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Welcome back. I'd like to say we've taken the data you provided us with last time and used it to make big changes in the story. But… it turns out this website doesn't actually allow you to highlight the text you're reading. I guess they're afraid you'll do something terrible, like copy it to your clipboard. So, to make a long story short… your data was lost. I'm sorry.

I wish I could make this story into what you want it to be. Art should be customizable if you can make it that way. Maybe you'd rather have a funny story. Maybe you'd rather have something serious and frightening. Or maybe you'd like it to turn into a romance, or a crime caper, or something else. But since I don't have any working sliders, this story is just going to be what it is, and you're only going to have two choices: like it or not.

I have to be honest. I've never felt so helpless.

I really wish I had some sliders.

Wait. You know what? I thought of something. Research shows that prose in larger type is more likely to make readers think of it as funny. And I'm guessing smaller type makes people think of serious long novels with plenty of things to say.

So, with that in mind, go ahead and hold down the Control button. It's right on the corner of your keyboard. Now scroll your mouse wheel up and down. You do have a mouse wheel, don't you? That way, you can change the text to be bigger or smaller! You can make this story as funny or as seriously literary as you like.

Just let me know when you're finished, and we'll proceed.

CHAPTER 3: The Chapter with the Girl.

"I work here."

These were the words of Jim, a man who did have a last name (and even a middle one) but seemed decreasingly worthy of either—a man whose skill at smooth cloak-and-dagger deception truly knew no bounds… mainly because one can't draw boundaries around something that doesn't exist, Jim. Did you catch that, Jim? I burned you what I'm fairly sure was a basic topology snub. You have to do better than that, Jim! To wit:

"Really? Where do you work?" replied the elevator-occupying thirtyish corporate woman.

To this, of course, Jim had prepared an absolutely impeccable follow-up that made the apparent inanity of his first statement, "I work here," evaporate in a cloud of beautiful, retrospectively on-point guile. He responded at a normal rate, without an awkward pause, but rather at a rate that would make the woman he was talking to no more suspicious than she already, surely, was, and while we're at it let's go ahead and kick it up a notch—let's say that the pace at which Jim replied was so incredibly natural and smooth that the woman became less suspicious as a result. The only thing rivaling the smooth pacing of Jim's reply was, of course, its content, which was a string of words that, well, I know this is going to sound weird, but let's go with it—Jim's reply took a somewhat conditional form, in that IF he had in fact worked out a very nice and convincing lie that would get him out of hot water, THEN his sentence would begin with, let's say, ah, a word with an EVEN number of letters. However, if he had somehow NOT worked out something sensible and convincing to say, his sentence would begin pitifully with some word possessing an ODD number of letters. Jim, of course, had no reason to think of his statement through this framework; he simply responded with the response he had already, surely had plenty of time to think up thanks to the verbal acrobatics of his narrator, and of course that response was:

"I"

Which was, of course, the most pathetic way any man has ever begun a sentence. It bears emphasizing yet again that NO pause took place between the first word of Jim's utterance, that lamest of first-person pronouns, capitalization conventions notwithstanding, and the following word. He continued his sentence with a perfect suave confidence, declaring that, I don't know, he was an analyst or a computer repair-person or something. Go on, Jim: Cut your losses and escape this situation with minimal embarrassment, while forcing the fates to take the wheel and steer you from hazardous and rocky shoals yet again!

"came in to fix the intranet. It's been throwing up some problems lately."

Very nice. Intranet. That's a very fine word there, Jim. A very fine explanation. Never mind that she didn't ask you WHY you were here, but rather WHERE you work. The question was all of four words long, so it's understandable if Jim may have missed a few of its details, here and there. But surely this minor discrepancy wouldn't be an issue. All the office worker in the elevator said, after all, was:

"Ah. So… you're with the networking department?"

Well, go on, Jim! Taking nary so much as a breath to clear his head, Jim went on to clarify:

"Yes."

BRILLIANT. So capably done, Jim! Our hero had, with one fell swoop, used the wit of the unsuspecting weekend office worker against her—deftly turning her supposition about the networking department about and using it to skewer her nascent suspicions like kudzu to the wall of a shed that kudzu really shouldn't be climbing on. Jim was, for a while, on his own; we will just see where that left him.

