The Opportunity

“A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work.” Betrand Russel, 1932

“Work, work, work, work, work, work.” Rihanna, 2016 

“Work hard. Every waking hour.” - Elon Musk, unknown

TODAY STARTED OFF the same as everyday. To be honest, I don’t think I even know when it started. According to the timer on my Fruit Watch, I’ve been working for three hundred and ninety four hours straight now, including the daily Opportunity. The days all blend together when you spend every waking moment, which is all of them thanks to the stimulants, at your desk surrounded by other workers doing the same in an office so generic it defies all description. 

Lunch dropped onto my desk from a tube overhead. My shaking hand delivered a bite to my mouth, and the stimulants in the sandwich soaked into my soft tissue under my tongue, stilling the withdrawal trembles almost immediately. I watched a few seconds tick by on the timer until my computer beeped in alarm at the lack of keypresses in the last thirty seconds. 

If I could just get away from the hunters during today’s Opportunity, I could take a break. 

FIVE HOURS LATER, I slipped my leather office shoes off and slid my feet into a pair of running shoes. I kept up my work with one hand while I tightened and tied the frayed laces. My productivity meter fell from green into yellow, but I deftly swept across the keys with one hand to keep it from dipping into the red. Everyone in the office was doing the same. If you didn’t know it already, you learned quick once you started here: every second of your head start on the hunters was precious, and wasting any of them tying your shoes after the Opportunity bell rang was the stuff of amateurs. 

A small beep out of my Fruit Watch told me we had thirty seconds left. A bonus stimulant dropped out of the food tube in front of me, and I dry swallowed it, typing away until the last second. Someone up above must have been feeling generous today. 

The bell rang and pandemonium erupted. We had ten minutes to get out onto the street and as far away as possible before the hunters started their hunt. I pushed a man out of my way and sprinted for the exit, leaping long-jump style over a woman who had been trampled in the hallway. I could feel the stimulant kicking in and rocketing my body forward with momentum down the stairwell along with the rest of the building’s workers. 

The afternoon sun shone bright and the stimulants added a cutting edge to the light so that when I pushed the door to the street open, I physically recoiled from the brightness. I was immediately pushed forward again by the surge of bodies behind me, and we all spilled onto the sidewalk gracelessly, scattering in every direction.

THE HUNTERS STOOD in the lobby of the building, watching through the glare off the plate glass windows as the workers pushed, trampled, and punched one another like animals in their desperate attempts to win twenty four hours of freedom. They waited for the hunt bell to ring, hopped up on stimulants of their own and emboldened or embittered from the morning’s Opportunity at a corporation up the street depending on whether they’d been successful or outsmarted. The bell rang and they filed in a quick and orderly fashion onto the street.

FOOTSTEPS BEHIND ME. I looked back and saw a hunter hoofing it down the street toward me. How did they always know where we were? I looked down at my Fruit Watch and saw that I was eleven minutes into the Opportunity. Forty nine more without being caught and I could enjoy twenty four hours of freedom from work. But first I was going to have to outsmart this hunter right behind me. 

I wheeled around a corner into an alley and stopped to pull down a stack of pallets and then kept running. My legs pumped like pistons, driving me down the alley in a blaze of stimulant speed. When I heard a clattering of pallets and a grunted curse, I looked back to see the hunter sprawled on his back, motionless except for a hand that put his radio to his mouth. 

I looked back in front of me a fraction of a second too late to jump over a rusty pipe sticking out of the ground and went sprawling myself. I cracked my face into the corner of a dumpster and crumpled to the ground. 

“Pssst.” 

I cursed the rat that I thought was hissing at me. I touched my eyebrow gingerly, felt blood seeping out of it. 

“Hurry up,” someone said in my ear. 

Rats don’t say “hurry up,” I thought to myself. In fact, they don’t say “pssst” either. I looked underneath the dumpster that had split my head open. A pair of eyes looked back from under a trap door covered with asphalt that matched the alley street. 

“Get in here,” said a mouth somewhere below the eyes. The person pushed the trapdoor up. “Now. Or never.” 

I shimmied under the dumpster and dropped my bottom half into the hole, finding ladder rungs with my feet and hands as I backed into the hole and found myself side by side with a woman in what looked like a dark robe in the short glimpse I got of it before she let the trap door close. We were now in total darkness. 

“Where am I?” 

“Shhhh.” 

A tug at the elbow of my shirt told me to continue down the ladder. 

“I’m not going anywhere until I know who you are and where I am,” I said. 

There was a small rustle and a gun cocked. 

“On second thought, let’s go,” I said. 

