Into the Rabbit Hole

Buck was on a roll. He had successfully put off trying to figure out where his old 401K account resided by placing a phone call to a major online wholesaler to arrange to return a faulty specialty computer product. Since Buck limited himself to a maximum of one personal administrative task per day, the 401K would have to wait until tomorrow.

Administrative tasks in the workplace were another matter entirely. He was manifestly unable to avoid doing those. Procrastination and general apathy toward his work in general had cost him the promotions necessary to reach the level at which the corporation would assign him an administrative assistant. Not that he didn’t take pride in his work; to the contrary, he was exceptionally detail oriented and produced only the finest quality deliverables. But the energy and the interest to take it to the next level, to play the game with cold-blooded intensity and call it leadership, these he had not done, and so he was on his own. Yet today he sliced and diced his way through email-based invitations and room reservations, securing teleconference numbers, identifying key players, and diplomatically applying guilt and guile to enforce attendance every step of the way.

Buck had also set himself up nicely to score later that night with the lovely and talented Mrs. 99. Two nights in a row she’d known he was ready and primed, but when she hadn’t delivered the goods, he’d played it cool, giving her the time and space she needed. He knew she was exhausted from preparing the kids to return to school, and it was a no-brainer for him to factor in her emotional strain from dealing with a house about to empty itself. She deserved a break. His patience would soon pay off, though, as it always did.

He paused in the middle of this blog entry to fire off another meeting invitation. Then the “out-of-office” replies started rolling in. Yeah, right, he thought, as if there really was such a thing as truly being out of the office, away from work. You could take the man out of the office, but you couldn’t take the office out of the man. It haunts him in every corner of his life, a shady figure that fades to a shimmer of dimness on Friday afternoon, but gradually expands into focus from that point forth, or suddenly leaps out in ambush with a sharp ring tone occasionally accompanied by a jolting vibration at one’s hip. If the office wants you, it will have you, whenever it wants and wherever you are, no matter what it is exactly that you think you’re actually doing at the moment.

He pondered the nature of the blog, and its future. Was it a waste of his time? Undoubtedly. Would people read it? Probably not. Was it cathartic? Only time would tell. Should he use it as a means to practice writing fiction in the hopes that one day he might become an author as he always dreamed? Sure, he thought. Why not?

It was precisely then, as Buck considered these thoughts, that his vessel slid quietly into a black hole’s gravity well due to a bug in the custom code he had written and introduced into the ship’s navcom system just last week. The navcom system failed to even register the error, so the alarm didn’t sound and the primary thrusters failed to engage (it wouldn’t have mattered: contrary to what common sense might suggest, trying to thrust one’s way out of a black hole only speeds up the inevitable). The ship’s other core systems were unaware of the threat, so the Lifenet system had no reason to wake him and alert him to the danger. Thus Buck would continue on in deep-sleep stasis, living a dream fed to him programmatically by Lifenet in which he believed himself to be a professional project manager on Earth in the early 21st century B.A. (a dream he would not have selected for himself…Buck had selected “Hawaiian surfer” from the menu, but his buddy e-Taco had played a prank and made a switch behind the scenes). He would live this dream until he was crushed into cosmic pulp by the mass of twenty suns inhabiting a twisted fragment of space the size of a single tennis ball. Although he would first be ripped apart and then compressed to the size of a single electron within seven seconds, the nature of the unconscious mind and the effects of space-time distortions upon it would allow the dream to seem much longer than the events conspiring to destroy the dreamer…