+]=~

Hello again.

I hope the level of contrast I helped you pick was right for the last chapter. I'm still getting used to this format. Text only, I mean.

Did you enjoy the contrast between Jim and his narrator in the previous chapter? Please select how much you enjoyed it on the following scale:

NOT BLOODY MUCH - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - || - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THOROUGHLY ENJOYED

Oh. I just realized you can't actually move the slider. It's just made of text. Like everything in this place.

I'm sorry.

Maybe you can just select the answer you agree most with. Just drag the mouse over it and highlight it. That's it. Maybe you can even highlight it all the way to the slider, so the slider still feels important.

CHAPTER 2: The Infiltration Chapter.

THE NEAREST OFFICE BUILDING was not, in fact, abandoned. It merely appeared to be. If we take together the facts that, on the one hand, it was Sunday, and on the other, that a certain viral infection operating on a global scale (to be left unnamed, but with a suffix greater than 18 and not so great as 20) had served as a rather effective excuse for legions of people in a cross-industry movement to stay home, as an ongoing practice, from work, and to affect astonishment at the idea that an office building might henceforth be considered anything other than a musty old antiquation… along with the general decline of enterprise in Jim's metropolitan area over the past decade or so, then we arrive at what one could very reasonably interpret, from the outside, to be an utterly abandoned office building in the frame of 31450 Grantham Drive, the name of whose company, which we may as well call Yadda Yadda Yadda, Incorporated, was emblazoned in rather outmoded and tepid lettering on the side.

In fact, Y-Y-Y-Inc was still, technically, a functional facility with some sort of going business, and there were perhaps a handful of weekend employees present, but as these barely filled the whole half so well as a handful of worms could fill a tequila bottle, it was altogether practical to treat the building as though it were a convenient abandoned one. Yes, there was a gate on the lot, but there was also a rather low curb separating it from the lot adjacent, and Jim's car had good tires, didn't it? Oh. Well, all right—Jim parked in the adjacent lot, eschewing the need for a permit, and walked across. Very well. Let no one claim that Jim's very modest jump functionality had been abridged.

He approached the front door and… found it locked. Well, this won't do, will it?

Jim decided that this wouldn't do, rather. He walked around the building's periphery and discovered, in a loading bay, a small door propped open by a doorstop. As nobody was around, he made his way inside and—

"Seriously? I'm just supposed to sneak through the back ways like some rat?"

Jim was supposed, need he be reminded, to do nothing. All of this was done by him entirely of his own volition. It was his desire to rid himself, for some reason, of the transcendent level of awareness with which he had been gifted, and as he had been instructed to travel to the nearest empty office building in order to effect this purge, that was precisely what he did. It required no coercion, and indeed, no guiding hand, for Jim was a fully autonomous and resourceful adult. He superintended a building, for God's sake!

"I mean, I'm used to going in places other people aren't allowed to go," he remarked, slipping reluctantly inside. "Usually, though, I'm not gonna get in trouble if I do."

There was no realistic threat of trouble whatsoever. Did this building look like a place where badges were carefully checked, where a person's presence in the maintenance halls would be called out? Did it have the air of a place where employees would gladly rise above the churn of their ordinary duties in order to challenge people they didn't happen to recognize in accordance with some barely remembered security protocol? No. It did not. It was no such place and Jim knew it.

"Fine," he droned. "Just tell me what to do and I'll do it."

Really? Well, this was exciting. It isn't common, one must understand, for a person to ask—nay, plead!—to be led around by his own narrator. All through Jim's life and up until this moment, Jim's narrator had confined himself to relating the facts as they naturally unfolded, nothing more. It was a utilitarian function as vital as the force that makes atomic nuclei cleave together, but equally as unappreciated on a direct level. Now, though! Now, at last and at length, Jim's narrator was about to take the lead! He would relate events, and events would follow his cues! It was an exciting moment. Was everyone ready?

"Everyone is ready," Jim whined. "Okay, here's a split in the path. Which way do I go?"

The dingy cement corridor had indeed branched off into an option that, far from ancient shoe-softened gray cement, offered generation-old white linoleum as a workable alternative. It was this path that Jim chose, yes, and when he found himself in a sort of employee's junction… a place with several doors, some of which were locked and some unlocked... when Jim came to this expansive smorgasbord of juicy options... he chose to summon the lift. Er, I mean, the elevator. Yes, Jim was an American man and used exclusively American slang, like a proud denizen of the U. S. of A.

And there it comes! The light is on... pardon me, slipped tenses there—the light was on, the elevator car was on its way... and the doors opened! Very good. Jim got on the elevator. All right, now. Ahem.

When Jim got on the elevator car, he chose to press the button for floor 9.

