Gerald nodded at him in a friendly way and walked toward the office of the manager.
Mike stood in the hallway and heard Gerald's voice change tone as soon as the office door opened. It got softer and a little more formal, like how people talk when they want to seem low-maintenance.
In response, he heard Petricia say something quietly. He couldn't understand what they were saying, but he could hear the word 'taxes'.
'Pfft... not my fucking problem apparently, if they're talking about taxes.'
He went to the room where the laundry was.
...
[GERALD SCHNEIDER PROFILE UPDATED.]
[CASINO ATTENDANCE: TUESDAYS, THURSDAYS, SATURDAYS. CONFIRMED BY SUBJECT.]
[ESTIMATED ABSENCE WINDOW: 4 TO 7 HOURS PER SESSION BASED ON STANDARD PATTERNS.]
[THIS IS YOUR ACCESS WINDOW, IN CASE THAT WASN'T OBVIOUS.]
[PETRICIA SCHNEIDER: DESIRE LEVEL: 7/100]
'Thank you, system obvious.'
[ASSESSMENT: GERALD SCHNEIDER IS WELL-MEANING, FREQUENTLY ABSENT, AND HAS NO IDEA WHAT HE'S DOING. CLASSIC SETUP.]
'He's not a bad guy,' Mike thought. 'But still... I do want to fuck his wife.'
[IRRELEVANT.]
"I know."
He sat on the edge of his new mattress and stared up at the ceiling.
Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. That took up a big part of the week.
And the way Gerald talked about it, quickly and without much thought, with a sideways look at the inside of the building, it wasn't a secret he kept from Petricia. She knew about it and had learned to stop arguing about it.
That was a very specific kind of tired. It was the kind where you've fought about it so many times that you're saving energy for other things after knowing that it's not going to work.
'People who love gambling are just brain-dead anyway... so yeah, I think I could use this, somehow, to try and raise her desire more.'
"High walls," the system had said.
Mike knew a lot about walls. For most of his adult life, he had gone over, under, or through them.
Petricia's weren't made of coldness. Experience built them.
She had been in charge of everything for so long that she had stopped hoping for help and started expecting to be let down.
That kind of wall had a very clear flaw.
'You didn't break it down...'
'You stood on the other side of it for so long that the person inside started to wonder what you were doing there.'
He took out his phone.
[NEXT STEPS:]
[1. CONTINUE BUILDING VISIBILITY. NOT PRESENCE. VISIBILITY.]
[2. LET HER SEE YOU BEING USEFUL WITHOUT ASKING FOR ANYTHING IN RETURN.]
[3. WHEN GERALD IS OUT, YOU ARE THE NEAREST AVAILABLE PERSON.]
[4. DO NOT RUSH THIS. PATIENCE IS YOUR ACTUAL WEAPON HERE, NOT CHARM.]
[5. ALSO, YOUR CHARM IS FINE. WE'RE JUST BEING BALANCED.]
"Stop telling me what to do!" Mike hung up the phone. "I'm not a fucking virgin who's dense at any of this shit!"
"I've fucked almost every day before coming here!"
[JEEZ! CALM YOUR COCK]
Mike ignored that because he now thought about Petricia coming back in with her grocery bag and adjusting the strap on her shoulder. The way she looked at him in the doorway for one second longer than he thought she would, then made an excuse about butter.
Seven percent.
He thought, "Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays."
He smiled at the ceiling, and it was the same smile he'd been wearing for a long time, even before anyone gave him a system to go with it.
...
He saw her again at four o'clock in the afternoon.
Mike came in to use the other machine while she was in the basement's small laundry room, taking clothes out of one of them. He had timed it on purpose by accident, which was a phrase that described more of his choices than he would ever say out loud.
"Oh," Petricia said. "Hey there, Mike."
"Sup," Mike said. He held up his tokens.
She moved a little to the side so he could get to the machine, and for a moment they were both in the small room doing normal things very close to each other.
"Forgive me for asking, but... I'm somehow curious about how you can find this apartment even though now I don't promote it anymore," she asked. "How did you find out about this building?"
"Someone pointed me here," Mike said. Which was true, if you counted a system notification as someone.
"From Erosyne?" she said.
"No, I don't really have any known people around here yet."
She folded the towel with the same level of skill as someone who had done it ten thousand times before. "Why did you come to the country?"
Mike said, "A document." Then, seeing her face, he said, "It's a long story."
"The short version is that someone I trusted gave me a very good reason to try something new."
"Are they still there...? Like the person who gave you the reason to come here?"
"Nope... R.I.P."
"O-Ohh..." She didn't push. "I'm sorry."
"He would have found it funny," Mike said.
And Rex probably would have. Especially the part where his legacy involved Mike flirting with a landlady in a basement laundry room.
