15. Default
Default
Dylan
Seat, headset, boot up computer, automated dial tone, “Hi, please stop eating meat, no, okay, bye, thank you,” new automated call, “Hi, stop meat, bye,” new call, on and on for eight hours. That was how her work days went.
But today would be different. Today, she’d brought tape.
In the early afternoon, Dylan got up from her seat, which retracted back under the desk.
She might not get the same desk when she came back – permanent hot-seating made it easier to accommodate changing shifts of workers, but it meant she couldn’t decorate her workspace in any way.
Already, as she walked across the office, she could see the cleaner drone coming to disinfect it, prepping it for whoever came next.
It’s just a toilet break, guys.
Then her muscles tensed. Mira was coming round again, the sunshine bouncing off her glasses making them appear milky white. She lifted her glasses up onto her forehead, ruining the effect.
“Alright, Dylan?” Her supervisor’s perfunctory smile twisted Dylan’s stomach. Did she know what she was planning to do?
She tried for a smile herself, failing miserably, her lips barely parted.
“Sure. All good, Mira?” It was her natural fear of authority figures that made her act like this with her boss.
Therapists would surely have a field day exploring how having revolutionary parents had affected how she saw the world.
Mira’s mouth was moving again but Dylan could barely pay attention.
The roll of duct tape in her bag felt like it was burning a hole in her side.
The stickiness of its inner side, the glittery sheen of its outer layer.
She was starting to sweat just thinking about it.
She realised Mira’s smile was starting to wane, and she was waiting to hear Dylan’s answer to a missed question.
“I’m sorry?”
“Where are you off to?” Mira asked, clearly repeating herself.
“Uh, the toilet?” Dylan made an awkward face, hoping that would end the interrogation.
She was wrong.
“We have nothing against toilet breaks,” Mira said, still smiling. “We’re all for work-life balance at the Office for Veganism Outreach Centre!” It was like she was a robot, playing out a repeated mantra, part of the institution’s training for their C-suite.
Dylan made to keep walking. “Right. Off I go, then.”
Mira grabbed her arm, her long fingers fully wrapped around it, nails digging into Dylan’s skin.
“Right! But we do keep track of toilet breaks and this is your fourth today.” Mira’s smile was starting to look strained, like a growling pug.
“Consider this a warning… and I don’t like handing them out.
” Mira’s voice lost all whimsy, steeped in seriousness.
Bitch.
Dylan nodded. She put on her best guilty, upset face.
“You can go!” Mira waved her arm, exasperation in her voice.
Dylan didn’t need telling twice.
The building’s bathrooms were massive and oddly luxurious for a government office, the kind with showers and shampoo if you felt like washing your whole body between bouts of calling hangry meat-eaters.
Dylan walked into a cubicle, locked the door, sat on the toilet seat, and grabbed the small roll of golden duct tape from her pocket.
The thought of what she was about to do was so exhilarating, she had to consciously calm her breathing. This would be her first time going in alone – her nerves had stopped her the previous three times she’d been to the toilet today.
I can’t wait any longer.
She ripped off a piece of gold duct tape and pasted it onto the side of her head.
An onrush of colours stripped the grey-brown walls of the toilet cubicle away, creating the tape-tube connection into the Tapeworld.
Each particle of the tape-tube surrounding her looked definite, of a miniscule but graspable size. Realistic, but limited. She reasoned it up to the resolution capabilities of the tech.
At the other end of the tube was a bright light.
She felt herself being pulled towards it, but she resisted.
The other times, when she’d joined Isaak, she rushed into the Tapeworld, not paying the entry process much attention.
Now, more curious, she wanted to savour it.
Thinking herself towards the floor, she landed her booted feet down.
It seemed like she could take as long as she wanted in here. Was it the same for Isaak?
There was a background noise inside the tube. A light hum, a vibration that was barely perceptible.
She tried to touch the side wall, but the particles moved away like a liquid. The liquid clicked back into place as she kept walking.
Everything she knew about the world had already changed.
The geopolitical implications of something like the Tapeworld were unfathomable.
Like the early internet, it seemed to have been built as a series of discrete spaces, not as a continuum, with shared experiences like the Boulevard being separate from other places.
Whoever designed it had put in a lot of thinking.
Or maybe it was all randomly generated based on data mined from the black box of an unknowable titanic AI model.
She sighed.
It surely couldn’t be one of the Kings who was responsible for it.
All of them would have ripped the place to shreds.
Especially the Fifth King – that guy was a nutjob.
Always threatening the precarious peace among the Kingdoms and the stability of Earth’s climate-change and plant-based-eating efforts.
