“Aaaand… he’s asleep.”
Jenkins leaned back in the desk chair and folded his hands behind his head. An array of monitors before him showed undulating waves and streams of data, as well as a slow and steady pulsing sound.
“He worked the whole shift?” Whitford asked, leaning back from his station, similarly outfitted with LCD monitors filled with data. He watched his older co-worker nod and rub his balding head. “He must be exhausted.”
“Yep. We didn’t even have to sedate him.”
“What’s this one’s name again?”
“In-game?”
“No. For real.”
Jenkins checked the monitor, squinting, his glasses left on the desk in front of him.
“Lucas. Michael Lucas.”
“How’s he coming along?” Whitford rolled his chair over to look at the monitors on Jenkins’s desk. “Wow. Eight hours in one sitting. Guy’s going for some kind of record.”
“One of the others is still going. But he’s not wearing the suit.”
“This Michael guy. He wore the suit the whole time?”
Jenkins nodded again. “Not only that, he played it to the hilt. He’s really our best candidate right now. Plenty of time inworld, wearing the suit, even watched both training videos for the duration.”
“Jesus,” Whitford said appreciatively, “his brain’s gonna be mush before we can touch it.”
“Makes it easier to imprint.”
“Did he go for the secretary job?”
“Stripper,” Jenkins said, and broke into a wide smile. “Did the whole female avatar thing. Even the boys upstairs aren’t sure what the results going to be, but…” Jenkins ran his fingers over the keyboard and brought up a vague human form on the screen, bands of color surrounding it like a rainbow aura. The legs radiated a soft blue, the rest of the shape reddish in hue. “…According to the feedback we’re getting from the suit, his body’s responding. Good thing the kid has wireless or we wouldn’t be able to tell what’s happening to him.”
“Keep me posted on this one, will ya? I’m curious to see what happens next.”
“You’re not the only one. The boys upstairs say he could be a prototype for a whole new usage set. It’s really the perfect storm. Lives alone, has some cash, wired to the net in five different ways and is marching through the induction sets in the game. We couldn’t have made up a better test scenario.”
“You feeding him the juice already?”
“First dose tonight. We’ll see how effective the in-game videos were when he wakes up.”
“Hope he wasn’t too attached to his old life,” Whitford grinned and rolled back to his station.
“You bring lunch?” Jenkins asked, tapping his keyboard to release the first dose of the treatment.
