Full Catch Diorama

by Nick Salomon

  “So, how you been?” I ask. She shrugs and sits in a fancy multicolored leather ‘gaming’ chair by her desk. Lucy is a utilitarian minimalist and instead of girly trinkets, shallow ‘live-laugh-love’ signs or carefully arranged interior decoration, her living room contains a desk full of computer equipment, her nerd throne of a computer chair and a sofa.

  “Doing alright. I’m getting some contracts from indie dreamers here and there,” Lucy replies then spins her chair to face the monitor and starts typing at a speed not many mortals I’ve seen achieve.

  The room is warm, uncomfortably so, even though the air conditioning box embedded in the window frame runs at max capacity and one of those huge industrial fans circulates air inside. They can barely keep up with the multiple servers, storage arrays and whatever other equipment she uses for mastering ramas.

  “Cool… cool,” I say standing there as she continues typing. After a couple minutes it’s like she forgot I’m here. She could offer me a drink or ask me to have a seat. I don’t want to stay here too late so I take the initiative and ask “well, what’s this cool stuff you were going to show me.”

  She turns to look at me and says “oh yeah. Hold on.” Then she continues typing. I see she’s bringing up an encrypted directory then enters a password that seems to be 50 characters long. The contents of the encrypted directory expand in a browser window and Lucy stands and motions for me to sit in her nerd throne. “Check it out,” she says.

  From standing there I have no idea what I’m looking at so I nod, sit down and scroll down the contents of the directory. There are custom firmware files for some kind of diorama device, then I see a folder full of configuration files. I open one of them and start getting a slight idea of what these files are for.

  “Is this firmware for operating a makeshift dreamcatcher?”

  “Not only that,” she says and I turn and look up to see her usual plain emotionless self, voice spiced up with a slight hint of arrogance. “I reverse engineered a legit neural catch driver and compiled mimic source code with directives that encode a random catcher ID in each rama frame at runtime.”

  I’m surprised by what I’m hearing. Sweet, nice girl Lucy. Who would have thought? Some of my shittyness probably rubbed off on her.

  “But that would make any ramas caught with a device running these drivers completely anonymous. Untraceable,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she nods.

  “And also, very, very illegal,” I clarify my point.

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, don’t get me wrong Lucy, I’m impressed by the technical achievement. Respect where respect is due but someone finds this in your computer and you’ll go to jail for a few years.”

  “Wasn’t this what you wanted?” she says now mumbling in apparent distress. I’ve always wondered just how far in the spectrum she is. I never asked. Too embarrassing of a question.

  “Well, yeah,” I say trying to remember if my exact wording was to wish for software usually used by sex traffickers and anonymous dreamers who distribute illegal ramas all over the darkweb. “It would be cool to catch high quality ramas without paying the obscene licensing fees that professional equipment requires but damn.”

  “Oh,” she says then approaches and I stand up to get out of her way. She sits back in her throne and types some more. “Well, I also got Chad’s latest rama. It was just mastered yesterday.”

  “Not a fan.”

  “I copied the firmware in that flash drive,” she says and motions with her head to the left side of her desk without taking her eyes off the screen.

  I grab the flash drive. It’s one of those fancy military grade models with built-in hardware encryption and self-destruct innards in case an attacker tries to disassemble to extract the NAND chips. Lucy continues to do whatever it is she’s doing on her computer and I sit down in her sofa, behind her. Not only did she spend the time to do the hack but also the money for the drive.

  “So why do all this?” I ask.

  She turns away from the screen and looks at me then says “you’re hardware, I’m software, remember? We’re going to make and publish our own ramas and cash in the craze before it dies down.”

  I chuckle and shake my head. “You still remember? That was pillow talk. What kind of rama can I make that attracts viewers and is not something illegal like those in the darkweb or near impossible to make like the sex vacations of Chad Mars that take millions of dollars to produce?”

