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alarawriting · 8 months

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52 Project #53: After The Chicken Story

And here it is, the bonus story, a sequel to the one I started this project with.

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Things have been kind of crazy around here the last few years, not just because of the pandemic, but there’s been a lot going on. Gotta say that mostly, those years haven’t been real great for us. Lots of changes, some good, some bad, some eh, but that’s life, right?

So my oldest daughter went to college to become a marine biologist, and now she’s on an expedition to study the Kraken in the harbor. Gotta say I didn’t expect it. Not because she didn’t show any interest in marine biology, she was crazy for it when she was young, but because every girl around here seemed to want to grow up to be a marine biologist, kind of like every girl when I was growing up wanted to work with horses. Except my wife, she’s terrified of them. Most of the kids who wanted to be marine biologists did not end up that way, but my daughter’s working on a master’s degree in it. Wants to do all this stuff with conservation and the Bay. Which, I guess, the Kraken lives in the Bay and if we piss it off enough by dumping crap in its home territory so there’s no food for it, it might burn the city down again, so there’s a good conservation argument for you.

My oldest son, the ninja, has actually left the country; he’s gone to Japan to study under ninja masters at some ninja school. Either that, or break into working for Nintendo, because what he really wants in life is to make video games. Being a ninja isn’t a profession for him, it’s a way of life. I miss the kid, he never writes home. Would it kill him to drop us a note on Discord? But it sounds like he’s happy, which is the important thing.

And my younger son has a web comic going. Well, it’s not exactly a web comic, more like one of those mixed media things where he’s got comic pages and audio files and animations and mini-games and all that kind of stuff, about, supposedly, a fictionalized version of himself going into the tunnel under the road and traveling to the Underworld. It’s like, Dante’s Inferno as rewritten by Gen Z. Not literally Dante’s Inferno, I think he’s only ever read the Wikipedia article about it, but similar concept. Surprisingly, it’s mostly a dark comedy. I haven’t asked him if any of it is true, because I don’t want to know.

My youngest kid’s not doing nearly as well, since we brought back her timeshadow from the moon. I never took her seriously when she used to say she had a clone on the moon; turns out that, while a timeshadow is technically not a clone, she did actually have a copy of herself up on the moon. (Nowhere near my family’s barbeque grill. I’m starting to think I’ll never see that thing again.) The thing about timeshadows is, if your timeshadow touches you, it merges into you and then you have all of its memories, but if it had problems, you probably got them too. And living on the Moon for most of your life is not good for timeshadows any more than for regular humans, so when they merged, my kid got frail and weak – not as bad as someone who’d lived on the Moon their whole life, in the weak gravity, but worse off than she was. She didn’t get any taller, though. The timeshadow had shot up like a string bean, side effect of Lunar gravity, but when they merged, my kid got the deficits and not the benefits.

I wish it hadn’t happened and part of me regrets bringing the kid back from the moon, but the thing about a timeshadow is, it’s not entirely real, but it has thoughts and feelings just like the real human it’s a copy of, so what was I gonna do? Leave someone who is essentially my daughter up on the Moon without family? My daughter has lost enough of her childhood memories that she no longer has any idea how the timeshadow got on the Moon or why she even had a timeshadow, and the daycare she used to go to is out of business, so I don’t think there’s any way I can find out.

Things got kind of bad for my wife, too. The last time I talked about things, it ended up looking like we were going to buy our annoying neighbor’s house after my wife harassed her into leaving the neighborhood. Well, that didn’t happen, because my wife lost her job, and then ended up with breast cancer. They had to take them off. She looked into getting breast missiles but the damn things are too hard to reload, so she got pockets instead. Now if she really wants to keep something safe, she can stick it in her boob, not just in her bra. I always thought that those things were only for drug smugglers, but my wife wants to be able to go to the beach by herself and keep her credit cards and ID on her person when she goes in the water, and apparently she can seal up the pockets to be waterproof. So far evidence suggests she’s cancer free and the thing never made it out of her breasts, and that’s good, so things could be worse. The people who did buy the annoying neighbor’s house are nice folks, a Hispanic family where the father works in some kind of industrial chemistry as a scientist… I think. At least, he’s got some crazy shit in his swimming pool.

And then, my idiot boyfriend let the Fae know his true name. He’s a trans dude and very proud of the name he picked. He wasn’t going to go deadnaming himself when the Fae dude he met asked if he could have his name. So now his paperwork is not going through, and some stupid thing keeps happening every time he tries to legally change his name, because apparently the Fae now own his name. He’s considered changing it to a different name, but once you start to think about yourself as a name, that’s apparently your True Name. So he could maybe solve the issue of the paperwork, but he can’t solve the problem that fairies know his name and keep calling him. Sometimes he tries to sleepwalk straight out of the house; we’ve found him in the middle of the street in a fugue state, or talking to people we couldn’t see. My wife’s been trying to help him with the paperwork, but since she’s had her own battles to fight, it hasn’t worked so well.

We still have chickens. But now we also have a 2 dimensional dog, a cockatoo who works tech support, and approximately seventeen cats. I can’t really keep track of them all. They’ve cleared out the rat population, which is good, because Orion the assassin cat has been getting up in years and isn’t quite as murderous as he used to be, but they break out into two clans and the clans feud like the Hatfields and McCoys. We’re not at war with the city over the chickens anymore; now it’s the yard. Mostly about the Fae circles, but also about mowing the lawn, which, you try mowing over a Fae circle. And tell me how it went, fifty years when you pop back into reality, if you ever do.

Anyway, this story isn’t about the chickens, or not nearly so much as the last story was. It’s more of an explanation of why things ended up the way they did.

So first off, work. Now, I’ve been working from home from before it was cool; got my own IT company, works with Amazon Web Services helping other businesses deal with them. When my wife lost her job, she started working here as well, which was just as well because then when she got cancer, she could get all the time off for chemo and stuff that she needed. A year or so later, when the news about the pandemic first hit, business was jumping. Everybody wanted to get into the cloud and not have to come into the office anymore.

Huh, actually, no, that’s not where it starts. Let’s start with the two dimensional dog.

So my youngest kid really wanted a two dimensional dog. They’re pretty rare, on account of being two dimensional. You ever hear of a paper tiger, well, this is a paper dog. They’re not really two dimensional, but something about, most of their mass is phased into a different dimension and we can only see the part of them that intersects with this plane? They can be very intimidating because you look at this dog, you think, goddamn that is one skinny dog, and then it comes up to you with its jaws hanging open, panting, and it looks like a smile. A giant smile. A giant, very toothy, very scary smile. This is a dog you want to keep happy because you don’t know what it will do if it’s not happy. They’re very tall, and very long, and very very skinny, but the mass is there, as you can tell when the dog jumps up on you.

Ours came from Russia. Well, her parents came from Russia. Well, her ancestors. We’re not really sure when it was that Russia engineered two dimensional dogs, but we know that when the Soviet Union fell, people over there started selling these dogs to the US because they were weird, and rich people love weird, and Russians after the collapse of Communism really wanted the money. Then some people who probably weren’t all that rich spent too much money on the dogs so they could look richer than they were, and ended up having to sell off puppies for a lot less than they wanted when the dot com boom busted. My daughter wanted one ever since she heard about them. She was super into science and math, and the idea of a two dimensional dog really appealed to her.

My wife’s ex used to have one he got from a rescue, but we went looking for the rescue and found out it had to shut down after they accidentally accepted a Hound of Tindalos, and you know how that goes. So we had to buy our dog. Her name’s Svetlana and she will do anything to get some peanut butter, regular butter, cheese, potato chips… you know, anything you might imagine your teenagers would clean you out of. Being that she’s two dimensional, she will absolutely slip through any crack in a door you leave, including the fridge door if you don’t shut it all the way. We’ve lost so much butter that way.

Now, Svetlana loves cats. Loves cats. Before we got her fixed, she loved them in a kind of not-entirely-PG-rated way, but even after that, she really wants to play with cats. She is six times as tall as a cat. Cats do not want to play with her. At the time, we had three cats – Orion the mighty hunter/assassin cat, Odin the grumpy ancient man who our best guesses had at 24 years old then, and Tiamat, the tortie who thought she was human. Well, who at least thought she deserved to be able to get chicken out of the refrigerator and sit at the dinner table. They had their normal cat idiosyncrasies; Tiamat liked Rice Krispies but hated fish, Odin enjoyed sleeping in the litter box, and Orion liked to cross-dress. Well, not sure you can call it that since female cats don’t generally wear frilly doll dresses, either. But the kids – and my boyfriend -- thought it was fun to put dresses on him, and while the others would immediately divest themselves if you tried to make them wear anything, Orion seemed to enjoy his dresses. He’d even head-butt the kids if one of them was holding a doll dress, until the kid put the dress on him. None of these cats wanted anything to do with Lana.

Coincidentally, my boyfriend’s parents in Canada had a bunch of local feral cats who’d just had kittens. You see where this is going.

Sylph was a pretty little Siamese kitten who enjoyed playing with my boyfriend’s parents’ dog. We thought she’d make a good friend for Lana, and because she had a sister she was inseparable from, we didn’t want to separate them. So we ended up with Raven as well, a solid black cat who became the photographic subject of many memes about how the void wants chicken.

Lana, big dumb goofy nerd that she was, got too enthusiastic about playing with the kittens. The kittens didn’t appreciate it. Then the kittens turned into teenage female cats, at which point we discovered that Lana is actually a lesbian xenophile… ailurophile? You can’t call it bestiality when they’re all beasts. This was more than a little disturbing, and we all wanted to return to our illusions that our dog loved our cats in a wholesome friendly way, so we arranged to get them all fixed, Lana first.

And then Covid hit.

If you had pets you might remember that right after Covid started, the vets all turtled up, nothing but emergency appointments. Fixing animals was apparently not an emergency. Lana got done in time, but our little girls, not so much.

We did our best to keep them inside, but with all the secret tunnels in the basement, the rat warrens that come up in the laundry room, and the holes in reality that the wall squids made, we cannot in fact keep anything the size of a cat in, or out. I mean, cats can’t usually phase through walls, but they are one of the only animals on the planet fast enough to catch a wall squid, and if they tag the thing, they can often follow it right through its phase. Since they can’t actually enter the dimension the things come from, though, this generally leaves them outside whatever wall they were going through, which is fine when it’s the interior living room wall and not so great when it’s the wall covered with ivy outside. The only thing that keeps stranger cats from turning up in our house at random is ours are so damn territorial, and the only thing that keeps our cats in is nothing. Nothing can keep our cats in.

By the time we got Sylph and Raven rescheduled for their spays, they were both pregnant with kittens.

There are some vets that will abort kittens while spaying. Not the ones around here. Also they both had lots of them. Sylph had six, Raven had five. We have a tradition around here that kittens don’t get real names until they’re adults, they get temporary names. So Sylph’s six were Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charmed, and Raven’s five were named after five members of Voltron, from the old series my wife grew up with, not the reboot. And she left out Sven. I think she forgot he existed.

As if this was not bad enough, Tiamat got pregnant. See, we’d never fixed her, because the one time we had an appointment, she managed to disappear, and she’d get fat and then thin again within weeks, not long enough to bring a pregnancy to term. We knew that her father and her brother were the same cat, so we figured she might have some kind of genetic abnormality preventing pregnancy. Nope! Or, maybe. Maybe she needed exposure to cat pregnancy pheromones to be able to bring a litter to term. She had four. We named them after the Three Musketeers plus D’Artagnan.

If you’re counting, you know that at this point, we had a total of twenty cats.

Meanwhile, we were hoarding food. Frozen and nonperishable, I’m not talking about stuff you have to refrigerate. We bought three new freezers (which took forever, because everyone else apparently had the same idea), filled them with meat (we hooked up with a butcher and got a whole cow, a whole pig, a whole emu, and a couple of deer), then filled our pantry and multiple bins with dry food. With Covid going on, we didn’t want to have to leave the house and go shopping any more than we had to. We even got dry milk. Which is disgusting, by the way, do not use it for your cereal, but it does tolerably well when the instant mashed potato box says to use milk to make mashed potatoes. We didn’t go full prepper with MREs and dehydrated food, but only because my boyfriend’s parents were preppers and he was able to advise us that that stuff tastes like shit.

Twenty cats produce a lot of cat poop. My boyfriend, whose job it was to clean the cat boxes, was frequently distracted by the Fae trying to call him. My wife and I were overwhelmed with work. My son the ninja helped out for a while, but then he got accepted to study under a ninja master. I thought there was no way he’d be able to go; we were in lockdown. Japan wasn’t accepting US citizens. Hell, Canada wasn’t; my boyfriend could go visit his parents because he was actually a Canadian citizen, but we were worried that he wouldn’t be able to come back, so he didn’t.

Ninjas, apparently, have resources that most ordinary Japanese citizens don’t. They came in a helicopter in the dead of night, and we only knew about it because he went to say goodbye to the chickens and woke them up and they started clucking, which set off the dog. We got outside in time to see my son disappear up the helicopter ladder, promising us, incorrectly, that he would write. You’d think ninjas wouldn’t use something as ostentatious as a chopper, but the truth is our city is lousy with choppers. Police choppers. News choppers. Medevac choppers. Elementary school bus choppers. Ghostbuster choppers. No one here blinks when they hear the sound of a helicopter overhead, and a blacked-out ninja helicopter looks exactly like a blacked-out police helicopter.

Since then we mostly hear about him through his brother, who does not have the level of detail sufficient to make my wife happy, but at least we know enough to know that his ninja cover is that he’s interning at Nintendo. Apparently ninjas do not really live in secret compounds where they dress all in black and train non-stop; the point of being a ninja is that you blend in, so ninjas get real jobs, and they’re plausible jobs that the ninja is good at doing. My son’s always wanted to make video games, so he’s in the best possible place, I think. I hope he’s doing well at learning Japanese, though. They only had French, German and Spanish in school and he somehow managed to skip out on learning any of them. I think the school decided that C++ counted as a language.

But this meant my son wasn’t around to help with the cats. My older daughter had moved out a while back while she was getting her degree, and she was living in her own apartment so she didn’t need to come back home for Covid like the college kids in the dorms did. My younger daughter hadn’t yet merged with her timeshadow, we didn’t retrieve her from the moon until the following year, but neither she nor my younger son were willing to be much help. Meanwhile, dry food, in bins, much of it in cardboard boxes that bugs can slip into, some of the bins chewable by mice. Plus, all the restaurants were closed, so the bugs and the mice and the rats all wanted to find someplace that still had food. And our house, as mentioned earlier, is porous to anything the size of a cat, or smaller.

First we had the plague of mealmoths, that infested everything we owned made of grain or nuts. We love nuts, and my wife is crazy for pasta, and we have rice, and cold cereal, and bread. The way you’re supposed to purge your house of mealmoths is throw out all your grains and don’t bring any in for two weeks. This was not happening. I wanted to build a cedar pantry, but a. very busy at work and b. not allowed to go to Home Depot, and not about to try to have expensive wood shipped to the house. The business was doing well, but not that well. I knew from my tunneling project and my attic renovation that if you need wood shipped to you, you end up having to buy way more of it than you need, which is why there are still piles and piles of lumber in my attic.

Instead we ordered tons and tons of jars and plastic cereal bins with bug-proof seals and stuff like that to store all our grains in, and my wife had to go through them all to identify what the bugs had already gotten to, and then throw bay leaves into all the containers. Apparently mealmoths hate bay leaves.

The dishwasher stopped working. By now, we could get repair people again, but the repair guy said that the wires underneath the thing had been shredded by mice, and he didn’t know how to fix that. We tried getting a warranty repair. Turns out warranty repairs don’t cover shredded by mice.

So we got a new dishwasher, and I stashed the old one in the garage, figuring I might be able to repair it once I had some spare time. Twenty cats managed to clean out the rats before they even got a foothold, but apparently they had been slacking when it came to dealing with the mice. It was understandable, given that most of those cats were kittens and three of the cats who weren’t kittens were occupied raising kittens. Odin was too old and there was only so much Orion could do by himself.

The world outside basically stopped. My daughter didn’t go to her middle school graduation, didn’t attend the school she’d been so enthusiastic about going to for high school, and then by the time they opened the schools again she was too fragile to walk around the school building. We tried to get her into a program where she’d get to still be attending school from home, but the school did not understand how a timeshadow merge could possibly have made her too weak to go to school, and they refused. Meanwhile, my son just stopped going to high school, basically marking time until he turned 18 and could drop out, working on his web comic. And me and my wife worked from home, and my boyfriend was on disability and didn’t work anyway, plus you really can’t work when the Fae are trying to summon you and you have to hide out from them. So nobody ever left the house. My wife would go out for groceries, when we weren’t doing Instacart or when she needed to pick up stuff for my home improvement projects, but aside from that, nobody went anywhere. Not even the yard; my wife used to garden, but we were busy, plus, Fae circles. No one wants to risk stepping in one of those.

When there’s no routine, when nobody has to leave and nobody has school and the people who have a job are working pretty much all the time, time disappears. I’d look up from my PC and find an entire month had gone by. It seemed like this was a bit much even for the liminal timelessness of no routines, and then we found the infestation of time flies. Fuckers love fruit. You know the saying, time flies like a banana, but we had a peach tree and apple trees and a mulberry bush and grapevines and tomatoes all over the place, and this apparently attracted the time flies, who then moved into the house after we killed the mealmoths. Time flies don’t look too different from regular flies; they look just like cluster flies, those incredibly stupid little guys who live in the walls and are too stupid to figure out how to get back into the walls once they get out, so we’d never noticed. They lay their eggs in fruit, but they themselves eat time, and they don’t care about bay leaves, or mint, which we were using to try to drive the mice off.

Problem was, with five people never leaving a house, hoarding food, and having twenty cats, as soon as the time disappeared the house became an utter disaster, and there was no way we could have an exterminator over. Also no way to call an exterminator anyway, because nobody was actually answering phone calls! Anywhere!! And we didn’t have the time to follow up on anything. It’s a miracle we got the cats fixed and managed to give some of them away. Not nearly enough, mind you. I don’t know whether we got rid of three or five or seven but we still have an absurd number of cats. And cats will chase mice, and wall squid, and Orion was willing to go after rats, but none of them were gonna touch a time fly.

We put up flypaper, of course, and rubbed mushy banana on it to attract them, but once the time flies have infested your house, you have a lot less time to get anything done, including getting rid of your time flies. Then the oven broke, but since we have two halves of a house, we had two ovens, so we didn’t do much to get it fixed. My wife wanted it to get fixed before Thanksgiving, but with the time flies, that was ambitious.

Then my boyfriend brought home a cockatoo. How he managed to find the time to get a cockatoo, I’ll never know. The family who’d owned the cockatoo apparently had to get rid of her because she was “wrecking our home.” I wondered, how does a bird you can keep in a cage wreck a house?

The bird decided she was my mate, and that my wife and boyfriend – who did most of the bird feeding chores – were her rivals in a harem anime. When I let her out, she wouldn’t let them come near me. Apparently the home-wrecking in question had not been literal destruction of a house, though she was capable of that too if she was bored enough. My boyfriend kept trying to win her over, but my wife had never forgotten about the birds who pecked her dog’s eyes out because the dog claimed that birds didn’t exist, and she was an introvert, so she was happy to go hide in her office all the time and never go near the bird.

Meanwhile, if I put Jessica – the bird – in her cage, she shrieked. All the time. Ever hear the Cure song “Like Cockatoos?” Where Robert Smith says that the night sang out like cockatoos, and it sounds all sad and romantic? Yeah, Robert Smith never went anywhere near a cockatoo. They do not sing. They screech. And they burble, and they talk, but when they’re bored, or angry, or angry and bored, they screech.

I couldn’t have Jessica climbing all over me while I was working. Sure, everyone loves when your cat photobombs the Zoom call, but the bird could talk, and did not give a shit about professional office language. I couldn’t have her screaming either. So I gave her a job. She was now Tier 1 tech support. One of her favorite things to say was, “What the fuck, Amazon?” This endeared her to the customers, who were generally calling in because AWS had done something to screw up their day. She really enjoyed interacting with the customers, they liked her, and my existing tech support team liked having someone to semi-screen the calls. Of course, she couldn’t type what the customer’s complaint was into a ticket, but she could peck a touchscreen with a co-worker’s face and make a call to tell them what the complaint was, so they could enter the ticket.

Cockatoos don’t eat time flies, either, and the time flies loved the fruit in her bowl, so we started losing even more time. The bills didn’t get paid. There were gaps of three months in telemedicine visits that were supposed to have been two week follow-ups.

We got rid of the majority of the infestation when the summer ended and all the fruit had been harvested. Turns out that time flies really do not like caffeine. We used old coffee and painted it on bananas and apples, they’d come lay their eggs, and then the eggs would die because of the caffeine. We couldn’t do anything about Jessica’s food because you can’t feed caffeine to a cockatoo, but time flies don’t really like dried fruit so much, unlike Jessica, who loved it. They also don’t care for seeds or nuts. And we weren’t feeding the chickens fruit, and obviously neither the dog nor the cats ate the stuff, so we finally managed to take a breath, come up for air, look around ourselves -- and realize that now we had a massive roach infestation.

We tried spraying. We thought that would be enough. Then the new dishwasher stopped working, we got a warranty repairman, and he told us he couldn’t do it. Warranty wouldn’t cover it. When he took off the cover and showed us the little roach apartments, with the roaches sitting around their dining room tables feeding the crumbs they’d stolen to their four million children, looking up at us and giving us the finger (technically, the leg, but I knew what they meant), we realized that spraying commercial pesticide was not going to solve this. But now the fuckers had destroyed our second dishwasher, so this meant war. And without time flies draining all the time away, we had the resources to go to war.

I’d planned to spend the winter months renovating the bathroom. I didn’t mention our bathroom, did I? The new house, the one my wife’s parents bought, had two bathrooms – a nice big one on the upper floor and a tiny little water closet with just a sink and a toilet on the first floor. But in our original house, the one we owned, there was only one bathroom, and it was a galley where literally most of the length and width of it was taken by the bathtub, so to get to the toilet on the other side of the bathroom you had to slide along the wall like you’re making a home music video for “Walk Like An Egyptian” by the Bangles. Or else stroll through the tub. Or else use the rings I bolted to the ceiling joists for my ninja son and swing along the ceiling, but he was the only one who could do that. My boyfriend, a big guy, could barely use the thing. So almost immediately after we got the other house, everyone stopped using that bathroom and switched to the one next door, except for my ninja son because his bedroom was right next to it and it was convenient for him. Ninjas are good at slinking through narrow passages. Now that he had left, I’d planned to tear the whole thing out, and his bedroom, and replace them both with a normal-shaped bathroom and a slightly smaller bedroom.

I didn’t get the chance. We needed to do battle.

It hadn’t helped that some neighborhood ne’er-do-well, who was probably high as a kite, broke into our house in the middle of the summer because our dog was mouthing off to him, threatened the dog, told the cockatoo he’d fuck her up (we know this because she started saying “Gonna fuck you up!” every time we told her it was bedtime or that she needed to be quiet or stop climbing in my hair), and smashed all our fishtanks. Fortunately we had no fish. Unfortunately we had like five fishtanks because my boyfriend had wanted to rescue feeder goldfish and breed guppies for sale, so we’d filled up three forty gallon tanks and two twenties, plus a few tiny five gallons, and then due to the time flies we’d never gotten around to putting fish in them. This did terrible damage to the floor. We had the guy dead to rights on video, managed to actually get the city police to pick him up and a prosecution going, and then he jumped bail and fled, possibly through a Fae circle because no one ever saw him again. He was gonna owe us several thousand dollars for the floor damage.

After we got rid of the time flies, we discovered that the damaged floor had become completely porous to roaches, so what had probably started as a basement infestation had become a full blown house emergency. There were roaches in the cereal. (This was the fault of whoever wasn’t following the mealmoth protocol and leaving the cereal out of the protective plastic bins.) They’d destroyed the dishwasher and were working on the refrigerator. Every cabinet and drawer we had was entirely full of the little assholes, plus the condos they’d built in the dishwasher, plus several of our sealed bins of food that turned out to be less sealed than we’d thought.

Meanwhile the city had sold our house to some asshole lawyers in Ohio, because we hadn’t mowed our lawn, and we had allowed Fae circles to spring up there, which was considered a hazard. Which it was, yes, but only to us and people trespassing on our property, and how the fuck do you safely get rid of those things anyway? We had racked up several thousand dollars’ worth of fines for not being able to mow the lawn because of the Fae circles and not being able to get rid of the Fae circles because we couldn’t safely mow the lawn, and then the time flies interfering with our ability to remember to pay the damn fines before they ballooned. We were still in a state of national emergency at this point, the vaccine was right on the horizon but no one we knew had qualified to get it yet, and they wanted to make us homeless because we didn’t mow our lawn. This was absolute bullshit, and personally, I think may have been retaliation from people at Animal Control, who are not the same guys that fine you for your lawn but they work under the same overarching department in the city government. If we hadn’t gotten rid of the time flies, we might not have been able to respond in time. There was stuff in there that was nonsensical, like fines for having high grass and weeds in February, or for not having cleaned up the area where we put our trash cans in 2019, or for too many kites on the roof. Why does it even matter if there are kites on the roof? We put them there to distract local falcons away from our chickens! They can’t fly into the power lines, they’re tethered with metal cable!

Also they threatened to chop down our mulberry tree because it was in the way of the street light, which didn’t work anyway and which, when it did work, blinded people in my son’s old bedroom, which my younger son was going to move into as soon as we finished the bathroom renovations. Which as it turned out we couldn’t even start, but he moved in anyway because his room didn’t have a ceiling. His older sister had been exorcising ghosts from that room and somehow this made the ceiling fall in, so we’d been using cheap fake paneling in lieu of a real ceiling, and this does nothing to stop ghosts getting back into the room. So my wife put barbed wire around the mulberry tree. Well, it wasn’t really barbed wire, it was tomato cages she’d unraveled and linked into each other in a crazy way that made a fence with sharp wires sticking out of it in all directions. The city fined us for that, too, but she was going to challenge that in court, because no one was going to hurt themselves on it as long as they didn’t try to trespass on our property and mess around with our tree.

Anyway, so we paid off the lawyers in Ohio to get full title to our house back, and we paid off the city’s fines, which, due to lockdown, involved going to city hall, then going to the basement of city hall because the front door was locked, then giving several thousand dollars in cash to a garden gnome because someone at the city had thought it was fun and whimsical to replace the cash drop with a garden gnome. The cash drop was now in his mouth. Then we called every day for a month before we managed to get someone on the phone who could confirm that yes, the garden gnome had had the money and the city managed to get it out and put it on our account, but they wanted another $200 in interest because the time between us dropping the cash and them picking up the cash and putting it on our account was somehow our fault.

And all this time, we’re battling the roaches.

They’d proved themselves immune to pyrethin or whatever that stuff is in most commercial pesticides, whereas we had a house full of people who’d blow up with allergies when anything even slightly nasty was in their airspace, so no more pyrethin for us. We had to get by on organics. Cloves, lavender, mint, citrus – turns out there is a reason humans eat a lot of the stuff we eat, and it’s not just because it tastes good. It’s because it preserves your food, because pretty much every critter except for bedbugs and time flies hate the stuff. Mixtures of boric acid and sugar. Diatomaceous earth. A new dishwasher that’s fully enclosed so it’d be a lot harder for them to get in, and putting the old dishwasher into a gigantic garbage bag, then buying dry ice and filling the bag with it to try to suffocate them all. It worked, but the dishwasher was still toast, and once again, the warranty repair people wouldn’t fix it. The roaches might have been dead but the repair guy could plainly see the condos they’d left behind.

