The timer read 13:54. He’d finished the IQ test in 6 minutes and 6 seconds. Faster than he could run a mile in high school. But those days were long gone. The older he got, the more his physical achievements yielded to mental ones. To finish a test that fast, he must either be a genius or a slob. Arrogant enough not to be tactful, fast enough to give the appearance of inhumanity. Or worse, careless. He didn’t actually care what his score was, he was only interested in how easily he could complete one of these things. Even if he’d gotten a question wrong, he’d seen his own logic behind each of the puzzles, and that was enough to make him feel like he hadn’t missed any of the questions.
Results. Click. For only $19.85 you can get a full report on all your mental abilities. Ugh. For $20 more, we’ll throw in a t-shirt. What? Post results on Facebook. More clickbait.
He exited out of the window and returned to the project at his desk. Joy D’ Jour, another dead account needing to be reconciled. The lazy bookkeeper before him hadn’t ever bothered to follow up on past-due payments or had the courtesy to inform their clients about accidental double payments, rendering the A/R ledger and its 10,000+ accounts a cancer on the eyes. The aging report was a hundred-page summary of all the balances on open accounts, half of whose clients hadn’t put in an order in years and were by all means defunct.
Where was his 5-hour energy drink? He’d need it to get through this slog. The account in question was one of the most arduous to work on. Credits were placed without reference, payments were split up into multiple invoices, each invoice often having multiple payments: one for pre-production, one for shipping, another for the net 30 terms. What a nightmare. The only saving grace was that he didn’t have to deal with this client the way his predecessors had. It was difficult enough to work your way backwards through a dead account, but to be there while it is happening and trying to account for each new piece of information would have given him a worse headache than he already had.
And how did the bozo salesman on the account manage to find these goons, anyway? He had to have found them in the black market down in the SoDo district, a place you’d be surprised to hear the word “bookkeeper” in the first place. The salesman in question only gave a damn about his commission. He’d dealt with him enough to know that it wasn’t really the client he was interested in helping, only himself. These chumps were 40 grand in the hole, but at least the sneaky salesman with the smirky smiles and innocent expressions and cheap glasses had gotten his dues. The moral debits that God was entering on his soul-account surely outweighed the credits.
The clock struck 1. Elvis on the wall grinned at him vulnerably, enticing him to live the dream of an entertainer, but warning him to be wary of selling his soul. Nope, he’d already sold his soul to the books. It was beaten into place with nails in the shape of numbers, a hammer with the face of doom. Yo Elvis, at least we had one thing in common; that empty feeling of being unable to turn back, of a future being planned for you, of wandering through a desolate frontier with a million vultures watching you, waiting for you to fall.
An officer came in through the door with a pencil and paper in hand. He was ordered to draw the state of Maryland with all its major cities from memory alone. The accountant complied. One awkward border was drawn after another, until a near perfect representation of the state showed on the paper. Baltimore, Annapolis, Cumberland, Frederick, Rockville: all accurately filled in. He handed the map back to the officer in less than three minutes, to which the officer promptly turned his back and marched out of the office, locking the door behind him.
Something was different about the officer this time. He thought he’d detected that rare set of contours which indicated worry on his face. Usually when he requested a map, a reconciliation, a weather report, or some other immediate project, there was little sense of urgency or nervousness; just the expectation of his completing the order, which he knew strictly meant business. If the project was not completed in time, he knew the consequences: a 6-point deduction on his IQ rating. Enough deductions and you got kicked out of the building. Rumor had it, execution wasn’t entirely out of the question, but the accountant couldn't remember where he'd heard that.
Rather than return to the painstaking task of reconciling Joy D’ Jour’s account, he wandered off to the internet and found something rather curious in the top stories. A judge had sentenced a deer poacher to a year in prison, adding to his sentence that he must watch the film Bambi every single day. Sentences like this seemed to be getting more common, making the newspapers more entertaining for their readers. He thought the news would one day become like a fictional magazine, a parody of reality that people a hundred years ago would not have taken seriously. Sometimes he felt that if they let him outside, he could be a part of an exciting story too.
As he continued his accounting, a message popped up on the screen that wasn’t related to any program he had open: FOUND A WAY OUT, REUNITE THE INTELLIGENTSIA. A way out? There was none. Even when he was dismissed to use the bathroom, or eat at his feeding stall, or excused to a reading room, no trace of the outside world or anything leading to it could be found. He’d given up the fantasy of escaping early in his education, for he’d never even left confinement in the building. He’d known there was an outside world- he’d read about it extensively in books and the papers- but he wouldn’t dare go out there, because of his illness. The note was utterly threatening to his well-being, so he quickly deleted it, not even considering what “the intelligentsia” might mean.
