Work Text:
She gets a migraine at work, but she can't leave until she finishes these tests. Green spots bloom in her vision, pulse and grow and make it impossible for her eyes to focus on the VR screen an inch away. Instead of wrenching off the headset, she closes her eyes, even makes an effort at some familiar miming, batting at phantom camera panels and door buttons, trying to let her muscle memory take hold.
It's not a stress headache, nor one caused by hunger or lack of sleep. She knows the difference intimately. Her brain throbs, a spike of pain like an invisible stake plunged into her eye socket. She wonders, down in the part of her mind that observes her own pain with terrible boredom, if it means her cycle is about to start. Maybe it will thunderstorm later.
The aura passes within ten minutes, leaving throbbing and nausea in its wake. When she opens her eyes, she's in the debug area again, the one with the audio files. Did her flailing send her back here? She hopes no one notices what the last few minutes of her gameplay has looked like. You'd think a company as skin-flint as this one wouldn't have so much time as to review every minute of a QA tester's day, but there's always a chance that an algorithm grabbed an anomaly, and someone will notice.
On her next break, she grabs the store brand Motrin from the pocket in her purse where she keeps tampons and swallows it with bottled water. The caffeine in the pills might help. Another coffee might help too. She has a long way to go until she's done for the day.
Her vision feels a little blurry, and she worries for a second that the aura is back. She closes her eyes, examines them. No, just tracers from the light, painted in her retinas from when she tilted her head back to swallow. It's nothing.
She heads toward the break room proper, and pours herself a lukewarm black coffee. It's so bitter, so overwhelming, that she almost spits it back into the mug like she's a child trying it for the first time. Quickly, she adds creamer, and it's still just as overwhelming, but not as bitter. She chokes down as much of it as she can stand before heading back to her station.
Her heart races as she lifts the headset. Just the caffeine.
***
She should be resting her eyes on the bus ride home, but instead she's looking at her phone. Social media is plastered with news of a wildfire in California, whole towns swallowed. Her stomach pulses with anxiety immediately, then it settles down into apathy. Who does she know in California? Nobody special, maybe some old college acquaintances. No one she'd ask after. It's not likely to blaze hundreds of miles over land to Utah. Not her problem.
She closes the app, then opens a game. Princess Quest. She should be sick of games after the day she's had, but Princess Quest isn't vertigo-inducing work. It's something to poke at mindlessly, and it's less upsetting than the news. She skirts the monsters on screen effortlessly.
She misses her stop by one, zoned out, and gets off a few streets away from where she should have been, hurrying past buildings made unfamiliar with darkness. Her heart is slamming against her ribcage by the time she makes it to her apartment door, fluttering with exertion and the last traces of over-caffeination. Tmp-tmp-tmp-tmp. No space between the beats, no rhythm.
It isn't until later, as she's getting ready for bed, that she notices she's burst a blood vessel in her eye, a watery splotch of red in the white. Her first thought is to hope no one notices. Her second is to hope that it's nothing serious.
***
There are no more migraines for the rest of the week, nor during the overtime she does on Saturday. By Sunday, she is so exhausted that she only makes it out of bed to forage through her cupboards for a couple of granola bars, and take them back to bed. The light coming through her window seems stark, painful, and she closes the curtain, sinking down into the covers and the dim pale glow of her phone screen.
She makes it further than she ever has before in Princess Quest, then orders a pizza on her phone after she dies. She starts another game, and it seems like only seconds until there's a knock at her door to startle her from her concentration. The princess dies in the game, and she tosses her phone aside.
When she opens her apartment door, a flat cardboard box is sitting on the ground. She can't tell if it was delivered by drone or human, but she also doesn't care. She'd only tipped the minimum on the app.
When she brings it back to her little nest, it's so warm that it tricks her brain into feeling a shred less lonely. When she takes a bite, the mixture of cheese and sauce and pepperoni grease slams through her tastebuds into her central nervous system. It's so good. She moans before she can help it, then is immediately mortified even though she's alone. Well. It's the only moaning her bed has borne witness to for quite a while. Work keeps her so busy. So tired.
She devours the slice of pizza, even though it's hot enough to hurt the roof of her mouth. She must have been hungrier than she thought.
***
The deadline is coming up, and they're going to miss it. The last level is a mess, and she's testing the latest rehauls. The game spits her into a flickering void before crashing, and she sighs as it boots up again.
Back in the main hub, she feels a strange sense of… unease. It's like the opposite of deja vu, like the strangeness of a bedroom in the darkness becoming unfamiliar, a coat thrown over a chair turning into a monster. She knows she's been here before, knows it hasn't changed, but she also has a feeling that she can't put into words that something is off. In her mind's eye suddenly, the prize counter is closer, dingier, smelling of stale candy and the faint chemical whiff of cheap plastic and processed textiles.