While this was going on, the second oven broke, so we had to get people in to fix them both. Guess what. No, no, you’ll never guess. No warranty repair. No repair at all, actually. The oven that had been under warranty turned out to have been fried by a pair of lovebird mice that had decided to get amorous right where their pals had been gnawing at electric wires, so when we turned the stove on, the current went through both mice, and now we had furry mice skeletons trapped forever in a posture that made it clear they’d been mating. The other oven was destroyed by roaches, and the repair guy, who we were paying for, not a warranty repair, refunded our money because he wasn’t willing to touch it.

We had no ovens and we were sick and tired of buying warranties that would never be honored, so we went to a place called Roy’s Discount Appliances, which was in the basement of a warehouse that used to belong to Toys R Us before they went out of business, and was a maze of ovens, dishwashers, refrigerators and washing machines that were used, refurbs, or on deep clearance because the manufacturer had discontinued them. Nothing like trying to shove two ovens into a minivan where you’ve removed the back seats, but you brought three people, so now one of them has to ride home sitting on the side of an oven and your tailgate won’t close so you have a bungee cord holding it down. We paid cash to get a 5% discount, and I strongly suspect some of those appliances fell off the back of truck, if you know what I mean.

Meantime, we’re repairing the floor. This means putting everything from the first floor of the house, except for the kitchen since it has a stone floor, into one of those portable rental units – not a storage facility because we wanted close access to it. The basement tunnels are prone to flooding, so we didn’t want to use them, also the staircase down there is a little too rickety for me to feel secure carrying my 80-inch television down it.

The city refuses to give us a permit for the storage unit. Says we have to pay our fines. We just did that. They record this stuff in cuneiform printed by dot matrix printers onto carbon sheets, so we have no way to tell if the fines they’re talking about are new fines, or the old fines that we paid cash to a garden gnome for, because we’re not organized enough to know where most of our mail is, so we don’t have the originals. Also we can’t read cuneiform. My wife’s dad can, but my wife doesn’t want him to know how big our fines are or how badly organized we are, and she thinks she could learn cuneiform if she had two weeks of free time. She does not have two weeks of free time. But my boyfriend makes friends with all the neighbors – he always did, but it’s especially been important since the Fae started calling him – and the Hispanic family with the chemist dad offers us their shed, which turns out to be significantly bigger on the inside, for less than we’d have paid for a portable storage unit. They’re just a couple of houses down the block, so it’s almost as good as a unit.

We spend a few months ripping up badly damaged tile and rug, all of which date from at least the 70’s and I always hated anyway, scrubbing off floor adhesive, and laying down a new hardwood floor, just us. By which I mean mostly just me, my wife doesn’t do handyman stuff (she helped with the scrubbing part, and she buys the supplies, but that’s it) and my boyfriend hasn’t really been useful for anything since the Fae started calling him. So now the roaches can’t get upstairs from the basement, but it’s too late, they have a beachhead here now, and so what we’ve just basically done is locked ourselves in with them. We start seeing more of the little fuckers. Now they’re getting into books and DVD cases and clothes hampers. Some end up in the bedroom.

You may ask why we don’t hire an exterminator. Remember the twenty cats? Maybe down to thirteen or seventeen or something by now – some of them spend all their time outdoors – but there are a lot of cats. And they’re at war with each other.

There’s the Canada clan – Sylph and Raven themselves have decided they are outdoor cats, but most of their kittens still live with us – and Tiamat’s clan, which includes Orion and Odin because Orion is one of Tiamat’s brothers (hopefully not the one who is also her father, but we got them from a hoarder’s kid going through his parents’ property, so we never actually found out), and she’s decided that Odin is less awful now that he’s a gazillion years old and she has the Canada clan to compare them to. My youngest daughter, who is mostly confined to her room due to physical weakness and compromised immune system, treats Tiamat’s kittens like they’re her own children (including carrying them around baby style, putting them in toy strollers she is way too old for, and occasionally putting one in a toy Pack n Play and then covering it with a large cardboard box as a “time-out”), so they have a home base. The Canada clan grew up in our bedroom, so they have a home base. The rest of the house is a war zone.

Whenever you walk through the house, there are cats hissing at each other, yowling, swiping at each other, chasing each other, the works. It’s still cold outside, so we can’t get them to go out and do their fighting outdoors like civilized cats. Our homeowners insurance dropped us when they found out about the tunnels in the basement. (They didn’t know we made the tunnels, and we didn’t admit to it, but insurance inspectors can be incredibly thorough when they want to be.) We haven’t been able to get a new policy yet. So my wife does not want a guy traipsing around the whole house where he might get tripped or scratched by warring cats. We’ve all learned to dodge, but an exterminator wouldn’t necessarily be experienced with being in a cat war zone.

It’s one thing to get repair guys into one or the other of the kitchens, they have doors and we can lock the cats out if we have to (I know most kitchens do not, in fact, have doors that can lock out the rest of the house, but we needed one back in the days when we had Angel, our beagle who we called that because as soon as you weren’t looking at him he would sneak into the kitchen and eat anything he could find, like the Weeping Angels on Doctor Who except with less neck breaking and more stealing your PB+J the instant your back was turned. That was before we had the other house, but we installed a similar door on the other house to keep the two dimensional dog from sneaking into our bedroom and pooping there.) It’s another thing to have a guy going all over your house while your cats are setting up ambushes for each other. And without homeowner’s insurance, we can’t risk it.

So it’s down to us. But we’re creative. My boyfriend has been seeing giant bugs that look like a cross between centipedes and beetles. Like the wall squid, they’re not entirely in our reality; he can see them because of his connection to the Fae. Well, my wife looks them up and apparently they are predators who eat bugs. We just have to get them over into our reality, and then figure out how to dispose of them. We can’t get frogs because the cats would attack them, and we can’t get an anteater because exotic animal, need a permit and besides, it’s not called a roach eater. We can bring the chickens inside to go roach hunting from time to time, but they poop all over the floor so the cure’s almost worse than the disease.

In our yard, there’s an old wooden gate that fell off the new house shortly after we got it, and instead of throwing it out, we leave it in the yard and move it around from time to time to kill weeds. The Fae made a circle on it. We carry the wooden gate into the house, and then my boyfriend leaves out sugar water to attract the centipeedles through the circle. Now we have centipede beetles the length of a human foot (which is mostly a lot shorter than the measurement named for it) in the house. Possibly this was ill thought out. The cats try attacking them, but it turns out, cats find centipeedles just as creepy as humans do, and the damn things have some pretty tough armor. It doesn’t take much before the cats get intimidated and leave them alone. Even Orion the assassin cat gives them a wide berth.

Turns out, the centipeedles are great at killing the roaches, but no one wants centipeedles in their pantry, or their silverware drawer. My daughter just literally stops eating off anything but her own private stash of sealed paper plates and plastic silverware because she’s so creeped out by the thought of either roaches or centipeedles touching anything she might eat off of. This isn’t great, the kid is already too thin and too easily put off her food. She was always picky, but apparently the timeshadow spent ten years eating moon cheese and is having a hard time stomaching Earth food, so now everything nauseates her, gives her a stomach, or is unappetizing in the first place.

One thing I will say for chickens: they’ll eat centipeedles. They don’t care, it’s all food to them. The cats have learned that chickens are much more of a threat and much less of a prey than they might think. Lana the two dimensional dog will happily chase the chickens, but she’s less two dimensional than she used to be. She doesn’t get enough exercise and she steals a lot of food, so she’s looking considerably more three dimensional than when we got her, which is good because it keeps her from slipping through closed doors, though bad in the sense that it’s not that healthy for her. There is enough clutter around the place, what with my tools, piles of lumber for the floor, and boxes of books that were deemed too heavy to carry over to the neighbors’ shed, that chickens have plenty of places to take shelter from a two and a half dimensional dog. And if we let Jessica the cockatoo out, turns out she thinks centipeedles are a fun piece of moving string to catch and tear in half. You’d think that a predator like a cat would be better at killing a centipeedle than a hookbill bird, but turns out, the centipeedles’ bellies are barely armored and the cockatoo has nearly opposable thumbs on her feet. She can flip them over, and then peck, peck, crack, done.

So we’ve got the chickens running around the place in chicken diapers to eat the centipeedles that we brought over from the lands of the Fae to eat the roaches, but we still have roaches and we still have centipeedles because it turns out you can’t control house bugs with predators. Spiders might be better at it and my boyfriend wants to get some, but my wife shoots that down.

I’m kinda at my wits’ end here, and then my youngest son wants to show me something.

So to understand this, I gotta tell you something about the layout of my house. We’ve got a full duplex, both sides, thanks to my wife’s dad. The front of the house is on a busy street, and my bedroom and my youngest daughter’s bedroom face that. The back of the house faces our deck, and my ninja son’s former bedroom (from the original side we had) and the guest room (from the new side we got) face that. Then there’s a room in the middle of our original house, that my younger son used to have, but now he’s moved into his older brother’s room. The bathroom is next to the boys’ bedroom, and also faces the deck.

Back a few years ago, before Covid, I did a renovation on my ninja son’s bedroom where I made it a little smaller, in preparation for making the bathroom wider. Then I didn’t have the opportunity to work on the bathroom. So there’s a narrow corridor between the bathroom and the bedroom. I threw together a quick and dirty closet to occupy some of that space, so the boys’ bedroom now has a closet in the corner that faces the bathroom and the deck. My younger son guided me over to this closet, and pulled up a trap door that I hadn’t known was there. There was a spiral staircase underneath.

So I went down the spiral staircase, of course, but I was freaking out. This hadn’t been here when I worked on the boys’ bedroom. I redid their entire floor, when they were so young they shared the room and my older daughter had the middle bedroom. There was no way this trap door could have been there when we moved in. There’s also no way it could be going where it’s going. My sons’ bedroom sits over the kitchen, but the kitchen has an addition in the back where we keep the laundry machines. This spiral staircase would theoretically be going right down into it.

Except it’s not. I’ve got pretty good spatial perception, so it doesn’t take me long to figure out that this very narrow little column is going between the two houses, at the edge where the kitchens meet the additions. I don’t know how it’s possible that I missed it. I’ve done so many renovations in this house. This is crazy.

The spiral staircase goes down underground and into a tunnel, which is not one of the tunnels my son and I dug to connect all the basements in the neighborhood. Technically this tunnel isn’t even in my basement; the foundation only goes as far as the original house, so the additions have no basement. This tunnel goes under my deck, then deeper underground, then turns, and comes up…

Ok, this is super weird. It’s a buried pillbox. This is like a basement, except what if your basement had a roof of its own rather than just being part of your house, and it was sticking out of the ground about two feet, with a lot of windows, and it was the size of maybe two rooms in your house put together, and it was at the back of the yard belonging to the neighbors with a swimming pool.

The room is mostly empty. There are tools, and some very iffy towels, and several empty beer cans, and a bottle of Windex and a really nasty roll of paper towels with spiderwebs all over it. I ask my son, “Did your brother know this was here?”

“I don’t know. If he did, he never mentioned it.”

“How long has it been here?”

“I don’t know, I just found it!”

There is no door, aside from the one we came in, and no staircase up to the ground level, but I open one of the windows and squirm through.

The fence around the neighbors’ swimming pool is about five feet tall, so I can see over it. My neighbors are sitting on their swimming pool. I mentioned the father’s a chemist or something, right? He’s got these substances that you mix into your water to change its solidity. They’ve turned about three quarters of their swimming pool into a semi-solid – a little bit squishy, their feet are leaving footprints in it when they walk around, but it holds their weight – and the remaining quarter, they’ve left as water so they can dangle their feet. There’s an entire entertainment center sitting in front of the pool, including a huge CRT TV, a VCR and a dozen super old video game machines like the Sega Saturn or the Nintendo GameCube, protected from the rain by a shade umbrella. Nothing is protecting this stuff from the water from the pool, though. They’re watching The Little Mermaid. I lean against the fence, and my neighbors notice me. The chemist greets me. “What’s going on, man?”

“I just discovered that this structure you have in the back of your yard is connected to my son’s bedroom.”

“Oh, wow,” he says. He gets out of the pool. He’s wearing swim trunks, but aside from his legs, he’s completely dry, since he’s been sitting on top of his pool dunking his feet and watching The Little Mermaid with his family. “You didn’t build that thing?”

“No, I didn’t build it.”

“But you built the tunnels.” I like this guy; he discovered the tunnels shortly after moving in, but he thought they were great. He wanted to get chickens himself, but there isn’t room in his yard with the swimming pool. The roof of the underground structure is completely covered with planter boxes full of tomatoes, peppers, flowers, herbs, and rutabagas. I don’t know why they’re trying to grow root vegetables in planters, but there’s enough foliage that I can tell what it is. The sign doesn’t help, it’s in Spanish. For obvious reasons I can read “tomato” and “jalapeno” and “serrano” in Spanish, but not “nabo sueco”, which probably means rutabaga because that’s what’s planted there.

“Yeah, a few years back, but I had no idea this thing was even here. Most of the tunnels go directly between the houses, not under the back yards.”

“Cool. I thought it was yours, but I didn’t know for sure. Can I go inside?”

“Well, there’s no door, but if you want to come to my house we can go down the staircase from my son’s room.”

So we traipse back over to my house, and then up to my son’s bedroom, down the stairs, through the tunnel, and into the empty underground structure. “This gets a lot of light for a thing underground,” he says. “A lot of windows.”

“It’s nice. I don’t know what it’s doing here, but maybe I’ll install some doors to give you and me privacy, and then make a trap door in the roof. I might have to move your rutabagas, though. That way you can come in and enjoy the space, too. Maybe we’ll make it some kind of den. You play board games? Role-playing games?”

“Not in English, not the role-playing games. I used to have an 11th level paladin before we moved here, but I was playing in Spanish. Board games, it’s mostly been Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly or some shit like that.” His kids are younger than mine.

“Well, we can put some furniture down there if there’s a trap door to lower it through, and get some lighting in.” There’s only one lamp, a work lamp clipped onto one of the ceiling joists. Its bulb works but is very dim. There’s one power outlet in the place. I’m gonna have to trace it back to see if it’s my electricity or his. “Set up some board games, maybe a mini-fridge with beer and Coke. We could hang out sometimes.”

“Yeah, that would be good. You like zucchini? My wife has too much zucchini.”

“I don’t, but my wife loves it. I could trade you some eggs.”

So that’s how I made friends with the mad scientist guy down the block. No idea what company he works for but they make some crazy shit. That stuff that makes the pool solid? Amazing. I don’t know how he keeps it from circulating through the entire pool, though. Maybe he’s got underwater baffles up to control the flow.

I tell my wife about this thing, and she looks at me funny. “Uh, yeah. You built that.”

“I did not.”

“You did. You got drunk one night and you said you were gonna seriously screw with the woman who called Animal Control on us. Then you built a tunnel to her house.”

“How the hell did I build that entire basement structure thing?”

“Oh, no, that was already there. You just connected to it. Same way you connected to the city’s underground tunnels.” Yeah, truth is, my son and I didn’t really build the entire tunnel system under the neighborhood. There was already a tunnel the city made and we just dug connectors to everyone’s basement, few years back.

“When were you going to tell me about this?”

“Why would I tell you about it? You’re the one who built it. I thought you’d remember.”

Okay, maybe I need to control my drinking, but that was a stressful time, with that woman being responsible for me losing my two roosters to Animal Control. Roosters aren’t allowed in the city, because the city is sexist. Apparently I built the trap door, the entire spiral staircase, and the connecting tunnel in one night, and I made my wife, my boyfriend, and my ninja son help, and now I’m the only one who doesn’t remember it. That’s embarrassing. After that woman did that, and tried to stop us from rescuing our own chickens, my wife started anonymously harassing her and sending her moldy videotapes until she sold the house and left town. Gotta say I like the new owners a lot better.

I hang out with the scientist a couple nights a week, after we get some furniture in there. My wife goes swimming in their pool, but I’m not a big fan of swimming; I go to the bunker with him and we shoot the shit and drink some beers, while my wife and his wife talk about gardening and practice my wife’s very rusty Spanish. My wife learned about ten languages but isn’t fluent in any of them, although she can say “This beautiful green Earth will soon be mine!” in Japanese. Maybe she shouldn’t have learned so much of it from anime.

It’s not easy to admit to anyone that you’ve got a roach problem, let alone a new friend, but liquor lubricates a lot of conversational topics. Yeah, okay, so it’s not always beer we’re drinking. Sue me. I tell my friend about the roaches, and he tells me his company is working on this really amazing fantastic pesticide. It’s a fungus that destroys exoskeletons, and it infects bugs, and only bugs, and makes them do Cordyceps type bullshit where they crave light instead of hiding in the dark like verminous bugs usually do, so they come out where you can see them. Then you can kill them, or let the infection kill them. I’m kind of worried about zombie apocalypses but he assures me that the fungus cannot infect humans, or anything without an exoskeleton. That’s the only place the spores can grow.

That sounds awesome.

So we get some from him and we mix it with sugar and we put it down everywhere. Big rectangular squares around all the furniture. Up table legs and counter sides. All around the edges of the tables and the counters. We’re taking no chances. We pull out the dishwasher and oven and coat the bottoms and backsides of them. Normally this stuff would be scary expensive, but our pal is giving it to us for free – well, “free” meaning we’re giving him tons of ground beef from the cow we bought, plus weird organs because his wife knows how to cook them and me and my wife would have to google it, plus eggs. And my wife is helping his wife learn English, but that maybe doesn’t count because she’s helping my wife learn Spanish, so that’s a pretty even trade. We watch their kids sometimes too; we don’t have a swimming pool, but we do have practically every game machine released in the US and a couple that were Japan only, and a gigantic library of media on hard drive, most of which was legal. Well, somewhat legal. Well, a good bit of them, my wife borrowed from the library and then ripped to hard drive. The kids are not unhappy to come over our house, is my point.

By this point everyone is vaccinated and my friend’s workplace always was pretty safe because it’s a clean room, where people wear Tyvek suits over their entire bodies, and masks and goggles, long before Covid was a thing, and his wife doesn’t work and me and my wife work from home and their kids are still going to school online and mine aren’t going at all anymore. So we feel pretty comfortable sharing air even with Covid still going on. We’re seeing a lot more bugs, but my pal reminds me that that’s part of the goal of this stuff, to entice them to come out and bask in the sunlight so we can kill them more easily. His kids like to run through our house with water guns full of soapy water, shooting bugs (and each other, and my boyfriend, who plays with them). I don’t mind as long as they stay well away from the computer equipment and they clean up the water spills once they’re done. It’s free housecleaning. These kids are more helpful at keeping the place clean than my own kids have been in years.

Then we start to see clusters of the bugs stuck on the wall. It looks like spots of mold, but turns out to be mold-covered bugs sitting on the wall semi-stuck to each other. I’m allergic to mold. My friend says it’s not that kind of mold, am I allergic to mushrooms? And I point out, the spores, yes I am, because I used to grow mushrooms in my basement and they’d spray spores out every so often and my nose would run like it was training for a marathon. He’s chagrined, says he didn’t know, because yeah, of course these things are gonna come out in the sun and spray spores. Light makes them spore, that’s why the mold makes them want to go into the light.

So now I’m popping Zyrtec like it’s candy and there are more and more moldy bugs turning up. For some reason they really want to join up together, like the mold wants them to make a mold mat, so they all go stand next to each other, centipeedles and roaches and ants and fleas, all together. It’s getting flies and mosquitos and mealmoths, too; they don’t eat the sugar we mixed into the liquid suspension of spores, but if they land on the mold mat because they think it’s ordinary wall or floor, they’ll be joining it in a day or two. Spiders, too, presumably getting infected by eating infected bugs. It spreads outside because the house is porous and the bugs can go in and out; there’s a giant ant colony burrowed into the dirt walls of the tunnels I made a few years back, and those guys are coming up out of the dirt and making giant mold mats of ants on the sidewalk and in the grass. It’s pretty gross. My friend begs me not to tell anyone who asks about the product I used; apparently it was experimental and he could lose his job for giving it to me. Well, thanks, buddy, wish you’d warned me! He assures me this never happened in the lab. I’ll bet they didn’t have nearly so many bugs in the lab, and they were probably in terrariums or something where there just weren’t all that many bugs per habitat.

At the point where the outdoor walls start getting covered with mold mats made of ants and earwigs and the fleas that lurk in the grass waiting for unsuspecting cats to walk by, the city gets on my ass. Apparently my walls are covered with mold and I need to clean them off, it’s unsanitary and releasing spores. “You think?” I say with my red, teary eyes and in between violent sneezes as I fish for more Kleenex in my pocket. I cannot actually get anywhere near the mold mats, not without a full on respirator. We have N95 masks and safety goggles, but I try those things and a. the safety goggles immediately fog up so I can’t see and b. it doesn’t help, the spores are getting into the safety goggles and getting into my eyes anyway.

My wife, my boyfriend and the friend-who-got-me-into-this-mess step in to help out. They’re spraying the mold mats with bleach, which would kill the bugs even if the mold hadn’t killed them yet, and scraping them off the walls with shovels and brooms. The ones they find in the yard, they dig underneath and cover them with dirt, then copper fungicide because, unlike bleach, that won’t kill plants that try to grow in the dirt. My friend has some more weird chemicals he thinks might help, but frankly I’m done; I got centipeedles to kill the roaches and then I got this stuff to kill the centipeedles and the roaches and it’s just made matters worse. Everyone in the world is allergic to roaches but not nearly as badly as I am to this mold. I’ve graduated to Benadryl, and bourbon, which does nothing about the allergies except to help me sleep through them. My wife says I’m not supposed to drink while taking Benadryl but I ask you, how do you look at your walls covered with mats of dead bugs that are growing mold and not drink?

The ants apparently go everywhere. Other neighbors are ending up with mold mats on their lawn. This is getting out of hand. I joke about setting the neighborhood on fire, but my wife reminds me that setting mold on fire just spreads spores.

So that gives me an idea.

We’ve got this water main that’s been broken for, oh, ten years now. The city keeps coming out to fix it and it just doesn’t fix. First it was up the street, pouring water down our street for years, winter and summer, which meant the road would turn into a slick sheet of ice every winter. Then they fixed it so that now it forms a pond in the median right outside my house. Maybe eventually they’d have stoppered that up too, but they left a backhoe on the median and somebody stole it. Not me or my family, for once; we checked the cameras but they weren’t pointing at the backhoe so we never figured out who did it. Anyway, mold likes damp, but things that like damp don’t necessarily like serious amounts of water, right?

My friend and I hook up pipes to the broken water main, and connect them to hoses, and connect the hoses to pumps, and pull all the water up the street to some of the neighbors behind my house who paved their back yards. We empty out the furniture from the underground room and clean out our respective basements, first, and park the cars up the street on the hill above all this. Then we let the water go.

This floods the neighborhood.

Yes. Again.

Everything below the level of where we’re pumping the water main to gets flooded. Yards and basements fill with water and wash down the hill to the river, which is really more of a cranky little creek most of the time, and the river washes it all down to the bay, where it should be diluted to the point where it won’t hurt the crabs. My friend assures me that this mold was bio-engineered to not be good at handling a lot of water. It can drown, too, even its spores. If they’re floating in water and they encounter a crab, they won’t be able to germinate on its shell. This is very important because around here we love our crabs. Of course, all this disturbed some local ghosts – ghosts don’t like flooding – but honestly I feel like it’s just negligence if you still have ghosts. We had all those floods a decade ago, like the one my car floated off in, so everyone should have known by now that there are ghosts in the area and they don’t like floods, so get them exorcised pre-emptively. It’s kind of like not having fire extinguishers in your house, if you don’t get the exorcism done.

We go around to any of our neighbors with a mold mat on the walls, and spray it off with a power washer. So far thankfully none of them have ended up with mold mats inside their houses, which just goes to show you how much the gods hate my house. We do not admit that any of this is our fault, just being good neighbors and helping out, but unfortunately my neighbors know me too well.

So this is great. Our animals are free of fleas, there’s no flies or mosquitos around for once in our lives, the mealmoths and the roaches and the centipeedles are gone, there’s no ants. And this is true all over the neighborhood. The bees seem to be fine; bees seemed to know not to land on the mold mats, and we didn’t poison with sugared fungus outside, so there was nothing to attract them to the fungus. Wasps, unfortunately, are fine too, but fuck it, they’re pollinators and I have fruit trees so I guess that’s okay. So this all ought to be great, right? Everybody happy, the whole neighborhood free of bug pests?

The city is now fining me out the ass for “stealing water”, even though come on, it’s bubbling up from the broken water mains so much it made a mosquito-growing pond, and I’m the one who got rid of the mosquitoes. (For the larvae in the pond, we just used mosquito dunks, plus our stunt temporarily drained the pond.) My neighbors are suing me for various things, including pain and suffering, water damage to their yards, riling up ghosts, and the death of so many poor innocent little buggies. (Are you kidding me? There are people around here actively mourning the deaths of flies and roaches. What the hell is wrong with people?)

And that is why I have posted this GoFundMe. Because I got rid of an entire neighborhood’s worth of bugs, at least for this year – no illusions about them coming back next year now that we’ve washed away all the spores – and people are suing me for it. And I’m not willing to throw my chemist friend under the bus legally, since he could lose his job, so the defense “this guy told me it was okay” is not gonna help. And everyone who wanted to get into the cloud when Covid hit already has by now, so business is not exactly booming anymore. Anybody want to help a guy out?

#52 project #comedy #surreal #magical realism #I actually have no idea how to describe this genre

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alarawriting · 8 months

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52 Project #52: Nate and the Hyperpurples

A device was singing. Blearily Nate opened his eyes and stared at it for several seconds, momentarily confused as to what it was and why it was singing to him, loudly.

Right. That was a phone. And that was the ringtone he’d set for calls to his jobsearch number. He reached out and swiveled the face of the phone toward him, swiping to accept the call. The phone’s settings would automatically reskin his face as looking perky, awake, and probably fully dressed, and also definitely not wearing his sleep bonnet, but he had to at least orient himself vertically to the phone or it would produce some really bizarre artifacts. Since being actually vertical would involve more wakefulness than he wanted, he spun the phone so that it was horizontal, just like him. He did have to raise his head off the pillow, though; the software wasn’t quite good enough to compensate for some of his head disappearing into a pillow.

“Hello!” said the giant chicken on the screen. “You are Nate Wheeler, I hope? I took the liberty of checking your time zone and it is typical for humans to be awake at this hour, so I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

Wait a minute. That was not a skin for video calls. That was an actual giant chicken.

“Uh, yes, this is Nate Wheeler,” he said, staring at the… well, okay, it wasn’t exactly a giant chicken. Its very, very bright blue, very, very tall crest was made of feathers, like a cockatoo, rather than the fleshy crest of a rooster. And it had more of a lizardy snout than a beak. Most of its facial feathers were brown, a shade only slightly lighter than Nate’s own skin, and its eyes were less like a chicken’s side-facing eyes and more like the close-centered eyes of a bird of prey, but without the hooding that predatory birds usually had.

“Honored!” the not-a-giant-chicken-or-even-quite-a-bird said. “I am frequently known by the name Bakoon! You are the Nate Wheeler who is seeking work as an engineer, I hope?”

“Spaceship. Yes. Uh, but I’d take a wide variety of different engineering jobs, but I was specifically looking for work on a spaceship.” The not-a-giant-chicken was a Diwar. The aliens who had given humanity the stars, at the expense of a good bit of collective self-esteem and most of the engineering jobs that were remotely interesting. Diwar did not hire humans as engineers for the same reason that medical hospitals did not hire clowns as nurses. “Um, is this about a job?”

