win and tonic

Jorge’s Choice

His mutt was such a vicious beast that she was less of a dog and more of a set of teeth with a dog attached. None could near her without deep chested rumbles filling their chests in kind. So alarming was this dog’s presence that the concrete slabs before Jorge’s house were a bit whiter than those of his neighbors’.

Jorge was lonely, but not yet lonely enough to do anything about it. He enjoyed soup, collapsible television trays, and the security his dog provided, though not explicitly - when his pet should eventually pass is when he’ll truly begin to appreciate her ambient contributions to his otherwise silent home.

Two bedrooms and two baths, but the bedroom not housing his bed laid empty and bare with white-dusted hardwood floors that appear solid enough to not squawk in protest should one walk across it, but with settled drywall pollenating each stripe to a bright and cheery grey. Dust floated freely before every window of his home, causing those with lesser constitutions to sneeze just from passing by them. Whether the concentration of airborne debris truly was denser in front of each window through some strange greenhouse effect having to do with heat pockets and thermal dynamics, or rather the sight of dust illuminated by sunbeams merely caused visitors to become acutely aware of the dust they were consuming to create a sort of placebo-induced sneeze was unprovable without sophisticated equipment that neither Jorge nor any of his sparse acquaintances possessed.

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Pedant

Everyone stared.

If the sound of my heels sliding on gravel didn’t turn their heads, the collision did: my forehead bounced once on the concrete before my cheek broke the second impact.

It didn’t knock me out. Nor did I feel surprised or alarmed. I anticipated the slip moments before it happened, but I failed to take action to minimize the damage. I laid there, ass in the air, while I calculated my next action.

Self-assessment, the doctors said. It’s a new thing. I still think it’s pointless, so I kept my old cron jobs at high priority, resulting in the newly-added process to take longer than it was designed to. My resources are better spent elsewhere.

I laid there relishing the sensation of pain on my skull and in my neck, cataloging the experience until my assessment completed. The cold pulses of discomfort starkly contrasted the warm blood pooling around my lips and ear.

A minute passed before I pushed onto my hands and knees. Gravity pulled my lips and face towards the browned sidewalk. I slid my tongue over my teeth and sat up, resting my ass on my heels, and looked around. Sitting upright seemed to be justification enough for the other pedestrians to not intervene. They unfroze, and resumed walking. I don’t blame them. I would have too.

I climbed to my feet, looking to the ground still - both to examine the fluid I’ve lost, and to keep any further fluid from landing on my shirt. After altering my course to the nearest service station, I too resumed walking.

I arrived ten minutes later. The blood on my forehead had yet to completely clot, but the bleeding had slowed enough that I was confident to stand upright without fear of ruining my blouse. I entered the garage’s entrance and a welder whistled, lifting his mask. He grinned around an expletive, then pointed me toward the door at the back of the garage.

Around the corner I sat in a dirty chair. The waiting room smelled like oil. Through the glass pane I could see other machines being serviced. One of them, a female, had her left arm completely removed. She stared at it blankly while her technician applied a magic wand to its exposed connectors. Blue sparks made her fingers spasm and clench.

A man was on his back behind her, raised 9.66 meters into the air. There were cables and intestines hanging below him. A little girl, perhaps 8 or 9, appeared to be braiding them. A potbellied man in a stained white jumpsuit supervised, nodding approvingly.

The little girl looked up and saw me through the window. She smiled. I smiled back, and saw fluid-stained teeth in my reflection. A large globule of blood dropped from my lip and landed on my blouse. The little girl giggled and resumed braiding.

Outside a car backfired. The machines jumped. The workers didn’t. Their organic eardrums no longer functioned at optimal levels thanks to the tools of their trade: drills. Saws. The roar of kilns. The technicians didn’t share the luxury of upgradeable parts. The did hard work with no reparations to its hazards. Still, they were happy to be here. Happy to be employed. Happy to be left alone.

A young woman in a pony tail snapped her fingers, loud enough for me to hear from the waiting room. She pointed at me through the glass then stuck her thumb over her shoulder, summoning me. I walked through the door, across the garage and towards where she stood. She inhaled through her teeth sympathetically while unfolding a metal chair for me.

“Had a nasty spill, didja?” she said, cigarette hanging off her mouth. She pulled a towel out of a plastic barrel and started wiping my face before I even sat down.

