Chapter 1: Chapter 1 – My Life as it Was

Chapter 1 - My Life as it Was

It was one of those nondescript, single-story office buildings that dot the landscape in the mid-western United States. Boxy construction. No windows. My current place of gainful employment. Although, really there was nothing gainful about ten dollars an hour. But hey, in another three months, I would qualify for insurance, and it would only cost me about a third of my paycheck. So that was something.

The place was named Steg-o-call. It even had a cute little stegosaurus wearing a telephone headset on the side of the building as a mascot. I’m sure it had a name. No one had told me. When I had first been hired, I had been glad to get any sort of job. I was about two weeks away from getting evicted, and I would work anywhere to avoid homelessness. So, here I was. In a call center.

Call centers, if you don’t know, are businesses that do not serve the public. Instead, they provide a service to other businesses who don’t want to spend the money on maintaining something they don’t even want. Namely, customer service. Why, after all, would you maintain a customer service department when, if you obtained a reputation for poor quality, instead of fixing the problem, you could just fire somebody. So that’s what we did.

Our current client was a TV cable/internet company. I was pretty sure that we had others, as well. Knowing that wasn’t my job, though, and I wasn’t paid enough to care. My job was primarily in providing technical support for their customer’s internet service with the rare cable problem sprinkled in. Initially, I had been a little excited to work in tech support. I liked computers, after all. I had built a few, mainly for gaming purposes, of course. I had never gotten to assemble one of those mega battle stations that you see people brag about every once in a while. Never had the budget for it.

Training had been a three week long affair. We each received a massive handbook filled with all sorts of information on the various ways a person’s internet connection could get fouled up. It had even been divided up based on operating system, although Linux was conspicuously absent. They probably figured that no one who was capable of running Linux would ever bother to call us. Which was probably for the best. I knew less about Linux than I did MacOS… and I wasn’t sure if my coworkers had even heard of it.

The trainer had been a nice lady who delighted in giving us all sorts of little computer puzzles to solve. It was quaint, but enjoyable in its own way. Over the weeks, I got to know my fellow trainees. They each had their own little quirks and foibles, and we became friends in that coworker sort of way. On our last day of training we had a barbecue cookout with cake and everything. We even got to sing a little karaoke. And then we had been ushered out onto the main work floor, and everyone just… vanished.

We were lost in that special no-where land known as cubical hell. I had been there for nine months now, and I hadn’t seen any of those people again. I wondered if they had quit? Or been fired? Or if I was now stuck in some limbo dimension where no one ever smiled or laughed and eye contact was to be avoided at all costs. I quickly discovered, once I was actually on the work floor, that all of that training had been a complete waste of time. My job wasn’t to provide tech support. No, my job was to help people understand how to reboot their modem — after having listened to a recording of a man explaining exactly how to do that while they waited on hold. If that failed, I was to send out a service technician some time during the following week at the most inconvenient time possible during a 3-5 hour time slot. The technician, I was pretty sure, had been trained to arrive either 5 minutes early or 5 minutes late, so that they could claim the client wasn’t at home. Whether they did anything or not, the client was charged fifty dollars an hour. That accounted for about 95% of my calls.

You see, if I actually tried to figure out what was wrong with their internet connection, that took time. That time increased my call time numbers. Increased call time numbers in turn increased hold times. And management hated that. Management, I was pretty sure, didn’t know a god damned thing about customer service. I couldn’t stand it.

That particular day, I was sitting at ‘the bad’ cubicle. I had gotten there just a hair shy of officially late — and therefore written up — so, naturally, it was the only one left. Getting a cubicle that wasn’t absolute garbage was the only motivation anyone had of actually getting here even a second early. That day, though, I was willing to make that sacrifice. The computer at that cubicle featured an ancient cathode-ray tube monitor sitting atop an even more ancient desktop console. It’s age was given away by the 3.5” floppy disk drive installed in it. I was agog. The desktop was running some version of Windows, but I wasn’t sure which. Not the current one, I knew that. Not by a long shot. Somehow, though, it still worked, and that’s all anyone here cared about.

There had been no office chair stationed at this cubicle when I got there. I had had to hunt one down along the wall. The ‘wall’ was where office chairs were pushed when they needed to be repaired. That never happened, of course. Or, at least, it had never happened since I had been there. The one that I had found had a hole worn into the back and canted slightly to the left. One of the wheels kept popping loose. On the bright side, I had discovered that if I turned in the chair just so, it would respond with a satisfying vibration and squeak. I had been taking advantage of that for the last 15 minutes or so, but I was starting to attract dirty looks. I might need to space those squeaks out a bit… or consequences might be coming my way.

I reached up to rub at my aching ear. The headsets provided by the company were some of the cheapest money could buy. The ear piece was a flat piece of plastic with a bit of a wire over top to attach it to your head and a little adjustable microphone out front. This being ‘the bad’ cubicle, however, the bit that actually held the microphone in place was busted. You had to hold it up to your mouth by the wire any time you wanted to talk. I was sure it had gotten down swapped by some enterprising scavenger around here. Incidentally, you could buy a pad to fit over the ear piece from the company. They cost a dollar — a fact that I felt deserved a congressional hearing. It was inhuman. Of course, my ear pad had a hole worn in it. Which meant I would soon need to buy another one. And I would sooner sell my first-born child than pay these people for another ear pad. So my ear ached.