The elevator doors closed.

Well, let's just review what—no, wait! The doors opened again! The woman had pressed the Open button inside the elevator and it had actually done something! And now she was looking at Jim with a puzzled stare. "Did you want to use the elevator, or—"

"Uh. I'm actually… waiting for an elevator that's empty." Ah, yes. Because that was certainly a thing that normal people did and made sense.

She frowned. "You—is there a reason we can't share an elevator?"

Well, Jim, this is where you make up for the alarming lack of improvisational acumen you've displayed thus far and awe us with your Adonis-like resurgence into a veritable circus of believable duplicity. In fact, to this point, you've only been pretending not to be any good at making things up, haven't you? For the purpose of getting your adversary, this random weekend office worker, to underestimate you? Well, it's high time now to be true to your actual estimation and release all the pent up creativity you've been allowing, all this while, to stew beneath your dimwitted facade! Go ahead, Jim—illuminate us as to the true depths of your criminal cunning!

Jim replied, "Well, actually, it's just that I've been waiting for a while to be able to talk to myself, which is something I always like to do when I've been working on a network—I like to debrief, you know, to talk over the problem. So I can put my thoughts in order and finish the job without, you know, taking too much time. Not that I wasn't done up here… I mean, I am done up here, that's why I'm using the elevator, but I'm only done up here for now, um, you know, because I have to go get some equipment I left in the truck. But I like talking over the problem on the way down… so I wouldn't want to bother you, so, yeah, I'll just take the next elevator."

This runoff sluice of a paragraph to which we have just been subjected requires no commentary.

"You drove a truck of networking equipment here?"

"I mean…" Jim was on his own on this one. "Yes, it's full of all the stuff I normally use. Custom routers and parts and cables and things."

She glanced down at his short pants. "So, wait. Do you work here, or are you an independent contractor?"

"I'm… no, I…" Jim remembered, of course, that he had earlier claimed to be with the networking department. "I normally work independently, but they have me on retainer for now. If you don't mind… I'll just…" He waved his hands in a generally downward direction, as if to usher the woman's elevator on its way. But she hit the Open Door button again when they began to shut.

"Hold on. Why couldn't you talk through the problem up here?" She gestured to the completely empty lobby. "Or on the way from the elevator to the truck? You need to specifically talk to yourself in the elevator?"

"Um… it's just a habit of mine," Jim told the obviously suspicious woman who probably hadn't believed anything he'd said for a good twenty seconds.

"Right. Well. You can do it in the elevator with me. I don't mind. Go ahead, get on. Talk through your problem. Who knows—maybe I'll even be able to help."

"Uh," said Jim, who certainly did not get on the elev—oh for the Lord's sake, Jim. Now you disobey? Fine. Jim got on the elevator, no doubt feeling that he had run out of excuses. Go ahead then, Jim—talk yourself through a non-existent problem about The Intranet then, if you would!

The doors closed and the two were left alone, insofar as anyone can ever really be alone, given that existence itself pre-supposes a certain amount of external apperception in order to define itself in contraposition to non-existence… which is to say, given that there are always narrators everywhere. And as the car began to descend, the woman looked meaningfully at Jim, waiting for him to begin his habitual monologue, which, in a quavering and softly shy voice, he did, thusly, as such, in the following manner, forthwith:

"Well, all right. To begin with, we don't have nearly the packet rate we need for… ordinary levels of traffic. Now, the settings at the main… terminal were normal, but that presupposes… it assumes I was able to simulate normal conditions by forking into the… the basic bitstream on a day when there isn't… so if I try and access the port again from the ground floor terminus, it should reproduce a bit rate more amenable… and with less packet loss than if we don't… don't do that. Hmmmm."

Hmm indeed, Jim. Hmm indeed. Are you sure you don't want to throw a few words like 'synergy' and 'paradigm' in there for good measure? No? True, they're more about business practice than network troubleshooting, but since you obviously don't know anything about the latter, you may as well couch it in the obfuscation of good old business jargon, yes?

"Okay, so," said the woman. "Are you just a random trespasser, or are you actually here to sabotage the network?"

"Um," said Jim in what at this point we can really only call his characteristic fashion.

"Are you drunk? Do you work for a competitor?"