  Lucy rolls her eyes in that cute way of hers. I look at the military grade encrypted flash drive and ask myself if I’m creative enough to put something out there that millions of people would like. Who’d be the dreamer anyway?

  “How’s things at Dreamax?” she asks, breaking the silence but still keeping her attention on her computer screen.

  “They announced downsizing today. Some people were already let go.”

  “Did you?”

  “Nah, I still have a little leverage. I’m not as easily replaceable as Linda from HR would like.”

  She giggles for a couple seconds. I haven’t seen her smile once since I walked in and now that she does, I can’t see her face. “Linda from HR,” she says. “That’s funny, the way you say it.”

  “ToBogan was there today for a catch.”

  “Really? What kind of dangerous beast did he go bothering this time?”

  “I don’t know, the rama hasn’t made it out of the catch shop.”

  “That’s something you could dream about,” she says, turning her chair. “You could explore abandoned buildings or factories. Or the deserted port of San Pedro in the middle of the night. We add ghosts in post or something. People like that kind of urban adventuring.”

  “Yeah and then my balls melt off from radiation. I’ll pass.”

  Giving up, Lucy shrugs and goes back to her computer. She’s probably spent the equivalent of a new car loan in all that equipment. Four 8k monitors, a main workstation, a storage array and a pretty beefy second workstation dedicated only to rama rendering. In her multitasking frenzy, I see her open a web browser and go to CNN, then she drags a news feed window to a side monitor I can see. President Trump is giving a speech while a sliding breaking news bar on the bottom contradicts every word she says.

  “You pay too much attention to that crap,” I say.

  “I like to be informed before I cast a vote. Besides, it’s entertaining,” she says, pointing at the screen. “Now that the right hacked the identity politics the left first weaponized, there is very little the libs can say to discredit a female right-wing president.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t care,” I say, pocketing the flash drive. “The way I see it, whoever is in power will fuck with whoever is not. Best thing we can do is try to gain a little bit of power ourselves so we don’t get fucked with as easily.”

  Lucy doesn’t have a rebuttal and continues typing. I guess she still remembers the hours-long debates on politics we used to engage in. The way I remember, they were smart exchanges I just couldn’t get from the average mental slave, God forbid they got offended by me openly voicing unpopular opinions. Sometimes, if I was lucky, they would devolve into long sessions of angry sex but otherwise we’d mostly just walk away from each other in frustration. Politics and relationships just don’t mix.

  “Well, I’ve got to get going,” I say, standing up. “Don’t want to walk around your neighborhood past 8.”

  “Cool, good seeing you,” she says, never letting her attention wander away from her workstation.

  I show myself to the exit and close the door behind me. It would seem the hip hop army gave up and now the narco-corridos reign supreme, louder than before. A baby cries loudly somewhere in the distance. Who in their right mind would want to bring a kid to this shithole of a world?

  The drive home is uneventful. A drunk homeless dude is passed out by the carport but I honk at him and eventually he drags himself out of the way, shouting what I think are obscenities in some language I can’t understand. />
  It was good going out for a drive for once. I should go on a road trip. San Francisco or Vegas. Maybe bring Lucy along to catch up. Not sure how long she can stay away from her computers though.

  My apartment is just the way I left it. Hasn’t been tidied up for weeks. With no one to visit, there is little incentive for spending a couple hours doing so. I sit down in my own nerd throne and fire up the computer. While it boots up, I pull up the military grade flash drive with the scary illegal compiled binaries. Without much use for it, I just toss it in the pile with the others. Maybe I’ll mess with it some other time. Right now, I must lurk. I must shitpost and debate TorChan armchair scholars. Got to get my daily dose of dopamine somehow.

  Doing More With Less

  It’s been two weeks since our fearless leader and CEO Audrey Reynolds announced the ‘strategic scale down’. Some people have already been let go while others watch the clock tick as the date of their official departure draws near. Must be horrifying, to invest your whole life and career to a niche industry. Me? I couldn’t care less. All companies need IT in one way or another, but where do you even go when you’re a Social Media Influencer Marketing Consultant? Or a Diorama Dreamcatcher Specialist? Yep, Scott was one of the first to get axed. Too bad, I liked the guy. Just another mind-slave in the herd, of course, but he’d show me cool stuff about dreamcatchers and all that.

