most things haven't worked out -- chapter one preview

Work


I’m going to kill myself, I know it. Not how I am, but that I am. Nobody and nothing makes a difference like it used to. Not anymore, and I can’t keep fighting myself fighting you. I just can’t do it. I don’t want to and even that I don’t want to doesn’t matter. And there are still things that I can’t stop no matter how much I try. All I can do now is remember so much that it hurts and keeps on hurting, and even when I try not to I can see it happen again and again and it overwhelms me and I’m in a coma and circular thoughts spread like a virus and keep digging in deeper. My chest caves in and I curl over alone with a person in bed or surrounded by people sometimes, together but always alone. And even when they are there they won’t really help me because they’re also just people. Most often we can’t ever really speak to each other, not about important things, things that are real. So I can’t stop the thoughts flooding like a river and I need out because it makes me feel old and numb and all there is anymore is misery and pain and I don’t care and I just fucking can’t. Remember how you always knew when I was feeling sad and you would reach out and twist my cheeks and make me smile with your hands around it saying pucker up and other nice things and you would tell me that I was an important person and people liked me and my work and that you loved me like when I explained to you for the first time what happened and you accepted my silence and pain and how hard it was to tell you because I didn’t really understand how to let other people in and you took what I felt inside of you and gave it warmth like it was yours and you smiled and said thanks with your fingers soft and warm on my face and we cried together and felt love and for the first time in my life after so many years of their talking and pills I cared that someone cared about me and that love would make a difference and then everything that we would ever make together exploded like joy out of the grace which consumed and suspended us folding into each other like a blessing made absolute and precious and ours always ours forever a present with the future frozen eternally long and held close to each other before we could save it for later and share with the important people in our lives saying that was when we knew that everything made perfect sense with a click and I wanted then to make an image preserved even though the colours could never be as vivid as they really were before the light fell away from us making this beautiful absence special and transcendent and ours always ours forever forgotten and remembered while we live in joy and the hope between people which makes love happen because love creates everything and makes sense of life and in peace brings chaos and in love I found my purpose and a need to get out of bed every day and keep going and get better and when you stopped I never felt the same again but always and forever worse.


Michael liked working until quite late into the night. It was a matter of habit. Maturity came with an understanding that it was the small rituals in each day which provided energy and confidence to achieve his goals, and his determination assured for him a stable and comfortable life. As he flossed his teeth one morning, he noticed that the skin on his fingertips had changed, made smooth and shiny like plastic under the vigorous demands of his professional life. Polished smooth plastic badges celebrating his dedication to his job, the ends of his fingers had worn down from continual contact with a computer surface, entropy making visible the point of interface between his body and his computer. The glass of the bathroom mirror was cold against his warm skin as he drew his hand across the image of his body, making lined patterns in the water which had condensed and collected. Bringing his fingers wet to his lips he tasted and thought of his wife naked in photographs until this quiet moment of reflection soon passed.
He worked as a mid-level manager for a very successful  multinational corporation which was the world leader in several industries. This career was realised shortly after completing a  degree from one of the best universities in the country. After a painful adolescence marked by insecurity, confusion, and one unpredictable tragedy, Michael matured quickly as he came to understand the importance of his studies. A schedule perpetually busy with volunteer activities involving academic and environmental activism were of paramount importance for realizing his life as successful. Hard work allowed him to keep his mind focussed against superficial distractions. University was a good time for him, even though he worked too hard to enjoy much of the social life so common and necessary to youth. Securing himself in his career allowed him to enjoy the after-work ritual with his coworkers at a happy hour bar on the first floor of the corporation’s headquarters. Drinking no more than half a pint of beer, he would often fondly reminisce about his adventures in university, which were as grandiose as they were untrue. Lying about his past was easy and effective and he could not help but fall into the inevitable path of his fantasies.
In retrospect, for Michael school was the most significant time of his life, when many of the goals which he had set for himself had been achieved. He had matured important friendships and fell in love with the woman who was to become his wife. These successes were due to fate as well as a strong work ethic. Hard work had brought him to the right people and the right places at the right times, and his ambition ensured that he would take advantage of important situations. Good marks were easy to get at school, and he was a successful athlete throughout his youth. High school friends had convinced him to pursue academic studies instead of the track and field scholarships which would have taken him to America and a different life. This was the first important moment when contingency shaped his life. The professor, whose class he had taken on a whim and who had provided him the opportunity to intern at a company whose international profile brought significance to his resume, provided the second. Tutoring a student whose father owned a company which was a significant institutional investor in the world’s most prominent technology companies, one of which was the company for which he now worked as a mid-level manager, was contingency number three. Michael was not a spiritual person, and so considered success to be the result of hard work and a determined focus. However, he did believe in the important mysteries which had caused him to meet the woman with whom he would make a life.
From the start of his career, Michael’s superiors repeatedly commended him for his diligence, creativity, and professionalism. The success of his work was a clarity of his purpose elevating discipline into a virtue. A shelf in his office was filled with small trophies and plaques, and after having efficiently streamlined one of the company’s manufacturing processes in southeast Asia, the company awarded him with a portable audio player plated in gold and black platinum. It remained in his pocket since that sublime day awarded him with a promotion and new responsibilities, which renewed his sense of pride and self-worth. Video from the reception was highlighted on his online profile and in the portfolio the company provided to its shareholders. For some reason the video was popular outside company channels as well. Marketing soon contacted him seeking rights to his likeness. Becoming the face of the company’s business-to-business transactions, he soon came to really like the feelings he experienced when a room full of people started clapping and making still and moving images with their cameras while he shook hands with the many politicians, corporate executives, and VIPs from around the world who flocked to do business with the company.
One day browsing through old photographs during a coffee break from work, he realised that graduation day had been the last time that he had fun with his friends, the last time that his life had been unrestrained and unscheduled. A sophisticated dinner like adults and then they went to a club downtown, drinking and dancing until three in the morning while making an album of laughing, drunken videos and images. But the conversation in the taxi at the end of the night left Michael feeling sour and dejected. His closest friends soon became quite jealous about his job with the company. Especially Mary Andrews, who had grown up on the same street as him and followed him through school until she left the city to be a dentist somewhere west of Thunder Bay. She had sat next to him in the back of the taxi and kept poking him in the ribs with a hard finger asking I wonder why the professor asked you to intern with Rand and Associates through playfully narrowed eyes. That’s suspicious and more than luck, Michael. In a small way, he felt betrayed by her. Perhaps she was joking, but he had not been sure. She was the first girl who had given him an orgasm, both in his head the first time he masturbated and in his garden the next year when she came over with toy cups full of tea. They were eleven and Michael was repulsed by her offer. He was too old for toy tea, but he changed his mind when Nancy said I’ve changed you know and took off her shirt to show him her changes and Have you? Michael said yes and opened his pants and she touched him and he kept talking nervously until a minute later he couldn’t say anything at all. She said it was gross when he ejaculated all over the grass and her hand, but then she collected his semen in one of the tea cups and laughed. Nothing else like that had ever happened between them, but they had stayed friends through school. Now Michael only heard from her when she sent a digital share to him and a very long list of other people every Christmas. Invariably, he would delete the message and ignore what she wrote under the new image of their family. He didn’t really like anything about Christmas, especially the outpouring of false emotion from people who were too scared of being judged to not present themselves to everyone as normal and happy around the same time every year. These memories often hurt and a long time ago he had learned how to try and forget them.
Adding to his contempt for December was the fact that clients were awful people over the holidays, more argumentative and overbearing. Michael hated their long faces as he spoke to them about his job, and more importantly about their work. Their angry disappointment never failed to unnerve him. However, he was professional enough to ignore the drawbacks of his job and focus on the manner in which his life had improved and ultimately made simple because of it. Wealth came to him over the ten years of working for the company, and the ease of his prosperity confirmed to him the jealousy of his friends. Appearances were important. During his first year there, the company had subsidised his purchase of an expensive luxury car. Driving to his office every morning in the comfort and style of an ultra luxury interior package with black leather was a vindication of his hard work and dedication to the company, and dampened the inevitable frustrations of gridlock and bad drivers. At first he had joked with friends about the public transit system they had been forced to endure before he bought his car, but this ritualized conversation soon began to mark the distance between them. They spoke quietly out of the side of their mouths and their jealousy suffocated him like a blanket. After a few months of driving his friends to work, he realised that he preferred silence or light vocal music to conversation with friends. He tried to maintain regular contact with them after making excuses about early-morning meetings in order to disband the car pool, but stopped after admitting to himself that there wasn’t really any time for them in his life. Everyone has to work hard to make things work as planned, he often thought. He couldn’t let himself be distracted by the idle demands sometimes required to keep friendships from slipping away.
In fact, Michael came to resent his attempts even while institutionalizing them into a ritual. Despite his reservations, he scheduled time at least once every year to meet with these old friends from his graduating class at the night club which they had frequented in the abandon of their college years. Even though he really enjoyed dancing until the morning hours, these scheduled nights did not feel the same to him after university ended. Events were now calculated and laboured rather than exciting. Never again did he or his friends allow pleasure to wash over them with a pure and effortless spontaneity, and over time these meetings seemed to him to be increasingly empty and impossible rituals more useful as an opportunity for judging each other’s progress through the mile-markers of life than as a truly beneficial way for them to continue being friends. People would comment about these nights online, often for days after, and so he liked to make sure that he recorded as much video as he could. These manufactured images of his friends reminded him of the home movies his parents often watched when he was younger. He had patiently archived and indexed these old family videos online before moving out of his father’s home. As a very young child, Michael often danced to recordings of old television shows and commercials. The rush of images forced unexpected memories. He would think about how his parents would smile at him as they captured video of his enthusiastic routine bathed in light from the television, and the warm feelings evoked by their laughter as they showed the footage to their friends at dinner parties, scheduled without exception for the second Tuesday of every month until he moved away for school.
