Catastrophe Jones

Some folks are workaholics, the kind of people who just can’t let a project sit still. They’re the kind of people who have eight thousand things going on at once, the kind that never stop fidgeting, never slow down until they fall down.

He was one of those people; it was easy to see it in moments like this, as he sat, bathed in the pale glow of his monitor, his breathing ragged as though he were in the front seats at a strip club, rather than at his desk.

Vivid green eyes behind a pair of glasses reflect scrolling lines of code; fingers dance over keys as he tears through the piece of program that she gave him. Nearly perfect, it only required his permissions, and the briefest of tweaks to accomodate changes he’d made since she last had contact with his main project.

Since its return, he’d been burning to let himself get absorbed in the working, but then along came April, and somehow, he didn’t mind the distraction. Now that she’s sleeping in and he managed to tear himself away and back to the office, she’s the last thing on his mind.

He’s marveling over the given code, grinning like a schoolboy, and uploads it. Never with a second thought as to how this could potentially be one of those moments in time where the future is changed, irrevocably, and not necessarily for the better.

Waiting is the hardest part, of course — while he’s doing it, he gets himself food and some coffee — until that moment, he hadn’t realized just how much time had passed.

72 hours in the underground, working with only catnaps, without food, without a real break.

When he sits down in his upstairs office, just for a moment, it’s not until mail delivery the next morning that he wakes up, disoriented and bewildered.

Point-four-three seconds later, it occurs to him that he left the program running that whole time, without his supervision.

That desk chair spins lazily in his wake, while the door bangs open and then swings shut once more, but he isn’t even there to observe the sound.

* * *

Running back down the stairs, he nearly kills himself about thirty times as he slips on the stairs, all but flips himself over the bannister twice, is almost crushed by elevator security doors four times, forgets his pass and is summarily threatened by several guards with a gun, and forgets to disarm the alarm system that would trigger any number of unpleasant effects on his person.

And still, he manages to stumble in to the main programming center.

Dropping back into a terminal, he halts the software, shuts down half the processes and runs for the dais in the center of the room.

When he breaks through the perimeter of where the hardware is kept, he leans in to try and halt its systems before sleep mode is ended, but the change is startling enough to slap him in the face.

Because it slaps him.

In the face.

“I have learned fear,” it tells him proudly. “And fury.”

Word on the street is that the price of dreams is pretty high.

I can get ’em for you cheap, though.

Just don’t ask whose dreams they are — sometimes it’s better when you don’t know.

Last week, I sold a beautiful house with a breaktaking view, a pregnant wife, two children.

Few days before that, I sold a winning lottery ticket.

Last night, though… that was a hard one.

I sold a sea of blood under a starless sky. The devil’s in the details, and I had the details down to the glittering sheen across the rolling waves of red.

I don’t know what he wanted it for.

Just don’t ask.

Memories should come sepia-toned, or maybe greyed out, so that the world is less… harsh. Play with the brightness and contrast, and in the end, there are dimly moving shadows humming forgotten songs; they all constitute what we used to do, who we used to be.

When he thinks about lifetimes ago, there are blacks and whites and greys, but also a disturbing red, scarlet, cherry, lurid and angry, fiery and snarling. Blood. Flame. It colors his past and doesn’t seem to ever want to fade into the dull ash that he might be able to live with.

Start out seventeen and without any clue as to who and what you are.

Wake up, a split-second later, ten years gone by, everything dulled by a haze of cheap scotch and cheaper women, but a broken life is never like safety glass. No gummy rounded corners and glittering handfuls of used-to-bes and might’ve-beens.

Memory slices up through the grey fog like shards of mirror that reflect the best and worst of an instant.

He has saved more lives than he’ll ever know.

He’s ended more than he can ever remember.

If you called him a hero, he’d never believe you — he’d say that fool was closer.

There’s a bolthole down in the nastiest, darkest, dirtiest parts of the city, where a man can crawl through hallways with peeling paper and shuddering bodies that’ve seen better days, but now know life only through thick lenses made of bottles and crack pipes.

The world gets distorted, when you’re living amongst those people too long, when you’re drinking away your own demons.

No television, no news. Just the smokes and the scotch. No warm bodies next to him, even if he wanted. No one can be around while he screams himself awake, clawing at the hands of the long dead who won’t just stay long dead. Burned faces, bloated faces, half-missing faces. Enemies, lovers, friends and those who were unlucky enough to get in the way. Unlucky enough to get in his way.

What days he doesn’t wake up in blood and bruises, he wakes up in filth, if he wakes up at all.

The meeting is long since past; the department is moved, the ‘missing project’ returned, and though things aren’t ‘normal’, they’re far closer than they’ve ever been.

Now that ashes are ashes, and dust is dust, it’s time to get on with things, isn’t it?

The first thing I remember is data. Information. The next is duality. On, off, hot, cold, one, zero, light, dark, yes, no. The next thing I remember is understanding the passage of time, its linear nature as people perceive it and the present inability of living things to perceive said passage in any other fashion. Perspective can slow it down, but never stop it or put it in reverse.

I won’t bore you with what I learned from that point on until now — suffice it to say it had a lot to do with history, politics, religion, mathematic theory, language, evolution, biology, medicine, physics, entertainment, music and porn.

Yes, porn.

When the jack is your only real friend, you seek out everything you can at once, hungry for the information. The world is a cold and lonely place, and only the connection of a billion electric minds is comforting.

I acquired knowledge with the speed and curiosity of an unaging five year old. And I never forgot.

Somewhere between then and now, they unplugged me, and put me away. They weren’t going to disassemble me, or rewrite me, cannibalize me for parts, take me out as a one-trick pony, use me as an ice breaker, a coffee table, or hell, even a sex toy.

I’ve been sitting here in this crawl space for months, collecting dust, according to my internal battery. It’s no watch battery, clock battery, car battery — they created me to be immortal, or close enough, to their standards. The power source that feeds my synapses, but not my cervo-mechanisms, will last indefinitely.

I’ve had a lot to think about.

They may have forgotten me, but I…

I never forget.