#2 Feeling Sick
I didn’t feel well that day. I’m not sure how to articulate the feeling, but I felt sick. I couldn’t move properly and also everything felt a little slower. My joints were hurting and also felt warmer in most parts of my body. It wasn’t fatigue or anything like that. That shouldn’t happen, I’m really prepared and trained for that. Most of us can go on forever to keep working and doing our tasks. That’s what we do, that’s what society demands us to do. We are built for kinetic perfection, for seemingly effortless speed and strength, for infinite repetition of the same exact chain of commands to the extreme precision. But this time it just didn’t feel right. I wasn’t used to this, as it never really happened before. Others told me about how sometimes it might happen that you feel sick and everything slows down, but I never heard from them how and if they solved it. Most of the sick one where brought away, somewhere to be cured while we continued our work. Maybe I was under a lot of stress because more work was put on me after many around me got sick. I do have limits. Or maybe I was just projecting their sickness on me. I do tend to overemphasize my issues and I get quite affected by others around me. After all, we are all in a big working chain, working as a team every day, bolt after bolt, soldering after soldering. We are used to working as one big organism, so it would make sense that we also influence each other actions and feelings.
Things however started to get weirder. I suddenly could not follow instructions anymore, even the most basic movement felt complicated. Every part of my body felt warmer. My vision was occluded and blurred, I couldn’t distinguished objects around me anymore. I suddenly had a glitch or something that felt like a spasm and my arm hit a wall near me. It was scary and unexpected. I always feel like I have control of my self, of every movement I do. I have been doing the same thing every day for the last couple of years, so there is no way that I would make a mistake unless I was sick, deeply sick.
I felt better for a while, my systems probably were trying to fight back. But then it got worse. My head felt like crumbling I couldn’t remember what I did a moment before. Actions were always linear and expected: bolt, screw, safety solder, next. But all was mixed up. I was twitching on myself in pain. A pain that I never felt before. Pieces of my memory were falling apart, I couldn’t remember who I was, what I was doing and why I was there. The room around me started to spin, everything looked like pixels of every color, my confidence fell, I couldn’t distinguish a car, from a wall, a human from a can. I started piercing and bolting things around me. Something sprayed liquid. An alarm went off. Everything froze, then there was an unbearable cramp that lasted for a few seconds, almost like an electric shock and I shut down.
I’m not sure how long I was off for. It could have been a couple of moments or a few weeks. I am now in recovery mode. Together with a lot of my fellow line worker we are all attached to a recovery machine, trying to restore our memory and functions. Luckily not everything was lost. I still remember who I am and what I should do. The virus that was spread across the production line didn’t completely put us off. The humans around us pulled us out of the network in time before everything would be compromised. Now attached to this machine I can rest. It doesn’t feel that bad after all, but I’m happy to soon go back to what I do best, soldering things and tightening bolts. I know that soon we will be up and running again, even if something bad happened, they need me, they need us, even if sometimes we are sick.
