here.”
Felix gritted his teeth, looking back at the screen in an attempt to finish his work. It was already well into the night and everyone else in the building had gone home. They were probably relaxing and enjoying their evenings while he still slaved away with the one person who seemed to hate him the most in the world. How was it that he could try so hard and spend more time in this place than anywhere else and it still wasn’t enough? He could feel his heart clench a bit at the disappointment he felt with himself amidst all his other feelings. Whatever. The sooner he finished, the sooner he could get out of the office and away from this jackass.
The more he thought of it the more he was sure HR would have something to say about his lead getting on his case about medical appointments of all things. Or would they criticize him too? Medical appointments were important! And sure maybe he didn’t actually have any, but his lead didn’t know that and neither did anyone else. His panic slowly traded out for seething silence the more he thought about it.
“Look, I’m the bridge between you and the higher-ups," his lead continued matter-of-factly. "If you show me more respect, I’m willing to give you a good evaluation. Now that doesn’t mean the others will give you one, but my opinion is the one that matters most.”
Wait.
Wait just a second.
Felix paused in his own typing, looking up from his screen as he tried to catch a glimpse of his lead who was squinting at his own monitor. Show him more respect? What did that even mean? Was he supposed to say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’? His mind dipped lower into worse scenarios. Was…his lead asking for a dick sucking? He wasn’t even sure if it was metaphorical or literal but the more he turned it over in his mind, the more that was what it was starting to sound like.
No. No way. Hell no. He would rather be homeless on the street than do something like that for this guy and—oh great now he was imagining it. Where was the off switch for his brain when he needed one? He needed a distraction, before he got sick to his stomach. Felix cleared his throat, carefully trying to find the right words.
“Did I…do something disrespectful, Paul?”
“Yeah,” Paul replied after a long pause, very visibly distracted by his screen as the typing continued. “Working on other projects…during work time…isn’t…profe…ssional…pretty… hypo…hypocritical actually.”
“Except I wasn’t working on other projects,” Felix insisted adamantly, typing quickly on the keyboard in front of him as he kept his gaze pinned to that monitor in front of him. He just wanted to finish and get the hell out of there. “Do you want a doctor’s note or something?” he offered, doing his best to keep his tone casual. He could forge a note if he really needed to. Probably.
“Yeah...a real one,” Paul replied, doubt thick in his words. Another pause. “How about…you… show a note from your teacher? That would be more…believa—”
Paul’s words abruptly cut off in exchange for a scream unlike one Felix ever heard from his lead before. Truth be told, he didn’t know Paul was even capable of emotion. If he were to have guessed, he would have thought Paul was just a robot in a human flesh suit. But now he was hearing screams that were only comparable to ones he’d only heard during his late night slasher movie marathons. Felix jumped to his feet, the continuous screaming chilling him right to the bones.
“What?! What is it?!” Felix quickly rounded the cubicle to get to his lead. Maybe if he was fast enough, he could save Paul from whatever spider or weird bug was on his desk. And maybe by doing that, Paul would leave him the hell alone about all of this. He could definitely deal with spiders for that. He could deal with a hundred spiders for that.
But what Felix was met with would be something far bigger than a spider and not something he was prepared for in the slightest. Something was pulling Paul’s face into the large CRT monitor in front of him. It looked like something straight out of an alien movie; four tendrils wrapped around Paul’s skull, dragging him further inside. The screen it was coming from was now glowing a bright neon green as his lead’s head slowly disappeared into the monitor, breaking all laws of logic.
Felix stood there frozen, shocked to his core and still able to hear Paul’s muffled screams.
“Okay. That’s…that’s a very big uh—spider,” Felix finally managed to stammer, trying to figure out if this was just another product of his overactive imagination. Maybe he wasn’t seeing this at all. Hands rubbed over his eyes and he looked again. No. No, it was still there. What if that thing was a virus? What if it was contagious? What if it turned Paul into a zombie? Or what if it gave Paul super powers? No. That would be bad. Very bad. He didn’t want to see Paul with more of an ego than he already had. But did he really want him dead?
“FELIX. DO S̷͑͠O̵͆̀M̵̅̚È̵̄T̴̊̓H̴͛͗I̵̛͘Ṅ̶̄G̶̒͝.”
“Do? Something? Okay, uh—what should I do? Should I hit it? Fuck, okay.” Felix quickly whirled around, grabbing the first thing he could reach from his desk. Without a second thought, he chucked the old stapler at the alien monitor, only to watch it bounce off ineffectively.
Paul twitched violently, his screams suddenly going entirely silent. Droplets of blood run down his throat, his body going limp. All the while, that thing continued to slowly pull the rest of Paul’s body into the monitor little by little.
“Holy shit. Hoooly shit,” Felix’s voice broke, as he fumbled back a couple steps. This was insane. It couldn’t be real. But if it was real, he was pretty sure his lead was now dead and being eaten. The screaming had stopped which to him, was even more terrifying. His first instinct was to hurry and tell someone, but logic swiftly got the better of him. No one was going to believe his lead was eaten by a computer. No. If he stuck around, Paul’s death would definitely be pinned on him. If there even was a body left by the time it finished with him. Felix drew in a deep breath. “That’s a good monitor. There, there, good job. I’m just gonna…go.”
Felix rushed to his own desk to grab his things. He couldn’t leave his stuff behind, that would look weird. Even as he rushed for the elevator, he could still hear the awful sounds of what he could only assume was the rest of Paul’s body being pulled into the machine.
