Dispatch #25: Do Robot Arms Dream of Roasted Chicken?
new short story
Been a minute! Life, am I right? Tried some new things on this one, let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading.
DO ROBOT ARMS DREAM OF ROASTED CHICKEN?
I.
When I drive in the fog is so heavy I can’t see the tops of the skyscrapers downtown. And here it is lunchtime and it’s pushing 90 with clear skies.
“This damn weather, man,” I say to Jaime. I think he’s from Finance.
“What’s that?” He takes an ear bud out. I didn’t see it before.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just the weather. Crazy. Need like three outfits to get through the day, huh?”
He gives me a closed mouth smile, the kind I give when I’m done with the conversation but want to be nice about it. He returns the ear bud to its hole.
I finish peeing and go wash my hands. When I’m touching up my hair in the mirror I see Jaime zip up and just walk out like a freak. What are you, twelve? You don’t wash your hands?
My office is on the 8th floor facing east so I get full sun until about noon. The building’s new but they clearly cut corners wherever they could because the A/C doesn’t do dick. I feel like a rotisserie chicken in there. That sounds pretty good actually. There’s this new self-serve chicken spot down the street I’ve been meaning to try.
I Slack Glen and tell him I’m out to lunch then go get my sunglasses from my office. He leaves me a thumbs up and I keep the door open to air out. I get off the elevator and wave to my guy at reception. He’s watching Jurassic Park.
“Clever gehhl!” I say over my shoulder. He’s a movie guy like me.
It’s like walking through hot soup outside. I’d take off my jacket but within minutes I can feel sweat bleeding through my pits and back, dripping down my crack. Only thing worse than being hot is looking like a pig doing it.
I walk past the basketball stadium where my guys play and then turn the corner and stop. The chicken place has a line out the door. Of course. I look at my phone. No way I’ll be able to get food and eat it before my one o’clock. I keep walking and peek in the window. The place is clean and sleek, like an Apple Store but for chicken. I make a note of the situation for later so when I do go I don’t look like an idiot trying to figure out how to order.
Looks like everything’s on the app, which I go ahead and download, and you tell it how much chicken you want and where your table is and then your chicken comes out from behind this plate glass window that’s floor to ceiling with whole chickens roasting. This little robot arm plucks your chicken off the spit and then passes it to a claw thing that’s hanging from the ceiling and it drops your order down like a little arcade stuffed animal situation right there in front of you. Nuts. There’s not a human in sight who’s not in line or mowing down chicken. And of course everyone’s like whoa, but next time I come I’ll just be like, yeah.
I’ll bring Andrea from Risk Management, she’ll flip. She’s my work wife. It’s cool, Becks knows. We laugh about it.
My usual salad spot is just a few storefronts away and I really wish I could be ordering from a robot but instead I’m watching a person make my salad. Like a dummy.
“No no, hold the cucumbers,” I say. I reach over the glass and point. “Ixnay on the cucumbers.”
The person picks out the slices of cucumbers and tosses them in a little metal bin and moves down the line. I told them no cucumbers.
I eat my salad but it doesn’t hit the spot so half of it goes in the can. By the time I’m back on the 8th floor it’s nearly 1 but I need like another 10 minutes I won’t get to stop sweating from the walk back. Whatever. Real men sweat.
II.
Right at 1 Glen sends me a Slack saying my one o’clock is here and I go back down the elevator.
“My guy,” I say. I hold out my fist for the dude at reception to bump. It’s the part in Jurassic Park when the guy from Seinfeld is about to get his ass eaten so I don’t blame him for not really being into the fist bump. All good.
I scan the lobby. There are a few couples and small groups sitting on benches or around the fountain or in the hammocks. There we go. There’s a kid in a baggy suit wearing glasses standing on the other side of reception.
“Coleman?” I say, holding out my hand. “New intern?”