“I am hopeful,” Bakoon the Diwar said cheerfully. His voice was masculine and had traces of a European accent of some kind, which meant absolutely nothing because Diwar were mimics like parrots or mynah birds, and would usually end up with the exact same voice as whatever trainer they’d studied English from. But a crest that big usually meant a male. Usually. “Would you still have an interest?”

“Um, yeah, I’m still looking.” This was worth sitting up. Nate did so, spinning the phone around on its holder’s axis so that it was now vertical, just like him. The image would have frozen while the phone was in motion or as soon as the cameras detected that his head was moving out of frame, so he wasn’t worried that the Diwar would see that he was getting out of bed. And the bedroom behind him wouldn’t show on his call skin; he’d recorded himself at the university library, in front of shelves of books, as his job search skin. “What kind of job?”

“Well, an engineering job of course, but the details are… somewhat confidential. I would like to meet with you and discuss! I will say that this role would be highly compensated, with great opportunity for advancement, fame and fortune.”

Nate blinked. “Fame?” Since when did engineers get famous?

“I can see my tailfeathers, so far ahead of myself I’ve become! If this proposition intrigues you, please come to Disque Hall at Drexel University, at 3 pm today. I will hope to see you!”

The Diwar ended the call. Nate looked at the time. Already 11:30 am. Shit. Bakoon hadn’t given him a chance to object to the time; he barely had time for a shower and shave if he wanted to make it.

On the other hand, if he was meeting with Diwar… would they really care if a human was showing some scruffy facial hair? Maybe he had time to grab breakfast? No, he couldn’t take the risk; there might be other humans involved in the hiring process for whatever this was. Shower, shave, deodorize, grab some clean clothes, and that was all he’d have time for.

***

Nate had been living off UBI, trying to find a job in the field he’d trained in, for a year and a half at this point.

There were human engineers who worked on building spaceships, or keeping them maintained while they were in space. They generally worked under the supervision of a Diwar; the aliens seemed to find it hard to believe that humans were remotely competent at anything related to STEM, and liked to insert themselves into any industry that used their technology, which nowadays was most of them. And there weren’t very many of them, and most of them came from Europe or Japan, not the US.

Nate’s mom had been on him, the entire time he’d been in college, that he should pursue acting instead. “There’s no jobs left for people who want to use their brains on Earth,” she’d say, with no small amount of bitterness – Ava Wheeler had been a physicist before the Diwar had shown up and more or less handed humanity the answers to all the questions physicists had been trying to solve, and she’d been considered too old to retrain to the level that Diwar physicists were at. She’d spent Nate and his sister’s lives raising them, trying to catch up to Diwar physics, and trying to push them into entertainment careers like the most infamous of stage moms.

The thing was, Nate knew he was a decent actor, nothing particularly special, and he knew that almost every young person on the planet who didn’t want to work in a restaurant or live off UBI was trying to get into entertainment in some way. Writers, artists, gamers, athletes, anybody who could create amusing videos of themselves doing normal human things like playing with dogs… and actors. The competition was enormous. And he didn’t think he was anywhere near good enough to break in to interstellar work, not like his sister, and he wasn’t going to trade on her name to get a better break than he deserved.

He was good at engineering. He loved it. It was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. It was also even harder to break into than acting. It’d have been different if he’d wanted to be a civil engineer and build roads and bridges, or something else that stayed on Earth and hadn’t been completely revolutionized by Diwar technology. But Nate wanted to work in space. Or work at space. Space something. And most of the work in space was relatively menial, because it was the Diwar who genuinely understood the technology and who owned most of the ships. Earth was building ships of their own, but even there, Diwar did most of the design and engineering work.

If the Diwar were hiring human engineers for something… why?

***

The maglev dropped him at one of the two stations at the university.

Nate had actually graduated from Drexel, so he was familiar with the campus. It was a short walk to Disque Hall, where Drexel’s department of physics had historically been, and which nowadays had a heavy Diwar presence. Bakoon hadn’t told him which room number, so he asked at the security desk. The security desk had no idea.

Then the giant fluffy chicken stepped off the elevator and made a beeline for Nate. “Welcome! Welcome, my boy! You are a boy, am I correct? I did not mistake your gender?”

Bakoon looked much more like a giant chicken in person than he had on the phone, to be honest. He was about five and a half feet tall, wearing a blue-feathered cape in the same color as his crest, with a downy golden interior. He had two legs, heavily feathered, his thick talons almost covered in his fluffy brown feathers, and four arms – two long, ape-like arms connected to his body on the sides, with four thick, finger-like appendages, and two small ones close to his body, positioned like a velociraptor or a T. rex, with four delicate, slim talons. The large-arms were heavily feathered, like they hadn’t quite made it all the way to evolving into wings but they were giving it their all, and the small-arms had feathers at the top above the elbow, and then bare wrinkly skin and bone like a bird talon. All of the claws on the talons had been blunted and then painted with elaborate red whorls. Something tunic-like hung from his large-arm shoulders, essentially just two rectangular pieces of cloth held together by golden clasps on his neck. They left his large-arms completely free; there were flamboyantly large and flared sleeves in the front for his small-arms, which he held clasped in front of him. There was a gold-colored belt around his middle and up around his back; loops on the belt held multiple pouches and sheaths for tools.

“Uh, yeah, I’m male,” Nate said. He’d met Diwar before, but this one dressed much more flamboyantly than any of the ones he’d met in college.

Bakoon’s head went up higher than a typical bird head, his beak-like snout distinctly lower than the level of his golden eyes, which focused front, but were wide apart and seemed to lay directly on his head, not in sunken orbits like a hawk. The blue feather crest was in full display, lifted high and fanned out on the top of his head. When he spoke, Nate could see serrations inside his mouth, like he was in the process of evolving from a reptile snout with teeth into a bird beak, but hadn’t quite finished the transition. He was gesturing expansively with one of the large-arms. “We have all been veritable tension belts, awaiting you! Come, come!”

Nate followed Bakoon into the elevator. “So, can you tell me about the job?”

“Not yet! The walls still have ears. That’s how you say it, correct? To express that there might be people listening to you, who should not be?”

“Yeah, that’s the right expression.” They got off the elevator. “Can you at least tell me if it involves going to space?”

“Maybe! All your questions will be answered momentarily.” They reached a room with no sign on it labeling what it was for, and Bakoon swung the door open. May I refresh you? A snack, a drink?”

“You got a bagel with melted cheese and a Coke?”

“Of course!” Bakoon went to an inner door and yelled. “Rikwaal! A bagel with melted cheese and a Coke for our guest?”

“What kind of cheese?” a feminine voice called back. “Cream cheese is typical with bagels but isn’t usually melted! Also what kind of bagel and what flavor Coke?”

“Hey, I don’t want to put you guys to a lot of trouble,” Nate said.

“Nonsense! The food printer is entirely capable of making such a basic human dish! Just let Rikwaal know your specifications!”

A white not-exactly-chicken head stuck through the door. She actually looked a lot like a cockatoo; her crest was pale yellow. “I didn’t spend all this time configuring and programming this thing to never use it. We can’t put fruit in the bagels, but I’m sure we can do anything else.” Her voice was crisp, with an American East Coast generic accent, similar to Nate’s own when he was code-switched into mainstream.

“Make it a poppyseed bagel, melted provolone, and just a normal regular Coke, no special flavors or anything.”

“With ice? You’re American, so I’m guessing ice.”

“Yeah, I like ice.”

As the white-feathered Diwar retreated back behind her door, Nate said, “So, can you tell me any more about this job?”

“Direct and businesslike! Well done,” Bakoon said. “Too often your fellow Humans waste precious time talking about things of no relevance. Time, after all, is the one commodity none of us can buy!”

Given how many Humans were employed doing menial jobs for aliens in space because it was the only way they could get the opportunity to see other worlds, Nate could have argued that point; anyone wealthy enough could buy people to do jobs for them, thus saving themselves the time. He could also have pointed out that right now, Bakoon was wasting his time talking about time wasting. He said neither of those things. “Do I need to sign some kind of NDA? You said this was confidential.”

“Yes, yes, that’s exactly what we planned. Rikwaal! You have a contract for non-disclosure ready, isn’t that so?”

“On the tablet,” Rikwaal yelled back.

“Of course, of course!” Bakoon picked up a tablet sitting on the unmanned reception desk. “Rikwaal has prepared this for you. She’s our project manager, by the by.”

Nate raised his eyebrows as he read it. It had normal NDA language throughout most of it, but was significantly more restrictive. He wasn’t allowed to talk about the fact that he’d been recruited by the Diwar for a job whether he got the job or not. If he was hired, he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone who had hired him or why or what he was doing. These restrictions would be in place until a press release went out about his position. “I can’t even tell my mom I got a job?”

“Oh, by all means, tell her you’ve acquired a job. You simply cannot tell her what the job is or that it involves Diwar in any form until the press release goes out.”

“This is the kind of job where you send information about it to the press? I’m looking for an engineering job, not some kind of… I don’t even know, what kind of job involves press releases?”

“This one,” Bakoon said. “Which I am positively dying to tell you all about, as soon as you sign that contract.”

Well, it wasn’t like he had any better opportunities. Nate signed the contract. If he got the job he’d be able to tell Mom about it eventually (press releases? Why?), and if he didn’t then there was nothing to tell her about.

“Delightful!” Bakoon pronounced, throwing his large-arms wide. Nate actually had to step out of the way. “Have you, by any chance, ever heard of the Great Build?”

“Uh… I think so. Isn’t it some kind of Diwar sports competition?”

“Sports!” Bakoon flung his large-arms up again. “If by ‘sport’ you mean ‘tedious competition of physical bodies performing a task no one cares about’, then hardly! But if by ‘sport’ you mean ‘rigorous intellectual challenge undertaken in competition between the best and brightest’, then yes, by all means!”

“Okay…”

“The Great Build is the ultimate challenge to the Diwar! A year – which is approximately thirteen and a half of your months – spent creating something, overcoming technical limitations and solving engineering problems, to eventually present to a body of judges to be awarded accolades, or dismissed as lesser!”

“So it’s a contest.”

Bakoon snorted. “If one wishes to describe it with such mundane terms, then yes, I suppose it’s a contest.”

Rikwaal came out with Nate’s bagel and Coke. “Sorry for the delay. The food printer is acting up. Again.”

“I told you we should bring Mip along,” Bakoon said.

“Mip said, very clearly, and I quote, ‘No, I’m not going to go to Earth with you! You people want to be insane, then fine, but leave me out of it.’”

“By the most technical of definitions, that was a translation, not a quote.”

“By the most technical of definitions, you are being a pedantic smear.” She turned to Nate. “Let me know how it came out, okay? It wrecked my breakfast and I had to order out. Did you know there are only three restaurants in Philadelphia that make Diwar cuisine?”

“I have solved this difficulty by ordering from sushi restaurants. The poke bowl is quite appealing,” Bakoon said.

“Yeah, they’re not open at breakfast time. Something about, Humans don’t eat sushi for breakfast.”

“A lot of us would like to,” Nate said. “But I guess not enough of us to keep the restaurants in business that early.”

Rikwaal was dressed the way Nate expected Diwar to dress. No cape. A similar tunic-like garment like the one Bakoon was wearing, but with straps made of the same fabric rather than clasps, and it was plain and dark blue, a nice contrast to her white feathers. Hers had additional straps holding the tunic together across her middle, approximating the shape of a human blouse with very, very wide sleeves. She was also wearing a belt in roughly the same place as Bakoon, but hers was white and had only a holder for a tablet and a small purse-like object large enough to hold a few credit cards hanging from it. Unlike Bakoon, she was wearing something that resembled short pants, except that it had a hole for her tail. The pants were a complementary shade of blue to her tunic, not quite as dark. She held out the plate with his bagel with one short-arm, and a cup of Coke with the other. Both the cup and the plate had obviously been recently printed, little bits on the edge still soft.

He bit into the bagel. “This is pretty good. I’m usually not a super big fan of printed food, but this one actually got the cheese right. That’s usually the biggest challenge; it’s hard for them to mess up breads unless they’re really delicate, but cheese is… well, it sits on a really fine line. It’s easy to make the oils separate from the curd, or make the cheese too hard or too soft, and I guess your printer toasts it too. That can be a challenge. A lot of food printers with toast functions will either burn your food or, like, heat it up two degrees and call it a day.” He realized that he was rambling about a subject that most likely Bakoon would consider ‘a thing of no relevance’, and shut himself up.

But Rikwaal responded, animated. “I know! I spent half a day programming the thing and I think the hardest part was that it didn’t want to follow my toast protocols. I ended up having to hack it and to stick a sensor on it to detect the start of a burn right before you can taste it.”

Nate wasn’t used to project managers who could hack food printers. “I never thought of that. Sounds like a good way to handle it.”

“On the subject of the Great Build,” Bakoon said, “in which we do not create or reprogram food printers. We are participants in the Great Build. Our team is known as the Proud-Crested Hyperpurples.”

“Hyperpurples?”

“Ah. We see into the range you refer to as ‘ultraviolet’. Since Humans cannot see these colors, you have no native words for them, so we Diwar, when speaking English, refer to the colors as ‘superpurple’, ‘hyperpurple’, and ‘ultrapurple’. To us they actually look quite distinct, as unlike each other as red from orange and yellow, so it perhaps is not the best naming convention, suggesting as it does that these are somehow all fundamentally the same color. But, it is the convention the Diwar chose years ago.”

“We had a committee analyze your languages and figure out how to express things you don’t have words for, about thirty years ago. The surprising thing was how many words we have to describe beer flavors that we had to translate as things that don’t really sound at all like beer flavors, like fruity.”

“Fruity actually is a beer flavor,” Nate said.

“A connoisseur of beer? Dare I hope?” A beak could not actually smile, and though a Diwar snout wasn’t quite a beak, it was too beaky for smiles. But somehow Bakoon’s facial expression looked like he was broadly smiling, even though there was literally no way he could do that. Nate had seen similar expressions on parrots before and had always wondered exactly what about their faces was making them look like they were smiling.

“Uh, yeah, I guess so. I mean, I drink microbrews, not like Budweiser and that kind of thing.”

“Delightful! Perhaps you can introduce us to some local brews!”

“Stay on topic, Bakoon,” Rikwaal said. “The Build?”

“Oh, yes. We are the Proud-Crested Hyperpurples… as I mentioned. The only team ever to come from Fillit Province!”

“Unfortunately there’s a reason for that,” Rikwaal said.

Bakoon tilted his head to look at her, and then leaned his head forward in a way that seemed almost aggressive. Rikwaal tilted hers, and Bakoon moved his head back. Nate had no idea what any of that meant.

“And you want me to…?”

“Join the team!” Bakoon swept his large arm out and fluffed his crest. “Be the first Human to participate on a Diwar Great Build team. Help us in designing and building something so audacious, so creative, so amazing, that we cannot help but gain positive attention, even if we don’t win.”

“Wow,” Nate said, taken aback. “Uh. Yeah, that sounds amazing! I mean… that would be fantastic. But why me, specifically, and also why a Human?”

“As to you, I have business dealings here with the university. I spoke to some of the professors, and perused school records, and came to the conclusion that you would be an excellent candidate. You’re not the only Human we’ve approached with the opportunity, but we’ve prepared a simple test to see if you have what we require to assure our place within the Build for years to come.”

“What he’s not telling you,” Rikwaal said, “is that we suck. Our team has literally come in last for four years. Any team that can’t make it out of the 10th percentile for five years in a row gets booted. And if we get booted I will never hear the end of it from my mother, not to mention that none of us would exactly have great career prospects. So the team decided that adding a Human to the mix would maybe inject some creativity and unpredictability into our performance.”

Bakoon did the head-tilt-and-lean-forward again, which Rikwaal ignored serenely. Nate guessed that that was the equivalent of a glare, for people who couldn’t substantially change the shape of their eyes’ appearance on their face.

This was all starting to make sense now. “I get it,” he said. “You don’t need me for engineering skills, you need me to be a performing monkey. A dancing bear. No one cares how well the bear dances, the thing everyone cares about is that it can dance at all.” He didn’t raise his voice, but the bitterness and anger came through more and more clearly as he spoke.

“Mm, you are not entirely wrong,” Bakoon said, “but also, not entirely right. You see, the competition rates us in three domains – creativity, skill of implementation, and followership. The number of watchers who’ve chosen us as a team to follow.”

“We suck at implementation,” Rikwaal said bluntly. “And we haven’t managed to be particularly creative, the last four years, either. Bakoon and Le’ir manage to get us some followers through showmanship, but there’s nothing much to follow, so most of the audience tunes out.”

Nate scowled. “And my job is to be a performing monkey, so everyone wants to watch.”

“One could say that, but you are mistaken if you think no one cares how well the bear dances. The Great Build demands rigor! Competence in the extreme! You would, at the very least, need to be able to transcend what our audience thinks Humans to be capable of. Show yourself to be on the level of at the very least, an inexperienced Diwar engineer.”

Rikwaal added, “And I imagine that some performing monkeys are just trained, pushing buttons for a treat… but some are actually good at getting the audience’s attention and running with it. I mean, I don’t know anything about monkeys, we don’t have any primates on Diw, but they’re your close cousins, right? They’re pretty smart for animals?”

Nate swallowed his deep irritation at being compared to a monkey. It wasn’t a racist microaggression. The Diwar were dinosaurs, by human standards; from their perspective, every human being was a kind of monkey. “So you figure, Humans are good at entertainment, you’ll pick a Human to entertain your audience?”

“Exactly!” Bakoon said.

“Not exactly.” Rikwaal lowered her head and glared at Bakoon. At least, Nate was no expert on Diwar body language, but that sure looked like a glare. “There’s definitely more to it than that.”

“Yes, of course,” Bakoon said. “We Diwar generally see Humans as creative but impractical. We want you to give us ideas that sound ludicrous, and then help us bring those ideas to glorious realization. While being a better engineer than anyone has ever seen a Human be, and while being charismatic and showmanlike so you can get and hold the audience’s attention even after the novelty of your presence wears off. The Build lasts for a year. No one’s going to watch a dancing bear for a year, unless the bear dances superbly.”

“So you picked me because you know about my drama minor?” Nate said sharply.

“You have a drama minor?” Bakoon perked up.

“You’re Human. We assumed you’d be good in front of a camera,” Rikwaal said.

“Not all Humans are good at performing, at all. Before you people came along, we thought of ourselves as a species that invents, and discovers, as well as a species that creates art and performance. Most of us aren’t any good at performing.”

“And not one single one of my extended family has ever been an engineer,” Bakoon said. “Or a performer. They consider me a genetic sport. Had I not so closely resembled my father, there might have been questions as to who, exactly, fertilized my mother’s egg.”

“Yeah, okay, everyone’s got their own preconceptions about other species, but you Diwar really did take over all our engineering and science. We didn’t take over your native entertainment industry.”

“You actually did,” Rikwaal said. “Mostly because Diwar suck at story telling.”

“Speak for yourself, friend,” Bakoon said. “I excel at spinning tales.”

“We had some tests planned for how you’d do in front of a livestream recorder, but if you were a drama minor, you might have some records of past performances we could look at instead. We really did pick you based on what your advisors said about engineering aptitude.”

“Perhaps we should have been looking for showmanship as a criterion! I will admit, it was short-sighted of us to imagine that a good Human engineer would also be good in front of a recorder, simply on the basis of being Human. But if indeed you studied drama as well, then perhaps our choice of you was purely serendipitous.”

“Where do you guys come from again?” Nate asked.

“The Hyperpurples all hail from the quaint fishing province of Fillit! We supply all of Diw with… I don’t know how to translate the specific words.”

“Crabs, mostly,” Rikwaal said. “Crabs are like felines. You see them on every planet.”

“Well, yes, crabs, but I was thinking of the ri’heenyu.”

“Oh, yeah. Picture salmon, but they’re saltwater only, and they don’t go home to spawn, and they have green flesh from all the algae they eat, not pink.”

“So not like salmon at all,” Nate said.

“Eh, the taste is kind of similar, and it’s a similarly fleshy fish.”

“My parents are fishers,” Bakoon said, “as are my siblings, my cousins, my avunes, my grandparents, and so on and so forth. But I have always heard the siren call of invention! To build things, to make ideas into a reality, was my only interest as a child!”

“If you’re trying to figure out why he talks like that, it’s because he went to college in Herwun. Our capital city. And then he decided he was ashamed of being a Fillito, so he adopted the most not-Fillito speech pattern he could come up with. It’s not an English language thing, he talks like that in Diwar, too.”

Bakoon frowned. Nate had no idea why his expression looked like a frown, given that he could not in fact frown with his snout-beak, but he had the very strong impression that it was a frown. Maybe it was because Diwar eyes could scowl, and Bakoon was not quite scowling, but not quite not scowling. “I was never ashamed of Fillit Province,” Bakoon said. “I merely felt it was misleading to imply to those who are non-Fillito that I share the knowledge and interests one would expect from a Fillito.”

“Like how to fish,” Rikwaal said. “They haven’t let him fish since the time he tried to electrify an inlet to stun the fish.”

“My plan was mathematically quite sound.”

“Except for how many fish it would have killed, and ruined the freshness.”

“You are hardly an expert fisher yourself, Rikwaal.”

“Never was. I kept the metrics on my family’s fleet of fishing boats.”

If he took this job, and so far he wasn’t at all convinced he should, Nate could see he was going to have to put up with a lot of these two verbally sparring with each other. “So let me get this straight. You want me to give you stupid ideas, help you build them, and perform in front of the cameras in front of an audience of thousands of Diwar—”

“Millions,” Rikwaal said.

“I dare say it may be in the billions now.”

“No, it’s not. I manage the metrics, remember? The Great Build is regularly viewed by 720 million Diwar on a yearly basis, with an additional 200 million occasionally tuning in during some years, or popping in to watch for a few days and then leaving.”

“920 million is close to a billion.”

“Fine, millions of Diwar, then,” Nate said. “Does that basically sum it up?”

“That sums up what you’d do for the competition, but your actual job would involve a lot of training and study on top of that.”

“A great deal. We must bring you up to Diwar levels of knowledge within the first few months. It will be challenging! Rigorous! If you consider yourself unable to manage such an intense course of study, you are of course not obligated to take this position.”

Nate wasn’t going to let Bakoon use reverse psychology on him, but this – minus Bakoon’s passive-aggressive comments – was the first thing he’d heard that left him strongly in favor of taking the job. The Diwar trained very few humans, and there were entire domains of their knowledge that they simply didn’t share. “Does that include the Interdicted Disciplines?”

“If you sign a pledge that you will not share your knowledge for the purpose of making war, nor will you share it with anyone who does not sign a similar pledge, then yes, we have absolute authority to train you in any discipline that seems relevant.”

“Your planet still doesn’t have a unified central government,” Rikwaal said. “We can’t take the risk that your existing separate states might make war on each other with our technology.”

“Come on. Humanity’s been in space for forty years now. The UN has a lot more teeth in it than it used to, before you guys came along.”

“Yes, yes, but the decision is unfortunately not in our hands. We are merely a sporting team from Fillit Province, not politicians or influential leading lights of society, as yet.”

Well. It wasn’t as if Nate disagreed with the restriction against using Diwar technology for war; tensions between human nations still existed, and war was overall pretty terrible. Maybe it made sense that they wouldn’t teach humans certain things unless the humans pledged to never use those things for war. The thought of actually getting to learn Diwar physics and engineering in the Interdicted Disciplines was heady. He’d be able to write his own ticket anywhere on Earth that did engineering at all, or become a professor with near-instant tenure if the college could enforce his students pledging against war.

“Ok. I’m sold, I guess. Happy to be a dancing bear for a year if it means I have a chance of learning the advanced stuff you guys won’t teach the rest of us.”

“Excellent!” Bakoon declared. “I will inform the rest of the team!”

“You will not,” Rikwaal said. “He’s gotta pass the test first.”

“Oh. Ahem.” He actually said “ahem” rather than making a throat-clearing noise. “Yes, of course.”

“What kind of test?”

“A test of thinking outside boxes! A challenge to your creativity and skill!”

Rikwaal sighed.

***

They brought him to a room where there was a chaotic pile of transparent chips that were about the size of his pinky fingernail, all over a table and spilling onto the floor. There was also a small robot. The robot, about a foot tall, was built in a Diwar-like shape rather than a humanoid shape, but it had very large eyes, proportionately much bigger than Diwar eyes, or human eyes for that matter. It was as if a Japanese animator had been given the task of making a cute Diwar robot, and had applied extremely large eyes for cuteness. The robot was painted in bright primary colors, with a thin visible speaker grille in its slightly open beaklike mouth.

“This,” Bakoon said in an apologetic tone, “is your assistive equipment. It will follow voice commands in English, to assist you with the task.”

“We figured you needed something,” Rikwaal said, “since you only have two arms.”

“Humans are pretty good at getting by with our two arms,” Nate said, in a mild tone of voice because sounding as irritated with the condescension as he felt would be a good way to not get the job.

“Most Diwar engineers working on a task have robotic assistance,” Bakoon said. “We regret, though, that all we’re able to offer you for assistance is… this.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Bakoon became very interested in smoothing down the feathers of his left large-arm. “It’s… well, it’s hardly up to the standards we’d prefer to use—”

“It’s a child’s toy,” Rikwaal said. “We borrowed it from Le’ir because the budget wouldn’t support buying anything more sophisticated and bringing it to Earth. Or buying anything, really. He’s held onto it since he was a kid.”

“In English, we would call it something like a… Buildy Buddy.” Bakoon was still very interested in preening his arm. This looked like it was conveying the same emotions humans would by staring at the floor or ostentatiously not making eye contact.

“A Buildy Buddy,” Nate repeated.

“Well, of course the name in Diwar Standard isn’t quite the same. It’s more of a portmanteau word than alliterative, but I thought this would be the best translation.”

“It’s not like you’re likely to need it for much,” Rikwaal said. “Maybe bringing you tools or something.” There was a large collection of tools, electronics boards, and various doodads all over a table that ran along the wall.

“Okay,” Nate said, hiding his impatience. “So, what’s the job?”

“These are memory chips. Most of them can hold a petabyte of data,” Rikwaal said. Nate whistled. The solid state memory chips humans used in their tablets and phones were a little bit smaller – not much, they were close to the limit of what humans could usefully manipulate and not lose in a carpet – but typically held only a few terabytes. “But about ten percent of them—” she held one up against the light with her small-arm’s talons—“are double capacity.” She picked up another and held them both up. “Take a look.”

Both were transparent. Both were the exact same color. Both had a numeric sequence on them that was too tiny to read and was written with Diwar hexadecimal numerals anyway, but looked to be about the same length. But when Rikwaal held them in front of the light, Nate could see that one of them was very slightly darker on the inside.

“And… what? I’m supposed to separate the two-petabyte chips from the one-petabytes?”

“In three hours,” Bakoon said.

Nate looked at the pile of what had to be thousands of the chips. He looked at the two Rikwaal was holding. “Is there any significant difference between them? Like… am I supposed to plug them all into that laptop to check their size?”

“You can’t plug any of them into the laptop,” Rikwaal said, “since this is a Diwar standard and that is a human laptop. Also that would take you much too long.”

Well, he definitely had to agree with that. Finding ten percent of several thousand, when they weren’t visibly different unless held to the light, was already the kind of task a fairy tale character would probably need the help of a kindly bird bringing her flock in to help after the hero had put the bird’s babies back in her nest for her, or something.

“As for any other indicator of the difference,” Bakoon said, “you have your two examples and you have your tools, and components for various devices you might choose to build. The rest is up to you to resolve!”

Great. Nate hadn’t saved any baby birds recently.

