The Heart Beats Again
Roddenbury felt the heaviness of the Ubermetro on this day – especially this day – more than any other day. Sunlight and sign-light all reflected off of the wetted surfaces and dirty pools on the ground in a dizzying and discordant show that made the weary trucker feel as though he were drunk, which is the opposite of how a semi operator should be feeling. The man knew that the cause was a combination of a lack of sleep and the disturbing thoughts that ran through his mind the entire night.
Right now, his new housemate was lying on a towel folded over a few times into a makeshift pet-bed. It was a wide gulf between that and the lap of luxury that the people who could afford to keep pets afforded their fur-babies, but that was all the trucker had, and the fluffy did not mind it because she slept like the dead nonetheless. Fortunately, Roddenbury had the steady rise and fall of her breathing as an indicator that the thing was not actually dead.
Dead? Broken? He did not know what a non-functioning fluffy would be considered in pedantic terms. Roddenbury felt that it was not right, regardless. It took him all night to determine that was why he did what he did. Leaving that fluffy to its own suicidal devices was not right. The right thing was a bout to make his day that much harder, though. This day. The next.
Roddenbury was not going to think about all of this right this moment. Right this moment, he was coming up to the depot, right on schedule. He felt like groggy, achy trash, but the man was well within the known routine. He could tackle the unknown in the few hours of the day he had to himself, but while he was dealing with his truck, he at least knew what he was doing and where his destiny lied.
Move a shipment from point A to point B. Bring a shipment from point B to point A. Be one of the many motorized-mules thundering down the roads, keeping the nation running. Compared to such a responsibility, what was the harm in helping a fluffy?
Corporate repercussion for handling unknown company assets.
Violation of housing codes, and subsequent eviction from housing unit.
General hardship in caring and providing for a being with an unknown set of needs.
The man in his company uniform dragged in an uneasy breath. ‘Oh… godDAMN it, Roddenbury,’ he cursed himself yet again.
Today, instead of heading straight for his rig, Roddenbury worked his way through the hangar complex to where the mechanics clustered together. They were having the morning talks as they normally did. Nice and routine. More than that, however, was the keg of plain, black caffeine that they guarded like the drakes of olden tales, in a time of stone bastions, rather than steel cathedrals that pierced the clouds.
These men did not possess a terrible roar to cow the souls of brave knights, or a guttural flame to melt their valiant armor and swords. They instead had numbers and jokes on their side.
“Guess who’s decided to join us!” one of them exclaimed when they caught sight of Roddenbury approaching from the thicket of cabling, lifts, miscellaneous boxy equipment and machinery.
“Big-hat-trucker come to grace the grease jockeys? Maybe extend a thanks for keeping his engine roaring and his gears turning smoothly?” said another.
“Maybe he wants to know what a blinky-blinky light on his dash means!” a third chimed in.
Roddenbury laughed along dryly as the group took their jabs at his expense. The Ubermetro was full of self-centered people who only drifted into the lanes of others’ lives to ask for favors, and the trucker was aware that he was no saint in comparison. Nevertheless, there was a decorum to this game that the trucker would uphold, as opposed to blatantly shoving past the bunch and taking what he needed; which he would have had no qualms doing in order to get his job done, if it did not mean provoking a group of six men conditioned to swinging heavy metal implements around into beating him in the middle of a trucking garage.
“I definitely want to thank you fellas for all the hard work you do; not just on my rig, but everyone else’s. I know it must be hard as hell to keep that up day after day,” Roddenbury told them, before smoothly changing tact, “I’m not trying to take up too much of your time – lord knows we all don’t get enough of it – so how about we raise a cup to our endeavors in what little space we’ve got to call our own?”
The depot mechanics, like those dragons from yore, were prideful things. One did not need to slay them with valor and exotic steel, but a silver tongue. Roddenbury was no socialite with a charm to sway all he met, but at least in the domain of oil and diesel, his words were moving.
“Gee, thanks there, guy! I can’t speak for the others, but I know I don’t hear that nearly enough!” one the mechanics sounded off, and the others voiced their agreements thereafter.
Roddenbury felt a meaningful relief in the depths of his spirit. The job was going to be rough, but with some coffee keeping his heart pumping and his eyes open, the next several hours would be somewhat manageable.
A mechanic handed a freshly poured cup of the steaming wakefulness elixir to the trucker. Roddenbury could feel his hand tremble slightly during the battle of restraint to keep himself from taking a swig right off the bat. The men raised their cups and commenced in a comradely toast, and then Roddenbury was finally free to pour life back into his haggard body.
“You speak some truth, big-rig!” one of the wrench-turners spoke while Roddenbury drank. “You ever wonder how, when so many other jobs are done by bots, we’re still here, boots on ground, tools in hand?”
“Uh oh, there goes Mullenieux again, with that Shaolin-Taoist mumbo-jumbo!”
“Shut your trap and stop making us look bad in front of the big-hat!” the mechanic snapped. When the sidebar chattered died down to snickering, he continued, “It’s because they can’t program a bot to do what we do! They can design an assembly line to put the machines together, but they can’t have machines look after other machines.”
Roddenbury raised a brow while lowering his cup.
Mullenieux continued on, saying, “They can trust a rocket to land itself in the middle of the ocean – in the middle of some field – but they can’t trust that same computer to drive down a city road, or a highway. They can make everything nowadays, and the computers call the shots, but even the computers know that there are some jobs that old-fashioned people-power just do better!”
The trucker nodded a couple of times, apparently mulling over the man’s perspective and coming to an agreement with its. “Shoot, I’ll drink to that,” Roddenbury replied. He downed his coffee, and Mullenieux gladly offered a second drink, which the trucker graciously accepted.
