Chapter 2 I left her terminal functioning again. Fan motors are something we carry in the kit. Yeah, of course I was wishing it were something more serious so I could go back. As I drove away I was thinking about an old song I'd heard in my grandfather's collection. He saved some really ancient stuff from his youth. It was called Old 55 by a band called The Eagles. It had to do with a guy driving away from a girl's place at six in the morning after a night with her. I guess she told him he had to leave and he got in his 1955 (did they have cars back then?) car and felt this feeling of freedom driving home at dawn. Well...it was dawn but I wasn't feeling free! Funny...techs always feel free. You know what I mean. Users are the ones with no freedom. Techs have all the freedom they can use. Who knows what the programmers do? But I wasn't feeling free. I'll tell you what; that user had a string running straight from her delicate little user fingers at one end and tied right around my neck at the other. And it wasn't just any string, oh, no; it was made of some very fine silk or satin and encrusted with diamonds from one end to the other. And, man did I feel it pulling. It must have had elastic inside because any second it was going to go snap! And I was going to be right back in her lair, sitting on the floor like a dog with this leash around my neck! Don't even ask me what I had on my mind. Couldn't you just see me with a user, completely mindless (and I mean both of us) telling her how I felt! You can't talk to those people. They don't understand. I had so much to say but I couldn't say it to a user. Now I really found myself wishing she had her own mind and she really was looking at me with interest. I know how absurd it is and how I was imagining the whole thing but I guess I'm just lost in the fantasy. Hey I'm not starved for contact. There are plenty of techs that go for me. Everyone knows you have to watch the sex. The programmers have pretty strict rules about keeping the numbers down. Procreating is pretty serious among techs. You wouldn't want to go to the trouble of raising a kid and have it made into a user. Man, there goes my prejudice against users again. I try to be tolerant but they take up so much space and don't take any responsibility for themselves. How could they? They can't even think for themselves. I keep thinking that if they could they would take responsibility and live like we do. At least I think she would. She, she, she... great, I've getting obsessed with a user. My friends will laugh at me. The programmers would can me or kill me or even worse, make me into a user. I've never known a tech that was canned or whatever. What would they do to you if you got caught doing something "wrong." We try not to do anything they say we can't do, but if they don't catch you... I can see someone saying, "What did you do wrong?" "I got caught," would be my answer. What could I use as an excuse to go back there? Then again why don't I just drive off a cliff? It would have the same result. I'd better just head for the warehouse with the broken fan. I got to the warehouse as the sun was coming up. Tom's car was in the lot. I felt better already. It's always good to have your best friend around when you're in turmoil. Who else would pretend to be interested in someone else's boring neurotic problems other than a best friend? That's why you have one. Tom Rhodes was a tech who seemed to have a little more understanding and compassion towards the users than I did. We'd been friends since school. We'd seen each other through a few relationships. He'd split a gut over this one. Tom is the best friend a guy could have 'cause he forgave me the ultimate sin. Back in our teenage years I slept with my best friend's girl. Yeah, I know, that's pretty bad. But it was like this, We'd drink a little too much (no, that's not my excuse it's just the beginning of the story). Me, well, most people thought of me as a happy drunk. Tom would get a little angry. Leslie was beautiful, I mean she could really turn some heads. One night a bunch of us were on this boat. Don't ask me whose it was or how we got there, I can't remember. But there we were, drinking, having a party. Tom got a little sauced and said some things to Leslie that weren't all that nice. He followed that act up by passing out on a berth up front. She and I were up on deck and she needed a shoulder and well...there I was just a thirty-eight regular, but enough shoulder to cry on. Somehow (once again certain details escape me) we were slow dancing. "If it weren't for Tom it would be you," she whispered in my ear. Now don't ask me why this gave me a chill that ran up my spine, back down again and maybe a couple more revolutions. It just did. See, you may not know it to look at me but I did alright with women back then. I had some kind of...oh I don't know, I guess in some far off land they'd call it "simpatico" with them. When I was sixteen and had just entered my last year of tech training I was chosen to attend a small private academy that my father had attended. There was a teacher there that took a liking to me. She was an older woman, probably way up in her early twenties. She asked me if I wanted to have lunch. Somehow (don't you just love those somehow's?) we ended up at her apartment. This