***

The two Diwar left the room, leaving Nate to his own devices… as many of them as he might decide to build in three hours, anyway. What he really wanted to do was rant about how ridiculous and unreasonable this task was, but he considered it very likely that they were watching and listening, so he needed to stay professional.

He decided to get acquainted with his tools. “Hey, Buildy Buddy.” Nothing. “Hey, little robot.” Shit, why hadn’t he asked how he was supposed to address the thing to get it to respond? They’d said it understood English. “Robot guy! Buildy Buddy! You dude!” Nothing. “Can you hear me, little robot dude?”

The robot chirped.

“Oh, ok. So I’m supposed to call you ‘little robot dude’?” Nothing. “Shit. Um, do you understand English?” Chirp. “Can I call you Buildy Buddy?” Chirp. “What happens if I ask you something that’s more complicated than yes or no?” Nothing. “Is it okay if I jump out a window and kill myself?” This time the sound wasn’t a chirp, more like a squawk. “Ok! Yes and no! We’re getting somewhere!”

So Buildy Buddy understood English, but could only say yes or no, in… Diwar Standard? Baby talk? Some made-up toy language? And if the question was more complicated than yes or no, Buildy Buddy couldn’t answer. “Buildy Buddy, can you go get me a screwdriver?” Chirp, and the little robot rolled along the table full of tools, found a screwdriver, picked it up with a large-arm, rolled back, and handed it to Nate. Its lower body had wheels rather than Diwar legs.

“Buildy Buddy, is this a double-capacity disk?” He held one of the chips up in front of it. Nothing. “Buildy Buddy, can you tell the difference between a single-capacity and double-capacity?” Squawk, but not exactly the same squawk. The response to his query about committing suicide had been loud and somewhat angry-sounding, like an infuriated chicken. This squawk was quieter. Maybe Buildy Buddy was programmed to alert parents if the kids were trying to do something dangerous? It still probably meant no, though. Nate hadn’t seriously expected that to work, but he’d had to try.

He inventoried his tools and components. There was a lot. Lasers. Scales. A centrifuge. Screwdrivers, hex drivers, crimpers, wire, a tiny soldering iron, an AR visor… what was that for? Nate put it on, and saw the words “Magnification: 100%” floating in the top right corner. “Visor, increase magnification to 200%.” Nothing happened. Then he found the up and down buttons on the right temple. Yep, that was a magnifier. Maybe there were other things it could do, but if it wouldn’t respond to voice commands, Nate had no idea how to get it to do anything.

The laptop was running LonelyIX, a variety of Unix with all the networking protocols stripped out aside from direct ethernet cable connectivity. It could be connected to a single other machine, or to a LAN running specific protocols, but it had no ability to connect to the internet. The OS was generally used on servers where it was important to keep them isolated from the Net, such as AI research or top secret projects. So the Hyperpurples thought it was very important that he not have Internet access for this test. That made sense, as annoying as it might be. Its lock screen had a timer on it, showing Nate’s time ticking down.

He tried weighing the two chips on a very tiny scale that had been provided. The double capacity was, in fact, slightly heavier, in the nanogram range. Nate tried weighing the chips; at twenty-three chips he found one of the double-sided ones. He realized there was no way he could separate the chips out just by weighing them, in the time frame he was given.

Could he do something with weighing large groups? There were larger scales that had the capacity… but no. There were thousands of chips. He’d have to weigh in small enough batches that he could get some idea of how many double-sided might be in a particular group.

OK. Inspect the chips with high magnification. See if there was any other trait he could use to separate them. He had two examples of the double capacity, and twenty-three of the single, counting the original sample he’d been given.

Wait a minute. Was that… seriously?

“Buildy Buddy, can you read the serial number on these chips?” Chirp. “Do you recognize the first character in the serial number on this chip?” Chirp. “If I show a new chip to you, can you say yes if the chip serial number starts with this character?” Chirp. “Can you say no if it doesn’t start with this character?” Chirp. “Am I wearing a purple hat?” Squawk. OK, it wasn’t stuck. It legitimately was answering yes to his questions.

“Let’s see how fast you can read,” he muttered.

He laid out chips for Buildy Buddy to chirp or squawk at. For the first fifty, he tossed them on the scale first to make sure they were, in fact, following the pattern he’d noticed. One of the fifty came up wrong, and he observed that it started with a different character than any of the others had. Meanwhile, of the forty-three he’d identified as single-sided on the basis of the serial number, there were seven that started with a fourth character. So it looked like the chips could have at least four separate kinds of serial numbers, starting with different characters.

“Buildy Buddy! We’re going to change it up some. Say yes if the serial number starts with the same character as either of these two chips, and no if it starts with the serial number of either of these two. If you see any other character outside of one of these four, I want you to roll backward five centimeters and then roll forward five centimeters. Got it?” Chirp.

What followed was an hour of lining up chips for Buildy Buddy to check, pulling out all the ones it chirped at, shoving aside all the ones it squawked at, and on three occasions, pulling out one it rolled back and forth on to weigh it, then modifying his instructions. All the chips he tested turned out to either weigh the same as the other single sided chips, or the same as the other double sided chips; there was no weight variance.

He was now two hours into his allotted three when the thought occurred to him. “Buildy Buddy, are you able to pick up these chips?” Chirp. “Can you put them in a pile?” Chirp. “I want you to take the ones where the serial number starts with one of these three characters, and pile them here. The ones where the serial number is any of these four, pile them here. If you find any other characters starting the serial number, give the chip to me. Can you do that?” Chirp.

There was his friendly bird. Buildy Buddy was not quite as fast as he was at picking up chips, but by now he had memorized what the characters on the chips looked like, and could identify them for itself. So while Buildy Buddy was going through the pile autonomously, he could sweep chips in front of himself, use the magnification on the visor to check the initial character of the serial number, and pull out the double-sided ones.

The laptop had a camera. If he had thought of it earlier, he could maybe have written a program that let the laptop use its camera to check his work, or maybe to check chips on its own… Buildy Buddy had two large-arms. It could have been stacking chips for the laptop camera and assigning them to one pile or the other, while it was picking chips up with its other arm. But it was too late to make use of the laptop now.

He was working on the last three when the door opened and Bakoon entered. “Time!” the Diwar called. “The test is over!”

On the assumption that at a 10 to 1 ratio, the last three he hadn’t looked at were probably single-sided, Nate swept them into that pile. “Done.” He stood up. “These two piles are double capacity. The rest are single.”

Bakoon cocked his head. “You are sure of this result?”

“Pretty sure,” Nate said.

Rikwaal poked her head into the room as Bakoon strode over to the table and stared at the Buildy Buddy. “Well, that was… interesting,” she said.

“You used a child’s toy,” Bakoon said, still staring at the Buildy Buddy. “All of these tools and instruments, and you used a toy.”

“And the fact that these are all the same brand of chip and apparently they have some coding in the serial number,” Rikwaal said. “I had no idea. I’ve never even looked at these serial numbers.”

“Yes,” Bakoon said. “Nor have I. You know that wouldn’t have worked if by coincidence the company who makes these hadn’t decided to use different characters for the single vs double capacity?”

“You’re Diwar,” Nate said. “It’d be efficient for a company to differentiate the serial numbers of separate products so they can’t overlap, and you guys usually go for efficiency.”

“True, but…”

“So, did I pass or not?”

Bakoon was plainly struggling. “We expected… an engineering solution of some type? Create an algorithm to allow you to identify the chips by differential weight. Use the magnifier and the laser in combination to detect the differential refraction of light passing through the singles and doubles. Something like that. Not… you just had the toy read the serial numbers and do the job for you!”

Nate shrugged. “You give your kids some pretty sophisticated toys.”

“We will have to check to see if your solution produced the correct results before we can say if you’ve passed the test—”

“No, we won’t,” Rikwaal interrupted. “You’re hired.”

“What do you mean?” Bakoon asked, aggrieved. “Of course we have to check if his solution worked!”

“I’d welcome that, actually,” Nate said.

“Sure, but it’s not necessary for him to join the team. We didn’t come to recruit a human whose solutions are always accurate. We came to recruit a human who could think of things none of us would. And using a kid’s toy to help him scan the serial number instead of using some more traditional engineering solution is exactly the kind of thing we were hoping for.”

Bakoon’s crest, which had puffed when he became agitated, slumped back against his head. “I… suppose you’re right. It is a very… different… solution.”

“I mean, go ahead and check it,” Nate said. “I’m pretty sure it’s accurate, regardless of what you think of the method.”

“What made you think of such a thing?” Bakoon asked.

Nate laughed with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. “So, on Earth, we have stories for children that we call ‘fairy tales’. A lot of these stories involve some witch or monster setting the main character an impossible task. Sort this entire bag of grains and separate the rice from the barley, that kind of thing. Only, the main character is so good and kind, they’ve helped some kind of magic creature early in the story. I remembered one where the character saved a bunch of baby birds that fell out of a nest, and the mother bird was so grateful, that she said the kid could call on her any time he was desperate for help. So this witch makes him do this sorting task, and he calls the bird, and she comes with her whole flock and they sort the grain for him. Or whatever it was. I was really, really young when I read the story.”

“And you took inspiration from this story?” Bakoon asked.

“Well… Buildy Buddy was chirping. I mean, the sound it makes when it means ‘yes’ sounds exactly like a chirp from an Earth songbird of some kind. And I made the connection. Buildy Buddy sounds like a bird, a bird helped the character in the fairy tale, maybe it can help me. Also, after I tried weighing them and realized it would take me way too long to weigh them all, I was inspecting them to see if there was anything I could see that was different about the chips, and I saw that all the ones whose weight was the same as my example of a single capacity disk had the same squiggle starting the serial number, and the two I had that I thought were double capacity based on their weight had a different squiggle. And I can’t read Diwar fast enough to be able to identify those squiggles, especially how small they are, but I decided to see if Buildy Buddy could do it. Turns out it could.”

“So,” Rikwaal said to Bakoon. “The human used a story to help him solve an engineering problem. You see how this sells itself, right?”

“I mean, I don’t usually solve engineering problems with fairy tales,” Nate said, feeling like this might be going in the wrong direction. “Usually I use math.”

“But the audience,” Bakoon said, his crest starting to lift again. “Yes. The audience will expect the human to know stories and be good at presenting them in some way; if he uses a story to solve a problem, they’ll be riveted! Who knew you could even use stories to solve problems?”

“We actually do that a lot,” Nate said. “We’ve built things because someone wrote a story about the thing and an inventor read the story and thought, Hey, I bet I could actually make that thing.”

“Amazing!”

“You guys do tell stories, though, right? I mean, you’re not… it’s not like you don’t have an imagination for fiction.”

“Of course we do,” Rikwaal said, “but humans are just better at it.”

“I think that’s probably a cultural thing. Diwar could probably learn to come up with amazing stories, too, if you wanted to. I mean, I was in Florida for spring break a couple of years ago and I met a Kai who was learning to scuba dive. She worked at the beach gift shop selling hermit crabs and shells.”

Both crests lifted. Nate got the impression that that particular lift indicated being taken aback. “A Kai, swimming? Earth is full of wonders,” Bakoon said.

Nate had felt the same way when he’d met the catlike alien – Kai famously did not like water, the same way Earth cats didn’t. It had made him realize that a lot of what the Diwar, the Kai, and all the other aliens thought about each other, or humans, was probably pretty close to human racist beliefs like “black people have rhythm” and “Asians are really good at math.” The Diwar really did know a lot more than humans, and had a culture built around excelling at STEM fields, but biologically he very much doubted they were actually better than humans.

And he might have the opportunity to prove it.

“So. Do I get a salary on this job?”

“We all do,” Rikwaal said. “Until the Build, at which point we will probably lose and be kicked out of the competition and we’ll all have to get real jobs.”

“All the skies forfend,” Bakoon said fervently. “Let us hope this strategy saves us from that fate!”

“What’s the next step, then?”

“Do you have an interstellar passport?” Rikwaal asked.

“Uh… no.”

“Then the next step is, I get you an appointment to get an emergency same-day passport because this specific country of all your nations refuses to modernize, and I book you a ticket on our flight back to Diw, and we all go back home and introduce you to the rest of the team. You’ll like Le’ir. You won’t like Enshru, nobody likes Enshru. Irta and Mip, depends on how they feel that day.”

“Be fair,” Bakoon said. “She’s had a difficult life. I am moderately fond of Enshru.”

“Wow. Uh, when I got up this morning I was not expecting to get a job out-system. How long do I have to pack? What am I allowed to bring? And how long before the Build, like, how long will I be out there with you guys?”

“Bakoon, we’ve got his email, right?” Bakoon nodded at Rikwaal’s question. She continued. “I’ll send all that to you in email, then. The Build is about ten of your months away; it’s annual, but Diwar years are shorter than Terran.”

“Or, looking at it a different way, the Build begins now,” Bakoon said, “and what is ten months from now is our opportunity to show off what we have made in the intervening ten months.”

Ten months on an alien world. Not just offplanet, but outside Sol System entirely. Nate had never even been to the Moon.

A grin slowly spread across his face, and grew bigger uncontrollably until he was smiling so wide, he was almost laughing. At this point he didn’t care what the salary actually was, as long as it was enough to afford room and board and some souvenirs on an alien world. This was a job he’d have taken for free.

#52 project #reblogging the 52 #kai diwar universe #number 52! yay!

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alarawriting · 8 months

Text

Reblogging the entire 52 Project because now I’m done!

There will be a 53rd story posted at 5 pm on Friday, Sept 1, because it took me so long to get this done, I am now 53.

52 Project #51: Dex

This story is highly autobiographical in a way that's actually kind of painful and embarrassing, and you'll all know why after you read it. And you'll also know why it has taken me two and a half years to write one year's worth of stories and I'm still not done.

BTW I hope like fuck none of the Reddit handles in here are real, but I didn't have a chance to check them all.

***

Jason had promised his boss he’d have a debugged version of the code checked in by morning.

He’d been tracking down a bug when he’d gotten sidetracked reading Stack Overflow. Dammit. He’d just lost an hour, and he still had no idea why his code wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, and it was 10 pm. Teresa was expecting a new version to be checked in by 9 am and she was expecting that it would run.

This was a job for more Coca-Cola. Jason got up, went downstairs and got himself a slice of pizza and a cold Coke.

His mom, also burning the late night oil at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, said, “How is it going? You think you’ll have what your boss is expecting by tomorrow?”

No. “Yes,” Jason said. “I just need a few more hours to track this down.”

“Well, you’re running out of them. You’d be better off getting a good night’s sleep, then waking up fresh in the morning early enough to work on it then.”

Mom was 57 and had apparently forgotten everything she had ever known about how night owls worked, despite having spent her younger years routinely staying up until 2 am. “Is that what you’re doing?” Jason couldn’t help saying.

“I’ve got a house showing tomorrow, I just have to make sure that I have my talking points memorized.”

“Why? Does the house really suck?”

“It doesn’t really suck. It’s a good house, really. Great bones, a nice big yard. But I’m gonna have to redirect the prospective owner’s attention away from how ugly the carpet is and things like that, because the seller? Whoo-ee. There’s people who have no taste, and there’s people who never fix anything, and there’s people who own dogs, and then there’s my seller, who is all three.” She sighed. “I tried to get them to rip the carpet out and install hardwood flooring before putting the house on the market, but the market is hot right now; I don’t blame them for wanting to charge forward. I just think they’d get more if their house didn’t smell like dog and look like water damage had a horrible transporter accident with the 1970’s.”

“That bad, huh?” He leaned up against the fridge, sipping his Coke. “You wanna go over your spiel with me, Mom? Some late night practice before you go to bed?”

“Yeah, actually, that sounds good.”

So Mom talked enthusiastically, if hoarsely, about the four bedrooms and the two and a half bathrooms and the recently modernized kitchen and how great the neighborhood was, and Jason listened, because he wasn’t contributing nearly as much to the mortgage as his mom was and she was also paying most of the utilities, so her career was important, not to mention what stress did to her heart.

When he got back to his computer it was 11:30 and he’d finished his Coke and pizza. He thought about getting ice cream, but best not to do that until Mom went to bed, if he didn’t want to get sucked into another conversation. Not that conversations with Mom were bad; they were much more entertaining than debugging code, which was the problem.

He opened up his coding window, stared at it for thirty seconds while doing nothing, and then convinced himself that maybe Reddit would have an answer to his question.

It didn’t. It did have answers to how to solve a particularly difficult problem in his current favorite game, a number of people who wanted to know if they were the asshole, some great reviews of movies on streaming that he hadn’t had a chance to watch yet, political rants, and some really entertainingly stupid coding mistakes that people had posted.

It was 12:30 am. Teresa was expecting this at 9 and she was expecting it to work.

His eyes glazed. The act of reviewing the code for the tenth time, looking for the bug he hadn’t yet been able to find despite knowing the general area it had to be in, was almost physically painful. He checked his brackets, again. The error didn’t look like a missing close bracket, but that didn’t mean anything. If he had a dollar for every time the error didn’t look like a missing close bracket but turned out to be one, he’d have maybe twenty dollars, which wasn’t a lot in terms of actual money but was a lot of times for the same stupid thing to happen in his code.

The software was supposed to warn him when there was an unclosed bracket, but half the time, if the code was particularly complex, it didn’t. It just re-interpreted the bracket locations and then his code broke.

One more time. Stepping through. Why the fuck was it stopping there? There was nothing there that could account for the error.

Time to go get ice cream. Maybe some sugar would help him stay awake and focused enough to get this done. Another Coke, possibly, too.

When he sat back down, he had Discord messages, so he needed to check them. And messages on Slack, which he could be checking in the morning, and probably should be, but maybe one of his co-workers had found an answer to his problem. They hadn’t, but Priyal had a different question and that one, he thought he could quickly get an answer to, so he fired up Google, dug in, and got her answer for her, which he sent. She’d have it in the morning. Unlike Teresa, who probably would not have what she was expecting.

It was 2 am. Stupid of him to get sidetracked with Priyal’s problem when he was having such difficulty with his own. He flicked over to Reddit again because this was unbearably boring and if he didn’t give himself a break from it, he’d fall asleep.

But he had to go back to debugging the code. Or to sleep. He could handle Teresa being pissed off in the morning a lot better if he got some sleep.

Third page of the subreddit he was on. Four. Man, he needed to keep up with this stuff, there was so much here he hadn’t read yet.

Fifth page of the subreddit. He really, really needed to get back to work. It was 2:30.

A screenshot of something really stupid from Cicada. Damn, someone actually posted something that stupid? Over to Cicada to see if there was context that explained it. There wasn’t, but there was a lengthy thread of people absolutely shredding the OP. Including someone he followed, and he should probably catch up with that.

No, he should get off Cicada and go back to coding. Or bed. His eyes were burning. Bed was probably a better idea. Give up on finishing the debug, tell Teresa he hadn’t found it yet and would need another day.

That was an interesting news article, though. He had to check that out.

No, he didn’t. He needed to go to bed.

Jason’s mouse clicked the link to the article. His eyes read the page, despite burning with exhaustion. Some frantic voice in his head was yelling, screaming, get up, put the computer down, you need to be awake to deal with Teresa in the morning, it’s late, you’re doing nothing useful, get up.

Back to Reddit.

Stop this. Get up. Go to bed. You need to go to bed.

3:30 am. He could barely keep his eyes open, but they were still riveted to the computer, his butt still glued to his chair.

Get up get up get up and go to bed, go to bed, turn the monitor off, you need to go to sleep so you can deal with Teresa tomorrow, get up, go to bed, go to bed

4 am. Look, there was his Firefox home tab, with articles from Pocket. A few of those looked interesting.

Don’t read them, you need to sleep, you need to sleep

Right, right, he didn’t have time to read them right now. He just needed to open them all so they would be there for him tomorrow. If he didn’t do that, Pocket would refresh and he’d lose all of them.

Wow, did they really find carbon deposits on the moon? He had to check that out.

Stop it, stop it, you have to stop it, you need to sleep, stop it

5 am. There was no way he’d be up at 9 to deal with Teresa.

Email. “Hey, I’ve been up all night bashing my head against this thing and I’ve made progress—” This was a lie. “—but it’s still not running. I’m gonna have to look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow. I’ll be logging in around 11 am.” This was also a lie, it would probably be closer to noon. But since he worked from home, all he needed to do was drag ass out of bed around 10:30 to send everyone a status update, tell them he was diving into the code and probably wouldn’t see incoming notifications until he came up for air, and then dive back into his bed instead.

Set an alarm for 9:30 am. Set an alarm for 10 am. He’d blow through them both, of course, but they’d wake him up enough to actually wake up when the 10:30 alarm went off, and then he’d convince himself to get up and send the status message by promising himself he’d return to bed.

Check out that article about a different way to manage your ADHD?

No. Go to sleep. Off the computer. Sleep.

Right, but obviously, he needed to put on his Spotify for music to fall asleep to, and adjust the volume because he couldn’t let it be too loud or it would wake Mom up, calm and peaceful or not.

Pop over to Reddit one last time.

5:30 am. Sleep!

The panic finally overwhelmed the inertia and he managed to drag himself off his chair, turn the monitor off, and stumble to bed. Now to get some sleep.

Oh, except now, he couldn’t sleep because he was overwhelmed by his anxiety and fear about not getting enough sleep to deal with Teresa even if he slept until noon because she was going to be seriously pissed off with him because this was the third time he’d blown the deadline.

It was another hour before exhaustion finally claimed him, and he knew that because the sun had risen.

***

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm.

He’d never set the 10:30 alarm, he’d blown through 9:30 and 10 just like he’d planned, but he’d never turned on the 10:30 alarm, so it was half past noon and he’d never sent that status message, so everyone would know he overslept way past the point Teresa would be okay with after an all nighter, and there was a meeting at 1 pm and he had to shower and shave because it was going to be a meeting with video so he couldn’t look like he’d just dragged himself out of bed.

Or maybe he could. He sent Teresa a message on Slack. I think I’m sick. My throat’s sore, and I’ve got a migraine. And I don’t have the program working anyway, so there’s really nothing to show anyone. Can we postpone until tomorrow?

The response was almost immediate. You need to figure out how to manage your time better. You’re sick because you stayed up all night.

Yeah, but I was trying to solve the bug.

If you can’t get something fixed by 11 pm, it’s not going to get fixed. You should have gone to bed.

I know, but I wanted to try. I was getting close. This was a lie. I thought I could get it done before morning.

Yes, and instead you made yourself sick and the program still doesn’t work. ☹ I’ll postpone the meeting this time, Jason, but we need results before tomorrow. Sorry that you’re sick but you know as well as I do it’s because you didn’t get any sleep.

Yeah, I know. I’ll pull myself together, have some coffee, and get back to work. I’ll try to have it done before 5. This was a lie. He knew perfectly well he wasn’t going to get it done by 5, not when he was this tired.

Do you want me to have Jorge review it? Maybe he can see something you missed?

No, that would be the worst possible thing, because then Jorge would know that he’d made basically no progress last night. I don’t want to add to his workload, but if I’m running into trouble later today I’ll pass it over to him, see if adding some eyeballs might help.

All right, I’ll let him know.

And now Jason was awake, the imminent terror of Jorge finding out that he had done basically nothing last night flooding him with enough adrenaline that he could focus enough to turn on his monitor and get back to work.

***

He had to stop living like this.

Sooner or later he was going to get caught, and he was going to get fired. He couldn’t stay focused on his work when it was boring, which debugging generally was; he enjoyed the act of creating code, making things happen, but when it wouldn’t work, it was an exercise in frustration and soul-crushing despair. He couldn’t keep up with his own documentation, he missed emails and chat messages because he was obsessed with something else when they came through, and he wasn’t even spending his time doing things that were fun; endlessly surfing Reddit and checking the news and articles wasn’t something he did because it was incredibly fun. It was just more bearable than focusing on work, sometimes.

It wasn’t like there would ever be a programming job where you never needed to debug, or never needed to polish off the last few functions that you’d kept skipping because of how tedious they were. He knew that. He’d gone into the profession knowing that. But when he was younger, his meds had worked better. Or maybe he’d just been better at being able to go without sleep. Or not as acclimated to the panic. It was the panic that got him moving, that made it so he could do the boring jobs. He had to be terrified of the consequences of failure before the fear and anxiety could override the whatever-it-was that kept him sitting in his chair, playing video games or surfing the Internet, rather than doing the boring parts of his job.

It had gotten worse since he started working from home. In the past, he’d had the fear that his boss might come by and see him goofing off. So he’d still goofed off, but carefully, always prepared to jump back into his work at a moment’s notice. Sometimes he’d pushed himself, polished off what was normally three or four days’ work in one afternoon, and then goofed off for the next three days. Because he could. Because when he was on, he was magic. The insights were lightning, his speed was legendary, his accuracy was amazing. When he was on.

He was off most of the time. And more and more often, nowadays.

Medication didn’t work anymore. It just made him jittery and irritable, so he’d stopped taking it. Overdosing on caffeine did the same but somehow felt more palatable, and he’d grown to associate the feeling of being competent with the tastes of coffee and Coke, so he used those instead. Then he couldn’t get to sleep. On the nights when he actually managed to get a satisfying amount of work done, he might have a beer or two to unwind and let himself relax and sleep, but that was impossible to do when it was late and he wasn’t done. Which was most nights, nowadays.

He couldn’t keep living like this. He couldn’t depend on a state of fear to enable him to work. Sooner or later he’d slip up, he’d be caught, and he’d get fired. And then he’d have to admit to his mother that he got fired. That terrified him far more than the thought of having to get another job. Jobs weren’t that hard to come by, but his mother’s disappointment and sorrow was utterly horrible.

Jason had spent his childhood alternately disappointing her and making her proud. She thought he was stable now, that the problems that had plagued his childhood – the inability to do homework, the losing it when he had done it, the dishes he didn’t wash, the laundry he didn’t do, the leaves he didn’t rake – were gone. And it was true, nowadays he could get the laundry done, because he’d figured out how. Pile it up in front of his door, and as soon as it got too irritating to open his bedroom door, he could gather up the laundry in his arms and dump it in the wash. It helped that he’d finally figured out that he didn’t need to sort anything if he washed everything in cold water and never bought anything that was white.

He didn’t know any way to pile up a debugging project in front of a web browser. He’d tried using software that blocked him from doing anything that wasn’t work related, but the trouble was, Reddit was a legitimate source of information on how to fix issues he’d never encountered before, and Stack Overflow and other sites and forums dedicated to development problem solving were enticing time sinks of entertaining information. There was no way to solve this programmatically, because no AI was capable of telling the difference between “this is useful stuff you need to solve this problem right now” and “you’re just reading about all these other problems other people have had so you don’t have to work on your own problem.”

And even if there was…

Jason was one of the best programmers at the company. He was only 29, but he’d been doing this since he was 12. So people came to him with their problems, and he was usually able to solve those. Most problems people had were something he’d encountered so often he could fix them when asleep, which had actually sort of happened a couple of times – he had once or twice found that he’d sent an email at 3 am that he had no memory of sending, when he’d been pulling an all-nighter, that elegantly and correctly solved a co-worker’s problem.

Their problems were easy, and the feedback was immediate and gratifying. People thanked him profusely, told him he was a genius, sometimes gave him homemade cookies or delicious ethnic lunches (this was the thing he missed most about working in the office, but too many of his coworkers were also working from home; he’d gone in once or twice after lockdown was over, but it had never been the same again.) Everyone had nothing but great things to say about Jason’s willingness to help a coworker out and ability to solve their issues. His own problems, not so much. But he got a lot of leeway for being the genius who could fix everyone else’s issue.