“Cron daemon priorities are all messed up.” I winced when her rag passed over the gash on my head, but immediately relaxed when the chair’s cool surface distracted my nerves.

“Apparently. Your equilibrium daemon up to date?”

I looked her over while I checked the changelog. She looked fit. Twentysomething. “Yeah, looks like it. I had better luck with the beta, I think, but that directory’s not public anymore.”

“Ah, probably an IP fuckall somewhere, I bet.”

It took me a full quarter second to parse that she meant not bandwidth or DNS errors, but patents. I nodded in agreement, and she blinked.

“You ain’t kiddin’ ‘bout your crons, are ya? Lie back, lemme poke around a bit.”

I put my hands on my knees and slumped in my chair. The cold metal pressed to my neck helped to distract from the pain even more than it did through my clothes. The repairwoman turned away briefly to pull a bus cable from her utility cart, then unhooked a bulky monochrome handheld from her belt. Her brow sullened once her scanner was interfaced.

“Hm. Your motor daemon doesn’t seem to be getting along with the latest assessment process. When’d you get that updated?”

“The doc did it for me,” I said. “I told him the one I had was just fine, but he wouldn’t let me leave until I upgraded.”

“Fuckin’ scam artists. Bet it cost a pretty penny to get it, too, dinnit?”

“More than that,” I laughed. “It took me half an hour before I got my blood pressure regulated again.”

She puffed on her cigarette and shook her head, reading the screen some more. “Fuckin’ scam artists,” she said again.

I looked to my left and saw the little girl from before standing on a stool. She was pulling one cable from the man’s back while another one lifted towards his spine, like a pulley. She was using so much of her body weight that her butt was practically on the concrete floor. When only a meter of looped intestine remained she jammed her fist on the lift controls in a practiced motion, and the man’s table lowered. She jammed another button and it stopped above her head. Then she gingerly tucked in the last of the roping hardware, folding it delicately between his spine and lungs. With a satisfied smile she put her hands on her hips, nodded, then turned to Potbelly. He beamed, and patted her on the head.

“There,” my technician said. “Found it.” She bent over with the screen turned towards me. “The new version of your assessment job kept booting your motor subprocess from the RTP resource. Looks like this version never learned to share before the vendor pushed it for sale.” She tapped her stylus on the screen a few times. “That should do it. I changed the permission settings on the resource. It’s flexible enough to be used by at least thirty processes - no idea why your self-assessment job decided he needed it all to himself.”

I smiled. She smiled back. “Oh you poor thing - here, let me get Len over here and he’ll clean you up, eh?”

“Thank you.” I sat up as she pulled the cable from my jawline free. She gave a playful salute while hopping back on her heels, then turned to whistle to a stick of a man across the garage. He perked, waved, and saw the wetwear tech beckon him over. After grabbing his clipboard he jogged over, narrowly avoiding a golf cart pushing spare parts across the garage. Its tiny trailer was full of limbs and cables, dirty with blood and oil. A thigh still connected to a hip was hanging over the edge, and it whirred and clicked while kicking in the air. Pink flesh was charred with burns where the knee should have been. It sounded old. Mechanical.

“Whatcha got, Jen?” The mechanic lifted a pair of swimming goggles from his eyes and snapped them onto his forehead. They looked like they use to be pink.

“This one here scraped her face pretty bad. You think we got some spare graft we can hook her up with?”

Len looked me over. I smiled, but not wide enough to expose my teeth this time. He was handsome. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I got a pigment that’ll match close enough, I think. Be right back.” Len jogged around the table holding male model from before, who was lying face-down now. The little girl was up on the table with him, standing in a straddle over him while she stitched up his back.

On his way back from the skin-bin Len almost got taken out by the same golf cart from before.

“Yeah,” he huffed, catching his breath. “This oughta do it, I think.” He turned to Jen, proudly holding fistful of drooping flesh up to my face. “You?”

Jen looked up from her handheld and smiled. “Damn near perfect, I think.”

Len beamed. “Alright beautiful, let’s get you lookin’ right. You mind standin’ for me?” He offered his hand to help me rise to my feet. “Thanks. Alright, let’s get you cleaned up a bit before I graft— whoa!”

I fell back onto my chair, bounced once, then landed hip-first on the smooth concrete. Hard. It hurt.