Jim knew that by going to floor 9, he would reach the most efficient route through to the end of his story, and probably acquire a good measure of emotional peace of mind as well. Company and work ethic, prudence and good decor—all of these things would be his, were he only to go to the best of floors—floor 9.

Ah—yes. Right. There he was. And then, arriving at the ninth floor, Jim got off the elevator and... navigated out of the service corridors, passing into the resin-floored main hall… then making his way around the main loop, stopping when he got to... Room 936.

Jim. Jim! I don't mean to criticize... really, I shouldn't be speaking in the first person at all... but...

Well, Jim, you're making this too easy on me.

"Fuck. Do you want me to follow your directions or don't you?" huffed Jim, who was now standing outside the dark glass window framing the room whose white plastic numbers declared it to be number 936.

Jim would be well advised to think this over. How is a decent story supposed to result if he just follows the narrator's cues all the time? What kind of a game would The Stanley Parable have been, to say nothing of The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, if the player had simply followed the story as it was presented to them, with no decision or deviation? The most stodgy, boring sort imaginable, that's what. Barely a 'game' at all. This kind of story requires rebellion from the protagonist, or it falls apart—didn't Jim realize that?

Jim's hand was on his meaty brow. "Okay, fine. Fine. So you want me to do the opposite of whatever you say?"

My god, Jim. Have you no reservoir of creativity in your formidably sized brainpan? To do the opposite of the narrator's instructions would be functionally no different from perfect obedience. No, in order to make a story that works, he must use his judgment about when to obey and when to deviate. The ideal ratio might be something like... oh, twenty... say, twenty-five percent disobedience?

"Fine," said Jim. "Twenty-five percent of the time, I'll do something different from what you say. But you know... you've only given me about three choices so far. If I was obeying you seventy-five percent of the time, I might have easily done those three things according to instructions."

Well, yes, that was correct, viewed from a strictly mathematical perspective. But it shouldn't have needed expounding that the more choices are available, the more liberty the protagonist should take! Those first three choices were alternative-heavy! There were so many doors and rooms in this building, not to mention so many other floors Jim could have gone to! To be so obedient so early could only be characterized—and let's be frank here—as a character flaw.

Yet Jim's reluctance to accept this wisdom was plain in the lingering way he held his hands, notably unclenched, and from the way his lower jaw refused either to snap shut or to open in protest. "Whatever," he finally admitted. Whereupon he promptly tore off around the main circuit, headed for a completely random door. "Here. I'm not going where you told me to go. Happy?"

Expressly, Jim. Indubitably happy. Now why was it so—oh good lord, not that door!

"What?! What's wrong with this door?"

Well, it isn't a very nice door, now is it? Doesn't lead to much of a room, does it? Just an office, so far as I can tell. And I don't know about you, Jim, but I've rather had my fill of stories about pedestrian things like… offices and office workers.

"YOU TOLD ME TO COME TO AN OFFICE BUILDING!" the man exploded. Goodness, Jim, it was lucky there weren't any people around on the ninth floor on a Sunday due to the abject failure of the hybrid work movement! That kind of tone really isn't even remotely suitable for a work environment! And as for the substance of your… ardent objection, yes, you were told to come to an office building, but not for a story about offices. Don't you see, Jim? The office building is the paragon of the motif that is artificiality, as represented by the profusion of paths and hallways where once grew trees and… bushes. And mountains. Mountains, Jim! How can one forge a path through mountainous forests and forested mountains, like a creeper man or otherwise, and feel in the slightest constrained? You can't, that's how! Through embracing the artificial, we give ourselves clear choices and thus, and THUS, Jim, the ability to tell a clear story! And what could be more artificial than a building devoted to work, the amassment of money, a wholly artificial commodification of worth and labor? And furthermore, of all the possible buildings devoted to work, from factories to mining facilities to hypnosis-based weight loss training facilities, what building could possibly bespeak the artificiality of the abstraction that is job better than a generic office building? I ask you, what do the people even do here? Or rather, or rather, Jim asked himself: What did the people even do here? Why, there wasn't the slightest hint of a clue available from his surroundings! Something involving copiers, presumably, because yes, that was one there. Or—oh, good god, was that a fax machine!? This was the year 2022, was it not? What on earth was this benighted business that obviously saw itself as a post-pandemic labor model doing with a fax machine? Oh dear, Jim no doubt thought to himself, what an awful eyesore. Jim chose to unplug the fax machine.

Ah. No, I suppose he didn't. He… what did he do? He… stood up on top of it instead? Well, all right, Jim was disobeying his inner voice, granted, but… what did he intend to do up there? Where was this narrative leading? Was Jim going to proclaim himself the Earl of the Kingdom of Fax and start… well, he wasn't going to be doing any faxing, not from up there. It simply wasn't clear what throughline was going to develop from the fact that Jim had spontaneously started to stand on the furniture.