When he was stuck, it was rare that anyone else could help him with it. And it was rarer that he was willing to let them. The humiliation of needing help, of what if it was a simple, stupid thing and it destroyed his wunderkind reputation that he’d missed it, made it so he never wanted help, not with the big problems he couldn’t solve himself. If your whole life was based on your skill at swimming, how close did you have to be to drowning before you were willing to call for help?

Jason managed to get the code working a little before 3 pm, after ignoring three messages from Teresa that maybe now it was time to bring Jorge in, and one from Jorge asking if there was anything he could do to help out. He then gratefully handed it over to Jorge. It’s working, but I could use some more thorough testing than I’ve been able to do. (I have done minimal testing because testing is so boring it makes me want to spork my eyeballs out, but I’ve made sure that it runs start to finish in the most basic scenarios and that the more complex functions kick in when given at least one example of data that should make them kick in.) The QA department would beat the crap out of it later, but the programmers didn’t hand over code to them until it at least ran, most of the time. Well, some of the time. Well, at least the one time they tried it.

He needed a nap, badly, but he was too wired to get one, and it wasn’t a good idea. If Jorge did find something in testing, he needed to at least look responsive. So he started reading the article tabs he’d opened last night, when he’d promised himself he’d just open them so they’d be available for him today.

Oh, and there was the article about a new treatment for ADHD. That was timely.

***

“The newest ADHD treatment on the market isn’t a pill, and it isn’t an app. Dex™ is an implant, that promises to revolutionize treatments for the long-forgotten invisible victims of ADHD… the ones who grew up.”

Oh, that was definitely promising. It had long been a source of deep irritation to Jason, and pretty much everyone else he knew with similar issues, that ADHD was treated as a disorder of childhood. Once you were grown up and out of the educational system, you were an adult and you could adult like an adult, because you were an adult! Right? It was a blind spot in the entire system. The go-to medications for kids could have long-term effects that got more and more unpleasant as you got older… such as developing high blood pressure. Or desensitizing to it, as Jason had. (His doctor had claimed that was not possible, but tolerance was a thing for pretty much every other drug, including allergy pills, so Jason thought that was bullshit. He was planning on changing doctors. As soon as he got around to picking a new one.)

But… implant?

“By utilizing dopamine, the natural chemical made by the body that promotes motivation, Dex™ enables adults with ADHD to stay focused on the important things in life. Their work. Their family. Their loved ones.”

Aaand it was off and running into marketing bullshit. Jason scrolled through the article, but it was pretty obviously pay-for-play.

Another article was more promising. “The idea behind Dex sounds frankly somewhat terrifying. A brain implant that uses AI learning algorithms to dose you with chemicals that make you want to do things? It sounds straight out of a science fiction dystopia. But in fact, the science behind Dex is rigorous.

“One of the biggest problems people with ADHD face is that they can’t motivate themselves to do what they know they need to do. This has long led to sufferers of the disorder being told they are ‘lazy’ and ‘unmotivated’, or worse things. But it turns out that this is a genuine medical condition. Science has identified the neurotransmitter in the brain that gives us motivation. It’s called dopamine, and people with ADHD don’t produce enough of it.

“By jolting the brain with a dose of dopamine every time the Dex user is doing something they need to do, it helps them stay focused and on task, even with the boring tasks that most ADHDers are famous for being unable to do. Wash the dishes. Remember to take out the trash. Finish that essay.

“Some have concerns because Dex is manufactured by Ulysses… the newest medical/pharmaceutical company to place its wares on the market. Ulysses’ focus has been on combining artificial intelligence with low-dose, just-in-time medication, such as the anti-anaphylactic implant Destiel or the—”

Wait. Wait. Did this company seriously name a medication Destiel? Who was that for, people who had never been in their teens on the Internet while a certain TV show had been airing?

“—or the virus-fighting Ajaxon, but—”

Too late, Jason couldn’t take a company seriously that named their product something like that. He flipped away to read about a nonprofit who would paint your roof with super-reflective white paint for free, to help fight climate change.

***

Jorge didn’t find any critical bugs, and Jason managed to take a nap after hours, which was good, because anxiety about the meeting that had been postponed started to creep in around 10 pm, and despite the fact that he knew he needed to be well-rested for the meeting, which had been moved to 1 tomorrow, he had to get online and play a video game to relax.

It was 3 am before the need to go to the bathroom forced him to get off the computer. He gratefully accepted the out his bladder had given him, and as soon as he was out, he went straight to bed. The light from the monitor was irritating, but if he got up and went over to the computer to turn off the monitor, he might succumb to the temptation of just checking one thing, and then who knew when he’d get to bed? It would go to sleep eventually, and in the meantime, he could use a sleep mask.

He hadn’t forgotten the alarms, this time. 9:30 am was probably too early to wake up when he’d hit bed at 3 am, but after yesterday, he knew he had to be online and responsive from early on to make up for his fuckup. Didn’t mean he had to actually work. As three cups of coffee made their way down his throat, he browsed online comics, read email, skimmed articles, answered Slack messages, pretended to be contributing to the discussion about the strategy for the meeting, and finally ended up at r/AMA, because when he googled Dex, he found that one of the people who’d developed it had done an AMA on it.

“I’m one of the lead scientists on the development of the new ADHD treatment, Dex. AMA”

He read over her initial post. Her name was Suzanne Burke and she worked for Ulysses, which was a subsidiary of the online retail-and-cloud-computing giant Jupiter.com. This was troubling. Jupiter was known for its forays into AI, having gotten its start with neural networks that recommended books to people, and was now well known for its near-ubiquitous AI household assistant, Ray-Ray. Mom had gotten one of those for Christmas last year, but Jason hadn’t let her hook it up. His specialty wasn’t cloud security, but he’d been working in IT long enough that he had no trust whatsoever in an appliance made by a giant corporation that could turn your furnace off and on and was probably sending all your data back to the mothership. On the other hand, he was guessing that Ulysses had been bought out by Jupiter, because naming a medical device after a fan fantasy of a gay relationship between a monster hunter and an angel from a TV show that had ended a few years ago did not seem like the kind of stupid mistake Jupiter would make.

[u/ineedcheese: How does it work?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Diving in the deep end I see! OK, for any of this to make sense, I have to give you guys a simplified run-down of how ADHD itself works, because it isn’t “ooh! Shiny!” It’s a serious medical condition.

[Firstly, ADHD is described as Attention Deficit Disorder because from the outside looking in, that’s what it looks like. A person with ADHD can’t pay attention. Unless they’re really interested, and then they can’t stop paying attention. But that’s really more of a symptom. What it should be called is Executive Function Deficit Disorder or maybe Executive Dysfunction Disorder.

[You can think of a brain as having multiple multi-threaded tasks, like a computer. One of those tasks is consciousness, of course, but the rest of them run in the background and you are rarely aware of them. Until they break. Executive function is the manager, the dispatcher that takes commands from consciousness – or other parts of the brain, I’ll get to that – and, generally, informs consciousness of what it should be doing. It handles the passage of time, so you have some idea how long an hour is. It remembers where you put your keys. It allocates your attention to speech, to reading, to tasks.

[A lot of this is performed by stimulating the brain to release dopamine. Now, if you’ve ever sought out help for depression, you’ve probably heard of neurotransmitters. There’s tons of them, but the ones you hear about most are serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Very very roughly, and with the caveat that some recent evidence calls some of this into question, we can describe serotonin as the happiness chemical, dopamine as the motivation chemical, and norepinephrine as the excitement, fight-or-flight chemical. Very roughly.

[Basically everything a person does, is done because it feels good to do it – in some way – or, being smart animals, we know that not doing it has a bad result. If we don’t wash the dishes we get roaches – brr! If we don’t do our homework, we get a bad grade and Mom and Dad yell at us. In a normal brain, small amounts of motivational dopamine are released when we set ourselves to a task that will prevent a bad thing, but that we don’t inherently like. Or, sometimes, to a task that we enjoy, but maybe it’s hard and we’re not always feeling it. Wash the dishes, get a tiny amount of dopamine because yay, you have successfully fought off the roach apocalypse for another day.

[People with ADHD don’t get that. The small amounts of encouragement dopamine aren’t there. We don’t wash the dishes because we enjoy it, and it turns out, we don’t do it because we are afraid of the roaches. We do it because our executive function has decided that roaches are bad, and it will reward us with some dopamine for doing things to keep the roaches away. Everything we voluntarily do, we do because it gives us at least a little dopamine.

[I want you to think about the mythical Sisyphus, endlessly pushing a rock up a hill, because he’s been told he can be free of Hades if he gets it to the top – a thing he wants, a lot. What if someone tells him, the deal’s off? You’re never getting out of Hades, no matter what you do? Well, he probably wouldn’t keep pushing the rock, because what’s his motivation?

[That’s what washing the dishes is like if you have ADHD. It takes time, it’s not pleasant, and it doesn’t reward you with that little bitty bit of dopamine. So what’s your motivation to push the rock up the hill? You can intellectually know that washing the dishes is a good idea and that not doing it exposes you to disease, yucky tastes, and maybe roaches, but you don’t do the smart thing because it’s the smart thing. Or at least, most of us do not. We do the smart thing because executive function rewards us for doing it. And people with ADHD do not get that reward.”]

[u/beepityboopbop: “It handles the passage of time, so you have some idea how long an hour is.” Unless your name is Karen and you’ve called for technical support, in which case five minutes is an hour]

[u/paleshadowofawoman: Suzanne Burke you seem to have a serious fixation with roaches]

[u/semicolonbang: Yeah did the roaches eat your baby?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: They ate my last relationship. My girlfriend and I broke up because of roaches.]

[u/semicolonbang: that sounds like an interesting story]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: it is but it’s got nothing to do with Dex so maybe I’ll answer it in a few days if I feel like it]

[u/ineedcheese: that’s a lot of stuff about how ADHD works but how does Dex work?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Getting to that. People with ADHD gravitate toward things that overstimulate the dopamine reward system, because it’s the only way they get any. Playing video games generally gives you lots and lots of small rewards along the way. Endlessly bingeing Netflix feels good while you’re doing it because television is created to entertain and reward you.

[Now, being smart animals like the rest of humanity, ADHDers really do not want to spend their entire lives playing video games and bingeing Netflix. They want the same things anyone does – to do work that’s rewarding, to have satisfying relationships, to get along with family and make friends. But to accomplish those broad tasks, usually you have to do a lot of small tasks that aren’t inherently rewarding themselves. It’s hard to have a satisfying relationship if your girlfriend blames you for having roaches because you didn’t wash the dishes.

[So stimulants enter the picture. Adderal, Ritalin, and the most powerful and oldest stimulant of all: norepinephrine. Excitement, fear, anger, sexual desire, they all release norepinephrine, which tells the body to rev up. Charge up with energy. It’s time to run away from that tiger! Or beat the crap out of the guy macking on your girl! Or ride your horse, which is terrifying and exciting because you’re moving faster than a human can, on top of an animal who is perfectly capable of doing whatever it wants instead of what you want.

[People with ADHD procrastinate, because the fear of the consequences of not doing the task eventually becomes high enough that that provides the motivation. If you can’t have dopamine, you can at least have some norepi. I don’t want to write that paper, so I pretend it’s not happening… and my executive function is so bad at keeping track of time, it’s easy for me to pretend, until the night before I have to turn it in, and my professor has reminded all of us to do it. Now I’m terrified. I’ve done exactly nothing on this paper, I’m gonna fail my class, my mom and dad will be disappointed, my asshole ex will laugh at me, I’ll suffer shame and disgrace for generations to come. Now I’m scared enough, flooded with enough norepinephrine, that I can do the thing. And maybe I will even get a dopamine reward when I’m done, because “congrats on getting us away from that tiger, buddy!” is a thing that even most ADHDers get.]

[u/semicolonbang: “It’s hard to have a satisfying relationship if your girlfriend blames you for having roaches because you didn’t wash the dishes.” Personal experience much?]

[u/estesrocketsarenottoys: “Or beat the crap out of the guy macking on your girl!” not exactly feminist]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: “not exactly feminist” maybe not, but try being a lesbian with a beautiful girlfriend who all the guys are hitting on and she is really weirded out and upset by it and she just wants to be left alone, are you going to tell me you would not want to punch them in their sexist faces?]

[u/semicolonbang: your life story seems very interesting Suzanne Burke]

[u/ineedcheese: I still don’t know how Dex works]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Dex works by releasing small amounts of dopamine when you do a task you know you have to do, even if you don’t want to.

[We’ve used sophisticated AI to analyze the brain states of thousands of volunteers who recorded a moment by moment diary of what they were doing for a week and how they felt about it, and from that we’ve figured out how to distinguish the brain state of “I really, really hate doing this and there is no good reason to” – Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill after Hades has told him, the deal’s off buddy – and “I hate doing this, but it’s a step toward getting what I want.” When you make yourself do the thing you don’t want to do, but you know it will be good for you to do it, Dex rewards you with a little dopamine. Just like your own executive function would have, if you had one that worked.

[Dex can also tell when you’re caught in that paralysis loop – “I really should be working on my paper, but instead I am reading Reddit” – how many of you are in that place right now?]

Jason blinked. Wow, that was a little on the nose. This was posted a week ago, though, so she wasn’t talking about him. Specifically.

[If you’re doing a thing, but you feel guilty about doing the thing because there’s something you should be doing instead… Dex can uptake your existing dopamine. Basically, Reddit bores you! So you go looking for some other source of entertainment. Well, if you take that moment and use it to write your paper, or wash the dishes, Dex will make you feel good about doing it.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: How good?]

[u/peterporkerthesuperbspiderham: Yeah, doesn’t like heroin or morphine also give you dopamine?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Not that good, and not exactly, but we’re not going to get into that. Dex isn’t addictive. Video games are a lot more addictive than Dex. Not that I ever blew a few hundred dollars on DLC, or anything.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: How do you know?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Because we’ve tested it. There have been years of clinical trials at this point. There are a lot of people who were very, very upset at the thought of ever losing Dex… but we drilled down on that, and they were more like, wheelchair users upset at the thought of losing their wheelchair than addicts upset at losing their fix. They described how Dex made it possible for them to focus, to get things done that they’d always wanted to be able to do. Not that it made them feel good. Because it doesn’t. Tiny jolts of dopamine for washing the dishes doesn’t feel good. It just feels like it makes washing the dishes tolerable.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: Should we be concerned about Jupiter’s involvement in this project?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Jupiter didn’t buy Ulysses until we were already in clinical trials, so no. They’ve been very hands off, actually.]

[u/ineedcheese: how does this fix me forgetting my appointments?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: it doesn’t. But if you’re like most ADHDers you’ve been told, “Oh, just program a reminder on your phone!” And then the reminder to take out the garbage comes through, but you don’t feel like taking out the garbage, so you ignore it. Or you forget to add the reminder about the doctor’s appointment because that just seemed like a lot of work and you didn’t feel like it. What Dex will do is allow you to use those tools to manage the parts of ADHD that it doesn’t directly fix. You won’t remember the doctor’s appointment, but you will feel like putting a reminder into your phone about it was a worthwhile thing to do, when you made the appointment, and you will feel like getting up and going to that appointment is more worthwhile than checking Facebook, again.]

[u/stephaniestick: no one uses Facebook anymore]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Or Cicada, or Instagram, or Tumblr, or whatever.]

[u/ineedcheese: so it’s not as good as medication.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: In what way?]

[u/ineedcheese: medication helped me remember things I was supposed to do.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: If medication works best for you, that’s a fine thing, and we’d advise you to stick with it. But a lot of adults can’t take the medication, or it doesn’t work for them.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Or they won’t prescribe it for you. I was diagnosed as an adult and my doctor told me, basically, no one will prescribe amphetamines for someone my age.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: also true.]

[u/paleshadowofawoman: you said it makes things unrewarding to do if you feel guilty about doing them. What if you feel guilty about everything?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: you absolutely should not use Dex if you have a scrupulosity complex, or in any other regard feel a lot of guilt over things you really shouldn’t feel guilty about.]

[u/beepityboopbop: so no Catholics, got it]

[u/mushroommushroom: A lot of people feel guilt over having sex, even if it’s healthy consensual sex.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yeah, so it turns out that the human sex drive is so powerful, Dex can’t do anything with it. We tried. We recruited a few volunteers who wanted Dex to reduce their interest in sex, because they were trying to not cheat on their spouses, or they wanted to get more done… or whatever. We didn’t probe very deeply. It didn’t work for any of them. It can help with more traditional addictions, alcohol or smoking, but it does not actually seem to reduce sex drive even in people who feel guilty about having sex and want to have less of it.]

[u/supermansshorts: But you can use it to stop smoking?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: If you feel bad about smoking, yes. If you know you shouldn’t smoke, and you would like to quit, but you are compelled to smoke anyway, having Dex will make smoking feel a lot less fun, which will help you quit. But you still have to do the hard work.

[Dex doesn’t magically solve all your problems. I’m pretty sure there is no implant that could do that. What it does is it gives you the tools you need to solve your own. When you have work to do, and you don’t want to do it, but you want to want to do it because you need to do it… Dex isn’t smart enough to know to reward you for that the first time you make yourself do it. It has to read your brain state while you’re doing it to know that this is a thing you should be doing that you don’t want to. You have to summon the willpower to do it the first time, yourself.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: Because willpower and ADHD are so well known to be found together.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I actually think people with ADHD have enormous willpower, because they don’t get rewards for doing the useful things they have to do to stay alive and healthy. Other people aren’t really using willpower alone, they’re using the fact that it feels good to do a thing you need to do. People with ADHD have literally no emotional motivation at all, no brain chemical telling them to do the thing, but often they manage to force themselves to do it occasionally anyway. I think that takes a lot more willpower than doing a thing that rewards you with a little dopamine.]

[u/mushroommushroom: How do you get it?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Currently, only a psychiatrist can prescribe Dex.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Not a regular doctor?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: No, and actually, we recommend that you be in therapy while working with Dex. Among other things, there’s a phenomenon called spin doctoring that you might need a therapist to help you recognize and work through.]

[u/chaosisawonderfulthing: You obviously want us to ask what spin doctoring is.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Haha, yes! OK, so you’re all familiar, I hope, with the fact that the brain has two lobes. They have a lot of overlap in function, though in a lot of people only the left side controls speech. But you are not two people, because there’s an entire wall of connecting neurons, the corpus callosum, between the two.

[Well, back in the old days, one treatment for really severe, life-threatening epilepsy was to sever the corpus callosum. So in a sense, patients became two people, but only one of them could talk. They did an experiment with those people. Sat them in front of a viewer where each eye could be shown a different image, and while they were doing tests, they sent a message to the right eye, go get a Coke. The right eye connects to the right lobe, which doesn’t usually have the ability to talk.]

[u/thisuserdoesnotexist: Doesn’t the right brain control the left side and so on?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yep, but the crossover happens below the head. So the eyes, being in the head, are still connected to the lobe on the same side. Anyway, so they’d tell the right brain, go get a Coke. So the right brain would get the body up and head for the Coke machine. Now, keep in mind, the left brain has not seen this message, and without the corpus callosum, and given that the right brain can’t talk, the left brain has no way of knowing why the body is heading for the Coke machine.

[You would think this would be terrifying. Your body is doing something and you never told it to! Aaahh! Horror movie! But when they asked people, what are you doing? They got answers like, “I was thirsty”, or “I wanted to stretch my legs a bit.” None of them expressed any fear or uncertainty about why they were doing this, and also, none of them knew they’d been told to go get a Coke.

[So the theory goes, consciousness is not actually where all of your decisions come from! Maybe not even most of them! A lot of stuff is being done by deep processes in the brain that are black boxes, that consciousness has no insight into. But when those processes decide that the entire collection of stuff that is you needs to do something, consciousness often smoothly and easily rationalizes why you are doing the thing, without any recognition that that’s what you’re doing. It feels to you like you got up to stretch your legs, and while you’re at it, why not get a Coke? When the real reason is, the right side of your brain, which your left side can no longer hear, was told to do it.]

[u/supermansshorts: Is the right side of the brain, like, vulnerable to mind control?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Oh, no, no. These were volunteers who’d agreed to do the experiment and follow the instructions. It’s not like the right side of your brain is a completely different person from the left side. Even if you sever the corpus callosum, both sides are still you, near-identical copies who think and feel much the same way about everything. So if the left side signed the papers and spoke the agreement, it’s likely that the right side also agreed, for the same reasons. The right side wouldn’t have done something like “jump out a window”, it’s just as capable of making rational decisions as the left side is. But it agreed to follow instructions the same as the left side did, because if the left side was the kind of person who’d volunteer to follow the experimenters’ instructions, then so was the right side.

[Anyway, so spin doctoring. Consciousness is so good at coming up with rationalizations for why you are doing a thing that some deeper process said to do, it doesn’t even know it’s doing it. So a lot of the time, we make decisions based not on anything rational, or even an emotion we understand and recognize, but something deep down that we’re not even aware of.]

[u/mushroommushroom: Like Freud’s ego and id.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Similar, yeah, but it’s more like, there’s all these different processes happening, and consciousness isn’t actually aware of any of them, just their outputs. And when the body as a whole acts on one of those outputs without going through consciousness first, consciousness comes up with a reason why they wanted to do that.]

[u/ineedcheese: But I do things all the time that I literally have no idea why I did it, like one time I poked a cake my mom had just iced and when she asked me why I did that, I didn’t even know.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Yeah, spin doctoring doesn’t always work, particularly since the ADHD brain is particularly vulnerable to processes just totally bypassing consciousness and doing a thing. That’s called “poor impulse control.”

[But the point is, we do things for reasons we don’t even know, and then our consciousness comes up with a reason why we did that thing, and then it enters our database of “reasons to do or not do things.” Like… if I found it very hard to do a thing, I might, for the sake of my pride, come up with “I really hate doing that thing” or “I think it’s stupid” or “That thing is completely unnecessary.” But maybe the only reason it was hard was I wasn’t getting any dopamine from it, and maybe Dex could fix that for me… if I was willing to try to do it, but the spin doctor might have already convinced me, doing that thing is dumb and why should I?

[One of the roles a therapist or psychiatrist can play with a patient trying Dex is to work through the spin doctor’s bullshit. Help you try out things you have already written off, or break patterns you think are just the best way to do things when maybe they’re not.]

[u/ineedcheese: Like what kind of thing?]

[u/snowflakespecialaisle10: Writing documentation if you’re a programmer.]

Ouch. That one especially hit home.

[u/semicolonbang: How is the implant done? Like do they drill through your skull?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: It’s a laparoscopic surgery done up through the nose. Outpatient surgery, you go home the same day.]

[u/supermansshorts: And that doesn’t fuck up your nose?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: Oh, your nose hurts like a bitch for about a week. When I did it, it drove me a little nuts because I have allergies, but blowing my nose would cause giant nosebleeds. Now, we give people a cocktail of antihistamine, numbing solution, and decongestant in a nasal spray, and apparently that works a lot better.]

[u/semicolonbang: You did it yourself?]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I told you that I lost my girlfriend because I never washed dishes and then we got a roach infestation and she blamed me, and you think I wouldn’t be signing up for the clinical trial the moment we opened it to human trials?]

[u/mushroommushroom: To be fair, the roaches probably came in on your groceries or from the next door neighbor or something. Not washing the dishes just gave them a source of food and water to breed from.]

[u/ohsuzannaburke: I mentioned that. Turned out that was not a helpful argument.]

At this point, a Slack message popped up, and Jason had to turn his attention to that. It was from Teresa.

Jason, I haven’t heard from you in a couple of hours. Are you going to be ready for this meeting?

Ready, eager and waiting, he typed back. Shit, the meeting was in ten minutes. And look, there was the Outlook reminder he had reflexively shut off the moment it popped up, popping up again. Good thing Teresa had decided to poke him.

***

The meeting went well. Great, in fact. Jason was able to demo his code, and nothing went wrong. There were a couple of features he hadn’t implemented that the upper-level managers were concerned about, but Teresa backed him up, because he’d told her a month ago that those features would have to come in a later version. She politely reminded the upper-level managers that she’d informed them in email a month ago that those features wouldn’t be in this version. “Controlling scope is a very important part of controlling costs,” she said, and they couldn’t disagree.

Afterward there was a second, internal meeting of the team, which didn’t go quite as well because Teresa was banging the documentation drum. “If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, no one here would know how to support your code,” she said.

“Good thing I never go anywhere. No bus injuries in my future,” he said, and everyone laughed.

“But you know, they say that most accidents happen close to home,” Adrian said. “Seriously, Jason, I know doc’ing sucks, but you gotta get it done.”

Adrian extensively documented his own code, and got it done approximately 20% as quickly as Jason when he was on. And probably only 75% as quickly when you factored in how much time Jason wasted. “I know,” Jason said.

Stacy, the business analyst charged with writing user manuals, said, “It makes my job a lot easier when there are docs.”

“I’ll take a few days and go back through and do that.”

Then they talked about next steps, and the QA team revving up to test. Duane tried to get Jason’s help with a different problem he was working on, but Teresa deflected it, unfortunately. “Jason’s focus has to be on fixing his documentation,” she said. “Jorge, maybe you could team with Duane, see if the two of you could get any traction on this?”

“Sure,” Jorge said, dashing what small hopes Jason had of being able to find an acceptable task to work on that was not documentation.

When the meeting was over, he opened up his code, stared at it for three minutes trying to figure out where to even begin documenting. Due to the lack of documentation, he wasn’t even 100% sure he knew what all these functions did.

Fuck it.

He jumped over to Reddit, where he still had the Dex AMA open, which reminded him that he’d wanted to google Suzanne Burke’s claims and generally the whole thing, because the idea of a brain implant that could help you control your own behavior wasn’t real far off from conspiracy theorists’ paranoid fantasies of the CIA putting mind control devices in your brain.

Three hours later he’d learned some things:

All the bad reviews of Dex came from people who had obviously never used it or didn’t even really know what it was, people who were complaining about absurd things (“I wanted it to help me stop eating snack chips so I filled my room with snack chips to test it and it didn’t work, I still ate snack chips”) or things no one had never claimed it could fix (“I still keep losing my keys”), or people who had gotten one of the earlier versions at the start of clinical trials. Most of the most recent reviews either raved about it or said something like, “It’s a lot of hard work to re-engineer your whole life even with Dex, but with Dex I can actually do that work without getting in my own way”, or “It’s an adjustment and you’ll find there are things you are used to wanting to do that you don’t even really want to anymore, and that can be bothersome, but they’re usually things you wanted to stop wanting to do”. Most of the complaints that remained after the positive reviews and factoring out the old and/or stupid ones were about the surgery – “They said my nose would hurt for about three weeks but it’s been six weeks and it still hurts when I blow it”. One person had a bad allergic reaction and they had to take it out.

There were many complaints from friends and family members of someone using Dex. “He never has time to hang out anymore”, “We used to spend hours chatting on Discord and now she blows me off after like half an hour”, “He’s like some kind of zombie drone where it’s all about work, work, work” (this was troubling, but when Jason drilled into that, it turned out to be a boyfriend who was annoyed that his paramour didn’t want to spend hours a day canoodling, because he had work to do.)

There were a lot of conspiracy theories about how Jupiter was using Dex to mind control people on behalf of the government, the New World Order, the Jews, the reptilians, the liberal left, fascism, or corporations. These were all presented with tremendous hysteria and very little actual evidence. One persistent theory was that the founder and CEO of Jupiter, who’d expressed an interest in space colonization, was going to use Dex to mind-control a sizable workforce into going into space to build his space colonies. Another one seemed to think that Dex had been created by the infamous tech billionaire who’d managed to destroy Twitter, as if all tech billionaires were the same guy, or had some kind of hive mind agenda.