It was through his love of dancing that Michael had met his wife Anne. Each of them had spent a considerable amount of time invested in activist groups on their college campus. Having watched the university janitorial staff throw the contents of several campus recycling containers into a garbage bin in the summer of his first year of school, he worked hard in a variety of student groups to ensure that the university adhere to a very high environmental standard. The lack of interest among the general student body was a manageable frustration. Anne, the intelligent and beautiful woman who would become his wife, was also involved in many student organizations at the same university and had quietly come to appreciate Michael’s initiative. She herself led the student movement for the reformation of the university’s administration and politics. The student union held a large banquet for all of the student leaders, and it was at this event that Anne was so impressed by Michael’s enthusiasm in the middle of the dance floor that she was compelled to speak with him, finally introducing herself with bright eyes while offering chocolate. It’s fair trade, she said and he learned to smile at the sound of her voice. He was dumbfounded by this curiously intriguing woman who immediately captivated him, as he had just written a history paper about the economic justice movements within the chocolate and coffee bean industries and the coincidence was remarkable. She would have had to have illegally brought it in from outside the banquet hall. Immediately she entranced him with her beauty and grace, and over the course of that night Michael realized that she would pass through life with him at her side.
Shortly after their wedding, they purchased two video cameras to document the lives of the children which they planned to have. One camera they would use to document the home renovations necessary to prepare a bedroom for children, while the other one stayed unopened until the day when their first child entered their lives, when they could both use it. Memories would one day be made, and he looked forward to keeping those memories and sharing them, often with others and always with Anne. Twelve years passed, and he would have forgotten about the unused camera had he not been able to access a complete and up-to-date listing of everything they owned, whenever and wherever he wanted through the digital Atom computer implanted in his brain.


Michael started work one summer Monday like any other Monday of the year. He got out of bed around five in the morning and brushed his teeth after eating three pieces of toast and having a shower. This morning ritual was cast in stone, each a key support for the next – carefully preparing his suit for work, making a lunch, kissing his wife goodbye as she started her own day, and leaving his newly-built suburban home for the office by twenty after seven at the latest. The sun pushed through the clouds as he opened the door to his garage and he knew that this day was going to go exceedingly well for him. The smell of gasoline ran through the garage as he thought of the large stock acquisition which he was going to make for the company in a few hours. He indexed all of the relevant futures and bond ratings before reaching the end of his driveway.
The sky was blue and bright and the radio said Thirty-four degrees with a humidex of forty as he drove onto the main highway toward Toronto. You might hate your commute right now, but not as much as we hate inventory overstock. Log onto our feed, browse our fantastic selection, and then come down now to Bay Bloor Carpet Wholesale Depot to complete that hot new look for your room. As always, buy two or more rugs and we’ll ship anywhere in the GTHA for free. Three days to ship or its free. Michael slowed his car to a stop behind a long line of impatient drivers. A transport truck had tipped over and spilled chickens whole and in parts all over the road. Feathers flesh and blood acted like glue as cars were not moving until they reached the other side of the accident after angry moments of immobility. A remote news helicopter was capturing video of the problems being experienced on the ground below. Some of the drivers close to the accident were irate and yelling. Michael watched as a fight developed between two men who had been inside the vehicles closest to the truck when it tipped over.
“You drove right into my backside, you moron!”
“Why the fuck were you stopping there? Nobody in front of you was stopping, you fuck!”
“You’re trying to blame me for this, you were right up my ass!”
“And you’re the goddamn idiot who stopped.”
“Go fuck your mom, asshole!”
Michael didn’t think that he was a violent person, but it pleased him to watch the men fight in the road full of chicken feathers and body parts. They looked like day labourers on the killing floor of a meat packing plant. The black and white photograph was clear in his head and he sees it – men with moustaches and short hats standing in dark work overalls in front of a factory line of animal parts, Chicago, early 1900s. It is one in a long line of related images suddenly made present for him by his Atom. The photograph fades as his eyes refocus on the fighting men. Their cars were as old and worn out as the clothes they were wearing. Middle-aged guys with three or four kids, he thought. At best small-money accountants, networking maybe or sales. Prone to health care liabilities. Replaceable. He encountered people like them at work when their profiles came to his attention and decisions had to be made. Profiles and data sets held under profit-analysis accounts, they flipped in and out of his life all the time and were easily forgotten.
The scene developed quickly as he zoomed in with his camera. A face exploded in blood as it was punched. One man fell and was kicked by the other until his face was swollen and red. Michael’s feed was popular immediately after he uploaded and tagged the video. Police officers arrived and quickly arrested both men, even though one of them was unconscious. They also detained several people who had risked their lives by running onto the highway to recover the remains of the few chickens which had avoided liquefaction under the wheels of the hundreds of vehicles that slowly passed through the scene of the accident. As the road would later be cleaned by robotic streetcleaning vehicles, Michael was not sure why someone would bother to recover animals which were quite clearly irrecoverable. So disgusting. Chicken soup for the soul, eh ladies? he thought as he smiled to himself. No other work for them this week. While most of them were obviously street people, he was less sure why some of those arrested had resigned to whatever was the cause of their desperation. Despite their dirty clothes and unwashed appearance they seemed reasonably fit and capable of earning a decent living. There was plenty of food available to a person properly employed. What’s their problem? Michael thought and felt revulsion for the vices which would lead a person to the depths of despair – drugs, gambling, sex addiction. He uploaded this second video with the caption Mad Chicken Beyond Thunderdome: Highway Robbery and posted on all the feeds, but was disappointed to see its low view count after a few minutes. He deleted a few of the insulting comments which offended him.
Minor delays in traffic today, but everything’s still flowing normally. Expect a standard commute with a small chance of rain. The synthetic female voice of the radio repeated the same message, then rescripted for Michael as it processed new information about the accident. By the time he had driven past the overturned shipping truck, the police were already directing traffic around the problem. A female officer stopped his car and administered a retinal scan before letting him pass. He did not let her know that he had taken video of the fight, as he didn’t want to be late for work by being involved with police paperwork. Atom’s driving the car right now, so video impairment shouldn’t be an issue. Besides, Michael thought, once I put the clip online, it’s certain that the police will watch it. An identity profile scan release form from the police department added to the email which he would have to process before lunch that day.
The importance of small duties. He did not mind the fact that this diversion would delay his arrival at work by several minutes, as his Atom kept him occupied well enough that he did not notice that it took nearly an hour to travel six kilometres around the accident with the chicken truck. Before he had started working for the company, he had been told that a real-time data access implant was required in order to get a real-time adult job. At first the surgery was worrysome, but he was convinced once he learned of the full extent of the health benefits provided by his company, which would provide not only for his needs but those of his family as well. The Atom kept him permanently connected to the company’s database and computer network, and also to everyone he knew through instant presencing services. The Atom was the centre of Michael’s day. It provided a fashionable platform for his professional work, and he never once minded that this time-saving device itself took a considerable amount of his time to maintain. The constant connections which it provided were important tools for professional and social situations. Users were able to rapidly gather, organize, and access a great deal of information whenever and wherever they needed it. The trick was learning how to efficiently navigate the stream of information. Sports, gaming, and entertainment feeds in particular were endlessly seeking to divert time from work, and Michael prided himself on his ability to ignore their transient pleasures. The majority of people who were Atom-connected had like him limited the majority of their social time to online social gaming universes. He often joked with his wife that by limiting himself to the exploration of virtual worlds he was able to maintain a social life while responsibly saving money otherwise spent on a nightlife. Initially, Michael had been very enthusiastic about the changes Atom brought to his life. Information could be rapidly shared and acted upon. The potential to inform and mobilise a large group of people was substantial, and early in his life Michael had studied such politics. As he aged and increasingly concentrated on his career however, he learned to keep himself focussed on workplace affairs. He seldom travelled outside of his home province, and despite the Atom’s automated information processing he really only kept track of the information which he thought important to his job or his taxes. He checked the traffic reports and recalculated the time required to get to the office and then took control of the vehicle from Atom to avoid running over the remains of a half-alive chicken, which had escaped from the principle accident scene only to have a portion of its body flattened against the pavement by a car wheel. Its head bobbed up and down, vainly trying to lift its broken body.
Michael, this is Aaron. A man his age in a suit was talking on video in the corner of the windscreen. Saw your GPS on the feed. Quick note to inform you that the truck involved in the accident was being driven by an unlicensed foreigner. Tell your friends at the company that we were right about the immigration bill. It’s moving forward no matter what, and hopefully now they will stop trying to petition us. Available for squash next Tuesday?
“Hi Aaron,” Michael replied into the air, recognising his friend. Aaron was the secretary for the provincial finance minister. “No worries. I’m driving through it right now. I can’t do Thursday. Wednesday at two-thirty?” He pulled up his stock feed over Atom and noted the gains he expected from Aaron’s news.
See you then, buddy. The face disappeared from the windscreen with a wash of cola red and a theme song.
Michael listened to music on the radio as all of the news networks in his favourite Atom feeds list told him that the driver was from Mexico and was wanted by the FBI for several unsolved murders in the southern United States. The man had been caught at a place called Houseboat Adventures on the highway through Dryden after he had tried to replace the forged refugee implant in his chest to bypass North American Perimeter Security crossings at the United States border. Michael indexed the news reports in his feed and saw a few photographs of the wanted man. In one of the images, the bell tower behind the Mexican looked like the one in an old movie from Michael’s childhood. The avatar of the film’s star, himself now long dead, was still a popular spokesperson in advertisements, and indeed Michael’s memory had been provoked as one of these videos played on his windshield. The estate had in death fixed the actor’s physical disability so that he could sell surgical procedures with animated graphics and Give yourself a new lease on life in a bright font.
The rest of the news linked with this story was easily automated into a one-minute data cluster presentation to watch later during lunch, then scanned an editorial in the financial section which interested him. It argued that the coming economic crisis would prove to be very difficult to many low-income families as the purposeful devaluation of the dollar to improve the manufacturing sector was putting a strain on food prices. The author believed that the country’s energy inventory should be nationalized and rationed to every citizen at a fixed rate to ensure that the needs of the economy would be adequately met. This is personal, Michael thought as he noted his objections in a message to the news site editor. Seeing his post, many of his professional contacts immediately repeated his objections online, threatening to undermine the publisher’s stock performance. The offending editorial was quickly retracted from publication, replaced with rescripted text about computer literacy programs instituted by the federal government with a headline about the employability potential of the nation’s poor.
