The workspace high-rise had a cafeteria where he was issued a swipe card that would record his consumption: everyone had a points allowance, which they could use on anything on the menu. The food was real food, not spurious glop like the stuff he’d eaten at Bearlift. The drinks had alcohol in them, which was the least you could expect in a drink.
The HelthWyzer women were brisk, and had jobs to do and not much time for small talk, and – he guessed – no tolerance at all for cheap pickup lines, so he didn’t even bother; but though he’d vowed to be careful about personal involvements because of the kinds of questions they could generate, he wasn’t made of stone. Already a couple of the younger females had looked at his Seth name tag – name tags were a fashion statement at HelthWyzer – and one of them had asked him if he was new because she couldn’t recall seeing him before, but of course she was kind of new herself.
Was there a little twist of the shoulders, a giveaway flutter of the eyelids? Marjorie, he read, not lingering too long on her name tag, which was perched on a breast of no more than ordinary prominence: obvious bimplants were not common inside the HelthWyzer walls. Marjorie had a blunt-nosed, brown-eyed, acquiescent face, like a spaniel, and in ordinary circumstances he would have proceeded, but as it was he said he hoped he’d see her around. Such a hope was not the top hope on his list of hopes – that spot was reserved for not getting caught – but it was not the bottom hope either.
The job description for Seth was that of a routine low-level IT guy, dime a dozen. Data inputting, using a packet of snoreworthy but serviceable software designed to record and compare the various factoids and buckets o’data the HelthWyzer brainiacs were coming up with. Glorified digital secretary, that’s all he was supposed to be.
The duties weren’t challenging: he could do the job with two fingers of one hand in much less time than was allotted for it. The HelthWyzer project managers didn’t supervise much, they just wanted him to keep current with the inputting. Meanwhile he could ferret around in the HelthWyzer databank unimpeded. He ran a few IT security tests of his own to see whether any outside pirates were trying to hack in: if they were, it would be useful to know about it.
At first he didn’t uncover any telltale signs; but during one of his deep dives he pinpointed something that looked as if it might be a cryptic tunnel. He wiggled through it, found himself outside the HelthWyzer burning ring of firewalls, then lilypadded his way into the Extinctathon chatroom. A message was waiting for him: Use only when needed. Don’t spend long. Wipe all prints. A. He logged out quickly, then erased his trail. He’d need to build another portal, because whoever was using this tunnel might work out that someone else had been through it.
He decided Seth needed to be known as a guy who did a lot of gaming so that checking into Extinctathon wouldn’t stand out should anyone be snooping. That was the operational reason; but also he just wanted to test out the games, and to see how easy it was to fool around during work hours without being reprimanded – staff weren’t supposed to waste time in this way, or not too much time – and also how easy it was to cheat. He thought of it as keeping his hand in.
Some of the games on recreational offer were standard – weapons, explosions, and so on – but others were posted by the staff at HelthWyzer West: biogeeks were just as geeky as other geeks, so naturally they designed games of their own. Spandrel was one of the better ones: it let you devise extra, functionally useless features for a bioform, then link them to sexual selection and fast-forward to see what the evolution machine would churn out. Cats with rooster-like wattles on their foreheads, lizards with big red lipstick-kiss lips, men with enormous left eyes – whatever the females chose was favoured, and you could manipulate their bad taste in male attributes, just like real life. Then you played predators against prey. Would the supersexy spandrels impede hunting skills or slow down escape? If your guy wasn’t sexy enough, he wouldn’t get laid and you’d go extinct; if he was too sexy, he’d get eaten and you’d go extinct. Sex versus dinner: it was a fine balance. Packets of random mutations could be purchased for a small sum.