There are three new messages from the representative when I wake up. They all tell me to wear the blue outfit today, in slightly different wording. I have eight outfits in total, and only one is blue. I have worn it many times, of course, but it has been a while. It is dark blue, and I feel it is too solemn. It makes me stand out.
I leave the messages unanswered. I assume silence is expected. I get up, get ready, and make my way to the complex.
I arrive a few minutes early, before my green light. It gives me time to sit in the staff room, but I choose instead to stand by the large window, looking down at the floor. From up here, it reminds me of a basketball court, painted entirely white. The children are grouped together at the centre. In my mind there used to be many more of them, maybe a hundred, because that is how many would fit on the floor at the current spacing.
I descend, take my place, and load the queued script on my console. Today, as yesterday and the day before, the topic is diabetes. My only knowledge on this topic is the tidbits that have stayed with me from recent days. The script reads as if it was written by someone who understands the subject, but it is raw, not proofed. It feels like a first draft with a set word count that strains the information. I read it, and the material slides off me. The kernels of knowledge are not arranged for my benefit or for the listeners’.
I think of them as children. I believe they are simulated. The representations shown to me are, of course, synthetic, but the question has gone unanswered, and I stopped entertaining it long ago, whether they are connected remotely to someone who sleeps and eats and has, or had, parents. They ask me things, when they are in that sort of mood, that children might ask. Some days, quite often, they stay silent. There are small rows of green and red lights on them that blink, possibly when they are being updated, receiving packets with new instructions, but the blinking seems arbitrary.
I read to them, slow and clear, about diabetes. The material passes through me, and I find it hard to believe they are absorbing it, assuming there is something connected to the painted mannequins in front of me that could learn under better circumstances. There are seven of them now. There used to be eight, but one went offline. I am guessing. I only know the little rows of lights on its chest stopped blinking long enough for me to notice, and on the same day, a man and a woman, both much younger than me, came and took it away. I assumed they would repair it and bring it back, but it never returned.
The rest seem fine, but I worry for them now. I was so used to there being eight. It had been like that for several years, ever since I was transferred to this task. I wait for the next mannequin to stop blinking. I worry that one by one they will go offline and be carried away until the floor is empty, and my task is obsolete. This is at the back of my mind.
I take one break before lunch, the lunch break, and one break after lunch. When it is time, I stop right where I am in the text, mid-paragraph if that’s where it falls. I used to read to a natural break, but I abandoned that habit, and there have been no repercussions. They can criticize me only if I abuse the system. I felt that trying to align my breaks with breaks in the text interfered with my rhythm.
I ascend to the staff room and sit there for the full break time minus the minute it takes me to get there and return to the floor. I have coffee on my first break. That is the only time I have coffee, at work or elsewhere. It is a way of tricking myself into thinking it is a reward. I try to keep my mind blank. I have considered watching something short but I suspect that’s not approved. I have two cups of coffee. I allow myself as many as I want.
The woman from next door comes in, looking for something, I think. Where she works is unclear to me, as is what happens next door, but she is one of the very few people who ever enter here, into what I have come to think of as my department, so I assume she is based somewhere nearby. There’s her, the sales guys, the office manager, the coffee refill man, and that one time, the young couple who carried off the malfunctioning child.
I get the impression she is looking for something because of the way she comes in, all the way into the staff room, as if to get a better look. She looks at me, and then she leaves again. The first time I saw her, I was struck by how she walks, a little hunched and almost stomping, like a lumberjack. I am used to it now, but it still impresses me. I feel that people must have pointed that out to her, at least when she was younger and more impressionable, and that she has not let it define her stride. I am scared to talk to her. I have no reason to, and I am glad.
I read about population-specific prevalence and disease burden after my break, and it’s automatic by now. The reading requires only muscle memory. I can sort of listen to my own voice. I tune it out, but I hear it sometimes, just there at the edge of whatever I am thinking about, which is blank, truly blank. I dismiss each thought as it arrives. I have lost track of whether I have memories. I have lived through events, taken action, been subjected to circumstances and the actions of others, and felt certain ways because of it, but I push all of it out. These occurrences exist only in my dreams, and I suppress the memories of those dreams, the memories of my memories.
I look at the set expressions of the child-sized mannequins, the glare of the ceiling lights on their bulging plastic, and I become, in some way, one of them, which is the closest I come to relief on most days. We are in this together, only I have to leave at the end of the day, while they stay.
At one point between my first break and lunch, they all start blinking almost in sync, as if they are picking up on something worthwhile in the material I am presenting to them. I arrive at this conclusion as I keep reading. I can feel a question coming, but the monitor stays the same.