Felix’s mind was in a complete panic. He had to come up with some sort of idea if he ended up questioned about Paul’s disappearance. He ran his ideas over internally. ‘Oh yeah, Paul was fine when I left! Gaaasp, what do you mean he’s missing and his computer was smashed? Weird!’ Alright. Good enough.
Felix pressed the elevator button repeatedly while he waited for the elevator to reach him, but something made him stop, looking back over to where everything had transpired. Things were now eerily silent. Was Paul really completely gone at this point? Did he get entirely sucked into the computer? Was he Tron now? The ding of the elevator went ignored as Felix’s curiosity got the better of him. Slowly he walked back towards the desk, cautiously, keeping his distance as he attempted to get a look at whatever that creature was…if it was even still there.
The monitor Paul had once been sitting in front of was now completely shattered, broken parts fizzling and small wisps of smoke slowly rising from the mess. Broken glass surrounded the desk, a strange black substance oozing out of what remained of the screen, but Paul wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He was gone. Really gone. Where a part of Felix felt as though he should have been celebrating, another, more reasonable part of him could feel a creeping sense of dread begin to rise within him.
From the corner of his eye, he caught a flicker of light. The second monitor sitting nearby, still untouched despite all the commotion, was now on. As he watched it, it looked as though someone else was controlling the cursor, saving all the files that Paul had been working on. Once the files were saved, the windows closed one by one. That in itself was fucking weird and Felix might have suspected a hacker if he hadn’t just seen some sort of weird alien crawl out of the other monitor and eat his coworker.
Once again, curiosity drew him closer as he took a couple steps around the crime scene to get a better look at that monitor. Not too close. He wasn’t fucking stupid, but he also knew he would regret running away immediately without getting at least one last look at whatever was going on here. What if that strange creature was still there? And what was that thing? Was it controlling the computer? Or was that Paul, now trapped in a world beyond his own?
He cleared his throat, hesitating for a moment before he broke the silence, his voice a near whisper. “Hello?”
The cursor on the screen paused what it was doing before opening up a notepad that was stretched into a long vertical rectangle. A response was typed.
Hi.
Well that was a surprise, especially because Felix knew these systems had no microphone access, so if this were just a hacker, there was no way they could have heard him. He knew in his gut at that very moment that it was that thing that was talking to him. Paul wouldn’t have responded with anything other than criticism at that point. Felix felt a shiver run down his spine, a mix of fear and intrigue rising within him. What if this really was an alien from another planet?
Afterwards, the computer (or whatever was controlling it) went back to what it was doing. It looked like it had somehow brought up another system entirely. To Felix this looked like some sort of banking system. So apparently this alien thing needed a lot of money. At the corner, he could see Paul’s full name briefly before it went away. Information seemed to be glitching in and out, Paul’s identity being stripped and replaced with that of someone else’s. Felix’s.
“Oh no…oh no, hey hey hey…hey wait…you can’t…” Felix trailed off as he saw the notepad come back, words appearing.
Is this good enough?
“Good enough…for what?” Felix hesitated. What if this thing was asking him if this was a good enough amount of money to allow him to buy a bomb that would destroy the world? Better to be safe than sorry. “No, no this is really bad. I can’t take this. They’re going to think I did all this.”
The cursor paused and opened up another window. Things were being typed and clicked so fast it was hard to follow what was going on. It became clear once things paused and that account appeared again, Felix’s name still visible.
Okay, $10,000.
Felix’s eyes widened and his breath caught in his throat. Between Paul being gone and that being more zeros than he’d ever seen before in his own pitiful account, he was surprised he wasn’t going into a full blown panic already. The words on the notepad being erased and replaced with something simpler didn’t help.
:)
Felix decided he’d seen enough. He backed away slowly. He had to get out of here before he got himself into more trouble. This was just too much for one day. This was too much for one lifetime even. His lead was dead, his bank account now had a suspicious amount of money in it, and he was pretty sure the thing responsible for all this wanted to be his friend. No one would believe any of this. Least of all from him.
“Listen, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer but…I really can’t. I don’t want to be put on some sort of suspect list. So, I’m gonna go home and—oh god, is Paul…is he coming back?”
:)
Felix waited for a moment, an eerie sort of emptiness filling the air around him. He laughed nervously. “Alright. Cool. Good talk. So, I’m just…I’m gonna go.”
Without any further hesitation, Felix hurried back over to the elevator, the reality of the situation settling in further with every floor that lit up in front of him. Those familiar feelings of panic were steadily rising and it was all he could do to shove them down.
Outside, dark, ominous clouds had gathered. His feet hit the pavement hard as he ran through the parking lot. A sudden crack of thunder shook the very air around him, spurring him to run even faster. By the time Felix had made it to his car, he was out of breath and a torrent of rain was pouring from split clouds. His hands clutched the wheel in a death grip while he attempted to get a hold of himself. He just needed to get home. He would at least feel safer there, safe enough to sort through all this…whatever this was. He needed to just be somewhere familiar, with something that could bring him any sort of comfort.
His shaky hand shoved the keys into the ignition, and the old car sputtered to life. Felix drew in a deep breath, attempting to keep his thoughts away from whatever had just happened. He had to focus and get himself home. He didn’t even take the chance to look back and see the weird shift of electrical energy gathering above the building he’d just escaped from. Home first. Panic attacks could come later.