The blue field resolved into the interior of a cookie shop. Cassandra looked down at her hands. They weren't her hands, but they were realistic enough that they almost convinced her they were.
"Hi, welcome to Sinful. I'm Julianna," said a woman wearing an apron. She resembled the actual Julianna, although Julianna would likely never franchise a cookie store, even a boutique one. So, she thought, Julian had put her into this world as a cross between an Easter egg and a love letter. It was touching.
Conscious that, in speaking, she would be audible to the real Julian and Julianna, as well as to this Julianna, and bizarrely not wanting them to hear even a mundane phrase from her right now, Cassandra merely nodded in response.
Julianna explained that Sinful had a very particular way that they tied the string around their boxes. They used a specific, hand-woven Turk's head knot for boxes containing more than twelve cookies. Julianna gave her a roll of string, light pink in color and embedded with pink diamond gems.
Cassandra began weaving the string together.
She had once read that the fastest way to tell whether you were dreaming or not was to look at a digital alarm clock, look away, and then look back. In a dream, the numbers would have changed. The same effect, strangely enough, applied to her numbers. She always knew she was asleep when people's numbers started shifting in front of her.
Though that was irrelevant here. Currently, she was staring at an image produced by a VR headset, so the humanoid figures within didn't have any numbers to her. It was an unexpected relief. She had had little experience with virtual reality, but she thought it might be something to get into.
Once she had threaded several strands into a braid, she began looping it around a white box of cookies. She looked up, expecting the completion of her task to somehow lead to the dissolution of the entire virtual world.
"Mobile orders coming in," Julianna said. A few boxes of Honeycomb Heaven slid down to her for ribboning.
"You get two fifteen minute breaks and one thirty minute lunch. Make sure you punch out for both breaks and lunch. If it's five minutes over or under, it logs it," Julianna explained.
Outside of the employee bathroom, under a sign saying "We're not stringing you along—Cream Dreams are back," which included a graphic of the famous string on Sinful boxes, was the pad for punching in and out.
(AN: I had a job like this. It was before the lab tech thing. It fucking sucked!)
She kept tying each string. The girl who was working the register, who was named Carmen, said to her, "Me voy a lunch," patting her amiably on the shoulder.
Through the windows, the streets of Manhattan were visible, though rendered with much less clarity than the inside of the store. She thought about the sentence, Me voy a lunch, as she was in AP Spanish and had homework due on Monday. The reason the regular verb for "to have lunch" wasn't used was because "lunch" here didn't really have anything to do with the meal. It was just a thirty-minute unit of time, as opposed to "break," as in Me voy a break, which denoted a fifteen-minute unit of time.
A young man named Mario replaced Carmen on dough duty. As his gloved hand distributed the cookies onto the tray, his ungloved hand was scrolling through an app on his phone. Cassandra peered over, assuming there was no expectation of privacy for an NPC.
Mario saw her looking and smiled. He pushed his phone towards her.
"This," Mario said, "is not a top."
The About Me section read, "Just a silly creature looking to make friends and more I'm just the type of person that goes with the flow and please don't start your message with a dick pic thank you :)." The man was making a kissy face in his profile picture.
Cassandra nodded politely. "I wouldn't really know," she said.
Mario shook his head. "You'll learn," he said.
"How can you tell?" she asked, curious in spite of herself.
Just then, Carmen tapped her on the shoulder. "Vete a break," she said. Abandoning the question, she stood up—then hesitated, wondering how fully she could move with this headset.
From outside the world, Julian's voice, speaking to her from the kitchen, said, "It's room scale," which she took to mean she could walk.
"I won't," she started to ask, then raised her voice, shouting through this world into the next, "I won't bump into anything?" Mario and Carmen looked at her as if she was crazy.
"We'll stop you if you're about to," Julianna, the real one, said from somewhere.
She moved towards the pad to punch out. The fingers she raised to enter her employee ID were, to her eyes, subtly marked with the impressions of the threads that had been wrapped around them. The detail in this world, she had to admit, was stunning. But was all of this programmed? Did Julian program a coworker who would talk to employees being trained about "tops" on a dating app?
Julian had said that the program was designed to exploit the user's stressors. He had mentioned, for example, the fire-alarms-always-ringing-scenario. Did that mean that something about this particular scenario was meant to appeal to her stressors? And if so, which aspects? The string? The Grindr conversation?
The app couldn't read her mind, of course. And there's no way it had managed to develop that complex of a psychological profile of her from the questions it had made her answer about which cookie she thought she was.
Officially off the clock, she moved to the front entrance. She wanted to see if there was a boundary on the door, an invisible wall preventing her from leaving, but there wasn't. She exited into the streets of the city, as rendered by Lyra.
It was significantly lower resolution than the inside of the store, but still recognizable. She looked up at the sky, thinking she'd test her old vertigo.
She froze.
It was the Empire State Building.
Suddenly, something blinding seemed to erupt in her head. She stumbled backward, back into the store.
Mario looked up at her in concern.
And then she saw it.
His numbers.
And floating over his phone—over the profile of Fun&Chill35.
Numbers.
She wrenched the headset off herself, or had it wrenched from her, she couldn't tell which.
She put a hand to her face and felt the tears.