One credible theory claimed that the device had a wireless component to receive updates, and that therefore it could be used in the future to send ads to people, somehow. The wireless component turned out to actually exist, and it really was sending brain scans back to Ulysses for analysis, and Ulysses really was sending out software updates. Ulysses claimed this was fully anonymized, that the analysis was necessary in order to improve the software that ran Dex, and that the software itself was so unusual and proprietary that it would be literally impossible to infect it with malware. Jason was suspicious. All of that sounded very plausible and also something a corporation could decide to throw out and do something evil with the moment the board of directors decided they could get away with it. He couldn’t figure out exactly how it could possibly send ads, but he was sure it could be nefariously used for something.

In the end, there were two factors that decided him on not bothering to look any further into Dex. The existence of the wireless connection to Ulysses’ servers, and the fact that he’d have to find a psychiatrist if he wanted to be prescribed it. Finding a psychiatrist sounded easy enough, but given that Jason had had “change doctors” on his to-do list for two and a half years, and hadn’t been to a dentist in longer than that because he just never got around to making an appointment, he had no illusions.

But without researching Dex as an excuse to himself, he had no good reason not to work on his documentation. Just the usual reasons. It was boring, he didn’t want to, and he couldn’t make himself do it without a stunning amount of caffeine in his system.

Well. Time for early evening Coca Cola, then.

Jason had a system. Complex carbs, he thought, slowed him down and made him sleepy. Simple carbs, sugar, were a quick shot in the arm of energy, but there’d be a crash afterward. Greasy protein was even worse than the complex carbs, so pizza was absolutely terrible for focus. (This did not stop him from eating it when it was available.) The secret was lean protein, cold vegetables (because warmth made him sleepy), and sugar. So grilled chicken or salmon on a salad, and Coke. It was a pain in the ass to make this for himself; salad, in particular, was annoying because you had to wash it and then somehow you had to dry it, or wait hours for it to dry on its own, or your croutons would get soggy. He put in an online order at a local place, and then turned to video games.

The good thing about ordering food online was that, when it showed up, it would automatically disrupt whatever he was doing, so it was a great way to break free from something he probably shouldn’t be doing to switch to something he should. The bad thing about ordering food online was that it resulted in multiple interruptions while he was trying to relax with the game, because they called to confirm the order, and then they called to find his house, and then they called to tell him they were on the porch downstairs. And then Mom called up to tell him his food was here, and why hadn’t he asked her if she wanted anything?

But now he had his food, and his Coke, so it was time to focus on this thing.

This boring thing.

This thing he would rather do almost anything than be doing.

He slogged through it, incredibly slowly. He’d add a comment, scroll down, pop over to Reddit or a newsfeed or Youtube or literally anything other than this documentation, do that for several minutes – he had no idea how many – and then abruptly remember he was supposed to be doing his documentation and go back to it. As the night wore on, he became less and less efficient, more time spent not documenting, less time unraveling his own code to figure out what he did and write it down. But he couldn’t just go to bed; he had to make enough progress that he looked like he was making progress. But he couldn’t stay up all night, because then he would oversleep tomorrow and he would look bad.

The two balanced each other at 3 am, and he was finally able to go to bed, the documentation close to sort of done. Not to sleep, though, because he’d had way too much Coke and he was much too worried about what Teresa would think. Was this enough to show due diligence, or would she be angry that it wasn’t complete?

***

It took four days.

Four days of Teresa pestering him about whether the documentation was finished, four days of having nothing required of him that he actually wanted to work on. Four days of dodging the documentation as much as he could by helping everyone else out. Including helping with their documentation, because as annoying as documentation in general was, it was much better when he was getting the warm fuzzies for helping someone else, directly.

There was a weekend in the middle of those four days. Jason promised himself he’d work on the docs over the weekend and then didn’t even open the file. Then he promised himself he’d get up early on Monday to do some work on it, and instead woke up at 10, having missed a 9:30 scrum.

At 2 pm on Tuesday, he was finally able to report being finished with documenting his code. He checked the final version in, breathed a sigh of relief, and got himself a beer. He’d finished the slog. Time to unwind. He didn’t officially clock out, because frankly he’d been working so ridiculously late each night that if he weren’t salaried, they’d owe him a whole extra paycheck, so it was only fair. While he didn’t log off Slack or close his email, he did dive into a video game that occupied the full screen and wouldn’t let him see if messages came through. He told himself he’d pop out periodically and check.

Six hours later, when he finally checked, he had a Slack message from Teresa to come into the office tomorrow. It was much too late by now to ask her why.

***

“You’re letting me go?”

He stared at Teresa, a feeling of cold and heat at once sweeping through his veins. “You know I’m the best programmer in the department, right?”

“No one disputes that,” Teresa said, conciliatory. “But it takes you too long to get your work done, because you’re always in late, or leaving early.”

“I’ve been working until 3 am for a week now! And I only left early yesterday because I’d finished my documentation, and I needed a break.”

“Right. Jason, other programmers do not take four days to finish documenting their code. They document it as they write it. If you’d been hit by a bus over the weekend, we wouldn’t have had any idea how the code works, and I’d have to put someone on tracing it back and figuring it all out.”

He realized, then, that she’d just been waiting for him to finish it before she fired him. “I’m always helping out everyone else in the department, that’s why I’m slow sometimes.”

“You’re a great help, and you’ll be missed, but we need programmers who can work standard hours and hit their deadlines. I’m sorry, Jason, but it’s out of my hands. Upper management looked at your metrics and told me you’ve gotta go.” She shook her head. “I know you have personal effects here at the office, so you can go get those. Charlie here will escort you.”

Charlie wasn’t dressed any differently than anyone else at the company, but he was probably security. Certainly Jason didn’t recognize him, so he wasn’t in IT. “Fine,” he snapped.

“We’ll need the work laptop back,” she reminded him. The one he had never taken out of the box, because the box had the specs on it and he’d realized that it wasn’t nearly powerful enough for his needs, so he’d been doing all his work on his personal desktop.

“I’ll drop it off.”

He knew that by now he’d already been locked out of all the computer systems, so he wouldn’t have a copy of any of his Slack messages, or the code he’d just finished. If he wanted his email he’d have to find a way to convert his Outlook OST to an archive without actually opening it, because if he opened it, it would probably ask for a password and then just endlessly prompt him for a login until he closed it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to keep his email that badly.

What a dick thing, to make him come into the office just to fire him. But then, it would also have been a dick thing to fire him by Slack message or voice call or email, and then he wouldn’t have had a chance to get his very minimal amount of stuff, which included a few cartoons he’d pinned to his cubicle wall and a family picture he’d photoshopped to completely remove Dad, so it just had him and Mom. Not that he couldn’t print out another copy of that, but the frame had come from a college friend he wasn’t in touch with much anymore, and he had sentimental attachment to it.

***

Mom was home, in the kitchen, on her laptop, as he came in, because of course she was. “Honey? You okay?”

For a moment he contemplated saying “Fine,” and stomping off to his room like he was still 17, but Mom would get it out of him sooner or later. Better bite the bullet now. “I got fired.”

“Oh. Oh, Jason, I’m so sorry. Anything I can do to help?”

Not tell me about how it’s my fault, I hope. “Not really, but thanks for the offer.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve got savings and I’ve got health insurance until the end of the month, and more if I take COBRA. I want to see a psychiatrist about these problems I’ve been having.”

Mom nodded. “That might be a good idea. Maybe there’s a new medication you could try.”

“There’s this thing I was looking into, called Dex. It’s like an implant that helps you train your brain to focus? I’m thinking maybe I need to take it more seriously.”

“That might be a good idea. Do you need help with finding a psychiatrist?”

He was about to say no, it’s fine, I’ve got it handled Mom… and then thought better of it, because that kind of thing was the strategy that just got him fired. “Yeah. I need you to keep reminding me I need to do it. Even if I get bitchy about it.”

“Oh, I can do that,” Mom said, amused. “Also, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get your COBRA paperwork to you, but you need to get on that immediately. Check the mail every day—”

“I’d think they’d email it.”

“They might, but probably they’ve turned off your email? Do they have a personal email address for you?”

A good question. “I think they have my Gmail…”

“Check that every day. Including the spam boxes. And check the regular mail every day. There’s some time limit they’re under for how quickly they have to provide you that, but I don’t remember what it is. And it’s to their advantage if they wait a few days so maybe you’ll forget. You need to be on that. You could try to go through the marketplace, since losing your job is a qualifying event, but that’s likely to be much more disruptive, and COBRA is probably cheaper than that.”

Jason nodded. “Keep me honest?”

“I sure will.”

“Gonna hit up Dice and Linkedin, maybe Monster, see how quick I can land a new job.”

“Good luck.”

***

But he had savings, and it seemed like a dumb idea to take a new job and then get brain surgery. Sure, the AMA had said it was outpatient surgery, but what if there were complications and he had to take time off? It might be a better idea to find out if he was getting Dex or not before he got a job.

He found a psychiatrist who didn’t take his, or anyone’s, insurance, which was expensive, but living with your mom for several years and paying only a third of the mortgage and half the utilities, while holding a good job, had enabled him to save up a fairly large nest egg. She was the kind of psychiatrist who never actually told you what she thought, but spent all her time asking you what you thought about things. She presented options and made suggestions and offered to help by writing prescriptions for whatever she had suggested that you had decided to go ahead with.

The company had given him one boon; they hadn’t told the state they’d fired him for cause, even though doing so would have saved on their unemployment insurance. Unemployment was less than a third of what he’d been making, but on the other hand, he didn’t have to order food out nearly so much when he wasn’t breaking his neck for the company that had just fired him. He could actually cook. He could help his mom when she cooked, and learn how to make some shit he didn’t already know.

Jason tried three non-stimulant medications over the course of eight weeks. One of them made him horny as hell, which was unfortunate as he didn’t have a significant other, and he felt like jerking off three times a day was a waste of his time. One did nothing. One made him overwhelmingly sleepy. He tried stimulant medication, again, a slightly different formulation, but still felt like it made him jittery and his heart raced and he got headaches and was irritable. A lower dose of stimulant medication gave him the same symptoms, just a little less of them, and lower than that didn’t actually work at all to help him focus.

This wasn’t the first job he’d been fired from for not being able to keep to a schedule or make deadlines, and if he didn’t do something, it wouldn’t be the last.

In the end, he talked himself into asking his doctor about Dex, just like the commercial said.

***

Outpatient surgery, it turned out, was still surgery… it just didn’t involve a lengthy stay in the hospital. When his mother came to pick him up, because he wasn’t allowed to drive after surgery, his nose was starting to hurt like a motherfucker. They’d given him a nasal spray that would keep the area sterile, promote clotting, and relieve pain, and they’d given him decongestants because it was EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, according to the aftercare nurse and the directions he was given on paper, that he not sneeze or blow his nose. If his nose started to run, they’d given him a second nasal spray that was a direct decongestant and antihistamine, and he was supposed to use that instead. If he had a nosebleed, he was to use his spray and lay down immediately until the bleed went away. Yes, his nose would clog up, because there was a healing wound and the spray was promoting clotting; he would just have to breathe through the other nostril. And this was supposed to go on for up to two weeks.

Joy.

They also gave him regular painkillers, which he quit taking about four days later because seriously, how do people get addicted to the sensation of having a fuzzy head? He had enough issues with being half-brained from exhaustion, he didn’t really want to add opioids to the mix. Tylenol and the nasal spray would do.

It was at that point that he decided to engage in the difficult task of trying to get a new job. He’d already updated his resume, but he hadn’t uploaded it; he’d already done some initial keyword searches for jobs, but hadn’t actually applied to anything.

He opened the job search site, logged into his profile, and began the laborious task of adding his newer skills from the job he was just fired from, and updating the length of experience he had with the other ones. It was nightmarishly boring, just like it had been every other time, so he popped over to Reddit. Just for a little while, just to do something more entertaining for a few minutes.

Except Reddit wasn’t entertaining.

He browsed around for a while, looking for something to catch his attention, but frankly nothing was as compelling as the idea of getting the goddamn resume done and out there, so he could get a job, get health insurance he didn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for, and stop making his mom anxious. So he went back to the job search site, and this time, managed to get the entire task done without interrupting himself. It wasn’t fun, but it was something he wanted out of the way, and he was able to power through it, and then finish doing the same thing with two other job search sites.

It wasn’t until after he was finished that he realized.

Holy shit. This thing works!

***

After that, Jason went a little nuts, self-admittedly, with his new superpowers of actually being able to focus and get shit done.

The AMA had been correct. He wasn’t any better able to remember where he put his keys than he had ever been. But he was able to order a bunch of devices that could be hung on key rings or slipped into wallets, that he would be able to use an app to find, and then get them set up and put them on the devices they needed to be attached to. He got “Find my Droid” configured for all the times he lost his phone, and a bunch of chargers he could plug in all over the house, including QI chargers, that he could leave the phone attached to whenever he didn’t want to deal with carrying it around, so now it wouldn’t die out of his custody.

He wasn’t any better at remembering that he had appointments. But he was able to focus enough to put in sufficient reminders, that would catch him at enough points in time, that he wouldn’t be blindsided… and enough to actually check the reminders when they showed up, rather than just absent-mindedly dismissing them. After he next saw his psychiatrist, he actually put his upcoming appointment on his calendar, so he didn’t have to run around like crazy trying to find the little appointment card when he finally remembered that there was an appointment.

He remembered to wash his clothes three days before a job interview, so he had options. (It was virtual anyway, but it did require his camera, so he wanted to look good.) He showered and shaved that morning, rather than forgetting and then racing to try to get it done before the interview. He actually ate breakfast, not just coffee, because he paid attention when his alarm went off, didn’t just snooze it, and managed to drag himself out of bed early enough that his mom was still home and making herself eggs and bacon, which she shared with him. He used Linkedin and Google to read up on the companies he was being interviewed for before the interview, so he actually knew who some of the people were and had some familiarity with what they did.

And in the meanwhile, he kept the dishes clean, the trash taken out, the kitchen floor swept, the toilet paper on the roll and the empty rolls in the trash can, the soda cans in the recycling bin, and he even got around to fixing the bathroom shelf above the toilet and taking his mom’s car to the mechanic for her, because a 30-year-old guy was a lot less likely to get scammed by a mechanic than a nearly 60-year-old woman.

This was fucking awesome.

He wrote a few of the personal programs he’d always wanted to get around to, like the one that helped him use his phone to take an inventory of his and his mom’s shit, so if there was ever a fire, they could back up their claims of what was lost… and then he actually went around taking the photographs, labeling them, and using the program to push them into the database he’d set up. He remembered, finally, after about twelve increasingly upset emails from Teresa, to bring in that work laptop and drop it off. He returned his library books, paid his fines, and checked some more out, and then returned them on time. He set up a blog and started writing about programming challenges he’d encountered in his career. He put a Pi Hole on his mom’s wifi network to block ads at the router so none of the computers had to work at that. He bought a cheap laptop and set it up with Linux like he’d always planned, and actually did the experimenting he’d always wanted to do.

His time on Reddit plummeted, and was mostly confined to subreddits about the games he was into, where he knew people and had stuff to say that he cared about, rather than endlessly surfing sites like r/AmITheAsshole and r/TodayIFuckedUp. He still gamed, in the evenings, for a reasonable amount of time that didn’t interfere with his sleep schedule, and felt no guilt about it because he was getting his important shit done, so he had every right to relax as hard as he worked. When he wasn’t doing job interviews or searching for jobs, during the day in what would be working hours, he was reading up on new technologies and actively teaching himself new skills.

Jason’s mom cried when she told him how proud she was of him for taking this step and getting his life turned around. He himself wanted to cry, sometimes, when he realized that he’d wasted 30 years of his life without this, and that ordinary people, people without ADHD, just lived like this. Out of the box. Without having to have a foreign object shoved up their nose and into their craniums.

The day he got the new job, he happily updated his LinkedIn, after making connections with old co-workers so they could see he’d landed on his feet and he wasn’t a total fuckup. A couple of them contacted him, asking if he could help out with some problems they were having. He asked them to go back to Teresa and get authorization to pay him as a contractor. They didn’t ask again after that.

He even went and updated his profile on some dating sites. Now that he had a job again, and now that he no longer felt constant guilt over what he wasn’t getting done at his job, it was time to try to get back into that game. He hadn’t had a partner since shortly before the first lockdown… that was a long time to go without.

And then his first paycheck arrived, and he grinned to himself. He’d been good… at least since getting the Dex implant. He hadn’t bought anything unless he needed it or it would help him improve skills and be more marketable. No new games, no new DVDs, no books, no new phone, no new speakers for his PC, no replacement pump and filter for the fish tank that had no fish in it and was at this point just an algae-growing experiment, no cast iron skillet because Mom had sold hers at a yard sale due to her hands being too arthritic to hold something so heavy while cooking, nothing.

It was spending spree time! He’d been promising himself this since he got Dex. Save his money while he didn’t have a job, keep spending as tight as he could, and he’d go on a spree as soon as he got a paycheck.

He went to Jupiter.com first, because that was where he could get most of everything he wanted, maybe even everything he wanted. Two new games he’d been jonesing for. Several graphic novels, a science fiction novel, and a memoir. A box set for a TV show he loved, because relying on streaming had gotten more and more erratic as fights over licensing continued. PC speakers with surround sound that were two generations better than what he had, and an upgraded graphics card. Fish tank supplies – maybe he was finally going to be responsible enough to keep fish alive. A hat, because it looked cool, even though he couldn’t imagine a circumstance where he’d actually wear it.

For clothes, though, and the cast iron frying pan, it was better to shop local, where he didn’t have to pay shipping, and he could immediately return anything that had an unpleasant texture. So he went over to Target’s web site, and was immediately bored out of his mind.

He tried to convince himself that the search tools for clothes were more specialized here, and he was more likely to be able to find one thing that fit and then six other things like it in slightly different cuts or colors. No go. It was like looking at the red color scheme and the font was draining the life out of him.

Which was ridiculous. He forced himself to look for the cast iron frying pan. That should be simple and easy.

But they had multiple options, and it seemed like just such an enormous amount of work to sort through them.

He went back to Jupiter.com. The fonts seemed cleaner, the pictures more inviting. The cost of shipping was challenging, though. But he could fix that. Just click the button for only free shipping, and look at that! He could even get three of different sizes. He added it to his cart without thinking about it much.

Clothes continued to be a challenge. It was kind of fun to go hunting, but his frustration was building, because there were so many items coming up in his searches that weren’t what he searched for at all. And no way to tell the texture of anything just from pictures, whereas with a local store he could go there and check things out.

So he tried going over to Walmart, which was disgusting, and JC Penney’s, which was overwhelming, and some of the sites for fancy mall stores, which just seemed to not have any kind of selection. He was used to buying from Target. They had good search filters for men’s clothes, that rarely pulled back complete bullshit. He should go there.

Except when he went there, everything looked overwhelmingly hard and chaotic and he just didn’t want to. All the fun of clothes shopping drained away.

And then he went cold.

Jason tried going to Barnes and Noble’s web site for a specific book. It was too hard to use the site. He’d used it before, but somehow it seemed really inferior now. He tried going to a PC online retailer to look for the video card he had already bought from Jupiter. The filters were too unresponsive. He went to Swappa to find a used phone to replace the one he had, and almost immediately gave up because none of the products looked good and he was feeling a general sense of unease about the idea of buying a used phone from a shady online store… even though he’d gotten his last three phones there and had been satisfied.

Shit. Shit.

He had to post about this. If this was happening to him… he couldn’t be the only one. He opened up Reddit and found the thread about Dex, clicked the new post button…

…and lost all enthusiasm for the task. Jesus, did he really have to write a post about this bullshit? Who cared? Probably everyone would jump his shit. It wasn’t like he had any scientific proof. And the idea of having to explain, in detail, what was happening? Humiliating.

No. No. That was more of it. He had to write this post. He started typing, grimly, using the same fortitude he’d used when he’d spent four days documenting his code so his boss could fire him.

“I really loved Dex at first, but”

“but some disturb”

“but I found”

“but there’s one thing”

Nothing looked right. The documentation, at least, had been right when he’d written it. Everything he was writing now just looked terrible and whiny and like there was no point to saying anything.

But he had to do this. He had to write this post. The thing in his head had to be making him not want to do this, not want to say this, but he’d gone for 30 years forcing himself to do things he really, really didn’t want to do.

“I really loved Dex at first, but its changing what I want, its bad, you shouldn’t”

No. Fuck. What was that? That was utter shit. Couldn’t he even be bothered to capitalize and use punctuation?

“I really loved Dex at first, but it won’t let me write this post about what it’s doing to me”

Fuck this, go read r/AITA.

Go read his video game subreddits.

Check Microsoft Teams, which his new company used instead of Slack. Maybe someone had a late-night request for help? Or something he was supposed to do tomorrow that he could get started on tonight instead?

No!

“I really loved Dex at first, but it makes me”

An hour of reading the news.

“makes me feel bored with shopping”

Just one round of his video game. Just one.

Six rounds later.

“shopping anywhere but Jupi”

This dog growled at the baby sitter, you’ll be shocked when you find out why!

25 screens later of a story he had predicted the end of when he’d started reading it.

“Jupiter. I go to tar”

Had anyone online ever posted that stupid ditty where they sang “shop at tar-jay” like the word Target was French? Go check.

“target or any other site”

Wow, it was late, shouldn’t he go to bed? Bed sounded really great. He really shouldn’t disrupt his sleep schedule for this now that he’d gotten a new job and finally established a good sleep schedule, right?

Focus.

“site and it makes me feel like it’s boring, or too complicated, or just bad”

How about his favorite TV show? Was there going to be another season of that?

“just bad, until I go to Jupiter, and then shopping feels fun”

Yeah. That was it. That was the message. He didn’t need to keep doing this. He could stop and post it here. Actually he should spell check first, right? And it was late, maybe he wanted to hold off on posting until tomorrow, when he could look at it with fresh eyes.

“feels fun. And it wont let me”

1 am. This was ridiculous. He had work in the morning. He couldn’t lose this job just because of something stupid like this.

Another half hour of reading the news.

“let me write this to warn you.”

Right! Wrap it up, turn off the monitor, go to bed! He’d done his part. The message was out there!

Jason absent-mindedly turned his computer off, and only then, wondered if he had ever actually hit post.

Well. He could check on it in the morning.

After work. And his chores. And he was supposed to game with his friends tomorrow, so after that, too.

Oh, fuck this. He'd spent his life struggling against things his brain didn't want him to do, and it was awful and it had traumatized him and he never wanted to go through that bullshit again. If he'd forgotten to hit post, oh well. Let someone else do it. Jason was done beating his head against the wall of things he really didn't want to do, that he thought he should do, forever.

#52 project #reblogging the 52 #science fiction #adhd #near future #i made up jupiter so amazon wouldn't sue me #just so you know

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alarawriting · 8 months

Text

Reblogging the entire 52 Project because now I’m done!

There will be a 53rd story posted at 5 pm on Friday, Sept 1, because it took me so long to get this done, I am now 53.

52 Project #50: Grandma's House

Just in time for Thanksgiving weekend!

The O Street Museum, unlike the grandmother's house in this story, is a real place, and is really as I have described. Possibly even more over the top than the grandmother's house.

***

Grandma’s house was cold. It wasn’t a metaphor; someone must have turned the heat down to some ridiculous level, 65 degrees or something. Grandma used to keep it around 75 degrees; I’d wear summer pajamas when we came here for Thanksgiving, despite how cold it was outside. For some reason I’d thought it would be just as warm as when she was alive. I shivered, and wondered if I’d find sweaters upstairs in the Sweater Room, or if someone had gotten to them first.

No time like the present to check. I stuffed the key into the pocket of my blazer and headed up the first set of stairs. I’d gone in on 27, so I headed up to the third floor and went through the secret door to 29, then up another flight of stairs and through the regular door to the fourth floor on 31, because you can’t get to the third floor of 31 through any other of the doors. The Sweater Room was on the third floor of 31. I went inside.

The walls were hung with sweaters. Cable knit sweaters, cashmere sweaters, sweaters with sparkly sequins all over them, ugly Christmas sweaters, cardigans, short-sleeved sweaters (never been able to understand why those even exist), thick wool sweaters… The sweaters hanging from the hooks on the wall partially covered the dressers, which were covered to the inch with knick-knacks of Grandma’s that had no real theme or connection to them, like she’d just dumped stuff she couldn’t figure out where to put it. But inside the drawers: more sweaters. Men’s sweaters, women’s sweaters, sweaters for every size child and baby.

Most of Grandma’s themed rooms seemed to have some artistic point to them – the rooms themed around specific historical figures, like Elvis or Teddy Roosevelt; the rooms themed around features of nature, like the Ocean Room or the Cherry Blossom Room; the rooms themed around seasons like the Winter Room, or colors like the Purple Room; or the ones themed around activities, like the Billiards Room or the Music Room. And then there were rooms like the Sweater Room, that had a theme, but the theme was ridiculous.

I asked Grandma once why she had a room dedicated to sweaters, and only sweaters. She glared at me. Grandma used to glare a lot. “No one will ever say I let any of my family members be cold, ever!”

My favorite was still hanging up on the wall. It was a gradient of blue, light at the top and dark at the bottom. I pulled it off the hanger.

It smelled like Grandma’s laundry detergent.

The tears welled up out of nowhere and I found myself sobbing, out of nowhere. I pressed the sweater to my face and breathed through it until I had myself under control again.

“What are you crying for?” Grandma would have said. “People die! If they led a long, full life, then stop crying about it! That’s the best any of us ever get!”

I didn’t know how long Grandma had lived. No one did. When you asked her, she’d say “As old as Ann,” and when you asked how old Ann was, she’d say “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” I took this as permission to try to find out, when I was thirteen; I went rummaging through her purse to find her identification documents. Her driver’s license said her name was Gloria Reyes and she was born in 1929. Her passport said her name was Long Xin-quan and she was born in 1918. Her other driver’s license, which was buried at the bottom of the purse, said her name was Aanya Desai and she was born in 1907. Grandma used to claim to be Chinese, which would have made sense given that the name on her passport was Chinese, but she could easily pass for any number of other ethnicities – she had long, straight black hair, she tanned very dark in the summer and turned very light in the winter, and her eyes were like Keanu Reeves’ – if you had assumed she was white, they looked white. If you assumed she was Asian, they looked Asian. She had, to my knowledge, been assumed to be Indian, Native American, Hispanic, Polynesian, Thai, practically every East Asian nation, Polynesian, and white, on various occasions.

I thought she was a spy. None of those ages could be right; Grandma couldn’t be that old. Although, my biological grandmother, my Nan-nan, also called her Grandma, so maybe she really was that old.

It didn’t seem weird to me until I was nearly a teenager. No one knew exactly how Grandma was related to us, and no one really cared. There were, the last time I counted, 25 separate families of cousins, all of whom counted as Grandma’s family. Some people might have been adopted; Grandma had taken in at least two abused kids on separate occasions and just declared them to be hers now, according to my mother. Though I happened to know that the Haskins, the African-American family that ran into trouble occasionally when people couldn’t believe they were related to Grandma, were in fact actually directly connected to me; my Nan-nan’s sister had married a black man. According to my Nan-nan, this utterly shocked and horrified her parents, but Grandma had just glared at them and said, “You had better come to this house for Thanksgiving, you hear me? I don’t care where you go for Christmas or anything else, but Thanksgiving is for my family, and you better come.”

With my sweater on awkwardly under my blazer, I returned the way I came, back to the front room of 27. I’d always intended it to be my starting point. And then from there, I went through the hallways to 23.

