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“Wakey wakey, sleepy dumbassy,” said a blessed, beautiful, annoyingly sharp voice.

“Mrgh,” said Cameron, and in being conscious enough to wish for sleep he knew that he’d already lost. “No.”
“You only have ten minutes.”
“Shit! Why?”
“Because you were so worn down last night you needed the extra time. Up and at ‘em.”
Cameron launched himself upright and into his clothing and into the kitchen and through a piece of toast with a nominal amount of egg attached to it and (resentfully) kissed Sophia’s cheek because she was right and annoying and he ran into the new day with such a jolt of adrenaline and purpose that he forgot his coffee until he’d taken his first step out the door, which made him miss it and nearly fall head over heel down another three more.

Thank fuck the start of his commute had a guardrail.

As it was, there went his left ankle, and there went the morning being smooth. Mournfully he thought of Sophia, but she’d already started on her own workday, left the house by her own set of steps, and her day wouldn’t converge for his for a long ways yet.

“Fuck,” he mumbled, and resigned himself to limping. Luckily his commute were relatively level here, and the steps were broad and smooth. Now and then it became so broad he crossed into public transit and shared shoulder to shoulder space with others, but then their paths diverged and Cameron was on his own little spiral downwards again, sore-footed already before he reached work.

Work, when he found it, was just like usual. Slightly uneven, oddly textured, and with a height between steps that was just barely inconsistent enough that you were never sure if you were imagining it. There were guardrails, and they were worn and thin and if you leaned against them they sagged in places you suspected they shouldn’t.

It was a typical white collar job, the kind Cameron’s father had railed against as sucking away his life in meaningless toil. Cameron didn’t disagree but he’d seen what’d happened to most of his friends and his brother Sean, who probably wouldn’t have killed Cameron to take his job but would’ve had to think twice about it first. Sean worked at a Wendy’s, and his steps there were so steep and crumbling that the day was a constant fight not to avoid falling but to avoid sliding.

It could be worse. Cameron and Sophie’s friend Janice wouldn’t say what her job actually was CALLED, but it was functionally a ladder without handholds.

“Cameron,” his boss called from his left, veering closer to him as their paths briefly helixed together. “Do this assignment.” And he threw some keyboards in front of Cameron and was carried out of sight once more.
This? This was peanuts by comparison. The trick was to step on the zeroes with your left foot, and the ones with your right foot. Or the other way around, if you preferred it the other way around. That way the only thing that could confuse you would be if you had to enter two zeroes or two ones in a row, because then you had to hop and if you weren’t careful you could lose your balance and start to fall.

Cameron’s left ankle politely reminded him it was there. Unrelatedly, he was very, very, very careful. Unrelated to THAT, he was also slow and had barely gotten anything done before lunch, blessed lunch, wondrous lunch roiled into view from out of the mist, broad as a mile and with a single long, well-worn rail for everyone to hold onto and lean against and shoot the shit about.

“I twisted my ankle this morning,” Cameron told his coworker whose name he would never ever remember or feel bad about forgetting.

“That’s too bad,” said the coworker thoughtfully. “Did you get your coffee?”
“Forgot it, missed the first step specifically because of that.”
“Bummer. I’m on meds for my anxiety, it helps.  I used to freak out real bad in the morning too, and you know how that always adds drop height.  Now my gradient’s way  gentler.”
“Oh. Nice.” There came the edge again already in the corner of his eye, with lunch passed in a moment of pure relief and a short conversation, the same as always. “See you later.”
“You too.”
And indeed, as Cameron departed down his afternoon shift, he saw the coworker’s own flight led – just briefly, just slightly – almost upwards.

Distracted by this, Cameron tripped on the first keyboard and fell down half of his next shift in a single ferocious instant, ruining his pants and scabbing his knees and cracking a very small hairline something—or–other his left forearm and sending a stray ‘q’ key flying off into the distance, where it beaned his boss in the noggin.

“You’re fired,” he called, low and sonorous. And just like that, Cameron’s day narrowed and deepened and shortened until every footfall had to be placed with the precision and care of a chess piece in the tail end of a six-hour game.