  Maybe the skillsets are transferable to other industries. But then, what do you do if you have a Master’s Degree in Corporate Diversity or Chicano Studies or Women’s Studies or whatever other useless stamped piece of paper given to you by a diploma mill and paid for by daddy’s trust fund? Where do you go if your job title is Social Media Diversity Awareness Officer? Or any other of those bogus jobs the company fills just to be able to say we’re ‘socially conscious’? It’s good to have those on the payroll in case a Twitter ‘influencer’ bitches that your latest rama character is not a black gay disabled undocumented trans woman I guess. Can’t have artistic license anymore. Must adhere to strict social justice guidelines in any content you create. Thanks, social justice warriors for killing the arts, among other things. No wonder people flocked to dioramas when the open source technology first emerged.

  It’s a quiet day on the second floor of Dreamax, a subsidiary of Tarios Group. I stand up to look around the open office from my cubicle. I can almost imagine a tumbleweed rolling by. With all the employee layoffs, there is not much need for people in the support money sinks around here. Rich was one of the first casualties. I hope he’s having fun playing Minecraft wherever he is. Mary from HR is gone and now Linda from HR is all by herself. The Finance people are still untouched. They’ll probably be the last to be shown the door, should the company tank for good.

  The phone rings and I see Steve Kowalski’s name in the caller ID. Senior Manager of Information Systems is his title. My boss’ office is behind my cubicle and he couldn’t just walk by if he needed something. I pick up the handset and greet the boss man.

  “Hey Steve, what’s up?”

  “Ted when you got a minute, please come to my office,” he says.

  “Will do.”

  We hang up and I continue messing with the rama render engines for a few minutes. Yes, will be a while before I get a minute, Steve, you’ll just have to wait for me. As I dick around with completely non-urgent work that could be placed on hold while I talk to him, it comes to me he’s probably about to lay me off. I did update and post my resume online two weeks ago and I have 6 months’ salary savings so I don’t even care. Recruiters are already bugging me with potential leads. It’s been a few minutes and I stand up to go to the restroom. Should be good enough to show the boss he doesn’t get to say ‘jump’ and I ask ‘how high?’

  I come back from the gender-neutral restroom and knock on the open door to Steve’s office.

  “Ted, come in,” he says with a smile. “Take a seat, please.”

  I make a concerned face. I hope I’m not overdoing it but it’s funny to see his reaction when he thinks I’m terrified of being laid off. Probably too much. I feel bad about it and stop being a dick. Steve is a cool guy, probably the best guy I’ve ever worked for. Gives me a couple goals to achieve for the week and goes away to let me do my thing. The complete opposite of a micro manager. How would I call that? A macro manager? Whatever the official definition I hope the next boss is not the micro type.

  “How’s your day going?” Steve asks. “And how about those projects you’re working on?”

  “Well, you know, I’m making progress. Should have deliverables by their respective deadlines.”

  “Good, good,” he says in that way people do when they ask something to make small talk but don’t really care about your answer. “You let me know if you have any blockers for those deliverables and I’ll take care of them.”

  “We’re a team, boss,” I say with a smile. Steve beams with happiness. He loves it when I call him ‘boss’ to his face. He talks about future deliverables. I guess I’m not being shown the door after all.

  “Well, just to get it out of the way, you’re not going to be let go,” he says. Of course not. Who would do the actual work around here? “But we will see some new budget constraints. We’ll need to go over each project you’re working on. You know, the people upstairs want me to justify every dollar we’re spending. You know how it is.”

  I nod and scoff then say “I know. Executives, am I right?”

