The Pedestal (2 page)

August 21, 2105

There’s an expression: once you’ve bedded down with death, she’ll never leave your side. Some guy said that over a hundred years ago. It must be very profound, because people continue to parrot this bit of nonsense as if it truly explains everything. I don’t really get it—the image that comes to my mind is a pretty morbid one. I’m hardly an intellectual, though—a little on the lowQ side, in fact, if my genomap is to be believed—so what do I know?

Not much, as you will undoubtedly come to understand.

Until early this morning—so early, in fact, that it still felt like yesterday—I really thought I was at peace with my mortality; death and I had an understanding, you see—and no bedding down was required.

She doesn’t come looking for me; I don’t tempt her by wandering into oncoming traffic.

It’s frightening how quickly things can change—like a worn-out toggle switch, completing a circuit at the slightest touch when one would rather wade through transition gradually, as if into cold water.

Just like that, death has plumed around me like a thick, clinging mist; I feel it condense on me like morning dew, and I wonder if I’ll ever be clean of it again. Certainly, I’ll never take death slightly again.

>>Silly, Wilson ... you’re awfully sexy, but did you mean to say ‘never take death
lightly
’?

Oh, uh, please excuse my nexus interface—Marilyn has a tendency to interrupt. To her credit, she’s considerably more pleasant than the other available interfaces. And I don’t suppose it hurts that she’s modeled after a wonderfully voluptuous pin-up model. Actually, I sometimes look forward to Marilyn’s corrections. Who am I kidding? I goad them when I get a little bored.

It should come as no shock to you that I am single.

Anyway, I stand corrected: take death
lightly
. The point is, I should’ve slept right through the waking hours. If I’d been granted even a tiny inkling of what was to come, surely I’d have covered my head with a pillow and smothered today from my future.

Speaking of sleep: though I crave it deep in my bones, rest is completely out of the question. I stayed up much later than was responsible last night, playing the odds that I’d manage to squeeze in a little break-room catnap during lunch today—it seemed like a good bet last night when I was riding an unnaturally hot streak at the poker table. A hectic morning at the ER wasn’t even on my radar.

And so here I am, headed to my office aboard a crowded tram with scarcely a few grudging ounces of gray matter left awake to man the helm. I know it’s hardly the appropriate time to notice, but the sun is kissing the clouds through the window in stunning pastels, and the air is crisp with autumn beginnings. Everything’s so beautiful, so disproportionately alive. It’s a slap in the face to cliché, whose script calls for a Gaussian haze of cold drizzle. Still, it’s an exceptional morning; I wish I could pause it in midstride to revive it on a day when I’m in better form to appreciate it.

What can you do?

I smile mechanically at a lady seated opposite me on the tram—not because I hope to engage her in conversation, but because she’s pretty, and society deems this worthy of a respectful, if not admiring, smile. She nods politely—not because I’m reciprocally handsome, but because it’s considered socially responsible to humor the plain among us—and looks promptly away with a subtle cringe. She doesn’t dare look again. The man next to me sniggers under his breath.

Yup, that’s me: chick magnet.

It’s okay, I’m used to it. Actually, while it often depresses me, I’m completely unfazed this morning. I’m far more dismayed—and likewise distracted—by the incessant nagging in my stomach. It isn’t some trivial, back-of-my-mind
did I leave the milk out again?
sort of nagging, either. You can ignore those, with enough practice—trust me on that; I’m an expert in the art. This one lingers at the forefront of my awareness, casting my thoughts in balmy shadow.

I’ve been hanging on a single strand of hope, and it can only stretch so far. As much as I long for some invisible force to save the day, I know logic doesn’t mesh with such mysticism—and disregarding logic certainly won’t do me any good.

I’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours, and I’m in dire need of sleep or caffeine—or both. Since leaving the hospital this morning, my thoughts have continually returned to just how surreal the world has become; I feel strangely betrayed that life and commerce continue to bustle with such energy, irrespective of my plight. It makes me want to make others as miserable as me.

I didn’t see any of this coming. If there were signs along the way, I somehow missed them. Yesterday, Arthur—my longtime friend and mentor—treated me to Gizi’s Trattoria for my thirtieth birthday. Today, he’s in a hospital bed with a heart that’s only twitching at all by the magic of some determined machine. I can’t fight off the primal need to scramble, to generate some kind of last-minute salvation by the sheer tenacity of my willingness to try.

