Shane Petosa-Sigel
Eng. 204-A
The Light Behind The Eyes
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. The sound came again. 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 vague 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 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 as if 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 across 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.
—PART 3 STARTS HERE——————————————————–
The question drifted emptily past Bob’s ears as he stared almost unconsciously at the gun, his eyes wide and his hands tightly gripping to the armrests of his chair. He didn’t speak, it was like his brain had hit a conscious lapse to try and regroup. The stranger adjusted his weight against the opposite wall, easing the tension bearing down on his midsection, and crooking his head to peer at Bob with those yellowed eyes. “Yʻhear me? Eh?” The stranger leaned a bit forward and lightly prodded Bob’s shoulder with the front nose of his blaster pistol, a small peck from the tip of the gun’s beak that woke Bob out of his startled coma. Bob spoke with a quiet and feverish mumble, “I-Iʻm sorry?” he said. “Bandages, poddie.. you got any?” The stranger winced again through the injury under his left side as he spoke. Bob got out of his chair for the first time since the silence before, slowly, and with a bit of pain as he finally straightened out his back from the arch of his swivel-chair. With both upright in the tiny pod, the two were only about a foot apart from each other. Bob saw now that even as the stranger was hunched against the wall, he was a smidge taller than the average man. His slit-like nostrils were still just about level with Bob’s eyes, shooting out heavy crackling breaths into Bob’s face as he gasped through the pain in his side. The stranger’s breath smelt like sulfur and metal, probably due to the blood he was spitting between words. “Yes, I uh, there’s a kit here…” Bob turned slightly, raising his arm behind himself towards a small squarish-shaped crease on the face of the pod’s left side wall. With another press off his thumb into a small pad, like such at the frame of the door, there was a small dignified beep and the rectangular crease emerged outward from the wall an inch or so. Bob used the new hold to pull the compartment the rest of the way out of the wall and, though he had not fully put his back to the stranger during this time, turned around towards him again from the wall and placed the detached compartment on the floor in front of them. “All pods are fitted with medical parcels in the uh, the event of unexpected damage to oc-occupants…” Bob said the phrase awkwardly from memory while he moved his chair and sat on the floor beside the medical compartment. He hated the words as he said them, remembering again how naïve he was back when he first designed the pods; how everything was designed for efficiency of work, not of well-being. The corporations who commissioned for the designs only wanted the medical parcels installed so that they would never lose production due to the distraction of a failing body. Anything to keep from a loss of efficiency.
The stranger hissed out in pain as he slid his body back down the corner wall to join Bob on the floor of the pod. Bob wouldn’t make eye contact with him though, his gaze sporadically switched between the contents of the medical capsule and the blood that was dripping off the chamber of the gun. The stranger noticed it. “You” he said to Bob, startling him. His voice popped in and out though the blood. “You going to make any trouble, poddie?” “W-What?” Bob shook as he eyed the soft glint of the light fixture off the blaster’s nose. “Are yʻgoing to make,” the stranger grunted past the pain “..any trouble?” There was a short but sharp silence in the room. Bob thought about the frightening question, although physically, there wasn’t much at all to think about. He clearly wouldn’t win any fight against a species like the whatever the stranger was. Hell, he knew he was an unworthy opponent to even his own species. Bob was frail, he was like a skeleton, a ghost of the man he once was so many years ago, like the suffocation of his spirit inside this tomb he built was somehow consequently starving his physical body as well through the years. But though the stranger had done nothing but terrify him since he forced his way into the fragile eggshell of his life in the workpod, Bob still remembered those eyes. The yellow, almost reptilian eyes that first glared at him through the gap in his door. Those eyes were frenzied with fear and disparity, those eyes were the same as he saw in the stranger now, as he slowly bled small crimson lakes of blood on the floor in front of him. “No.” Bob spoke softly. “No trouble.”
There was another quick silence, as the stranger seemed to be debating the stakes to himself as well. “Well then,” he said slowly, in a gruff cackle of breath, “if you keep right on that, then thʻiron here isn’t for you.” He slowly rolled this leathery thumb across a switch near the hammer of the blaster, which made a faint wisp of sound like air releasing from a kettle as a small light on the side of the barrel dimmed, and the gun’s firing mechanism disengaged. The stranger lowered the weapon away from Bob, even slower, as he stowed it back again under the shadow cast beneath his bleeding midsection. He kept his eyes on Bob the whole time he did it, hesitating almost, but both men released a quiet sigh of relief when the gun was finally put away. It was as if, though he had the capacity, the stranger was as reluctant to have the gun go off as Bob was. The two shared a subtle and dismissed comfort for the first time, as Bob finally began removing items from the medical compartment that had been sitting patiently on the floor between them. Bob took a small package of out of the parcel marked “SMART GAUZE” in large red letters. Not only did he have zero medical experience, but Bob had never even seen the contents of the medical capsules before, as he had only designed the compartment and mechanism it was carried in. As he had remembered before, there really was no emphasis of importance ever put on those things when he was asked to design the pods. As he unclipped the seal of the package with blind effort, five small strips of light-blue gauze slipped out and onto the floor, each about the size and length of a short belt. Likewise to the placement of a belt’s buckle, a thin sliver of rounded glass lined the edge of one of the short ends of each bandage. Puzzled, Bob looked up at the stranger, who shared his confusion as he patiently bled out in the corner of the workpod. As he leaned over towards the stranger, the artificial sunlight