Read time: 4 minutes.
You had the office mostly to yourself that day. Rhiannon would come in after lunch, but you had till then to slip on your company-provided virtual reality headset and function check your projects without disrupting her work. You closed the door to avoid a similar noise disruption for people in the hall.
The user profile popup appeared first. User: PixelPenny42. Confirm? The avatar was the one you’d customized during the initial setup: a woman with a red wolf cut wearing a dark black suit and bronze monocle. I still don’t know why the headset always asks for confirmation when Penny’s the only profile on it. It can’t be a remnant of earlier profiles because the headset didn’t have any profile until you created Penny.
Anyway, you worked for a medical education center creating their training materials. Your current project centered on programing simulated patients so students could practice examinations. The finished product would let students practice when human actors weren’t available, plus providing a wider range of reactions than physical dummies. You’d ironed out the scenarios, now you had to program scoring criteria and connect those scores to the course’s gradebook.
You heard your door open and Other Thomas clomp through.
“Hey Parker,” he said, “Dr. Monty says drop the interview project and help me with a sailing sim he’s working on for a shipbuilder.”
More than the fluorescent light hurt your eyes when you pulled off the goggles. Other Thomas’ neckbeard led your hand on a semi-conscious trip to your own throat. No matter how long you spent shaving, how taut you pulled your chin fat, or how firmly you pressed the razor to your skin, those dark strands never totally disappeared. No one ever saw those hairs but you, and then only in harsh light or when you practically kissed the mirror, but you could never imagine your face without seeing that shadow. Somedays you thought it looked like dirt caked on your face.
Other Thomas likely also found shaving difficult, considering he shared your excessive body mass and presumably had a similar double chin (the beard obfuscated the issue). He complimented his beard with long, oily hair and hipster glasses. You combatted yours with periodic applications of facial hair removal cream. Even that didn’t usually get you more than 24 clean hours. You’d have used it once a week if you hadn’t inherited your father’s distrust of abrasive chemicals.
I’ll stop calling Other Thomas that now and just call him Thomas. At the Office you were Parker. You and Thomas joined the Center about the same time. Your new coworkers spent most of your onboarding process joking about having to specify which Thomas they were talking to. You’d eagerly pivoted to using your middle name instead.
“What’s that go to do with anything? Unless it’s a physical therapy program?”
Thomas flung his head backwards and laughed hard enough to shake Rhiannon’s hobbit bobbleheads. “It’s how Monty’s conning a yacht builder into paying him to window shop without visiting the showroom.”
“Paying us, you mean, since we’d build it.”
“He offered me a bonus ‘cause it’s my project. You’d be doin’ it outa loyalty to the Center.”
We’ll indulge a fantasy that you put on a pair of rubber gloves, grabbed him by the beard, manifested a dagger in your right hand, and shaved him clean.
“One of us has training to create. Kindly vacate my office.”
You closed the door behind him, locking it this time.
You caught your reflection in your darkened monitor when you turned around. Egg-shaped body, made to look shorter and rounder by the screen’s proportions. Hair sticking up where the helmet rubbed. You touched your Adam’s apple. Just above it waited a thick blanket of porcupine needles. In your mind, you now inhabited Thomas’ body. You swore you felt a cold slime absorbing you. Small patches of dry skin around your nose mentally became a cracked, red mask covering half your face.
You whipped the goggles over your eyes. Nothing in the virtual environment showed you your avatar, but you knew that, in this world, magic pixel dust glamoured your body into Penny’s. When you pictured your virtual actions, you could honestly picture Penny in your place.
The slime receded as though you’d washed under a waterfall.
Your back straightened. Your steps became deliberate.
I could breathe.
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