Distant Worlds Volume 2

by Benjamin Sperduto

  The data he was left with painted a clear picture of the event in question. There were statistics on unemployment rates, water shortages, and housing prices throughout Metro Phoenix. A few studies on political paralysis at the state and local level drew connections between the statistics and the simmering social tensions that led to the outbreak of violence in the summer of ’34. There were records chronicling the eventual military response, imposition of martial law, and subsequent federal administration of the metro.

  Nearly all of the more scintillating stories surrounding the riots were gone. The collator traced the allegations of clandestine conspiracies to hundreds of stories connected to similar events. Some of the results even went back to fictional sources like television shows or spy novels. Most claims had been repeated so often in so many different forms that they were taken uncritically as articles of faith, situating themselves deep within prevailing narratives of “reality” that ran through the old Internet like swirling currents of a powerful river waiting to pull down unwary swimmers.

  Lyndon was already typing his response when the when the collator finished its exhaustive search cycle.

  Sources unreliable; no verifiable evidence of plot or cover-up beyond organizational incompetence; see attachment for filtered results. Thank you for turning to Veri-Finder Systems for your research data needs.

  He paused for a moment before continuing.

  Not that you really give a damn anyway. I don’t expect you to ignore all the shit that I just told you isn’t true. Now that all the data is nice and organized, go ahead and make whatever truth you want out of it. It’s not like anybody will fucking know the difference, is it?

  Although he derived an impish glee from seeing his sentiments in text form, he quickly deleted them before transmitting the response.

  The client request blinked twice and then vanished from the workload screen after he sent his reply. He glanced at another screen to verify his performance.

  Time: 10 minutes 24 seconds. Files Sifted: 16. Files Collated: 151.

  “Shit.”

  He was halfway through his second client request when a message icon appeared on one of the touchscreens. After answering the query, he tapped the icon to view the message.

  A review of your recent workload has indicated that your average performance time has exceeded the contractually mandated threshold of eight minutes and fourteen seconds per client. In order to refine techniques for conducting optimal reviews, please complete the Veri-Finder Systems Performance Efficiency program at the conclusion of your shift. Also, to remind you of the importance of our obligations to the clients who depend upon our swift and accurate services, please review Chapter 1, Section XI, Pages 16-19 of your Veri-Finder Systems employee handbook and complete the attached assessment. Thank you for your diligent work and for taking these measures to improve your performance.

  There was a small box below the message. He tapped it to send an automated reply that informed his superiors that he had both received the message and would comply with its dictates.

  The Performance Efficiency program was anything but efficient. Lyndon had taken the interactive tutorial several times before and hadn’t managed to complete it in less than two hours. The policy assessment was hardly difficult, but it would take at least an hour to review the materials and answer the adaptive prompts accurately.

  There were still more than five hours left on his shift.

  Before turning back to the workload screen, Lyndon noticed four unread messages in his inbox. They all bore the same subject heading.

  FWD: New Sleep Deprivation Studies.

  He let out a single, mirthless laugh as he pushed the message screen aside and opened the next client request.

  The monorail car was as tightly packed in the late evening as it was at midday. Half of its occupants were staggering homeward, scarcely aware of the other half that were mindlessly shuffling towards the impending workday. The scene would be repeated throughout the day, the rail system facilitating the constant cycling of the enclave’s perpetually productive labor force.

  Lyndon felt lightheaded. Jammed in the car’s crowded walkway, the bodies pressed against his own were unfamiliar. The usual faces and odors of his commute had reached their respective destinations hours ago when the Performance Efficiency program was bashing him over the skull with its insufferable obtusity.

  Not that he knew any more about the passengers from three hours ago than he did about the current batch. He couldn’t associate a name with any of them and had never engaged one in a conversation that went beyond “Excuse me” or “Sorry,” but there was a familiarity to their presence that was mildly comforting. Together, they formed a predictable, closed eco-system, each inhabitant of their artificially established confines mindlessly co-existing like single-celled microbes clustered together upon a Petri dish.

  He did not belong here. The people around him started when they bumped against him and their normally sightless gazes regarded him with extra scrutiny. Removed from his native environs, Lyndon was noticed and he did not like the attention.

  As the monorail car pulled clear of the office building and the firewalls that kept its occupants cut off from the outside, his contacts’ retinal displays were bombarded with messages. Most of them were meaningless, advertisements from various corporate affiliated retailers, political groups, and utility service providers or status updates and comments from strangers in his various networks. The rest were scarcely more important. A few friends going to the bar in their residential block or planning some work related event.

  After spending a day sifting through antiquated data files, sorting out his personal messages seemed like an even more thankless chore. He fished his phone out of his pocket to access the information sprawled across the outskirts of his vision.

  With a few quick swipes upon the touchscreen, he deleted everything and shut off the retinal display.