“Whoa there girl, you alright?” Len scrambled towards me and reached for my arm. “Jen, get over here and take a look at her equilibrium cron and see if -“

“I’m fine.” I waved them off. “Really -“

“Naw sweetie,” Len said, grabbing my forearm. “That was clearly a problem. Just let Jen take another look-“

“I said I’m fine.” I sighed, then smiled up at them reassuringly. “It’s nothing. I just,” Len offered his arm and I hoisted myself up with a grunt. “I don’t trust this version of the assessment daemon the doc gave me, and I’m still trying to figure out how many cycles I want to give it.” Jen looked just as skeptical as Lem did. “I took too much away from my equilibrium cron that time is all. I’ve worked it out now, though.” I smiled again, brushing my hair from the sticky wound on my forehead. “I’m good. Promise.”

Len didn’t look convinced. “Alright,” he said, and nodded slowly. “Alright, if you say so.”

Jen crossed her arms with a smirk and shook her head. Len caught her eye and jerked his head to the side. She got the message, graciously bowed, and started walking backwards. “Okay. Well, you stay upright, girl, y’hear?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will.” She snapped a finger gun at me before turning to walk towards some other emergency in the garage.

Len pulled another towel from the bin and started dabbing at my wound. I turned to look straight ahead, as if I was getting a haircut. I tried to stay still while resisting the urge to overcorrect minutiae movements. Though my eyes were staring straight ahead, Len was soon in front of them. His tongue stuck out a little as he concentrated.

“So…” He kept his eyes on his hands while he dressed my wound. “What’s your name?”

“Tam,” I said. “Tammeron.”

“Nice to meet you, Tam.” He smiled, still not really looking at me. He had a nice smile. “I’m Lenny.”

I felt my cheeks flush. “Hi Lenny,” I whispered. At only 11.1 decibels, I doubt he heard me above the 86.7 db buzz of the tablesaw 64.8 meters to my right. His smile widened, though, demonstrating that he’d seen me say it.

“Hi Tam.” He said back, then finally met my eyes. “What say you we getcha patched up then, eh?”

I pursed my lips and I smiled back, nodding. I’ll be damned if he sees my teeth still covered in blood, I thought.

“Webmasters are the new truck driver.”

The silence of our studying was broken by another of his unprovoked non-sequiturs. He always jumps from one subject to another in between pauses, and continues the latter half of his thoughts verbally, as if I was following his internal monologue with as much clarity as he does. I sighed. “What?”

“You know how they say that truck drivers rule the world? Without them, the entire world economy would crumble - virtually every commercial good ever harvested, produced or manufactured requires a trip on a trailer from vendor to store shelf.”

He never fills you in begrudgingly, though. He’s incredibly caring and surprisingly not vain - he doesn’t resent having to catch you up to his train of thought. It’s almost as if he realizes that he spoke out of context, but prefers to have his conversational postulates in reverse order. Not to keep anyone in the dark intentionally, I don’t think; like I said, he isn’t vain. He’s just brilliant. “Okay, yeah. So how do computer nerds take the place of truck drivers? We move data, not physical goods. We can’t eat numbers. At least, well, not yet anyway-”

“See, that’s the thing!” Charlie turned in his computer chair to face me, hunching over with his elbows on his knees with his hands suddenly eager to emphasize his words with more motion than any sort of visible meaning. “We can’t eat numbers, but we can make numbers bring us our food.” He paused for a minute when he saw my brow furrow with confusion.

“So, essentially, since I’m a computer programmer, I can build a robot to replace a truck driver to deliver a Hershey bar to my door?”

“Nono, too literal, hang on.” He always says to hang on when he needs to re-articulate his thoughts for us mere mortals. He never makes you wait more than a second or two, though, his eyes darting from one side of the floor to the other before looking back at you with renewed enthusiasm. “Okay, say, for instance, that all private transit just suddenly disappeared. No truck drivers, trains, or airplanes - like, say we ran out of oil. We thought we had a reserve for a while longer, but - but we miscalculated, and we ran out. What would happen?”

“Probably something along the lines of Mad Max.” I reached for my ill-kept zen garden on an upper shelf of my desk, and grabbed a fistful of sand, theatrically crying “Noooo!” to the heavens as I let it run from my fingers. He laughed a little. Just a little, but it was enough. I love making him laugh.

“Hah, no, seriously, what would happen? If trucks and cars suddenly didn’t work, what would we, as resourceful Americans, do?”