And yet, it doesn't alarm her, the not-deja vu. She is simply dreamy, dissociated, as her avatar moves to the prize counter. One of the plushies is clipping into the ground, flickering rapidly, its little legs sticking up in the air. It's yellow. Must be a Chica.
She picks it up. It's not Chica. It's Bonnie. It's the wrong color.
She removes her headset to flag the error. It isn't until she tries to type that she notices her hands are shaking.
***
There's a round of layoffs after the game comes out, and she manages to dodge being axed. She doesn't know if its luck or skill, or if she should be thankful or not.
She can't help but trawl social media, alternately searching out praise and hatred. Maybe it's simply a maladaptive attachment, but she feels a strange amount of ownership over the game. She wants to see it do well, wants to defend it and excuse the flaws for which she saw so much work sunk into smoothing down to mere bumps instead of jagged mountains.
Somehow, she ends up skimming a piece from one of the "thinky" gaming outlets that sidebars into a long discussion about the indie games that inspired the virtual reality experience, and about the real life events a half century ago that inspired said games.
"After the charges were dropped, the 'Missing Children Incidents,' as they came to be known among hobbyist investigators, were relegated to the cold case files. The instances of abducted children, totaling 14 over a span of 11 years..."
Fifteen, she thinks to herself, noting the error. No one ever missed C--
Her phone hits the ground, slipped from her fingers. She stoops to pick it up, stabs the article closed with a pointer finger, afterimages of something too sick to speak of flashing in the darkness of her mind.
That… that was an intrusive thought. Just an intrusive thought. Like the idea of jumping while standing near a tall ledge. Like the idea of kissing a teacher while standing in front of his desk being scolded. Strange, inappropriate, but human. Whatever crossed her mind in odd, anxious moments did not define her.
Panic is welling in her, intimate in its familiarity. She feeds it this time, hyperventilating, working herself into tears. It was a ghoulish project; she ought not to be surprised that she's having a delayed reaction, having weird thoughts about dead kids that've been dead longer than her parents have been alive.
The tiny part inside of herself that's always watching herself, bored of her own pain, is afraid too now, still and trembling and alert to danger.
It takes a long while to calm down, tracing her way through mental exercises she was taught when she was still on her parents' insurance, gulping air and wiping away spit and snot and tears until her sleeves are wet with it all. When there's nothing but trembling aftershocks left, her fingers find her phone, lighting it up with just her touch. Her thumb brushes the icon for Princess Quest and the screen blooms blacks as it loads.
Something mindless will calm her down.
***
She doesn't feel quite like herself lately.
Then again, she hasn't felt quite like herself since she started working 70 hour weeks testing a VR game that made her increasingly dizzy and nauseous and on edge. She hasn't quite felt like herself since she moved away from everything familiar to take a job with a worrying turnover rate in the middle of Fucking Nowhere, Utah because it was the only place hungry enough for a warm body.
She hasn't quite felt like herself since that holiday party where one of her managers cornered her, red-cheeked and slightly clumsy with alcohol, and opined in no uncertain terms which of her… assets he personally thought had earned her a position with the company, while she froze like a prey animal in his sights, heart racing and brain emptying.
She hasn't felt like herself in so long that whatever self she imagines she was might never have been there at all, just a mirage in the distance, hope and ignorance with nothing underneath.
Also she's been having a lot of cravings for sweets lately? Low fat yogurt and portioned bags of cookies aren't cutting it anymore.
There is a round of unceremonious layoffs at the company following the release of the game, even though it's decently successful. After all, there won't be anything much that needs testing for a while. She barely dodges the axe, not sure what exactly saved her. Luck? Her performance on the job? The… other thing…?
She can't tell if she's grateful to keep her position or not.
You deserve better than this, she thinks to herself, and she isn't sure why it took her so long to come to this conclusion. After all, it would be so simple to just try applying for some other job. This one isn't serving her anymore.
It couldn't hurt to look, anyway…
She waits until her break to open an incognito window and search for jobs in the area. The hiring sites give her dead ends until she broadens her fields significantly, and realizes that she keeps seeing the same company flooding listings for hospitality, data entry, IT…
And it's the same company that already bought out this very game studio two years ago and moved its base of operations to this tax dodge ghost town with a skyline of two malls and an Ikea. Great. Just perfect.
She moves to close the tab, and her hand stills midway.
She clicks on a listing.
***
The transfer seems to take forever, and also no time at all.
This is for the best, she decides, sometime between shopping for modest blouses and touching up her roots with a kit in her apartment's mildewy bathroom. She's not a little kid. She can't just play video games all day long and call it a job. Eventually she was going to have to move on anyway.
There are three rounds of interviews, and at every one, some well-fed man with a close-cropped beard or woman with scrupulously restrained makeup tells her how important it is to the company to promote from within.
And in return, she smiles at them, and certain tiny muscles in her face twinge, as if she's never held them in that exact position before in her life.