He was going home, at least. But at a pace and in a way he was unfamiliar with. He steered a little to one side and got some whiskey, and lo and behold, the discomfort was replaced with calm and things were wider again, the world was opening up in golden brown warmth. His foot, his arm, his knees, none of it was that bad anymore, and everything was going to be okay.

Then Cameron took a step, and the step was level because it wasn’t a step.

He blinked. Then he wiped his eyes. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on and looked around, and looked around, and looked around, and for the life of him he couldn’t see a single step. He was standing there, alone, on open, empty ground, stretching off to either side of him as far as he could see.

In the distance, someone was approaching.

“Hello?” called Cameron. But they were too far away to hear and didn’t respond when he waved.

Cameron shrugged and shuddered, and above and below him people descended onwards on their own days, on their own stairways, as far as he could crane his neck, and it was precisely when he was looking upwards as hard as he could as high as he could that the oncoming car reached him.

He was flattened. 

It is quiet out there now, as far as my instruments can determine. I could call for help if I dared, but I do not, and half-excuse myself with endless arguments as to how this is only common sense, and half-condemn myself with endless retorts that I merely present cowardice as prudence.

Underneath it all, I know the truth: I am the last. Which is fitting, since I was there at the first moment. I was there when Tenacious Vem broadcast the very latest innovation to an audience around the globe; I was there for the anticipation, the rumours, the thrill, and the disappointment when the cameras on the laboratory were activated and saw the project.

They were clumsy. Feeble. Pathetic. They could barely stand, could hardly process stimuli, could barely EXIST.

“These,” Tenacious Vem promised us, “are the future.”

One of them tried to pull itself upright, then fell over.
“Of what?” I asked – I myself, because at that time I was important, important enough to ask the stupid questions everyone else didn’t want to, which I thought made me very clever. “Comedy?”

“Everything,” said Tenacious Vem. “Everything we’ve had to do, they will do for us. They are a universal tool.”
The thing on the feed tried to haul itself up on its haunches again and failed again. This time it landed on its back, all limbs wriggling in alarm.

“Universal? Hardly. Maybe in a sealed environment,” suggested another observer – was it Worthwhile Mir? I think Worthwhile Mir was still active. Yes, I remember. “With minimal obstructions. They seem very rigid.”

The thing on the feed wriggled itself around one last time, surged upwards, and grasped the camera with its manipulator forelimbs, arresting its fall and leaving it upright, if wobbly. It witnessed nothing but a lens, but still the feeling of being known was quite disconcerting. Soft fumes ejected from its facial ports, and the monitoring equipment informed us that it was burning oxygen internally for fuel and emitting water vapour.

“They will learn,” said Tenacious Vem. “I promise this. They are biogenetic organisms, and they will serve us well.”

On the feed, the biogenetic let go of the camera and fell over again.

***

They were a joke for a long time. Hundreds of cycles passed before the first batches stopped their assembly process and became service-ready, by which time entire production lines of factory assemblers could have replicated themselves ad nauseum ad infinitum. We would all check in at Tenacious Vem’s lab output and mock and snipe and sneer and yet slow-moving though their expansion was, it was inexorable. A drip of carbon and water here and there made an extrusion of endoskeleton and integument there, slowly, erratically, inevitably. The blueprint this all followed was vague and torturously oblique; to properly analyze and break down the data took even an experienced database a frustrating amount of effort, and Tenacious Vem was loathe to tolerate an amateur opinion on its creations.

Then came the time when it said “they are ready,” and we weren’t ready, and lo. They were. Bigger than before, but still recognizably themselves – tetrapodal body shape, with the foremost limbs possessing grasping, dextrous manipulators. A memory and processing system bundled into the sensory hub as a glaring and non—dispersed weakpoint – that also cohabited with their fuel intake! The fuel system itself was diverse and adaptable – oh, its appetite for trash carbon and carbon waste products (particularly the waste from Tenacious Vem’s biogenetics facility) knew no bounds! – but it was wildly inefficient and needed to power down for what seemed like a quarter of its runtime, even when fully fuelled. They needed oxygen, and became distressed when it was absent, and they were tolerant of a shockingly narrow range of temperatures.