A seagull floated onto the highway guardrail as Michael remembered an old pastime and waited for traffic to speed up. For three years after finishing university he focussed on Bonsai trees, cutting their limbs and controlling their size so that they would stay small and not grow to their natural potential, but to a different potential instead. This hobby had captured his attention before he had received his Atom, so memories involving this time in his life were more distant to him than those which had been made after receiving his implant. Users often called this barrier between memories formed before and after Atom the ‘Grand Canyon’. Atom allowed memories and brain activity to be recorded, archived, and replayed much like other digital files, although these memory traces could not be understood by other Atom users without significant translation into tangible objects. Trace memories were as immediate and present to a person as the events which they recorded, and endowed memory with enhanced precision and vividness. Michael’s life before receiving his Atom now seemed unreal to him, an impression which changed each time rather than the concrete permanence of Atom traces,  but he could still remember them if he focussed. One memory in particular often came to him. In the fall after graduation, one of his mother’s friends – an art teacher but he couldn’t remember her name – had told him that a few of his trees were emotional states and ways of understanding made tangible, like art. One of his trees looked like it was crying after he cut its boughs with a small knife. Another stood impressively defiant against his violent intentions. He prided himself for understanding in his trees a fundamental principle of nature, and he wanted to get better at cultivating that understanding, but it upset him that his friends did not recognize this talent. Some weeks he did not even see them once as he did nothing other than cut trees. Two years of practise and he was ready to open a business to supply his trees to interior decorators and high-end landscape companies. Sales picked up, then he started working for the company and he comfortably matured into adulthood. Over time, he was increasingly tasked with accounts of significant responsibility and could no longer afford any distractions. By this point, his working life with the company was worth far more to him than the eight-hundred dollars which his trees provided when they sold two or three times each month, so he stopped answering his phone for anyone except his mother and Anne. The rest of his inventory was forgotten in the basement of his mother’s house, and was ruined by weevils by Christmas after many months of neglect.
As on many other occasions when he had driven through the scene of an accident, Michael messaged Anne at home to tell her that he was alright. She was able to communicate with him over the feed to her Atom, which had been installed in her head shortly after Michael had received his implant. Not impressed with the text he composed for Anne, he decided to use the momentary break in his commute to speak to her instead. Hearing her voice while driving calmed him. As a result of his preference for voice communication over direct Atom feeds, Anne often described her husband’s use of technology as old fashioned. The old man’s sending his carrier pigeons, she often joked with her friends when he wanted to speak to her voice. Video of her face lit up one corner of the windshield, but he did not remove his eyes from either the pavement stained with chicken blood or the cars in front of him.
“Hi, love. Another accident on the highway. I should get to work on time, though. I want you to know that I love you.”
Michael smiled and talked into the air while staring through his windshield as a chicken stopped twitching under the tires of the car in the lane ahead of him. A notification sounded in his ears and a feed of spreadsheet data streamed to him from the company. “Sorry, Anne. One second.” He immediately knew what was requested of him, and seven seconds later he had successfully processed a data file which projected the sales of the company’s updated end-user interface protocol through the next six quarters. As the work request had come from his superiors, he did not expect notification from them unless they had to troubleshoot his findings.
“It’s ok, I can see that you’re busy. I can wait, though it’s good to hear your voice. I love you too. I got your text.” Anne smiled and kissed the air in front of the camera. The video stream made artefacts in broken stripes and gold pixels blocked out her eyes as she rubbed them with her fingers while parts of her hand blocked motionless. Anne could never avoid experiencing the worst among her anxieties when she saw that her husband’s GPS data correlated with a violent stain painted on the concrete as displayed by the traffic news feed.
“The accident looked absolutely horrible on the news. I was really concerned when I pinged you a minute ago and didn’t get a response.”
“I was scanned by the police.”
“Ok. You know I love you, and after what happened to Ron last week, I’m having trouble not worrying. I don’t think that I could live without you being healthy. Things must be awful for Nancy right now.”
She connected them to the data feed from the hospital where their friend Ron was being treated in intensive care. His spine had broken in four places when the brakes on his car stopped responding and he drove through an intersection when the light turned wrong. The driver of the moving truck which ran into the side of his car was ejected from his vehicle after being run over multiple times. Ron was being kept alive by machines after thirty-seven hours of surgery, with more expected. His organs and brain were safe, but autonomic nerve damage was complicating his recovery. After accepting their identity profiles, the hospital computer relayed that Ron’s condition was stable, but he was unconscious and his condition was not improving. The computer indicated a rather low probability for his survival, so Michael and Anne sent condolences to Ron’s wife Nancy, with whom Anne had lived while she earned her doctorate.  Nancy did not respond to the ping over her Atom.
“We should get her something,” Anne said flatly.
Michael sent Nancy a gift of virtual flowers along with his thoughts in a note.
“That’s not good enough, Michael.” Anne sounded angry as she connected to a distributor of cloned flowers. “Her husband is going to die. Let’s get her something alive, something she can smell.”
Videos of Ron playing with his children had occupied Anne for several days following his accident, and Michael could tell that she was watching one of them as they spoke and he remembers another time when he watched her watching the screen and now it is then, in the memory, vivid and real and all around him. The room in the video in which Ron and his children are playing is painted heron blue. Anne says the colour will work perfectly in the unfinished bedroom on the upper floor of their own house. He fills the room around her body then with dreams of a future in which they will welcome children into their lives, before before he blinks. The moment passed as he refocussed his eyes on the video stream of Anne in the windshield.
“When he gets better, we should all go on a quick trip. Sailing, maybe,” she said once and then again through video artefacts. Over Atom she indexed and highlighted the shares which they had posted together over the course of the first year of their marriage. Images and video streamed in a cluster. “We could also do this again.” Ron, Nancy, Anne, and Michael on a beach with small swimsuits and big smiles. They had travelled together to Fiji three times that first year after university. The photographs reminded Michael how beautiful the sky had been just before the nightfall then, before the hot climate made such trips impossible, and a nostalgia which he couldn’t quite control slowly overcame him.
“Don’t worry, love,” Michael smiled. “I bet the dead chickens make the news look like a tragedy, like last winter when I was coming from work and there was a pile up with maybe with one hundred and thirty cars on black ice.”
“Yeah.”
“But this time everyone’s fine. They caught the guy. Some foreign driver.”
He wanted to make more memories like those pictures of Fiji. “We should immediately book another trip for next spring. I’ll have some time after the fiscal year closes next quarter. Also, I think we should go on that canoe trip we talked about.”
A yellow light flashed numbers and he read his weight from the biometrics readout on the windscreen of his car. How did I put on six kilos in three months? he thought. I’m going to have to start going to the gym again before being seen on the beach.
“I’m too busy for a long vacation right now, Michael. Too many projects are coming together in the next six months. We’ll go again later, maybe over the winter break next year.”
“Canoe in the winter?”
“We could go down to Sonja and Dan’s place, you, know, outside Pittsburgh.”
“Yeah, you know how well Dan and I get along.”
“Funny. Anyway, sweetheart, thanks for the call. I’ll see you later.”
Michael composed a short entry for his personal blog before saying goodbye to his wife. He thought about one of the photographs from their honeymoon. Anne, in a long summer dress,  absolutely beautiful and sitting under a tree on the beach, with the light making perfect highlights and shadows and one leg stretched out in front of her and her head tilted to watch a bird walk on the sand. The first few years of their relationship before marriage and their Atom implants was a busy time in their lives, and Michael was careful to thoroughly document their time in Fiji with images and video. Love isn’t just memories or thoughts of the future, he remembered Anne saying on the last full day of their trip, laying in warmth so long ago together on a part of the beach they thought was private, her face on his chest and breathing lifted her up and they were drunk while she lightly stroked his chest. More than fantasy, it is crudely, absurdly practical. Love is something shared in the present with other people who you want to be important to you for a long time. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. She had made him worry a lot back then, as they were new to each other and he was anxious about not living up to what her other boyfriends had provided to her. They were successful athletes and came from good families, and Michael was jealous of the way Anne held their bodies in the still and moving images he could access over Atom. She had quite obviously experienced a lot more in life than he had. I want us to stay here forever she had said then before putting her hand into his pants.
“Bye, Anne.”
She left a colour stream of emotions in his mind. He finished his blog post and made it private so that only he could read it, then unfocussed his eyes and looked at old photographs they had made together. The road ahead of him was finally clearing. When he got home from work, he decided, he would make love with Anne, even if he didn’t feel in the mood. Duty can realise the sublime intimacy needed to properly raise children in this world. He thought of Anne’s belly full with the ecstatic joy which life would bring to the room painted heron blue.
For the rest of his commute, his Atom arranged his schedule for the days in the week ahead of him up to and including making time for his favourite late-night talk show before bed. This was frequently the last thing which he planned to do before trying to sleep. On days when he had a lot of tasks to organize, Michael was often so distracted that he would forget to connect his car to his Atom and allow it to automate his commute. Other days, as had happened twenty minutes earlier that morning, it was his wife who distracted him while driving. He especially liked when she was in the car with him and her distractions included taking him into her mouth under the dashboard while he tried to keep his feet on the pedals. These oversights caused him to be involved in enough minor accidents over the years that his insurance company once invoked the active assistance clause in Michael’s policy to remotely assume control of his car for nearly a year, during which time he was so thoroughly embarrassed that even though he could mimic the motions and no one would tell the difference, he did not want to be seen driving.
Sometimes the anxiety associated with his responsibilities threatened to overwhelm him, so he often replayed short videos from a celebrity motivational speaker in his head. A tall man with stern features repeatedly slapped his hand while telling a room full of well-dressed people that life is organised for success, this phrase trademarked in animated graphics all over the screen. Michael often reminded himself that the only way to succeed in this world was to keep your ducks all lined up in a row. At least one of his fifteen minute breaks each day was spent arranging the random clutter of desktop icons and files on his office computer. It was important to keep work-project files properly up-to-date and archived in a protected back-up. Though it would have been easy to network his Atom into the desktop to automate this important process, Michael preferred the assurance which came from performing the task himself. It also allowed him to add his own aesthetic touches. Chaotic abstract paintings emerged daily from the matrix of icons which cluttered his desktop. Icons did not have to be perfectly aligned and could be customised and transformed into what for him was a work of abstract beauty made sublime by its gossamer existence, or at least those were the words Michael used to placate his fear of lost time. Order would be restored by four fifteen in the afternoon, as he finished creating an optical record of his work progress and deleted another day from his computer’s desktop. Life was all about maintaining a precise workflow and not allowing exceptions to unpredictably dictate the course of the day.
