Bookmark stories: Lili

Tax office webpage.
Government portal with information about obtaining a work permit.
Online courses.
Sixty two bookmarked ads for rental apartments.
Job advertisements.
Forum post asking for help for an injured homeless cat.
Pages titled "Hiking in ...", "Things to do in ...".
"How to cope with anxiety"
Crafts shops.
Online journal for cultural studies.

Fix it

I run down the narrow streets, turning left at every crossing. Something tells me this is how  I should do it. I know I am late and I have to call. When I reach for my pocket, it is empty.  If only I can remember the mobile number, I can ask someone to use their phone. Or at least  remember the name. Where was I supposed to meet them? Monday, it is Monday, right?

I've had that nightmare for some days now and it bothers me. I wake up sweating and short of  breath, as if I have been running around in my sleep. The bed sheets do not look much better.

My wife is in the kitchen, with a coffee cup in one hand and a bottle in the other, watering  the flowers as she maneuvers around. The cable of her headset is plugged in the tablet on the  table so her head reminds me of a space shuttle floating around the mother ship, connected by a  cord.

"We have to send Ogy by courier", she says instead of "good morning" when she sees me. "My mom  called to tell me that Dany did not sleep that night. Neither did they."

Dany is staying at his grandparents for a week. My wife drove him from the kindergarten to the  airport yesterday. I was supposed to deliver his luggage there and somehow I forgot to take his  favorite toy. "You know what he's like without Ogy, dear", she looks at me from behind her  coffee mug. I don't really want to go over it again, so I try to ignore the accusation in her  voice.

"Do you remember how you made it to dates and meetings before the mobile phone era?", I ask  instead, going back to my own nightmares. She looks at me a bit unfocused, as if taken by  surprise by such a question but still interested in finding the answer. "You know, when you  did not have the option of calling at any time to say you are late, check the details in the  calendar, find the place in online maps..."

"I don't know, dear, I just remember I used to manage", then I see she remembers  something and looks at me from behind the mug again. "It is like what happened with Ogy. In the past people did the things that mattered and did not count on the idea that one can fix anything later."

Rhyme essays

It is not the doomsday mood
that settles in your grim expression
when you say I would not change, even if I could,
that gives me such a sad impression.

It is in fact this weird feel,
telling me you have no fear
that I can prove you wrong with actions,
and thus, your subtle satisfaction.

Worry too much

I used to remember the carefree moments of mutual trust before we bought the car. Since I did not have a license, he would drive us around. It felt funny at first, both of us alert and watchful, going slow enough so that words can float between us while two pairs of eyes scan the road for danger. But I could not keep up with the speed at which comfort swept through for him.

"Keep silent, please, I know what I am doing, your comments are too much", he would say. I knew he was right. My judgement was now a useless burden. The threshold that I had for worrying was too low and it started to show in every aspect of what we did together. Packing for vacation, swimming in the sea, running in airports to catch transfer flights, even party planning - my comments came in too fast, too raw, too unnecessary. Filter them out, or risk being ignored even when it mattered. I could see it coming and I tried, oh, how I tried. 

The strategy was simple - stop the words before they come out. Go in another room to make it physically impossible to react in an audible manner. Turn around the moment I see his annoyance with my reasoning. Fighting the signs that my body would let out was too hard, though. I would jerk in the passenger's seat sometimes, when a car went past too close. "Just let me drive", he would start then, and I would just hope for him to shut up and watch the road instead.

Then it happened. I remember the flowers he brought to my hospital bed. They were pretty. I kept that one good memory when I walked away, and one bad - that I could not really forgive him. I could not forgive myself either.

The receiver's end

There are two things you need in order to get a message through - the right package and the right  sender.

The first time I did this, I was a sixteen years old girl. Every high school has its stories  and there is usually a group of bullies involved. Ours was a pack of five "ladies", stepping  over trembling bodies as they practiced their runway walk in new high heel shoes. As a result  the victim girls would cry in the bathroom, fear going out in public, develop anorexia, have  suicidal thoughts, hate their parents, or suffer a number of other harmless conditions. This  came to an end some months after the leader of the ladies' group received a letter. The  sender? A mysterious guy that kept sending letters that soon started to get responses, hidden  under trash bins, in flower pots, or to cut it short, wherever he said the reply should end up.  The dialog went on for a while and even though most of it I would call just a smart package,  the essence was that as a result the "lady" broke up with her boyfriend, started fighting with  her best girlfriends, fell down into a deep depression well and caused the break up of the  bully group. It was not so hard for a girl to come up with the whole scenario but it took a  man to make it work. That is why I made him up.

Later in my life I have caused things to happen in a much more professional manner, meaning, I  got payed for it. The techniques and technologies that I used had changed too. The main steps,  however, would always be the same. Make up the right person to deliver the message and create  the perfect environment, the perfect story, the perfect package for it. It sometimes took  years. I had to create a blogger once. A couple of professional writers and sociologists  worked full time on his feeds, one year to make him believable enough, one month to drop off  the message. The blog is still up and running. One of my employees gained a PhD in the course  of her work on a task in the pharmaceutical industry. Needless to say, she was the  personification of a creation that came to life with the help of our clients. It took three  years. One year later her character burnt in a laboratory, together with a set of samples and  records, used in her thesis.

I have had my finger in financial, political, and personal affairs long enough to know that  what I do happens all the time, on different scales, triggered by different motives, executed  deliberately or not. Way too often people turn themselves into someone else just so that they can  transmit a message via the perfect wire. Way too often they cannot go back and somehow, in a  weird way, they become the receiver's end of their own communication. I assist the ones that are smart enough not to fall into their own traps.

Breakpoints

Let us reproduce the error, darling,
Put some breakpoints on those lines,
Throw exceptions, do the log file reading,
Let us look again for signs.

A six word story 2

I do not have a plan.

Pending

Three of the four air filter modules were now out of order. James filed a new request in the supply and repair system and watched the result message blink in orange on the screen. "Pending."

Last time he needed help he had to wait a whole week to get it. Then the main transport tunnel in his area got damaged too. The worst was, he had not received his vaccine update yet. He looked up to the flash news display over the entrance. "Population: decrease 2%."

Five years ago he started donating his share to the gene and health fund. Two of his children had survived, he was informed, and resided in baby care cells. "Not that different from me", he thought, "Isolated."

A century and a half now, since the quarantine regime has been into force. Millions had died while building the infrastructure and tuning the system that sustained the life of this world. "No", he shook his head, "Our life in this world."

It must have started a long time before that but no one saw it coming until it was too late. They have tried to tame this planet, breed the species that would feed them, and kill the ones that got into the way. Then evolution filled in the gaps that were left out open. Organisms that survived adapted to the new situation, humans and their livestock were now the main, or even only, hosts for parasites and parasitoids. The greatest effort of his society was targeted at biology and medicine research and development. "And I sit here and wait, for someone to pack and send a fucking twenty by ten by eighty centimeter module over the robot wire line, before the fourth one is down and I choke to death. Someone. Somewhere. So that I can live to help someone else live. Somewhere else. To help build a future for our children that will be born one day. Sometime. And now is just an abstract thought of an abstract notion of an eternal world that stretches outside of my twenty square meters of life. Why do I care so much, when a couple of million years from now it will not matter at all."