Free The Artificial Mirage by T. Warwick

“You can take your foot off of my neck now,” he gasped.
    “Just relax while I watch you die,” Cameron told him.
    Elvis groaned.
    “He will pay. I can guarantee,” Harold said.
    “Yeah? Well, I’m not his damn loan officer. It’s time for me to go to work. So I’m going to take my foot off of your neck, and you’re going to act normal, right?”
    “Right,” Elvis answered.
    “OK.”
    “You old fuckers have a way of being silly at the wrong time, you know. Thanks for the drink. You owe me, Harold.”
    “Yes,” Harold said.
    “Y’all have a nice day now.” Cameron left and walked out the front door without closing it and slid into his car. He took the car off automatic and peeled out toward his work zone.
    He found a space close to the building where his team was meeting in a conference room. He walked through the color-coded door of his building’s zone: blue. One of the Indian janitors was standing with a tray full of coffees, and he grabbed one and sipped it as he alighted the concrete stairs withglossy blue handrails past Chinese mumbling in Mandarin. His mind had begun readjusting to the reality of a world without women. He walked down the hallways of glossy paint and carpets and concrete and through his work area, where he clocked in.
    Leaning over the Saudi employees as they shouted and joked in Arabic, he checked the pump gauges and pressure monitors and brought up the status reports of his AR assistants as they stood by in a circle around him to answer questions with blank expressions on their cartoon faces—depictions of real men were not permitted under Saudi law. In his last assignment a decade before, he might have been making calculations or helping to decide on the optimal method of extraction of a particularly hidden or difficult-to-reach area. Now, it was his AR assistants who communicated this information to him. It was AR assistants who were always there, nagging and berating and explaining things to him in the same monotone speech. None of them were female. Sometimes, he came close to feeling compelled to tell the laborers that he was just following the instructions given him by the AR assistants. He’d stop himself just before opening his mouth with the knowledge of the chaos that would be created if he disrupted the leadership hierarchy. He pretended to lead, and they pretended to work; it was very symbiotic. He was an advisor, so he continued to advise. He waved his hand through pages of gauges that were projected from the swiveling lamp projected from the ceiling. None of the infrastructure was broadcast in AR to avoid terrorist hackers. All of the gauges had fail-safe systems, but he was there along with the Saudis for that anomalous situation that fell outside of the realm of variability. At lunchtime, an alert went off because one of the Saudis had taken a long lunch, so he had to make a few quick calls to the other zones to make sure that nothing had exploded from too much pressure. A visual alarm came across his line of sight in pulsing red light. It was time for him to assemble his team. Back in the United States, a crew monitoring a pipeline consisted of a team of guys in an office working dispatch for teams of robots patrolling the pipeline. After decades of Saudization, they had teams of twenty men, and they were expected to expand in the coming years. Cameron welcomed new team members by telling them they were on welfare and they didn’t even know it.
    He met his team in a light-blue conference room. The rules of conduct were projected on the conference table, along with a list of their names. As they came in one by one, they placed their ID cards on the projection onthe table to be recognized by the familiar “thank you” in a male voice as their names disappeared from the list. By seven o’clock everyone was sitting around in the swiveling conference room chairs waiting for Salem, the only remaining name on the list.
    “You’re late, Salem,” Cameron said as he