of the walled fixture revealed the hole in his side, a small orifice slowly oozing a steady flow of blood. “What is this? Why are you here?” Bob said, cautiously placing a gauze lining on the strangers wound, the cloth’s surface turning to adhesive and gripping onto the rough skin. He grunted and looked away, gazing out towards the light fixture in the wall to his right. “…Shot.” Bob paused. “What does that mean?” He pressed on the question as he pressed another bandage strip on, this one with a bit more weight. The trim of glass on the end of the gauze beeped and lit up with a soft green light. “Not everybody in thʻcity gets a cubicle, poddie. Not all electric lights for us. Some of us run analog. Some of us get dirty.” Bob didn’t know what he meant, but he stayed quiet this time. “Thʻworld where my people came from was greeted by your kind like others, eh? Inter-planetary voyagers to find new worlds, and meet new beings. Many species from other worlds live among you Humans now, but my kind wasn’t met with hospitality… They saw us, our skin, our eyes…” His voice trailed off. The room turned silent again for a moment, the only sound the crackle of blood in his throat as he breathed in and out. Then the stranger spoke up again, taking a deep breath before to relieve the pressure on his wound. “I never saw my planet, poddie…” He said it softly to Bob, like it was a terrible secret he wished not to tell. “..Never saw my world with my own eyes, just heard thʻstories. I was born here, on your planet, after my people had been taken away from their own. Was raised in the engines of your cities and taught your language. I’ve never known my own tongue. An outsider to my own kind, poddie. An outsider to my own…” Bob had almost finished dressing the wound, though it had been a slow process, as his attention was mostly invested into the stranger’s words. “I still don’t understand, how were you shot, and why did you break into my workpod?” He raised his voice with a bit more intensity. “Why are you here?!” “I’M TRYING TʻGET OUT OF HERE!” The stranger’s voice echoed over Bob’s with a reverberating snarl.
The pod was briefly silent once more, as the two sat on the floor, frozen with intensity. The stranger then fessed up, his voice almost trying to recoup from the strain the shout left on his injuries. “I was shot… was shot by a guard at thʻCredit Depository Bank, thʻone down at thʻother end of city center. Me and twelve others of my kind, we were going tʻget thʻmoney for transport back to our planet… back to thʻhome we’ve never seen.” Bob sat across from the stranger, still and silent in disbelief, or was it shock? He thought about how now, this pod was home to two men who filled the walls with cries for escape. This pod seemed to be prison for more men than himself now, and Bob was unsure whether or not that made him feel less alone, or more so. Bob was about to open his mouth to respond when all of a sudden, the light fixture in the pod started to flicked abruptly once again as it had at the initial break-in. As the artificial sunlight died out once more, nothing remained to illuminate the cramped pod but the faint glow of Bob’s monitor, still atop his desk. From the crippled door to the pod, there seemed to be a rummaging of sound, and muffled tones of unknown movement from outside. The stranger, his leathered face and rigid features carved out by the light of the monitor, straightened up a bit from his slumped posture in the corner. His eyes seemed to glow in the darkness, like tiny bulbs darting at the door, like he was aware of more than Bob could gather. Then the stranger spoke. He spoke not with the speed or desperate intensity as he had in that first moment outside the pod door, what seemed like an eternity ago. He spoke in a calm and concentrated tone, his grizzly voice crackling soft words to Bob, like he knew what was happening. What’s more, the stranger seemed to have accepted something that Bob hadn’t even realized was happening yet. “I want tʻthank you” the stranger began, “for everything you’ve done for me, but I’d like you to do one more thing, if yʻcan…” “What’s going on? What is it?” Bob asked, confused and a bit stressed, bouncing his attention back and forth between the strange sounds conspiring outside the door, and the trivial words of the stranger. “I want you to forgive me, for all thʻpain I’ve cause you, if yʻcan find that in you.” “What are you talking about?” Bob didn’t understand. The sounds behind the door became louder. “I want you to know,” the stranger stared into Bob with his yellow eyes, deep like veins of gold, “your life deserves more than this pl– -”
Maybe Bob could have stopped it. Maybe, he thought, in the infinitesimal split-second of time that it was already happening, he could have moved in front of it. Maybe he could have acted, in some way, as a barrier between. But even as he lifted his hand out to stop it, in that brief snapshot of unconscious hesitation from the most innate parts of his being, he froze. And then, it was done. The shot had been fired straight through the door of the workpod, leaving a molten hole in the metal that let into the room the first real sunlight Bob had seen in a long time. Dust and flakes of burnt metal danced in the newfound sunshine as it showered down a single beam of light into the dark room, and like a spotlight, guided a trail of new light upon the crater that lay smoking inside of the stranger’s chest. Bob stared at the body in silence, watching the synapses of muscle slowly melt from the afterheat of the shot, as he realized solemnly that there was no way he could have stopped its path in the slightest. As the two bionic officers pried open the rest of the door, the small pod was flooded with more unfamiliar sunlight. Bob noticed that despite the tunnel of crisped flesh that was burning through the center of his chest, the strangers’ arms were outstretched with leathery palms facing up, and a content look of peace lay rested in his face. Bob stood up from the floor of the trashed pod, and carried the corpse out of the doorway, the stranger’s head resting limp on Bob’s chest. The officers paid no attention to either Bob or the man whom they had massacred, they only clicked their eyes diligently around the interior of the workpod, in order to ensure that no important corporation property had been damaged. As Bob stood in the city center, a matte of dried blood on his sleeves, and a friend in his arms, he knew that two men had died in that pod that day. His body had not changed, yet, in the deep windows of his once cold eyes, a new light now resided as Bob stared out at the sunrise peeking out among the buildings.
The End
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