was Friday afternoon. We didn't surface again until Monday. When I got to the school the administrator called me into his office and said, "Miss Johnson never came back from lunch on Friday. Someone saw you getting into her car. What did you do with Miss Johnson?" I replied, "It's not what I did with Miss Johnson, it's what Miss Johnson did with me." Being the "older woman" she taught me all kinds of things that guys my age didn't know. Anyway, maybe that's what they mean by "simpatico." The administrator was one of those older guys who liked living vicariously through the sexual escapades of the younger guys so I didn't get in trouble. Never did find out what happened to Miss Johnson. Oh, yeah, back to Tom and Leslie. The night on the boat came and went. Then one night we were at a party. Tom and Leslie did the usual fight routine and he stormed off. She looked at me and there I was, the thirty-eight regular. I guess we knew as I drove her home what was going to happen. And without a lot of discussion it did happen. As beautiful as Leslie was the memory is mostly one of guilt. I knew I was the ultimate back stabber and didn't know what to do with the knife. I figured I'd absolve myself with the comforting, "this will never happen again." I didn't even have that. Oh, it was never going to happen again as far as I could see, but I guess I'm a little nearsighted. A short time later a group of us threw a birthday party for Tom in a hotel room. You guessed it. They got in a big fight. This time Leslie didn't feel so bad. She figured another shot at the thirty-eight regular would make everything better. Now there's conscience and there's conscience. I tried to tell her that I'd felt bad enough and we shouldn't do it again. She said she'd tell him about the first time if I didn't do it again. Oh, pity me, I was being "blackmailed." Yeah, what blackmail. I guess I didn't exactly call the police. Instead I did what she was giving me an excuse to do. The next morning I awoke to the buzzer (I lived in a building with a security buzzer at the front gate). I noticed the beauty sleeping next to me and was reminded of my life of crime. But that's okay, I'd worry about my battered conscience and my dammed soul later. "Hello." I said to the intercom. "Hey, man." came the voice of Tom's brother, Steve. "We could use some help cleaning up the hotel room." I guess I'd worry about it now. Was I going to get away with it? Then he added, "Did you see Leslie leave? No one knows where she went last night." Who the hell ever came up with the term "white lie," because it's a real gray area. "No, I thought she was still around," I said. Well, I guess there was some truth to that. I told him I'd be down in a minute and Leslie went out the back of the building. Anyway that was the last time. Leslie and Tom got back together and I guess I thought we should just pretend it never happened. Quite possibly not the most noble solution but without a doubt, the easiest. Some time later I was apprenticing at the local computer supply warehouse. Tom's brother, Steve, was also apprenticing there. Enough time had gone by that I thought the past would stay in the past. Funny thing though, the past has an awkward habit of popping up in all kinds of tenses, worst of all the present. I was clocking out one day and walked by Steve's section. I thought I'd stop in and say hi. He was on the phone at the time and looked up at me as if I was a ghost, a very unwelcome ghost. "My brother wants to talk to you," he said. I picked up the phone, still ignorant that the mischievous past was going to play a little trick on me. "Hey, what's up." I stupidly said, not seeing the jumbo grade AA sailing toward my face. "I thought you were honest, I thought you were the only honest guy I knew." he branded into my soul. "Leslie told me what you guys did, she wants to talk to you." "I'm so sorry." She said quite uselessly, as if it meant anything at this point. "We got in a big fight and it just came out in anger, that we slept together once." Oh no, I thought. Now I understood why she wanted to apologize. It was code for, "We're still lying." After the initial shock of not knowing what to say to him and just hoping I was dreaming I tried apologizing to Tom. I tried apologizing a few times in the coming weeks. I begged him to take a sock at my jaw. In true Tom fashion he was too much of a gentleman and a friend. I've always carried that guilt around in the years since. Sometimes I think sipping blended chili con carne through a straw for a couple of weeks would have been preferable.