He’d constantly undermined the furthering of vegan laws.
Some countries still depended on meat, according to the Fifth King, though he was never clear about exactly which.
It was just an accepted fact that the Kingdom of America provided that meat.
It harboured the only known farms still growing cows for the purpose of consumption, rather than preservation.
The unlucky few, chosen to feed people clinging to the old ways, while most other animals in the world were safe.
It was widely known that the laws were broken all over the world, but the degree and frequency varied.
The FK, under the protection of the Twin Queens and the government of Betty Summers, was the country with the highest adoption rate: ninety percent.
The Kingdom of America’s percentage was unknown.
And she knew all about veganism adoption rates – she bloody worked here every day.
Focusing on the now, Dylan walked slowly through the tape-tube, continuing to marvel at the shimmering ever-moving lights and glowing shapes.
They seemed to move as she did, some closer to her than others, in a parallax effect.
A few steps more and the tube dissipated into an expanding horizon of green fields and rolling hills.
The sight left her breathless. She turned around, but the entry tube was gone, dissolved into nothing, like things tended to do in the Tapeworld. She looked down her legs and feet.
What?
Her black Dr. Martens were gone – her toes were among the grass, a temperate breeze blowing around her.
Her boots must have been removed by her subconscious when she entered this place.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh air.
She had no idea how the Tapeworld worked, but she fucking loved it.
So much so that the real world was beginning to pale in comparison.
Looking out into the fields, the colour of the grass, the blue sky and white clouds, the light of the sun at this particular angle…
“Am I in a default wallpaper…?”
Ahead of her, a gaming chair and desk configured themselves, the space preparing for Dylan automatically. Miss Kitty emerged out of a taller patch of grass, bounding over next to her.
“You’re not in a wallpaper, Dee-lan,” the cat said, yellow-brown eyes twinkling, “but this tape-space is modelled after a famous one, yes.”
“Goddess, you scared me.”
The cat looked at her, expression unchanging, head tilted like she was unable to empathise with Dylan’s reaction to her appearing out of nowhere.
“You’re lucky, you know?” Dylan told her.
“How so?” the cat asked, her hind leg scratching the side of her head.
“You get to be in the Tapeworld all the time.”
A swirling mass of blue and red suddenly materialised in front of her. No. Not just in front of her. All around her. Before she could react, she was pulled into it.
She shuffled back a step, her muscles rigid.
The rogue tape-tube enveloped her until she couldn’t see Kitty anymore, or her green field.
What the—
What’s happening?
With a blast, the particle cloud disappeared from around her. Gone was the sun and the green wallpaper hills of her tape-space, replaced by the golden glow of evening and a thick forest of trees. Nearby was a white house, and…
“Isaak?”
Him. A tightness took over her chest. Her skin was tingling, but she wasn’t sure if it was because of the tape-tube, or because he was right there in front of her, in all his high-def glory.
She’d been bored out of her mind at work, and the Tapeworld and Isaak brought her all the excitement she was craving. Gah, stop swooning.
“Fuck!”
Not the reaction she was expecting.
“Fuck!” Isaak avoided eye contact, shuffling in place like he was in a hurry but didn’t know where to go. “I thought of you, and said your name…”
She pressed her lips together. The tingling dissipated, but her chest remained tight. “Isaak, stop!” Grabbing him by the shoulders, she forced him to cease pacing about. “What’s going on?”
He glanced towards the house. The sky suddenly went from golden end of day to pulsing blackened red. At the same time, a dull, repeating tone echoed through the trees.
“What’s that?” Dylan’s heart rate jumped back up. “I was just in a grass field, and now… Talk to me.”
Isaak was rapidly scanning the horizon. “Quiet,” he said firmly.
That was new.
“Do you hear that?”
“I can’t hear anything besides that bloody alarm,” she replied.
“Shh.” His voice was taut, but there was no malice.
A howl ripped through the silence, and they stared at each other.
Where she was expecting to see him gasp, he was stoic.
His posture changed. It must be… He’s behaving like he did when he was captain of the London Lazarus.
How many games had she watched, how many victories had she celebrated over pints with her mates?
How big was her crush on Isaak Powers? Getting to know the real Isaak…
It was exciting, but also reality-crashing.
What she’d seen on the screens was an idealised, perfect version of him.
The real one got nervous and struggled to tell her what he was feeling.
Until, it seemed, shit hit the fan.
He looked her in the eye. “I’m sorry, Dylan. I really am. I don’t have time to explain everything this second, so please just trust me. I think we’re going to have to run.”