Charter, Act 1
Certain members of the human species possess a kind of softness about them, a vaguely slippery quality that provides a layer of forgetfulness to their personage. This is not to imply that they are forgetful themselves, but rather, that it is curiously easy to forget them or not think about them when not in their immediate presence.
Charter Manfield thought of it as the ‘man in a crowd’ phenomenon. Standing five-foot-nine, weighing around two-hundred pounds, he possessed a sort of averageness that kept him from being memorable. His facial features were slightly rounded and smooth, with a fair and unblemished complexion that was neither notably handsome or homely. His hair and eyes were both chestnut brown, and he had no immediately recognizable or distinguishable scars, tattoos or markings of any sort.
He blended in without an effort. This aspect of his character had been a hindrance in some areas of his day to day life, and incredibly useful in others. At just about every job he’d ever possessed since completing high school, he performed his duties thoroughly and efficiently, but never in a way that drew too much attention to him.
This afforded Charter with a wealth of usable down time once he clocked out for the day. His hobbies motivated him outside of the workplace, just as they had occupied the vast majority of his free time as a child and teenager.
His sketchpad notebook sat on the latticework top of the metal bench he sat at, his pencil making small, light strokes to add shadow and depth while his cigarette smoked and smouldered in his left hand. Charter only had a few minutes left in his break, and hardly anybody sat with him most times since he kept largely to himself anyhow, but he did occasionally get compliments from his coworkers upon the quality of his artwork. The drawings were all of different kinds of robots and combat machines, many of them reproductions of characters and objects in his favorite animated programs, with a handful of original designs kept carefully separated by a piece of plain red construction paper, inserted about eighty percent of the way through the notepad. This was how he differentiated with all of his sketchbooks, a uniform habit he’d picked up years earlier from a source he could no longer recall clearly. Regardless, it worked out well for him.
At present, he was adding shadow to a drawing of the classic Soundwave character from the Transformers animated program. In the sketch, the legendary Decepticon had his chest cavity open, one finger pressed down on a control button on his own shoulder in order to deploy the miniature ‘cassette minions’ that he employed in battle against the Autobots. One of the taps, black and red, hung in the air just to one side and in front of Soundwave in the image, not quite into its transformation.
“Razorbeak,” someone said over his left shoulder. Charter looked up abruptly, and found himself looking at Daryl, one of his fellow packagers on Packaging Team 2.
“That’s right,” Charter replied with a partial grin. “He was always my favorite of the tape robots, because he was used for stealth and intelligence missions.”
“Useful thing to have for galactic warfare,” Daryl commented, lighting up a cigarette. “What nest they got you on tonight?”
“Seventeen,” Charter said, closing up his notebook and striking alight one last smoke for the break. He checked his watch, noting that they only had five minutes left. He would normally not even wear a watch, but Ganges didn’t allow cell phones past the security check line inside the Processing facility, unless you had a special permission; such permissions were almost exclusively reserved for management. “Which one are you on?”
“Six,” Daryl replied. He shook his head, let out a long thin stream of smoke. “It’s kind of slow, I’ve got a new guy doing nesting for my group.”
“Hurting your rate?”
“Not as much as the hoarders are,” Daryl grumbled. “Stacy keeps waiting around, twiddling her goddamn thumbs until a chute finishes with a ton of teeny tiny items to ship, so she’s keeping rate mathematically, but kind of cheating me and Sameer out of any good bumps on our numbers.”
Charter nodded, sympathizing with Daryl. There had been a whole batch of newbies on Sunday night for their team, fifteen people in total. However, between Sunday and now, on that batch’s first Wednesday night, their numbers had dropped to just six; eight folks had just not bothered to show up since the end of that first Sunday night/Monday morning, and one had been forced to be taken out of the facility by emergency medical technicians when he’d broken his ankle.
Charter had seen it happen, too. With so many people flitting around hither and thither, all trying to keep their rates up, the young woman hadn’t called out ‘Crossing’ while walking behind someone on her way from a cubby back to her post. One of the other packagers went to take a step backward, knocking into her and stepping on her foot while trying to avoid being knocked off of their own two feet in the moment. The ‘SNAP’ had been loud enough to be heard even over the machinery whirring all around them, and her screams had been the stuff of legends.
Harpies from Hell’s seventh circle couldn’t compete with that yowl, Charter had thought when it happened.
“Think there’s any chance the last few stick it out and come back next week,” Daryl asked. Charter shrugged.
“I think maybe four or five of them, sure, but one or two of them will decide it isn’t worth it,” he replied. It had been much the same when the center first opened and he got started a month or two later. He’d come in with a batch of approximately forty people, and of those, he was himself among only a dozen who had remained a year and a half later.
“Well, hopefully, they’ll be able to keep up,” Daryl said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray built into a depression on the bench’s top. “And hopefully they’ll be bringing more people on. If we don’t shore up the numbers pretty soon, they’re going to push mandatory overtime every week until we get back to a full staff.”
Charter thought about this as he headed back toward the facility entrance, his sketchbook tucked under his arm, pencil in his pocket. Somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred personnel had shown up a couple of months earlier and headed inside, forming a human wall just shy of the security walk-in line and scanners, barring entry into and out of the warehouse. They had demanded the chance to sit down with management, to address several of their grievances with the way things were run in the Processing Center.
For three days these folks had effectively shut down the warehouse, bringing all functions to a grinding halt. On the fourth day, local law enforcement had been called upon, and the moment they started handcuffing and hauling people forcefully out of the facility, the herd had broken, fleeing the property in droves. Charter had read online that evening that Ganges had terminated everybody who joined in the blockade, utilizing footage from internal security cameras and their facial recognition software to identify and contact each and every employee who had joined the spontaneous ‘strike’.