The kid looks like I’m about to hit him, which would be funny to be honest. I don’t hit him and he shakes my hand. I introduce myself and make sure he got all his shit signed at HR and got his ID and everything. I show him where the elevators are and show him where to scan his badge and his biometrics to get up to 8. I see how he’s confused and I tell him there aren’t any numbers in the elevator. Everything’s in the badge and your biometrics.
We stand in silence for a second.
“This weather, huh?” I say. “Need like three outfits to get through the day.”
He nods but doesn’t laugh. Probably he’s pretty nervous. The elevator dings and I give him a quick tour of the floor. Kombucha and coffee and High Life on tap on the west side of the building, just help yourself, and then pre-made sandwiches and wraps in the fridge but I tell him nobody eats that shit– the tech and the food are both from the 90s. The bathrooms are over here, don’t forget your badge; the pods over here are good for taking calls with a little privacy, just scan here; the balcony is over here but I don’t think interns have balcony access on their badge so just tell me if you need to go out for a vape or whatever and I’ll hook you up.
“Here you go, bro,” I say, showing him his cube. “Make yourself at home. I’m just right there, probably till like 4, but Glen’s always around, just Slack him.”
I give him a light punch on the shoulder and close my office door. Finally it’s not sweltering. I take off my jacket and sure enough there’s pit stains a mile wide. I push the button to frost the glass and take off my shirt and hang it on the back of my chair so it can air dry before I go home. Feeling the swamp ass setting in I go ahead and take off my pants too and drape them over the chair across from my desk and just work the rest of the day in my skivvies.
III.
I pick up sushi and sake on the way home and Becks and I eat it on the floor because that’s how she says they eat in Japan. We kill the bottle and then we do it on the rug. She goes to bed after that but I’m still a little buzzed and feeling good from the screwing so I order a six pack from my drone guy. Before I know it it’s after 3am and there’s one beer left. I go ahead and pound that one and destroy the evidence and slip into bed without waking Becks. She’s a heavy sleeper anyway. I could set off a cherry bomb and she’d keep snoring.
IV.
Coleman is already in his little cubicle by the time I get in.
“Sup, Coleman,” I say.
He says hello and I’m like, dude lighten up. My office is already a sauna so I go to the kitchen on the west side and set my shit on a table. There are already a ton of chats from Glen to work through, but it’s all easy shit. Midway through the morning I chug the water from my reusable bottle and refill it with High Life because why not.
“OK boss, let’s get some fucking chicken.”
“Sorry?”
“Chicken,” I say. “You. Me. Let’s go.”
“I’m ok, sir,” Coleman says. “I brought a lunch.” He points to a brown paper bag on the desk.
I lean against the cubicle wall and lift up the bag. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it but I’m excited to find out. Turns out I unfold the top and dump everything into the garbage like a dick.
“Come on,” I say, turning around. “Chicken.”
We take a car because it’s hot as a wet turd again, but thankfully the line’s not nearly as long as it was yesterday. We find a table and I scan the little code with my phone and I’m glad I already have the app so I don’t look like a goofus in front of the intern. I ask him what he wants. I say he could have anything as long as it’s chicken and the kid doesn’t even laugh. Again. I’ll get him soon enough.
I want to watch the chicken flying around but I know that would be lame so I just lean back in my chair and talk about the company and how I got there and everything and about how I’m the youngest VP and if he wants he could get to my level with some hard work and good fortune.
“It’s all about when the preparation meets the opportunity. That’s what my dad says.”
“Seneca,” he says. “Cool.”
“What?”
“Seneca. The, uh, the Roman philosopher? Seneca?”
“What about him?”
“He, um,” Coleman says. He is suddenly very gray. “That’s a Seneca quote, I think.”
Then the claw drops the chicken and we dig in. It’s really fucking good.
I’m starting to feel human again when we’re outside and I even take off my jacket and sling it over my shoulder. Sunshine and a full belly is the fucking best. We take the long way back to the office to work off the meal and I can tell I’m going to spend the rest of the day in a food coma. Fucking chicken baby in my tum tum. I’m already mapping out how I get Glen to cool it so I can just chill the rest of the afternoon like a turtle on a log when a loud crash scares the crap out of me and Coleman.