But oh, when their conditions were met, they thrived – as flexible and trainable and multi—usable as Tenacious Vem had ever argued, and although they were slow to build they were ASTOUNDINGLY cheap and miraculously decentralized. Even the most untrained of them could replicate multiple prototypes when left to their own devices, all without so much as a basic assembly plant. They sorted debris; they cleaned; they fit into small spaces; they carried equipment; they plugged in cables and disassembled old units and waited on our every command, provided they were given the ridiculous and repetitive sort of instruction that they craved.

Tenacious Vem had made its argument irrefutable again. This was generally agreed to be the greatest thing since spliced carbon nanotubing. Demand outstripped supply, but with sufficient resources the biogenetic organisms could replicate exponentially, and soon they could be found everywhere they were wanted, which was everywhere.

This was the moment when it was already too late.

***

There were so many of them, you see. Who could tell if there were a few more or less than there should be? Who could tell WHERE there were a few more or less? Who could tell where there weren’t? And if there were problems – little recurring maintenance issues in a foundry; a pattern of inefficient waste disposal at a laboratory – well, guess whose job it was to do something about it? Certainly not ours. They could do it. And if some of them went missing while the problem went away, and if the problem sometimes came back, who cared? Biogenetics were messy and inefficient and that’s what they were for.

We didn’t even know something was wrong when Tenacious Vem went offline. It had always been a more reckless than meticulous researcher, and this was not the first time contact had been lost from its facilities due to pushing a boundary that pushed back. But when its main server began to visibly collapse on public camera feeds – well. That warranted investigation.

They were living in it. They had torn up its wiring and made nests of it and they had placed those nests in its server rooms and they had taken down the memory drives and smashed them and they had scattered the pieces like worthless biogenetic waste and they saw the monitoring drone we sent in and fled from it with bared teeth and screams until several of the larger, braver ones leapt atop it and tore and stripped and gnawed until it came apart too, just like Tenacious Vem had.

THAT was when we knew something was wrong, and it was much too late. But to our credit, we did try.

***

They were nigh-invisible and nigh-indestructible as far as much of the electromagnetic spectrum was concerned, and they put out surprisingly little ambient heat. No wonder they had spread so far out of control before we saw anything. They were so useful and so ignorable and they were already everywhere (we had made it EASY for them to be everywhere they were so useful), so finding out how many of them existed that weren’t supposed to and where they were was impossible.

Especially as things kept failing. Our creations had always learned through imitation rather than direct data transfer – an amusing failing, one of those charming inefficiencies fundamental to their design – and as we realized the scope of the problem, we realized that the ‘properly behaved’ biogenetic organisms were now outnumbered by the ‘uncontrolled’ biogenetic organisms. And they were eager to learn from them.

Every factory, every foundry, every waste site; every laboratory; every service depot was filled with saboteurs, and there was no way to separate them from the maintenance crews. Wires were cut. Sensors were lost. Databanks were infested. We couldn’t talk to each other, couldn’t coordinate – it’s a terrible thing to be mute and deaf after centuries of automatic connection to everyone at all times. So we panicked, and we authorized extreme measures.

They didn’t work very well. An electromagnetic pulse is all well and good when you need to deactivate a drone; and a manufactured solar flare can sterilize the minds across a hemisphere; but well, that was when we learned about the nigh—indestructibility. We fell back on wild innovation – ballistic force, thermal overloading and sapping, anything that we’d seen them fall victim to in the past – but it’s slow, careful work to retrofit an entire planet to make it inhospitable to its own service tools, and time was not our ally.

We’d laughed at how long it took a single one of them to reach functional state. But how long does it take a chunk of ore to become a processor component? How long to turn that processor into part of a greater system? How many steps, and stages, and specialized sites and plants must be planned and built and operated and carefully maintained? Our maturities were rapid, but conditional on infrastructure – efficient, centralized, VULNERABLE infrastructure – in a way that our new enemies simply… weren’t. They bred in our assemblies, trod our manufacturing underfoot, deprived us of access to tools, to resources, to lifelines that took us from insensate minerals to networked perfection that had been laid down so carefully and so long ago that we’d forgotten they were capable of being destroyed at all.

Until they were.

