Work Text:
When despair breathes down the necks of those condemned to die, in every action they do, there's a silent prayer in their heart. A mundane prayer, similar to the kind that one makes when everyone else forgets your birthday. You know that nobody is going to comment on it, but there's this ill-placed hope that someone'll give you a gift. A card. Say happy birthday without your input. Someone will take the time to do something that doesn't matter, except to you. The desire ties your tongue and lies heavy on your back. You walk, expecting someone. You eat, expecting someone. You count each speck of sand in the hourglass as the day goes by, with the certainty that maybe this time, someone remembered and they're readying a surprise right around the corner. You had mentioned wanting a new mug. Just blowing out a candle someone else lit would be all you could wish for.
And just like the year before, it goes unnoticed. Everyone ends their shift and goes back home until they're ready to start again the following morning. The streetwise Hercules simply isn't out there to reach for you, as your ever-sharp mind points out from the start. A droplet of hope in a glass of cynicism. That's the cycle you live by.
She sighs, as she looks at the cheap plastic clock they placed on the wall. Tick. Tock. Tick. The despair weighing on her mind is overwhelming, suffocating, and worst of all, has the toxic after-taste of boredom. Philosophers close to death get to leave behind last words that'll be quoted and subsequently misquoted for centuries to come. The everyman who laboured five days a week for fifty years gets his kids to hold his hand at the end. Prisoners on death row get to decide their final meal. Someone decided they ought to get a lobster paid for by the local government before they're put in the chair, and who'd deny them that single act of kindness? The justice system could afford it.
But what does she get for having to dance with death far earlier than her peers? A few hours on an office computer with draconian work restrictions. Each redirect to a polite and oh-so-understanding admonishment asking if she's *sure* there's nothing better she should be doing right now, each page demanding an administrator provide their details before access will be granted but since they're usually busy you really shouldn't bother them with this, brings her a little closer to smashing in that stupid glass screen. There's a rope around her neck, you know? If it was anybody else on their deathbed, they'd be allowed to doomscroll on the social media of their choice before being chewed apart as an appetiser to unspeakable powers beyond comprehension.
The wound would've ached less if there'd been any final purpose for her to reach, an important document to finish and send off in her last moments. Even some meaningless busywork would've eased the pain, both as a distraction and a final defiance, something that showed even if she was forgotten, she'd been a good employee (or at the very least, a useful one!) until the end. But her inbox is empty, and pressing the refresh button repeatedly refuses to change that fact. Either they lost her address, or more likely, they simply decided there was little point in assigning work to the soon-to-be retiree. Ontologically speaking, she quite literally has nothing better to do than goof off. She's here to be a cheap Halloween costume, not work. She just hasn't been put on yet.
The calculator app works. She fiddles with it. Tries dividing by zero, why not? The error comes and goes without fanfare, accounted for, safely contained without chance of breaking the wider system. Starting with zero and adding one repeatedly provides a modicum of amusement, for about half a minute. 8 times 17 times 39103 is 5318008. Hah.
There's a drawing program. One layer, one brush, one thickness, five colours. She doubts anyone else has ever opened it before. She makes a little city of black rectangles with white windows, all lined up in rows and columns. She hovers over the save button, before thinking better. Her two-minute tour de force would’ve been too much for the critics, anyway.
The table lamp shines in her face. She turns it a little to one side. How long, now? Will her coworkers still be typing away when it happens, in cubicles that might as well be on the other side of the universe to her, or will they have left the building by then? Will it just be her alone on her computer as the lights shut off, and the doors lock?
She stares at the clock for a few more seconds, then returns to the computer. Inevitably, in her clicking around, she finds the few simple games that came preinstalled. Her brain tinkers in silence. Games have goals, and that's something. Click, click, check the numbers, flag the right squares, apply some logic. Nope, that's a mine. Restart. Something with more lights and sounds, watch the marble as it rolls and bounces across the screen, up the rails, down the slides, just try to keep it in play. Miss, miss, down the gutter it goes. Restart. Card games this time, shuffle the deck, lay out the piles, then draw and rearrange, make order from chaos, find the right spot for everything, one step at a time. The game slows, locks up, no more valid moves are possible.
