Katie One Shot: The Day Craig Caught My Alias
At Cherry Pie LLC, nothing ever ran entirely aboveboard—not in the workroom, and certainly not in the field labs where the boundary between virtual, astral, and physical reality was thin as mist. My job was to train clients whose incarnations hadn’t rolled the highest stats—a little less vision here, a little less dexterity there. We didn’t call it “disability” in this world; the official term was lessability. Sometimes it was coded in your virtual gear, sometimes in your astral chart, sometimes right down to your bones.
Craig was the one they called when the interface gear wouldn’t sync, when an avatar glitched or a controller wouldn’t map to someone’s reach. He could repair anything—hardware, software, sometimes even a bad mood. He moved through the corridors like a friendly ghost, all quiet presence and offhand brilliance.
One afternoon, I was running orientation for a trio of new arrivals—one with a missing hand, one with a drifting sense of direction, one whose voice barely registered in the virtual. I defaulted to my “field alias” without thinking. “Just call me Katie,” I said, spinning up a virtual noteboard, smoothing over the slip with practiced ease.
Craig was in the back corner, calibrating a virtual touch glove. He didn’t say anything until the others left. Then he rolled his chair over, all easy grin and knowing eyes.
“Which one is it really? You got a whole shelf of aliases, or just the one for today?”
For a second I froze. No one at work had ever caught me switching names—at least not out loud. I waited for the wrong kind of joke, or the usual “You hiding from someone?”
Instead, Craig just winked. “Don’t worry. I used to do the same thing. At my last shop, I ran three different tags just to keep the data miners off my scent.”
He handed me a slip of paper—actual paper, retro even for Cherry Pie. “Signal me here if you ever need a safe relay,” he said. “Alias or no alias.”
That was the day everything changed. From then on, whenever I needed a new protocol, a second opinion, or a gear fix that came with plausible deniability, Craig was my first ping. We traded tips and survival stories—how to code your field to read as “neutral,” how to rewrite access logs, how to train someone with a lessability so well the world would never notice.
In the Railroad, we’d call that day a resonance lock: two people, same frequency, finding each other by the shape of their caution and the sound of their story.
And as every client left with a little more freedom—and every alias of mine grew stronger, not weaker—I knew I’d found a co-conspirator, mentor, and friend who’d see through every mask, and never use that knowledge against me.
—Katie
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