Travis ignored the sign as he stood up, noting his feet were still bare. “Can I have my old Red Wing boots?” The breze tickled his toes and abruptly cut off as the shoes formed around his feet in an eyeblink. “Huh, that was slick. I think I’m getting the hang of this.” He looked sharply at the sign, expecting a snide comment to go traipsing across the sign, but for some reason, it remained black. Hah! Got you under control too. I must be sobering up. He shivered as he remembered watching himself being pushed aboard the ambulance, then he straightened his back and glared at the dark door with the weird silver inlay, and at the sign. Sober or not, it’s time to really wake up. I bet it’s been telling me to go through there so I wouldn’t go through there. Well guess what you old flatface, I’m going through them doors.

The sign offered no comment at all as Travis pushed hard on the door, which flew open and stopped just before hitting the wall. The other door followed suit and Travis was looking at a room he’d never call an office in a bazillion years. It looked more like something out of a bad black-and-white space movie. The room was an unrelieved dingy grey all over the floor, walls, and ceiling. The room swept in a smooth arc from the entrance to either side, then joined up again by Travis’ guess a good fifty yards away. This place was huge. The ceiling wasn’t one really. It was more a curve of the walls. The whole room looked like the top half of a globe. Hemisphere. I remember that from high school. Half a sphere. This room is a hemisphere. What the heck kind of office has a hemisphere design and no windows? And what is that contraption in the center, it looks like a raised floor with a microphone and some levers.

Stepping closer Travis saw it was indeed, just what it looked like. The center ten feet of the room was a raised circular floor, with an old-style diamond shaped microphone on a pole, and seven levers arranged in a circle along the ‘front’ half of the raised circle. There were two things near the microphone that looked like ski poles, with big cushiony handles at their tops. Light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, the grey on grey on grey walls, floor, and raised stage all were easy to see, but there was nothing contrasting to really focus on. Well, that thing was right, it ain’t now jump and scare, though it is really creepy looking. Letters in vibrant neon colors flashed from the base of the floor to two thirds up the wall and ceiling. ‘It is not creepy. I should know. I live here. Just like you do now.’

The sudden attack of color had Travis falling back onto his bum and backpedaling like a crab on all fours away from the center of the room. After a second, he pushed himself upright and turned towards the door. A blank curving wall stared back at him. “Where the hail is the door?!” Two sections of the wall opened towards him back into the bedroom, which had been cleaned up and the bed remade and turned down waiting for him. The whole room shifted again and faint words gargled like an explosion of sound. Travis jumped. ‘That is the boss. Time for you to meet her.’ “Her?” First this weird place, and now a lady boss? What kind of weird drunk dream am I having?