UnBooks:Vriesea

Chaos.

Landscapes of Logorrhea

Let's start our story with rain. Rain is something simple, just running an economy-grey brush over the tired cityscape.

Medical affixes were raining from the machine, from the blank sky which someone likely forgot to paint. Careful, having the wrong combination of words in your hair could bring a pernicious disease. I was heading to the "Not All Socialization Has To Happen In The Workplace" club which I'm a member of, when the first lightning struck pointless on the pigeon-poop-coated bronze statue a yard from me, which likely protected me from an irrelevant death. Heat from the lightning created a small explosion at the point of impact; among the pieces of flaming pigeon poop falling like meteorites, I quietly thanked the historical figure for saving my life.

Where were we? Oh, I found a bus in the street and hopped on. The bus had a volatile disposition and shook me off, leaving me clinging to the passing time in the traffic. Time leaked over the railings drip by drip, and soon there was not enough for me to cling on, so I decided to go to work.

To Relax, Engage with the Feed

The First Entrepreneur named us after those leaves. Then again, he had no choice since the flowers had been copyrighted.

In the half-flooded subway station I sold my heart for a one-way ticket, as my heart didn't work well in the low-baro anyway.

I got back in the main building. The summer sun was strapping a flock of light to the COVID-testing gargoyles. A burette of people were sinking and floating in the elevator shafts.

I calmed down a little. No matter what raged outside, I was safe in here. Work was rewarding. Every client I dealt with has been polite and reasonable. I have learnt a wide range of new tech. I really did know it all.

Yet when the clock struck coffee and lunch break descended on the quiet office, a sense of dread would fill my heart. The stress, or str's as it is called for the taboo around this term, was starting to creep up on me. In response, I put on my AirHeads and dived into ever more self-paced training, to rule over this weakness with personal growth. The Value-Adding Departments abuzz; the air-conditioning winds fair; and all around the loudspeakers have spoken.

Boom, Bloom, Like Vriesea.

 – Our heavy corporate slogan hung low in our collective necks.

For a Human Operator, Press 1

A generic sense of unrest shrouded the buildings, fairly lazy and spread-out like dumplings in a soup. Of course, I was the only one who didn't know what was happening. To find out what was wrong, I struck a casual conversation with customer service.

Good morning, is this the Art-of-the-State Product Dept?

Good morning, this is AotS Judy, listening to you.

Did something go awry when I was away?

Mountains of gold, mountains of gold.

All hell broke loosening of the bowels. A fundraiser is to be organized within three days to raise money to be melted and remolded into a plug.

Silence. Spent cows lay by the street like deflated balloons.

Apart from stopping the loose stool, our client prefers a neat little pyramid of gold bars, deadline by yesterday.

I heard face powder fell like snow. Judy must be making a face at the receiver.

Fed up... too strs'd. Fortunately it's not my circus this time. I only have a report left so I'll be going to a club meetup.

Bye. You are well fed. She chuckled and hung up.

And Drink Till This Plague Leaves

At Vriesea, everyone stood the same ground, and below that was a gym. From the visitor center, it was hard to believe that a different world existed 5+1 feet under. Manufactured modernist paintings float in the air, splattered across the corridors, accompanied with peculiar invocations: And in the manager's dungeon clients come and go, talking of biz-hyperbole. And if you see the electronic clocks displaying invalid time, stay away.

Today the gym was bloated beyond its normal boundaries and clogged nearby passageways. When I approached the fattened doors a screen gagged, spitting static all over me. Not the most friendly gesture, but it seemed I had to cross it. With my newfound superpowers.

Folk belief has it that someone who is hit by lightning and survives gains the power to control the bolts. Now giant holes punched in the mythology system ensured this wouldn't happen, because the city didn't want to leave those transmission towers idle. Nobody knows what people will do to the towers if the power is turned off.

Great, my electric field has caused my employee ID to malfunction. Whatever, those doors heal over time. I kicked open a Staff Only passage that led deeper into the complex.

Seriously, what sort of club meets in a basement?