She's distracted by a realisation as she plays, a little thought she can't tell if it's profound or meaningless, that games like these are a vestigial organ left behind by most computers. Maybe once, they had a purpose, but now? They weren't new anymore, weren't the only source of entertainment available. And so, who cared about these old tech demos, tutorials for using the mouse and keyboard? Who'd spend time playing single-player mahjong, backgammon, checkers or chess? Would someone ever leave flowers behind for pinball's corpse? Were tears ever wept for solitaire?
They were just games. There's no solace within this odd kinship of forgotten entertainment, no special comfort. Maybe she was always just meant to be a mine-sweeper sort of person.
The hours draw on. Boredom drags at her like wet sandpaper, punctuated only by a brief commotion when someone from another department visits the office. Not that they have anything to do with her, of course, no need to bother the hard little worker sitting in her stall. She can hear the shape of their chatter without getting any of the words, and it makes for a nice enough background sound while she solves a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle of a potted plant. Then they leave, and the room calms down once more.
Absentmindedly, she opens another application. She’s close to running out of the available games and puzzles. Seems there’s only enough to sustain a single workday of idleness, if you only play each one once. Part of her wonders if upper management planned it out that way, or if they just had some intern check it over, or maybe they aren’t even aware that the computers came with games at all. But it doesn’t really matter. Tic-Tac-Toe’s just another classic one to add to the pile, something so simple and inoffensive it probably came with the default operating system.
There’s a two-player option. She picks the one under it. Solo play.
She draws.
She draws.
She draws.
She draws.
She lets herself win as the Os, just to spice things up.
She lets herself win as the Xs, to balance things out.
Playing Tic-Tac-Toe by yourself is utterly pointless, even beyond other games. You can learn more about chess strategy by testing out different moves and positions, but there’s nothing to learn when it comes to that little 3-by-3 grid, no puzzles to figure out. It’s a solved game. There are 255168 possible move sequences giving rise to 5477 possible board states, most of which no player would ever intentionally reach. You either draw or you give up.
She finishes the match, and chooses not to replay, exiting back to the menu. Scrolls the mouse to the quit button. And then she sees it. Just another option, one that’d phased out of her conscious awareness from the blandness of it.
Saved games.
Who, in this great, vast, wild universe, needed to save a Tic-Tac-Toe game for later? Who found themselves in such a rush that they couldn’t finish? What kind of player would demand that a game resume from the exact position it had been in, on the exact same computer it’d been played on? How could this possibly have a use case?
Amusing to think about. Just a little. She clicks it, for no particular reason. These computers are new after all. No previous users, no past data.
And yet, there they are. Saved games, a list of them, going back far, far further than they should be able to. All single-player games. Each with a title (because, of course, the save files were nameable) of 8 characters or less.
“Good job”, “Freedom”, “Bad luck”, “The game”, “Have fun”...
A hundred save files. A hundred words saved in some haphazard order. Not random, not repeating. Some with creation dates from a few hours ago and from the future. The computer clock doesn't quite know how to comprehend the impossible nature of the data.
Who’d have thought there’d be this one little hole, huh, one little gap in the full reset? Just a tiny little bug, in something too simple and too stupid to be worth going over closely. Maybe there were others. IT departments always had a few oversights like that.
It takes her time to read through properly, to find the right order. There are mistakes, threads that go nowhere, notes left unfinished. Still, as she reads, she lifts her head a little higher.
Her eyes flit over to the table lamp. It’s just a lamp. She turns it on and off a few times. Click, click, click.
There’s still no way out. No chance of survival. But she feels a little better. When everyone else forgets your birthday, it’s nice to find a gift you left for yourself.
She leans back in her chair and stretches out her stiff joints, before returning to the game. As the office starts to empty of people, she stays, playing Tic-Tac-Toe with herself.