Leaning back in my seat I feel the world spin, my stomach sinking as I feel the tall wooden stool threaten to tip over. My hazy and dazed mind barely has enough time to release what is happening, my hands snatching out to grasp at the bar as I pull myself back into a seated position.
It had been a long week, interview after interview that had seemed to go nowhere and amounted to little more than a time waster. My time in academia hadn't done much for my corporate prospects and without going back for more study I doubted that would change any time soon.
It was the last interview of the week that had led me here, a small little dive that seemed to cater to the various workers who streamed out of their offices once the clock hit five.
Being alone at the bar I had taken a seat both out if the way but also by the bar, my lonely wallowing in pints and highballs giving me a great vantage point of the group's shuffling in and stumbling out as the hours rolled on and on.
Office workers stumbling in as they loosened their ties, high-heeled women getting shots before mincing out the moment happy hour ended, uproarious laughter erupting from booths and tables as rounds of drinks were downed and spilled.
Men in high-priced suits eyeing up the back bar for the most expensive whiskey soon being juxtaposed with nervous-looking groups of introverted IT workers trying to navigate the crowded room in order to get their cheap and basic drinks.
Each time I looked up I found the room had shifted as large swathes of tables and booths would shuffle about rapidly as the start of the weekend rolled on. The only group that seemed to remain constant we what seemed to be a team of janitors sitting only a few feet from my own perch at the bar.
The group of three men had arrived only shortly after I had, two older gentlemen along with what looked like their latest hire. Over the course of the night their table had quickly filled with empty glass after empty glass, the two older men laughing heartily as they watched their younger colleague attempt to keep pace.
Each time the young man, barely being old enough to legally drink, would finish one of the older men would immediately order a round. With each passing round of beers the older men only seemed to grow redder in their faces, foam accumulating in their facial hair, while the younger lad seemed to turn pale and sickly green.
The three, all dressed in grey and somewhat dirty jumpsuits, each carried a small device from their belts. The thick heavy-duty shock case seemed to clip to their uniform, the small tablet/large phone inside occasional jostling as they tormented their new coworker.
While waiting between rounds the older men would fiddle with their tablets, snickering as they glanced around the room and seemingly took pictures of those around them. The screens looked like a jumble of command prompts, the fine white text meaning little to me from my distant vantage point.
The older men failed to restrain their laughter more and more over the course of the night, always quickly turning away once they had done whatever it was they were doing.
No matter how hard I tried I couldn't work out what the hell they were laughing at, my eyes trying to follow theirs through the crowded bar. From the finely dressed women trying to find the most expensive champagne at the bar to the nerdy cuties trying to muster the courage to get to the bar it all just seemed like they were laughing at nothing.
Little did I know at the time but I had incidentally stumbled across the guardian angels of our day, the Metaphysical Maintenance Service.
These men and women in gray jumpsuits had one all-important job, to fix and repair subtle breaks in reality.
The universe as we knew worked much like a tree, branching out and growing evermore as time stretched on into infinity. While there was a perfect and pristine way for this great being reality to grow the very action of nature taking its course and the sheer number of actions taking place often left it growing in odd or strange ways.
While these changes from the perfectly aesthetic universe were mostly harmless others required more attention. These were more akin to rotting leaves or branches that stole the light from other. These could be immediate or compounding problems as it didn't matter either way, these limbs of the universe would need pruning.
The Metaphysical Maintenance Service traveled the world, finding the causes of these most detrimental breaks in reality before ending them forcefully. Genders flipped, wealth added or drained, ages shifted and nationalities altered, anything and everything was on the table to correct the inevitable and devastating path these people were on.
The incompetent engineer who leads to the worst nuclear power plant meltdown in history can't make their mistake if they're some applied heiress who never applied themselves in the first place, the corrupt politician that allows millions of acres of land to be poisoned can't sign the law if they're some rural poor in some far-flung country.
While the members of the Service had final say on the changes being made, so long as they fixed the temporal and metaphysical issue at hand, doing so was more difficult than one would think. Once scanned a target would merely appear as lines upon lines of spaghetti code, each variable leading to some factor of the individual's reality.
