"Today, the story of a daughter - born, lost, and born again. Her mother, a senior programmer for Novatech in Boston, opted to bear a mage's child to term, spending most of her pregnancy in VR. Born prematurely, only the biosurgeon's suite saved her daughter's life - the first of her many debts to the house of Villiers."
"Young Arwen grew up to be a dreamer - more interested in old Maria Mercurial synths and Deities and Demigods than in project management or public markets. Before long, however, Dumas predicted her Awakening - she was shunted into the pre-thaumaturgic educational stream. She found it just as boring - applied ritual warding? When were they going to learn how to cast Pluripotent Projectiles? How can she save the world without her Pluripotent Projectiles!?"
Below this is a combination of a simsense recording and a cartoonish sketch - a young girl standing on a table, a blanket melodramatically tied around her neck, hands thrown forward as though to unleash the mightiest of sorceries. The presumable creche caregiver is the target, a rather bemused look on his face.
"Despite her tendencies to, ahem, seek adventure rather than attend class, she was given one of the finest pre-thamuaturgic educations that Novatech and her mother could buy. Eventually, as the years added some patience, she became quite knowledgeable in the hermetic arts, and it seemed it was just a matter of time before she enrolled with MIT&T. However, as her adolescence came and went, she found herself in the most peculiar of situations - mundane."
Another scene - the girl, now older, is again throwing her hands forward, but the wonder has been replaced by desperation, sweat beading across her forehead. The same warden looks on briefly, then away.
---
"Eventually, her Dumas results were ruled a false positive - the appropriate research data was filed with MIT&T to improve testing accuracy, while the young daughter was left with an education she could not use. Her mother blamed Arwen, blamed the surrogate father, blamed the biosurgeons, blamed Fate - she threw herself into work, leaving young Arwen in the care of the creche's placement counselor. They rarely spoke, after that."
"The daughter was given an abbreviated version of the Matrix security courses after that, an attempt to recoup a lost investment - skills that came to her naturally, if begrudgingly. She could at least be Awakened on the Matrix, in form if not function - she could pretend, at least for a little while."
Another simsense recording shows a reproduction of a host - a wicked-looking samurai with a flaming katana charges through an endless array of blockily rendered cubicles, only to be pummeled with a hail of prismatic darts unleashed by the shittiest Shitty Wizard you've ever seen. The samurai explodes into a cloud of voxels as the ridiculous wizard strokes his absurdly long and tangled beard, capering briefly.
"However, even with her talents, the spectre of failure haunted our daughter, and so she entered the NeoNET 'family' a pariah from the start. Despite her wishes, she was shuffled from role to role, taskmaster to taskmaster, and for each one performed...PERFORMED FINE! SHE WAS SOLID! A respectable A-! Several corporate intrusions were detected and repelled, and she proactively introduced a number of infrastructure upgrades and software patches to correct security flaws! She achieved clean ITIL17 best practice audits for 3 years straight!" You notice the text here here has reverted to plain block font.
"Her bosses just didn't want to have to deal with filling in the fragging forms for a health claim on muscle toners when the application form kept trying to replace it with 'holistic, Essence-compatible health treatments'! Nobody in HR would fix the fragging form to reclassify her as Matrix support, even after I sent them the updated file *three times*! Not everybody who goes to a biosurgeon is getting turned into a killing machine! Sciatica sucks harpy drek! Go to hell, Hun'tyrre! Plenty of people can get a degree from Brown without having their mom's name on the goddamn lecture hall! Who names their fragging kid Hun'tyrre!?"
---
After several more paragraphs going into extensive detail about Hun'tyrre's various encounters with opportunistic viral infections, the monologue eventually resumes. "The halls of Lord Villiers had no patience for such foibles as 'sick days', 'health insurance', or 'I booked this vacation 3 months ago so I could go to the ARLARPing convention in Vancouver, Hun'tyrre, please try to remember'. With every performance review, every cruel whisper in the corridors and elevators, every trip to the surgeons, her debts grew deeper. Eventually, our daughter was written off, abandoned - a ghost haunting a forgotten cube at the accursed Desk of Service, the wasteland left behind from the era before semi-autonomous knowbots."
