High on Ron’s enthusiasm, I walked around the bar trying to recruit more fighters to our cause. The response I got taught me a valuable life lesson. Want to find someone who will stay with you and work themselves to the bone? Don’t look in a bar. Bar Bituate’s patrons were mostly drunk. They’d been in their cups for a good long while, and they had no plans of walking back out to the city. A lot of them couldn’t have walked if they’d wanted.
Feeling dejected and overwhelmed, I thought of having a drink or seven myself, but the clock was ticking. I didn’t have time to work myself into a stupor. And I surely didn’t have time to work myself out of one.
Back on the street, we all received another system message. It was the last thing I wanted to see.
Breaking Announcement! You have been invited to an official company meeting. All fights have been paused for the duration of the meeting. Your full attention is expected, nay demanded.
As you probably know, I’m Dag Hamorsmyth, CEO, owner, and resident yogini of BioZone. Well, I’m not a practicing yogini (yet), but you should look into practicing Vinyasa Yoga. It’s optimized my energy and balanced my chakras.
You’re likely familiar with my work nearly two decades ago developing the crypto platform ConCoin, a coin devoted to ComicCons. And I’m sure you’ve followed BioZone’s development of a rocket system that will break the earth out of its orbit so we can travel as a terran system to visit new worlds. Excelsior, my friends!
Now, you might be thinking, why is the great, handsome Dag talking to us? Isn’t he busy and important? Well, yes, I am busy, very busy, and very important. I’m the CEO of seven companies, after all! I meant to address you sooner, but I got entangled in MicroNukes’ board meetings over regulatory red tape. But let me get down to business. By virtue of entering into BioZone City, you are now BioZone employees. And let me tell you, your biometrics are unacceptable. I’m looking at them now—and just, no. This is incredibly poor. And poor biometrics equates to poor ratings. I don’t have to tell you that the ratings for BioZone City are not hitting the levels we expect. To drive viewers to BioZone City we’re going to amp things up. Optimize. Optimize. Optimize. We’ll be following data-driven strategies to get on an exponential growth trajectory. But for all we’ve done to make BioZone City great, it’s not going to work unless we’ve got collective buy-in. That means we’ll be watching you. It also means you’ll be watching you. We’re giving each player access to live data so you can track your performance. And no more ignoring system messages!
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I’ll leave you with this. You are expendable. If you don’t play our game, someone else will. But partner with us, and reap the rewards. And remember, Stay in the Zone!
Thank you for attending. The meeting has ended.
“Biometrics. Optimization. None of that sounds good,” said Trix.
“You guys looking at the live data page?” asked Ron.
“Yeah.” Was I ever. It looked like this.
Feed views: 25,012
Profile clicks: 473
Quadrant player ranking: 322/430
Betting total: $4,058
Action Figures sold: 9
“I’ve got a betting total of over $35,000!” said Ron. And it’s going up!”
“What’s your player ranking?” I asked.
“389. What’s yours? I bet you’re in the top 10.”
“I’m not. Other players had a head start.”
WILL: The betting can only be about one thing, right?
TRIX: Correct. Not that I’ll miss the smell, but I think BioZone has it in for Ron.
