Daisuke shut down his computer. He was usually the last to leave the Office Pool. Maxi was always the first go. She couldn’t sit still if the apocalypse depended on it. Belinda was usually next, usually purring like a cat or babbling about machine parts followed by Patti and Flav, who had been leaving together more and more often lately. Farhad was a contender for the person who stayed the longest, but packed it in when Daisuke would chide him snoring.

  The company had no work hours or set schedules. It was all job performance related. If job performance meant being at a desk at a certain time like the lone security guard in the lobby or IT maintaining staffing levels during peak call hours, then there were metrics that tracked when you arrived at your computer and when you were there.

  There were ongoing quests with goals like staff the front desk from nine to five each day and timeliness would count toward completion. However, most quests didn’t have specific hours, just time limits to complete the task, and it was the employee’s choice to manage their time when they saw fit.

  While the system had its perks, Daisuke noticed that almost all of them spent less time at home and more time at work. They were incentivized to put in more hours than they normally would. Not that Daisuke minded, the menial labor was the equivalent of zen meditation for him while he was healing in his chair. But it meant that he had no social life.

  While he’d sometimes go out for drinks with the Office Pool, there wasn’t anyone else besides them who he saw except his mother. His apartment wasn’t any better than the office. It was a company issue attached to the elevator network located somewhere in the building. Like the bathrooms, there wasn’t any way to tell where in the building. Considering the building could change size and structure to suit the needs of the moment, Daisuke was almost positive that it was an interdimensional space not part of the physical world.

  The advantage of paying for the apartment, aside from not sleeping in a capsule was that all his leisure time, personal internet needs, and everything was baked into the monthly cost and not subject to surge pricing. If Daisuke wanted to spend all day in his apartment playing video games, he could do that, but he also wouldn’t be able to afford the apartment if he didn’t quest and earn money.

  Daisuke turned off the lights of his Office Pool and called the elevator. He stepped inside and said, “Home.”

  A few moments later, after the express elevator lurched, it opened to his apartment. It was a studio with a single mat in the center and training weapons on the wall.

  “Living room,” He said and the space morphed. The training mat stretched and turned into a couch. The swords changed into a TV with several gaming systems.

  He grabbed a controller, and sat, staring at the blank screen. After a few moments, he said “kitchen” and the couch changed shape into a bar stool and floor rose until it was a countertop. The other half of the room turned into a dining room. The sensation of couch stretching and hardening into a stool had happened so many times, he didn’t even feel it anymore.

  When he had first rented the place, it was a strange sensation to have a bed twist and contort until he stood in the bathroom, but now he was so used to it, he wouldn’t even fully wake up until the water from the shower splashed his face.

  He poured himself a glass of water and opened the fridge. There was leftover pizza from last night and condiments in various levels of use and expiration. His pantry cabinet was mostly noodle cups, a bag of stale chips, and some cookies that he hadn’t remembered buying.

  Objects like his food, TV, and gaming station were all stored when the room would morph. He wasn’t sure exactly where, but if he wanted to watch TV in the kitchen or eat leftover pizza on the couch, he could call it into existence, but couldn’t make objects from nothing. The apartment created furniture much like the office made a new cubicle when a person joined their team.

  When Yancy had left their team, his cubicle was confiscated and his stuff seized by the company for investigation. The Office Pool room was a bit smaller than before. There was no trace his coworker had ever been. The fate of a company employee was to disappear. Daisuke was positive he would be gone too one day and there would be no one who remembered his name.

  He sighed at the selection, but didn’t want to go to the cafeteria, nor did he want to have food delivered. The price of delivery was outrageous. It made the food apps look reasonable. The reason behind the large markup is that only company employees could ride the elevator network. If he wanted food from a NPC restaurant, a Worker would have to go pick it up. Daisuke supposed he could meet the NPC on the street corner, but even that was too much effort.

  Instead, he grabbed the bag of stale chips and called the bed. The room morphed around him, stretching and compressing, changing shape and texture, until there was a king sized bed with two ornate lamps and end tables. They were a gift from his mom for his apartment in New York, one that she would never visit because of the NPC restriction on elevator travel.

  He ate the chips in silence and woke up several hours later, his bed a mess of chips as he had rolled onto the bag in his sleep. Unacceptable. He chided himself. He tossed the bag in a trash chute and left the crumbs for the self cleaning cycle. He checked the time, it was still too early to go to work, but he still could visit his mom in London.

  He called the bathroom and the apartment morphed again slowly placing him into a standing position. He stripped his clothes, and a suit of chain armor that felt more like a track suit inside than chainmail. He stuffed everything but the armor in the laundry chute. The company laundry services would polish and clean the armor for him, but it didn’t ever need maintenance unless it got bloody.