Chapter 3 "She's a what?" Tom said. "You're obsessing over a user?!" "You should have seen her," I said. "You're the guy who always refers to them as idiots," he said. "You should have seen her," I said. "You said that already," he said. He laughed at me for a moment. "Well, lucky for you, you can't do anything about it," he said. "I could see you having sex with her while her lifeless eyes were staring at the ceiling. Then again I think I've been there myself, and not with a user!" I thought of telling him about my suspicions that she could understand me but I didn't feel like being laughed at anymore. "You always say that they just clog things up. How about your theory that whenever you want something or need to get something done there's always a user in your way to hold you up?" He said. "And you always tell me that without them we wouldn't have jobs," I said. "What's one thing got to do with the other?" He said. "I don't know," I said. "And by the way," he said, "It's still true." "Yeah, and so's what I said" I intelligently replied. Then in a desperate attempt to salvage any self-respect I had left I said, "Let's drop it, it's not worth discussing." "Yeah, you're right. So what are you doing today?" He said. "Probably getting the sleep I didn't get last night," I said, "How about you?" " I've got to rebuild the motherboard on this one. After that I don't know. Why don't you call me when you wake up, see what's going on," he said. "Good idea. What'd you do last night," I said? "Downed some scotch and watched TV," he said. I never developed a taste for scotch. I always feel like guys who drink scotch are more cultured than I am. How's that for insecurity. "What'd you watch?" I said. "I don't remember" was his answer. "Were you looped?" "Not really. It's just that I've done the same thing every night this week and they just seem to blend together," he said. "Other than last night, my weeks been pretty much the same," I said. "You ever get the feeling you're in a rut?" he said. "What exactly do you mean by rut?" I said (I think they call that denial). "I mean doing the same thing day after day, night after night," he said. "Is that what we're doing? We go to different places to fix terminals. It's not like we go to the same office everyday like the users. And the hours aren't fixed either. You never know when you'll work or where," I said. "Still, I feel like I can predict what every day or night is going to be like whether I work or not, I know what I'm going to do, how it's going to feel and when it's going to end." He continued on as if he were in on the joke, "One time I wish I'd go into a user's place and get surprised. Like, wouldn't it be something if that looker you were telling me about just up and started staring right at you, so that you didn't feel like you were alone, and then just grabbed you and jumped your bones!" Why was he doing this to me? As if he knew what I hadn't told him and he was taking pleasure in making me feel like an idiot. Was this just some bizarre coincidence? Did Tom take up mind reading? I hate this feeling. See, now I feel like telling him what really happened, or what I think really happened. Then he'd laugh in my face and tell me what a dope I am. That's just how you get baited into being a fool, like at this point I need to be baited. Nothing doing. I'm not spilling a word. "Hey, I'm talking to you, did you just turn into a user?" he said. I wanted to speak but I kept staring at him. Finally I said, "sorry I must have gone to Jupiter." "Well, what do you think of what I just said? Have you ever imagined that?" he said. I went back to Jupiter. Then I landed. "Not really," I lied. "Have you?" "Are you kidding, what kind of idiot do you take me for?" he said. Yes! Saved from embarrassment once again. A constant battle but one that must be fought moment by moment. It's like one of those programs for chemical addictions, one day at a time. "Okay, so maybe sometimes I feel like I'm in a rut. But just compare your life to a user's life. We've got it pretty good, my friend," I said.
Chapter 4 Well, there I was again, in the car, on my way home. So this is turning out to be a pretty good day. I waste a glass of gin, meet the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, only she's a brain controlled zombie. I just slightly avoid telling by best friend that I'm entertaining what may very well be the most ridiculous bucket of thoughts that any red blooded moron as ever let seep into his cranium, and find out that my life is in a rut. Just short of another hole in my head I'd say that's about all I could handle at the moment. I opened my apartment door and checked for messages. I was relieved to find none. I got undressed and poured myself another Gordon's and believe me, this one was going down. I got under the covers and took that glorious first sip. Aahh, things were looking up already. I put the ice cold glass against my forehead and cooled off, then I took that wonderful second sip. The phone rang. No way could this be happening again. What is it with the third sip of my drink? No, not this time. I deserve some rest. It's my right. I put in my time last night. A person needs their sleep. They aren't allowed to work us like this. There is a legal turn around time. I'm not picking up that.... "Hello," I said. What I heard next knocked me right off the bed. The machine was telling me to go back and fix that same terminal. I know I did it right. I replaced the burned out components and the fan. That explains why I would get a call so soon after I'd gotten off a job. Usually if you didn't get the job done completely they'd call the same tech since he'd be familiar with the problem. Of course the first thought that popped into my brain, which was seeming to be getting progressively more damaged by the moment, was the elation of getting to go back to her place. Let's face it, I was toying with an excuse to go back there anyway. This was amazing. Although a quick trip back to reality reminded me that there was no good