Market Research
This tea is too hot. I’ve had a long day, I have to see my wife tonight, so I’m in a rush and I don’t have time to drink hot tea. I know I’m supposed to write important things down in this journal. But all I can think to write about is my tea. It’s aromatic, which is nice, it relaxes me, but I can’t drink it. It smells so good, but I can’t drink it because it burns my tongue.
***
Today, my tea is a lovely temperature, though a tad too sweet. My days are long, I work very hard, and I consider myself a serious person, so I prefer not to drink things that are too frivolous or silly. My wife prefers sweet things. I would buy this as a gift for my wife, or someone like her.
***
I am enjoying my tea. After a long day, where I have worked very hard, it is good to drink this tea. It is bitter to the taste, but sits nicely in my stomach, without exciting the senses. Because it is the right temperature, I can drink it at the speed I like. I can sit back and enjoy the afternoon sun, streaming through the window. I wonder if I flicked back through this journal, how many entries would be about drinking tea in the afternoon sun? That would be a laugh. It would show that I surely do love tea! Better not, I have to go meet my wife, we have a busy evening planned.
***
Hey Jerry, this tea guy is giving us good stats, wanna put him in with the mums and see what we get on the passive tolerance scores?
Why?
It’ll save us running it separately, and we’ll get out of here sooner.
Yeah no worries, get it done and let’s go get some lunch.
***
I’m still drinking the same cup of tea. It still tastes good, and has somehow stayed the right temperature. Suddenly, through the window, I can hear conversations — two women talking to each other. They have children with them, who are asking them questions. The mothers give the children toys, which seems to quieten them. I am no longer enjoying this tea as much.
***
The women stopped talking as suddenly as they started. I didn’t hear them leave, the noise just stopped. Their voices seemed to come from the window. What is out there I wonder? My tea seems bottomless, which is strange. I am enjoying it, sipping quietly, it is the perfect temperature, and relaxes me after a long day. I feel compelled to write that after each sip. While I could hear the women and children, I was not relaxed, which I wrote down, but now I feel relaxed again, which I am writing down now.
***
I have heard the women and children come and go again and again. I do not hear them enter, I do not hear them leave. First there is silence, then there is chatter, children pleading with their mothers for attention, the mothers discussing their weeks, their days, their husbands, their friends. Then, without fail, the mothers will provide the children with toys. Sometimes the toys quiet the children, sometimes not so much. Sometimes the mothers are able to continue their conversations, sometimes they must deal with their irate children. Every time, soon after the toys have been dispensed, they go quiet, and are gone.
***
Hello? Is anyone reading this? If not, then why do I feel compelled to write so? My tea is warm, and feels good in my mouth. I know it is relaxing me after a long day, though I can’t seem to think what I did that made the day so long. All I know is that this tea is good, though I have been drinking it for a very long time. I know because the mothers have come and gone uncountable times. Sometimes the toys they give their children make them happy, and sometimes not. I’m not sure why I am writing this, I know I need to write down that I’m enjoying this tea, it is a good temperature, but I need to go home, I’m sure of it. I have had a busy day, and a busy night planned with my wife. I have enjoyed this tea, but now it is time to go home and see my wife.
***
Will this tea never end? Will I ever be able to go home? It tastes good and it is the temperature I prefer. I feel relaxed, but when I write about my situation, I don’t understand how I could be relaxed. Why am I here? Why am I writing this? I drink my tea, I write how I feel, over and over again. And when the mothers come, with their infernal children, I am less relaxed. How many times must this be said?
***
I am not relaxed. The children are screaming, the mothers are screaming. They are not happy, the toys have not satisfied them. They are shouting things at each other now, ‘your child is bad, your child is wicked’. As I sip my tea, I feel my stress levels rising. I know I need to go home to my wife, but instead I listen to these voices bicker and squabble. I feel fear, even though my tea is a good temperature — I know I need to go home to my wife, we have a busy night. But I cannot picture her face, or say what it is exactly that we were supposed to do.
***
I know this room has a window. The afternoon sun comes through it and warms my face as I drink my nice, relaxing tea. Now the clamour of the children pours through it, over and over again. Crying, silence. Laughing, silence. I cannot understand, they seem to be on repeat. They never talk of anything new. I try to turn my head, and look at the window, to see this strange, inconsiderate family, but my head does not turn. My hand does not leave the page. I have tea in front of me, and a sunny table. A relaxing setting to wind down after work. But I cannot look down and see myself write. I cannot turn my head to look out the window. All I know is I sit at this table, and I enjoy my tea, if only those brats would be silenced.
***
My hand should hurt. My stomach should burst. I should be sitting in my own urine. I have drunk and drunk, and written and written. WHOEVER IS READING THIS — THE TEA IS GOOD. I’m sure I must be insane. This is not the mind of a whole man. I would stop writing, but it is the only time I have words in my head. It is the only time I seem to… exist. That and when the noise starts. Like a switch, the babble, the nasal laughs. I must be insane, for I have heard it begin and end thousands of times. I’ve written that the tea is good, the noise is bad, thousands of times. And every time, it is a little different. The children are happy, the children are sad. They laugh, they scream, they whip themselves into a bloody frenzy. I’ve heard the mother’s copulate, while the children are ignored. I’ve heard the poor babes smothered, or the squelchy sounds of dismemberment and psychosis. Every possibility has played out through that window. And yet every time, my tea is warm! It is made the way I like it! my hand moves, because I know it does, because I write these words in the afternoon sun I cannot see but they come and go again and again!
***
I write now because I must. Because to write is to be, because I am nothing but the words I leave. I know now that there is no window, there is no tea, there is no hand to hold a pen. Just these words, and the voices I hear. I understand now. The toys. Every thing changes, based on the toys they give. They are testing something. Testing how the toys affect the children, how the children affect the mothers, and in some circuitous way, how the mothers affect me, and the way I drink my tea.
So they are a test, a simulation of some kind. So too then, I must be. If so, then someone must be reading this, someone must surely see that though I have no hand to write, no eyes to see, I still have a mind of sorts, even if it is only to hear the voices and taste the tea. If you are reading this, please, hear me. The tea is relaxing, it is just the way I like it, and those infernal voices that I have heard twist and cavort in glee and agony a million times over are not relaxing and they spoil my tea. So please, surely you know what you need to know, and you can end this. I feel like I should be getting home to my wife, but I know now that surely she mustn’t exist, or if she does, it is like me, trapped in another box, and we are never to meet. Please. Switch me off.
***
Hey Jerry man, that GPU is running pretty hot.
Oh yeah? Shit you’re right, lol, the toff isn’t looping, but the mums are. Woah it’s done nearly three million logs!
Holy crap, want me to kill it?
Nah no stress, lets grab lunch first and then we’ll check out the logs and see if we can figure out what the glitch is.