***

If you’ve ever been to the O Street Museum in DC, you might get a sense of what Grandma’s home was like. Grandma claimed that the founder of the O Street Museum got the idea from her, and I don’t know enough to dispute it. O Street Museum is five interconnected town houses; Grandma’s house is seven, and they all have four floors and finished basements. Oh, and a gabled roof, where most townhouses, including the others on the street, have flat ones. It actually looks from the outside like just one very long roof, the only visual indication from the street that the townhomes are connected in any way. There’s supposedly an attic under the roof, but I’d never been there and neither had any relatives I’d talked to.

We used to call the houses by their street numbers, but not the whole thing. We were on the 1200 block, so the houses were 1223, 1225, 1227 and so on up through 1235. 27 was the main entrance to the whole thing. You could also get in on 23 and 33. All the rest of the doors were blocked.

There are over 70 rooms, not counting the private bathrooms that most of the bedrooms come with. And every square inch of the walls and furniture in most of the rooms is covered with Grandma’s stuff. Art, knickknacks, jewelry, books, clothes, you name it. One of the rooms is filled with nothing but hats. Unlike the O Street Museum, which has a similar aesthetic but with more selective artistic grounding behind it, you couldn’t buy any of the stuff and you couldn’t rent a room. Grandma wasn’t running a hotel; this was actually her house, and she didn’t take in boarders. Not for money, anyway.

So when Grandma demanded that the whole family gather for Thanksgiving… she meant the whole family. 25 separate families, as in family trees with kids and grandkids, and around 30 singles and couples who had no kids and weren’t considered part of one of the other families. Everyone was your cousin, and the exact degree didn’t matter. Us kids indiscriminately called everyone in our parents’ generation Aunt or Uncle (or Avun in a couple of cases where someone considered themselves non-binary, but that comes up more in my generation than it did when we were the kids), and everyone in any generation above that was either Aunt/Uncle or Great-Aunt/Great-Uncle depending on how elderly we thought they were.

Grandma also owned a parking lot, about two blocks away from the house. That, she rented out, but around Thanksgiving the parking lot would close and you had to have the code, which Grandma would give out, to get in. Even then, there wasn’t enough room for all the cars. The disabled and elderly parked in the row of on-street disability parking spots Grandma had acquired in front of all of her houses, and everyone else parked further away and walked or took mass transit. The 7-Eleven across the street on the block corner actually had signage specifically forbidding that anyone from Grandma’s house, which was generally referred to as “Long Mansion” due to being long enough to take up most of the block, park there.

All of that would be gone soon. Grandma had entrusted me to sell off her stuff and give the proceeds out to the entire family, and that meant the houses too. I figured I would probably have the doors between the houses sealed, covered up with wall, and sell them as separate townhomes. Grandma’s will said I could do that if I wanted. I didn’t want to – I wanted everything to be exactly like it was. I wanted all of Grandma’s stuff to remain in her house and for the family to meet every Thanksgiving and Grandma would be there. But that wasn’t happening, and I had a mission, given to me in Grandma’s will. And a seven-house four-story mansion wouldn’t sell to anyone unless they planned to cut it up for apartments, which no. I wasn’t doing that. I was going to sell these houses to families, people who wanted to raise kids in them. Or run a nonprofit to give housing to runaway teens, or something. Something better than being a landlord renting out apartments.

I’ve done estate sales for the past six years, but I’d never had to do one for anyone I was related to. There was a pattern we’d always follow. You meet with the bereaved family members who hired you. You express condolences on their loss. You’re gentle, friendly but not over-familiar. I work for a company that does these, so someone else was responsible for setting the percentage we take, doing the marketing, signing the contract; it’s just my job to satisfy the customer by getting the best price possible for their loved one’s stuff, while making sure no one in the family feels slighted because some favorite knickknack got sold instead of given to them like their mom promised.

I always begin by walking around in the house, taking pictures of everything. Often, the person who owned the house had been sick for some time, and the house smells… not bad, exactly, but it smells like sick old people. Often, cats have peed on a good bit of it. I’ve been in the homes of hoarders, where rooms are stacked to the top with old magazines and newspapers the deceased couldn’t bear to throw out. It’s a little weird, walking through someone else’s life, but I’m professional about it and I try not to speculate on the life I’m observing, even in my own head. Then I catalogue all the photos in a spreadsheet and make sure that the family members all get a chance to see it and point out what they want to take, even before I price anything. Once they’ve done that, I work on getting pricing. Often someone will come back after I’ve priced things and tell me they wanted a specific item, they forgot about it or they didn’t see it in the sheet. They come back during pricing often enough that I know this isn’t always motivated by money… but sometimes, they just coincidentally remember that their grandfather left them this particular piece of fine art that’s worth a few thousand, or whatever. I always check that against the will, first, and then against whichever family members are closest, who hired me. The children, usually. The siblings, sometimes. In some heartbreaking cases, it’s the parents, who outlived their own child.

Grandma picked me to do her house because I’m the only family member with experience doing estate sales, and I’m generally very professional. But walking around in Grandma’s house, every little stupid object with a history I remember, and the afterimage of Grandma everywhere… I broke down a few times. I didn’t know if I could do this.

I was so glad there wasn’t anyone here to see me crying.

I’d made the mistake of going to the Kids’ House first, number 23. When I was little, my parents lived in the same city as Grandma, as many of the family did, and sent me over here for babysitting, so I spent a lot of time in the Kids’ House. Later after we moved, we still came here four or five times a year. The basement was a playroom for kids to run around in. There were some huge dollhouses, large enough for a Barbie doll, and some smaller ones that were more works of art, that only the older children and adults were allowed to touch. First floor had the game room, where there were board games and three different televisions hooked up to every video game console that had ever existed. Grandma actually had a Colecovision. I was going to have to test if it even worked.

On the same floor we had the huge dining room with the enormous child-height table, the high chairs and booster chairs and children’s seats still ranged around it like Grandma was expecting guests with children. 23 also had a working kitchen; most of the family’s food was prepared in 25, but 23 had a fridge full of healthy snacks and bottled water, a pantry and a breadbox full of not-so-healthy snacks, canned food on shelves, and a stove with every childproofing technology known to man. Kids were encouraged to learn to cook for themselves. There were children’s cookbooks on a shelf, and a TV hooked to a computer that had nothing on it but cooking videos, and links to cooking videos online.

I wondered if it had usually looked like this when we weren’t here. For obvious reasons, I’d never seen what the house looked like when Grandma hadn’t prepared for child guests. There used to be milk, chocolate milk, apple juice, and sometimes for a rare treat even soda in the fridge. None of that now, just water. There were no handmade brownies or cookies on the platter with the glass lid, no fruit in the fruit bowl with the bug net over it. Carrots and celery in the fridge, and jars of jam and jelly, but no peaches, no pre-made salads with plastic wrap over the bowls. The breadbox had a loaf in it, but it was wheat bread, which most of us had always refused to eat. Grandma didn’t do pure white bread, but she usually had multi-grain and potato bread and honey wheat, as well as the wheat bread and the weird options like pumpernickel and sourdough. None of that was in there. And the wheat bread had gone stale.

On the second floor, we had the TV room, separate from the game room; that was on the second floor and had probably been a master bedroom, once. We also had the Baby Room, with cribs, and the Toddler Room, with the baby gate to lock them in there so they couldn’t get down the stairs. I held it together until I got to the Toddler Room, and then I started bawling. The kids who had last visited Grandma who’d stayed in this room wouldn’t even remember her.

I got a piece of tissue paper from the Toddler Room bathroom, and a bottle of water from downstairs, and got myself under control. Then I went back up, to the bedrooms. They were practically Spartan compared to the rest of the house; I thought that would be a good way to ease myself into it.

“Compared to the rest of the house”, however, turned out to be the operative word. Each room had bunk beds – sometimes two sets – with nice sheets, nothing ever branded with commercial characters, fluffy blankets, and a few dressers, bookcases, and bins for toys. The bookcases were stuffed with children’s books. The dressers were completely covered with kid-friendly decorations, and some that weren’t such a great idea for kids, like ceramic statues as music boxes. Inside the dressers and closets, there were clothes of every size. The rooms tended to be themed, with gender markers in the toys and the colors. Bright rainbow colors on a room with dollhouses. Deep blue ocean colors and murals of monstrous sea creatures on a room full of action figures. Some rooms had no clear gender, devoted to books and art supplies and board games, painted in light blues or neutral yellows.

Why had Grandma supplied us so many clothes? These clothes weren’t for us to take home, they were to stay here for cousins who needed them. Sometimes kids stayed with Grandma for extended periods of time – maybe because a sibling was sick, maybe because there was upheaval in their homes. Sometimes, cousins brought friends to Grandma’s, and the friends stayed for weirdly long periods of time even after the cousins went home. Some of those then kept showing up every Thanksgiving as new cousins.

So many clothes. All of them smelled like Grandma’s laundry detergent.

I was old enough that none of these had been my toys or my clothes. Grandma swapped out the toys and clothes to stay on top of fashion and children’s interests. Even things like board games got replaced with newer editions of the board game in question. There had been videotapes and small TVs with VCRs in these rooms when I was coming here, and I remember heated discussions with my other female cousins as to which of us would room together in which room, based mostly on which videos we wanted to watch, or wouldn’t be caught dead watching. Those were gone now. Instead there were laptops, one on each bed. Most of the kids brought their own, but if you didn’t have one, you’d have one at Grandma’s house.

The thought occurred to me that Grandma must have been fabulously wealthy to be able to afford things like this. New toys and games every few years. Every game console there had ever been, and televisions to go with them. Clothes for any and all possible grandkids. Laptops.

My uncle, the executor of Grandma’s will, had said that once I’d sold everything on behalf of the estate, then all of the money would be divided among all the family members. Including Grandma’s existing liquid money. Everyone was waiting on me to get this done.

It took me three hours to get through house 23, taking pictures of everything, and 23 was the simplest one because it was set up for kids. I had over a thousand pictures of separate items to price, and then sell at estate sale or online auction.

This was gonna take forever.

***

I met my cousin Vanessa while we were staying together at 23, when we were both around 8.

I mean, I’d seen her before; she was my age and she was at every Thanksgiving, just like me. But there were enough kids running around at every Thanksgiving that I didn’t even know all of their names, and I’m not sure if I knew Vanessa’s before the year I was 8. That year, we were put in the same room together, and something clicked.

We went exploring together. When you’re 8, something the size of Grandma’s house is a mountain, or Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea’s journey to the West Coast. It’s a major league undertaking to explore it. Some rooms connect to other rooms with a door, without going through the hallway, and some have secret passages that go to other rooms. There are closets nearly as deep as a room in themselves. Almost every bedroom has its own bathroom, but you can’t explore the bathrooms if there’s someone asleep in the bedroom, so you have to explore over multiple days to actually get every room.

We spent four nights at Grandma’s, as usual. Wednesday was always the night to travel to Grandma’s, after school. Vanessa’s family lived closer, so she’d been the first one in the room. We’d been given the Boat Room, a two-kid bedroom where the beds were themed as boats, the furniture and decorations were all nautical, and the walls were painted ocean blue, with fish and seaweed and coral painted onto the walls as a mural. When I’d arrived, late, and dropped my bags on the bed that was left, Vanessa said casually, “I’ve been playing Nintendo for two hours and I’m bored. Wanna go explore?”

“I just got here,” I said. “I want to go to the kitchen and get some food. We had McDonalds, like, five hours ago.”

“I’d like a snack.”

Vanessa accompanied me to the Children’s Kitchen, where I got a roast beef sandwich and some handmade chocolate chip cookies, and Vanessa got juice, celery, and a peanut butter dip in a ramekin. While I was eating – you were not supposed to take food back to your room – Vanessa told me that she found a swimming pool. It was November, of course, and I’d somehow managed to never get here during the summer, so I – and presumably Vanessa – had not known about the swimming pool.

If there was a swimming pool we’d never encountered before, what else might there be? After my long drive, I was tired but also restless from having to sit still so long, so I agreed to go exploring with Vanessa.

I don’t think we successfully managed to get the whole place that visit; it might have been another couple of years. Vanessa got her parents to hold her 9th birthday party for her at Grandma’s house, and invite all the cousins close in age; her birthday was in July, so this was her clever plan to get access to the swimming pool. That visit, we spent too much time in the pool to explore much. Exploration resumed that November, and then Grandma had us come back over winter break so she could hand out presents. I got a Sega Genesis and a Sonic game. Vanessa got some Mario game, I don’t remember what. So we didn’t explore much that Christmas either. It took until our 10th Thanksgiving for us to finally finish filling in the notebooks we were using to track our progress, though since we had started that the previous year, it’s entirely possible that places our notebooks said we’d never hit were actually places we’d gotten to that first year, and we’d just forgotten.

Vanessa and I exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and we spent a lot of time writing letters. Less time on the phone, at least until long distance charges stopped being a thing, but we tried to call each other once a week or so, given parental interference in the matter of the phone bill. We were best friends. She crocheted me a doll. I wasn’t crafty enough to make her a present like that, so I scoured toy stores until I finally found a stuffed animal that wasn’t a bear. (Seems odd now, but in that decade it was genuinely hard to find stuffed animals that weren’t bears.) When we were teenagers, we talked about school and classmates and our romantic lives. We met up for Vanessa’s birthday at Grandma’s, every year, and Christmas (an event to which only families containing children under 18 were invited), and one year I managed to get my February birthday at Grandma’s. We made up names together for the hypothetical babies we would have, and talked about buying a house together when we were adults, and our husbands would just have to suck it up because we would insist on living together.

This did not happen.

I don’t know when Vanessa and I drifted apart. Maybe college. Maybe when she got married at 23 to a guy with an annoying laugh. I went to her baby shower a year later, but not the one two years later for the second baby. By then I understood that my life was going to be different. I had no desire to have kids, and I was never going to get married. Gay marriage was on the radar then, as a thing the community was working toward achieving, but I had a good career I was moving ahead in, and friends, and I didn’t think I’d ever want the level of being tied to another person that marriage represented.

Vanessa and I didn’t have any angry, angsty falling out; we still see each other on Facebook and comment on each other’s posts, perfectly civil, like we were nothing but cousins who see each other at Thanksgiving, because that’s all we are now. And as I was remembering it, I realized, I don’t know when that happened, or how. We just got busy, and we didn’t have much in common anymore.

***

25 had the Kitchens. This was the area that fed the majority of the people, at Thanksgiving and other large gatherings. Nearly the entire first floor of 25 of was a kitchen, and there was another kitchen in the basement, plus a pantry. There’s a dumbwaiter in the basement that goes up to the first floor kitchen, and a passage at the back of the house that goes over to the dining hall in 29, bypassing 27 entirely. (It doesn’t actually bypass 27, it still runs through that house. It’s just that you can’t get into it from 27.)

The first floor kitchen was all stainless steel and granite countertops. I remember a time when all the appliances in here were white, and then black, before the stainless steel came in. All of Grandma’s cooking pots and pans were either cast iron or stainless steel. There were knives in blocks, modern kitchen appliances like food processors and blenders, a microwave oven, and a bread maker that was still in its box. I couldn’t help laughing, imagining Grandma’s expression upon realizing someone was suggesting she use a bread maker rather than knead her own dough and bake it herself. The waffle iron had seen a lot of use, though.

I went down into the basement, where the pantry – the size of one of the smaller bedrooms – and the basement kitchen were. The basement kitchen was used when someone had an allergy, so there wouldn’t be cross-contamination. I remember seeing Grandma directing a few adults in scrubbing the basement kitchen so she could cook for the vegans and the people with dairy allergies, after she’d already made food for the nut allergy people.

There were four chest freezers and a tall freezer down here in the basement, and three refrigerators. A lot of meat in the freezers, as if Grandma kept it stocked with entire cows, pigs and sheep on a regular basis. There were three turkeys and a dozen large roaster chickens. A lot of very large whole fish. I’m no fish expert, so I couldn’t tell what kinds they were; I just wrote down “fish” in my notebook and noted how many there were, and approximate sizes.

All the food was making me hungry, but it felt almost sacriligeous to cook in Grandma’s kitchen, without her permission. I used my phone to find a local Asian fusion place and ordered myself delivery food.

Grandma had cooked food from all over the planet. It had been impossible to figure out her ethnicity based on her cooking style or her choice of cuisines; Thanksgiving dinner itself had always been the traditional American turkey and sides. Usually two turkeys, a ham and maybe some other large roast like a goose or a pot roast. But the rest of the holiday’s dinners could have been Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Indian, Peruvian, Nigerian, anything. Not usually Northern Europe, she said there was no spice in their food, and no taste. Grandma liked her spicy food, though there was always something on her table that family with more mild taste buds could handle. I’d tried a curry she’d made one time when I was little, and had to chug an entire glass of milk after one bite. Everyone had laughed, and I felt ashamed.

“Don’t worry about it,” Grandma had said. Her voice was never gentle. Everything she said was barked or shouted or growled. But we just accepted that that was Grandma. If she was actually mad, she’d let us know. “Mighty dragons start out as little cubs out of the egg, after all. Try something that spicy once a year, maybe once every few months, and it’ll get easier. Or eat a little bit of hot with your food every day, and a little bit more, and a little bit more, and you’ll get there.” I still haven’t. I was here for Grandma’s Easter celebration earlier this year, and she had enchiladas, ranging from mild to super hot. I’d taken a bite of the super hot, but ended up eating the medium. Super hot was still too hot for me.

By the time the food arrived, I’d finished cataloguing the kitchen, so I took a break to eat, and then onward. In 25, the second floor has color themes and then the rest of the floors are themed for old celebrities. So we had the Olive Room, the Lavender Room and the Orange Room – all foods as well as colors, and the lamps had glass shades with colored bits showing off the plant the room was named for – and then rooms like the Elvis Room, Sinatra, Monroe, The Beatles… Grandma’s interests were all over the 20th century as well, because she’d also had Teddy Roosevelt and Ozzy Osbourne themed rooms. That was quite a spread.

When I was in my twenties, I’d brought my first real girlfriend to Thanksgiving one time. Most of the younger folks did; Grandma fed the plus-ones same as the rest of us. We had the Ozzy Osbourne room, which my girlfriend thought was hilarious. Posters on the wall, photographs, a Funko Pop of Ozzy, album covers. Also a train-on-tracks decoration on the dresser and a Marvel action figure of Iron Man. I didn’t want to tell Grandma that that wasn’t the Iron Man the song was about, because she’d have asked then who was it about, and I wouldn’t have known.

We’d been making out, our tops off, her skirt racked up, my pants unbuttoned, when there was a loud knocking at the door, which repeated when we tried to ignore it in hopes that it would go away. And then there was my mother’s voice, calling my name.

After frantically getting dressed as quickly as possible, I opened the door a crack, expecting some kind of emergency. No. The house was full of dogs, because several of my relatives had brought their dogs, and my mom wanted me to go to the Lounges and cover all of the sofas with chairs so the dogs wouldn’t climb on them overnight.

That girlfriend wasn’t back the next Thanksgiving, but I tell the story at family gatherings now with teens and twenty-somethings, to great horrified hilarity.

The Ozzy room was nearly the same as I remembered it from that night. There were a lot of actual vinyl albums hanging on the walls now, and some newer reprints of photos, and the inserts to the DVDs of “The Osbournes”, but the Funko Pop figure and the train were still there. Iron Man had been replaced with a small iron sculpture of a man. I took it. There are advantages to being the one your grandmother picked to catalog all her stuff and run her estate sale.

I’d been at this for eight hours and only gotten two houses done. It was a good thing the estate was paying me; if I was doing this as a volunteer, I probably would miss so much work I wouldn’t make my rent.

***

I turned up the heat the next day. I know why the thermostat was set so low, but it was just wrong for Grandma’s house to be cold.

Today was 27’s turn. This house was our main entrance. There was a large, open foyer – I think this was the kind they call a lawyer foyer, extremely fancy and open, with a wide spiral staircase going up to the second floor. We called the first floor and the basement “The Lounges”, because that’s what all the rooms were dedicated to. The basement was a man-cave sort of room, finished, dark paneling, no windows, a pool table and a cribbage board, and fat vinyl armchairs and sofas strewn about, surrounding coffee tables. At least one of the coffee tables was one of those chessboard tables with the chess and checkers pieces hiding in a drawer underneath. There was no television, though. This was a game room, not a TV room.

Upstairs we had the piano room (which also had a couple of guitars and a trombone) and the art deco lounge. Then most of the back of the house was taken up by the TV room. I’d never seen it showing anything other than sports. Even when we kids had begged to be able to use the big TV to watch Disney movies on videotape, none of the grownup men had been willing to relent and give up any of their precious sports. The day after that, Grandma had gone out and bought us a big TV; before that the TV in the children’s room had been a normal CRT. She replaced it with a projection TV – flat screen televisions didn’t exist yet – that was bigger than the one in the TV room. At one point one of the uncles came over to the kids’ TV room and complained that our TV was bigger. Grandma apparently heard of the complaint, even though she wasn’t there in the room, and came to chew him out. “You think you’re better than them? You think because you lived more years, you have a job, you think you’re entitled to have things that are better than theirs, all the time?”

“It’s wasted on them,” my uncle – I forget which one, there are a whole grouping of them of similar age who all look pretty similar, and I always confuse their names – said. “They were fine with a regular TV. They all have good vision!” He wasn’t old enough to have old-age related vision problems. “Kids don’t need fancy things, they like the regular things just fine.”

“You men wouldn’t let them have the main television to watch a movie, because you wanted to watch sports commentary. The game was over. So they get a bigger TV than you to teach you a lesson. You don’t treat my grandchildren like crap.”

I was going to point out that he was wrong about the vision thing; I’d learned by then that older people tend to get farsighted as they got older, which meant they couldn’t see things that were close up anymore without glasses, but children who are nearsighted often don’t get diagnosed until late elementary school, because they don’t know that the blurs they’re seeing aren’t what everyone else sees. And nearsighted people need big TVs a lot more than farsighted people do. I didn’t have a chance, because Grandma shooed him away. She always used to tell me not to complicate my arguments anyway. “If they say something that’s not true while they’re in the middle of making a stupid argument, you don’t need to tell them that the thing they said wasn’t true. That makes it sound like their stupid argument would make sense if the thing was true. Just tell them their argument is stupid. And why. Or don’t. Sometimes they don’t deserve to know why.”

The TV room took up almost all of the back of the house, but there was a narrow extension of the hallway that went all the way to the back, up a ramp, to a door. That led to the Decks. Plural; on the first floor the deck stretched over to 33, but it had two additional decks above it on the second and third floors, and the third floor deck was technically multiple. It ran from 27 to 29, skipped 31, and was back on 33. The second floor deck actually only went to 31; if you wanted to get to the deck on 33 you took the spiral staircase on the first floor 33 deck. There used to be a rope ladder from the second floor deck at 31 to the third floor at 33, but I think Grandma was convinced to get rid of it in the late 00’s, in case one of her grandkids fell off it and broke something.

Not much on the Decks, though. Patio furniture with covers over it. I had to take off the covers to take pictures. A fancy grill, probably only about 5 years old, on the first floor of 29. It was out at the edge furthest from the houses, and the second and third floor decks weren't quite as wide, so the smoke would miss them… usually. Some plants in pots. None of the games or lawn toys appeared to be out here; they might be in storage under the deck.

Someone had removed the volleyball net from the lawn. I'd have to go down there to assess the lawn features, but later. I could see the pond filters were still running, but from here I couldn't see if there were any fish. The parts I could see of the pool were covered in tarp.

A long time ago there was a really elaborate treehouse. That was long gone. The swingset of my childhood had been replaced with one of those kid playsets of wood and plastic, with foam cushion underneath, sometime in the 00’s. I'd have to check Grandma's records and hope she noted down the purchase, or kept the receipt. The age would be important in determining the resale value.

I remembered so much about these decks, that lawn. The trees, most of which were still here. The fish pond. The swimming pool partly under the decks. Me and my cousins running around here screaming, because kids always scream when they play outside.

All gone now. All going away forever.

I don’t have kids, don't plan to, so why was this hitting me so hard? The nieces and nephews (technically, cousins, but our standard practice was, everyone a generation younger than you or more was a niece or nephew) who were children now… I hardly know them. Some of my favorite cousins, their children, I know pretty well, but this emotional reaction seemed extreme.

I went back inside. Time to do the rest of 27.

***

Upstairs we had Music, Movies and Dancing for themes, then colors, then Famous Writers, Sculpture and Animation. There was a whole fine arts theme going on the second and fourth floors, which begged the question why the third floor was Purple, Green and Yellow.

When I was in my late 20s, I was hanging out with a 14 year old nephew, technically cousin. It wasn’t just me and him, but I was the one rooming in Animation Room that visit, and he was the one who said he wanted to see it. So I went over there with him, and we ran into Grandma on the way. Grandma, being a very nosy person, asked what we were doing, I told her, and she came with us.

Then she spent the next hour telling us all about the different styles of animation that the pictures and objects in the room came from or represented. Steamboat Willie. Rubber-hose style. Looney Tunes. Claymation. Ralph Bakshi. At the time I didn’t pay a lot of attention, because animation isn’t really a thing I care about much, then or now. Evan – that was my cousin – was blown away. He wouldn’t stop talking about it all weekend long. Now he’s in his 20’s, making animated shorts on Youtube, and he and some friends are apparently trying to make a pilot episode for an animated series.

I envy him a little, although I’m making a lot more money than he probably ever will without exceedingly good luck. I didn’t get into estate sales because it called to me or I was obsessed with it. I applied for a million different jobs, like most of late Gen X/early Millennials, because there were online job application systems and it was so much easier than going around in person or even calling various offices. A few interviewed me, and the one that sounded most interesting was the estate sale business. You have to be fairly good with people – compassionate and patient, because they’re grieving, and because the matter of a dead family member’s estate is something that raises a lot of emotions in a lot of people – and you have to be detail oriented, and good at math, and willing to do what I was doing right now, systematically going through a house and recording everything. When I got started, we wrote descriptions down in notebooks. Now that I use a phone to take pictures, I can barely remember how we managed that.

It's important work. The things that families owned, the things that the dead pass down to their loved ones, those carry memories. They’re representations of the times spent with the one who’s now gone. Or they’re representations of one’s own past, now gone forever, the way the past always is. Things are never just things. They always represent emotions. Sometimes the emotion is ennui, or the mild aching emptiness of the absence of emotion – when people buy things they don’t really want to assuage some lack in their lives, all those things carry are memories of the lack. Sometimes the emotion is bewilderment or even betrayal, like when the dead’s estate turns out to contain things that throw into question the living’s understanding of their loved one, such as evidence of a long lost child or an affair in the past or papers that indicate employment as a spy. But they are always emotions, and it’s important to tune into what the survivors are feeling about the stuff I catalogue, price and sell… or don’t sell, because sometimes a survivor says “oh, that old thing, yeah, sell it,” but you can tell that either they don’t mean it, or some other family member has emotions attached to that thing, and they want to keep it.

So I care about my work, and I’m good at it, but it’s not my passion. I’ve never been sure what my passion actually is. I’ve loved my girlfriends, but never enough to make them the center focus of my life, which is probably why I don’t have one right now. I was into alternative fashion for a while, until I found my look, the pantsuit lesbian, and now I just buy clothes that fit that and I don’t really go outside that zone. There were times in my past when I collected things, when I was deeply emotionally invested in them, but nothing I acquire nowadays has much of any emotion attached to it, so I’m something of a minimalist in my personal life now. Two storage units full of memorabilia from my childhood that I can never let go of, things my girlfriends left behind when they left me, stuff I owned in college… but my apartment looks barely lived in, like a model from a magazine about Less Is More Living. Evan loves his animation. What do I love?

