by Nick Thacker
Contents
Myers
Myers
Rand
Myers
Sol
Myers
Rand
Myers
Myers
Sol
Myers
Myers
Rand
Myers
Sol
Myers
Rand
Myers
Rand
Myers
Rand
Myers
Rand
Sol
Myers
Rand
Myers
Rand
Myers
Myers
Myers
Do Me A Favor?
Books By Nick Thacker
About the Author
Copyright
MYERS
IT WAS THE SECOND DAY of his new life when Myers finally remembered that he’d forgotten everything.
He had spent the first day running, though he wasn’t sure why. When he finally crashed outside an old stone temple, his body had given in. He was done.
The morning found him just as the night had left him. Cold, broken, and afraid. But it was the unique flavor of fear coursing through him that ultimately startled him awake.
Myers stood, his back cracking from the stiffness of sleeping on hard-packed dirt. He almost laughed. This wasn’t how a forty-three year old man should spend a night.
Forty-three?
He had no idea.
This was yet another thing he couldn’t remember. He looked down at his body and saw a wobbling, exhausted frame of a man easily in his sixties.
How many years has it been?
He knew his name, his hometown, his parents’ names. A few other things, but that was it.
So he started running again.
It was a stumbling type of run, one that would have made his track coach in high school yell at him. He remembered that man’s face better than his own — creases above his frown lines from years of pushing students to their limit. He felt some sort of tugging as he tried to bring the memory into focus.
He took many breaks, stopping to rest his hands on his head to maximize his air intake. He walked to the top of a small rise — the highest point he could see — to get his bearings.
Having no idea where he was, or where he’d started from, it was as good a plan as any.
And he loved plans. That much he could remember.
The rise revealed what he needed to see: there was no direction that would provide anything other than open sunlight and miles of dry, cracked earth, except for one.
About three-quarters of a mile away he could see a broken, deserted city. Crumbling spires stretched into the sky, but their tops, if there were any, were hidden behind clouds of brown dust.
He sat down, staring at the city. The remains of a rock wall extended across his field of vision and back over the horizon, leading him to believe it was at one time a border for the city. In front of it stood a chain-link fence, taller and much sturdier than the wall. The city itself was on a rise similar to his, though much larger.
Myers reached the outskirts of the town — or what was left of it — ten minutes later. He gasped for air, but kept his dirty, swollen feet shuffling forward. At some point yesterday he’d wrapped them with two halves of his torn button-down gray shirt, leaving on the thin, cheap white undershirt, and the thread was already wearing thin. He felt every pebble and grain of sand as they landed, but he didn’t stop.
There would be no answers here for him. He already knew that somehow, but he pushed forward anyway. Stick to the plan.
A tall fence loomed over him as he neared the edge of the town. It was rusty, and a crooked sign had been mounted on one of the locked sides of the chained swinging gate.
Instanbul.
Nothing else. No welcome, no instructions. Just a label.
Odd.
He reached a blistered hand up the gate and felt the rough chain links on his fingers. He applied a little pressure, but the gate remained stationary.
Myers shook it, hoping the gate would remember that it was supposed to be open. It jangled with the motion, creaking as the heavy lock and chain clanged against the two halves.
He looked up, assessing the climb. There was no barbed wire on top, but the fence was certainly higher than it appeared to be from afar. Myers shrugged and started climbing.
He wasn’t sure when he’d climbed a fence like this last. Probably as a young boy. Flashes of memories exploded through his mind: climbing a fence to get a baseball, climbing a fence to run from a dog, climbing a fence with friends — hollow faces now in the memory — though none were helpful. He moved steadily, his weakened body keeping pace surprisingly well.
I must be in decent shape when I’m not stretched to my limit, he thought.
He reached the top and took his time shifting his weight to the side of the fence. When he began descending, he had a brief moment of vertigo that passed quickly.
At the bottom he stood for a moment looking back up the high fence to revel in his accomplishment then turned and walked into the city.
There was still a half-mile gap between the gate and rock wall and the first of the buildings, so he used the extra time to formulate some sort of loose plan.
Will there be people here? Will they be friendly?
In a moment of insight he looked around him for something to use as a weapon.
Just in case.
He found a fist-sized rock with a sharp protrusion on one end. Brutal, but it would have to do.
The buildings in front of him, except for the two spired towers, were identical. They formed an avenue around the open space between them, facing each other from each side of the road. Farther down, the buildings rose in height until he could see two- and then three-story buildings. They were abandoned, but remnants of activity were visible behind each of the dust-covered windows.
Televisions, ultra-thin and long dead, hung behind windows, facing the street. Shops displayed their dust-covered wares on counters, still waiting to be sold.
In one particular building, Myers noticed a small toy display case tucked into a corner. All of the toys were dolls of some sort, some plush, some plastic. All of the toys were covered in a thick layer of dust, painted the same pale brown as everything else.