  “Yeah no kidding,” Scott says and puts his elbows on the desk, hands clenched together near his chin. Oh shit, serious boss mode engaged. “The bad news is, after we’re done talking, I’m going to pull Mia and Eric in here and sadly, I’m going to have to let them go.”

  Sucks for them. “They’ll be alright. They’re both good help desk technicians.”

  “Yep, it’ll be just the two of us buddy.”

  Aww shit. Oh fuck. Does he mean what I think he means?

  “We’re going to have to do more with less,” he says. “Since most of your projects are not critical to company revenue, we’re going to put them on hold. Then you’ll need to pick up the user-level tickets as you make progress on those projects we determine to be critical.”

  Oh god no. Don’t make me deal with fucking PDF reader. “Huh,” I mumble. Must make it look like I consider myself lucky to stay. “What percentage of my time you think I should spend on user-level support?”

  “It would be hard to have an exact figure,” my boss says as he reclines back on his chair in apparent relief. Probably expected me to bitch and moan. “I’d say prioritize trouble tickets and when there are none, work on long-term projects.”

  When there are no tickets? Is he joking? There are always tickets. Hundreds of them. The average office worker couldn’t install PDF reader to save their life. For some reason in this day and age, basic computer literacy is not a skill required to get a job in a company that deals primarily in entertainment technology. Good for me, I suppose. Job security is always guaranteed.

  “I understand,” I say with a smile and a nod. “We’ll do more with less.”

  “Excellent,” Scott says. He always says ‘excellent’ to signal the end of a conversation for some reason. Guy thinks it makes him look clever. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to give the bad news to Mia and Eric.”

  “Sure thing, boss. You know where to find me if you need anything.”

  Scott nods, pleased, and I walk out of his office. I haven’t even reached my desk and I’m already pulling my phone out to check on the job hunt app. Six emails from recruiters. Hopefully I’ll be out of this crumbling shithole by next week. I wonder if I should have overreacted and feigned outrage. Would have been funny to see Scott’s reaction to me walking out. I’ve never done that dramatic exit kind of thing some people do.

  I take a quick detour to the lunch room and get a mineral water from the vending machine. Even the break room is quiet. I’d usually find people engaged in half-hour long conversations that made me wonder
just how useless and expendable their job is when they can walk away from their desk for an hour without anyone noticing. Unsurprisingly, it seems they were the first to go.

  Back at my desk. Checking my emails. Checking the trouble tickets queue. I was working trouble tickets 10 years ago. I did my time in the trenches. I really don’t want to go back to installing PDF reader. I open the job hunt app on my phone and message a couple of recruiters inquiring about jobs that look interesting. One of them for maintaining a supercomputer array at a USC research facility where they mess with gene sequencing. The other is to build a startup online presence from scratch. I’m surprised by how low the salaries are. I’m pretty sure I could handle either one but it would cost a considerable chunk of my current paycheck to leave Dreamax. I scroll down the list of job openings. Shitty salaries all over. The economy is just FUBAR. I realize I’m trapped here. I’m stuck installing PDF reader.

  Fuck me.

  Involuntary Requisition

  Another week goes by. Another day working ten hours, dealing with computer illiterate people who get sassy when you explain how they fucked their own computer up and it’s my job to clean up after them. Job hunt has not improved. I am now looking out of state. Maybe I land at Silicon Ranch up there in Montana.

  I’m done for the day. I’m back home, my sanctuary of solitude, shitposting on TorChan. Maybe I should take a sabbatical like the hippies and trust fund babies do. Yeah, I could just quit the shitty job and maybe travel. It amazes me how mind bogglingly bored I am that I should even consider traveling. I never understood, the resources some people spend on packing up, flying to some place a thousand miles away, just so they can post selfies on Instagram and make their cardboard friends jealous. I suppose traveling used to mean something. One could go somewhere far away from one’s country and learn from how people do things outside of what we consider normal. Nowadays it’s just an expensive, dumbed down activity for vapid people to one up each other on social media. Just like everything else.