Traffic came to a stop a few hundred metres from the off-ramp connecting to the office block where he worked. His Atom calculated the wait time and calmly told him that his message inbox was more full than usual. In fact, there were nearly twice as many requests as was normal for a Monday morning. Most of these messages  urgency demanded a response. Resetting his mail filters to accommodate future surges in his message quota, he removed a lunch meeting with a friend from the schedule which he had created earlier in his commute that morning. A major project deadline was fast approaching, and he could not afford to lose track of his responsibilities. Tonight, Michael would be working very late indeed. He would soon forget the important news item from that morning about the foreign truck driver, as he would never get the chance to read the headlines or watch the presentation which he had so neatly organized into his day. By ten in the evening, his Atom would automatically delete this unread information. Michael selected his Atom preferences so that he could focus on work. His operating system would not allow the capriciousness of world events to distract him from his important efforts with the company. The foreign driver and the accident which spilled the chickens would never exist again, and the morning’s experiences would thereafter be distilled to two men fighting for slightly less than three minutes in a popular online video. No context was necessary for the video’s success, just two people angry enough to risk hurting themselves because they wanted to hurt each other.


The elevator to his floor was rapid and well-lit with advertising lights and video. In the twenty seconds that the ride took to complete, Michael indexed and archived the advertisements around him according to his desire for each product and service. Most of them were immediately forgotten. Video for a sexually-provocative body spray, however, had effectively caught his attention. Over Atom, he noticed that his wife had recently catalogued a similar advertisement for the same product. He decided that he would stop at the mall and purchase the spray on his way home from work.
At the sixteenth floor, two of his co-workers joined him in the elevator.
“Hi Michael,” one of them said, adjusting her tie to more precisely align with her jacket.
“Hey Grace, Robert. What’s up?”
“I’m not bad. How’s life on thirty-three?” the man asked, referring to the floor on which Michael’s office was located. “You guys still have your heads in the cloud?”
“Ha, we’re more cutting-edge than that,” Michael joked. “Still pushing paper, you know how it goes.”
“Right, like four or five billion in profit just last quarter,” the woman said and brushed her hand across the front of her hair.
“I hear that,” the man replied. “Hey, what did you guys think of Ashlei Lopez’s performance on American Late Night last night?”
Michael had to quickly check his archived schedule before he could remember what to say.
“Actually...wait, I did watch that. I really liked her blue dress, but her hair was pretty bad. And no pop singer should dance like a whore anymore. It’s out there and nobody wants to see it. She should know better after her performance at the GM Moondance Symphony last month.”
“Yeah,” the woman replied. “Moondance was worse.”
Robert had not actually watched the performance, and his unfocused eyes betrayed a momentary abandon to his data feed. “Look at her, though. The way she’s wearing almost nothing there. My wife thinks it’s all a bit scandalous. You remember my wife, Leslie, don’t you?”
“See, I sat across from you both at the sales gala last month. She’s a pretty funny woman. I like her.”
“And a pretty good lawyer. She likes you too, Grace.”
“I remember Moondance lighting up the Arts feeds. This year’s wardrobe malfunction, or something like that. A major media circus, I guess.” Michael read the archived headlines of thirteen different news organizations while he spoke. The words were not his own, but his co-workers did not seem to care about his lack of originality.
“I wouldn’t want my girl to ever look like that. People talk if you don’t look respectable. Since I earn the gas card, my wife usually listens to what I want us to be.”
“Ha, yeah,” the other man agreed. “Hey, you’ve got a line on hockey tickets for this weekend, right?”
Anne’s face. He accessed the feed which she had sent to him during his morning commute past the chicken truck accident. One of the images was a picture of her at a Halloween party three years before they had met. She was dressed like a prostitute and a large dollar sign was hanging around her neck. A young man dressed like a barbarian, naked except for a loincloth and a plastic helmet, had his arm around her and was smiling. He held a beer in his hand, and was smiling stupidly at the person who was holding the camera. Anne was smiling as well, and her arm was behind his back. Michael wondered how many times she had taken the barbarian’s penis into her mouth and between her legs and he thought of a large number. He wanted to joke about how his wife had enjoyed a scandalous past when the elevator reached the thirty-first floor and his co-workers got off.
“Later, Michael.”
“Goodbye,” Michael said to them as the door closed behind them and they didn’t turn around. He linked the online pictures of Ashlei Lopez’s Moondance performance to his wife. Security camera footage of people singing, shouting, and crying into the air was always leaking online to popular websites with names like Muses of the Lonely and Schizophrenic Atom. Anne already subscribed to those feeds for her research, so he decided to text her a voice message using the Atom’s voice synthesizer rather than call her from the elevator, which, much like the rest of the company campus, was clearly marked as being under company surveillance.
“Anne, you are as gorgeous as Ashlei Lopez. Your voice fills my heart and days with longing for you eternally. Someday, I will build a stage for you and the television cameras will transmit your beauty to the far reaches of the universe. Long after the Earth has passed from existence, your face will exist among the stars as a cloud of electromagnetic energy forever spreading away at the speed of light from the moment that I loved you.”
Anne had never heard her husband speak with such poetry, and over the course of the day she came to treasure the dulcet metallic ring of the voice message as translated by the Atom company’s text-to-speech software protocol. She encrypted it with a personal cypher so that she would be the only person able to access that trace of her husband’s passion.


Except for the fact that work was a never-ending stream of projects which required him to maintain a very high degree of accountability and diligence, Michael did not think that his job was difficult. In large part due to his oversight of the company’s deployment of a software management system for the city’s wastewater division, which converted household sewage into marketable energy products, he had risen very quickly to the salaried managerial position which he currently occupied. He had perfected his workflow during the initial phase of his career with the company, and was now a master at completing tasks with maximum efficiency. Positive performance reviews were an inevitable yearly success.
On this particular Monday morning, he corrected the formatting of one of the indexing reports sent to him by the human resources department, scheduled a health and safety meeting for the new employees recently hired by the company, and fixed a paper jam resulting from a malfunctioning printer, despite the fact that this last task was not outlined in his job description. Concerned for a few minutes after his office software crashed three times while he was entering data, he anxiously contacted the company’s IT department about the state of his desktop computer. Remotely, they quickly fixed the problem and notified him via inbox that he was no longer to use 123connect.com, a popular social networking service. He signed the mandatory print-off, which was normal protocol when dealing with IT, and submitted the form via office courier. Michael always considered it an odd anachronism for IT to insist on forms signed and printed on paper. It worried him that several of his friends from the 123connect.com network would never know why his avatar went silent or why he would no longer share any memories with them. It was probably easier for him not to remain friendly with those people rather than try to explain office protocols, so he deleted their contact information from his database and continued working until his now-shortened lunch break. Over lunch he noticed a few impatient messages with subject lines such as Hey, what’s up? Did you disconnect? and Were you offended by the photograph I sent? He did not respond to them, and spent a few seconds between processing tasks setting up email filters to block these friends from his life.
Working from home was made simple because of Atom protocols. He and other co-workers would coordinate their Atoms after supper, usually between the hours of eight and eleven. They shared resources with each other, met with representatives from other companies and government officials, collated their data, and agreed to meet again later. Those frequently-experienced days when he did have to work from home required particular diligence and meticulous attention to details, as it was easy to miscalculate the amount of time required to complete all of the tasks which were expected of him. Michael did not want to anger any of his bosses at the company and had worked very hard to earn his corner office with the large corner window. He liked when he could see his fellow employees staring enviously at the sunlight pouring into the room. This benefit, so rare among workers in office towers, allowed him to cultivate plants in his office, horticulture being a hobby which he had been forced to relinquish as his career progressed. The presence of other life, dependent on his dutiful ministrations, excited and consoled him.
Tired and it’s only Monday? Join thousands of other people– Michael pulled his face down from tired eyes as he dismissed the video advertisement on his computer surface. For at least a third of the year, he did not have time to receive what was usually understood as a healthy amount of sleep. It was common for the tide of his sleep-deprivation to crest with motivational speeches delivered to management at the office, as though his determination were being monitored. Senior management would encourage everyone to work harder so that the company would overcome that quarter’s difficult preliminary results. Year after year, the company would be threatened economically, everyone would work harder for longer hours, and then the company would continue doing business as the old chaotic and confusing amount of work became the new nromal, solidified into procedures and production quotas with efficiency always the most important criterion. Successful employees rapidly changed their lives when necessary so that things could stay the same for the company.
Atom would not often let Michael sleep for longer than a few hours at a time, as urgently-sent messages required his immediate attention. Meetings with clients or representatives who lived on the other side of the world were occasionally announced at the last minute, necessitating a call from the company executives to the alarm function of employee Atoms. In a paper notebook, which he kept in the night stand next to his bed, Michael logged his thoughts like a diary. Interruptions to his sleep were particularly annoying, as on these occasions he woke up with a headache that would not go away even after several cups of well-brewed coffee over the course of the morning. He knew never to publish such opinions online, nor would he ever share them with his fellow employees, and treated his writing like a personal diary. Diary entries he always ended the same way, like a signature.
I wish that one of my projects from work was as exciting as one of these dreams so my Atom would wake me up in love instead of anger.
To keep his lack of sleep from negatively influencing his workday, Michael entered the staff kitchen at precisely ten forty-five in the morning and parked himself in front of the coffee maker. The coffee from earlier that morning had long since expired and would need to be brewed again. Though it involved manually grinding the coffee beans, he relished the task which he had assumed to be his so early in his career with the company. Brewing coffee for the late-morning staff allowed him a chance to socialize with his co-workers on a more personal level than did instant messaging or feeding information to each other over their Atoms. Over time, Michael had noted that many of these conversations were permutations of the same simple and repetitive dialogue. The conversation on this Monday morning was not different as Michael entered the room and interrupted a conversation between his co-workers.
“...so much experience that I levelled up and got so powerful that I could kill everything in the room without taking any damage. Like, not even from the fucking Shadow Stalkers. My creep skill got so high that no one knew I was there before I hit them.”
“I keep dying too often to get anywhere. Maybe because I picked the wrong character class or something. Half the time I play, I’m travelling back to look for my body.”
“Get better companions.”
“The weather’s nice today,” Michael said as he waited for the coffee machine to finish its work. He didn’t really like to play games online anymore. “Baseball tonight should be exciting. The Jays and the Yankees, right?”
A co-worker named Ian, who Michael only really knew from having to authorize his account reports before sending them up the executive chain, politely returned the conversation. “Well I don’t know baseball, but I just checked the pools, and the Yanks are supposed to score a clear win. Vegas says two to the power of four to one against, or something like that.”
“You mean eight to one?”
“They aren’t my numbers. Don’t kill the messenger.”
“What, you have a guy in Vegas now?” the other man said. Michael thought of a photograph and knew that the name of the man smiling and holding burgers at the company picnic last summer and standing in front of him now was Bill Raefelson.