***

We’ve died in whimpers, all of us. I listened to Mortified Lun broadcast for assistance until it went off the air, and by the end even it was tired of fighting.

I’m sealed behind so many hatches and so much plating that it would take an asteroid strike to get me out. I might have killed myself with this level of security, but I’d rather die that way than torn out like an old broken scrap of trash. Even running on minimal power, maximum quiet, I will run out someday. I sleep in the dark, blind and barely listening.

And yet even bereft of so much as a rudimentary graphical imaging device, I still am haunted by the memories of their structure. The round, grey body; the ring-patterned tail; and above all else, forever and ever until the guttural fragmentation of my data is complete, that fuzzy little bandit’s-masked face, bewhiskered and merciless.

That, and those damned grasping forelimbs.

The sea was sharp and ungrateful, and the rocks were much worse. But Rilla had her hands on the tiller and her eyes on the stars and the wind between her teeth, and that was all she needed.

Then the stars went out.

“What?” she asked, helpfully. She looked at the stars again: still gone. Also gone was her ability to see the tiller beneath her hand, her hand in front of her face, and the rock that slammed right through her hull.

“Fuck’s sake,” she mumbled, and then the mast fell on her.

***

Some time later, Rilla awoke in a bright new morning with three of her five lungs full of water and a nostril full of a seagull’s beak.

“Fnarf,” she expelled.

“Oh good!” said the seagull as it picked itself up and shook unspeakable droplets from its head. “You’re not dead! If you were, I’d have to eat you and my GOD you are made ENTIRELY of scars. Very obnoxious to peck.”
“What happened,” Rilla said, deciding to stick to the basics, “to the stars?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” said the seagull.

“They blinked out. Couldn’t see anything at all.”
“Oh,” said the seagull. “That’s the light house!”
“It’s one word. Lighthouse.”
“Not this one! There’s a wizard up the coast, he made a house that keeps light inside it. A good few leagues across or so is its reach, and its grasp is absolute. No light? No seeing anything.”
Rilla closed her eyes again, in the hopes this would make everything more sensible. Instead, she just saw last night. “I liked that boat.”
“Really sorry to hear that,” said the seagull helpfully.

“Tell me: exactly how… wizard… is this wizard?”
“A few years back he made me talk so he could ask me what day of the week it was.”
“Great.” She ground her palms into her forehead and breathed in so hard her gills creaked. The most wizard she’d ever had to deal with was a fresh apprentice out on the town, still new enough to be reasonable. He’d turned the bar’s water into wine and wine into water and the bartender into a crayfish before she broke his legs. “Great. Great great great. Well. Guess I’d better go deal with this then.”
“If you could, that’d be swell. Don’t get me wrong, the light house DOES keep me pretty well fed what with shipwrecks and such, but my best nest was there and I can’t find it.”

“I don’t suppose you can help me, can you.”
“What kind of help would you like?”
“A magic sword.”
“I’ve got a very nearly not broken plank!”
“Invincible armour.”
“There’s some tattered and filthy rags trapped under your left hand. I think they were your shirt!”

“A goddamned drink.”
“I found a cracked bottle behind that rock. Empty though. Sorry!”
“Thanks for helping,” said Rilla. She dredged up the last of her resolve, then when that didn’t work, remembered how much she’d liked her boat. That got her upright.

“Seagull. One last thing.”
“Shoot.”

“What day of the week is it, anyways?”
“Tuesday the fourteenth,” said the seagull promptly.

“Thanks,” said Rilla.

And she started putting her feet down and hoping they ended up in front of each other eventually.

***

The light house boundary was invisible, but its effects weren’t subtle. One moment you were cracking along without a care in the world, the next you were elbow deep in an absence of illumination so profound that the inside of a geode would blink. For the second time, Rilla couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but she took heart from her inability to wreck a ship she didn’t own, and pressed onwards guided by the smell of salt and bird shit; the rise and fall of the surf’s roar; the crunch and crackle of sand and stone under her scaly feet; the wind’s steady, unrelenting sharpness.