But what can anyone really do for anyone when his number’s up?

If you knew Arthur at all, you’d assume someone of his intellectual means—a man knee-deep in the tides of progress, nose buried deeper in the nexus than just about anyone—was surely first in line to opt in for medical monitoring on his NanoPrint. And you’d be wrong. Mrs. Grace, my elderly next-door neighbor, is convinced her implant will catch fire and cook her from the inside—like that’s happened at all in the last fifteen years—yet even
she
had the common sense to opt in; there’s just no downside.

But not old Art.

He’s a paradox: he spends his days developing technology that few among us can fathom, and he’s almost vehemently opposed to enjoying it. To be fair, it isn’t the technology itself he takes issue with; it’s our eager, worldwide reliance on it—the nexus, specifically. It’s our global crutch. “One day,” he’s fond of ranting, usually over—or perhaps under the influence of—a tall glass of Cabernet, “the pedestal of this arrogant civilization is going to collapse. It’s a historical inevitability. We’ve lost our animal instinct.”

He’s a good friend—the best, actually—but at the moment, I want to give him a good kick in the nay-saying rear. If his aversion to all things normal wasn’t so freaking acute, his health problems would’ve been detected long before they could fester.

But then, I guess he wouldn’t be Arthur.

Passing swiftly into the lobby of my office building, I grab my usual extra-large coffee from an automated kiosk. Please don’t judge me for my addiction to manual caffeine infusion—there are far worse things to be addicted to, after all. I make a careful run to the elevator, where Keith Billings, my recently transgendered boss, is already onboard. We slingshot to the seventh floor. I expect her—er,
him
—to offer some tacky, preemptive condolence as if Arthur has already passed—because Keith’s just the sort of socially retarded person who would do something like that—but he doesn’t say a word.

At least, not right away.

He waits until we’ve already walked into the office to open his mouth, and when he does, his androgynous voice pitches to a level of condescension one might normally reserve for a six-year-old—I mean, if there’s a mother out there with so little regard for her maternal responsibilities that she’d even allow a weirdo like Keith near her kid.

“Hey, Wilson. Didn’t see you there,” he says. “How’s it going?” Sheesh, he might as well drop to one knee and put a hand on my shoulder—
What do you wanna be when you grow up, little guy?

For a split second, I imagine my coffee soaking his face, washing away that stupid smile and a pound of blush.

Seriously? Like we didn’t just ride the elevator up here together?

Like I didn’t just hold the door for you two seconds ago?

Like you don’t already know that I’ve been sitting in a hospital room for the last four hours?

This is exactly the sort of thing that drives me crazy about Keith. I used to be more tolerant of his disregard for social mores, perhaps because I thought I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately for us all, his little, uh—
procedure
didn’t resolve his extreme eccentricities. Worse than ever, his weirdness routinely breaks free from the good old parentheses of gender confusion and bleeds into everyday interaction, where it manages to make even the most innocuous of social situations utterly unbearable. So pardon me if I’m a little intolerant. I think I’ve earned it. This particular incident is pretty mild, I suppose, but recognizing that doesn’t make me want to backhand him upside his fat head any less. So I dig deep, clench my fists and—

A wave of chemical calm ebbs through me, and for a split second, I nearly forget why I’m upset at all.

“Doing fine, Keith,” I say in a voice that seems far away.

That’ll show him.
Okay, weirdness aside, he’s still my boss.

“Too bad about Arthur, huh?” he says. With my irritation re-enflaming, I don’t respond in word; rather, I look at him like he’s a crank wearing mascara because—well, in part because he actually is, but moreso because he doesn’t get to chum up with me by the watercooler of my dying best friend—and frankly, I can get away with a nasty look when nasty words might just get me the boot.

He waits about two seconds longer than is socially acceptable and then decides to move on. “Well, anyway, I guess you know we’re all gonna be pretty swamped for a while; hope you’re up to the challenge.”