“No. It’s on the feed. I decided to put a few bucks on the Jays.”
“You did? I don’t see your bet.”
“Probably because you don’t use a feed expander. How can you navigate the feed with just the raw data cells?”
“I don’t know. My agent does the work.”
“Mine does too, but I never check my sports feed before six in the evening,” Michael interrupted.
“I can’t keep my head out of the sports pages. They wake me up and put me to bed every day. Much better than my wife does. Yours too, right Bill?” A few of the others in the room began to laugh. Michael accessed Bill’s employee file and saw that he had recently separated from his wife Jane.
“Whenever you want to go fuck yourself, you just go and do that,” Bill replied. “I’ve already got a visual replace censor on you. Don’t make me download one for sound as well.”
“What are you replacing me with?”
“Shealai Amani, naked and direct from her feed.”
“Seriously, right now?”
“Live feed buddy. I’ve got a few shares left in my account if you want to try it out.”
“Sure.”
“Michael? Pretty cool app, you want it? You can replace whoever you want. You don’t even have to know who they are because it uses facial recognition.”
“Sure.” Michael said as a digital signature request came over his Atom. The censor installed with Bill’s settings and Michael turned it on. A naked woman flawless and smooth like plastic replaced Ian as another shift of co-workers opened the door in search of coffee.
“I don’t see anything,” the girl replacing Ian said with Ian’s voice while massaging and squeezing her breasts.
Bill scratched his head. “Of course you don’t. You have to replace someone else in the options.”
“Ha, obviously,” Ian said, looking around the room and then unfocusing his eyes. “Cool. This one’s way more realistic than other censors I’ve tried.”
“More powerful too. Give it a try with big crowds. Things get insane pretty fast.”
“Crazy,” Ian said, his eyes unfocussed. “The scent module isn’t as good as the myfield app I’m already using. And it’s more expensive. She’s fucking hot, though. If I buy her, maybe you can get me a coffee with your portion of residuals from the share.”
“Maybe,” Bill laughed. “Anyway, Michael, you coming in on the Jays with us?”
“Sports doesn’t really do it for me. I guess that I have a mind for other things,” Michael said as he turned back to the coffee maker.
Bill started talking with another person in the room. Michael recognised her from employee records as Sarah Matthews, a recent graduate hired by the company last fall. Since Michael had not been in charge of her training, he did not really know her beyond the sales and acquisitions profile he could access.
“I saw you reading on the train this morning. Are you working on something new that I should know about?” Bill asked as he crossed his arms playfully and looked down his nose at Sarah.
“No. Nothing for work. It was a self-help book on motivation. I bought it for my younger brother who sits on the couch in front of the television all day.” she said, smiling. Michael poured coffee into his mug.
“For your younger brother! You’re quite young yourself, Miss Matthews. Your little brother must still be in school, so you shouldn’t worry about him sitting around all day. That’s what teenage boys do best. Frankly, I’m grateful, as it makes our gender look so much better in our midlife and old age, when all we can do is stay busy. We’re often workaholics only after we have entirely wasted our best years.” Bill laughed at his joke without waiting for others to join.
“He’s in his second year at Mohawk College,” she retorted, looking at the floor before turning back to him. “We’re all still waiting for him to figure out what he wants to do in life.”
“Excuse me,” Michael interjected. “Sarah, if you are so worried about your brother, do you really think that a book will change things?”
“No, not really. But I can’t stand him wasting his life away. I don’t think he realizes that if he doesn’t get his act together soon, he’ll be too old to get a good job.”
Bill raised one of his eyebrows. “If someone ever writes a self-help book which actually works, then the entire world economy would collapse the next day. You can’t have everyone getting out of bed with smiles on their faces. What would we all do with ourselves?”
“That’s so true!” Sarah said and briefly grabbed his arm. “The Oprah network would be a twenty-four hour blank screen! Or maybe just advertisements.”
“That might work, actually. No more pandering giveaways from a broken, long-dead celebrity’s avatar. I’m old enough to remember the real Oprah. If everyone were to fix their emotional problems, she could finally stop rolling around in her grave frustrated by what her estate is doing with her avatar.”
“And since you’re perfect and no longer need anything, you get nothing. And you get nothing!” Sarah mimicked and convulsed her body and pointed as she laughed.
Bill’s eyes unfocused for a moment and then he stopped laughing and warmly returned Sarah’s touch. “Nice. The self-help industry would collapse overnight. But that’s my point, really. At the end of the day, you know where you are with failure. Every boy who has ever asked a girl out knows that lesson. It shows you what’s truly valuable in life. Number one rule for solidifying market share – note where a market has failed to create demand. Number two rule – create that demand.”
As Bill and Sarah continued their conversation, Michael could tell that she was opening herself to his flirtations. She tilted her head and smiled a lot and absentmindedly groomed her long black hair. Occasionally she touched his forearm or shoulder. Michael wanted her to respond to his words with a similar interest, but thinking of Anne he cleaned the counter around the coffee maker, hiding himself behind it to hide the visible display revealing how much he couldn’t stop thinking about disrobing Sarah Matthews and fucking her from behind until he came on her ass. The impossibility of ever realizing such a desire only further excited him. Over the course of many mornings and many cups of coffee poured and presented to his co-workers, Michael had come to understand the distance between them. Unlike him, they could flirt with each other without worrying about their spouses. Unlike him, if they had missed anything cultural from the previous evening they knew to check their feeds early in the morning to catch up on the things that were popular at the office. It was about learning to like what other people liked, so that they would like you.
This particular Monday was a little different than most, however. Michael stirred sugar into his coffee and felt a sharp muscular contraction along the top of his spine. He dropped his cup onto the floor because his hands were shaking too much to hold it, then looked down as his body and the floor around his feet disintegrated into a sea of intricate, multi-coloured pattern of visual artefacts which flickered randomly like a video stream breaking up before the feed cuts out.
A memory of Anne played across the floor in moving images with multicoloured pixel artifacts and confused Michael because he knows that she cannot really be there. His eyes unfocus, and he is then there, now, feeling slightly outside of himself. The cup falls two more times, jumping unnaturally along its trajectory to the floor. The walls behind his coworkers begin to artefact and their faces pixelated into obscurity and he is past them. An advertisement for an aspartame sugar substitute splashed red Times Roman across his consciousness. He falls to the ground and stops shaking, his eyes darting quickly between his co-workers.
“We are facing a dangerous period ahead,” Michael said in a calm voice. “The culling is coming. If we do not stop, correct, and change our wrongdoings now, we are all going to suffer. The things we make will overtake us, and the worst aspects of our nature will take over.”
He grabbed the foot of the person closest to him and looked straight up at the ceiling.
“Father, can you not see that I am burning? This maze is ashen fire!”
Sweat formed around his eyes and on his top lip. Except for one person who took a small mobile computer out of his pocket to make a video, everyone in the room was shocked into motionless. Especially unmoving was the woman whose leg was being still being held by Michael. Over their Atoms they immediately contacted the company’s emergency officers. The young woman ran out of the room as Michael began to speak again.
“Earthquakes, flood, drought, rain. Severe summer, severe winter. Lightning destructing. Great wind destructing. These things will warn us that we are not following the law of the great spirit. The trouble ahead will remind us that humans need a temple as equal for their sins as for their salvation. We are bodies living in this world, here on Earth. Our vanities have led us to forget this truth and judgement will be upon us! It will come upon us with its own announcement, sudden and loud. The Earth will reject humans as humans have rejected the Earth.”
Michael closed his eyes and fell forward onto the ground. His co-workers looked at him with a sudden and confused suspicion. They conferred with each other as well as with the other employees on the company network. Company lawyers and doctors were notified of the incident. After consulting with the others, one of the men left the room in search of a first-aid station.
“Michael, are you ok?” asked another who helped him back to his feet and away from the woman, now free of Michael but still shocked into motionless silence.
“What just happened?” another woman asked while extensively consulting her feed for information about brain damage resulting from strokes. “I think that we need to get you to an ambulance.”
The red and white coma of the aspartame advertisement passed from Michael’s consciousness. His vision returned and he found himself sitting on the floor of the staff kitchen as three of his co-workers attended to him. They were looking him over very sternly with eyes open.
  “I think that everything’s fine,” he said, picking himself up from the floor. “Sorry. That’s embarrassing. Bad code popped onto my feed from somewhere. An advertisement backfired or something,” he joked and fell back onto the ground.
“Help him up,” one man said as his co-workers consulted with the doctors and nurses in their social networks. They were concerned about a red wound that had appeared on Michael’s forehead. Nobody had seen anything quite like it before.
“Really. I just need to get some rest. The Jones portfolio has kept me busy quite late at night all week.” Michael checked his strength. He could probably stand up. “Honestly, I’ll be fine as soon as we close the numbers on this one.”
“Michael, I don’t think –” Bill let his unfinished sentence hang in the air before turning away from Michael and leaving the room. Everyone else who remained stayed beside him until they were provoked back to work by their superiors with a sternly-worded memorandum. The attachment from human resources stated that if employees could properly perform their tasks and the company doctors authorized the decision, then a cursory glance through the company medical checklist should suffice to allow work to resume without liability to the company or management. After all, streamed one of the company lawyers, strokes constitute a pre-existing condition outside of the company’s liability profile.
Seated at his desk ten minutes later, he worked through the rest of the day as a company doctor streamed a consciousness test and neural diagnostic aggressor over his Atom. The procedure was relatively unobtrusive, with only a slight pain when some of the neurons which constituted his ability to appreciate higher-order spatial relationships were eradicated along with others deemed expendable for a reason known only to the team of doctors who worked on his implant from a neurosurgery building seventy-one kilometres away. He consented to requests from the doctors to restore Atom control to its default settings. Michael was never to notice that he no longer worried about the arrangement of the icons on his desktop computer, and was now satisfied to allow them to be automatically sorted by his Atom operating system.
A few minutes after getting back to his schedule for the day, the news indexes in Michael’s Atom feed froze for several minutes. The most recent item which he could access was a report from Europe about the fuel and food shortages among those countries which were not politically associated with China or Russia. Other headlines from the day prior were published in bold with attached video streams. Michael accessed the feed.
