Day In & Day Out, Page 3

questioning, her answers creating more questions than before. Sensing his impatience, she interrupts him.

  "Excuse me! I'm trying to help your entire world, please let me speak and all things necessary to your survival will be imparted. Our technology, though advanced, is still limited in certain ways. We only have the ability to call not to dictate where the call goes. Once we have a connection with a world, that's the only communication device that we'll ever reach there. That single device becomes our whole means of communication with that realm"

  This time he interrupts her, catching her at a time when she draws a breath. He is a paid communicator, and he directs people over the phone for a living, so he's good at things like that. He has only one question for her.

  "From what you've said, it sounds like this isn't the first world you've attempted to save. How successful have you been with the others?"

  He senses her choosing her words carefully, deciding how much information to give him in her hesitation as she pauses before answering. This makes him uneasy, and he begins to feel sick.

  "We've had some minor successes, and as a result, have made improvements to the design we will be delivering to you."

  He asks her to "Give it to me straight." She doesn't understand the idiom, so he explains to her that she must relate the singular success story to him without any deception or half truths.

  "The last realm we attempted to help, the machine actually overloaded their planet's core, instead of keeping it vibrating at the correct frequency. But their device was found to be unstable. It wasn't built to the new specifications we designed based on the data recovered from that event!"

  All he heard was the first sentence and then they were cut off. He sees a hand pressing the release button on his phone, and his eyes follow it back to it's socket and the consciousness attached. He realizes, with a shock, that it's his supervisor.

  His supervisor threatens his job. He reminds him of his attendance issues, and of his issues with negative customer reviews of his performance. He reminds him that he's already been reprimanded for talking to customers for too long, let alone having outright conversations with them.

  He calmly and plainly reminds his supervisor of his ability to sue on the grounds of this place being a hostile work environment, especially after having his direct superior threaten his job. His supervisor fumbles for words, obviously more infuriated by this remark, but not quite sure how to respond to being told no for a change. He decides to respond with the same high school bully response comfortable and familiar to him.

  “HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME?! I HAVE THE AUTHORITY AND WILLINGNESS TO END YOUR EMPLOYMENT RIGHT NOW, AND YOU STILL WON'T EVEN PERFORM A SIMPLE TASK! I WANT YOU OFF OF THAT PHONE IMMEDIATELY!”

  His supervisor ripped the headset he was taking off out of his hands. His supervisor finishes his frothing rant by telling him to go home and 'politely' informing him that he could expect to no longer be employed tomorrow. He silently has a moment of something resembling respect for his supervisor for being able to at least keep his word choice of a professional manner while melting down.

  The HR manager nervously told him as he was leaving that they would pay him for the rest of the day and he would not receive any consequences for going home early. He would return tomorrow morning as scheduled. As he walked out, the HR manager watched him apprehensively, hoping he was ignorant enough to be satisfied with that, and not litigation.

  The next morning would be better, he thinks, pondering all the way home. He knows he has just played a really good card with threatening to sue. Although, he can only use that card once, and he was hoping it would've been much longer before he would need to cry wolf and seek a civil suit against the big bad company that repressed him.

  All night, he gets drunk and proceeds to watch reality television, welcoming the escape from actual reality. Tonight, he passes out drunkenly. He will not remember half of the evening when he wakes up, but he will remember one thing. He slips into drunken stupor thinking about the difficulty he will have mustering the will to work tomorrow morning.

  Back To The Top

  DAY 4

  He'd already gotten the call. The one he was expecting. Somehow he knew, he thought. Haha, sarcasm again. Or is that irony? He couldn't remember, but it was something. His supervisor hadn't been around all day, and he didn't anticipate him coming in anytime soon. In his absence, he took a thirty-seven minute break, in honor of his wonderful management. All time paid on the company dime. Or is it quarter? Sign of the times. He'd done this twice today before getting her call. This time on the phone with her, he does nothing but listen.

  “It's too late for us to try to tell you to get help; to give you our instructions for the sustenance of your world. Even if you could convince someone to listen, there's no way to power up your generators in time, let alone build them. I'm sorry we couldn't be a more resilient or better equipped people. We take it very hard when we encounter a world that cannot be saved. We take it even harder when it's a result of a combination of our shortcomings and the planet's ignorance. When I told you that we hadn't had much success before, usually it's been due to our own inability make the project work. This is the first time we have been rejected by a member of the society we are trying to save. This realization that we may have had the ability to save you, but were barred from doing so ; it pains us greatly. Tell whomever you wish that I personally apologize to your realm for not having the resources to save them.”

  For the first time, he found himself fervently hoping she was actually crazy, or that it was some sort of prank. His supervisor, the HR Manager, and whoever this girl really was all conspired to trick him. He intently wished he wasn't finally getting some excitement in his life, only to have existence ripped from him immediately afterward. He didn't want for life to finally start feeling like it meant something again, only to have his hopes ground away by a proverbial child's shoe, perpetually crushing, judiciously, all of the bugs on the playground.

  No point in going on with this then, he thinks. Getting up from his desk, he leaves his headset behind, having no need for it anymore. He leaves his little lunch box. He walks away from his fully customizable, 32 positions for whatever chair that he used to love. He traipses away from all of the little clutterings and curios on his desk. A pen holder; the cat calendar. A little, plastic hula girl, dancing silently as he leaves her view.

  Walking away slowly, the sounds of confused callers slowly fade away from him. Empty headsets reverberate echoes of anger and frustration. The only sounds are rage filled customers digitized and played back over the speakers of dozens of headsets around the building. He thought about phone calls. If you've only ever talked to someone on the phone, have you really ever heard that person's voice? A phone turns sound into electrical signals, and the phone on the other end converts those signals back into sound. Is there anything lost in this sort of transportation of information?

  As he blissfully exits the building, he remembers noticing there were a lot of empty seats that day. He thinks about this because he's also noticing the lack of any car other than his in the parking lot. He notices an absence of human life all the way home, so he takes his time driving, thinking inattentively. He thinks about the last time he got laid. He thinks about high school, and his friends. And how come he hasn't seen them in so long? He thinks about the peace, and responsibility, of freedom. He goes home without stopping at the liquor store, even knowing as he does that the fridge at home is empty. Void of food or drink.

  When he comes inside, the television is blaring something about catastrophe. As he puts on his sleep-flesh, he listens to the reporter weeping about the vanity of man. How could we possibly think we could fix the environment, he screeches madly between choking, body-convulsing sobs. As the news anchor begins to tell his what would surely be heartbreaking story, he enumerates upon his apologies to his wife for cheating on her. The television's only sounds are from his explanation that he forgives her for cheating on him. The television
shuts off, and the remote is dropped on the floor, as he heads for his bed. No, not a heartbreaking story, he thinks to himself. That was the desperate rambling of one who knows he has nothing to lose, and therefore nothing to live for.

  He lays down to meditate, "Or whatever," he thinks to himself. He contemplates suicide passingly for a moment, then remembering his thirst for life, even in the face of death, brought his mind to other thoughts. He was glad he would soon see that choice rendered useless, knowing his decision would be stripped from him very soon. He knew he would never take his own life, but had hoped for death to come in various forms on multiple occasions. Now it was here. His mind lost in thought, he started to slip closer to that precipice between the waking world and subconscious meandering.

  He's nearly asleep when he hears the sirens going off in the distance. Somehow still loud enough to produce a painful buzzing of the ears. He looks out the window and sees the flames and fire and molten steel and burning flesh and crumbling civilization screaming towards him from far away. The flames lick high enough to reach above the clouds. He watches the doom blowing around for a short while, then returns to falling asleep. He lays down on his back and closes his