Shane Petosa-Sigel
The monitor hummed softly as Bob ran his fingers across its sleek and luminescent face. Light projections of blue and green danced along the otherwise transparent surface of the glass as he scrolled and tapped, their soft ebbing glow reflecting in the dark windows of his eyes. Contrasting the faint light of the screen, a stronger fixture sat embedded in the wall to his right, set behind a thick pane of clouded glass. Its light was bright and warm, painting thick tones of orange and yellow all throughout the small room that were meant to imitate the hues of sunlight, as there were no windows in the space. The rays of artificial sun draped over the curves of the desk and down the slant of Bob’s back as he sat hunched over the glass monitor, his nose almost touching the screen as he worked. The workspace itself was clean, but cramped. It was a single-room area roughly the size of a standard cubicle, with just enough real-estate for Bob to stretch his legs out if he swiveled his chair and pointed out his toes to a particular direction under the desk. No other accessories lined the walls other than the false sun to the right, and a closed door that almost disappeared into the metal wall behind him, its edges blending in with the room’s contours. He was of course alone in the tightly packed space, not that anyone else could fit comfortably inside if he ever did have the company. He didn’t. If company meant any of the countless neighboring work pods that were stacked above and beside his own, then well, he didn’t know them either. He once waved to an accountant as they entered their work pods one morning, but he must’ve been bionic, because the man just clicked his eyes at Bob like camera lenses and disappeared into his cubicle without a wave back.
The pods, almost like thousands of bricks stacked together into a skyscraper sized wall, had phased out the use of recreational office buildings around the late 2090s, in an effort to “maximize efficiency by consolidating employees to each their own distraction free workplace”. Bob muttered the words to himself as he jabbed a bitter finger against his screen, making the monitor jolt backward towards the wall. He had been the lead architect on the closet-sized cubicles years ago, he just had never thought that he’d ever be subjected to working in his own design.. only now did he realize how difunctional they were on the inside. And what’s more, his pod sat on surface-level, the bottom of the heap, only a slim door between his miserable pod and the open clamor of the city center. He had designed the pods to be elegant and simplistic, yet every day Bob sat inside the cramped box that he designed, cursing his younger self for building his own prison. He thought about that a lot, the way he was back then, an eager architect set on changing the world. That man saw things that the light couldn’t catch. “What an idiot” Bob spat at his monitor. The jabs at his screen became progressively harder as he fought with himself inside the small box. Was it shrinking? “Maximizing efficiency..” the monitor scraped against the desk. He was yelling at himself now, his voice reverberating off the cold walls of the pod. “Distraction free workspace, give me a break Bob, it’s a fricken stackable coffin you adolescent piece of –” THUDNK.
Bob stopped rambling and looked up from the monitor, the warm light beside him flickered, causing a temporary seizure between night and day in the pod. He swiveled his chair around to face the door, there was a clatter like the sound of two marbles being thrown around, and a weighted muffle of something pressing up against the outside of the door. Bob stood out of his chair, his head a few inches from the ceiling. THNK. Was someone doing electrical work? There were no announcements he could recall of any pods being refurbished. THUKNK. There were only about two steps from his chair to the slender metal face of the door, but he took them slowly as he went to unlock the pod. As he set his thumb into the small pad on the edge of the frame, the door beeped and unlocked, and the weight stopped shifting against it. The door slid open only about three inches before stopping abruptly, jamming, but Bob could make out the shoulder and leg of an individual rummaging with the hardware outside the pod. “Hey pal, I didn’t request any electrical service, but whatever work you’re doing is messing up the –” Bob lost his train of thought as the figure shifted its weight, and two yellowed eyes darted up at him from behind the slim gap in the door. The eyes spoke. “Open th’door!” The words were quick and sharp, like they were anxious to leave his mouth, like they were short on time. “Open th’door, c’mon!” The eyes didn’t look threatening, not much. They looked desperate, of what though, Bob had no clue. He tried to make the eyes understand. “You uhm.. y-you did something to the wiring pal, the system is all electric. You have to fix whatever it was that you –” Bob was interrupted again by a gasp of frustration on the other end of the door, as a leather-skinned hand pushed its way between the gap and slid the door almost halfway open. The rest of the figure shot his way through the door with such vigor that Bob stumbled and fell back into his chair. The figure moved with such haste that Bob could only see him in a haze as he slammed the door shut again, the metal creaking from the force. As the door closed again, the electrical had another attack, and the lights shut off. Bob said nothing as the figure breathed heavily in the dark work pod, with only the faint light of the monitor illuminating his thick jointed legs.