I was on one of the rare calls that actually had to do with our cable service, at that moment. I knew what the problem was, of course. The old woman on the phone had accidentally sat on her remote control. This had pressed some button, and now her television was only showing static. All she had to do was to press the Source button on the remote to switch it back from her DVD player to Cable. Unfortunately, she was half blind and deaf from age, and most of the remote had been taped up by a helpful grandson. The task of explaining to her how to fix her problem on a remote I was unfamiliar with for a TV whose brand I didn’t know was Sisyphean.

I had been on this call for twenty minutes now. I knew. I checked. She was in the middle of her third pass at explaining her problem, again. I wasn’t sure if she honestly felt like that would help or if age had made such an ague of her memory that she wasn’t aware of it. Shaking my head, I decided that the only recourse available to me was to send a technician, which I desperately did not want to do. She did not deserve that. Here she was, an old retired woman, living all alone, her only companion her television. And because of a simple mistake, she was going to be without said companion for weeks. Because, of course, no technician was going to be available until Wednesday after next.

I decided to try one last hail Mary.

“Ma’am, do you have a neighbor or your grandson that you might be able to call who could come over and help you with this?” I asked, searchingly.

There was a pause, followed by her quivering, “Well, my grandson works in Branson…” I had no idea where that was in relation to her. I assumed it was a no go. “And I think my next door neighbor is at work right now. Do you think I could call her when she gets back from work? What time does she get off work?”

Was she asking me? How did she expect that I would know that?

“I… see. Well, if she works a day shift, I’m sure she’d be home around 6 o’clock? Maybe a bit later depending on errands or her own schedule. Why don’t we try calling them over around then and see if they can’t fix your problem before I call out this technician. I don’t want to have to charge you for a service call you don’t need.”

“Well… Alright, then.”

“If you decide you need that technician after all, do please call me back. Okay?”

“Alright. Thank you, young man. You’ve been very helpful.”

I wished that were true.

As the phone disconnected, I quickly set myself to INACTIVE. I only had a few minutes of INACTIVE time available per day, and technically you weren’t supposed to use it for breaks. But I just couldn’t take another call right then. I desperately needed a new job. At that moment, I would rather work the lava forges of the mines of Moria than sit for another hour in this hellhole. Pulling the headset away from my throbbing ear, I rubbed my eyes and sat back to stare at the drop down ceiling — my chair giving an unstable wobble.

“I wish I could be anywhere else than here.”

That, of course, was when I fell through the hole.

There was no earthquake or sinkhole opening up or really any indication that something like that was going to happen. One moment I was sitting there, bemoaning my lot in life, and the next, the floor was just gone. With a squawk, I was falling through empty air. Wild panic set in as the air screamed past my ears and whipped my hair about. As I tumbled in free fall, my eyes strained to make sense of my situation. But there was nothing to take in. There was nothing but blackness all about me — all save for the hole rapidly receding above me. Even that vanished in mere moments.

For a long time, I screamed and tumbled in the black. I was awash in the sensation of air ripping past me. My ill-fitting khakis and cheap polo shirt were not designed for this kind of abuse and soon began to rip and tear. This continued for an interminable amount of time, but eventually, I managed to stabilize my fall into a pose I’d seen skydivers assume. That helped. Yet, still I screamed.

As time went on, my panic began to recede to manageable levels. I was gasping for air from the screaming, and my eyes were steaming from the air continuously blasting my entire body. After a few more moments, panic gave way to confusion. “Jesus. This is a seriously deep hole!” And then I started laughing. It was one of those adrenaline fueled panic laughs where your only options are that or weeping. Possibly, followed by a complete mental shutdown.

When the laughter faded away. I slowly began to realize that soon I would be dead. I had fallen for far too long for any other outcome. No tree could break my fall. A water landing would shatter every bone in my body. It was unavoidable. A strange calm settled over me, and I closed my eyes to await my fate. The thundering in my chest slowly began to settle and my breathing evened out. They say that your life flashes before your eyes in those moments. But that didn’t happen to me. There was only that calm resignation and acceptance of the end. And I waited. And waited.

“What the fuck?” This hole had no end to it. This was impossible. No hole in the Earth could be so deep. And yet I was falling. The air continued to stream past me unabated. Was this the proverbial hole through the center of the Earth? How long had I been falling anyway? Probably not that long, really. I knew that adrenaline tended to skew a person’s perception of time.

I had heard somewhere that a person falling through the center of the Earth would take you 42 minutes. A fact that I remembered because 42, of course, was the meaning of life. And if you can’t accept that, then quite frankly, you don’t understand the question. Had it been that long yet? I doubted it.

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After a while, I began trying to angle my descent in the hopes of maybe finding an edge to this ridiculous hole. If I could slow myself somehow, maybe I could pull through this? Even if I did, I had a feeling it was going to suck. Pretty soon, however, that hope was dashed. I couldn’t find an edge.