At the time, it was a matter of convenience to agree with the mechanic in order to get a double dose of that precious chemical, but over the course of the empty drive, Roddenbury passed the time by ruminating on the man’s words. It was curious how tightly regimented the shipping industry had become as a logistical necessity to maintain such a tightly packed industry and infrastructure, yet regular people were the supporting sinew that kept it all running.
Maybe it was just cost-effective that way. A person’s brain was just a computer that needed roughly eighteen years to program, so to an algorithm-overseen economy, the time to raise a healthy person was a negligible detail when sheer numbers were taken into consideration. Yes, the algorithm could designate a robotics factory to churn out perfect worker-androids and deplete expensive resources doing so, but why would it when the average person was subsisting with the bare minimum and continuing to reproduce?
The world as it was, was the perfect arrangement to generate wealth and ensure that the ones that devised this future generations ago were the ones that profited from it the most. The founders and their descendants.
By the time Roddenbury parked the truck at the depot that night, he had discovered two new truths. The first was, now he knew why the other mechanics considered Mullenieux to be their resident conspiracy nut. The second was that there was still value in a human life.
Not that Roddenbury ever had a conscious concept that human life was irrelevant.
He, like the rest of the masses of this world enwrapped in wire-veins coursing with electricity and the constant flow of binary code, was raised by computer screens more than he was raised by his parents. He was educated by the state and pushed into a career sector that most benefited that state. Life had not been hard for Roddenbury, and at every stage of his growth, the system slotted him into his preordained position seamlessly, as per its design. Its workings were efficient and nigh unnoticeable.
When Roddenbury reflected on his path while on the road, he could not discern where he had made decisions for himself versus where the decisions were made for him. By sixteen he was deemed an apprentice in vehicular operation. By eighteen he was away from his parents, living in housing provided by the MoverZcorp company. At his current age, he was able to support his own living costs and income at the housing complex. A way through life, as streamlined as the markings painted onto the roadways.
Life was not hard. It was just a life of deprivation, unless one had the right composition of smarts and physical ability and willpower to make it rich. That basic tenet was what allowed the corporations to expand. That basic tenet was how they convinced people to sit by while the world was sold to the machines that built the computer brains, whose algorithmic thoughts created the roles for people to fill, in order for them to chase the delusion that they too could sit in the conference rooms where these decisions were made.
All these jobs that the computers could have filled with more machines, but did not. Unfeasible expenses. Unduplicatable skills. A combination of both. This was where the value of human life remained in a global society that eroded humanity in favor of numbers. This was the value of living when life itself was just another currency, or in the case of fluffies, a novelty.
It unnerved Roddenbury to come to terms with these facts in the way that he did.
Would he really have carried on his part with the intended, blissfully manufactured ignorance, if it were not for him rescuing the stray and needing two cups of coffee to get through his deliveries?
The answer was yes.
This was the consequence of a life run by routine.
The three-legged stray was a glitch in the code.
Roddenbury returned to his apartment deep underground and opened the door. His modest bed was among the first things his gaze fell upon, as it always was, and the man focused on the towel he had laid on his sheets for the fluffy to rest. There was an imprint where the fluffy had been lying, but the mare was gone!
Roddenbury stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. Then he pulled in a deep breath and held it. This apartment was tiny; all he had to do was walk a single circuit around the few rooms and he would find the fluffy. Yet the horror that someone had already confiscated her, and that he was in some database getting his entire life erased so that he could be carted off to some prison, was a gripping one.
The fluffy rounded a corner to poke her head out a smidge. Roddenbury relaxed his lungs in a deep sigh. The man placed his back against the door as his knees buckled. “Jesus Christ.”
The mare stumbled out from her hiding place to approach him. Walking with three legs was still a trouble for her. “M-m-mistow?”
“Hey. How’s it going?” Roddenbury responded tiredly. If he had any meaningful questions to ask the fluffy, his mind was too far gone to do so at this hour. His anxieties had sapped the last of his energy.
“Fwuffy am… am… scawed… fwuffy nu noh wha’ did wong! Nu noh! Nu…” Tears tumbled out of her eyes as she bawled, “Nu noh wha’ did wong, buh’ neba do 'gain! Eba! Eba! How time tiw weggy back!?”
Roddenbury blinked a few times, shocked by the outburst. Something propelled him despite his lack of energy, to reach out and scoop the fluffy up into his arms. He took her as he did before, holding her as though she were an infant. “I’m not the one who did that to you. I–” The man stopped himself from addressing what happened to the mare’s leg. He could not bring himself to tell her that it more than likely was not coming back, save for some yet unknown regenerative power that fluffies were unlikely to possess.
“I don’t know a lot of things, fluffy. I do know that you’ll be safe here from whatever hurt you. I know that I want to help you. I don’t have much else for you past that, right now. I’m sorry. I’m tired and scared too.”
“Huu, huu huu,” the mare blubbered. Despite her lack of ability, she pressed her one foreleg against the man’s chest in some attempt at a hug.
“I’ll figure it out, though. I promise,” Roddenbury told her, though he did not fully comprehend why. ‘The right thing to do, I guess. I’d tell a child that, if I had to rescue one, right? Right…?’
While he was asking himself this, the fluffy replied, “Can f-fwuffy hab namesies? Fwuffy woo wike namesies… woo ma’e fwuffy feew widdow beddah…”
This gave the trucker some pause. He was certain that he was not in the right state of mind to grant this request, but he also did not want to disappoint or sadden the little creature any more than she already was. “… Straya,” Roddenbury named her.
Because she was a stray. And stray was very close to what those down under had renamed their continent-country.
“Wha’ am mistow namesies?”
“… Call me ‘Rod’.”