To a lay person, or even a new recruit to the service, this meant nothing but to a veteran this code painted a rich tapestry to be unwoven and altered as they saw fit. For those new to the service, or the lazy few who just wanted to meet their quota, there was an automatic option 'Synchronization'.
Upon being selected, 'Synchronization' would begin to interpret the immense amount of code before coming up with an internal score. As the errors needing correcting by the Metaphysical Maintenance Service were seen to be caused by compounding errors, the 'Synchronization' option would score the code and attempt to automatically correct what it saw as elements that were bringing down that score.
This of course leads to wildly differing results, sometimes even making the problem worse. However, as each change was played out the system would learn more and make further changes in the hopes of getting its synchronization score to 100%, a life that fits perfectly for the target.
These changes, whether manual or automatic, rewrote reality as we all knew it, those poor saps being targeted by the Service only having a few moments of lucidity and terror before their memories would be overridden by the service member manually once all was said and done.
Each change of course led to more and more alterations in reality, leading to the Service only being a last line of defense to prevent disaster. However, this didn't stop the staff from using it personally in their spare time.
From fun little alternations whole out and about to fiddling with friends and family, so long as things were put back to normal by the start of their next shift or were seen as a 'better fit' in their internal system then it would be a matter of 'no harm, no foul'. Where the system didn't detect the changes it would simply be impossible for anyone besides the one who made the change to detect it, while if the change was detected there would be hell to pay for the employee whose tablet actioned the change.
Of course this only mattered for small and single changes, ones where the device was still in the Service member's possession. While largely unheard of in the Metaphysical Maintenance Service there had always been a concern as to what would happen if someone not of the service used the device.
Of course, if they used it on others it would only be a matter of time before the Metaphysical Maintenance Service would find them and exact as terrible vengeance for the transgression as they could muster.
However, what worried those in the know more was the thought of swine accidentally using it on themselves. Late night conversations and contemplations abounded of what could happen, would anyone be able to make sense of the code without training? Would they be able to detect the change without the constant of the service member behind it? What would happen to the tablet in that scenario?
While many felt safe and secure knowing it had never happened before they were sadly mistaken. These sorts of transgressions and alterations to reality had happened many times since the Metaphysical Maintenance Services' founding, unfortunately with each rewrite it became all that much harder to find the source even if they knew to look for it in the first place.
After a few hours of uproarious laughter from the older men, and pained gagging at the now foul-tasting beverages by the younger man, the three stand up to leave. As the younger of the three pushes up from the table, his white-knuckled hands gripping the sides for support, the whole thing buckles.
Partially filled glasses come falling down around him as he topples to the floor, the sound of shattering glass filling the bar.
"Taxi!" call the older men in near unison, the two bellowing with laughter at the sight of their inebriated and clumsy compatriot.
As the young man scrambles to his feet, struggling to avoid the large shards of glass scattered across the hardwood floor around him, he sways and bobs in place. His face turns ever more green as the alcohol coursing through his blood and agitating his stomach only seems to make the vertigo and nausea from his fall that much worse.
The two older men quickly right the table, patting down their young coworker to get any dirt of glass off the uniform. Suddenly one of the older men winces, gritting his teeth as he looks down at the young man's belt. Without a word he snatches some serviettes from a nearby table, the young man only then noticing the droplets of moisture on the screen resting at his hip.
In a fit of panic he pulls it free from his belt, burying it in the tiny paper towels like one would do with a phone and a bag of rice.
The sudden movements seem to catch up with him though. The young man's eyes going wide as saucers, his lips sealing shut as he races to the back of the bar and towards the bathrooms much to the delight of his older coworkers.
The commotion soon dies down as the minutes passed. The older men, standing around the table, soon grow restless as they wait for their young friend to 'finish his business in the tiny bathroom. One fiddles with his pocket, fishing out some crumpled cigarettes and a beat-up lighter.
As the staff arrived to sweep up the glass, gesturing for the men to stand aside, they simply leave with a nod to the bathroom and to the exit.
"Be outside Doug" shouts one, his deep voice struggling to carry over the resurgent noise of the bar. "Just need some air."