  Laundry was included in the cost of his apartment and armor wasn’t included in the package. He showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, flossed, exfoliated his face, combed and styled his hair, used the bathroom, and pampered himself as if he was getting a daily dose of spa treatments.

  After filing off the dead skin on his cuticles, he summoned the elevator. It arrived seconds later, a little quicker than usual, being so early in the morning, and once inside, he said, “Mother’s house.”

  A lurch and short ride later, he came out of the metro elevator a few streets over. He set off at a brisk pace. It occurred to him that he was very familiar with the London Underground, having lived in the city since his family moved when he was ten. Most of his teenage years had been spent traveling from one place to another with a clique of aristocratic kids from the city’s elite.

  While he was an outsider to them, he was just different enough to be accepted by his peers less as a trusted friend and confidant, but more as a badge to show how worldly they were that they knew someone from Japan. Despite his birth country, his Japanese accent was light, and Queen’s English was thick as he had tried to assimilate as a child.

  It didn’t work as most of his teenage friends lost contact with him when he went to University. He studied business as a good Kaze family member should, but was completely overlooked for positions in his father’s company. Not that he would have even applied for one if asked, but it galled him how he’d just vanish when he wasn’t around except for his mother.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He eventually made it to his mother’s house, and the cleaning woman her mom kept on staff answered the door. She was a blocky British woman with red hair, and ushered him in with a smile.

  “Your mum’s in the studio,” Matilda said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Mom couldn’t afford a cook now that she was living on a stipend, nor most of the other staff, so between Matilda living full time on site, and a couple part timers, the entire house was run by the woman. She took it upon herself to do just about everything.

  Daisuke appreciated the fact that the woman was looking after her mom, but Daisuke had run the numbers, her mom wouldn’t be able to keep the woman on staff for long, if she wanted to keep the house. However, Daisuke understood, the woman was as much a fixture of the family as his mom.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I’ll just go down to watch my mom for a bit.”

  He headed toward the basement stairs where the room was located. He passed the dining room where he had completed the “Sins of the Father” quest. The blood had been cleaned from the carpets and drapes. The table cloth cleared. There was no evidence of the act. Janitorial had done a thorough job of cleaning up any evidence.

  He trotted down the stairs to where he heard an American Hip Hop artist blaring, his mom was alone in the dance studio, sweating and dancing, unaware that she was not alone. He watched her work and could see the passion in her moves.

  There was fierceness, almost anger. The song ended, and she flourished. He clapped, and she realized that he was there. His mom grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat off her brow.

  “No need to clap for me,” she said in Korean.

  Another point of contention between Daisuke’s half brothers and sisters was that they were the only two people to speak Korean in the family. His dad only spoke to him in Japanese and his mother Korean. He was educated in an English style boarding school both in Japan and in England. Daisuke could switch between the three languages without any trouble.

  He never thought much of it, until he realized that his half brothers and sisters didn’t speak Korean, and assumed he was scheming with his mom when they spoke. It was far from the truth, but when the siblings didn’t understand the conversation, they always assumed it was dark deeds.

  Thus, was the fundamental difference between him and his relatives. They assumed the worst in people from a lifetime of being told that in order to succeed that they needed to be as ruthless as they were shrewd.

  Whereas Daisuke was taught from an early age to see the good in people and recognized that people weren’t always perfect, but nor were they cartoon villains twirling their mustaches looking for women to tie to the train track. People were just people, with good traits and bad, acting as if they were doing what they thought was right. If Daisuke and his mom had been plotting to take over the family, then he could forgive his siblings and the hell they put him through growing up.

  “You should have let me know you were coming, I could have had Matilda pick you up from the airport.” She scolded him.

  “The tube is fine, and the company is paying for it,” Daisuke said, always settling on half truths when his job was concerned.

  “The London Underground is not safe,” She said.

  “It’s fine mom. I’ve been using it my whole life.”

  “Times are different.”

  His mom always thought the world was more dangerous than it was. Daisuke had been to lower class pubs, watched football with supposed hooligans, and they were people just like everybody else, just trying to get by. The truth of the matter in Daisuke’s estimation was that most people were concerned with their own shit to worry about anyone else’s. It was only when those shit crossed paths when conflict arose.

  “I’m sorry about what I did to father,” Daisuke said.

  “He had it coming,” She said.

  “Did you love him?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why aren’t you mad at me? Why didn’t you kick me out of the house and curse my name?”

  “Because you are my son.”