Charter hadn’t participated. It wasn’t that he didn’t sympathize with the group’s demands, which he thought were reasonable enough. However, he’d suspected all along that nothing good would come of it, so he showed up each day, saw the blockade, and turned around and headed back to his apartment.
When all was said and done, he’d returned to work on mandated overtime, but with a dollar-and-a-half raise in Imperial credits per hour as a kind of reward for remaining ‘loyal’ to the Ganges brand. It wasn’t loyalty, he thought, sliding his sketchpad into his locker and clapping the door shut, heading back through the security tape line and onto the warehouse floor. It was just knowing which way the wind was going to blow and taking the appropriate shelter. If you want loyalty, get a dog, he mused.
Charter headed back to his station, and got right back to work.
**
Ray quirked an eyebrow at him, then looked down at the tablet once again. “This isn’t going to work,” Ray said with a shake of his head. “There’s an interrupt here that isn’t going to follow through, and the whole thing’s going to go back to the opening line.”
“Oh, shit,” Charter said, taking the tablet back from the veteran IT programmer, pushing his empty plate aside to look more closely at the coding lines.
“It’s still pretty impressive, though,” Ray continued, taking his last bite of eggs before setting his fork and knife down on the plate. “I mean, you didn’t take any kind of classes, like, at all?” Charter shook his head, still looking at his code and attaching his micro-USB keyboard to it, editing the odd line out to fix his error.
“I’ve been fascinated by computers and programming since I was a kid,” Charter replied. “I think it all started with Transformers, really. I thought the idea of a whole race of thinking machines was the coolest thing ever.” He turned the tablet back around to Ray, who looked it over briefly, then nodded. Charter saved his work and shut the tablet off, tucking it into his messenger bag.
“So, is this part of a video game you’re making or something,” the IT specialist asked. Charter felt a twinge of guilt when he asked; for months now, he’d been hanging around the IT guys and gals on their breaks, subtly dropping himself into their conversations and finding out more about them all as individuals. His aim had not been to make friends, though that seemed a pleasant side benefit. He was, in fact, trying to use them as a sounding board to test some of his own programming ideas.
“It’s something like that,” Charter replied with a grin. “But I want to start laying some groundwork before I can talk about the whole thing.” The pair split the bill evenly between them, then headed out to their cars and headed their separate ways. The diner was only about five minutes from his humble abode, and when Charter got through the door, he flipped the lights on in the living room and smiled at the coffee table/workbench that dominated the floor in front of his recliner.
A pair of complicated, finely-articulated plastic and metal figures stood on the leveled surface, several thin wires connected from them to a laptop with a blank screen, the computer on sleep mode. Charter got the laptop running, connecting his tablet to it and transferring the new section of code over to the program he was using to design the control schemes for these figures.
Once he was finished with the transfer, he hopped onto the Ganges website and ordered himself a set of Blutooth transmitters and receivers. It wouldn’t be long now until he could put his efforts to the test.
**
Charter flinched a little as the hand came down on his shoulder, and he gave Ray a sheepish grin as the IT specialist plopped down on the bench beside him. “Dude, that looks pretty awesome,” the tech said, pointing to Charter’s sketch. “Is that a Transformer? I don’t recognize him.”
“That’s because he’s not a Transformer,” Charter said, looking around surreptitiously to ensure they weren’t being listened to by anyone else. “It’s my own design,” he said, turning the pages to show his colleague the other robots he’d been sketching and designing. “I call them Robokin.” Ray pulled the sketchbook over in front of himself, marveling over the detailed drawings.
“Dude, you should seriously be making your own comic with these,” he said in a hushed tone.
“I’ve got a better idea going,” Charter replied. He pulled out his cell phone, which he kept in his messenger bag in his locker when he was on the warehouse floor, and showed Ray the pictures he’d taken most recently of his constructed figures. “I’ve been building the first two for the last half a year. These are just prototypes, but once I get them moving, the others will come a lot more quickly.”
Ray handed him back the phone, pulling an appreciative expression. “I don’t really get it, though,” he said. “Is it like one of those Amibo things, like Nintendo did? You know, plug the figurines into an interface that ports them into the game?”
“No,” Charter replied. “They’re going to be remote control robots. I’ve been trying to calculate how much range they’ll get, simulate different Blutooth signals to lock it in. That’s part of what that last batch of code was for, to make sure two inputs can be read simultaneously.” Charter closed the sketchbook and gave Ray a level look. “You’re not going to tell anyone about them, are you?”
“Not if you don’t want me to,” Ray said. “But, you know, if you develop more of them and want to sell them, you already know the best place to go for distribution,” he added, hooking a thumb toward the building.
“Absolutely not,” Charter almost yelped, shoving his sketchbook into his messenger bag. “I’ve seen the way the folks in Storage cram stuff into those roller cubes; our own people are half the reason stuff gets broken between orders being placed and arriving to customers. I mean, it isn’t necessarily their fault,” he amended, not intending any foul talk of another department. “They have rates they’re supposed to hit too, and all.”
As he headed back inside the Processing Center, Charter found himself thinking that, much as he liked Ray, he really wished he hadn’t shared Robokin with him. It was supposed to just be his, until he was fully prepared to share it with the world. But as he got settled back into his usual pace on the packaging line, he let the notion loosen in his mind. After all, what harm could come of telling one of the IT guys about a toy robot?
****
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