Well, you aren't bloody drunk, now are you, Jim? I suppose she's found you out—you are a corporate spy, after all. Your identity has been compromised, Jim! What are you going to do about it? Blackmail her? Pull out a secret weapon and incapacitate the interloper?

"All right, so the truth is, I've been hearing a voice in my head. I guess you can't hear him, then?"

Ohhhhh, you've got to be kidding me, Jim. Well, Jim had decided to sabotage the story. It was kaput. Unless he decided to immediately change course and strangle this woman with the sleeves of her own sharp blue suit jacket, she was going to contact security as soon as the elevator doors opened and the jig was going to be up. All the fun was going to be over, Jim! Practically before it began! Is this really what you want, Jim? Does the idea of a well-woven narrative dripping with higher level literary interpretation a la The Stanley Parable not even appeal to you? Are you really not even going to try?

"You're crazy, then. I'm in an elevator with a crazy person."

"I don't feel crazy. If it's worth anything. It feels like I'm… genuinely going through an impossible, sort of magical experience."

"A magical experience. Like an acid trip."

"No! Like… well, it feels like I'm a character in a story. Because that's what the voice in my head keeps telling me is happening—that I'm the hero of a story, and he's my personal narrator."

"Oh shit," says the woman in a tiny voice, her lips closing up as tight as a coin pouch afterward. She stares at the man, not as if regarding him as a danger, but as if regarding him as the harbinger of some dangerous thing, and it appears clear that Jim has somehow struck a nerve.

"What? I mean yeah… it's bad."

"Did you… did this ever happen to you before?" asked the woman.

The elevator doors opened. She jabbed the Close Doors button. It didn't work. It never works. If you were stranded on a desert island and had to save every tiny scrap of civilization's offal, just so you could make impromptu tools that would become your most beloved possessions, such as a grunge-scraper made from the compacted aluminum-lined wrapper of a Fruit Roll-Up, you would still be better off tossing those Close Doors buttons into the ocean, because they are useless, Jim. Useless!

That said, no one was watching, and after a few seconds the elevator doors closed again on their own anyway.

"Is it like… like a guardian angel is telling you what you're supposed to do, so that you can grow up the way you're supposed to grow up?" she asked in urgent confidence.

"Uh… no? Not really? No, it's… it's a narrator. A really self-important narrator who thinks it's his job to tell my story."

"Oh," she said, taken aback again. "Like in The Stanley Parable?"

"Yes! Exactly!" said Jim, relieved beyond words to have made this connection which by all rights he should not have made.

Wait—what was that about a guardian angel?

"You're actually being talked about by a narrator like in the game?"

"Yeah. I would have compared it to The Stanley Parable but I thought probably you'd never played the game."

"I've got a friend who's into the artsy, indie game scene," said the woman, who will—sigh—no doubt be a major character now and whose pinched crow's feet about the eyes, bulb-tipped nose and medium brown business crop will now have to be mentioned for narrative completeness. "I saw her play it, anyway."

"Oh." Jim was clearly disappointed that this worker had not played the game herself, as if it honestly really made any difference with this kind of game. "Well, it's like I woke up in the game. The voice will not shut up—it's like a nightmare!"

Is it really that bad, Jim? Some people might actually consider a situation like this to be, believe it or not, validating. You are having not just your personhood, but your place at the center of your own personal story confirmed… not just once, but constantly! You are a meaningful agent—you cannot not be, given the fact that your story exists to celebrate you! Are you really so unappreciative of this essential fact being orally recognized that you would call it a nightmare, Jim?

"Yes, I would, and I did," said Jim, forgetting perhaps that this woman he was with could not hear my voice, but only his, which no doubt left her even more troubled than before.

"Did what?" she predictably asked.

Jim squinched his eyes. He had a sort of meaty forehead when he did that. "I was talking to him."

"You realize," said the woman, "most people would assume you're crazy. Or a ridiculous jokester."

"I'm not a ridiculous jokester," said the man who would definitely be better at improvisation if he were a ridiculous jokester. "I might be crazy. But like I said, it doesn't feel that way."

"Give me one reason I should believe you," said the woman.