"Damn it," said Jim, "I'm trying to surprise you. You want me to obey you, then to disobey you, then to disobey you, but more interesting? I just can't seem to do anything that satisfies you."

Gracious. What Jim didn't seem to understand was that this was interactive fiction. In this kind of medium, it took two to tango. The poor narrator couldn't tell the story all on his own! No, Jim was going to have to help, to do his part, and perhaps if he started looking at things from the light of someone trying to spin an interesting yarn, he would have a good sense of what to do on his own and wouldn't need any instructions. Did Jim understand all of this? Well, he was off the machine, anyway. He went… poking around the doors. Trying to open an exterior window? Jim, do you really think anything good will come of that? We're on the ninth floor. Ah, and then Jim began… sorting through index cards. Oh. Well, now he was just sitting at a computer. Yes, Jim reflected—surely an exciting page-turning adventure would result from his sitting on his—and this wasn't even gratuitous defamation, just simple, literal observation—on his fat arse, doing exactly what he would have been doing anyway if he were at home?

Jim looked up at the place he imagined the voice was coming from. "What am I supposed to do?" he demanded. "Am I supposed to find a gun somewhere and shoot the place up? Keep riding elevators all day? Maybe you want me to climb down an elevator shaft? There's just not much that's fascinating to do in an empty office building! Aren't you supposed to be… creating weird passages and twist endings and having strange things happen, like in the game?"

Oh, the game. Oh certainly, what a reasonable thought! Why didn't the narrator just… snap his fingers (which he didn't have, by the way) and transform the architecture of the building itself, through nothing more than sheer power of will? For that matter, why don't you, Jim? BECAUSE THAT ISN'T POSSIBLE IN REAL LIFE, Jim! The Stanley Parable is fiction! In real life, a narrator can't just conjure up a corridor that bends six times in the same direction passing through itself, Jim! This is reality, and we are storytellers! We use what we have available to us, and we still manage to kindle the most distant recesses of the imagination!

"The office in the game, it at least had a Mind Control Facility," groused Jim. "I'm almost certain this place doesn't have one of those."

Mind Control? Mind Control? That's SCIENCE FICTION, Jim! Do you think your mind is being controlled? You're completely in charge of this train wreck you call a narrative, thank you very much. Neither I nor any vague, nebulous—oh, good grief, you've got me narrating in the first person again. Got to stop that. Ahem. There was no mind control machine, and Jim knew it very well!

"Of course not," he retorted, his bristly mustache tilting sarcastically. "Oh, and The Stanley Parable is science fiction, is it? That's the genre it fits into? What, because it's got… a lift that goes over a catwalk, and… countdown timers, and… a baby that comes out on a pole?"

No, of course The Stanley Parable as a whole wasn't science fiction. It was… metafictional commentary? No, that wasn't a real genre, was it? Magical realism? Oh, bother. It was honest-to-god Literary Fiction, Jim. Upmarket literature in a god damn executable file. Even with any text to speak of. Yes, it was a computer game, and it was literature.

"Fine. It's literature. I don't know how to make literature. I'm not a writer. I don't even know what kind of story you want me to tell."

Why not simply a story about the nature of choice, he wondered? Wasn't that good enough? Wasn't that a profound enough topic to send the synaptic impulses careening across the dance floor of ingenuity? Of course it was. The concept of choice was truly profound. It was the one and only thing capable of splintering the universe into multiple branches of itself—and yet it was a phenomenon that took place with mind-shattering regularity. Jim made at that very moment—

"Oh, did I?"

Yes, Jim did. Jim chose whether or not to… to look for… an employee breakroom, and make some coffee.

"Oh. Sure. Jim chose not to do that," said Jim, firing up—oh god. He had downloaded Steam onto the office PC and was installing The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe.

"Was wondering when you were going to notice," Jim replied, as if he were actually doing something that was smart in some way.

"I figured it might be good for something. Maybe if I can defeat you in the game, I can beat you in real life?" He shrugged like—and this isn't me saying this, Jim, this is objectively narratable fact—a moron. No, Jim could not 'defeat' his narrator by playing a computer game. There were so many problems with that idea that it wouldn't even—look, it's just a game, not reality; the narrator is never really 'defeated' in the game; you don't actually want to 'defeat' me in the first place, you wouldn't even know where to start—and most salient of all, THAT IS A DIFFERENT NARRATOR. I am not Stanley's narrator. You are not Stanley! I have simply taken inspiration from the narrator in the game in having decided to speak directly to you and try my chops at making an exciting game of my own. I was inspired by the narrator in the game you so enjoyed, but he is not me. Are you planning to play to the Skip Button Ending? That will have no effect whatsoever on me. Strike that—the only effect it would have on Jim's narrator would be to bore him silly. And Jim wasn't sure he would like the narrator when he was silly.

