Boots

by Phillip Donnelly

  ‘The office is a prison and the screen is the warden. It watches you while you watch it. It is reading you now.’

  David Vincent sat at his chair, let out an unconscious sigh, and pressed the ‘on’ button of his computer, plugging himself into the office collective and preparing himself for another day of subterfuge, dissimulation and counter-espionage. Each day could be his last, he knew, but he fought on. What else was there to do?

  Every day, immediately after sitting down on his swivel chair in the faceless open-plan office, he bent over and changed from dirty street boots to clean office shoes, thus completing the transformation from pedestrian to office drone, from free man to office man. While his fingers played the shoelace sonata, he secretly listened to the aria of the computers booting up.

  This was one of the few opportunities he had to actually listen to them speaking, to hear their real language: Beep ... Buzz ... Burr ... Click ... clack ... cluck. It was indecipherable, of course, but fascinating nonetheless.

  A flashing blue light on the computer tower told David that his computer had established a connection with the office network. The office Trinity was joined: Man, monitor and machine were one.

  David finished putting on his office shoes and looked at the world above his feet. He knew it was not a good idea to spend too much time bending over his chair with his ear stuck against the computer tower. It might make the Imposters suspicious.

  The part of the office day that David always found most difficult to deal with was the beginning, the ritualised greeting stage, the exchange of pleasantries and conversational tokens that the Imposters had made a compulsory part of the start of the normal working day.

  He looked up at what appeared to be a woman in her early thirties approaching him en route to the photocopier. She cocked her head slightly, and smiled.

  “Hi Dave! You’ve put your shoes on.”

  The woman, like many Imposters, had an irritating habit of stating the obvious, thereby revealing their fundamental inability to master human communication.

  “Yes, I’ve put my shoes on,” David replied.

  The Imposter smiled and David smiled back. The Imposters often smiled for no reason. David suspected that those who didn’t smile enough were locked up and had their brains turned to jelly with lobotomies and electroconvulsive ‘therapy’. Sometimes the Imposters simply medicated happiness outside of hospitals, with drugs named after alien planets, like Prozac or Lithium.

  As David held his plastic smile, the Imposter spoke once more. ‘It’s raining again, eh?” she said, and pointed to the window in order to clarify where the weather could be found.

  David stared at his computer screen to keep the conversation short.

  As always, when looking at the screen, he tried to keep his face as neutral as possible, to put on his screenface. They would be watching him now. They paid particular attention to a screen that had just been switched on. It offered them a new window on the human world, and David could feel the screen staring at him, attempting to study his facial expressions to vacuum his mind.

  ‘All the world’s a screen, and all the men and women merely images,’ David thought to himself, careful as always not to translate the thought into a facial expression that could be turned into screenfood.

  He double-clicked on the Outlook icon and scanned his inbox, looking down through the e-mail titles to see if any of them were urgent.

  A management Imposter, whose flawed assimilation had left him with a facial tic, had instructed him to conduct an office-wide stationery check. David reacted quickly, darting from one part of the office to another with a clipboard, counting staplers, pens and reams of paper.

  These Imposter e-mail assignments were part of The Experiment, and speed was an important factor. He tore around the office furiously, questioning the office drones on their current stationery provisions.

  When he had completed this task, David was worried to note that there was a sudden lull in e-mail traffic and that none of the managers were currently in the office. This could only mean that the Imposters were assimilating a new member.

  He scanned the no-mans-land of the open plan office, and noted that the accounting rebel, Gary the Goth, was also not present. David wondered if the assimilation bells and buzzers were tolling for him, somewhere deep in the hidden bowels of the building.

  Each fallen colleague, David knew, brought the day that he would be taken to the Assimilation Chamber one day closer. There were two possible futures: assimilation or death. He looked uneasily at all the empty chairs around him. Failed conversions resulted in disappearances, which were disguised as dismissals.

  As if reading his mind, two grey co-workers met at the photocopier behind David. In hushed tones, they discussed rumours of more cutbacks and non-voluntary redundancies.

  In a vision, David saw the office personnel transformed into a herd of pigs, surreal in starched shirts and ties. The desks became long lines of troughs. All along them, the office pigs’ snouts dripped in and out of a swill made from pulped e-mails and memo pads. He heard the sound of sharpening butcher knives and saw the computer cables fill with blood. Panicked eyes stared through USB ports. Nails scraped against grills.

  The vision ended as quickly as it had begun. Gary the Goth returned, following what David overheard him describe as a “performance review meeting”. Gary was oddly silent for the rest of the day. Out of the corner of his eye, David was sure he caught Gary staring at him.

  David felt the terror of isolation. He was alone. He was the last man in the office.

  He knew the end would come soon. The vision was a premonition. David felt the end, like a wave that has grown weary and feels the shore under its feet, as it heads towards the coast of frothy death. The furtive glances of Gary could only mean that David’s mask was beginning to crack.

  David let his eyes drop away from the screen, put his head in his hands and felt indescribably heavy, so heavy that he thought he might fall through the floor at any moment, and fall all the way to the centre of the Earth; fall into nothingness and freedom.

  Through a crack in his fingers, he looked at his screen’s cursor, becoming hypnotised by its flashing regularity, its soothing predictability. The rest of the office and the world beyond it ceased to exist. Entranced he stayed all morning, as the e-mails built up in his inbox, unseen and unheeded.

  One of the David’s colleagues noticed David’s aberrant behaviour and signalled her alarm to David’s supervisor, who spoke to her own supervisor. They both expressed their earnest concern over David’s recurrent periods of absolute inertia.

  When David escaped from the cursor trance, he saw that the first e-mail waiting for him was a summons to attend an important meeting in the afternoon in the Director’s Office. The Employee Actualisation Team (formerly known as Human Resources), the e-mail went on to say, were ‘very concerned’ by certain aspects of his performance, and wanted to discuss ways to ‘move forward’ and ‘successfully resolve some long-standing issues’.

  David knew what this really meant. He had learnt some Imposter code over the years. He was to be brought to the Assimilation Chamber where his personality would be cauterised and his body would become a vessel for an Imposter mind.

  He considered trying to escape, but after the e-mail all Imposter eyes were on him. Even the screens seemed to follow him around the room. Feeling their laser eyes burn though him, he paced around the office, like a toothless, caged wolf, peering through the windows that separated the office from the outside world.

  David’s supervisor approached him, touched him on the shoulder and asked him if he was well.

  He told her he had a cold, ran out of the office and tried to hide in one of the less populous parts of the building. He couldn’t sit still but he knew he couldn’t leave. Imposters always guarded the building’s exits and the windows couldn’t be opened.

  David wanted to cry out, but he knew it would only serve to bring the hour of retribution closer. His mind
was filled with the images of pigs in stainless steel slaughterhouses, prodded along conveyor belts to their mechanized doom, wondering hopelessly what they had done to deserve this, and cursing themselves for not running for the hills when they had the chance.

  Acting on instinct, he ran to the roof of the building and stared at the bulbous grey clouds. He reached up to them but they were too far away. The clouds sent the wind as their messenger and whispered in his ear, chanting of escape. The rain ran down his face and washed the office visions away, and he smiled to thank it. A real smile.

  He ran to the ledge, looked up to the sky, opened his arms and jumped backwards. As he fell, looking at the infinity of the sky and space beyond it, he felt euphoric. The Imposters would never have him. There are no screens in the sky and no computer towers in the earth. Coffins are off-line.

  The trinity of man, monitor and machine was broken.

  David Vincent was free.

  Free.

  The Post Modern Prometheus

  (Adapted from the Novel, Kev the Vampire)