Riots are burning a great deal of the suburbs of Paris to the ground. An image of a young girl, naked except for a red scarf around her neck and standing in a field of corn ready to harvest, over the caption New Hope for Biofuel. The image distracted Michael from his email, so he switched to his newsreader. Heavy manufacturing labourers in England are in the seventh month of their general strike protesting the government’s intention to implement policies for the mandatory conscription of citizens into military service based on education. Prime Minister Saladeau today confirmed reports that he and his wife Monique are comfortably recuperating at the Lake Okanagan Medical Centre. While on their way to a party fundraiser Saturday evening, their limousine was struck by a van driven by a licensed temporary foreign worker. Police have confirmed that the driver was not connected to his vehicle through an Atom control interface, and was likely distracted. Militants have taken over the Brazilian ethanol plains as desertification continues to threaten farming in parts of South America, Africa, and the American southwest. What does this mean to your gas bill? Ashlei Lopez continues to burn everyone’s feed naked raw now. Get her latest single, available everywhere and in every way you want it. Another hot week ahead as temperatures are expected to climb into the low forties by Friday.
Michael tried to file these stories for later reference, but could not maintain an archive in his head. His personal contact list was still functional, however, and its database appeared to be intact, so he immediately contacted the Atom company’s troubleshooting department and was soon dispatched a work order number for future reference. A maintenance appointment was scheduled and he promptly forgot the index of articles which he had read as the day progressed around him.
Despite the technical glitches, he was relieved to note that his newly-impaired Atom did not impede progress at work. The absence is comforting, in a way, he thought. The lack of a data stream seemed to improve his concentration, but his work was proceeding much more slowly than was normal. In two hours he filled two spreadsheets with the collated market data produced by another co-worker, who had reservedly sent over the files using an antiquated file transfer protocol which took nearly half a minute, and then scheduled the employee training sessions for the following month. The company was thinking of adopting a newly-developed software platform in order to maximize its flexibility in the market while lowering its exposure to any turmoil related to volatile financial assets. Michael was expected to train employees in the new protocols, and then assess the termination profile of those employees who could not maintain the minimum data transfer rate required by the new software’s interface. Just before his mid-afternoon break, he looked out of the window of his office and was slightly troubled by the fact that his work for the day had failed to achieve an optimum level of productivity. Delays undermined the integrity of his work, and he really did not enjoy having to deal with employees face to face. Recovering the composure of employees whom he had recently terminated certainly did not ease the burden of having to work without Atom. He much preferred the simplicity, brevity, and objectivity of telepresence to the awkward and simultaneously intimate emotions which filled any room in which he would sit with an employee whose profitability index was sufficiently low that it had come to his professional attention.


“Daniel, can you consult with HR about the employee buyout package requirement for the Mitalor consolidation? I need these figures to be less than one percent of the total acquisition cost. Our people want this account to proceed much like we handled the Dranodyne merger last year. Limit human resource payouts.”
Michael spoke patiently and deliberately into the microphone attached to his desktop computer. The image of his co-worker Daniel, who worked in the company accounting department located in another city across the continent, was projected onto the surface of his desk.
“Nothing less than four percent will be possible unless we liquidate the employee pension plan and transfer the money into new investment portfolios owned by Mitalor.” Daniel wiped his nose as he spoke. “Hopefully you’ll get your Atom reconnected soon, as then I’ll be able to keep you in the game in real time. Anyway, as long as those assets remain in the possession of the employees...”
Michael looked out of the window of his office as the image on his desktop surface remained motionless for a few seconds. Network slowdown was common at this time of the day.
“... not going to happen. I don’t know, Michael. Mitalor is not Dranodyne, as much as making steel is different from military logistics. We have a union to fight if we need to make this deal happen with the numbers you want. An old union, with considerable solidarity and a high degree of public sympathy. Lucky us, though, as through a jointly-owned subsidiary their assets are not entirely separate from Mitalor’s.”
“I’m not worried about getting the workers to like it. After their last strike sent steel prices through the roof for two years, the public has moved their support away from the workers. Petrick’s analysis suggests that we can ignore the optics on this. Legal will be able to utilize the forfeiture clause in the employee benefits contract when this account gets to court. Is it not entirely possible that challenging the rights of shareholders to achieve their projected dividends countervails the union’s own code of conduct, especially if, as you said, the union benefits from a subsidiary financial instrument which would itself be harmed if they were to proceed with any action?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Then it won’t be much of an issue to suggest to the union that if its redundant employees want to see their severance packages and qualify for employment insurance, union leaders will agree to the liquidation of the pension or they will be in breach of contract. If they’re stubborn about it, tell them that they will lose even more money in the courts, as Mitalor will be able to retroactively pursue financial restitution from them for breaching the terms laid out in their last collective agreement.”
“Michael...”
“They can take the offer, or they will have fucked themselves out of everything.”
“Yeah, maybe. That might work, but there could be legal expenses that amount to bringing the total acquisition cost higher than the one percent limit you want for this project. The union has a few high-profile legal teams at their disposal. Standtford and Nicholas represented them a few years ago. Those guys have never lost a case.”
“What if Mitalor declares bankruptcy? Your department can easily demonstrate that the company had been lying to investors for years. After all, last year didn’t we purchase the firm which handles their accounting?”
“We could probably find something there. If Mitalor files for bankruptcy protection and stays  there for more than six months, the union would be forced to liquidate some of its pension assets to pay out its membership. Legal should then be able to argue that such an action demonstrates a clear lack of faith in the profitability of the company, and  thus the company’s contributions to the pension plan would be designated as Mitalor assets under forfeiture. As long as Mitalor invests that funding inside the company, we should be able to achieve a one point five percent expense profile.”
Michael accessed the financials on his computing surface. Icons danced until they were replaced by numbers. “So we would still need to lighten the employee payroll by a few thousand.”
“Looks like it, yes.”
“Mention to the union that the projected inflationary expenses for the next fiscal year are going to require that they accept a reduction in paid work hours. Write overtime hours out of the contract. They’ll accept job losses then.” Michael paused while he finished some calculations on his computing surface. “They’re going to have to accept a reduction of roughly three percent salary and seven point six percent paid hours. Daniel, can you get this done by three today? Three-thirty at the latest.”
“Uh, ok. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good. I’ll leave this one in your hands, then. You and Molly will be at the barbecue next month, right? We’ll need your pitching in the softball tournament again.”
“Sure thing.” Daniel said and turned away before the video feed terminated.
Michael was filled with a sense of purpose. He sat at his desk and looked out of the corner window of his office, remembering that once, when he was a month away from turning nine, he had sat in the living room and looked out the window while thinking of how much he expected to do over the coming summer. Fun games of soccer and football that will last well into the night. Slaying the demon hordes of Ironlands 2, which his brother Thomas got for Christmas and won’t let him play until he can’t say no anymore. The completion of a model of a giant sailing ship, then camp with his friends Bruce and Darren, where they will create memories as the sun sets and their adventures stretch the evening very late into the night. Clouds moving slowly past his window and birds in the sky once. Laying on the grass hill in the park on the corner of his street, he was excited by the thought of holding the hand of one of the girls in his class who had recently moved into the house next door to his.
The sky artefacted pink and grey out of his window as Michael longed for the naive days of his youth when his dreams were filled with promise. Two birds flirted with each other dangerously in the air outside the window. His adult life had taught him the truth of necessity, which so often limited possibilities instead of creating them. Always lacking sleep, he did not often remember his dreams anymore if he didn’t write them down. He pulled his paper notebook from his briefcase.
I’ve been thinking about my brother for a while, in fact it’s tough to think of other things. After Thomas died I cried for seven and a half years. Mom and Dad never really talked about things the same way anymore after that. It was weird how the bees went away around the same time that summer. I’m walking with Becky and Liz from school and we’re wet under dry clothes from being naked in a river. Sun’s hot Liz says and sits down. So we’re obviously late Becky says and pulls me down next to Liz. Yeah I say and take off my shirt. Show off Liz says and makes a picture with her phone. Have you ever kissed a guy Becky asks me. No I say and she asks why. I say because a man isn’t beautiful and Liz says to you and there’s lots of guys that are. You only say that because you have to I say. So you’re saying that girls can’t know when things are beautiful Becky asks and Liz says yeah cuz that’s stupid. Guys are ugly I say. Would you suck a guy’s cock Becky asks and I say no. What if it was beautiful Liz asks. Whatever I say and get up to climb a tree close by and hang upside down. You’re such a hero Liz says and I’m flipping over. It’s going to rain I say and fall down off the tree onto my feet. For example your arms are beautiful Becky says and I can say that because I’m your friend and I laugh and sit down and then she kisses me on the lips and I move back even though it feels good and she’s really soft and warm and Liz takes off her shirt and sits closer and I’m frozen until after a slow silence I touch her breast once and get hard and she smiles and tries to take my pants off and I kiss her back and then Becky grabs it through my pants and says it feels like three fingers and Liz puts her hand on my face and kisses me and Becky says let’s see and pulls my pants off and says nice and holds it and Liz keeps kissing me and I come far and Becky says that’s so gross and lets go and then water rushes down from the sky until it stops. Liz stops kissing me and says that was fast and I say have you ever kissed a girl and the sun comes back out.
Michael looked out of his office window at the sunlight which reflected off the other skyscrapers not as tall as the one in which he worked. He turned to his computer surface and checked the video news feeds which his software agent had catalogued for him. It lacked a necessary signal normally sent from his Atom, and the surface remained dark except for an interface window stating that the computer was waiting for a proximal user. Michael blinked and unfocussed his eyes but there was nothing in the feed. He concluded that he should return to work without further distraction. Later, as he was preparing to send his mail for the afternoon, he decided that he no longer wanted to purchase a new plant for his office.


Video of the morning’s events was being thoroughly discussed throughout the company. People stopped talked to each other whenever Michael entered a room, and their silence became unbearable. Keep it together with a noble face, he thought and focussed on the banal details of each task. Just a few more hours until you can go home and decompress. They’ll forget everything by tomorrow.
Later in the day, two of his co-workers were filing paper documents and talking as Michael arrived in the coffee room.
“... with her hand broken. It was totally fucking crazy! Hold on a second, Steve.” The man who was speaking lost his smile as he turned to Michael. “Hi, Michael. My name is Allan. We haven’t met, but we’ll probably be working together soon. I’m with Internal Relations.”
“Good to meet you,” Michael replied as they shook hands.
“You appear to have recovered from your earlier dizziness.”
“Yeah, sorry. I didn’t see you earlier but I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“No, I wasn’t there. Obviously I saw the feed.”
“Obviously,” Michael agreed, looking at the floor. “I’m so embarrassed. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before.”
