| The Pocket Universe Office |
[Mar. 11th, 2008|05:31 am] |
I can't remember my "infraction" or whatever it was that landed me here-- something about time travel, I think. Time travel is always trouble.
"Time Out" is an empty, inky void of a universe. There are no stars. I'm not sure what the atmosphere is or how the local physics work but for whatever reason the feeling is of somehow not being weightless but at the same time not being able to touch the floor. Needless to say, this is tremendously disorienting.
Also odd: your eyes never adjust to the dark. I know this because when the sliver of light abruptly opens up in front of my face I am not blinded in the least. Or perhaps the lighting in the Office of Extropic Affairs really is as bad as its employees say.
The Office of Extropic Affairs exists in little patches here and there-- it is not a centralized building, as this would render its services impossible. To process the some thirty million sophonts per year who are discharged from their respective realities they need to be everywhere, and everywhen, at once.
My patch is tiny, perhaps six rooms. The waiting room is actually the smallest. It's also where the door is. Remember that part about not being weightless? Comes in real handy stepping through that door, let me tell you.
This isn't my first time at the Office of Extropic Affairs, but it is my first time at this branch. I can't remember when exactly my last time was but this is all quite familiar.
"Fill this out," says a squat man in his forties, handing me a clipboard. I start filling the form out. There are a lot of fields with "if you don't know what that is, don't bother" written under them in small writing. I don't fill out much of the form.
"The thing I don't get," I say to nobody in particular, "is, what IS all that outside?"
"What, that," the squat man opens the door again and for the first time I notice there's a faint howling to the blackness, "it's nothing. More or less literally." He closes the door again, never once showing the slightest indication of surprise or alarm at the howling void. He sees it all the time. I hand him my form.
A scrawny, acne-scarred youth in oversized spectacles waddles in under the weight of a heavy cardboard box-file with folder tabs, each with little shoddily handwritten names on them. The youth, I think his name is Dennis, sets down his burden and accepts my clipboard from the squat man, who has added a few stamps and checkmarks to it.
Dennis picks through the box-file with his chewed-short fingernails and in a single, practiced motion opens the clipboard, pulls the top sheet off, and slides the remaining carbon-papered forms into the file box. He hands the top sheet to the squat man and waddles back to the filing room.
The squat man puts my topsheet into a binder and sits down next to me in one of the three seats immediately adjacent that door to the howling void. "Let's see what we got here," he says with no serious emotional attachment, perhaps as one might say when flipping over a stone at the beach. His eyes narrow a bit as they pass over my records, "Ah," he says, faint disgust rising in his tone, "an adventurer."
"Hey, I'm not an adventurer," I protest, "I'm a scientist!"
"Tomato, toh-mah-to," says the squat man dismissively. "You're a digger. And diggers are always hard to satisfy."
I'm actually a little heartened by that. "My satisfaction is a goal here?"
"Well, the goal is to keep you out of the hair of certain extropic entities and down in levels of reality you're equipped to handle."
"Oh," I say, any hopefulness quashed. This seems to satisfy the squat man.
"I'll have you talk to Bretta. She's better at dealing with adventurers."
"Or scientists."
I get only a derisive snort in reply. The squat man fiddles with his office phone for a bit. I hear one end of a conversation: "Got an adventurer here. ... Yeah. ... Fine." The squat man hangs up and sits down. Before I can ask him what's been decided, a female voice beckons me out of the waiting area and through a short paper-file-crowded hallway into a marginally less claustrophobic office area. Awaiting me is a woman of mixed African and European descent who regards me with the warmest emotion I've felt in this place yet: pity.
"So I guess you're wondering-- what is this place?"
This is the first time curiosity has been acknowledged as a possible reaction to this place, so I nod eagerly.
"Well it's more or less nowhere." Bretta (I assume this is Bretta, anyway) strides over to the window. The window is more or less a mirror due to the darkness outside. Bretta slides it open, showing off the same blackness I'd met at the doorway. And that same howling, perhaps even louder than before. "This office is an illusion, Allan. We're your case workers and so to you we appear as you'd expect case workers to appear."
"Okay... so... all the paper files? They're just-- representations of the others who've been here? As I'd imagine them?"
"Right."
"And in reality, we're all still floating in the void right now, in empty blackness."
"Right again."
"Okay, wow, so... the kid with the filing papers-- he doesn't really keep all that stuff in his head, right? There's some kind of apparatus allowing all this to happen, right?"
Bretta only smiles.
"So what now," I ask, not really remembering what had been done about my presence the last time I was here.
"Well, we could put you back where you came from or we could put you somewhere else. It doesn't really matter to the brass upstairs where you end up so long as it's, shall we say, a lateral move."
"Somewhere else," I echo. "Is that, like, anywhere of my choosing?"
"Let's get you to the catalog."
"I get a catalog. Nice. Uh... the last time I was here, why didn't I pick the Somewhere Else option?"
"How do you know you didn't?" |
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