Jane is clever, thought Greg, more clever than Jose, but not that clever.
BigCorp had introduced the VR goggles about eight months ago, and though it was initially a boon, most of the dev team had come to hate them. Sure, working at home was nice at first. You didn't have to wear pants anymore, you could cook fish in you apartment and not get death-stares, the commute over the Bay Bridge was gone along with the tolls. But it quickly became apparent that you still had to 'put ass to seat.' Initially you could skip out, take a long lunch, go to the dentist, take the dog out when you were bored stiff from the monotony.
But then that first update came out.
Thing was, in order to downplay the nausea effects from the screens, the goggles tracked your eyes' saccades, pupil dilation, and a bunch of other bioengineering stuff Greg barely knew about. It really did help with the nausea, not the Greg really suffered from it to begin with. His ex-girlfriend certainly did, making VR-sexting nearly impossible with her back in NYC.
It wasn't so much that the VR-goggles could track exactly what you were looking at, that data stream was just too much to parse, it was that they knew you were there at all. Once most of the dev team was no longer in the bullpen, and instead they were off actually living a life, productivity skyrocketed.
Well, initially.
Greg's boss, Jose, had loved it. But as the product reached it's natural limits, sigmoided to the economy, the squeeze began. At first, the number of tickets became the metric to game. Then it was peer-feedback, which naturally came to an armistice between all of them. One thing after another, as Jose was squeezed from all of this many bosses. Until eventually, you had to have 'continuous telepresence' during work hours.
Sure, when the new JK Rowling product came out, the entire virtual office became Hogwartz, complete with the ghosts and staircases. Fridays were a reliable beach scene. Mondays had that dark humor of a Dilbert strip in the skin and layout of the office. But Jose had each scene constructed so that he could monitor if you were there. Like a manager in a Cuban Cigar factory, his seat was higher. He could easily see if you were there in his goggles. A little red mark in Jose's HUD came up when you pulled out of the office. He had to, it was one of the few metrics he knew about and that he could manipulate to appease the matrix of his bosses. 'Put ass to seat'.
But Jane knew people. Greg didn't know who she knew, maybe one of the hardware guys at the VR goggle plant. But Jane was faking it. Greg has seen it, cataloged it, and studied it. The times she would message him, idly talking about some show, all of them were pulled from the NYT's RSS, easily a chatbot she'd actually paid for. The voice was just that side of choppy. And the way her head moved, that here eyes scanned across Greg's virtual face, totally scripted. He'd seen her replay the exact facial scan at least six times in one meeting. Greg knew: Jane was faking it.