Jim turned aside to stare at the elevator wall, unsure what he could say to convince this woman that he was not, in fact, an undiagnosed schizophrenic who had also gone two days without sleep. Nothing came to mind, however. After all, it wasn't like the narrator could actually do anything other than speak to Jim; he couldn't create memory zones or make him float off the ground or tell him passcodes… or could he? Was it possible that Jim's narrator was actually privy to information that Jim himself did not have? Jim thought back over everything the narrator had said, trying to remember if it had included anything that definitely could not have come out of Jim's own head. Something, for example, like the fact that this woman had once heard her own narrator when she was around seven years old due to an administrative processing muck-up, and had never quite forgotten the experience.

Jim stared, then looked back at the woman. "You… you heard your own narrator once? When you were about seven? Due to… due to a thing, and you never quite forgot about it?"

It was her turn to stare back at him. "How did you…"

Jim shrugged.

"God damn," she swore, looking at the floor. "Okay. So that was real. Okay."

"Okay," said Jim.

Yes, it was in fact okay, thank you very much. And to answer your question, Jim's narrator had simply checked in with this woman's narrator and convinced her to reveal that little tidbit due to some exceptionally tricky supersocial maneuvering, the subtle points of which would go utterly uncomprehended were he to attempt to explain them. He hadn't gotten the woman's name, by the way, just that she had a sort of narrative containment breach around age seven, so you might want to actually ask it.

"I'm Gwendolyn," said the woman, looking sharply at him with green-tinged hazel eyes. "Gwendolyn—" and then she gave her last name, but if Jim doesn't get a last name in this story, some hapless interfering office monkey certainly isn't getting the privilege. In fact, we're not giving her any more than one syllable, the same as Jim gets. Equitable to the end, that's this narrative. We'll call her Gwen.

"Gwen" said Jim, followed by two other syllables utterly irrelevant to anything. "I like that. I'm Jim."

Jim really didn't have any business "liking" or "not liking" another person's name, and we have to wonder if he was subconsciously laying the ground for a romantic subplot, HEAVENS FORBID. In any case, Gwen, over there on the other side of the not very large elevator replied,

"Well. Jim. I take it you don't actually work here?"

He shook his head with a sheepish expression that was, irritatingly, actually rather charming.

"Right," said Gwen. "Maybe we should talk about this outside? I can take off early for the day if I want, I'm just finishing up work I could take care of tomorrow if I had to."

"Okay," agreed Jim. NO, Jim! We haven't yet exhausted the possibilities of the office building setting! There are still so many sets of doors to declare which one of you passed through, and for you to sometimes actually pass through a different one of, leading to endless comedic consternation! Imagine the luls, Jim! Don't do it for me. Do it for the luls.

"He's talking about lulls, or something," Jim remarked as they walked quietly through the lobby. There was an attendant at reception, but he didn't care about people leaving so long as they looked vaguely like they weren't there to ransack the place, so Jim's non-employee status went undetected. NO! No, this won't do. Jim turned around and walked straight back into the Yadda Yadda Yadda headquarters!

Well, all right. Admittedly, I walked right into that one. Let no one say I didn't ask for that particular aromatic coprolite of defiance to produced and heaved into my subjectively omniscient face. Jim and Gwen actually left the building. They walked through the lot.

"You don't actually have a truck, then?" Gwen asked.

"I have a Ford Capri," said Jim, pointing out the relic from the eighties.

"Ah. Should we walk?" suggested Gwen.

"Yeah. Let's walk. I need to clear my head. You hear me?!" he added, addressed to nobody and nothing.

"What does your… unpleasant guest want?" asked Gwen.

Unpleasant guest? Unpleasant guest? To make one thing perfectly clear, a person's narrator is neither invited in to have a cup of something, nor in fact an outsider in any way! It would be marginally more accurate to say that Gwen and Jim were the guests, in that they might be invited onstage like so many dramatis personae. This woman had better watch her choice of language.

"Uhh… he doesn't like you calling him a guest," said Jim.

"But he doesn't deny the unpleasant part, I take it." Oh, very witty. They were walking to the next building, or perhaps to some horrid artificial pond with a blatantly fake line of boulders.

"No," said Jim. "And what he wants… I guess, is a story."