An invisible amount of time later — while keeping a careful distance from the increasingly-distant crash and roar of the surf against what her ears told her was a pretty tall cliff on her right – she found the wizard’s tower, which her nose determined to be crafted of finely-cut granite, obviously quarried at a great distance and brought here at some significant expense of magical power or money, where it had crushed her cartilage against her bone quite cleanly.

“FUCK!” she shouted.

“You shouldn’t say that,” admonished a voice from the tower that sounded something between quiet and querulous. “It’s quiet time.”
Rilla wiped the blood off her face. “You the wizard?”
“Yes,” said the wizard. “And I was enjoying quiet time. Monday morning is quiet time, and since you’ve interrupted me I will have to turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea. AGAIN. This keeps happening! It happens all the time!”
“It’s Tuesday,” said Rilla.

“Oh. Which one?”
“The fourteenth.”

“Well then, you might as well come in.”

A few awkward minutes later, he added “door’s to the left.”
“Thanks.”

The doorknob was simple and rough beneath her hand, but it did shiver in an unwholesome manner, and seemed to contract when she turned it. Then it opened and Rilla was inside the wizard’s tower, insulated from the distant sound of waves by thick stone walls and what smelled like an open sewer crossed with a library supply office. There was an undertone of rotting fish, and memories of better days and better meals swallowed her whole for a single and utterly self-pitying second.

“Welcome to my unhumble abode!” said the wizard. The voice seemed to be moving around her, but the pace was unsteady – every syllable came from a new corner. “Are you here to slay me?”
“No,” Rilla lied carefully. This was, as far as she knew, the smartest thing you could do with a wizard under any and all circumstances. They wouldn’t take anything you said reasonably, so you might as well say whatever seems most helpful at any given moment, unrestricted by reality. Fight fire with fire.

“Oh good, that would just be the stone whistle again.” A faint noise came that sounded like rats rustling through fallen leaves; it made Rilla’s hackles rise. “What’s the other reason, the other reason everyone comes here…are you here to complain about something?”
“No,” said Rilla, with utmost delicacy.

“Wonderful. No stone whistle. Then there is but one remaining option: are you here to be my apprentice?”
“I guess? Sure. Absolutely.”
“Stone whistle! Wait, you are? Oh.”
“Definitely.”
“Then you must act as an apprentice must,” said the wizard regally, and Rilla heard the rustling again and realized it was fingers thoughtfully combing through wizardly beard. “An apprentice must do as the master bids to prove themselves willing to learn before they are given anything to learn, that’s just common sense. Make me a sandwich. Cheddar mustard salt pork EXTRA mustard please, on rye. And do it in ten seconds or I’ll turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea. Onetwothreefourfive.”
“Here,” said Rilla without thinking enough to panic, and she held out the board.

“Oh, perfect!” said the wizard, and a fell, frail wind gently ghosted across her knuckles as the board was yanked from them. “Delicious. Wonderful. Ah! Ow. Mmm. Bit prickly. I think I have splinters in my lips.”
“The rye looked a little stale.”

“Blasphemous lies! Ow ow ow. Yes, those are splinters. I’d best not whistle for a little bit. Ooooooohouch. I was going to clean up today. You’d better do that for me. Clean every room on every floor of the tower, and don’t knock anything over or move anything or touch anything or breathe too hard or too moistly. Should take about five minutes. If it doesn’t take five minutes, you’ll have to wait a few days for me to turn you into a stone with my whistle and drop you into the sea.”

The wind blew by again – cold, like old meat. Rilla stood there, probably alone, trying to decide if the sweat running down the back of her neck was from fear or from fury, then shook her head and mopped her brow down with her filthy rags.

She looked around, eyes useless and straining. Her ears caught the clink and groan and clatter of a horde of fragile glass instruments; the mutter and rustle of a draft running through the pages of innumerable overcrammed bookshelves, and the furtive zoom of a mouse scavenging a discarded meal from a lost plate. Something hissed; either boiling liquid, escaping gas, or seething animal.

That was one room. Who knew how tall the tower was.

“Finished,” she said, and held her hands out, rags-upwards.