that could come of this for me. What the heck would I do with this user anyway. The answer, of course, is nothing. "So, dopey, stop being happy about it, you just wasted another drink!" I reminded myself. Oh, well, better get to it. So, there I was again driving down the road, on my way to her, her, her ,her, her, her. What the heck are we men made of! Someone somewhere once said that men do everything they do for woman. Yeah! A bus full of users drove by me on their way to work. A couple of them looked at me through the windows so I immediately became aware that I was talking to myself. I'm always talking to myself but let's face it, this particular conversation was so particularly stupid that I was actually embarrassed. Like they knew what I was saying! Of course they didn't. But it felt like the whole universe knew I was entertaining the fantasies that, well, let's face it, I was entertaining. The fact that I was happy to be going back to her place was one dumb thing but I wasn't going to leave it at that, oh no. That object that rests in my head had all kinds of pictures playing in it. Ooooh, that's a nice one. Wow, can we actually do that? Then it hit me. The thing I hate most of all, the voice of reason. No matter how bad your problems are, sometimes you enjoy the problems more then the solutions. What a simple thing life would be if more of us listened to the voice of reason. I remember once when I was a kid I had a terrible dilemma on my hands. I wanted to buy an ice cream cone and I couldn't decide what flavor I wanted. I only had enough money for one scoop and I was complaining that (and here comes my least favorite phrase of all time) "it's not fair." My father said he had the perfect solution, "Save your money and don't buy the ice cream." That way next time you can have a double scoop." Of course the problem with that was that I wanted some right then! But it would have solved the problem I had and that's why I hate the voice of reason so much. It always seems to say, "Just don't have what you really want and you've got no problem." So what was the ice cream cone this time? Well, that was obvious. Some things never change. The flavor of the ice cream just gets more dangerous. And of course the voice of reason beeped in again and said, "Hey, I'm still on hold here." The solution, of course, was to call in with an excuse and have someone else do the job. Let someone else get in trouble, let someone else get obsessed, let someone else have my ice cream cone! Nothing doing, I'd never stop thinking about her. I'd stay awake all day thinking about her. Wondering what my replacement was doing over there (besides fixing her terminal). Ah, yes, her terminal. Don't I owe it to her to do it right this time? I'm the one who didn't get it fixed last time, it's my responsibility to fix it. Justifying the wrong choice in the face of reason is so easy, no wonder why so many people choose to do it instead of making the correct choice. And let's face it I'd never see her again, even one more time would be better than nothing. So I guess I don't want to do what's right, I want to do what I want. Whew, that was a close one. You can always depend on the good old human process of justification to end up doing what you want when you know you shouldn't. I was just about to turn the corner to her apartment building. Suddenly I pulled over. Something made it hard for me to breathe. A sense of danger. Well, here's when you pay for the act of justification. Sitting in my car I tried to breathe. I have a thing called asthma, funny, my grandfather said it's been around as long as he could remember. They've never been able to cure it. Some say it's genetic, some say it's due to allergies and some say it's due to stress. This time I'd put my money on stress. I pulled out my little inhaler and took a couple of shots (not the shots I'd like to take right now but the more healthy, and I must admit, readily available ones). Such a little container to keep a person breathing. My, my, how tenuous our little lives are. When you think of the many ways we can be harmed it's amazing we escape with as little injury as we do. So, what is it, Ben Thomas, what's the alarm? What lies in there besides an incredibly beautiful woman and a busted computer terminal? And which one of those two things are deadly to a man? Not a difficult question to answer. But remember, she's a user not a real woman. How can she propose any danger? Maybe I'm just tired. I looked up at her apartment and for a second I thought I saw her curtain flutter. Yeah, right, like she was waiting for me to come sweep her off her feet and she was impatient. Of course she would be waiting but not impatiently. Users are like dogs, they have no real sense of time going by, they just wait as long as it takes for the next thing they're told is going to happen. And for the first time in my life I thought, maybe it would be better to be a user. Better to just be told what to do and to have no anxiety about the outcome. In other words not to sit just like I'm sitting right now going around in mental and emotional circles over such trivialities. Now, I've gone around in circles before, actually most of my life, but I've never and I mean never thought it would be better to be a user than a human. Wait a minute, users are humans, just not quite like us. Yes, they are humans. Oh, don't even start on that issue again. It's not my business to decide if it's right or if it's wrong to use humans as servants by the methods of mind control. My job is to fix the terminals and that's it. That and to obsess neurotically over my attraction to one of them and over the moral question of the entire society in which I live! Just stop it! My father used to call me opposite man. He said I would always do the opposite of what made sense at the time. If he was still around he'd have a good laugh at the fact that I'm still opposite man. .