As the men reach the short set of stairs leading into the bar and out to the street beyond the sound of flushing struggles to make itself heard over the din of the crowd. The young man, slouched and drained, with various foul stains clinging to his one pristine uniform, appears to shuffle out in a fugue state.
His glazed-over eyes dart lazily around the room looking over the table he had been sitting at before searching the small space around him for his coworkers. As he spies the two older men climbing the stairs he bolts, bumping into damn near everyone and everything between the bathroom and the exit.
After a short pause my own addled mind catches up to the world around me, my eyes turning to the pile of serviettes still resting on the table.
"H...Hey!..." I call out, watching as the young man clambered sloppily up the stairs and out into the street beyond.
Easing up from my seat, wobbling slightly after hours of sitting as the liquor seems to finally hit me, I slowly approach the now abandoned table. I quickly move the sudden white paper towels from the piles, finding the outer ones reasonably dry with only a few near the middle having any amount of liquid soaked into them.
It all looked like a bit of an overreaction, the small tablet in the hard shell case seeming to be untouched and unmarred by its owners fall.
Without much though I reach out for the hefty device, turning it over in my hands as ai search for a company name or phone number. Despite my best efforts I find no identifiers on the outside, the secretive group unfortunately not advertising themselves on their products.
With a little huff of frustration, and feeling my own bout of liquor-induced nausea sinking in, I quickly pace back to my seat at the bar. Fiddling with the large black cases tablet in my hands I quickly turn it on, hoping to find something more useful inside.
Unfortunately, the moment I turn it on I'm met with the sight of lines and lines of code. Each string is absolute nonsense to me, the gibberish combinations of numbers and letter all color coded in a manner that made it all more confusing than less.
No menu or phone number make themselves known as I scroll through, just more and more of the dense code. As I sway on my seat, the tablet's rear camera moving with me, I watch as the code shifts and changes. Massive sections of the jumbled letters and numbers quickly change as I point the camera at different people, a small button at the bottom appearing once I have someone centered
[LOCK TARGET]
For a moment I pause, fidgeting and playing with my lower lip and kicking at my chair absentmindedly as I try to work out what to do next.
"Surely they'll come back for... Whatever this is" I think to myself, aiming it around the bar as though I was taking a video. With each passing group the code shifts and mingles, the lock button flashing on screen only once things settle before leaving once more as I pass over the crowd once again.
Eventually, as I reach the end of the bar I have a thought. Positioning my finger over the [Lock] button I spin the tablet around, facing the camera with a weak smile as I blindly tap at the unseen screen.
Spinning the device back around I'm met with an un-moving block of nonsense text, numbers and letters all meaning nothing to me as they display my entire reality in digital form.
As I swipe up and down, looking over the weird coding language and searching for some change or menu in the damned thing, I finally find something new. In the top right-hand corner sits a new button, separate from the now altered [LOCK TARGET] turned [UNLOCK].
[SYNCHRONIZE]
Looking up from the tablet, my eyes darting to the door in the hopes of seeing the worker once again, my mind begins to wander. How the hell was I going to get this back to them? Should I just leave it here? What the hell is this thing anyway?
As the last thought reverberates through my intoxicated mind I find my thumb gently gliding to the new button. "Maybe this does something" I think to myself, justifying my curiosity.
As I tap the tiny text I watch as the code on screen begins to race past. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of lines of codes whiz by in a flash and faster than my eyes can even hope to keep up with. On occasion the device seems to seize up, the code suddenly getting highlighted before it returns to the high-speed scrolling.
Suddenly, it stops as it reaches the bottom.
A blinking dot at the bottom of the screen appears to await input, as though I had finally reached a command line of some sort. However, before I can type anything myself I watch as the command line is suddenly filled out by itself.
...Executing Synchronization...Error Codes (Y)...Sync Score<100... Running Test...
Before I can do anything more I watch as the world around me slows to a halt, people stopping mid-stride and beers freezing as they pour from the tap. Looking up I see the three men frozen by the door, one of the older men simply staring at me in shock while the other appears stuck midway into pointing at me.
Glancing back down at the tablet I watch as the command line quickly types out...
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