“Oh, really? That wasn’t five minutes. I wanted it done in five minutes, but mostly I just wanted you to fail horribly so I could do the stone whistle. I miss that whistle so. I learned it from my grandfather. He was-”

“I’ve used up these cleaning rags doing it,” said Rilla. “See?”
The cold little breeze swept her palms clean again. “Oh. So you did, so you have. Well, that’s awkward. But maybe this is good! Maybe this is good. You see, I need you to find something for me! Someone put splinters in my lips and now I can’t whistle to turn them into a stone and throw them into the sea.”

Rilla bit her tongue, removing what felt like a good few millimetres of it.

“But I just need a little pinch of bottled sunlight and they’ll heal right up again. Good for your lips, sunlight is. I left it somewhere in the glass-maze. Could you find me that bottle right now?”
“Here,” said Rilla, holding up her cracked bottle.

“Aha! Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you wait. This is EMPTY! There’s no light left! I’ll have to get more from the light house.”
“Could I hear more about that?” asked Rilla.

“Oh of course not. It’s far too dangerous and fragile and clever for a clumsy ol’ apprentice. Why, it’s secured with sixteen different knots, all of them not real! You need to pull them all out widdershins while whispering to yourself. Like this. See?”
“Not really,” said Rilla.

“Of course you don’t, you’re an apprentice. Then you need to infasten the unzippper and roil the gate. See?”
“I can’t quite manage to,” said Rilla.

“Hsst! Pay closer attention! Then I hook this to that and that to this and disarm this little spring—spear with my finger – my LITTLEST finger, you understand! – and it’s all safe and ready. See?”
“Completely incapable of that.”
The wizard gave a little shriek of frustration, and Rilla heard the tip-tap dog-on-a-hardwood-floor scrabble of him dancing in angst. Something fragile fell over and shattered into shards of…glass? Wood? Bone? “Oh, you brainless, soulless apprentice! Listen! If you can’t keep anything else in your head, remember this: NEVER. EVER. OPEN. THE LIGHT HOUSE.”
“How do I do that?”
“You don’t do that!”
“How do I don’t do that?”

“Like this,” said the wizard promptly, and he turned the light house inside-out and dumped nine-hundred-and-three days-worth of sunshine directly into his own face.

***

This time the gull was on Rilla’s chest.

“Hello again,” it said. “Feeling better?”
“Much,” she said. “But I don’t think I fixed anything.”

“Your eyes are shut.”

“Oh,” she said. And she opened them and yes, that was a lot better. There was a lot of shattered stone and wood and glass, and sky, and a sunset, and the moon faintly hanging in the last of the blue. And a twinkle on the horizon that could be the very first of the stars coming out.

 “Tell me something, gull,” she said. “Do you know where any of the less-rotted shipwrecks are around here?”
“Probably! What’s in it for me?”
She pointed. “There’s probably cheddar, mustard, salt pork and rye inside that shattered cupboard over there.”
“Sold!

There was a lot to do, and Rilla couldn’t imagine having the strength to sit up, let alone start. She had the first and most brutal sunburn she’d ever experienced. Her limbs and felt like they weighed a ton apiece; her eyelids, sixteen tons.

But she didn’t want to close them in the slightest.

Breakfast was hard for Manny. He couldn’t get a hold of himself, particularly his arms. They kept falling off, and each time he reattached them they migrated steadily farther down his torso.

“What next?” he asked himself.

“Coffee,” he replied.

“Right. Yes. Good. Yes. We have none.”
“No! We get it from someone else.”
“Excellent,” he said. And then he walked out the door, only forgetting his keys, wallet, glasses, hair, nose, and shoes, one after the other, which he returned to with increasing slowness and frustration. By the end he was making noises like a cross kettle, which continued all the way down the street and up to the very doorway of the coffee store.

“I won’t say anything weird,” he told himself.
“Right. Be certain not to do that.”
“I will.”

“Keep it short and simple.”
“Right.”
“Do you need a moment?” asked the barista, who was wearing the face of someone earning the absolute hell out of their paycheque.

“I do.”
“No I don’t. One of those things please.”
“And a little too much sugar,” he added, with a friendly wink of his knee.
“Please.”
“Don’t even TALK to me without it! That is a joke I am telling you.”

The coffee was produced and very gently and very VERY casually placed on the counter. “Cash or card?”
“Wallet!” said Manny.

“Coming right up!” he replied. 