  The ride to his flat was mercifully short, lasting only about ten minutes. He pushed his way through the mass of unfamiliar bodies as the car slowed, each one of them moving away at his touch as if remaining in contact with him might pass along some virulent contagion. The doors hissed open just as he reached them and he lurched out onto the station’s loading platform so quickly that he nearly crashed into the woman standing at the head of the throng waiting to board the car.

  He took an awkward sideways step to avoid her and almost fell over.

  A lilting, delicate sound rippled through the air around him and Lyndon felt the blood rushing back to his head.

  The woman was laughing.

  “Watch your step, there,” she said.

  He turned to face her, but she was already moving towards the car. Her curly brown hair bounced with each step, the tips brushing against her shoulders. The hair obscured her features now, forcing Lyndon to reconstruct an image from the brief glimpse he got as he exited the car. He quickly lost sight of her as the mass of commuters on the platform shuffled through the exiting crowd to fill the spaces left behind.

  The door slid shut and the monorail car slipped away quietly along the magnetic track.

  Lyndon stood alone on the platform watching the train shrink into the distance. By the time it vanished, he had forgotten her face.

  His solitude lasted for nearly a minute before someone walked up alongside him. Another person joined them before another minute passed. The flow of commuters increased steadily until a small crowd formed on the edge of the platform. Most of them kept a pronounced distance from Lyndon. Although some probably lived in his building, he was not a familiar aspect of their daily routine.

  Lyndon turned and moved through the gathering crowd. The strange faces gave way before him without any resistance.

  He felt lightheaded again.

  Lyndon dreamed about the woman on the platform all night.

  Although he couldn’t remember the details of her face, his lucid subconscious was quick to fill in the blanks. Sometimes her features were lon
g and sharpened; a cold, statuesque beauty chiseled out of the most precious stone. But just as often her face was round and warm, her smile and plump cheeks happily driving away his worries. She ranged from inhumanly gorgeous to endearingly homely without warning, but Lyndon cherished her company in all its forms.

  No experience escaped his slumbering mind’s hallucinatory attention. They hiked along wilderness trails, drank coffee in streetside cafes, made love in their wedding bed, and shared their deepest secrets with one another beneath the glimmering stars. But the joy of her company was marred by pain as well. She mocked him with his mother’s words and struck him for forgetting something important to her. He caught her in his bed with another man. She overdosed in his bathroom. He killed her when she threatened to leave him.

  The images and events flashed through his consciousness without any semblance of structure. She was everything to him in those moments: friend, tormentor, lover, victim, mother, prisoner. He could feel her at all times, sometimes warm, sometimes cold. It was a dream more vivid than any reality he had ever experienced.

  When he woke up, he cried.

  “I see here that you’ve been having some difficulties with your job.”

  Lyndon didn’t look up.

  “That what my file says?”

  The diagnostic machine let out a wheezing huff of air.

  “You’ve been falling short of your benchmarks since we last met. Is there something going on that you’d like to talk about?”

  “Why?”

  “So we can help you feel better about yourself and your work.”

  Lyndon leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. He glared at the woman on the viewscreen.

  The machine snorted.

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “All you care about is getting me back up to my benchmarks.”

  “Lyndon, I’m your therapist, I don’t-”

  “Bullshit. The company pays you to keep us productive. Isn’t that why we have these little sessions?”

  The machine was rasping heavily now.

  She pursed her lips slightly, her blue eyes trying desperately to hold his attention.

  “I think you need to take some time off, Lyndon. You just need a little space right now. Did you think about the vacation like I asked you?”

  Lyndon felt the soft tips of curled, brown hair brushing against the back of his neck.

  A sharp clicking noise sounded from somewhere inside the diagnostic machine.

  “What’s the point? I’ll just have to come back when it’s over.”

  The client’s request flashed in the center of his screen.

  Topic: 2019 federal abortion legislation.

  Client: Yale University of Atlantic Technologies Enclave.

  Query: Rider stipulations provided doctors financial incentive to perform abortions; please verify.

  Lyndon had sifted through the same data for a client last month. It would be a simple matter to recover the results and use them again.

  Such recycling could drastically improve his productivity.

  He looked at the time counter tracking his progress.

  Time: 15 minutes 03 seconds. Files Sifted: 0. Files Collated: 0.

  There were several messages calling for his attention on another screen. All of the subject headings had something to do with efficiency.

  He closed his eyes.

  She was wearing the black dress that he liked so much. The sunlight filtered through the curls of her brown hair, leaving her face obscured in shadow.

  She said something. A warm breeze swept over him as she approached. She touched his face. Her skin was soft and cool.

  Lyndon opened his eyes.

  Time: 20 minutes 48 seconds. Files Sifted: 0. Files Collated: 0.

  “Shit.”

  He didn’t go to the office the next day. A hasty message to his supervisor mentioned something about a headache, but he felt fine.

  After the first few hours went by, he regretted the decision.

  He got out of bed and paced around the flat for a while before settling on the couch in the living room.