I stopped to think a bit, unintentionally mimicking his thoughtful pose of nose to the floor. I smirked a little, barely succeeding in suppressing a toothy grin once I realize it. I look up briefly - luckily, Charlie didn’t notice. I didn’t want to explain to him why my similarity to him brought me joy - the admiration I had for him; his brilliance, his looks, his demeanor, his… kindness. He’s always so fucking nice, all of the time. I wish I could do that.

A split second later I regained my composure and thought over the question. What would we do?

“Well, let’s see… the government would probably intervene. Do some PR stuff, telling us that it’s for the best and that they’ve had a longstanding plan for this outcome. They’d have some sort of rebate, or, like, tax-cut for trading in our cars. The economy would dip tremendously - vendors wouldn’t be able to receive anything from one another that can’t be carried by foot….” I trailed off. I tend to over empathize in movies, and this hypothetical scenario was quite literally depressing me. We wouldn’t last a month.

“Now see, out of desperation comes the most brilliant ingenuity. What would the scientists busy themselves with? What would the guys at MIT do?”

My eyebrows perked. “They’d… shit, they’d fix it, wouldn’t they? They’d be the smart ones, rejecting all unreplenishable fuel sources and making that final push towards shit like hydrogen cell batteries and… make solar power useful, or whatever. Probably in a matter of months. Weeks, even, if every resource available in the scientific world were focusing on it. Which is probably what would happen more or less, yeah?”

“Exactly!” He almost stood, but instead just dropped back in his computer chair, sliding his butt back in the blue fabric of the seat cushion. “See, all the reasons the government had put in place for the current means of economy - GM, fossil fuel, all the jobs they’d worked so hard to protect in the automotive industry to keep our economy afloat, they’d all collapse within hours of the news.” He shifted in his seat again, his posture straightening while looking intently into the alley his palms made as he spoke. “But that’s the push the scientific industry would need to make some serious breakthroughs in applicable, everyday sciences. But in between those breakthroughs and the collapse, what would the rest of us do?”

“Considering we still have means of electricity with the depletion of fossil fuel, we’d… well, we’d all network, I suppose. All the sedimentary types would stay put and organize.”

“Right! We’d continue to curate information, keep each other informed. Entertainment and communication would make a definitive paradigm shift to computers, since the means to see each other face to face would be increasingly difficult. Those currently rejecting technology would have to embrace it, or else they’d literally starve.”

Now it was my turn to sit up straighter. This was getting interesting, but I’d completely lost sight of the original query. “So the internet would push the economy out of a rather imminent depression. What does that mean? What’s your point?”

He beamed as he stood up. “Webmasters are the new truck driver.” He stretched his arms some before flopping on the bottom bunk, bouncing a bit on the creaky mattress of my bed. “If truck drivers disappeared,” he continued, staring up at the underside of the mattress above him, “life would suck. Then computer nerds would keep us alive. If it were the other way around -”

“If computer technicians all died because, like, silicone is a carcinogen or something, then the world would fall apart. It’d be pen and paper - the dark ages.”

“We’re too reliant on technology for the world to suddenly do without it. But truck drivers, they’re simply means - a medium for transporting stuff. But information -”

“- information rules the world.”

Charlie grinned. He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back, feet on the floor as he lied on my bed. My heart skipped a little when I thought of him leaving a warm spot on my mattress. I silently hoped he’d step out for a minute so I could lay where he laid, pretending his warmth from the blankets weren’t second-hand. I swallowed and held back a blush.

“I mean, it’s the fucking Information Age - we named an entire era after today’s currency! We sell information, and we can pack more of it in a minute than we could in a whole library a hundred years ago. Information can push goods and goods need information to be made, to be transported, to do everything. Even though we haven’t the technology yet for pure information to literally make a physical impact on objects, you have to admit… we’re practically there.”

There. That’s the thought he had. That profound visualization that he plotted in seconds inside his mind before he mentioned anything about trucks or computers to me. And he guided me through the flowing creek of consciousness that is his train of though. He relived it all, verbally, at what must have been eons longer than if the conversation were held completely in his head. And he just laid there. Grinning.

On my bed.

There’s a good side and a bad side to falling in love with your college roommate. On one hand - if he takes the top bunk - you get to sleep under him. On the other hand… you’re stuck sleeping under him.

It’s at once the worst and most comfortable hell I could have ever hoped for.