That last statement wasn’t exactly phrased as a question, but I can definitely sense one in there, buried in Keith’s careless inflection—as if I suddenly get a vote in my workload and can just say,
No, I’m a little tired this morning; just ignore me for a while so I can go watch cartoons, would you?
For a moment I think he’s hinting that we have a new contract coming down the pipe. I cringe at the very thought, reflecting back over the countless weekends and late nights I’ve sacrificed to the god of career advancement as new contracts are broken in by Innovative Design Systems—my renowned employer and, in times like this, my Alcatraz. We’re already sacrificing our Saturdays just to keep up with the workload—for once, I think we can afford to say no to a client or two. But then, as Keith busily miscalculates my reaction in another swell of awkward silence, I realize what he’s actually getting at.

Arthur’s not likely to return—time to face facts—and that means someone here needs to take on his immense workload until more permanent arrangements can be made. Unless I’ve misinterpreted Keith’s shoddy imitations, that someone is going to be me.

>>Silly Wilson ... you’re so kissable, but did you mean to say ‘Keith’s shoddy
intimations
’?

Whatever, Marilyn—
intimations
. If you weren’t so smokin’ hot—

Anyway, the point is:
yikes!

I work nine or ten hours a day, and I’m a zombie by day’s end; Arthur’s been putting in a minimum of twelve a day since before I was born, juggling a million hats to keep our projects on target. He’s sort of a jack-of-all-trades around IDS. He’s as much a fixture here as any of the equipment we rely on every day—moreso, when you think about it: he’s been around a heck of a lot longer.

More to the point, he’s a department of one. If he dies—when he dies—the rest of us will only be able to speculate about what he did all day long.

Sure enough, when I walk into my office, I find one of Arthur’s project drives on my desk. I sip my coffee with a scowl. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a team player. I’ve always been willing to go the extra mile in my professional life, and I don’t intend for this situation to be an exception. But I’m irritated. It’s not necessarily the extra work—which is pretty significant, by the way—it’s that I’m neither equipped nor trained to handle the tasks that have been tossed so casually into my lap. It’s a recipe for failure, and I don’t relish the likelihood of coming up short. Ironically, the one person with the necessary skill set around here to train me was never given time or priority to impart his wisdom when it counted.

So now, when it’s too late, I’m supposed to perform a miracle with my hands tied.

This isn’t the first time Keith has pulled something like this, either. He often tries to play like I should know what the heck Arthur does all day long, since we happen to be buddies. It doesn’t appear to matter how many times I explain to Keith that I am not Arthur by proxy. Actually—and my boss is fully aware of this, even if he likes to feign ignorance—my work at IDS has almost no overlap with Arthur’s. It hardly seems appropriate for me—or anyone else in my tiny department—to absorb that level of accountability. Arthur and I work in two completely insulated worlds. My department writes procedures for the nexus; Arthur secures them.

Sip, scowl.

Case in point: for several months now, I’ve been working on a proprietary add-on named IntelliQ, whose title is a pretty lame convergence of
intelligent
and
queuing
. Don’t blame me—my opinion on the matter died a horrible death the moment the marketing department got their CamelCase-addicted hands on it. Anyway, unlike our usual projects—which are generally proposed and commissioned by our clients—this one is of my own design and volition. If it makes it into the marketplace, restaurants will be able to use the nexus to seamlessly manage their table turnover, waiting lists, and even their supply inventory. And I’ll finally make my mark on this company.

I’m very excited about it, yet in the entire time I’ve been working on it, I don’t think I’ve ever done more than toss around its market potential with Arthur.

Why?

Because the guts of IDS programs simply aren’t germane to our friendship. They are, however, germane to my tale. So please forgive the following explanation.

IntelliQ is a patron analysis suite. Unlike native nexus analytics, which are leveraged exclusively for logistics management, IntelliQ endeavors to quantify the eating habits of restaurant patrons—what they typically order, how often they leave room for dessert, how long they like to linger for leisurely conversation, how much they tend to tip, et cetera—and calculates the likely resource investment and, ultimately, the profit margin associated with each dining party before they ever walk through the door. Patron statistics are carefully guarded throughout this process in accordance with nexus privacy protocols, but the statistics aren’t the point. The real payoff begins at the moment when a patron makes a formal entry to the daygrid on his—or her—implant, favoring a particular restaurant; as these data points become available to the nexus, IntelliQ fluidly adjusts projections for consumer turnout at the restaurant and modifies its efficiency plan for seating, menu preparation, staffing, et cetera. It will shave a minimum of twenty percent off the average restaurant’s operating costs.