"Whoa," said Jim. "Okay, no, I was actually going to try the infinite hole."

It was the bottomless hole, not the infinite hole. And it wasn't actually bottomless. And that would be ridiculous, because there was no point whatsoever in playing long enough to get to the expo just to fritter in order to away Jim's valuable hours toggling through various skins and music cuts for lord knew how long. What was Jim hoping to accomplish?

"I was hoping to change my perspective," said Jim.

Ahh… well. That was… actually one of the wittier things Jim had managed to conjure up during his brief acquaintance with his own narrator. In what way, exactly, was Jim hoping to change his perspective?

Jim opened his mouth.

And, of course. Nothing. Well, if Jim had absolutely no ideas, it would seem the higher agents of fate would have to take things in hand. Ahem.

Jim was a corporate spy. He was rifling through the office computer, not to play a frivolous video game, but to find information on activities the company, Yadda Yadda Yadda or whatever its name is, was taking that his employers disapproved of. It was vital that he find… the list of passwords.

"Passwords for who?"

For whom? For the clients, Jim, the clients! Jim had to find the clients' passwords so that their accounts could be… hacked into, and their transactions… stopped. Their numbers would be stolen, their portfolios upended… and all trust in Yadda Yadda Yadda, Inc. would be forever lost.

"Fine. I'm looking. But I don't think I'm going to find any password lists. This is just… this is some sort of usage data? I don't even know what—"

The usage data! Jim needed the usage data in order to… figure out how much his competitors used… what is it usage data for, Jim?

"I don't know. Programs? How much different departments are using different pieces of software, I think?"

Ah yes. He needed to know how much his competitors were using their software so that his employers could… have a better sense of industry averages for this sort of thing and better direct their own work priorities. Oh, I don't know, Jim. Help me out here. Why did you want the usage data?

"Beats me. You wanted it first."

Jim, if this story is going to be of any use, it has to mean something. We can't just wallow around randomly in an office, standing on fax machines and pressing elevator buttons and expect that it's all going to amount to something worthwhile! There needs to be a cause behind it. You do understand the idea of a cause, don't you?

Jim shut his eyes. "My cause right now is getting you to leave me alone. So I can have my fucking life back."

…Well there you go! Freedom. Independence. What every redblooded American man strives for! Never mind that Jim was once again going to be very, very lonely when his beloved narrator was gone—never mind what he was actually going to do with his independence… what mattered was that Jim would have the right to listen, or to not listen to strange voices in his head, according to his whim at any given moment! And it was for that right that Jim fought. It was for that blessed trove of sweet independence that Jim… ah, are you printing out the usage data?

"I figured I might as well have a solid object to hold onto."

Excellent thinking, Jim! Yes, Jim knew he could never fight his way past the formidable Y-Y-Y corporate firewall. A physical copy would be essential! Grabbing the paper from the printer, he swiftly made his way back to the elev—oh, all right, he conscientiously logged out of the system first, waiting for the user login screen to appear—really, whoever's computer this is should never have left it unlocked in the first place—and THEN made his way back to the elevator for the next stop in his audacious espionage mission. Once there, he pressed the—oh.

"Ah, hello," said a woman in the elevator, oh god, oh god. "I don't think I… know you?"

"Uhh… yeah," stumbled Jim, who was about to come up with a very convincing lie for why he was here. Jim. JIM. Stop staring. Convince us that you are meant to be where you are. Sell the story. Be the story! Without the story, Jim, you are nothing!

Jim, who had definitely spent the last few seconds thinking of an extremely convincing explanation and not just staring blankly at the woman in the elevator, opened his half-open mouth the rest of the way and said,

A/N: The author would like to thank his thousands of readers for their copious outpouring of support: in particular, to name a few, CharlesCrescendo91 for patient nights pacing the floor and brainstorming over verte absinthe; rejected_Reindeer for endless suggestions and revisions; arhpoignbat for unflagging moral support and more than a few trips to the sushi bar for Happy Hour; Steve and Vera Tourtellotte for their very warm and unexpected gifts of fan art; BuzzyBoddy for offering to translate the story into German and Finnish; Sonny_Mackerel for beta and gamma reading; and jenstratford_ for her steadfast maintenance of the Jim Parable Continuity Bible. He would like to thank all of these people, but sadly, he cannot, as they do not exist. This story has no comments to date and practically no one has read it. The author is a delusional egomaniac. I just thought it bore saying.

+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~+]=~...