If you go deep enough down those stairs, people float there, sequestered by the viscous air. No, the entire underground complex is well-understood. There are 3D renders for each and every section, and GPS service in every corner. How about a guided tour?

Who's talking to me?

A tramp was leaning over on the wall in the stairwell. He made no attempt to prove if he was alive.

The elevators sang, a hustling steel-on-steel battlecry.

I've Seen You Before

What are you doing here?

I'm here because I am, and I'll be here till the end of time. I am the Universe. The homeless man's face shone a steely grey under the dim fluorescence.

Boring.

He chuckled. I have something to show you. Ever seen the sky?

I have seen all. Anything I'm yet to see is saved in a PowerPoint on my Googol Drive. I'm not interested.

You will be. The world is more concrete around me. I am the island of stability.

From the other side of the wall came a sickening sound of metal biting through cartilage. Around us the concrete cried; coffeefied blood was leaking from the cracks in the wall. Why? Why spiral around the roundabout? Why do we not run but rather pour, over the strange beverage flowing in streams in-and-out? You see, my words freely run into the surroundings. The tramp spoke with my voice.

His lips didn't move while he was speaking. Fine, what do you want to show me? One more repetition of the everyday, one fewer hatter in the endless manager menagerie; so what?

Inflexion Point

The heavy fireproof door above us slammed open. A figure stood in the doorway, knife in hand.

It was the client! In reaction to my embarrassed-professional smile, his face twisted in anger. I told you I need my stuff delivered a week earlier, and you failed me! I'll kill you all!

The homeless man wanted to say something, but the angry client walked up and pushed him away. Without a single line of redundant dialogue, he grabbed me by my proud collar and stabbed me through the chest.

But I didn't die. The bad weather saved me. The client was fooled by his own surgical precision, as I was heartless. I escaped down the stairs and squeezed into an elevator. The doors closed and separated me from the attacker. I felt a shot of guilt for leaving the poor tramp behind to face that brute –

The doors were opening again. No, the walls were opening, lifting from the ground like a gate, revealing internal details I could not have imagined. A steel pyramid basking in surly sunshine, with little icons along its circumference squirming and producing value. It was perhaps all a phantasm because however I stretched my neck like a pheasant, I could not see the tip of the pyramid's-game. Regardless, I was already lost in fascination over the clean accumulation of emails, the deep-fried and re-fried presentation slideshows, the sum of agony in all that is bound to this building. With the familiar metal-on-metal cry the walls re-emerged unharmed, and as the crevice narrowed my memory of the hellscape erased itself cleanly.

The elevator stopped. I stepped out, the weird dream left behind as the elevator space disappeared from my sight.

Top Floor, Please

I found myself in a golden chamber, of which the details were mostly forgotten; I only saw a window, and as I gazed down from it I was stunned in place before a splendid view, mouth open in awe. Standing above the pollution, I saw the blooming of the world.

Below was a raging sea of dust, from which rose a few skinny apartments and advertisers' towers; a default background claimed the space above, of an indescribable texture and color, flowing toward the sun at a leisurely pace. Under the polyurethane sky and replacement sunlight, it was postulated that I fell in love. The sky. So it was real. That man wasn't lying.

Even up here the competition was fierce. Angry billboards showed an eraser unmake factories into green hills, turning cities into classic Windows XP desktops. In this way they caused much unemployment and endless societal agony. The smart among the laid off workers defected to advertising, so that they could destroy factories too and at least make more people feel their pain.

I realized I was honored with a privilege I didn't deserve.

This is the top floor, the place where managers, monsters and monies go at night. I don't belong here. I'm not authorized to be here. Should I run? Or should I hide? My brain pulsed out a final burst of confusion and stopped responding.

It was too late. Now The Vriesea was standing behind me, a thousand ranks above me. I knew I would be among the layoffs soon for the trespassing. I stiffened my spine and stared at the ground dejectedly, waiting for him to voice the verdict.

Of Quality

Mr. C of Vriesea was a paradoxically-nosed man, impossibly young for the power he wielded. His attire was sterile, his stride confident, and his eyes radiated ambition.