He reached a juncture in the road, stopped, and peered both directions. He had no plan — at least not one that involved more than “walk into the city” — and that drove Myers crazy. He felt adrift, lost, and not just because he was, literally, lost.
He chose left. It was an odd feeling, not “deciding” to turn left. He just turned and his feet began walking. His body seemed to agree, so Myers went along for the ride.
His feet were now caked in dust and dirt, and he was sure he’d need to stop and rest soon, so he started looking for an out-of-the-way home or storefront he could bed down in for the rest of the day and night. As the thought of sleep came over him, he looked up to find the sun directly above him.
Noon. I must be getting old.
He walked for another hour, still unsure of the proper plan. Look for another person, or seek shelter? When he came to a bridge over a dried-up river, he decided to call it quits. A small kiosk stood next to the bridge, each side of it covered with windows. It would make a decent lookout, if he needed it.
He brushed a circle of dust from each window, providing him with an unobstructed view in every direction, and entered the kiosk.
Inside Myers found a desk mounted to three walls, a chair in the middle, and little else. Postcards and brochures advertising
sights and historic landmarks of the area, long since forgotten, were strewn about the floor. He slid the chair to the far side of the kiosk and sprawled out on the ground. The cool concrete felt fantastic on his sunburned neck and back, and he fell asleep before he could assess the wraps covering his feet.
MYERS
MYERS SLEPT IN FITS, TOSSING and turning as his back found every small crack, rock, or piece of trash spread over the floor of the kiosk. He was sweating, even though the absent sun had cast the city into a cool, dry night. During one particularly long waking stretch, he tried to take a mental assessment of his condition, but he had no idea how to do that.
He started with his feet, wiggling his toes and rotating his ankles. To see if anything is broken, he told himself. His feet worked, though they were near the end of their ability to provide support to the rest of his body. He assumed sleep would help, so he mentally wrote it off as “minor stress.” He had no idea if that was a medical term, or if it was even true. He imagined a doctor standing over him, arguing with him; Myers silently tried to justify each of his decisions the invisible medical professional.
He moved upward from his feet and continued the absurd pseudo-medical self-assessment. My legs are sore, sunburned. I need to get some rest and see if I can find a pair of pants tomorrow. Maybe shoes as well.
The common diagnosis when he reached his stiff, burned torso was “you need rest,” so he concluded that a proper medical examination would have to wait. He needed to sleep.
The next time he woke up was from the silence. It was heavy, deep, and constant. It was an odd thing to be forced out of restful, much-needed sleep because of silence, yet that was the only thing that made sense. He knew it wasn’t from a noise — there hadn’t been anything like that since he’d entered the city. Myers realized he hadn’t even seen so much as a bird.
So the silence woke him. He shot upright and looked around. For the briefest of moments he was back at home — wherever that was — at a desk. He saw the old, hardwood antique splayed out in front of him, covered in papers that were illegible. A beautiful craft lamp sat on the corner, surrounded by photos. He couldn’t see the photos, nor could he make out any other features of the room. In the split second the scene was depicted in front of his eyeballs, it seemed as though the desk was floating in empty space.
But he knew it wasn’t. He knew at once, even as the darkness from the creeping night seeped in and found him alone in the kiosk, that it was a memory. It was a vision from the past. His past.
He struggled to manifest it once again, but it was now toying with him. Just out of reach, just beyond the conscious mind, the memory nagged at him and threatened him. I’m right here, but if you try to catch me I’ll be gone, it said. He almost screamed.
To not have any recollection of the past years was a new feeling for Myers, and one that he thought might be the worst possible emotion he’d ever felt. It wasn’t like not knowing something, like never having learned that the earth was round or that it orbited the sun. It wasn’t like not understanding something, either, like quantum physics or plumbing. Those were reconciliations people made with themselves. They chose, more or less, what things they wanted to know and what things to ignore.
But to not be able to recall something you knew, something that was close to second nature, was a totally new experience for Myers. He’d always had a fantastic memory, to the point of being labeled eidetic or having a “photographic memory” numerous times growing up. He remembered those times, sitting in class and watching as the other students struggled to recollect an important fact or date from their textbooks. He had no problem seeing in his mind’s eye the teacher or professor nodding their head in confirmation as a younger Myers Asher answered a tough problem correctly, just from the sheer luck of remembering the obscure fact needed to find the solution.
Those memories, from long ago, were still there. Myers had an older brother who’d died in a car crash when Myers was seventeen. It tore his family apart, and the memories around that event and the emotions he felt were still very much inside him.
He tried to remember, again, the desk. It wasn’t critical, that much he knew. The desk was just a strong association in his mind, to something he couldn’t recall. There was nothing particularly special or stunning, or even significant, about the desk other than that it was his and he had remembered it, at least fleetingly.
He moaned. The pain from laying on his shoulder had finally caught up to him, reminding him that even if his mind couldn’t remember his age, his body could. He stood, stretching once, then returned to the relative comfort of the cool concrete floor. He brushed aside some pieces of paper and pebbles that had gathered near him and tried again to remember his past.
