The coffee shop mishap jabbed at Erin’s pride. She should have been more aware of Beast Hunter’s location. She hadn’t realized his little event last night, fighting some spectral pack of animals in a disused alley, was just a block away from the coffee shop.

At least she still had her coffee. It didn't taste like the burnt bitter water at work, from someone inevitably using too little grounds from the community pool of cheapest-coffee-on-wholesale brought in by whoever was next on the coffee club list. 

Erin had opinions about work coffee. She kept them to herself, and just bought to her own preferences.

Erin made her way upstairs and settled into the office, being sure not to place her drink on one of several charts she had artlessly scattered across her more practical than particular desk. She couldn’t recall offhand which of the charts were the most recent and was reluctant to try to sort through the stack or throw away something she might have to present at a manager’s notice. 

She was permitted to have two spare laptops, both of which were hopefully finished compiling the latest architecture built by the team from yesterday. The only personal items were little things her mom gave her that she hadn’t had the heart to throw away.

There were several other people in the office already, younger folk like herself, who probably had been up hours before the sun, watching the news. She knew them by face and name only. She could hear a couple of them over the cubicle walls, speculating about the new villain’s debut the night before breaking into and damaging part of the Meridian City Water Treatment Plant. And in international news, it sounded like the Dutch Republic was going into talks with Germany concerning their shared issue of UberStar, a notorious supervillain.

Erin didn’t engage in that sort of talk at work. Only part of it was because she didn’t want to risk the Protagonist in their office overhearing her. 

When she unlocked one of the compiling laptops, Erin found the program started to crash repeatedly shortly after she left. Erin loved cutting a swath through a jungle of uncharted programming from scratch. Unfortunately, she worked at a software-as-a-service company, so servicing code iterations was what she did. Reluctantly, she dove into trying to resolve over a dozen errors in the script. She suspected that these errors were each hiding half a dozen more problems in the code. Annual update contracts were more of a pain than they were worth, in her mind. 

Sometime later, Erin blinked and rubbed her eyes. Someone knocked on her cubicle doorway partition.

It was only Isabel, a coworker on the same project. She was an older woman who didn’t quite start out in the programming world, but learned quickly that she wasn’t cut out to just be some secretary when she was younger.

Isabel was a bit of a busybody, but Erin didn’t mind too much. She tried to get together some of the team for lunch at least once a week, usually on Fridays when there were a small fleet of food trucks just down the street. They ended up spending more time in line than eating, but it was usually good, and it was better than being ‘as asocial as the typical code monkey’, as Isabel liked to put it.

They got to claim part of the time as a team building event, since sometimes their project manager joined them. Today he didn’t, so it was just Erin, Isabel, Joel, Mike and Greg.

Joel and Mike were younger than Erin. Good natured but they wore their whole life on their sleeve, which usually amounted to drinking and playing video games with friends.

Greg was older, somewhere between Erin and Isabel, about fifty. He was a widower, and fairly withdrawn. Nice guy, but probably as good as Erin as an example of asocial behavior. His mood was even worse as of late, actually bad enough for Erin to take note of. She was surprised he was willing to come today. He’d been insistent last week about begging off. 

The conversation was relatively banal as they all rode the elevator downstairs. Joel and Mike were hosting a tournament of the newest game at their house. Isabel was trying to figure out a new ergonomic keyboard rest that would help with arthritis. Erin dryly complained that she would be staying late that day, on a Friday. She’d left early yesterday, and needed to make up. They all sympathized.

They walked the block and half, most of the conversation filled with Joel and Mike’s tales. For the most part it was business as usual, though Greg lagged behind. The group surveyed what was being offered at the food trucks.

Erin always had a penchant for the Greek food truck, but they had that last week, so the five of them got in line at a new Mexican truck. Isabel sidled up to Erin and whispered, “Talk to Greg, would you? Try to figure out what’s going on?” 

Erin agreed with a conciliatory motion, though she wasn’t much of a comforter. Apparently, even if Erin wasn’t one to pry, she was the poor sap who would try if asked.

Erin hung back in the line, behind Isabel and Joel and Mike. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence that hung between them, but Erin had been tasked with breaking it, so she went ahead and offered, “What’s going on, Greg? You doing okay?”

He had been staring off into the nearest street, one not blocked off by food trucks. There was a fender-bender nearby. The drivers were out of their car and arguing while the rest of the city backed up.

Erin stared at it with him, not sure he heard. Greg’s voice was gruff, a little gravelly from two decades of smoking, and finally spilled forth, “I hate all the uncertainty. Are we humans, Erin? Do we even have a choice? Or are we just fractions of a computer program?”