As the artificial sunlight rebooted in the room, flickers of orange light uncovered pieces of the figure trying to regain its breath by the door. As the sunlight regained consistency, Bob flinched. This wasn’t at all what he was expecting.
—PART 2 STARTS HERE——————————————————–
As the electronic sunlight spastically flickered back to a consistency, Bob sat tightly crumpled into the back of his swivel-chair. His spine was uncomfortably contorted into the same harsh bend of the lower seat, but he didn’t dare to move, he kept his eyes on the figure that had just torn its way into the workpod. Opposite from where Bob was timidly backing up and riding his chair up against the brim of his desk, the intruder sat slumped against the other corner of the room. He was hunched over and seemed like he was almost sunk into the wall itself, pinned between the busted door to his left side, Bob’s right, and the harsh glow of the light fixture. The light casted warm glows over the stranger’s hunched shoulders and across his large right arm that draped a dark shadow over his face. They stayed like this for a while, or at least, what seemed to be a very long and uncomfortable quiet. It was like they were caught in a terrible in-between, like they were stuck in transit between two moments, and time itself was afraid to tread them on to whatever might be awaiting. The still and silence was only companion to the heavy breaths of the stranger still slumped in the corner, a steady rise and fall in his shoulders as he tried to regain breath from his rushed intrusion into the pod. Bob said nothing, he did nothing. The ache of his back against the swivel-chair was ignored as he stared at the face concealed behind the shadow of a leathery and muscular arm.
Maybe it was not too soon after the awkward and frightening silence had started, or maybe it had been several minutes, but Bob began to notice more about the intruder than just the leathery skin. Funny, how he was so used to his architecture inside that pod, that it was as if Bob was constructing the stranger himself, like one of his buildings, in the same time he saw the creature– Like he was a foreign and terrifying piece of art, each member of him painted in the exact instance it was being unveiled by the light. His shoulders, shown harshest in the light, were bulky and brutish. They were uncovered by a lack of sleeves, but Bob couldn’t make out if it was cause of a vest or some other clothing fault, because the stranger’s midsection was clothed only in shadow. The skin was, as he had noticed before, leathery and uneven. In some parts of his complexion where it had grown to be thicker in the shoulders and the crests around his elbows, there were scaly bumps and points on the skin, like the shallow hills on the face of a pineapple. As Bob looked on in silence upon this stranger, he noticed the definition in his muscles. Bob himself was a frail man, both from his natural physical stature and the strenuous environment of the pod he had practically lived in for so many years now, but from what he could see the stranger slouched in his workpod was built with a healthy roundness to his limbs. He was not in any way a weight champion like the Cosmi-Bowl freaks that were paraded on the city monitors, but Bob was no longer in shock that he had managed to force an industry-grade pod door to malfunction like he did. In fact, whatever species this creature was, Bob was surprised that the stranger didn’t manage to shear the door completely off the pod’s walls. He was more and more enthralled by the strangeness of the intruder, by the frightful beauty of his unfamiliarity to Bob, that he almost completely dismissed the terrifying way in which they were both stuck in the workpod together.
That was, until the stranger moved. It was an abrupt and groggy movement, as the stranger pushed with his legs and slid his back up the wall so that he was at an awkward half-hunched standing position. All the terror from the initial break-in came back to Bob now, as if he was so mesmerized by the ocean that he had completely forgotten about the unpredictability and danger of the waves. He backed away towards his desk in the swivel-chair once again.. had he been curiously inching closer to the creature during the silence? And then, as more of the intruder’s body was revealed as he had himself propped against the wall, Bob saw something. He saw the reason why the stranger had broken into his workpod, and why he was in such haste when he tore his way in. He saw why he had shrouded himself from the artificial light of the fixture, and why he heaved for breath unnaturally in the silent corner of the room, why those golden-yellow eyes winced as he stood. The creature’s left forearm and hand, which had previously been covered by shadow under his body, was now clearly slick and shiny with deep burgundy blood in the newfound light. The hand was pressed tight underneath where a human’s ribs would usually be, with various trails of blood winding down his stomach and the folds of his pants. The creature broke the silence, a crackle in his voice that Bob realized now had not been due to his species’ tongue.. he was spitting speckles of blood. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any bandages, eh pod-junkie?” The creature winced again as he said it, the yellowed eyes tensing up as he unclipped a blaster pistol from the left side of his belt, the metal coils of the barrel tainted in thick blood.
Smeagul Seagulʻs Bloggo 