  None of the messages on his retinal displays caught his interest. Only a few even seemed to be addressed directly to him, but he wasn’t sure if he actually knew the people that sent them. He caught himself sifting through the backlog of messages and quickly shut the display off.

  The rest of the day felt long and empty.

  He was already dreading returning to work tomorrow.

  The monitor was off when Lyndon walked into the room, but the diagnostic machine sniffed at him as he eased himself into the chair.

  “Yeah, yeah. Good to see you too.”

  He stared at the screen for some time while the machine hissed quietly.

  The door opened behind him.

  Lyndon turned to see a slender, dark-skinned man in a cheap, but well-fitted suit enter the room. He strode over to the monitor stand, rolled it out of the way, and pulled up a nearby chair to sit on the opposite side of the table.

  “Good morning, Lyndon,” he said, leaning forward to adjust one of the dials on the diagnostic machine. It sputtered briefly as something inside it recalibrated.

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess you wouldn’t know that, would you? My name is Isaac Vemel. I’m the coordinator of psychiatric treatment for Veri-Finder.”

  Lyndon nodded his head in the direction of the monitor.

  “Where’s Jenica?”

  “I’m afraid that Ms. Ware’s employer is no longer under contract with us. We’re in the process of negotiating with a new counseling provider and there’s going to be a bit of a gap in coverage until we get everything in place.”

  “Oh,” Lyndon said.

  The diagnostic machine rattled coarsely. Lyndon had never heard it make that sound before. Vemel glanced down at it briefly; he seemed as surprised as Lyndon by the noise.

  “I’ve been looking over your file and reviewing your sessions with Ms. Ware. I do wish that she had reported your state of mind to me earlier; it would have made your treatment much easier.”

  “Treatment?”

  “Yes, for Type 3 Social-Operational Displacement. Your case is quite advanced at this point.”

  “Jenica never said anything about-”

  “I know she didn’t. That’s one of the reasons why we parted ways with her employer. Too many serious cases were not being called to our attention.”

  Lyndon felt lightheaded again.

  “Given the circumstances,” Vemel said, “I’d like to commence with your treatment right away.”

  “Wait, shouldn’t you be going over this with me or something? I don’t understand what’s-”

  “You don’t have to understand, Lyndon. You’ve already consented to treatment as part of your employment contract. Once a diagnosis has been made, we can get on with resolving the issue. We’ll have you back on track in no time.”

  The machine clattered hoarsely as Lyndon leaned forward in his seat.

  “What if I say no?”

  Vemel raised his eyebrows.

  “On what grounds? Your contract clearly states that-”

  “What if I quit?”

  Vemel shook his head as the machine twittered. Something inside it sounded broken.

  “Lyndon, you can’t voluntarily terminate your contract without company approval.”

  Lyndon slumped back into his chair.

  “You may not feel like it right now, but you’re still a valuable asset to the company.”

  The machine wheezed like a dying cat.

  A message icon appeared on one of the touchscreen monitors as Lyndon finished his report on a client’s request regarding a 20th century musician.

  Sources unreliable; no verifiable evidence of subject’s association with human sacrifice cults or devil worship; see attachment for filtered results. Thank you for turning to Veri-Finder Systems for your research data needs.

  The time
counter blinked onto the screen after his reply was transmitted.

  Time: 6 minutes 11 seconds. Files Sifted: 18. Files Collated: 204.

  He clicked the message.

  A review of your recent workload has indicated that your average performance time falls well below the contractually mandated threshold of eight minutes and seven seconds per client. This is a significant improvement on the results of your previous two evaluations. Thank you for understanding the importance of upholding our obligations to the clients who depend upon our swift and accurate services. Keep up the good work!

  Lyndon closed the message and looked back to the client list. If he maintained his pace, he might be able to clear out the entire queue for the day.

  The man standing next to the monorail car’s door seemed to move according to a carefully delineated script of predetermined behaviors. He read something on the datapad screen, looked up to the ceiling of the car, sighed, looked out the window, and then turned back to the screen. Every third time he looked up, he scratched his nose. After completing the cycle five times in the course of two minutes, he craned his neck around to scan the interior of the car before repeating the entire process.

  Lyndon watched the man’s mechanistic habits closely. Such attention to minute details was, he had been told, a side effect of the treatment. It had proven useful to his job, of course, but it created difficulties in other parts of his life. He would often stare out his window for hours. Twice he had been so absorbed by the buildings passing by the monorail car’s window that he missed his platform stop.

  It took a great deal of effort to look away from the man, but he managed to divert his attention by sorting through the piles of messages flooding across his retinal display. He wasn’t entirely sure why he kept responding to some of them. Although a part of his mind told him that doing so was a waste of time, he felt some compulsion to interact with these people that he was only vaguely acquainted with. They contacted him and he replied, an exchange that appeared to please everyone even though it seemed relatively meaningless.