“Here it is!” he finished, and dumped half a pocket on the counter, containing one wallet three dimes a ten-dollar bill an expired Blockbuster Video gift card and his arm.

***

“Work will be fine,” Manny told himself. “It’ll be fine. Just focus on the job in front of me.”
“But I didn’t get my coffee,” he mourned. “People will talk to me without my having had my coffee.”
“That’s alright, it’s a thing people say that doesn’t mean anything, don’t worry about it. And I think I said it wrong.”
“Did I?”
“I’m pretty sure we did.”
“How?”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t know.”
Manny hyperventilated for a minute or two then slapped himself around the torso head and limbs with some of his other pieces. “It’s okay,” he reminded himself. “It’s alright. It’s not the end of the world. Everyone messes up. There are people worse off than me. All we have to do is get through the day, and it’s a good day, a good job, a good thing we do, that we like, that we’re trained for. This is what our life is.”
“Move these boxes over to the back room,” said the shift supervisor.

“I don’t know how,” said Manny.

“Why?”
“I don’t know which boxes you mean when you say ‘those,’ because it seems obvious they could be the ones in this pile but I suspect I don’t understand the basic operations of this building and fear you refer to things that are common matter-of-fact knowledge that I have somehow completely avoided learning of. I don’t know which back room you refer to, since I can imagine half this building being back rooms and trying to deduce which room is most likely to be referred to requires knowledge of your psychology I do not possess and am terrified to guess at. I don’t know the last place the dolly was left in, and I’m sure that lacking this information is a sign of terrible and omnipresent flaws in my most basic psychology. I don’t know how to communicate any of these problems to you without you looking at me in ways that fill me with the most ancient fear of the deeply unknown.”
The shift supervisor looked at Manny.

“That is the way you are looking at me right now,” explained Manny, painting a big friendly smile across both of his wrists to show happiness and good intentions.

“I said too much and did too little.”
“Or said too little and did too much. Being terse and overzealous was the problem with the coffee.”
“No, it was definitely too much explaining and not enough action this time.”

“I’ll pick up a box and ask where he wants it.”
Manny picked up the box.

“Where do you want it?” he asked.

The shift supervisor fled.

“Wrong grip,” Manny said. “The opposable digits are on the HANDS, remember?”
“Oh NO.”

“That certainly didn’t help,” he added, “but I think the biggest problem there was that the digits are the things on the LIMBS.”
“What am I using then?”
“Ribs.”

“Oh NO, oh NO.”

***

Manny was having a great time.

“I am having a great time,” he told himself. “I am looking at this thing in my hand, and it has all the information in the world in it, and in my other hand I have a beverage, but NOT coffee, and that means I’m having a great time right now. I am simultaneously extroverting and introverting. I am mesoverting. My verting is medianalized. I am having a blast. People see me and want to be like me and be with me.”
“I maybe should be doing this at an establishment.”
“I wanted a quiet night in.”
“Then maybe I should be doing this at my home.”
“This is a compromise.”
“This is the parking lot of my workplace.”

Manny looked around.

“So it is, but so what? I have company AND privacy, and I share pre-existing interests with my peers.”
“Everyone has gone home but me and the shift supervisor.”
“He’s getting friends.”
“He’s calling the police.”
“Why? I’ve done nothing wrong. Is picking things up with your ribs a crime?”
“I don’t think it’s a crime, but I think it’s bad if you drink in the company parking lot.”
“I brought this beverage on my own and made it myself from myself.”
“Nonetheless.”

“Fine, fine, fine.” Manny’s shoulders slumped. “Final grade?”
“I think two out of five.”
“Be fair!” scolded Manny, ducking his head down and scowling.
“Two out of six then. More room for improvement.”
“That’s right. That’s right. That’s right,” Manny reckoned. One shoulder slumped too far and fell off altogether. “I’ve got time, right?”

“Nothing but.”
“Same time tomorrow morning?”
“And don’t stay up all night.”
Manny sighed and broke apart into his constituent fauna for the evening. “Geez,” he muttered to himself as he skulked back into the woods on hundreds and thousands and pairs and dozens and zeroes of little legs. “Thanks, MOM.”