Having never exactly been an extravagant man given to wasting money, and having none of the habits that tended to be costly, George found himself goggling at his banking app screen in something approaching divine paralysis. For the first time since before he’d been married, he had just shy of ten thousand dollars just sitting in his savings account.
He had no idea what to do with it. His bills were paid, his pantry and fridge and freezer stocked, and his car didn’t need any major work or repairs. Facing the remainder of his weekend alone, with the kids having already cleared with him and their mother a sleepover weekend with another family, he was genuinely at a loss for how to spend the time and money on hand.
Fetching himself a couple of frozen breakfast sandwiches and popping them in the microwave, George headed to the living room and turned on his smart tv, clicking his way down to the Ganges Deluxe Home Video icon. As one of the perks of working for the company, he had a free Ganges Deluxe membership, which granted him access to their broad selection of streaming films and television shows, as well as free 2-day shipping. He’d already browsed the catalog, adding a dozen movies and programs, but finding he never had the time or energy to sit up and actually watch any of them.
“No time like the present,” he said to himself as he cued up a horror film he’d been dying to catch.
**
There exists for parents a strange kind of nervousness, one that, no offense meant to those without children, childless adults simply do not have access to. This nervousness is birthed from primal, selfish instincts at its core, there’s no doubt about that. On a fundamental level, concern over one’s offspring can be boiled down to a bestial snarl of ‘my children are the continuation of my DNA, an extension of myself, and damage or harm or threat to them is a form of damage or harm or threat to ME’, if one removes the trappings of human emotion, sentiment, faith, ethics or philosophy. Pushing those elements aside is a Herculean task, however, and very few humans who are fully functional are capable of doing so, in this humble storyteller’s experience.
George’s mind began filling with a fog halfway through his second film viewing, a fog composed of tiny particles of this particular worry. At first, the fog existed only as a thin scrim on the undercurrent of his consciousness. I wonder what the kids are up to, he thought. This came ten minutes into the second movie. I can’t remember where the Carters live, he thought, a realization that wiggled its tendrils through his mind fifteen minutes along. Finally, the fog expressed itself aloud as he paused the movie and said to himself, “I’m just going to go ahead and give them a call.”
The Carters’ home phone number was written down on a magnetic notepad affixed to his fridge door, and George felt his hands starting to tremble slightly as he dialed. The moment the family patriarch, David Carter, picked up the phone, George felt a strange, cooling sensation wash through him. He didn’t consciously recognize that this was born of the affirmation that there was a functional, capable adult near to his children, capable of keeping them safe, no. Knowing this on a level closer to consciousness would not have improved the quality of the knowledge, so his brain did what all human brains do, which is to file that information away under the heading ‘Confirmed’, never to be directly referenced again.
A brief conversation later, he was back to his movie marathon.
**
Heading home from work on Monday morning, in the first hour after the sun had risen for the day, George regretted having effectively sat around doing much of nothing over the course of the previous weekend. Fifteen hours of packaging products had left his wrists and ankles sore, his knees threatening to buckle under him on the walk from the facility’s front doors to his car, and his head wrapped in a layer of thought-muffling haze. It would be three weeks of this Hell on Earth, but he was determined to get through it as capably as he could.
His ex-wife had been strangely understanding when he’d reached out to her Sunday morning to ask if the kids could stay with her on this first weekend coming up; he just didn’t see himself being capable of properly caring for an interacting with them after five days of this kind of brutality. At the end of the second week, George reasoned, he’d be acclimated to it and able to process the needs and desires of his children appropriately. “I’ll adjust, but I’m going to need that first weekend to just recover,” he’d explained on the phone, and she had been receptive, which he hadn’t expected.
As he flopped onto his bed, George recognized that he still had one thing to take care of before he could even attempt to rest his battered body. Setting an alarm for four hours of sleep, he kicked his shoes off and plugged his phone in on the bedside table, praying to the God that the Empire insisted was the divine guide of the nation that four hours would be enough to skate by on.
It would prove to be just enough, for the time being.
**
“It’s only temporary, George, but you’ve got to push that rate up,” his Area Manager said peevishly as she completed her Spot Talk. These brief interactions were normally once-a-week check-ins of sorts for the Area Managers throughout the facility to talk individually with their assigned associates. George had apparently not been meeting the expected hourly rates expected for the Ganges Deluxe Drive promotion, a three-week annual sales period wherein customers could benefit from deep discount bargains on the site.
“I’m trying,” he offered weakly, rubbing his left wrist without thinking about it. “But I was already having trouble before. Isn’t there another area I could work at, until Drive is over?”
“We need everybody where we’ve got them,” she replied, already turning away from him to move on to her next victim, a deep scowl marring her normally bright and friendly visage. George just shook his head and turned back to his packing station, aware of the stares of his fellow packagers up and down the line.
He hated their pity, but could do nothing to deflect it.
**
Three days of this horror show had reduced George to an almost unthinking, unfeeling husk. He was only a few hours into the fourth day of Drive, and already the shroud of numbness had settled into his arms, back, and legs, stripping away conscious thought and feeling. He experienced a singular moment of envy for the storage robots as he sent another taped box down the line; at least if they malfunctioned or broke down, there were Ganges engineers immediately sent out to fix the previous machines and get them back up and running.
As he scanned his latest package into the system for completion, a message popped up on his interface screen, one that he’d only seen a few times before, but which broke him momentarily out of his fugue. ‘FILL-IN ORDER, PROCEED TO SHIP DOCK IMMEDIATELY, TOT WILL BE PARDONED’, it read. This indicated that the box he had just taped up was required on the shipping dock as soon as possible to complete a load, and the packager was to take it there personally and immediately, and any time off task would be excused until he returned to scan his next order in.
George grabbed the box and headed to the end of his aisle, pausing just long enough to put on a blaze yellow safety vest, so the forklift drivers on the shipping dock could spot him more readily as they sped about their tasks. This was all standard procedure, and he’d already taken a few of these fill-in orders to the dock in the last couple of months.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of this, not really. George actually enjoyed these fill-ins, because while he was personally carrying the package to the dock, he was considered Excused from any and all TOT until he scanned in his next package code. It was a reprieve, born of, perhaps, the smallest of oversights on Ganges’ part. Their systems could watch associates throughout the warehouses, track their online activities, trawl through their preferences and profiles and build up a program of ads to serve people based on their interactions.
But those systems couldn’t risk an entire shipment going out late because a single order got shunted out of order. Further, those same systems could not account for the human condition in its entirety; proof positive of this would transpire in less than a minute.
George Collins had survived a fair amount of trouble, trauma, and damage throughout his life as a citizen of the Weiland Empire. As he strode toward the shipping station dead ahead of him with a loose grin on his lips and a sense of calm, one of the rarest gifts the universe can bestow upon a lifeform about to perish was granted to him-
George Collins was blissfully unaware of the fact that he was about to be crushed flat by a runaway forklift, its operator asleep at the controls. There wasn’t even time enough to register pain as his legs snapped clean and his whole body cantilevered violently sideways, sending his skull crashing to the concrete at a velocity that was immediately terminal upon impact. There came no brief flash of vision as the machine rolled over said broken skull, reducing his brain to a foamy paste under its bulk.
He was simply there one moment, and gone the next. In the soul-draining and body-beating environment of the average Ganges facility, this instantaneous demise could be mistaken for a true and merciful gift from the God to whom all Weiland citizens prayed.
Just don’t tell that to his children, or the undercover journalist who witnessed his sudden and violent end.