Entering the serene bubble of his creative products company, Cooper inspected the cubes of cogs operating frictionlessly. All wore earbuds. As usual, on hot days, many had arrived early for the air conditioning. Adding people to the office was like placing cereal in the fridge. Since the boxes were cold, it was best to fill them.

  “Good morning, Cooper! Nice to be seen in your presence!” Arnold called from his private pod on the opposite end of the room.

  Cooper sniffed. He curled his lip at the jeering voice. He supposed he had skittered a moment late to work. The incident in the corridor had slowed him. He hated the artwork more than ever. He hated the artist too. Cooper hated art most of all.

  Viewing it.

  Making it.

  Selling…Selling…Selling it.

  “Thrilled to be here!” Cooper called back.

  At first, he hadn’t intended to respond, but recalled the consequences just in time. Dismissing any Super, whether the tenement superintendent or company supervisor, was punishable by corrective labor. He inferred that everything was.

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  Cooper scrambled to his niche in the darkest corner of the room. Copying the rest, he stuffed his ears. The sound surrounded him still, neither damped nor gone. As he operated, it slithered below conscious awareness, ceasing to upset the equilibrium air condition.

  The broadcast fluctuated, a fickle trace, its riddle unfathomed. The riddle probed whether it played whenever he didn’t hear it, but not if it rattled the gas beyond his brain at all. He couldn’t detect its acoustic source in any direction at any distance.

  Pulling up his first prompt of the day, Cooper dove into his task. The prompt solicited the design of a timeworn relic in a desert wasteland. The monument should amaze and inspire. The prompt asserted that it must mystify.

  In a blink, its spirit struck Cooper. Although he had never seen such an entity with his own eyes, he encountered manifold numbers in his mind. He excelled at seeing things that weren’t there, so he had been selected for his job.

  Each day, Cooper generated pixels based on weird, absurd descriptions by company clients. Whatever any client could fuzzily think of, he could conceive in all its exquisite facets and code it fast to screen.

  At the same time, a cog in the mechanism with him cooked up a competing product. The client chose the winner, who was paid a small commission on the purchase price.

  Nobody knew who any adversary was in any given round. The struggle was a fight of all against all, sudden death in a survival story. Cooper had only to defeat an enemy at a time. The salvation of the cog was contending. Either he contended or collapsed even deeper, ever direr, into straits.