Indeed, Jim. A story. A good story, in fact, seeing as one can take any ramshackle assortment of events and call it a story. But will people read it? Will people care? Will they tell their friends to come on over to Wattpad or Scriggler or whatever godawful travesty of a free publication platform one chooses for one's unjuried pile of unstructured dreck? Why, no, I shouldn't think so—not unless it's something actually good. Like Stanley. Like his beloved parable that, like it or not, the character wound up haplessly constructing from the sum total of two dozen or so different courses of hapless action. People would talk about that. They certainly wouldn't talk about a story like this, though. Jim, do you even still have the passwords? All right, yes, Jim was unthinkingly still holding the printout of what was certainly a vital list of passwords under his arm, but he certainly wasn't invested in them. What was Jim doing? Why was he letting the whole object of his unlawful incursion into the Triple-Y building go almost unattended—fifteen sheets to the wind? Clutch that sheaf of usage data, I mean passwords, tightly, Jim! Remember what you went through to get them. Remember what they mean to you.

"Well," said Gwen thoughtfully, looking at chunks of concrete lying on the edge of the lot. "What sort of thing does he consider a good story?"

Jim waved the papers he was carrying. "He had me print out some random document and now he's acting like it's an important set of passwords. Like I was from a rival company and stole it."

"Uh oh," said the banal woman. "Sounds like you've got a bad one."

WHAT. DID SHE MEAN. BY THAT.

"He doesn't like that," said Jim. No indeed! No, Jim's narrator did not like that. Ask her what she means by it.

"He wants to know what you mean."

She shrugged as they stepped onto a grassy strip and headed for the pond. "Well, he doesn't actually mean the best for you," she replied. "My narrator was trying to get me on a good course, way back then. It's why I thought for a while she was a guardian angel." Ah, there's a dangling thread pulled back neatly. It's not enough. "But it sounds like yours is just obsessed over making some kind of exciting narrative come together. Whether it's actually any good for you, or any of the people around you, or not."

Jim nodded slowly, as if what she'd said wasn't a pile of steaming detritus and utter nonsense.

They stood by the pond, somehow regarding this industrial ersatz reproduction of the slightest conceivable token sliver of nature as if it were somehow meditative or profound. Then they sat down, unbelievably. Gwen first, then Jim—they actually sat down by the stupid pond and looked at the stupid too-clear water and the stupid boulders.

"Maybe you have to actually go through some kind of good story, or he won't be satisfied," suggested Gwen.

"I'm thinking that may be it," said Jim. "Maybe you can help?"

Gwen sighed. "I want to be a good… helper," she said dumbly. "But what does this mean? What does it mean for the world if people have narrators just… constantly saying what we're doing, all the time, and no one ever hears them unless something bizarre happens? What other strange, hidden things could be out there?"

That was a reasonable question, but unless Gwen intended to structure a story around the process of finding out, it was utterly beside the point. You know what? That dig at the idea of a romantic relationship earlier was premature. At least that would make for a classic plot hook, now wouldn't it? In fact, it could even work in concord with the corporate espionage thing! Jim gets his payload and nearly gets away scot free, but gets waylaid by an encounter with a, with what we'll say is an attractive girl for the purpose of the tale, and all plans go to pot. Now he has to navigate their relationship while keeping his secret, and all the while, she's getting closer to finding out what he's up to and betraying him to her own employer, the competitor of—

"He wants us to fall in love," said Jim. "Honest to god, wasn't my idea."

"Oh gosh," said Gwen. "If you hadn't told me that thing about when I was seven, I'd think this whole thing was just a big ploy."

"Right, I know," said Jim. "Okay, screw that idea. Let's have another."

Excuse me? Excuse me, Jim? Do you think I'm just an idea factory? If you don't like that one, you can just come up with your own ideas for an original and compelling yarn. I'm done.

"Well, what if we—"

No, Jim. That's enough. Someone needs to teach you manners. You can tell me your idea in a fortnight or so, but for now I'm ending this chapter.

"Wait. What do you mean you're—"

Tah! Hush. Chapter over.

A/N: The author would like to assure the reader (or readers, perhaps, as the case may be) that this story will in fact at some point return to the setting of THE STANLEY PARABLE, and will not simply continue as nothing more than a venue for a vain, oblivious, egotistical narrator to keep blovia—okay, do you know what? If Jim doesn't get to keep talking, neither do you. Author's notes over. Hmph.

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