The CEO of Texitron made a steeple with his hands and rested his chin on his fingertips. He looked distant for a moment, then focused his attention back to the mage.
Luke started to sweat under that gaze. He slowly put down the laser pointer, as if it were a weapon. The CEO then said, tapping the printed out spell, “I don’t see the need or reason for this.”
Luke looked down, and knew his presentation disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by the stylized blue “T” with waves before and after it. The administrative assistant handed him the flash drive.
The CEO turned to the rest of the mages in the room, as Luke walked over to the door and slowly, quietly, left the room. “Gentlemen,” he said as the door shut, “about our fourth-quarter earnings…”
Luke took the elevator from the 22nd floor down to the third floor, where the assembly line of mages worked. He stopped at the office of his boss, Tony, and peeked in.
“Hey,” said Tony, glancing up from his computer.
“I blew it.”
Tony looked apologetic. “I know.”
“How?”
“Admin sent the email. You’re locked out.”
Luke’s mouth dropped open. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m sorry. You have to go to the first floor.”
He had heard bad things, really bad things about the first floor. It was the center of IT, where you had to fill out tons of paperwork and wait for them to retina-scan you back into the system. And there were lines. And waiting. It was worse than the DMV.
“I guess I’m done for the day, then,” said Luke with a sigh.
“We’ll see. They might not be busy today.”
He left the office and went to the stairwell, and went down the two floors to floor one. Exiting the stairwell, he followed a maze of corridors to a room with a black door. He went inside.
He never noticed before, but he did today – there was no handle on the opposite side of the door. Gentle music played in the background as he saw the line to the window to get the paperwork was only three-people deep. The waiting room wasn’t full, having about six people, two with clipboards, the other four perusing year-old magazines. Some were in civvies, some were in robes.
He got his paperwork, filled it out. Waited with the other people there. A woman came out and called people’s names, so he waited on pins and needles for his name to be called.
“Luke?”
He jumped up at his name. How long had he been down there? There was no satellite service, and he had left his phone in his locker; there were no clocks, no TV, just that musak that pumped in, putting him to sleep.
“I was locked out,” he said to the woman, but she held up a hand to stop him from talking. “Please come with me,” she said.
He followed meekly and she brought him into a room that looked similar to a dentist’s chair. There was a desk with a bank of very small monitors not unlike a security camera’s monitors behind the chair. He sat in the chair and she fitted a helmet around his head. It didn’t touch his head, but its edge rested just beyond his field of vision. He knew it was there.
“Please keep still,” she said. “Try to think of pleasant memories.”
Pleasant memories? What did that have to do with the retina scan? He thought of the time he got Scruggs, his first puppy. He loved that puppy, even after he grew into a full grown chocolate lab, all legs and head. Scruggs slept with him, crowding him out of the bed more often than not…
He got a sudden flash of memory, of the machine he had built and presented to the CEO that morning. It was just a moment, of everything he had done to create the machine. It was in his apartment. It was in the closet in his apartment. In a box. It was under lock and key. You had to take the box, and it was damn heavy. But it worked, he knew it did.
And then the memory was gone. Forever.