There was a bottomless hole with seemingly no sides to it… underneath Steg-o-call?! That… actually, now that I thought about it, it made a strange sort of sense. I always knew that place was the gateway to hell. I just never really thought I would be sucked into it. Somehow, though, I had earned a one-way ticket over the event horizon. I sighed. This ride sucked. I wanted my money back. As my mind began to spin off ridiculous ideas of government conspiracies and underground missile silos, something new finally did happen.

Uuuuuuh…?

A crisp blue box appeared before my eyes with words of welcome. I turned my head to look around, instinctually trying to see if anyone else was seeing this. The darkness was unresponsive. I turned back to the box in time to see it vanish and be replaced.

I was a little freaked out by this, I will admit. Then again, I had left logic behind back at the entrance to that hole. Or well, maybe before that. Steg-o-call defied logic, just in general. After a few moments, I shrugged. There was no reason not to answer, after all. So, I spoke my name aloud, shouting above the wind.

The hell?

“What do you mean my name is invalid?” The blue box did not respond. It just sat there patiently. Did this thing expect me to make up a new name? Like in a game or something? But if there were naming conventions, that meant there were rules for what names were appropriate.

“What are the naming conventions?” Still no response. Great. This was like an MMO or something then. Rules enforced but not disclosed. I hoped I didn’t end up with something crazy like… xXxBaiterMaster5000xXx.

Oh shit… It could read minds. Oh, that was bad. Thank goodness that one was invalid.

I thought about it for a while. Something simple. I knew what my name supposedly meant in English. I’d looked it up a while back. And I knew a little Latin. Maybe…

“Donum?”

Okay. Okay, I could live with Donum. It was a little weird for a name, I guessed, but I could get used to it. I wondered why Latin was acceptable. Or maybe my old name was too long? Of course! Those old games always restricted you to like 6-8 characters. Rats. I should’ve tried my nickname first!

“Hey, can I choose a different name?” Again, no response. I’d take that as a ‘No’.

Alright… fine. Character class, huh? So, it was like a game.

“Uh… What class options are there?” Nothing.

“Classes?”

“Options?”

“Menu?”

“List?”

All met with no response.

Hmm… maybe it’ll take MUD commands.

“Help?” No dice.

Shit, really? Hell, even in those old text games, it would at least give you a list of valid commands. Was I going to have to guess? What even was I choosing this class for? Was magic a thing? That might be kind of neat. Although, I never really liked being a spellcaster in MMOs and such. I always preferred to be up close and personal to the combat. But that was a game. It was impersonal. If I was in a real combat… I would want a gun. From a long distance away.

Vrekfren? That’s the name of this game? Maybe, it was from German folklore? Or Norse? That would be typical. Game designers where always tapping into Norse mythology. If I ended up defending Yggdrasil, I was force quitting. The ever present wind ripping past my face stood in cacophonous mockery of that idea.

Well, that at least narrowed it down a bit. No guns, huh? I guessed archery was the next best thing, but I sucked at that. I’d tried it a little that one year I was in the Scouts. Plus, archers were great until you had to deal with hand to hand combat, and then suddenly they tanked. No, not archery.

Really, I thought, the way to go would be some kind of pet class. Those are always the best when it comes to solo work. Not the best with groups, but if you wanted raw survivability, then you wanted a pet class. I mean, you could go with some kind of tank, but there was no way I would want to do that in real life. Oh, yes! Let’s take the brunt of all the damage so that other people can have fun. And you had better hope that you have a good healer on hand. No, thank you.

What kind, though? Some kind of ranger? No, no bows. Uh… Maybe a summoner of some kind? My mind flashed back to the countless hours I’d played in ‘The Elder Scrolls’ series. Conjuration was a fun school of magic. Not very powerful… unless you used mods. And I always did like that fire daedra. For reasons… Heh heh…

“Wait, what? What class?! Hey!” My protests were ignored as suddenly, and without warning, a new hole of light opened up directly ahead of me — or, I guess, below me. The precipitous ring of light I was barreling towards was a shock after all that time spent in darkness, and before I had any thought of preparation, I was through.

Below me spread a vast world of oceans, rivers, mountains, and as I got closer… flying islands? Okay, sure. Flying islands. Let’s pretend that’s fine. My threshold of disbelief had been torn asunder at this point.

After a moment, I realized that the end of my rapid descent was finally going to come to an end. I had forgotten that ‘the end’ was a thing I needed to be worrying about when a person is free falling. Panic rapidly began thudding in my chest as the ground started approaching me faster and faster. I lost sight of the mountains and rivers. I was going to be landing in a forest, it looked like. Quickly the trees grew larger and larger, and soon they took up my entire field of view.

I covered my face from the branches as impact became imminent, but somehow I missed them. Suddenly, with an alien sounding WHUUUN, my fall was halted about 5 feet in the air. It was so sudden, I felt as if my stomach was going to rip itself out of my gut and splat onto the ground, forcing me to grunt out involuntarily as all of the air was forced out of my lungs. And then, whatever force held me abruptly let me go. And I splatted face first into a puddle of mud.

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