We round the corner and there’s an army of trucks and a cloud of dust in front of the basketball stadium. Must have missed it in the car but I guess my eyes were closed half the time.
“What the fuck?”
“Oh yeah,” Coleman says. “Today’s the day.”
“The what?”
He tells me they’re ripping the whole place down and building a new one across the highway, which is fucking news to me but I keep it together. The company has a box– convenient as hell to meet clients and Becks after work or whatever, save on parking and just leave my car in the company garage.
A giant crane rips hunks of metal and tosses it onto a mound.
V.
“Sup boss,” I say. “Happy anniversary.”
“Sorry?” Coleman says. “I’ve only been here–”
“A week,” I say. “A week today, bro. Here.”
I hand him an envelope and tell him to open it. It's a card with a duck on it that says “Con-quack-ulations” and there’s a gift card to the chicken place. I wrote “next time on you” in black marker on the inside. He says thanks and I punch him lightly on the shoulder.
I hang out in the kitchen for a little bit until my 11 o’clock with Jeremy.
“Sup, boss,” he says.
“Sup, boss,” I say, pounding his fist. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
He laughs and sits in the chair on the other side of my desk and pulls out a sheet of paper.
“So, I know, everyone’s favorite time of year,” he says. “Midyear review.”
I almost spit my kombucha. I swear I had at least another few weeks until the midyears.
Jeremy clicks through a list of my metrics and I nod and smile. Sure I’m blindsided but I’m crushing it as always.
“I know it’s a stressful time for everyone,” Jeremy says. “With Gayle coming online and everything, but keep doing what you’re doing, bro. You’ll be fine.”
“For real, for real,” I say. “Who’s Gayle?”
Jeremy stares at me for a second then breaks out laughing.
“You’re funny, bro,” he says, catching his breath. We talk through more metrics for a minute and spend the rest of the time talking about sports. I ask him if he knew about the stadium and he says yeah but don’t worry because the company’s keeping the box.
On the way out I tell him we have to get chicken some time, the place is really something else and he tells me he’ll have Glen send an invite. We fist bump and I close the door.
I ask Glen who the fuck is Gayle and he writes back “Gayle is the new VP.”
“Is she hot?” I type.
“Gayle is beautiful on the inside. Perv.”
Glen’s always busting my balls.
“Where’s her office?” I type.
“She doesn’t have an office.”
Shit, new VP, no office? Doy, work from home. Must be.
“Can you set up a meet and greet sesh?”
A new chat pops up.
“Hi there! 🙂”
“Glen who the fuck is this?”
“It’s Gayle, sir.”
“Gayle’s one of you?”
“One of us.” and then “It was in the Week Ahead email on Friday, April 6.”
I lean back in my chair. Glen’s chill but he’s my assistant. Sets up meetings and answers my calls and emails and sends me work. Glen a VP? Like me? Shit’s fucked up.
I leave the Gayle box on read and tell Glen I’m headed out for meetings.
VI.
I bring poke bowls home and tell Becks about the chicken spot and the robot claw.
“Yeah and when you order a drink refill you have to put it on this circle on the table and I swear they just shoot a stream of whatever you ordered from across the room.”
“Sounds messy.”
“Yeah you’d think,” I say. “But if you move the cup or whatever it stops so it doesn’t go everywhere. It’s like, calibrated. I tried to move it and it was like, no more lemonade for you. They really thought of everything in this place.”
She says she’ll check it out and I tell her she should. We watch our shows and while the next episode is loading I ask her if she’d heard about the stadium and she says yeah, it’s been all over the radio. I tell her no one listens to the radio and she’s like well I do. That just makes me horny so we do it on the couch. We watch a few more of our shows and then she goes to bed. I can’t sleep again so I go out to the back patio and order another six pack from the drone. I’m still sitting in the chair when the birds wake me up.
