Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “So, um,” I hazarded, “when does the interview start?”

  Jiminson snorted. “Oh, you’re hired.”

  What? Seriously? I hadn’t even had a chance at screwing it up? If I’d had half a minute upstairs, I would have taken a mad run at that behemoth they call a printer and tried to kill it. “Really.”

  “Yes. You’re the only person that showed up.”

  “Do you think,” I started slowly, “that this is a wise decision? Have you looked at me?”

  Jiminson did me the favor of pretending to look in my general direction. “Son, I work for the Unbiased Herald. Have done since I was sixteen as a coal stoker for the press. Worked my way to where I am through years of diligent application of skills learned. I’ve weathered three JournoWars, earned myself a couple Trueshot Badges, a personal meeting with Herbert and survived attacks from UH reporters who have gone off the deep end in ways you or I couldn’t possibly imagine. I’ve watched this city grow from a tiny little nothing that was a ‘stop on the way to New York’ into the biggest city on the planet. You showing up with a large bruise on your head and those bright red shoes is nothing much.”

  We hit floor minus fifty-five and the doors opened. The first thing I noticed was the incredibly dry air. It sucked the moisture out of my skin and made me long for a bath.

  “We need to keep the environment as dry as technologically possible.” Jiminson explained. “To preserve the paper.” He patted something I’d mistaken for a wall. Silly me.

  There were hundreds of shelves, stretching from the floor up nearly fifty feet, each one carrying the groaning, burgeoning weight of full-size, leather and brass bound replicas of each edition of the Unbiased Herald since its inception. Contraptions similar to the one Janey operated like a fiend upstairs were moored at one end of each gargantuan shelf. Specialized Tesla-lights called Willowisps made a stately progression between the stacks and rows, generating a piercingly bright light without any heat at all.

  I whistled in appreciation. Willowisps weren’t cheap and I counted more than forty before Jiminson pulled one of the volumes out like it weight nothing and tossed it at me. Reflexes took over and I managed to catch the damned thing (which did weigh a ton) before it hit either the ground or the bruise on my ribs.

  “Your job is to go through each volume. If you find a page that is smudged, torn, slightly decomposed, wrinkled, folded, spindled or otherwise less than pristine, you need to replace it.”

  “And how,” I demanded, heaving the volume back at Jiminson, who caught it one handed and slid it back into place in one smooth motion, “am I going to do that?” Had to be something in the water, strength like that. Or maybe the Press loaned the old dink demonic strength.

  Jiminson waggled a hand towards the other end of the floor. “Somewhere over there is a baby press that does one sheet at a time. It’s connected to the main computers up in the penthouse. All you need to do is enter the year, month, day and page number and the press will reprint it for you. Next to the baby press is a binding machine that’s been specially built to temporarily remove the binding from a volume so you can replace the page.”

  “What happens if I don’t want this job? Or if I pretend to take this job but just come here and do nothing at all?” Maybe it was the concussion talking or maybe I just plain old didn’t like the way Jiminson had automatically assumed I would take the job no questions asked.

  “Kid,” Jiminson smiled, eyes sparkling, “I like you. Your honesty is refreshing. Most people who come here for work are reporters in disguise, trying to sabotage us from within. They ask all kinds of probing, leading questions because no one really knows how Herbert gets his stories, how he pays for all of this, or even why he’s doing it. You, on the other hand, are hostile, interrogatory, reluctant and possibly arrogant as well. So I am going to tell you a secret. The Unbiased Herald employs over a thousand people, including Herbert Smith himself. That includes the delivery company we use to shift the papers. Herbert writes more than ninety percent of each newspaper himself, making all two hundred reporters absolutely useless. Your sister runs the press, oversees the layout and a few other things. I run security most of the time, and when I’m not doing that I hide in my office and watch television on the Internet. Next to Jane and the press monkeys, the lawyers, of whom there are many, are the only busy people in this entire company. The ‘paper’ we use for the archival stocks is actually a carbon fiber weave that feels and acts like paper but is approximately a thousand times more resilient than a wood pulp based cloth. We are hiring someone to cover the archives simply to obscure the fact that we have invented a new type of paper that is cheaper to make and more environmentally friendly. We are doing this because it is not yet time to release the news. The chance that a page will really need replacing is incredibly slim. Before you ask, Herbert is fully aware that this is a throw-away do-nothing job and is inordinately pleased that anyone showed up.”

  “So all I have to do is, what, punch in, find a place to hang out for eight hours, punch out and go home? And I get paid?”

  “Actually, the position is salaried. You wouldn’t even need to punch in and out, but you probably should anyway. Technically, you wouldn’t even need to stay. All you’d need to do is be here at the beginning of your shift and at the end to fill out roughly ten minutes worth of paperwork.”

  “That’s great!” It really, truly was. “So how much do I get paid?”

  Jiminson smiled. “Forty dollars a day.”

  My heart sank. “Forty?” I hate to admit it, but I’m certain my voice squeaked.

  “Come now, son, you didn’t imagine you were going to be making hundreds of dollars a day, did you? This is, after all, a do nothing job. A smart kid like yourself can probably figure out how to make it even more do nothing than it is already.”

  I almost pointed out that Jiminson had already admitted he didn’t do anything unless he absolutely had to until I remembered he’d been through a few JournoWars and that he’d grabbed that UH volume one handed without any strain. “What if I wanted to make more money than that?”

  “Again,” Jiminson said, walking off into the stacks, “smart kid like you could probably find a way to make more money in a place like this without too much effort. You start tomorrow. Come in whenever you want. Paperwork is self-explanatory. There’s an elevator by the baby press so you won’t have to go through Hell again unless you feel like visiting your sister…”

  Anything else he said was swallowed up by the heavy stacks.

  I stood there in the stark bright light, trying to absorb the rapid succession of changes to my life. In the last twenty-four hours I’d gone from a bottom rung Writman to the first Renegade Writman in at least a century, been rendered vehicle-less by a presumed pre-emptive strike (possibly by Johnny King himself, though that wasn’t his normal MO), possibly destroyed a good working relationship with the number one police officer in the city, gotten the best possible job at illegal wages and a concussion. Oh yes, and broken ribs.

  All in all, it’d been a very busy twenty-four hours, and I doubted that I’d seen the last bit of excitement.

  Well, since Jiminson had told me right to my face I didn’t need to start until tomorrow, I decided I’d go home and stare at the walls until some sort of all-encompassing super-complex idea that solved all my problems in one fell swoop lurched into my concussed brain.

  “Some may call the Unbiased Herald a joke, or the ‘world’s most depressing newspaper’. I suppose these things are true in a sense but, you know, you can build one helluva lean-to with the Sunday edition. Now that’s a newspaper!” -registered homeless person

 

 

 
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