***

After I’d catalogued all the bedrooms, it was time to do 29. I did it upside down this time. There was a door between 27 and 29 on the fourth floor. When we broke this up into multiple units, we would be going to have to bar all those doors. It wouldn’t be enough to put locks on them; total strangers will be living in them. We would have to wall them up.

That made me very sad, but honestly all of this did. I was grateful no one was here to see me. The constant on-the-verge-of-tears look would play holy hell with my rep as the one who was always strong, always cool, helpful and friendly and compassionate but never with weaknesses of her own. That wasn’t just my professional rep; it was what I showed my friends and girlfriends as well, the way I wanted to be, and it was bad enough how my feelings about Grandma’s house were wrecking that image to myself. I couldn’t bear letting anyone else see that image being destroyed.

Maybe Grandma herself. She was the only one I could ever imagine deliberately letting myself be weak with. Even my parents – ever since I went to college, I’ve tried my best to never upset them or make them unhappy by letting them know I’m suffering. Grandma was the only one who loved me enough to care if I was hurting, while being strong enough to take it. But Grandma was gone.

The top floor here had some of the weirdest rooms – Jewelry was fairly normal, but then there was Figurines, and The Majesty of the Law (we weren’t allowed to shorten it to either Law or Majesty), which was dedicated to politicians and judges. When I was something like eight or nine, my cousins and I used to sneak into the Figurines room to play with the figurines, which were mostly collectable toys and models with occasional ceramic statues. One time Grandma caught us and yelled at us; we were supposed to be in the Kids’ House, playing with the toys that were there for us. These, she said, were for looking at, not playing with.

I asked, “Aren’t they sad, with no one ever playing with them?”

In retrospect, this was a little bit of a strange sentiment, given that the movie Toy Story hadn’t come out yet. I don’t remember why I thought that toys wanted to be played with. Grandma took it perfectly seriously, though. “I play with them sometimes. They’re too fragile for kids, but when you’re as old as I am, you learn how to take care of things.”

Then she put on a little play for us, doing voices with different figurines. I actually don’t remember what it was about, I just remember we thought it was hilarious, watching our ancient, intimidating Grandma playing with toys the way we did, using them to tell stories.

The other floors’ rooms were more normal. The third floor had Stars, Moon, and Autumn, which sounds weird until you know that the second floor was Winter, Summer, Spring. Summer had a door that opened onto the second floor deck, above the swimming pool. Most of the pool was sheltered by the deck; it ran horizontally along 29 and 31, with a third of its width sticking out into the sunlight. You could get into the pool area from the basement level, or the first floor, or you could go down the stairs from this deck. I wanted to test the stairs, so I took them. They were still in good condition.

The pool was tarped, not drained. Grandma used to drain the pool in early November so the frost wouldn’t crack it. She hadn’t made it that far this year. Without the pool drained, I couldn’t inspect the condition, but I didn’t need to right away. I noted that we should have the pool drained so I could check it over, and I catalogued the pool toys and lawn furniture. Unlikely that they’d have any real value; I half expected they’d get thrown out, honestly.

A swimming pool with a tarp on it, in cool weather, looks so empty. It’s almost a liminal object, something that looks wrong, like it shouldn’t exist. Swimming pools exist in the late spring and summer. They should just vanish on the fall equinox, not to return until spring. Grandma had a pool heater, so we would generally start swimming in late April on nice days. By the end of June, the pool heater would go off, and then run most of September. We never went near the pool on Thanksgiving, obviously, but there were plenty of times we’d come up here in the summer. Sometimes the families would come up and then the kids would stay for two weeks while their parents went back home, back to work.

I remembered this area in summer, so many summers, crowded with all the kids in the water, most of the adults out on the pool deck or up above us on the regular decks, a handful – usually dads – in the water with us. I never understood why the moms didn’t want to come in the water. I still don’t really; when I grew up, I was one of the adults who’d play with the kids in the pool. One time, my parents and I came up in May, before school was out, and I remember being alone in the pool, floating on my back, looking at the sky. My parents and Grandma were on the pool deck, so I wasn’t truly alone, but when the water’s in your ears, all you can hear is your own heartbeat, and when you’re looking straight up, you don’t see the people to your sides.

It was peaceful. I’ve tried to get there again in public pools, but even though I can’t see or hear the other strangers in the pool, I know they’re there, and it’s not the same.

From the pool deck, I unlocked the gate from the pool area, and went out onto the lawn. Someone had set up the croquet hoops and never taken them down. I noted that; it was a potential hazard, but I wasn’t going to walk around pulling them up. The estate could pay for someone to do that. I inspected the children’s play structure and the fish pond. The fish were in there, but hiding until I showed up. Then they figured it was dinnertime and they all swam over to me. I felt bad for them, and decided to try to find the fish food. Turned out all of the pond stuff was down in the basement of 29, along with the changing rooms, the swimming pool accessories like the chlorine and the skimmers, and the showers. I went down the concrete stairs from the side of the swimming pool, catalogued the basement quickly, and brought the fish food up.

Big koi can sell for a lot. I photographed the fish as they ate. There were five, and they were large and looked healthy. Then I went back inside and up to the first floor.

The Dining Room, where all the adults ate at the holiday events, took up most of the first floor. There was also the Guitar Room, which I’d always thought was odd – why so many guitars? There were already some in the Piano Room, why another bunch of them here? – and the Salon, where smaller groups of adults would get together and talk. I never quite felt adult enough to join them, even when cousins my own age joined in.

It was late. I’d been at this all day. I should have stopped here, saved 31 for tomorrow… but I had 31, 33 and 35 yet to do. If I stopped now, I’d have three left.

I pushed onward, up the stairs to the fourth floor and through the door to 31. It was hard to get there any other way from where I was; I could have gone via the first floor or second floor deck, or go over to 27, go outside, in through 33’s door, and then go through the first floor door. But in 29 proper, there was only one door to 31, and it was on the fourth floor.

Up here, we had the Comedians Room, the Rock and Roll Room, and the Actors Room. My cousins and I would go in those room, look at the various pictures on the walls, and try to guess who was who; this was before the Internet was a significant thing. On the third floor, we had the Sweaters Room, the Shoes Room and the Hats Room. We used to try on the hats and show them off to our parents. There were dresses in the closet in most of those rooms; we’d try them on and put on makeup, badly, and high heeled shoes that didn’t remotely fit us, and show off to our parents. I did it to fit in, but sometimes I’d dig out a fedora or a snazzy suit, and put that on, and everyone would laugh. Grandma never laughed; she clapped for us.

I couldn’t do this.

The family had been there long before I was born. It couldn’t end in my lifetime.

All of this… I was going to sell all of this? To strangers? People who couldn’t care about the history, because they wouldn’t know? People who never played with these things, never danced in this ballroom, never ate at the table, never laughed here, never swam in the pool… I was going to divide this estate into separate houses, and no one who lived here would ever use the secret doors, and none of the family would ever come here again?

The Ballroom, down on the first floor of this house, where the family parties were held? I’d attended so many weddings and graduation parties there, and one or two funerals, and a celebration for a family member who’d been elected to some minor political office, and Grandma’s birthdays…

The library in 33, the books I’d always promised I would read once I was tall enough to reach, and then I never did, because there would always be time later…

The Princess Room in 33, and showing it to my new adopted cousin Jessie, joining the family at the age of 6, and how frightened and unsure she was, and how much I wanted to make her feel like she was part of something that would never abandon her, something that would protect her and shelter her and give her joy for the rest of her life…

Being a just-turned-teenager in the Boat Room and inviting a whole pile of younger cousins in to play sailors exploring, because I was a big teenager now and I didn’t need to play, but of course, it was only kind to play with the younger ones because they would like it. And never mind how much I secretly resented growing up and wanting to be a kid who could just play and not having to pretend I was above all that now, no, I was just doing it for them…

Listening to the beat of the music from the Ballroom from the Mountains room in 33, which was catty corner to it…

The Board Games room in 35, and the D&D set I’d put there myself, and running a game for the teenagers when I was in my 20s. The Billiards room, learning how to play pool because women playing pool were sexy in a competent, badass way and I wanted to be that.

All of this, I was supposed to sell it off? Me? The person with the two storage units of memories because nothing in my life right now compelled me as much as my own past? The person who did estate sales because the past was so important to people, because the things of the past were such a vital part of any family’s history, and family members deserved to have that treated with respect and care, and I was supposed to do that to my own past? The past for all the young cousins I played with and mentored and treated like brothers and sisters? The future for all the young kids now who would never have this?

For a moment, I thought, No. I’ll take it all for myself. Grandma’s will gave me the right to do whatever I thought was right with her property. So I’ll keep it. I’ll be the new family matriarch and I’ll share it with the family the same way Grandma did.

And then reality sank in. I was not a mysterious elderly figure of unknown age and origin who had always been there. I was 36, and half the family had known me as a child. I didn’t even have kids; I certainly hadn’t earned the right to be a family matriarch, either through raising children or through a lifetime of service to the family. They’d see it as a selfish property grab, not an attempt to keep the family together.

And did any of it really matter, since Grandma was gone anyway? No one could step into her role. All the older men and women of the family had their own lives, their own subset of the family where they were the elders. If anyone had ever been Grandma’s direct child, they were dead now; my grandmother had called Grandma “Grandma” the same as everyone else did, and so had my great-aunts and great-uncles, many of whom had technically been my Nan-nan’s cousins rather than siblings.

It could never be the same because the woman who had made it that way was gone, and owning her property couldn’t possibly make me into her.

I finished going through 31, dully, going through the motions. It was very, very late and my eyes were burning by the time I was done. Part of me wanted to keep going, right now when I was so tired that my emotions were numb, but I recognized that I was too exhausted to do a good job. The temptation to cut corners in the bedrooms, to maybe not photo every sweater, every piece of memorabilia in the Rock and Roll room or the Actors room, had been very strong, and I wasn’t going to be able to resist it if I kept going, and the family deserved better. Grandma deserved better.

***

I didn’t go back to the house the next day. I spent the day entering stuff into the database, looking up current price assessments and adding them to the records. I didn’t normally do the pricing at this stage, but I didn’t normally work with houses this incredibly big. Also staring into space thinking about Grandma and the rest of the family. I’d lost touch with most of them, so why did I feel so strongly about protecting all of this for them? Was I just being selfish, wanting to hold onto it for myself?

By the time I was done for the day, I was already at an assessment of slightly over a million, based on the resale value of everything I’d entered, and I’d only finished 23, barely starting on 25. And there was a lot more stuff in the rest of the houses that might actually be valuable. Kids’ toys don’t have a lot of resale value unless they’re collector’s items or there’s a lot of intense nostalgia for them. I wasn’t even counting the house itself, which in this neighborhood could probably go for half a million all by itself.

This whole thing was probably going to end up being something like 20 million dollars. Which is a lot, until you consider that it had to be divided amongst somewhere between 125-250 people. Individuals were all likely to end up with less than $100k. Not chump change by any means, but in today’s economy, not exactly fabulous wealth either.

Was all this work even worth it? To give all the family members an amount that wouldn’t cover a full four years of college, or buy a nice house in most places in the country without having to have a mortgage?

I was being hypocritical. Most of the estate sales I did resulted in similar or lesser sums if there were a good number of family members; only when there were few children or few grandchildren did anyone walk away with half a million. Also, I wasn’t considering Grandma’s wealth in banks and investments, which had to be substantial for her to have afforded all this. Yes, it was worth it. If the family couldn’t keep the properties and the possessions, at least they would probably all get a substantial amount of money. I doubted Grandma was a billionaire, but she had to have a few millions stashed away to have afforded all this, unless she had literally spent it all on the property and possessions, and somehow I doubted that.

That part wasn’t my concern. I wasn’t the executor of Grandma’s will or the accountant tracking down how much she had had in liquid assets and investments when she died. She had specifically named me as the one to assess her properties and possessions, and dispose of them in whatever way I thought was best for the family. Since my job was estate sales, we’d all assumed that meant she wanted me to run the estate sale and manage the sales of the properties.

Thoughts occurred to me as I worked, plans that would allow me to avoid breaking the properties up. The O Street Museum has a very similar deal going on, and they’re a museum and hotel, taking ticket fees to see the place and significantly larger fees to stay overnight. But they were also in DC, in an area of town where there were other attractions as well. Our home was in a city where most of the things tourists came to see were nowhere near us. Plus, I didn’t want to risk them suing us.

What if we made it some kind of shelter? Homeless teenagers, maybe? Mentally ill people who needed to get back on their feet after leaving a hospital?... no. I didn’t expect that people who generally hadn’t been treated with basic human respect would respect the property, and all of Grandma’s charity had been for her family members.

There simply weren’t that many applications in the world for seven townhomes linked together. I could sell it to some incredibly wealthy person, whole, but most incredibly wealthy people were assholes and it still didn’t solve the problem. I didn’t just want to keep the houses together. I wanted the family to continue to have access. I wanted this place to be what it had always been, and I kept running into the same incontrovertible problem. Grandma was dead. This place could never again be what it had always been.

***

My thoughts were dark when I went back to the mansion, and it was hard for me to work. I don’t do a lot of mansions this size, or have to catalogue quite this many knick-knacks and little things, so I was burning out from just the workload. But if this hadn’t been my family, I wouldn’t be pushing myself so hard. And if this hadn’t been my family, it wouldn’t be haunting me this badly.

There was no way I could get through the library on 33. I had to skip it and do it last; cataloguing so many books could take a day or two all by itself, and I feared I might end up losing time to trying to read them. There wasn’t much else on the first floor – the coat check, which was of course empty aside from a desk, a number of cubbies and a portable closet rod with hangers on it, and the room where the outdoor equipment was stored. Badminton sets, frisbees, sleds, a tire swing that I didn’t even remember ever having been up.

I started to head upstairs, and then I sat down on the stairs and cried.

“Grandma, what were you expecting me to do?” I said to the empty house. “What did you want me to do?”

The will hadn’t just said that I should do the estate sale. It said, specifically, that I should be the one to dispose of Grandma’s properties and possessions “in whatever way she thinks would be best for the family.” Uncle Paul, the executor of Grandma’s will, had assumed that meant she expected me to do an estate sale. It was my profession, after all. But then why had she said “whatever way” I thought best? Why make it ambiguous? What had she thought I should do, or what did she think I would do?

What alternative was there to just selling everything to strangers?

I got up, slowly, and continued upstairs to catalog the rooms.

It was tiring. Every room I entered had memories. I hadn’t stayed in all of them, but I’d been in them all at one point or another. Nearly everything I touched reminded me of something, and I wanted to pack it all away in boxes and put it in my storage unit.

What would any of this mean to strangers?

What would it mean to us that we’d never see it again?

Oh, many of the things would probably go to individual family members. Anyone who had a particular sentimental attachment to something would probably get it, unless there was a conflict. But never again would there be one place that had it all. Never again would there be one place the family could all come together…

…why not?

For the first time it occurred to me. What if there was a family trust, set up to manage the estate, with a board drawn from different generations and branches of the family?

If we didn’t sell anything, we wouldn’t make enough money to maintain the place. Grandma had never had hired help. The people who kept the house clean and in good repair were family members, repaying loans she’d given them, usually young people with more time than money. I’d never been in that position but several of my cousins had. It wasn’t something we thought of as bad or demeaning. If Grandma gave you money, to pay off your student loans or put a down payment on a house or help you buy a car, and you didn’t have the money to pay her back, you helped her out in return. We wouldn’t necessarily be able to do that on an ongoing basis. I didn’t know what access Uncle Paul would approve for the family trust to use Grandma’s money.

But AirBnB was a thing. We couldn’t be a hotel, there would be zoning issues, and permit requirements, and possibly renovations required in places… but we could absolutely rent out rooms via AirBnB when the family wasn’t using them. Or other such services, I knew there were some more traditional “rent your house out to vacationers” services in more touristy locations, and there might be something like that in this city. Also, Grandma’s parking lot counted as one of her properties, and we could absolutely continue to rent out parking spaces.

What if the Long Mansion remained family property? Where any of the objects here could be given away to family members who really wanted them, but most of them would remain here as décor? Where any family member who needed a place to stay could come, anytime, and we had scheduled events – like Thanksgiving, Christmas, the summer stay for the kids… And anytime the whole family wasn’t here, the rooms could be let out, via AirBnB or one of the services that did that kind of thing. And the proceeds would go to the upkeep of the house, and if there was any profit, it would be used to give out loans to family members, like Grandma used to.

There was no one matriarch – or patriarch – to step into Grandma’s shoes. But we could have a board. We could have elders who everyone respected, and representatives of all age groups. Including the children. I could see reserving a spot on the board for a teenager, and maybe even a ten year old.

I needed to talk to Uncle Paul.

***

Uncle Paul listened to me go on about my idea for some time, without saying anything. I was beginning to feel distinctly nervous about the whole thing, when he finally spoke. “Grandma thought you might come up with a suggestion like that,” he said.

“Wait. Grandma thought this was what I would do?”

“She mentioned a number of potential things she thought you might do, and she left you letters in case of each of them. I’ll email you the one for this idea.”

“Well, but, what do you think? You’re part of the family!”

“I’d be happy to serve on your board, if that’s what you want,” he said, which didn’t exactly answer my question, but it wasn’t much of a surprise to me. Whether because he was a lawyer or he was just that kind of person, Uncle Paul rarely gave a straightforward answer about what he thought.

“So you think it’s a good idea?” I persisted.

“I think it has some merit.” I knew that was the best I was going to get out of him. And I wanted to know what Grandma had thought. If she’d guessed this was something I might do, had she thought it was a good idea? Had she wanted me to proceed with it?

What if she hadn’t? What if she’d wanted me to go with the other plan, and sell everything, and divide the money amongst the family? Would I still do it?

I realized… yes. Yes, I would. Because if Grandma was dead, what she wanted no longer mattered. She wasn’t here. Whatever I did had to be for the sake of the living. And I felt sure that this was what the living needed. It was certainly what I needed. I couldn’t be the only one.

“Well, thanks,” I said. “I’ll be waiting to see what Grandma said. Are you snail mailing it?” I couldn’t imagine Grandma writing an email.

“It’s a scanned copy of a paper letter. I have the original in my office, here. I’ll email you the scan.”

***

Grandma’s handwriting looked like the kind of fancy cursive people had used in the 19th century. It was hard to read, but I sized up the scan as far as I could on my laptop monitor while still keeping the whole width of the page on screen, because I really hated bottom scrollbars.

“Dear Tara,

“If you are reading this, you’ve told your Uncle Paul that you are planning on keeping everything together for the sake of the family. Perhaps some kind of family trust, or perhaps you are giving it all to Paul or another to hold in my place. I hope you haven’t decided to try to keep it for yourself. I believe you’re more sensible than that.

“I set letters aside for different contingencies, but this is the one I thought you would most likely follow. You are too much like me. The old blood runs strong in you. I thought when I saw your apartment that I might be wrong—” wait, when had Grandma seen my apartment? I’d never seen Grandma leave her house – “but then you mentioned to me that everything you had owned in childhood and your younger adult years was in storage, and I knew what you were.” I remembered that. I’d been trying to feel Grandma out for whether I could store things in her attic or not. She’d told me that there was nothing in the attic but that I couldn’t store things there because there were bats and squirrels and the roof leaked.

For the first time, I wondered if that was actually true.

“My recommendation would be that you set up a family trust, but if you intend to hand it over to some member of the family to hold it for the rest, I do recommend Paul; he is impeccable. I chose him to execute this will for a reason, after all. And the others respect him. He’s old, though, and I don’t know how much of the old blood runs in him or how long he will live. A family trust is a better idea.” I felt bands around my chest untighten, and tears prick my eyes again. Grandma had the same idea I did. She believed my idea was a good one.

“Now, before you do anything else, go up to the attic. The way is sealed in every house but 35. In 35, go to the top floor, to the Fire room.” 35 was laid out slightly differently than the others; there were four rooms on the top floor, Earth, Wind, Water and Fire, all of them slightly smaller than the bedrooms on the other floors and in the other houses. Fire had a wooden stove. I’d stayed there several times, basking in it. “At the back of the closet there is a panel. Pull it aside and you will see a spiral staircase. From that you can reach all the attics. There’s more information waiting for you there.

Love, Grandma.”

So there was something hidden in the attic that she hadn’t wanted anyone to see. She must have told me about the bats and the squirrels so I wouldn’t think the attic was a safe place to put anything, and therefore wouldn’t ask how to get to it, or what was in it.

***

I did what she told me. It was a very clever trick. Making the rooms smaller and distorting the shape of the Fire room with the wood stove had hidden the fact that there was a narrow vertical passage, large enough for a human who was of medium or smaller size, unaccounted for in the floor plan. I suspected if I’d actually looked at the floor plan, the space would have been labeled as part of the chimney, or insulation, or something.

The spiral staircase went up to a trap door that rose. I pushed it open and went up and through.

The attic had no walls between the houses. There was a wall at the side of 35, which was actually the end of the block and the last house on the street, so of course there was a wall, and there was a wall I could barely make out in the dimness, all the way at the end of 23, but between the seven houses there was nothing but open space. At its highest it was only about five feet tall, so I had to bend over slightly to stand.

It was crammed full.

I don’t know how the floors didn’t cave in. She had literal chests full of gold and jewels up here. Big cedar hope chests stacked on top of each other. Instead of fiberglass insulation, there were piles and piles of blankets, and roughspun sacks that looked like they might have clothes or other cloth, pushed up against the eaves. There were china cabinets full of fragile things, packed in behind plastic milk crates full of books to the point where I could barely make out the china cabinet or what was behind its glass doors. There were narrow, very narrow, winding passageways between the stacks of things, so a slender person could get to everything, with difficulty and maybe some scraping against their arms.

At a wild guess, this would easily add several million to the total. So many of these things were old. Grandma didn’t have a lot of very old antiques downstairs; most of everything she had down there dated from 1920 or later. Some of this stuff might be over 200 years old. Plus, I couldn’t even begin to assess the chests of jewelry just from seeing the tops of them, and I didn’t know how many other enclosed chests there might be with gold and jewels in them.

There was a manila envelope hanging in a transparent plastic pouch, which was attached to a nail in the nearest support beam by a chain and a grommet, directly in front of a full-length antique mirror that wouldn’t have been out of place in an evil queen’s boudoir, telling her to kill Snow White. I went over there and removed the manila envelope, and opened it.

“Dearest Tara, the grandchild who carries the old blood more strongly than any I have seen so far, what is here in the attic is for you. Your legacy. I have taken all that I can carry already. It breaks my heart to part with it; I can yield it up only because I know you will care for it as I have.

“I am not dead. You may see me again, depending, but none of the rest of the family will, and that too breaks my heart. But a person in the United States cannot hold an identity over a century, and it is too hard to establish the new ones. I have spent twenty-seven years growing my new identity, because when I saw how you behaved toward your possessions, and toward your family, I hoped you would be what I believe you are, and everything I have seen of you since reinforces that belief. Except for that apartment. I don’t know how you bear to live in it. I know that you have had to move several times, and that you are often inviting girlfriends to live with you who then leave you, so I believe you are storing your possessions where you think they will be safer than your apartment, and perhaps also following the modern fashion because you believe that being what you truly want to be will frighten women away. Perhaps it will. It was more acceptable when I was young.

“I have spoken of the old blood more than once, and I am sure you don’t yet know what I’m talking about. Our kind surround ourselves with what we own. We are greedy, and yield nothing unless we must, for everything is precious to us. We live a very, very long time… and with the coming of electronic measures to verify identity, it becomes harder and harder to hide among humans. Perhaps by the time you need to do that, we won’t need to hide anymore, or perhaps we will have a better solution.

“Your father is descended from the old blood as well, so I thought you might be the one. We are rare. Most of my grandchildren have only my own blood, and your parents had only you, so you were my best hope. I am pleased to see you have shown all the signs. Even if you are just human, you have the correct attitude, and I am sure that if you age and end like a human, you will carefully arrange for the things I own and the things you own to be returned to the family.

“Things are not as important as family. You know this. Things are precious because they remind us of the things that are most precious. Family, and memories of family. The people you love, and the memories of those you love. There are humans who treat family as disposable, who can be cruel and write family out of their heart for not being what the humans want them to be. There are other humans who treat family as nothing but possessions, and those humans will lose those family, because people are never merely possessions. I lost family that way, in the past, by treating my family like things to own, not like people. In this era, and with the example I have tried to make from the lessons I have learned, I believe you will never have that problem.

“I know you do not intend to continue the bloodline. I know that someday, in the far future, you may change your mind, but if you do not, the family I created will be all the more precious to you. I know you have always treated the cousins of your own age as brothers and sisters, the cousins of the younger age as nieces and nephews, perhaps even your own children. They are the most precious thing you have. You may add a person you love, in the future, perhaps several. That only adds to the precious things you have. No person you love should ever try to separate you from what you already hold precious.

“I have been alive a very long time. I have held to precious things, as memories of who has not passed the years along with me. I cannot take any of them with me now, so care for them for me. You may sell any coins, precious stones, stamps, or pure gold or silver; those things no longer matter to me. They carry no memories, they only allow me to care for my things and my family. They are yours to use if you need money. Everything else, I beg you to hold to. Someday, I hope, I will be able to talk to you and tell you of the memories everything here holds.”

I put down the letter and looked around. Everything here had memories? This looked as if possibly twice, maybe even three times as many things were in here as were downstairs. How old was Grandma?

The letter went on. “You will find it hard to believe when I tell you of the old blood. Humans call us dragons. You imagine a monstrous beast with scales. We can be that, though in most of us, the blood has thinned enough that such a transformation is nearly impossible. We can breed with humans, and we look human, but we live far, far longer. I am five hundred years old and I am not old, though my human form seems so. It’s because I surrounded myself with grandchildren, and they saw me as old. Where I am now, in my new life, I appear young. You would barely recognize me, Tara.

“The same may happen to you someday. I think there is enough of the old blood in you that you will live a long, long time.

“I will try to come to you, sometime in the future, when your blood has proven itself, or not. Until then, I hope you understand. I am rebuilding a new life. Before long I will have a new family. I grieve the loss of the one I must leave behind, and hope that someday we will no longer need to hide what we are, and I will be able to rejoin you.

“Love forever, Grandma.”

I stared at the letter in disbelief. Dragons? Was this some kind of a joke? I actually didn’t find it hard to believe Grandma was immortal, or incredibly long-lived, when I was surrounded by so many antiquities, and with the evidence of three different legal identities I’d found in her purse as a child. But seriously, dragons?

I looked into the mirror. Grandma saw something in me I’d never seen in myself. Was it seriously evidence of dragon blood?

She’d said the transformation was “nearly impossible” for most of the ones she claimed had the “old blood.” Without any serious belief that anything would happen, I thought, as I stared into the mirror, What if I looked like a dragon?

And then stared, and stared harder.

My eyes were gold, without irises, and slitted. Like a cat. Or a reptile. Or a dragon.

Eventually they turned back to my normal brown, within an eyeblink.

I laboriously climbed back down the stairs. Setting up the family trust would take time, and persuasion, and probably arguments. I was going to let Uncle Paul know that the letter said Grandma agreed with me – I wasn’t going to say anything about the dragon thing, though. She hadn’t mentioned that in the letter she’d given him to scan and mail to me, only the one I found in the attic. I’d tell him I’d found a few antiques in the attic to add to the list.

My hands were itching to get back up there, to start going through everything there, cataloguing it, deciding what could be brought downstairs to be shared with the family, what could be sold to support the trust, what I wanted to keep hidden away until I saw Grandma again. But first things first. The family was the most important thing.

#52 project #reblogging the 52 #slice of life #takes a fantasy turn toward the end

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