Lady Red was having an excellent day: Her project was going to finish on time, now that she shook off those meddling managers in Legal. She lengthens her stide, takes a little hop-skip and jumps headfirst for the slide at the end of the hall. With a "Wheeeeeeeeee!", she plunges into the ball pit in the lobby of Meta's headquarters and makes for the front door. The little flippy plastic arms of the waist-high security cordon don't open in time and stop her short. A stray ball-pit ball slowly rolls past her, on through the gate.
"Whoops", bleep bloop, she swipes her card again, but still the gate is closed. A receptionist spots her and walks up. "Let me try", they say. bleep bloop, "Hm", they frown, let me take a look at this". As the receptionist walks back to the front desk, a man wearing a well-fitted suit and a snazzy gold wristwatch comes up to them and says something. The receptionist walks back to their post and the man approaches Lady Red.
"Ma'am", he says, "you're going to have to come with us".
"What the heck!", thinks Lady Red, "What on Earth could this be about? It almost feels like I'm in big trouble. What did I do?". Lady Red thinks back over what she'd been doing the past few days. It seems like she hasn't done anything specifically bad, but who knows if she did something she shouldn't have? This place sure has a lot of rules. Maybe she left a door open, or maybe she hadn't noticed the "from" field of an email and while she thought she'd been sending pictures of her pet lizard to her manager, she'd been sending them to a scammer in Croatia. Maybe she'd introduced a security hole into the Occulus Operating System and a hacker group on 4chan had given a thousand people vertigo at the same time, and now other groups were trying to beat their record. It really could be anything.
It didn't take long, turns out that the guy she befriended on her Buddhist Meditation chat server is a journalist, and had published the internal Meta email she'd forwarded him. It was just too hard to describe their genuis UI for a 3D Space Battle System based on orbital mechanics! She had had to send screenshots to get the point accross.
Of course she couldn't talk her way out of it. Their servers had logged the email and you could tell at a glance that she'd written it. Of course, that didn't stop them from briefly dedicating a few thousand dollar's worth of GPU compute time to training a fresh Neural Net to recognize her writing style and declare with 96% certainty that she was the author. Gotta give the interns something to do. If she had tried to leave the office an hour later they probably would have gotten it up to 90.7%
She was probably fired. "Welp", she says, and then takes a deep breath. Breathing is so important! She takes another, on the plus side, all that studying meditation is going great. Of course, she'd been enjoying this job, and now whoevever replaces her might endanger the project roadmap! She has to remind herself that that isn't important anymore. Apparently lawyers need to be consulted, and her boss is working remote from Croatia this week (weird coincidence) and can't officially fire her until tomorrow.
So, she goes home and does nothing but stress about whether she's fired or not. Is there something she can say to her manager in order to get out of it? Maybe she can pre-emptively confess to her skip-level manager and get rewarded for her honesty? Or would that be digging the hole deeper? She tosses and turns all night, wracked with anxiety.....
.....And then her alarm goes off and she wakes up. "I must have finally fallen asleep! Ugh, I hope I'm not fired". Who even cares about the UI for the VR space game, it doesn't even have a name. It doesn't even, wait, wait. Meta isn't developing a new space game. It was all a dream! Come to think of it, she has no idea how a game like that would even work.
Still, the details are super vivid. She posts in the #random channel of her Bhuddism chat server:
Guys, I had such a weird dream last night......
This launches a two hour argument over whether the game will be any fun, as everyone speculates on how the battle system must work, based on Lady Red's hasty sketches of the screenshots from her dream. The conversation is so good, she almost decides to work from home that day, but at the last minute decides to drive to the office up at noon because they're serving Wagyu Beef in the cafeteria today and a food blogger is going to give a lecture on why it's the best.
Having had a predictably good day at work, she took the stairs down to the lobby because unlike her dreams, the ball pit is way over on the other side of the building and she parks on this side. As she walks up to the security barrier and passes right through, she lets out her breath: a small part of her brain had been worried that maybe she was stuck in a time loop. Smiling to herself, embarassed of her foolishness, she doesn't notice the two guys coming up to her until it's too late. They grab her and quickly push her through a nondescript door right off the lobby.
Things happened too quickly for her to react, she was just kind of stunned. Had she just been assaulted? She turns around and grabs the door she just came through but it's locked. No window either. She's in a normal office room, with just two chairs and a table. Another door behind the man sitting accross the table.
"Sit down", he says sternly. Lady Red sits. He lays his hands on the table, around one of his wrists is a fancy gold watch. "Does that watch mean something?", she asks. He glances at it, "Maam, I work in Intellectual Property Law for Meta, and you're in big trouble." "What!? Well just stop me at the security gate then, why did you throw me into this weird room?!" "I don't work for this Meta, Maam. I'm in the Interdimensional IP Enforcement department. I work for the Meta you visited last night" "You're the guy from my dream! But you already punished me, dream-me was fired from dream-Meta! Why are you here?" At this point, he becomes more businesslike and passes you a folder of papers. He's less tense now that he's in his comfort zone. "Maam, we thought you would have learned your lesson after leaking those screenshots in my universe, but now you've spread them accross astral boundaries." He holds up one of your sketches from that morning, "This is a significantly larger offence which I must submit to a higher juristiction, we need you to confirm your receipt of the following documents....."
She's definitely fired. Double fired? Was she fired last night too or was that somebody else? Was she controlling the body of some other Lady Red who works at dream-Meta, or was she along for the ride, witnessing their experience and thinking she had free will? Are she and dream-Lady-Red treated as a single legal entity, or are they in trouble separately? Or, is there only one Lady Red? This is really confusing and the Interdimensional Lawyer keeps going over paperwork. They saddle her up with a lot of forms, and he has to video conference with people who are probably calling from his home dimension. She wonders how anybody ever managed to make video conferencing work interdimensionally, and then gets a headache trying to design a distributed database that's sharded accross the astral plane.
She misses most the conversation. In the end, she finds herself driving home on autopilot, with an armful of papers and a promise to "get some calls going the next morning". It seems like she's in big trouble now, but not sure how any of this works. She also has to think hard about the meaning of life, but can't shake the anxiety of losing her job.
goes home, meets muse in her bedroom, who explains how this other dimension is beset by patent trolls and the muses help fight IP litigation
"Meta is an interdimensional company?" "Not your Meta, your dimension doesn't have the technology to move between realities yet. Maybe never will". "But they had an office in the Meta building here" "It's a logical strategy to take, turn a blind eye to your use of office space on the off chance that there's a copy of your company in another dimension and that they have interdimensional travel, you'd want them to have convenient use of company resources while keeping their existence secret. Most companies that big do it."