Chapter 5 I rang her bell and waited in my worked up, over anxious, mercury bursting state of anticipation. She opened the door. I only wished she wasn't a user so that she could appreciate the incredibly funny sight she would have witnessed before her. Me, with my belabored smile pasted on my face like some garish rictus done in clown make up. It's like when someone wants to take your picture and they say smile but for some reason another forty-five seconds go by before they actually snap the picture and you've exhausted every possible resource in your imagination to go on smiling. So that the smile on your face is nothing more than some left over thing sitting there long after your eyes have started saying, "Take the picture, you idiot!" Well, that was what I must have looked like. But then again it wouldn't have mattered because she was a user. I starred at her for a minute, thinking about how her face looks the same as the image I'd been carrying around in my head since I left her. I felt a little guilty. I could've starred at her indefinitely but I felt that would be abusing her in some weird way. Again, what did it matter. We walked to her terminal as we did before. Every step filled with deja vu. Remembering the first time I'd walked this walk, how I couldn't keep my eyes off of her. I'd had such a strong urge to reach out and grab her around the waist and pull her toward me that at one point I thought I was just going to do it. I thought my arms were just going to defy my will and do it all by themselves, without my permission. Yet my mind seemed to win out because my arms remained where they were. Deja vu, hell, it was the same feeling I'd felt the first time and I was just repeating it. And my arms were still attached to me and not to her. Somehow I managed to exercise the super human strength it took to keep my mind on reality just enough to execute the physical process of opening up her terminal and looking inside. What I saw made no sense to me. Damn if that fan wasn't burnt out again. I know I'd replaced it just this morning. I used a brand new one but it's possible it was defective. I supposed that's happened before. Then it came. Not like anything I had anticipated but as such a shock that I couldn't actually move, it was just internally that I jumped out of my shoes. Oh, the voice was in the low, heady, dulcet tone I would've imagined, but the words, pointed, blunt: "You are a very secretive man, Mr. Thomas." Came the voice behind me. Now you may have thought I would have jumped up or maybe jerked my head around like a scene from a detective mystery. But I didn't. I just kept starring at the burned out fan. You see I had to wonder if I'd imagined it or not. I knew the next step was to turn and look at her. Was there going to be someone else in the room with us? Was she going to be alone, looking at me with that same blank user stare? Was I going to see that other look in her eyes, that human one, the one that I thought was watching me before? It was time to find out. I turned and there it was. Just her, alone, looking straight into my eyes with every spark and shine I've ever seen in the eyes of a thinking, feeling, knowing human being. We might have been looking into each other's eyes for hours or maybe a few seconds. I couldn't tell. But somehow from somewhere in me and I don't know where, came the words: "Did you just say something to me?" Not the most intelligent reply in history but then again I can't claim control over it's origin. She looked at me for a few more millennia. I repeated my question: "Did you just say something to me?" "Yes, I did," came the silky, smoothctive lyric to what had to be the most lovely melody I'd ever heard. Just three words but I could have danced to them all night. And then, as if I needed more from a moment that I already wished would go on forever, she spoke again: "I said, you are a very secretive man, Mr. Thomas." By now I'm sure my temperature was up to about one hundred and three point five. I then said something really smart: "What...what do you mean?" She smiled and said, "You're good at keeping secrets." "I am?" I replied. "What if I told you that you have been watched for many years, Mr. Thomas?" She said. Now I myself could have or should have said any one of a thousand things. I mean, in this one moment I found out that this beautiful user I'd been obsessing over was not really a user at all, but some member of some secret organization capable of the statement she just made and someone or some group has been spying on me for years! And I'm sure the implications pointed to something very, very dangerous. So why I said: "Call me Ben," I'll never know. <<<TO BE CONTINUED>>> |