The last memory he could muster before everything went blank was of a party. He watched the playback of the scene from a third person point of view. He and his wife, Diane, were holding hands and yelling toward him, at something he couldn’t see. They raised their clasped hands and he could see fuzzy outlines of other people raising theres in response. The party was for him — about him, but he couldn’t remember why they were celebrating. It must have been the last memory he had before everything was wiped, and some of this one had gone with it.
Myers sighed, knowing that it was a losing battle. He wasn’t sure if the soreness, exhaustion, and sunburn played a part in the amnesia, but he knew it couldn’t help. He decided to listen to his earlier diagnosis of getting rest and forced himself to fall asleep.
RAND
JONATHAN RAND STEPPED INTO THE hallway and began the long, arduous journey to the coffee pot at the other end. It was tucked away into a closet-turned-breakroom, which meant that it housed little more than a table with a percolator, some styrofoam cups stacked next to it, and hardly enough room for one person to “take a break” inside of it at any given time.
Rand really was at end of the earth. Especially for a high-tech company like Vericorp. Rand’s current employer, Vericorp was a state-of-the-art server optimization and cloud storage giant, but out of geographic necessity, it had to maintain offices in places like Umutsuz.
Rand resented it, but the System was in charge of reassignment, and there was nothing he could do to change that. He neared the end of his trip and swung left, into Roan Alexander’s office.
“Cup of coffee?” he asked, before he’d even been noticed by Roan.
Roan looked up, his permanent state of annoyance reflecting on his face. “Uh, what? Yeah, sure, I guess.”
Jonathan took the opportunity to jab his friend. “Hey, buddy, if you’re deep in something important, feel free to —“
“I’m not,” Roan said. “I never am. You know that. Nothing here is ever ‘important.’”
Jonathan didn’t even need to nod in agreement. Of course he knew that — it was all anyone here ever talked about. ‘Washed up programmers find solace in community’ was the topic du jour every day. They’d been reassigned at about the same time, Roan from what was left of Silicon Valley and Rand from Austin. Both cities had been all but abandoned in recent years, leaving only low-tech manufacturing and distribution companies behind. When Jonathan had first arrived at Vericorp, he was stunned to see the narrow, dimly-lit hallways inside the old, decrepit facility tucked away in downtown Umutsuz.
Roan Alexander was the first person he’d complained to about it, and quickly found a kindred spirit in the quiet, perpetually-on-edge developer. Roan had racked up quite a career as a “bug squasher,” using his uncanny ability to find and annihilate errors, bugs, and glitches in software in just about any computer language. He’d been sought out by every major tech conglomerate as a contractor, but when the System called him out to Umutsuz, he was forced to close his local consulting firm and ship out.
The two men both had a professed love of coffee, and Jonathan would often find Roan leaning against the wall in the tiny break room, silently sipping the drink with his eyes closed.
Roan stood up from his desk and followed Jonath
an across the hall. They each poured a cup and returned to the hallway.
“So, anything exciting in the world of System Analysis?” Jonathan asked.
Roan shook his head. “Not unless you think watching a computer find, isolate, and repair its own bugs sounds exciting.”
It didn’t. Jonathan already knew his friend’s line of work — it was somewhat of a joke among System assignees like them to recognize their uselessness in the ‘new world’ of System-based administration. Programmers, developers, and IT folks all had some usefulness to the world at large, just not enough to do anything remotely considered ‘fun’ with their skill set. New assignees that showed up often jumped into their new work with the vigor of a recent convert, only to find that their job, now, was only a fuzzy reflection of their past career.
Jonathan wasn’t bitter. You couldn’t be, in this type of work. He’d had his moments, like anyone, but he was generally grateful to still have a job. At least that was something.
Roan, on the other hand, never missed an opportunity to gripe about one thing or another. His resentment matched Jonathan’s, but Roan was much more vocal about it.
“Yeah, no, I definitely don’t,” Jonathan answered, perhaps a bit too late. Roan was already moving back toward his open door and desk.
“Huh?” Roan asked, not even turning to look back at his friend.
“Oh, nothing, I —“
Jonathan didn’t bother. ‘Assignees,’ like him and Roan and a handful of the others on their floor, could be picked out of a crowd solely from the disinterested looks on their faces. They tended to be restless, disconnected, and even flighty, and Jonathan was glad he wasn’t in charge of managing them all. He started thinking about their manager, Felicia Davies.
“Hey, what do you think about Davies’ reapportionment of the servers from B-Wing?” Jonathan asked.
Roan looked at him and shrugged, then sat down at his desk and sipped the coffee, his eyes closing.
I already put him to sleep. “Yeah, me too. Sorry, mindless chitchat, huh? Nothing I can possibly conjure up would make this place any more bearable. We can at least bitch about her, then.”
