He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.
Okay, so, Deepak said, so this is how it works. The client, he books the time, and then at the appointed hour, a switch in the implant chip kicks on and starts transferring his consciousness over. Perceptions, sensory data, all of it. It goes first to an intermediate server where it gets bundled with other jobs, and then a huge block of the stuff gets zapped over here, downloaded onto our servers, and then dumped into our queue management system, which parcels out the individual jobs to all of us in the cubicle farm.
Okay, so, it’s all based on some kind of efficiency algorithm — our historical performance, our current emotional load. Sensors in our head assembly unit measure our stress levels, sweat composition, to see what we can handle. Okay? he would say, when he was done. Like a professor. He wanted so badly to be an expert at something.
I always appreciated Deepak trying to help me understand. But it’s just a job, I would say. I never really understood why Deep thought so much of those programmers, either. In the end, we’re all brains for hire. Mental space for rent, moments as a commodity. They have gotten it down to a science. How much a human being can take in a given twelve-hour shift. Grief, embarrassment, humiliation, all different, of course, so they calibrate our schedules, mix it up, the timing and the order, and the end result is you leave work every day right about at your exact breaking point. I used to smoke to take the edge off, but I quit twelve years ago, so sometimes when I get home, I’m still shaking for a little bit. I sit on my couch and drink a beer and let it subside. Then I heat up some bread and lentils and read a newspaper or, if it’s too hot to stay in, go down to the street and eat my dinner standing there, watching people walking down the block, wondering where they are headed, wondering if anyone is waiting for them to come home.
—
When I get to work the next morning, there’s a woman sitting in the cubicle across from mine. She’s young, at least a couple of years younger than me, looks right out of school. She has the new-employee setup kit laid out in front of her and is reading the trainee handbook. I think about saying hi but who am I kidding, I am still me, so instead I just say nothing.
My first ticket of the day is a deathbed. Deathbeds are not so common. They are hard to schedule — we require at least twenty-four hours’ advance booking, and usually clients don’t know far enough in advance when the ailing loved one is going to go. But this isn’t regular deathbed. It’s pull-the-plug.
They are pulling the plug on Grandpa this morning.
I open the ticket.
I am holding Grandpa’s hand.
I cry.
He squeezes my hand, one last burst of strength. It hurts. Then his hand goes limp.
I cry, and also, I really cry. Meaning, not just as my client, but I start crying, too. Sometimes it happens. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because he was somebody’s grandpa. And he looked like a nice one, a nice man. Maybe something about the way his arm fell against the guardrail on the hospital bed, nothing dramatic or poignant. Just a part of his body going thunk against metal. Maybe because I could sort of tell, when Grandpa was looking at his grandson for the last time, looking into his eyes, looking around in there trying to find him, he didn’t find him, he found me instead, and he knew what had happened, and he didn’t even look mad. Just hurt.
—
I am at a funeral.
I am in a dentist’s chair.
I am lying next to someone’s husband in a motel bed, feeling guilty.
I am quitting my job. This is a popular one. Clients like to avoid the awkwardness of quitting their jobs, so they set an appointment and walk into their bosses’ offices and tell them where they can stick this effing job, and right before the boss starts to reply, the switch kicks in and I get yelled at.
I am in a hospital.
My lungs burn.
My heart aches.
I’m on a bridge.
My heart aches on a bridge.
My heart aches on a cruise ship.
My heart aches on an airplane, taking off at night.
Some people think it’s not so great that we can do this. Personally, I don’t really see the problem. Press one to clear your conscience. Press two for fear of death. Consciousness is like anything else. I’m sure when someone figures out how to sell time itself, they’ll have infomercials for that, too.
I am at a funeral.
I am losing someone to cancer.
I am coping with something vague.
I am at a funeral.
I am at a funeral.
I am at a funeral.
Seventeen tickets today in twelve hours. Ten half hours and seven full.
On my way out, I can hear someone wailing and gnashing his teeth in his cubicle. He is near the edge. Deepak was always like that, too. I always told him, hey, man, you have to let go a little. Just a little. Don’t let it get to you so much.
I peek my head to see if I can steal a glance at the new woman, but she is in the middle of a ticket. She appears to be suffering. She catches me looking at her. I look at my feet and keep shuffling past.
—
It used to be that the job wasn’t all pain. Rich American man outsources the nasty bits of his life. He’s required to book by the hour or the day or some other time unit, but in almost any crappy day, there are always going to be some parts of it that are not so bad. Maybe just boring. Maybe even more okay than not. Like if a guy books his colonoscopy and he hires us for two hours, but for the first eight minutes, he’s just sitting there in the waiting room, reading a magazine, enjoying the air-conditioning, admiring someone’s legs. Or something. Anyway, it used to be that we would get the whole thing, so part of my job here could be boring or neutral or even sometimes kind of interesting.
But then the technology improved again and the packeting software was refined to filter out those intervals and collect them. Those bits, the extras, the leftover slices of life were lopped off by the algorithm and smushed all together into a kind of reconstituted life slab, a life-loaf. Lunch meat made out of bits of boredom. They take the slabs and process them and sell them as prepackaged lives.
I’ve had my eye on one for a while, at a secondhand shop that’s on my way home. Not ideal, but it’s something to work for.
So now, what’s left over is pretty much just pure undiluted badness. The only thing left to look forward to is when, once in a while, in the middle of an awful day, there is something not-so-awful mixed in there. Like the relief in the middle of a funeral, or sometimes when you get someone who is really religious, not just religious, but a person of true faith, then mixed in with the sadness and loss you get something extra, you get to try different flavors, depending on the believer. You get the big foot on your chest, or you get the back of your head on fire, a cold fire, it tickles. You get to know what it is like to know that your dead lover, your dead mother, father, brother, sister, that they are all standing in front of you, tall as the universe, and they have huge, infinite feet, and their heads are all ablaze with this brilliant, frozen fire. You get the feeling of being inside of a room and at the same time, the room being inside of you, and the room is the world, and so are you.