I skip meals during my lunch break. It’s a way of tricking myself into feeling that the day moves faster than the hours. The hunger helps with that. I drink exactly one glass of water, and then I go to the bathroom. It would be better for my system to go during my first break, but now I have more time to enjoy it. I wait for it.
I have tried masturbating in there too, or at least intended to. I can’t remember whether I did, whether I succeeded. I’ve seen videos, of course.
The final remainder of my scheduled break time I spend looking for things to buy. I’m in the market for a peeler, specifically. I have been replacing my kitchen utensils lately, one by one. Maybe once that is done, I will cook more. That is the idea. To cook, I need ingredients, and I can see myself buying them in person, touching the vegetables, smelling the herbs, asking someone who is selling them about certain qualities that I value for my cooking. Maybe I will say something ordinary, and they will smile back at me. Maybe someone who is doing their own food shopping next to me will look up, drawn by the small exchange.
Sometimes the sales guys come and take their lunch in my staff room. I try to accept it as normal. They probably just want to talk in private. I think people like them usually work in larger teams. I gather from their conversations that they do sales, or account management, or customer relations; something that requires them to talk to people outside of the organisation, to be the face of the organisation. They are polished. They eat delivered meals.
We said hi when they started coming here, but we stopped when they kept coming. It bothers me that there must be a reason for this. Their impression of me must have changed, most likely for the worse. Now, when they come, I feign obliviousness. I’m sure they talk about me, that they have a name for me derived from something in my appearance or behaviour that they find off-putting.
After lunch, once my mind has gone blank, I get a question. One of the children, a boy fixed in a pose that brings to mind kite flying, lights up. It’s a soft white glow, and it means that he is the one asking the question, either he or the recipient of my presentation for whom he acts as a proxy. I believe this.
The text on my monitor reads, “Will there be more types of diabetes, or do they think that all have been discovered by now?”
I type the question into the prompt in my console to open a context window. The answer takes a few seconds to formulate. The answer baffles me as I read it out. It seems disjointed, improvised by someone who shares my ignorance but has to answer anyway because it is their task. I assume it is auto-generated, with a certain word count as one parameter. The light inside the boy with the missing kite switches off. A task has been completed somewhere else through my action, and it has been logged, perhaps.
According to the representative, there is a constant transfer of information, and sometimes human stages must be applied at the right phases to keep it from growing stale. I have no way of proving that this is the reality of what takes place with my involvement. Every indication I have is consistent with this, and the shape of contrary evidence is beyond my imagination.
I know that tea is preferable for my afternoon break. It’s closer to warm milk than tea. Black tea on an empty stomach makes me throw up. I’ve made that mistake before, many years ago. The incident itself has faded, but I’m aware of the precedent.
I am comparing peelers when the woman from next door appears again. She has never come twice in one day, and I feel drawn into whatever event is placing her there. I suspect our schedules coincide. This makes me no wiser.
She says to me:
“They asked about types?”
I think it’s a question. That must be how she asks questions: by stating.
I clear my throat and start talking, and the voice I use for saying things that I choose to say comes from a different place than the one that I use for presenting to the children all day, although the throat is dry just the same from hours of talking. I say:
“Yes. Not long ago. Who are you?”
It is awkward to talk like this, always, and especially at this moment, and it is exhausting to say things that are purposeless. The words slip away. I try to listen to the words coming out, like I am used to from work, but now I lose track of whether they are coming out right. I keep questioning, every time it happens, when I am expected to make conversation, if what is coming out of me is really me, talking. Verification eludes me.
“What do you think it means?” says the lumberjack, staring straight at me, the way I always feared she would if I was ever required to interact with her.
Whatever I answer is lost to me the moment it leaves. It is incoherent to me. It is groundless. It is at least sufficient to make her leave. My reply serves its purpose, does the job. They always do, the things we say. We might as well just be quiet between readings.
Maybe she is a technician, I wonder. Maybe that is why she is so sure-footed, because she knows what it is that makes the children blink, while I can only read to them. I have been living among these people for a very long time, that much I know. The duration has blurred. They appear authentic, whatever that means, but the act is all there is. Their words and actions and accomplishments float free of any foundation. It took me a long time to convince myself of this.
Questions cease for the afternoon. The girl who appears to be swinging a missing tennis racket blinks on her own at one point but stays silent. The boy with the kite, the boy frozen mid-dash, the girl with the plastic ponytail, the smaller boy teetering on one foot mid-twirl, the crouched child peering at some imagined bug on the empty floor, and the child stretched out towards the sky; they all stay doused while I read to them, or their principals, or to the room itself, about diabetes. No more children are taken from me.
Sami Brant is an emerging writer of short stories based in Europe.