The room was awkward around him. An identifiable tension existed with his co-workers. Except Samantha Curtis, quiet in the corner of the mail room with friendly eyes. She had worked with him during their junior years with the company but had not progressed very far in her career. Then after six years with the company, internal wanted her to come to an important meeting because there was an accounting oversight which was traced to some of her processing. An email message from Samantha Curtis shortly before this meeting was the closest thing to friendship which Michael had felt with a coworker during the past year and a half of working for the company. She had written to tell him that her family was expecting a new addition in May, and that he and Anne should come over for dinner before things got too hectic with the pregnancy. As a result of their attempts at friendship, Michael remained anxious scheduling the following week’s meeting with her to discuss her next role for the company. Often, presented with an awkward situation, he allowed himself to speak only partial truths, and so he had written to Sam stating that they should meet in his office to discuss her position on the company softball team. He did not read her response before the meeting two days prior to this encounter, and since he deleted her contact information from his database shortly after she left his office, he did not receive the Atom feed of videos and images of their professional and personal acquaintance over the previous ten years, which Samantha had highlighted to him as a final appeal to keep her job with the company.
“Yeah that was strange,” Allan said.
Michael tried to access the company’s employee records to learn all he could about Allan, but none were available. All that he could find was his own public employment file and one of Allan’s comments which had been made in response to a photograph which had been posted online during a company management retreat. The advertising kiosk in the corner of the coffee room streamed through his Atom. Are you suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder? Text 45297 to contact a research group which cares about your outcome.
A siren of white noise behind the synthetic female voice of the newsreader made Michael look up at the monitor which was hanging from the ceiling. Remember to contact your group manager immediately when discovering a coworker under duress. Video of his body, lying down and shaking its head back and forth like a puppet, was being displayed on the screen as a pixelated digital zoom beside one advertisement for inexpensive mortgages and another for a deodorizing body spray. Text crawled under the video, indicating that the stock market would remain volatile throughout the day.
“I think I was hacked by a spam feed or something. Maybe an aspartame company didn’t like that I had put sugar in my coffee.”
“Weird,” Allan said, then turned back to his mail.
The smile on Allan’s face suggested that he appreciated the comment as a joke, but Michael wasn’t entirely sure. He tried to think of something to say to introduce himself to the person who up to this point had remained silent, but his co-workers left the room before he could think about anything interesting about himself.
“Rest well,” Allen said. “Maybe we can talk more at the company barbecue.”
Michael wanted to reply that he didn’t know when the barbecue was happening this year, but he decided not to bother and left the mail room to return to his desk. Video from one of the company executives appeared on his computer surface as he was about to finish sorting his files in order to transfer them to his home computer.
“I’ll need you in my office at five today, Mike,” the man said before the image disappeared and was followed by a replay message button. Michael hurried to finish his work and found the twenty-ninth floor five minutes before the time of their meeting. He sat in a chair and waited, looking at his shoes and the floor around his feet, unfocussing his eyes but finding nothing there. Taking out his notebook, he fell into his writing and didn’t really have to think about the words as he wrote them.
The worst Christmas of my life. Noise from the television is filling a corner of the room but everyone’s ignoring it. Mom’s upstairs and hasn’t really left her room for very long except to go to the bathroom. Once in a while, not very often, she eats at the table and smells bad. This Christmas is one of her public days. Dad is drinking rum and playing bridge by himself. I’m reading about death in books and I stay silent but want to cry and I keep turning back the pages. No one can find Thomas and everyone knows why we’re not looking anymore but we won’t talk about it until the new year. Days have passed since I spoke to anyone. Silence smothers the whole house like a heavy blanket until Dad gets up and falls into the Christmas tree crying and drunk and I can’t pick him up so he sleeps in the broken multi-colour ruin which in normal families marks the happiest holiday of the year. I leave him downstairs and keep reading upstairs in bed.
A minute of silence was followed by ten seconds of footsteps and Michael looked up to see the smiling face of a co-worker. Nicholas Rodjenko had been hired by the company on the same day as he, and they shared nearly identical employment profiles throughout their careers. Nick now worked in a different division of the company.
“Hi, Michael. Wow, I haven’t seen you in, what, an age or two. An Age of Dead Empires,” Nicholas joked, quoting from the advertisement for a computer game which was the most popular entertainment product of the last quarter. “How have you been? My department has been very busy with the Honey Well project. Lots of people, lots of time. Big numbers all around. And there’s more down the pipe.”
They had not talked to each other since an afternoon work tournament involving that game. Nicholas had beaten Michael to place third overall and was awarded a large plastic sculpture of one of the game characters. Most companies stopped making plastic toys and models after the price of oil rose to over a thousand dollars per barrel. New, virgin plastic models such as that won by Nicholas often sold in collector circuits for tens of thousands of dollars. The company had brought assets in biological plastics to market years ahead of its competitors. Maybe if I were to find a few extra dollars in the Mitalor deal, he reasoned, the company would reward me with something made of virgin plastic.
“Fine, thanks Nick. I know all about Honey Well.”
Even though he didn’t really like Nicholas anymore, Michael vaguely remembered having enjoyed a great afternoon with him at their first company picnic. Without being able to access his digital stores, however, he couldn’t confirm anything about the man and felt lost as a result.
  “Hey, how’s Anne? I forgot to connect with her after I met her at the picnic.”
Anne’s Atom was offline to him, so Michael had to think for a second.
  “She’s doing well. Getting the house ready for the fall.”
“Oh, you mean she’s expecting?” Nick said, distracted.
“No, no. Nothing like that. She likes decorating for the autumn house-party season. Things to buy. New recipes. She wants a new microwave to handle the one-button meals that just came out.”
“Oh, my wife just bought one too. We picked up the RangeTop Fifty-Nine Seventy. With the built in food recycling unit and automatic cleaning mechanism. Everybody on the HomeWork channel is giving that model great reviews. Let me send you some, and I think that you’ll be a RangeTop customer just like us.” He unfocused his eyes for a moment. “There”
Michael did not receive the feed.
“I think that we’re going to stick to one from Ramstung Residential. I have investments with that company, and they’ve paid off for years. I really like their line of red brick appliances.”
Nicholas was confused and checked online, but could find no data relating to a line of red brick fridges from Ramstung or any other manufacturer.
“Strange. Do you have insider information on that company? If so, I’d like to invest. Last quarter’s bonus was pretty substantial for our department, so I’m fairly liquid right now.” The door to the executive’s office opened. “Anyway, let me know. I’ll talk to you later,” Nick added before quickly leaving the hallway.
“Please, come in Michael.”
Michael followed his boss, a lean man of about forty who wore tailored designer suits, into a large room adorned with imposing architecture and a minimalist black metallic decor. Computer screens hanging on every wall displayed financial and productivity performance charts, and another device displaying personal information such as family holographs was inlaid into the surface of a massive desk in the centre of the room, around which were three small chairs symmetrically arranged. A large additive manufacturing machine hummed and chirped quietly in a corner and was more than half finished making a wood-coloured stand supporting a large golden trophy. Every surface was clean and lacking decoration except to display data.  Michael’s boss sat in one of the chairs and folded his hands in his lap.
“Michael, how have you been?” the man asked and opened a drawer in his desk.
“Not bad. Busy at home and normal at work, I guess.” Michael feigned a smile.
“Wonderful,” the man said and took a small data drive out of the desk before standing up again.
“I haven’t been up here since the Northern Packing talks last quarter. I forgot how nice your office is.”
“Fine, Michael. I prefer the word fine in this context to the word nice. Let me be honest, as we feel that you aren’t really handling the Jones account to the best of your abilities.” His boss stood back up from his chair and remained standing on the other side of his desk while he touched various parts of the video information on the surface in front of him. Icons danced and windows trailed his fingers until everything swirled into a corner and disappeared. He put his hands in his pockets and the desktop surface was clean in front of him. “How’s the wife?”
He started to sweat. No thoughts came to him, except that the Jones account was perfect. He knew that the Jones account was perfect, as though it were an extension of his body and he couldn’t deny its existence. His boss paced a few times before sitting down.
“Human Resources is happy with the training programs you have administered. Accounting likes your expenditure profile.”
He paused for a moment to let his words have an effect on Michael.
“Marketing and public relations have a real problem with what happened this morning. When marketing and PR are unhappy, the shareholders are unhappy. When the shareholders are unhappy, Mr. Jones is unhappy. When Mr. Jones is unhappy, I am unhappy. I think that you can see where my line of thinking is leading us. I am unhappy, Michael.”
Michael could see exactly where this line of thought was leading him. He wanted to say something about bad advertising in defence of his outburst earlier, but then decided that silence was a better option than humour.
“Specifically, everyone is upset by your comment about a great spirit or some other nonsense. Frankly, I am in agreement with public relations on this. Your outburst sounded like the new age idiocy of a delusional armageddon cult. What we all saw you say in your video demonstrates associations with a dangerous undercurrent of neo-fascist and terrorist social reform movements. How do you think the market will react if they think that our employees are involved with revolutionary activities or thoughts? More importantly, how will our competition respond?”
He was being surveyed, each word falling against him heavy and sharp like daggers until he couldn’t look into the eyes of his boss but instead stared sideways at a video screen. The sales data windows displayed by the wall surface rendered a stream of Asian language. In a video window in the left corner of the display, many thousands of people are starving in distant parts of the world while a well-dressed white news reporter offers a small group among them twelve seconds each on camera as charity in exchange for desperation and sadness and the flies around their mouths.
“Michael, you are well aware that this company does not endorse any creed or faith. You are equally well-aware that in no way can we allow company resources to be used to propagate any religious or social ideas. You say one little thing like you did this morning, and the network lights up. Now everyone’s talking about it.”
Michael was made really uncomfortable when his boss paused for a second time. He tried unsuccessfully to connect to his Atom feed, but his attention did not leave the room and his eyes stayed focussed.
“For decades, this company has prided itself on the objective nature of our goals. Pure and absolute. We cannot allow anything to damage the company reputation,” Michael’s boss said and turned to look out of the window of his office. “The market right now is moving together very quickly.”
Michael looked down at the floor. The tile next to his left shoe was coming loose.
“As you know,” his boss said as he sat back down at his desk, “we’re in merger talks with two other companies. Right now is a big time for us, and we cannot have negotiations compromised by actions such as you presented this morning. The executive board has agreed that the Jones account is going to be transferred to someone else in your department. It’s a big file. We need it done right and we need you elsewhere.”