"Having a role but no duty, days passed like weeks, trance-like. Our daughter fulfilled her role admirably as the whipping girl for the heirs and heiresses awaiting their sinecures in the boardrooms of the upper floors - she lost count of how many Calibans she had to repair from 'water damage'. She was alone, despairing; would her entire life would be like this? Perhaps this was all the world was? Perhaps she should have expected this, after all. Not everyone could be a wizard, be a genius, be a hero. That was just the way the odds had played out for her. Another nobody."
You see the same woman again in another scene - she appears to be gluing googly eyes to the front of a Job-A-Mat in an dusty storage closet. Her hands are shaking, and her own eyes are puffy and red.
---
"But no, that was not all the world was. A mad dragon shattered the illusion of invulnerability, and the princelings in their conference rooms found themselves abandoned in turn. They couldn't escape the consequences of their hubris, and the bright star of NeoNET came crashing down to earth. She watched the frenzy unfold - the quiet murmur of propaganda to soothe the rank-and-file even as the corporate sharks were cast thrashing upon the rocks one after another. When, for the third time in a single day, distant gunfire and muffled screams echoed through the plascrete floors, she couldn't help but laugh. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed, then threw up, then laughed again...until she found the world was laughing along with her. The latent spark of magic hidden in her heart burst alight, and her Awakening had come at last."
Another scene from the dusty storage room - the Job-A-Mat is sailing through the air, being ridden around by a phantasmal dog wearing an oversized wizard's hat and robes. The woman claps and giggles, her violet eyes bright with tears.
"The Matrix came to life under her fingers, and it was a simple thing for our daugther to 'liberate' copies of the freshman MIT&T thamuaturgical textbooks and VR seminars. Her skills in magic and Matrix grew in tandem, and she realized that her split affinity had enhanced her skills to a level far beyond what her performance reviews - WHICH WERE FINE, BY THE WAY - suggested. And yet, in all the mayhem surrounding her, the assassins and corporate spies and hunting spirits never paid attention to the humble service desk, its sleeping daughter, and her wayward drones. She knew this was her chance to escape, and she made a cunning plan indeed."
---
"Her plan was threefold. One: like all wayward tech support, it had been trivial to make some nuyen under the table by 'requisitioning' hardware for those who were not strictly members of the NeoNET family - the O'Rilleys had inducted her into their pipeline nearly before she had started working there. A few additional forms filed and a lovely new cyberdeck was ordered, to be delivered to the Matrix Security department - not an unusual purchase, particularly considering the circumstances. It was briefly waylaid, of course, at the service desk, for tagging and inventorying."
"The second part was for Arwen to use her new weapon to inject a few, shall we say, less-than-true statements about her health status into the HR pipeline. A tragic case of CFD-induced suicide - foul play was not suspected due to her peripheral role in the Novatech family."
"The last part was, perhaps, the hardest. One by one, she went through everyone who remembered her - a short list - and with a touch she disappeared Arwen Morgan from their memory. Roger, her HR representative that was always encouraging her to 'practice more mindfulness in her daily routine' - what does that even mean? - gone. Cute Tyler, who always made sure the kaf dispenser had dark roast for her - gone. Her mother, pale and drawn after a thirty-hour stint in VR - gone. This time, she was the one who abandoned them."
You notice with alarm that the last sentence is *writing itself* as you read it, an elaborate feather-quill dancing across the bottom of the ARO: "Free from want, free from care, free from timesheets, she named herself Lethe, having washed away all memory she ever existed. A few final bribes paid to the O'Rilleys erased her records from the GSINR and bought her a seat on a coyote's plane; she cast her heart into the shadows of the Emerald City, her debts paid in full. No one remembered her at all."
A final scene shows the woman, sunglasses on and a smirk on her face, as she looks out the window of a t-bird down at a distant cityscape as the sun is just beginning to rise. The blocky Job-a-Mat is resting on her lap.
---
Her eyes snap open as the cursor-quill finishes off the entry with a flourish. She immediately lifts herself off the table, muttering to herself as she wipes her mouth before quickly glancing around - too alert to be asleep, she must have been in VR - her vision instantly fixing on you. "Hey, did you read that?" She hisses, her thick Boston accent suddenly getting shrill. "You did, didn't you!" you notice a flicker of argent light around her fingers, coalescing into gossamer cobwebs. "You son of a hellhound bi-" she growls as everything fades to white for a moment-
You blink. Ah, your order's ready. That was fast. Back to work.
