Try This Weird Trick to Escape Your Life — II
I meant to tell you about Joanne. But then I realized — you’re probably wondering what is this story about? Where’s the science fiction and fantasy? After all, shitty corporate jobs are so common as to constitute a shared setting, a typical milieu familiar to us all, even if only from watching Office Space. And bad bosses, too, are more the rule than the exception, at least in my experience.
So I’ll come back later to describe Employee Source, Incorporated, the glass-and-aluminum office building on Lincoln Drive, just up 24th Street from the Esplanade, Fashion Square Mall, and all that. We’ll talk about the Sandwich Thief, the Consultant’s Mysterious Device, the Meetings at the Roach Coach, and Mack the Mail Guy. You’ll get to meet Anthony and Gail, Pam and Bryan and Julie.
Later —
Think, if you will, of a clickbait article. Maybe it showed up on some pop culture website. There’s a picture of a photoshopped body builder, too muscular to be real, or a woman with a ten-inch waist. Deep in the uncanny valley. You wonder why anyone clicks on such things.
Then you click on one. You couldn’t help yourself. It just kept showing up, page after page.
This guy found something in the woods you won’t believe.
There’s an amateurish picture of some trees. There’s something gray hidden behind some bushes. What is it? A wall of a shed, maybe? Some kind of industrial thing, a metal panel like on a transformer? You can’t tell. To be honest, it’s not that interesting. But they keep you showing that picture.
Whoever’s paying for it must be spending a lot of money for all those hits. This guy found something in the woods…
What is it he found, and why is some clickbait company paying $0.02 an impression, ten million times a day, to spread it across your screen?
Or maybe it doesn’t go to everyone. It doesn’t show up on Pam’s screen, as she eats a bagel with cream cheese in her cubicle. Anthony guzzles Mountain Dews, white light reflecting off his glasses, and he never gets that article. Neither does Julie, as she mopes in her window seat, always on the phone with her kids, voice low and depressing.
Whoever made the ad thinks you, with your browsing history, need to see it.
And of course it’s all BS.
But you click anyway. And of course, it’s totally not going to be worth it. There’s a picture of the woods, and a little narrative underneath.
Jim Solloway used to bike past these woods every day on the way to his job at the Post Office in Raleigh, North Carolina.
You have to click the arrow button. A new page, with new ads, loads. There’s a new picture. It shows a trail strewn with brown leaves and a discarded paper cup from McDonald’s.
He always wondered where this trail went.
Next page. Laboriously it loads, slow because of ESI’s crappy internet connection, and probably because there’s about six viruses on the page, which are trying to get into ESI’s servers and your computer, and bright, busy ads for dating websites and self-help books. Now you see this thing, well it’s kind of a shack or shed, but rather solid and thick looking.
At the end of the trail was a bunker.
Ok, so it’s a bunker. Made of metal or cement so if it got hit with an artillery shell, it wouldn’t blow up.
But why would there be a bunker in Raleigh, North Carolina? That fine city is rather far from the nearest theatre of operations in Europe, and nowhere close to Korea or the Pacific or anywhere else that’s had military action.
There was a sign on the bunker, but it was too faded for Jim to read.
Probably just saying to “Keep Out” or “Property of the US Army Reserve” or something like that. Of course, we know Jim’s going to go in… it would be a lame clickbait article that ends after three pages.
Jim didn’t want to go in, but you called him a pussy until he opened the door with a crowbar.
You?
The next picture makes your blood run cold. The door’s busted open now, showing only darkness inside. There’s no picture of Jim Solloway, but there is a picture of a guy in a long-sleeved checked shirt and jeans. And that shirt, well you have a shirt just like it, and you have jeans like that, and the face on the guy is also just like your face.
None of this makes sense, of course. You sneak a peek over your shoulder. The other employees of the Tax Accounting Department are working hard at pretending to work. Julie’s still murmuring at her son or other family member. Anthony, who you can see through the rectangular window separating your cubes, shoots you a “what?” glance. You just shrug.
In the next picture, Jim Solloway and the other guy who looks exactly like you seems to be inside the bunker. It’s dark except for what the flashlight shows. Everything’s made of bare concrete, with rusted ladders and pipes running here and there.
Jim and his friend found what seemed to be an old military installation. The question was — which military?
Indeed, as the pictures kept coming, one thing is consistent. The style of architecture isn’t similar to US military standards. Everything’s shoddy, too small or too big, awkward. For example, a staircase so narrow Jim and you have to go down sideways.
The staircase went down approximately twelve stories.
You were exhausted by the time the staircase let out (the captions say). Jim wanted to turn back because he was claustrophobic, but his friend screamed at him and wouldn’t move out of his way, and even stabbed him with a knife to make him keep going.
The side of your nose gets sweaty, and you stomach churns. Not because of what was happening in the story, but because none of these pictures is looking any less like you. Jim’s friend looks exactly like you. You have no memory of ever visiting Raleigh, North Carolina, or any guy named Jim Solloway. None of this is ringing a bell.
In a huge, man-made cavern, an ancient city had been excavated. It was an architectural dig, organized into a grid pattern with fences and wires.
More pictures follow, showing drystone walls of houses and other walls of unknown structures. Scaffolding props up some buildings. There are a few huts or sheds made of aluminum. A picture of Jim shows a dark spot on his shirt, presumably where you’d been forced to stab him so he wouldn’t freak out in the tight stairs.
No, not me. It can’t be you, that just doesn’t make sense. You’re just a guy with a crappy job at ESI, in a cubicle, screwing around on the internet when you’re supposed to be collecting payroll information and filling out tax coupons for the various tax authorities in Ohio.
They found weird machines, the purpose of which they couldn’t figure out.
Hulking in the background are objects, massive and dark, with turrets and long barrel-like projections and curves and plates of metal. They’re vaguely military, like something you’d find on a naval base somewhere. The cylinders suggest big guns. Picture after picture show details and shapes that are maddening because none of them really seem to go together, none of it adds up into coherent machines you understand.
Jim lost sight of his friend in the machines. He called out, but his friend didn’t answer. Jim was forced to leave when his flashlight began to go out.
You’re getting goosebumps on your arm. There’s no use denying that Jim’s friend is you. Even if you don’t remember any of this, even if none of it is possible. The final picture in the clickbait sequence is chilling. It’s the same one from the beginning, just some boring-looking woods with a dull, flat thing behind it.
Jim never saw his friend again, and can’t find the location of the bunker anymore.
Continue to part III.
