MS Open Window

Entry for The Friday Challenge for 6/26/09


MS OPEN WINDOW


"Roberta will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very self-possessed young assistant; "in the meantime you may look over any of the brochures on the side table, or you may try out some of our products on the computer wall."

Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly flatter the assistant of the moment without unduly discounting the H.R. Director that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nervous breakdown cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.

"I know how it will be," his therapist had said when he was preparing to migrate to this new city; "you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just have your recruiter set you up with a series of interviews with all the companies in the area likely to be hiring at the moment. You should have a job in no time."

"Are you familiar with any of our VR products?" asked the assistant.

"Hardly at all," said Framton. "My sister talked about buying one, but I don't believe she did."

He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.

"Then you know practically nothing about our company? Have you met Roberta yet?" pursued the self-possessed young lady.

"No, I have not even talked to her. The only information I have about the company is what I was able to find on line.”

"Her great tragedy happened just three years ago," said the assistant.

"Her tragedy?" asked Framton; somehow in this modern, bustling building tragedies seemed out of place.

"You may wonder why we keep that computer displaying a window with an unmoving, empty scene," said the assistant, indicating the wall-sized screen showing a large French door that opened onto a lawn.

"It looks like a security camera," said Framton; "but has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?"

"Three years ago to a day, Roberta's husband and her two young brothers went off for their day's shooting in beta VR Shoot. They never came back. All the engineers and VR architects searched through the code and the video for weeks, but they never found the virtual hole they fell into." Here the young woman's voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. "Poor Roberta always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that door just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open around the clock. Poor dear Bertie, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing 'Bertie, why do you bound?' as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window--"

She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when Roberta bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her appearance.

"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.

"She has been very interesting," said Framton.

"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; "my husband and brothers will be back directly from beta testing in the shooting VR, and they always come in this way. They've been out for snipe in the marshes to-day, so they'll make a fine mess over the virtual carpets. Or at least they should, if the VR is doing its job."

She rattled on cheerfully about the testing and the scarcity of good VR developers, and the prospects for VR Shoot becoming a best seller. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his interviewer was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window on the computer screen. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have scheduled his visit on this tragic anniversary.

"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement," he continued.

"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention--but not to what Framton was saying.

"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the assistant with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The young lady was staring at the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.

In the deepening virtual twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the building, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you bound?"

Framton grabbed wildly at his keys and briefcase; the lobby door, the concrete walk, and the parking lot were dimly-noted stages in his headlong retreat. A car turning into the entrance had to run onto the grass to avoid an imminent collision.

"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window; "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up?"

"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton; "could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."

"I expect it was the spaniel," said the assistant calmly; "he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere in VR Vampire by a pack of wild dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve."

Romance at short notice was her specialty.