By David Hamel
It was an average day in 2030. Rob was getting ready to go to work. He set up his laptop and sat down at the dining room table to start the meeting. His boss, Tim, wasn’t on the call yet. But everyone else was already waiting. At least three of the members started to criticize some of Tim’s ideas right before he joined the call. When he finally logged on, his camera showed him at his desk in the office while everyone else was at home.
Everyone saw Tim talking but no sound was coming out. But they all had the same idea and thought it would be funny to let him ramble for about a minute before telling him to unmute. Finally, Rob spoke up and told Tim that he was muted.
“Good morning, everyone,” Tim said into the microphone, not looking even slightly annoyed. “You’d think after ten years of this pandemic, I’d be more prepared. Silly me. Anyway, today is going to be a very constructive day for Sunshine.com, I can assure you that.” They proceeded to discuss plans for new at-home tools to make people’s lives easier. “And I was thinking,” Tim explained, “Why get up and go to the DOOR to receive your delivery… when you could stay in the comfort of your own couch!”
The rest of the meeting was spent discussing plans for other convenient items and products. Rob felt tired once the meeting was over and after logging off, he decided he should go to sleep. “That guy is weird,” Rob said to himself.
The next day, when Rob logged onto the meeting, a few of the members almost simultaneously received knocks on their doors. They each excused themselves to temporarily leave the meeting so they could go answer it. But after several minutes, none of them rejoined. And by the end of the meeting, Rob decided to stop the boss mid-sentence to ask about it.
Tim paused. After a long moment, he smiled and yelled “WHO WANTS A RAISE?!” Everyone in the meeting got excited. “Whoever can get to the end of this week without mentioning the disappearance of our fellow friends first will get a raise!”
“But that doesn’t even make any sense,” Rob responded. Tim didn’t answer. About an hour after the meeting ended, Rob heard a knock at his door. He knew not to answer it and ran upstairs and locked himself in the bedroom. That’s when he realized that he had forgotten his phone! But before he could rush down there to go grab it, he heard a loud crash downstairs followed by several voices.
Rob could hear people talking downstairs and knocking things over. Then, after things were silent for a few minutes, someone started pounding on the bedroom door. Rob hurried into a closet and held his breath.
Meanwhile, Tim cleans up his desk as he tells his friends to take down the greenscreen from behind him, revealing the large chart of Tim’s progress, complete with several names crossed out. “We’re doing good,” Tim says to everyone in the room with him. “We’re getting people to stay indoors, making their lives more ‘convenient!’ But what they don’t know is that once we have them spending their entire lives in their homes, we’ll be able to have control over everything they do! And good news, we’ll start adding some higher-quality cameras to the vacuums next month!”
Right after he finishes speaking, the doors to his room burst open and multiple cops come rushing through, yelling at him. “Am I under arrest,” Tim asks?
“Very,” one cop responds.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Tim says.
“Well, we’ve heard from an anonymous employee that you NEVER make sense! You know what else we heard? That you've been up to some corrupt nonsense!”
“Oh… well I guess I’m going to jail now…” Tim starts to say slowly, reaching for a weapon under his desk.
But before he can make a move, he gets tased in the face and put in handcuffs. The cameras watch as Tim and his friends are walked out of the room. And through those cameras sits the real boss. “We’ve lost the puppet,” a creepy voice says, watching the whole thing from an oversized chair.
“I need a donut! From now on, we have to be very careful. Luckily this is only a layer chipped off of the system we have going…”
Back at Rob’s house, the intruders have broken into his room. It isn’t long before they tear the closet door practically off the wall. Rob sees several masked figures standing directly in front of him. Before Rob even has the chance of escaping, one of them sprays him in the face and he goes to sleep immediately.
A few hours later, Rob wakes up with some sort of VR headset, turned off at the moment, strapped to his head. He tries to take it off but is unsuccessful.
“Great,” Rob thinks to himself, “I know exactly how this is gonna go.” Suddenly a face appears on the screen, practically blinding Rob. It’s an old guy wearing a suit.
“How are you doing today?” The man says. “Probably terrible, I can assume. Anyway, let’s get this out of the way really quick. I’m the real boss of Sunshine.com. The Tim that you know is a fake! We know he’ll be caught sooner or later. Our company is made up of a large variety of-”
“Please stop rambling and just move on to whatever hypnotizing routine you have ready,” Rob said in an annoyed tone.
“And if you want me to stop rambling and get to the hypnotizing routine, I’m happy to tell you this is a pre-recorded message and you’ll have to sit through the whole thing.”
“Oh no…,” Rob thought.
“And we don’t provide any bathroom breaks, either. So this may take a while and it may not take a while.”
Rob started to hit the VR headset against the wall in an attempt to break it off, but nothing was happening.
“And everyone has been really predictable so far,” the real Tim said. “So I’m sure you’re trying to get the headset off. I can assure you that won’t happen. Unless you wanna take half your face off, that is. HA HA HA!”
“This is like Saw!” Rob said to himself.
“And this is just the beginning of our project! Soon we’ll have an army of hypnotized employees that will kidnap people from their homes and force them to work for our company! And if any of you get in trouble, there’s no way it can affect us! Goodbye for now, enjoy spending the rest of your life working for Sunshine.com!”
Later that day a new commercial aired on millions of TVs across the country advertising one of the many evil products manufactured by the corrupt business. Luckily, people were already starting to suspect that they were up to something, and some even started their own groups dedicated to exposing the company.
But it would take a lot of time, effort, and evidence. Then the first real piece of evidence to be put to use was after people started spotting strangers walking around outside, wearing weird-looking headsets and committing various crimes.
After over a month of randomized attacks, the news reported that authorities caught one of these criminals and were able to remove the headset, revealing the first clue to bringing down Sunshine.com, the company with a name meant to deceive the world.