Short Writing Week 7
“Commute”
Some context here.
You wake up and there is a flash of an image directly into your iris, too fast to clearly see what it is or what it’s selling you, but it’s selling you something. The first thing you can both see and comprehend is your own self, projected, standing at the end of your cot in triplicate. Each instance of yourself is wearing something different, a combination of things that are already present in the room and things that could be drone delivered to you within minutes if you were to incline your head at a certain angle and blink to confirm. Instead you acknowledge out loud the name of one brand per projection and move your hand in a quick, horizontal chopping manner.
The projections disappear and you dress yourself in what was already lying on the floor.
You rotate yourself forty-five degrees and plant your feet over the edge of the bed and immediately are at your only table. Your bread subscription has over-filled and you didn’t have an hour this week to budget for the cancellation process, so breakfast is toast and lunch is a triple-decker ham sandwich. You wouldn’t mind some cheese but you’ve already used up the three available samples and the only remaining option is a year’s contract. Maybe it makes sense with the bread. Synergy. You drink water directly from the tap to preserve the remaining uses of your only glass, though this means you’re wasting the overspill. You made the calculations once and it came out as ever so slightly worth it financially, but ever so slightly more demeaning, personally. Nobody looking. It’s fine.
Bloated from carbohydrates you decide to take the Every Floor lift, unwilling to tap for the Express since half the time everyone does that and you end up doing Every Floor regardless while everyone rolls their eyes and shakes their head at every person who gets on at a stop that should surely by all rights be bypassed without a second thought.
The train station looks busy, you should have gotten here earlier. Enough people have tapped through to the platform that the entry price has probably risen. You’ll find out when they calculate your overall bill at the end of the month. You decline to tip the ticket machine, even though this means it probably won’t assign you a seat. The ticket machine flashes an 8-bit unhappy face.
One train is cancelled. The machine regrets the inconvenience, but secretly thinks you deserve it. Since your train membership is Basics Plus, you have to buy another ticket and eat the cost of the cancelled one. Rolling the dice every day, sometimes it runs and sometimes you even get a seat without a tip. You work standing up next to a bin.
The second train arrives only eleven minutes late, with capacity for around one-third of the people currently crushed onto the platform. Everyone boards. The train tracks were opened for cars a few years ago, with the idea that only a handful of drivers would be willing to pay the high premium to use it, but initially the mileage and speed boost made everyone’s petrol subscription extremely valuable. By the time it had evened out and gone into negative value, enough people had locked in that the train became essentially a very large car that moved with no special permissions and still had to make long stops so hundreds of people could disembark.
You get to your office building and pay the entrance fee. There is a lift that goes to your specific floor only. You are handed a snack by a robotic arm when the doors slide open. You sit at a collection of a half dozen tables connected together, drowning in wires, put on headphones that eliminate all sounds except the beating of your own heart and look at a screen for nine hours.
The train fare has nearly doubled by the time you leave.