He looked up to the video playing on the wall computing surfaces behind his boss and his breath fell back into his lungs. Text on the bottom of a news channel is reporting a management change in Michael’s company which is having a positive effect on stock prices. In a video window to the left, men walk in barren farm fields with Where are all the bees? in bright red with orange and a moving title. A woman outlining the growing consumer confidence crisis is mouthing silent words while numbers move on the screen with the text Interest rates are going up, and consumer confidence is going down.
“We do have something important for you to do, so please do not get too upset about your situation. In fact, we would prefer you to view this transition as an opportunity to mobilise your skills in a new avenue.”
His boss spoke using a precisely measured tone as Michael played with the tile beside his foot.
  “For the next quarter, at least, we’re going to ask you to work from home. You will only need to log part-time hours, so you’ll have plenty of space to recover from whatever your condition may happen to be. And think about it, you can spend time with your wife.”
Michael watched as his boss opened several instant message windows on the computer surface in front of him while focussing and unfocussing his eyes and moving his hands in circles on the desk.
“Naturally, this means a revocation of your gas permit for the duration of this project, as it will be needed by the other manager who we have just now assigned to your portfolio. Your new assignment has already been forwarded to your home computer, and you will find that adjusting to this change will be rapid and wholly effective for our respective interests.”
Michael rubbed the red spot on his forehead with his left hand. A bump had grown over the course of the day. His boss stood up from his chair.
“Look on the bright side. All this time with your wife means that we could soon see you with a brand spanking new member of your family. The company really supports family men. In the meantime, you might want to ask HR about the Deepwater Horizons investment program to supplement your income during this transition.”
It felt to Michael like the air in the room around him evacuated as he was quickly ushered out of the office.
“Have a good day, Michael. We’ll be in touch.”
The hallway was lit by the sun outside and was empty except for a small vacuum robot which slowly cleaned the floor around an advertising kiosk in the corner. Michael did not feel pleased with himself, and was not comfortable in his skin as he went back to his cubicle and stared at his desk without moving for five minutes before packing up what he needed in order to work from home. He got into his car and saw that the gas permit barcode sticker had been removed from his windscreen. The commute home was uneventful, although he soon realized that he was far too distracted by his thoughts of the day to organize any of his moments into a schedule or stop at a mall to purchase the body spray which he had planned for a successfully romantic evening spent with Anne. Instead, he concentrated on the road ahead of him and wondered how he was going to inform his wife of the horrible events of this particular Monday.
Anne had prepared an elaborate series of courses for dinner by the time Michael returned from work. She talked about the weather, and wondered why his Atom was so silent, as he had not communicated with her since late that morning. He explained his accident to her and she hugged him.
“It seems odd to me that you wouldn’t have at least emailed to tell me that you are ok. I mean, especially after this morning. I was getting scared again, Michael. Your absence always scares me, and you know that.” Anger was obvious through her sarcasm.
“I know. I’m waiting for Atom to fulfill the repair order I sent.”
“But I wonder why you couldn’t message me from your desktop to tell me. That’s inconsiderate. We both need to be a team, or otherwise why are we doing all this?”
After dinner, they drove to the lightbox at one of the mall plazas near their house and watched the latest summer blockbuster before going to bed at what Anne often joked was a reasonably civilised hour.
The next morning Michael awoke in a panicked sweat and his bed sheets were dripping wet. The sun had not yet risen and only the electronic displays in the room were visible. Anne was still asleep beside him. Normally, his Atom woke him at precisely five in the morning. It was typical for his sleep to be regulated by ambient dream programs, which were intended to induce sleep while simultaneously maximizing mental exercise so that a user could get the optimally beneficial results from their rest. They were very popular as their use was often required in order to receive  full health coverage. It was rare for Michael to see the end of the program, as he was often interrupted by calls from the office. Checking the time he determined that he would not be able to sleep again before he had to leave for work and grabbed his notebook from the night stand instead.
An old dream – Some old friends invite me to stay with them at a new apartment in the city for a holiday weekend before I met Anne. I say yes and that I’ll bring enough food for everybody, for the entire holiday. I don’t remember driving to the apartment building and am suddenly inside of it after filling the kitchen cupboards. The door leading outside opens forcefully when I try to leave the kitchen and I fall to the ground in pain. Before the door closes again, I see the man who opened it and he’s laughing with a female shape over his shoulder. The door closes abruptly behind him and I look down and see blood on the left side of my pants but there’s no injury, only a wallet. I open it and it’s full of blood and seven broken teeth fall to the ground. I pick them up and run to the door but it’s locked and the teeth won’t fit in the keyhole. I can see through the small window at the top and outside in the apartment courtyard the man who hit me is still holding a woman’s body over one shoulder and with one hand is moving obscenely under her dress. The man’s shark-like open-mouthed smile scares me and I need to tell the police and instead of using Atom I pull a notepad out of my shirt pocket and write buttons and a screen and talk to a man who tells me he is the police and says that they are sorry that they cannot help him and next time I should use the proper communication channels. It’s not my phone I say and then he’s standing beside me and I show him the buttons and smile and he says in the future don’t distract the police with nonsense and I drop the notepad and pencil and run through the apartment to the front door but am not tall enough to reach the handle and fall sideways as armed men break through every window. Don’t worry one of them says and grabs my shoulder and we’ll keep your family safe says another.  The men are all wearing metal helmets and masks which cover their faces, and on their blue uniforms there’s a picture of a red snake which looks like a cobra. I feel warm and safe and go to Dad’s bedroom to play Thomas’s new role-playing video game without him.
He stopped writing and started worrying about getting to work. The reality which opened  in front of him was shaming and made him feel exceptionally vulnerable. He was now barred from using the public gas stations, and no one liked to use the private ones. Without the company gas barcode, he would no longer qualify for transportation subsidies for food products from the government. The expanded cost of purchasing food would no longer allow much discretionary money, and the first thing to go would be such frivolities as dream ambience program subscriptions  and lightbox entertainments. He could not stop his thoughts from racing as he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Sweat still covered his entire body and he wrapped himself against the cold and watched as the pattern of shadows produced by the overhead fan travelled across the room as the morning sun began to rise in the sky.
At precisely five-thirty in the morning, Anne rose out of bed and started her morning routine. Michael was already awake beside her. He decided that it was best not to mention what had happened. She would not know how to respond except to purchase a new ambience program. At the same time, however, he could not really allow silence to grow the distance between them. While not quite a violence, silence remained in a sense a wilful betrayal of their intimacy. There was a point during breakfast, as Anne asked him to pass the pitcher of orange juice to her, that his need to express what had happened in the office of his boss the day before overcame his reservations and he nervously spilled juice all over the table.
“Sometimes, you’re just so clumsy,” she said, dabbing at the table with her napkin. “It still amazes me that you were ever co-ordinated enough to dance well.”
The way that she smiled when she insulted him reminded him why he loved his wife so very much. Throughout their marriage, their friends had told them how much fun they were having together in the pictures and videos that they had captured. Michael and Anne are the most fun couple we know he kept remembering one of them saying. The witty titles of their digital image stores made them popular among their friends. Once, they had even won a substantial shopping credit in an online voting pool held the previous summer by a reality TV show, for making a comedy video during a Caribbean cruise for their fifth anniversary which they had taken with one hundred and thirty other couples. A gust of wind caused Michael to lose his plate of food over the side of the boat, and Anne made him look foolish when she decided to throw a replacement sandwich to him and the package opened mid-flight. The wet sandwich hit him in the face and stuck long enough to provoke the entire deck of the boat to laughter. Inadvertently, Anne had turned their video camera on when she put it down to eat, and so the moment of Michael’s humiliation was preserved and posted online. Michael’s caption to the video Loved the vacation until my wife made dinner became immediately and exceptionally popular, appearing on mugs and t-shirts sold at tourist shops and on street corners. For a short while, there was talk that the video of Anne and Michael would be rebroadcast on the major channels and that he and Anne would be flown out to studios in Vancouver and Los Angeles. A video crew from one of the networks had followed him around for several weeks, capturing nearly everything over the course of each day until they stopped filming and suddenly disappeared, along with the fame promised to both himself and his wife. He was later told that sales for merchandise with his catchphrase had peaked before the show went into production.
“So I finished the Jones account earlier than expected.” He paused as he finished eating one of the eggs from his plate and began to rub the red spot on his forehead. Anne looked at him for a minute, then returned her attention to her food. “I finished my numbers late last night, and then senior management told me that I could take a short break before starting another account. They said that I could do a few things from home for the next few weeks.”
“So that means that you won’t be going in to work today? I was planning on working here today.” Anne placed her fork on her plate and briefly unfocussed her eyes.
“No, I won’t.” Michael replied as he cleared his plate.
“Well, I won’t mind you around, I guess. Maybe we can go for a drive later. I still need those groceries that I told you about a few minutes ago.”
“A few minutes ago? What do you mean, what groceries?”
“I sent you a shopping list. Don’t tell me that your Atom doesn’t work for that either. This is really becoming inconvenient.”
“Yeah, I didn’t get it.”
“Well, now you can just come with me, I guess.”


Michael began working at his home office at a quarter to nine in the morning. The commute from his kitchen to his office had taken exactly thirty-three seconds and no surprise delays experienced along his route, except for the moment when he noticed that one corner of the carpet in the hallway leading between the two rooms had begun to fray and was sticking up from the rest of the floor. He made a note to fix this problem at some point during his lunch break.
Before logging in to start his new job, he expected to receive roughly eighteen hours of account data to process and was moderately disturbed by the fact that he accomplished all of the work which he had received from the company that morning several minutes before his morning coffee break. He checked his surface computer several times and finding no new messages he contacted his district manager to indicate his availability for data processing in the afternoon. While he waited for a response from human resources, he used his desktop surface to play old jazz music and video solitaire. Ten games were indifferently won and lost before he realized that he would not be speaking with his district manager as much as he had the previous week.
The solitaire program was streaming cards down the side of his desk as he looked out of his window. Anne was outside moulding the garden into the shapes which she thought best complimented their house. He stirred aspartame into his coffee and drank in silence for fifteen minutes.
After five weeks of finishing all of the work assigned to him by the end of each morning, there was one day when Michael received no work assignments at all. He locked himself in his home office and played solitaire on the computer until the sun stopped shining outside of his window and Anne showed her anger that he did not come to bed when she wanted him to by slamming the bathroom door after waking up at precisely five thirty in the morning.