  “But you loved him!” Daisuke said. He could feel the lump in his throat, the pit in his stomach. He choked on his words and he collapsed to the floor. His mother squatted beside him, patted, and rubbed his back.

  After a while, she stood up. “He was not an easy man to love, but I did it all the same.”

  “Did you know one of the music executives propositioned me? Right out of school, he cornered me in the bathroom. Told me what he wanted. Told me I was going to be a big star. I pushed my way past him and cried myself to sleep that night. Lots of girls in the dorms were crying. It was final’s week, everything we had been working for. During the large dance number the next day, he was in the audience. There were others, different companies, different labels. He wasn’t the only one, I told myself. There were others.”

  Daisuke looked up as his mother. He had never heard this story. He knew she was a backup dancer, one of the many to make up the background in videos and on stage. His mom could have lived an entire life working on cruise ships and casinos had she not met his father. Hearing the story made his blood boil. Had the man she rejected spread rumors about her being difficult to work with and throttled her career before it even began?

  There was a slim chance that Daisuke would have ever been born at all had she become the next K-pop legend. Then again, his father had a reputation for doggedly pursuing what he wanted. Daisuke frowned and said, “Are you telling me because father–”

  “No, that was why I loved your father. He was persistent, but always respectful. He would have let me walk away, and probably would have still built me this dance studio. He was opposite of that man.”

  Daisuke felt a punch in the gut. He always thought of his father as cold and distant, not the caring man that his mother knew, and his brothers and sisters. He wanted to scream, cry, and vomit, but all that came out was, “I’m sorry.”

  “You did what you had to do. We all did what we had to do…” She said.

  “No mom,” he said. “I didn’t that night, the night of the dinner party I could have done more. I could have done so much more, but I didn’t. I took the easy path.”

  “If you hadn’t done what you had done, we’d all be dead.”

  “No mom, you don’t understand…” but he stopped himself, and here it was, the point that made all the company employees the ghosts of their family. Protect the secrets, or tell his mom everything. Maxi had chosen the path of radical honesty and seemed better for it.

  When she had first started, she seemed overwhelmed by it all, a ticking time bomb of stress that was going to end poorly for her, so Daisuke had chosen not to get close, he distanced himself from her, another doomed employee before she even started. But then she let it all out, and had changed. She was the leader they needed, and Farhad, who’d always been stuck with the responsibility, seemed all too willing to give it up to her.

  Maybe Daisuke could take a lesson from her, and tell his mom everything. The only way the company knew that a person was breaking the secrecy vows was when the Hacker Branch searched the web for video or posts to scrub. Web crawlers would come across terms and then if it was linked back to an employee who should know better, they were terminated. The only way Daisuke would get in trouble for opening up to his mom would be if she mentioned it publicly, or told someone else who did.

  But after a moment, he hesitated. Maxi’s mother was a former employee, his mom was a dancer and part time dance tutor. The most stress she dealt with was whether or not the parents would drop their kids off on time when she had back-to-back appointments. Was it fair to his mother to know the sword hanging over her head, or was it better for her to worry about phantom dangers in the places she would never go.

  Was it better for people to live as if their lives were always in danger or better for them to be blissfully unaware that their laptop could grow jaws and snap their hands off at any time? People exchanged the feeling of safety for reality all the time. If people were never able to put dangers in the back of their mind they would never build in an area repeatedly destroyed by hurricanes and build cities around volcanoes.

  Daisuke wasn’t sure if it was his decision to rewrite her world so he could feel better about himself. If she wanted to avoid the London Underground and never take a train because it made her feel safe, she could do that. She wouldn’t be able to purge her entire house of everything with a microchip because she feared grutomatons without building a log cabin out in the woods and living off the land.

  His mom was a dancer and a city girl. She married into the upper class and was now a part of it even if it was through a monthly stipend and dance tutoring appointments from other rich people’s families. He couldn’t take that away from her. Telling her was selfish.

  It still didn’t change that he had screwed up the night he killed his father, just not in the way everyone thought he did.

  4.7+ Stars: Definitely buying this one.

  4.5 Stars: I'll consider it.

  4.2 Stars: Sure, if I have nothing else to do

  3.9 Stars or less: It burns us! Take it away.

  if you are interested in purchasing it, I've included some fun extras not here on Royal Road like a short story about Farhad and a glossary that's half informative and half fun. Also, the book is available on every website, not just Amazon so if you don't like Amazon, shop where you prefer (you'll have to order it if you want to support a local bookstore, but they can find it, just give them the ISBN from Amazon if typing the name only comes up with maxi dresses for the office).

  . (FYI, this is not all of them just the most popular, search had your prefered vendor, you'll find it).

  Thank you for coming with me on this journey.