"Are you going to stay for a long time?" Petricia asked.
Mike said, "It depends on how good the reasons to stay are."
"But... honestly?" He took the last of his clothes out of the basket and put them in the machine. "The tea has been good so far, which is a good sign."
"I love me some good ol' tea."
Her look was a mix of amused and suspicious, with amused winning out slightly. "You have very low requirements for a city."
"I have specific ones," he said. "There's a difference."
"And what are the exact ones?"
He turned to face her directly. "Good friends. Something fun to do. A reason to get out of bed in the morning."
Petricia held the towel in her hands and looked him in the eye, doing the calculations that he could see happening behind her eyes. She was still trying to figure out if that was a simple answer or a more complicated one.
"That sounds about right," she said in the end.
"Yeah, for most people," Mike said. "It's harder to find than it should be, they said."
She grabbed her basket. "Well, I hope Erosyne comes through for you."
"Well..." Mike said, "It's already looking better than I thought it would."
"I'm glad to hear it."
"See you later then," Petricia said, offering him one last smile before she departed.
He watched as the washing machine began its cycle.
[DESIRE LEVEL: 11/100]
Mike blinked at the notifications that came out of nowhere in front of his face.
"Four points from a conversation in the laundry room," he thought. "It's so fucking bad...!"
[OBSERVATION: SUBJECT IS RESPONDING TO HONESTY ADJACENT STATEMENTS. THE REFERENCES TO THE DECEASED CONTACT AND THE SUBTEXT ABOUT SEEKING CONNECTION HIT HIGH ON HER EMPATHY PROFILE.]
[ADDITIONAL OBSERVATION: SHE CHOSE TO ASK QUESTIONS. THAT'S HER REACHING TOWARD YOU, NOT YOU REACHING TOWARD HER. THAT'S THE DISTINCTION THAT MATTERS.]
[YOU'RE DOING WELL. TRY NOT TO RUIN IT BY BEING SMUG ABOUT IT.]
'I'm not being smug,' Mike thought.
[YOU WERE ABSOLUTELY BEING SMUG.]
He put away the system's interface and waited for his laundry to finish. He stared at the wall with a blank look on his face.
...
That night, he stood on his balcony with his second cup of coffee and watched the street go through its end-of-the-day routine.
Around seven, the lights in the office of management went out. A few minutes later, he heard the front door open and close.
He also heard Gerald's voice on the phone outside, walking away from the building.
The light in Petricia's room stayed on.
Mike looked at the city across the rooftops. The ambient glow of Erosyne City, like cities do at night, filled up its own dark spaces with light and noise and the general sense that something interesting is always going on nearby.
"Same old Michael," he mused yesterday. Same instincts, different name, different country.
Yet, it wasn't quite the same. The aliases had once been mere tools.
Erik Voss represented a role. Jin Mao was a strategic move. El Sombra had simply carried a tarnished reputation.
He was still trying to figure out what kind of person Mike Hawk really is, other than wanting to have sex with a lot of taken women like wives and girlfriends.
He looked at his reflection in the balcony door glass.
Red-tinged hair that he was getting used to. New face shape from the weight he'd put back on.
A person who did not appear in any database connected to anything inconvenient.
Rex had wanted this for him. Not the system, probably, since Rex had died before whatever this was had decided to materialize.
But the clean start.
The country with room to move. The life where the name on his door wasn't a liability.
'Cuck Them All. L.O.L.,' Rex had written at the bottom of the document, in his careful handwriting.
For the first time in a long time, Mike really laughed at something by himself.
"Fuck you, Rex... I'm doing this for myself to come here, so I'll see you in hell!"
That night, he slept well. It had nothing to do with the new mattress and everything to do with knowing exactly where he was and where he was going for the first time in years.
The pipe in the wall made noise at two in the morning when the people upstairs took a shower.
Mike hardly noticed. He was already planning for Tuesday.
Gerald had told him that Tuesday was one of his nights at the casino.
This meant that Petricia would be here on Tuesday. By herself, probably taking care of the building, folding laundry, and watching whatever was on TV with the office door half open.
And Mike would be right up there.
Ready and helpful. It's intriguing to think about, yet not so evident that it becomes a source of concern.
In the dark, he rolled over and looked at the ceiling.
'Eleven percent...'
"Patience," he told himself again.
The system sent one last message to his phone screen in the dark without him asking for it.
[WE'RE AWARE TUESDAY IS FOUR DAYS FROM NOW.]
[IT WILL BE WORTH THE WAIT.]
[GET SOME SLEEP, HAWK.]
He did what he was told without arguing this time.
There was no noise in the flat. The city outside did what cities do.
And one floor below, Petricia Schneider went about her evening without knowing that her desire level was at eleven percent and rising.
She probably would have been scared by that information.
And of course... She would have been right to do so.