Another day barged its way into Jan's life, entirely against her wishes, her curtains not opaque enough to keep the morning sun shining straight into her bedroom. She still had a couple of hours before work and would have preferred to spend it asleep but the sun and the architecture of her building had other ideas.
She stood up and fumbled around the pile of clothes on the floor to find her dressing gown so she could walk through the shared hallway to her bathroom and begin the arduous process of getting ready for work.
Jan had recently started work at a government data entry job and like most things in her life it was not her choice. She had applied to the first job in her inbox every day to keep her benefits flowing and when an interviewer finally said yes she decided to roll with it anyway. Now she had to drag herself through a shower, put on one of the five white blouses and one of the five black trousers she wore every work day and take a bus to a big ominous building that seemed to smell of a thousand years of squashed individuality.
Her boss was a large hairy man stuffed into a suit and clearly angry at the choices he had made in life.
"Jan, we need someone archiving files and someone else filing archives, seeing as you're here early I'll let you choose what you want to do." He barked.
"Honestly Greg, I don't care, just put me where I'm needed." Jan groaned.
"Fine, if that's your attitude, head down to B3 for death duty." Her boss groaned in an equally disinterested tone.
Nobody Jan talked to seemed to have a big picture on what this government agency actually did. Sometimes they would be processing schematics on antiquities, other times they would be putting GPS coordinates into mapping software. The only consistent task was death duty, the intense digitisation of death records, covering every aspect of their death, adding digital tags for strange and somehow irrelevant factors such as "mortician reports body smelling of cinnamon." Most found death duty a bit ghoulish but Jan had never really minded. It was a nice repetitive task, engaging enough to not get boring but requiring no creativity or innovation.
Into her third hour moving files from her input tray to output tray, the strangest thing happened, a ghostly green light flooded the office in a very literal sense. It started as a green puddle next to her chair, but slowly it ebbed and flowed as it grew. As the mysterious green light began to wash over Jan's legs, she thought about how she couldn't feel anything, but she knew that the green light was somehow attaching itself to her. There was no screaming or exclamations coming from her nearby colleagues so she assumed this ghostly light show was just for her.
Soon the whole office was a flowing tide of green, Jan's vision swirled, and as soon as it had begun, the green light began to retreat and coalesce in front of her. Then with a sound like a taught spring being released in reverse, the light formed into an eyeball and mouth, connected by strands of green light and floating in front of her.
"Alright, who do I have here, who are you? What's your deal? Tell me everything." The green being quipped in a voice that would have been meek and unimpressive if it wasn't also echoing around an infinite unseen cosmos.
"I'm Jan." Jan stammered out. "Erm, who are you?"
"That's it, that's all you got? 'I'm Jan' you exist beyond a name don't you? Fine, I'll lead by example." The being puffed itself up and spoke in a deeper voice to try and sound impressive. "I am eternal and nameless, but those who feel the need to address me have often used the tag 'entity V.' The laws of science and nature are beholden to me and I travel infinite cosmoses to sate a fathomless curiosity about all living things. Energies beyond even my comprehension have driven me to your consciousness and now I wish to learn everything there is to know about one more spec of sentience in the swirling chaos that is existence."
"Cool, err I work in data entry." Jan replied, taking a sip of her coffee.
"Hey Jan, this is a long walk but let's go down it together: the average lifespan of a black garden ant is four years, I once spent my time following each of the 7539 ants that made up a single colony in Ipswich for the entirety of their life. 30,156 years following ants doing regular ant stuff and it was still less boring than the two and a half minutes I have so far spent in your presence."
"I dunno what to tell you." Jan replied, "I was born in Cardiff, went to school in Cardiff, studied sport science at Cardiff university and now have this job in Cardiff. I have a couple friends, a normal family, I once went on holiday to Ibeza and it was alright." Entity V had neither a face nor palms but was able to manifest both from light in order to facepalm.
"Alright I'm bored, scanning your brain." Entity V announced before Jan could object. Jan let out a squeak as she felt her brain have every thought she had ever had at the same time over a fraction of a second. "Wow, you've never had an independent thought in your life have you. Alright time to move from the theoretical to the practical."
In the space of a blink all sound and movement in the office around Jan froze, Entity V had stopped time.
"I see you're familiar with the game 'would you rather,' I mean you sucked at it but you at least knew the rules. I'll give you two options and you choose one. Then I get to see how you react when your destiny is actually in your hands. "Alright, which would you rather, lose all your clothes or lose all your clothes?"
"Permanently?"
"Oh no, it's just what you currently have."
"In which case I'd lose all my food. I can get more from the shop." Jan confidently replied. Entity V blinked and Jan saw mist rising from her bag, she checked inside and saw her sandwich had vaporised. "Wait, what I respond will actually happen?"
"Reality is mine to play with." Entity V casually explained. "And you realise how much humans are in the minority with that priority? Food is objectively life, yet you lose it over modesty, an entirely artificial construct."
"But I can't have my work colleagues see me naked..." Jan began.
"So it's social pressure? Interesting, let's test that. Would you rather have every person in this office see your naked body but not know it's you, or have everyone in the office know with certainty, that you have starred in a porn movie?"
"You've got to be kidding, I'm not going to choose between those, they're both horrible." Jan objected.
"Time will remain frozen until you do, and you just sacrificed all your food so this won't end well for you if you hold out."
Jan angrily growled, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger, she silently concentrated, hoping some voice of inspiration would come to her and help her make this choice.
*For everyone seeing Jan's naked body scroll to section 2*
*For everyone to know that Jan starred in a porn movie scroll to section 3*
--------------------------------
#2#
"Alright, fine. I'd rather everyone saw me naked but didn't know it was me." Jan growled.
"Who was that?" Entity V asked looking around the office.