Halfway down the ladder an orange light started to seep up from below. The way it flickered like a torch made me wonder yet again where the hell I was. At the bottom, I saw that it was an actual torch. I stood on a small stone platform surrounded by rushing water, with a narrow wooden bridge stretching across the water to a passage carved out of a vast stone wall. 

The woman’s brown hair fell around her face as she drew back the hood of her robe and faced me. “Throw your Fruit Watch into the water and stay here forever, or keep it and you must leave in less than ten minutes.” 

“What?” I said. “Excuse me?” 

“You must choose. Now.” 

“I’ll keep it?” I said. “I don’t even know where I am?” 

“You can guess.” 

“Who the hell—” I got out a few words before it dawned on me. “The Anti-work Squadron. You’re one of them.” 

“Yes. Join us, or leave. The choice is yours.” 

My Fruit Watch showed thirty eight minutes left in the Opportunity. Twenty two minutes without being caught was better than I’d done in months. 

“Can I stay the full ten minutes?” I asked. 

“Yes.” 

“I’ll leave when my time’s up.” 

“Fine,” she said. “Follow me.”

She removed the torch from its sconce and we walked down the stone passage, a bubble of light following us and bobbing along to her footsteps. 

“Why ten minutes?” 

She turned to me and pointed to my Fruit Watch. “We have measures in place to prevent you being tracked down here, but they only work for so long. So you either ditch the watch or leave.” Her robe flowed around her as she turned back around and continued down the passage. 

“Only a certified technician can take it off though.” 

“That’s what they would have you think,” she said. “But I’d be willing to guess that somewhere in your mind you know better.” 

We came to a room. Sparsely furnished, with a bunk carved into the stone wall, a small table with two chairs, and a jelly cabinet. She hung the torch in another sconce and opened the cabinet to pull out a small box. She set the box on the table and pulled out some first aid supplies. 

“Come here,” she said, motioning to a chair at the table. 

I sat down and she cleaned the wound at my eyebrow, applied ointment, and set two butterfly bandages in place. Then she put the box back in the cabinet and brought out a small piece of bread. 

“Did they give you stimulants before the bell?” 

“They did,” I said.

“They’ll be wearing off soon,” she said. “Eat this as soon as you get above ground, it has more.” She wrapped the bread in a small napkin and put it in my hand. She indicated an opening opposite where we had entered. “Take this passage until you reach a fork. Go left, and climb the ladder. It has a trapdoor just like the one you entered in the alley.” 

“Why would you help me? Risk your operation just for me?” 

She simply said, “I risk nothing by showing you this place. And of course I would help you. I swore an oath and must keep it by helping those who work. It’s the anti-work way.” 

She said nothing more, and I could think of no more questions. 

“Go now,” she said. “Return anytime and we will find you and release you from your yoke.” She nodded at the Fruit Watch. I looked at it as the timer ticked over to thirty two minutes. “Go.” 

I found the ladder just where she said it would be, and returned to the surface a few seconds shy of the ten minutes she had allowed me. Sharp timing. 

I now found myself underneath another dumpster, lying flat on my belly with the smell of garbage invading my nostrils. The alley appeared empty, and I lay there wondering what to do.

A PING IN the hunters earpiece told him his Fruit Watch had just homed in on a worker. He brought up a heads-up display in his heavy-duty safety glasses and saw that the worker was in an alley two blocks away. Easy money. He popped a stimulant. Three catches away from two hundred and fifty consecutive successful hunts. Just three catches away from seeing his family for a few hours. He pulled up a picture of his wife and daughter on the heads-up display, said a silent prayer for them, and then started jogging toward the alley.

THERE WAS NOTHING to do but run. I ate the bread and felt the stimulants coursing through my body, replenishing the manic drive that had already been fading. My shirt and tie were smeared with dirt after I crawled out from under the dumpster. I peeled a banana peel from my pants leg. 

I looked one way down the alley, and then the other. Where to go? I started walking toward one end and a hunter jogged right into the alley with his energy gun pointed right at me. I turned and bolted. 

“Stop!” he shouted. As if. I don’t know why they even bother yelling stuff like that. Maybe it worked on the other workers, but it only made me run even harder. Or maybe that was the stimulants kicking into full gear. Whatever the case, I was running so fast I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped. 

The brakes of a car screeched as I ran straight out of the mouth of the alley and into the street. I ripped open the door and pushed the driver into the passenger seat, jumped behind the driver’s seat, and punched the gas before I even had the door shut. I heard the hunter cursing at me, yelling after the car until the door sealed shut and his voice was drowned out. 

“What the hell are you doing?” the woman yelled at me. 

“Running,” I said. 

“I can see that you idiot,” she screamed. “What are you doing in my car? Why did you get in my car?” 