With his eyes on me and his overwashed suit weighing me down, I knew I must act like a qualified Vriesea mook. I tried the Workshoply Yogify Breathing – in, out, in, ow. Lungs hurt-ify. I buried my head deeper in my messy collar. No use, these people are see-through, they know you as if you're transparent, I thought.

Apology would not help. He would consider my actions as a deliberate ploy to challenge his status. Selling more parts of myself would be a sign of weakness before him. I'm already disowned, I thought.

Stop writing a novel in your head. Redo your clothes and schedule an appointment to get your heart fixed.

Hearing Mr. C speak, my hands reached my nonexistent tie and redid the air, probably hypnotized. My lips opened but no voice came out.

Look at you, you look disheveled. Need a coffee?

Mr. C produced a paper cup, filled it from a faucet on the wall, and offered it to me.

Initially I hesitated, but I couldn't leave Mr. C holding his hand in midair for too long, so I took the cup and took a sip. Then another. Then another. All this time Mr. C stood before me, covering me with his long shadow, like a mother duck protecting her duckling.

As I slowly emptied the cup down my stimulant-deprived body, strength returned to me. I forgot I was heartless. I forgot the anxiety of the looming layoff. I forgot to remove the penis joke from the draft of my required report. Floating in an endless sea of light, the city bustle below and the sky above, I happily hippie'd anumb, for the moment has been etched in my soul and become part of me, an eternal spring ushered in by one drop of kindness.

V

Spoilers Trigger warning: major character death

The door burst open, interrupting my musing. It was the murderous client, now painted over with blood. His face turned upside down and his eyes shone with vengeance as he stared at Mr. C.

Yaaas! I did it! I speedrun Vriesea!

He raised his knife and bolted at Mr. C. Without a second thought, I swerved and put myself between the client and Mr. C. The knife got stuck in my chest.

The client ding'd like a microwave oven. He tried to retrieve his weapon, but it was glued to me. He grabbed the hilt and pulled, to which I shook this way and that like a metronome. I could only pray my useless body would delay the attacker for a few more seconds for Mr. C to escape.

Finally the client ripped his knife free, tearing open my hollow chest in the process. Arrows of sunlight pierced through my body. I knew I was of no good; my legs went soft, my professional smile collapsed in a disgraced stupor, and I smell dinner at the most inappropriate time, when my internals �vI�n��lK�^�3��V#^B�^NI�%^G�v�3I��

Floor

I was lying on the floor, which had begun to crack and tilt. The client caught up to Mr. C and stabbed him, to no avail: his blade turned into pumice and escaped between his fingers. You can't harm a man with his own product, I thought.

Gravity started to pull me toward the staircase, the lowest spot on the floor. I rolled over, and before I knew it my body was splattering off the stairs, leaking sticky juices on every step like an overripe mango. I felt myself lightening up, as more and more parts of me lost along the way, floating in midair to form a new modernist sculpture-spiral.

I didn't know what happened afterwards. Colleagues said I rolled into the hall, with only my head standing on a bare spine, like some goth lollipop. They reconstituted my body with coffee and reconnected me as a Teamsmember. Then I got up to write my unfinished report. Life returned to normal.

From the scurrying shadows behind the drawn curtains, however, I could tell a silent storm was raging. I think the upper layers of the main building collapsed three times in the month that followed, tons of inane concrete sinking into the ocean of dust.

The contacts on the company home page led to a page filled with Lorem ipsum. The blood trail in the hall stopped abruptly at a wall. The elevator shafts have grown varicose in constant restructuring and would be out of service till next year.

Epilogue

We were doing the team connection game thing again, because we had another new manager. The years have domesticated me; I remember I used to pass the time mixing up lyrics of the Vriesea Theme Song, or the earsore brand-identity put on repeat, with another intern. Now, I just followed through the ritual like everyone else did.

Yet when spiky cars zoomed past blasting the song and shame from the past boiled me from the inside, I would mix up the lines once more and sing along:

Where'd the man'ger go?
I'm f*cked if I know;
'rrupting on our heads,
'dosing on our woes.
Spread your arms and fly,
Dive off-line and die;
The future starts with you:
Your pain could amuse –