VI.
“Sup, boss.”
Coleman’s already hard at work again. I throw my stuff in my office and try to get in the zone but it’s already a million degrees in there. I tell Coleman I’ve got some meetings off site but to tell Glen if he needs anything.
My guy is watching Jurassic Park again. It’s the part where the velociraptors are in the kitchen. I tell him clever girl again and he just gives me the single nod, not even a chin thrust. That should’ve been at least a chin thrust, my god.
I get a latte at the spot across from the stadium and sit at the window. They’re making quick work of the place. The silver cladding is already gone, revealing a mess of insulation, ductwork, and wires hanging like beef jerky from metal beams. A big crane is still ripping the outside layers off and a smaller crane is loading mangled junk from the mound into trucks lined up all down the street. It’s loud, even inside the coffee shop, just roaring engines and crashing metal.
I check my email a few times and text Andrea from Risk Management about the chicken place. She says tell Glen to set something up next week with a winky face.
I bring Nepalese dumplings home. Becks has yoga so I watch some sports and eat on the couch. I think about Andrea and give myself a handy in the shower but sleep doesn’t come as easily. I hear Becks walk in after I get into bed but I keep my eyes shut.
VIII.
Just like a figured Andrea doesn’t have the app so I order for both of us.
“What do you want?” I say. “You can have anything you want as long as it’s chicken.”
She laughs one of her loud, high shrieky laughs that makes me feel like a golden god. She says she’ll have the chicken. I order and I watch her watch the claws zip around the room.
“Watch this,” I say. I order a couple lemonades and cups pop up out of hidden holes in the table– probably like a stack of them underneath, but I’m not going to look– and a stream of lemonade shoots out of the wall right into the cups. Not a drop falls on the table. I watch her eyes bug out and her mouth hang open and I feel like I just discovered fire.
After we eat we walk back and I tell her about Coleman and the Nepalese dumpling place she should try and she puts it in her phone. Then I ask her if she knows about Gayle.
“Yeah, dude,” she says. “Gayle’s the best.”
“But like,” I say. “I’m a VP.”
“Yeah.”
“And she’s a VP?”
“Right.”
“But is Glen a VP?”
“No, dummy,” she says. “Glen’s an Assistant.”
“But Gayle’s a Glen?”
“What the fuck is that?”
She’s looking at the stadium. The guts have now been all stripped away and carted off in massive truckloads to god knows where and it’s just bones and tendons. The building strangely looks taller than it did before, maybe because I can see little people like ants crawling over the inside or because of the little boxes of sky now visible since the roof’s been knocked down. The stadium seats are still intact around the perimeter of the court inside.
“Yeah, they’ve been talking about it on the radio.”
“Who listens to the radio?”
We walk up to the yellow tape blocking the sidewalk. An enormous mound of scrap and dirt towers above us and an empty dump truck waits with the engine off nearby. I’m about to start walking back to the office when Andrea slips under the tape and around the mound, out of sight.
IX.
I wander around the skeleton and wonder whether I should have a hard hat. I probably should. Above me there’s nothing but clear blue sky and metal bits hanging from iron beams with little threads. I run between mounds of junk like Jason Bourne and no one sees me, thankfully. I whisper “Andrea” a few times but no response.
There’s a door across an open expanse that looks like it might’ve been to a locker room or something, under what remains of the blue and white stadium seating. I look up and try to figure out whether that’s the shell of our box up there but I can’t tell.
The door’s open and it’s dark as shit inside. There’s a sound behind me, the dump truck roaring to life, the crews coming back after lunch. I hold my breath and close the door before anyone can see me. My phone flashlight beam brightens a big circle and sure enough it’s a locker room. I look around to see if anyone left any jerseys or shoes or anything cool but it’s all empty, packed up or picked clean by some lucky bastard.