“To run faster.” I swerved between two cars and barreled headlong through an intersection. 

“This is my day off,” she said, her arms out stiff and hands pushing on the dashboard to brace herself against my reckless driving. “Do you know how long it’s been since I had a day off? Years!” 

“I’m sorry, but I had to do what I had to do,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.” 

“It just figures,” she said with a sigh. “Three years since I’ve had a day off and this happens.” 

“I’m trying to get a day off too, you know,” I said. I blared the horn and blew through another intersection, seeing the flashing lights of hunter dune buggies in the distance behind us. 

“Obviously,” she said. “How long since you’ve escaped during Opportunity?” 

“My last day off was sixteen days ago,” I said. “Not that long compared to you.” 

“You could say that again—AHHHHHHH—”

She screamed as a hunter dune buggy drove off the side of the freeway above us and crashed down in front of her car. I swerved left around it as best I could but clipped the front fender and felt the tires on the passenger side of the car leave the ground. I yanked the wheel as hard as I could to the left to bring them back down, and then corrected course to narrowly miss a semi-truck and barely make it through another intersection. 

“What did you do to my car? Oh my god!” 

“Just relax,” I said. “You’ve got insurance, right?” 

“Yeah but when the hell am I going to get it fixed? When I win Opportunity in another three years?” I kept driving. “Where’d you learn to drive like this anyway?” 

“Practice.” 

“You’ve done this before, huh.” 

“Yeah.”

“Always with other people’s cars?” 

“Don’t have one of my own.” 

“Figures.” 

A sudden thought entered my head, and at the next intersection I pulled a huge u-turn, heedless of traffic signals and much to the chagrin of the other drivers. 

This is what my life has always been. And all it’s ever going to be. I’m better at Opportunity than this woman in the car next to me, but even still, that just means I get a day off once a month? Twice if I’m lucky?

I looked down at my Fruit Watch. Sixteen minutes remaining. Another sixteen minutes without getting caught and I would be rewarded with a full twenty four hours of freedom from work. 

But I didn’t want twenty four hours. I wanted to be free for the rest of my life. Even if it meant living in a cave in the ground. I was never going to work again.

THE TRAPDOOR IN the alley by the dumpster wasn’t so easy to find. Expert craftsmanship made it lay so flush against the asphalt that I started to think I’d gotten the wrong alley. But this had to be it. My blood was on the dumpster a few feet away. This was definitely it. 

On my belly again, I was fishing desperately for anything that felt like a catch when my pointer finger finally touched rock that had a little give. I pushed down on it and the trap door popped out of the asphalt. 

I looked back and saw no one coming yet, though I could hear sirens all around. The hunters were pissed I’d outsmarted them in the car, they were closing in on me with full force now. 

I clambered into the passage and down the ladder and found myself on the same platform, surrounded by the same sound of rushing water, but with no torch this time. I stood there for a second, but no one appeared. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess I thought she’d still be here. 

My eyes adjusted enough to find the wooden bridge and I walked down the passage to the spartan room, where the torch was burning down and cast only a soft orange glow over the room. There was a piece of paper on the table. 

Use this.

Taped to the piece of paper was a paperclip. What the hell was I supposed to do with this? I sat in one of the chairs and thought about everything the mysterious woman had said earlier. Was this paper clip supposed to help me take off the Fruit Watch? That was definitely my first priority. The hunters would be swarming the alley above now, and in just a few minutes my Fruit Watch signal would be visible to them again. Eight minutes left in the hunt. Plenty of time for a motivated hunter to make their way down here and catch me. 

I picked up the paper clip and looked at the Fruit Watch. The buckle had a hole that was the perfect size for the paper clip to fit into. I unbent one side of the metal until it stuck straight out and then pushed it into the hole. The buckle unclasped itself and the Fruit Watch fell to the floor. The glass screen cracked on the stone floor and the sound echoed back and forth off the stone walls of the small room before traveling down the passage. 

Back on the stone platform, I threw the watch in the underground river with four minutes left on the timer, plenty of time for it to travel many blocks away judging by the rushing of the water. Any second now it would pop back up on the hunter’s Fruit Watches and tell them I was far, far away and that they had lost this time. 

Which meant I had twenty four hours until I was supposed to report back to the office. Twenty four hours to figure out what the rest of my life was going to look like now that I was illegally unable to be accounted for. 

I heard her step up behind me but didn’t turn from the rushing river. 

“You came back.” 

“Yes.” Talking more to the watch, and the office above me somewhere, and my own heart, I said, “I quit.” 

The End

Cover photo courtesy of Randy Auschrat under Creative Commons.