Timeout by Stephen Hilderbrand Science Fiction/Game 2001

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About the Story

"You were minding your own business, doing the work of The Computer, hard at work on the floor of Plastic Factory K, inhaling plastic fumes for a bed-slot in the increasingly hip and high-rent Alpha Complex. Pull this lever, push that button; your life had become a routine in some vast Ueberplan thought up by The Computer, the "benevolent" master of all you know.

That is, until today.

You have never been outside Alpha Complex, and have never heard stories of anyone else ever venturing beyond the elephantine walls, you have never had a thought of venturing that way.

That is, until today.

This morning, you had a vision of something strange, something unusual, but altogether beautiful. Maybe because it seemed your first independent thought, if there is such a concept, but for some reason you were overcome with the vision. As you worked diligently at your post, reaching and pulling and prying and piercing in a repetitive motion in time with the machines which had always surrounded your workdays, a piece of paper drifted to the soil against a backdrop of the most verdant green. It was the most luminous, life-affirming vision you had ever seen! The image bounced upside-down against your ocular cavity, and you fainted on the the floor of the assembly line.

What followed was a bright orange light, probably shone into your eyes by one of the foreman bots that watches the floor of the megalithic factory for any strange, unusual, unexpected happenings. You, TEND-IR-FUT, are overjoyed by this light.

You awake, only to find yourself on the floor of Plastic Factory K, your eternal nightmare..." [--blurb from Competition Aught-One]

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