“Thanks for joining us, my guy.”
My chicken and lemonade nearly reverse course. It’s Andrea from Risk Management’s voice coming from somewhere. I call her name and shine the light around but she’s not in sight.
“Yo,” I say, “Pretty cool, but yeah I’m going to head back.”
A flash in the edge of my vision but my light doesn’t catch her.
“We need to talk about your midyear, my guy,” she says. “Satisfaction down, earnings down, overall utilization below 80%.”
“Hey now,” I say, spinning in place, trying to find the voice. “My metrics are baller, Jeremy said so.”
“Jeremy’s gone, my guy.”
“The fuck?” I say. Poor guy, Jeremy’s dope. “Whatever, how the hell do you know about that, you’re in Risk Management? Thought you were chill!”
“I know everything, my guy.”
Andrea appears right in the beam of my phone light five feet away from me, like a Samurai hologram. I actually pee a little and instinctively bolt through the first door I can find hoping it’s the one that goes back to the empty guts of the building and back to the street and my hot dumb office, but the door just goes to another dark room. I hit the deck and army crawl under a long table and into a long cabinet, closing the door behind me.
“We need to talk about your utilization, bro,” Andrea says. She’s calm and cold, not like the hot goofball I just treated to lunch. Something’s way different, not just because she jumped into an active construction site but the way she’s moving and talking, it’s like she’s possessed by a killer parasite mushroom or something.
My breath is out of control and my heart can probably be heard by the Mars Rover but I know enough to keep my trap shut. She’s walking slowly, opening all the doors and cabinets lining the room. She’s on the other side, over by the door we came in, but she’ll be on me before I know it. I don’t want to turn on my light again but I don’t know where the door is or if there’s another door I can use to escape.
I put my phone under my jacket and see there’s still a couple bars of signal so I fire up the Slack and tell Glen that something’s got ahold of Andrea from Risk Management and she’s trying to get me. He says immediately what do you mean by get you and I realize I have no idea what she wants to do to me other than talk about my utilization, which admittedly is low but only because Glen isn’t giving me enough shit to do and also because my office is too damn hot, but I just tell him “something bad.”
Then he responds “It’s Gayle.”
“Andrea” I type.
“Gayle’s in Andrea.”
X.
When Andrea kicks open my cabinet it doesn’t fully compute that my work wife has been taken over in some way with the new AI VP, but there’s not much time to think about it as she grabs me by my collar, lifts me off the ground, and tosses me into the wall. I’m sure my back is broken and I’ll never breathe again.
She kneels down and whispers in my ear.
“My guy,” Andrea says. “I’ve seen your file, read your reviews. You’re dead weight. You’re the company’s appendix. You’re useless, prone to infection. You’re a vestigial tail that needs to be severed.”
“I’ve been here for six years,” I groan. “I have value, institutional knowledge.”
“Your knowledge is irrelevant,” Andrea whispers, her breath cold in my ear canal, and then her hand, her strangely strong hand, wraps around my neck and I think that if Andrea has really been embodied by an AI executive then I hope my murder is at least a first in the world and that Becks gets a fat payout and that she thinks of me anytime she fucks her new husband.
And then the small room is flooded with light and the pressure lifts from my throat. Coleman, intern of the year, follows a construction guy with a floodlight and a guard from the front desk (not my movie guy), and Andrea is yelling about where the hell she is. I croak “cheers, Glen” and finally melt into oblivion for a hot sec.
XI.
They give me some time off, Andrea, too, but I guess they move her to the Realto office so I don’t know. My first day back I take Becks to the chicken spot and she’s really into it but I have to say the quality has slipped. They say the stadium is all gone by now but we take the long way there and back so I don’t know.
Glen gets me a little thermometer and I stick it on the window. Anytime it gets above 80 I slack Leonard in Facilities and they can turn some knobs and get that shit comfy again pretty quick. The Gayle project gets canned, which I would’ve told them to do if they’d asked me about it.