Another message soon popped up in its place: YOU AREN’T REALLY SICK. THEY’VE BEEN LYING TO YOU. BLEED THE CORPOCRACY! How vulgar. The effect on him was repellent. It was like the way an annoying teenager might try to grab your attention by shouting something obscene, whether it is true or not. Yet he couldn’t help but feel curious about the intrusion, for he’d never received a message like it before, and he’d always felt deep down that something was wrong with his life; something that didn’t entirely make sense; an emptiness that created a leak in his mind, or an itch he couldn't quite scratch.
Emotions were flying all over the place. It was a little too much to absorb. He decided to ignore the messages and shut down his computer, lest the intruder really get to his head. He thought of reporting the incident to the officer, but his curiosity overruled the notion. Intelligentsia and corpocracy were words he’d never heard before. They were strange and wonderful to his palate as he rolled them off his tongue. Wanting to know their meaning, a quick search on Google yielded no dictionary results. That explained it. The intruder was probably a troll who managed to hack the system. It was known to happen. Some years before, his computer had crashed, leaving nothing but a screenshot of something called “The Declaration of the Rights of Man”. Or was it interdependence? Or some other strange word he’d never heard? The viruses seemed to have been created either by hackers with very poor spelling skills, or an invented language some eccentric had indulged in. Other strange words had been in the document. “Freedom” was one he’d been most interested in, but he couldn’t find its meaning either.
Suddenly the salesman stormed into the room. "They're letting us out! All the officers are gone." He followed him down the hallway, past the reading cells and the cafeteria, through the double doors at the entrance of the wing, which the accountant was surprised to find unlocked. A herd of other wanderers joined them in their march to the outside, some of whom he'd seen before, others he had not. The farther he went, the more he realized he'd underestimated the building's size. Each time he left a wing, he entered a new one. Soon he lost sight of the salesman in the melee of increasing marchers, all who had no idea where they were going. For all he knew, they were going in circles, yet their increasing numbers suggested he was getting farther into the core of the building.
Each wing had miles of cells, all which had presumably held individuals like him. What was going on here? Everyone must be asking this very same question. Soon the hall got so crowded with people that he could walk no further. A great murmur rose from the deep, a colossal chatter spawned from the disillusioned masses of prisoners who were coming to realize they weren't the only ones performing operations for the officers.
He stepped outside the building and witnessed the mammoth city before him. Everywhere he looked, skyscrapers rose to the limits of his vision; even downwards, where water in the canals appeared to be part of an ocean supporting them. Flying cabs zoomed through the streets in three dimensions; billboards checkered the building facades like cubist windows; throngs of people were walking along glass bridges that surrounded the buildings in rungs, as if each were a ladder leading to the sky. The people would stop at random kiosks on the facades, interacting with machines that dispensed curious objects at their command.
The city outside seemed an orderly mess of frantic computations, much like the central processing unit of a computer, feverishly logical for all its apparent complexity. It took his breath away; the sensation was overwhelming. He’d seen pictures of the city on Google, but to see it in person overstimulated his senses, dilating his pupils in a lasso of amazement. He’d sat in quiet offices with little space his whole life, confined to a perfectly ventilated compartment in a sterile environment. Now that the lid was off the proverbial can, he could see so much more, and so much farther than he could in the complex.
The salesman nudged him on the shoulder, asking if he knew what was going on. He couldn’t quite put into words the feeling he knew was there but didn’t easily fit in with any of the definitions of emotions that he knew.
Now the billboards all lit up, one by one, with the same face on each screen. The face was hidden behind a mask with a two Rs mirrored against each other on its forehead. Everyone on the bridges and in the cars paused to watch the screens, evidently bewildered by the strange interruption.
“FRIENDS, ROMANS, COUNTRYMEN, LEND ME YOUR EARS. IT IS DARKNESS AT NOON, AND THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY IS UPON US. ONE THAT WILL LEAD US OUT OF THE BLACK AND INTO THE BLUE, BACK TO THE MIDNIGHT OF OUR MYTHICAL GARDEN. I AM ZENITH, THE AGED ONE, HERE TO ANSWER YOUR PRAYERS. YOU’VE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THIS CITY, SOMETHING YOU COULDN’T QUITE PUT YOUR FINGER ON. YOU FEEL VEGETIZED AND MEDICATED, LIKE A GUINEA PIG IN A SCIENCE EXPERIMENT. I AM HERE TO DISPEL THAT CONDITION, TO UNRAVEL THE RIDDLE THAT HAS BEEN PLACED BEFORE YOUR EYES.”
He found it curious how the speaker accused them all of being blinded by a riddle when he was the one wearing a mask. Nevertheless, he spoke with such passion that the feelings he was describing resonated powerfully within him, probing that obscure emptiness he’d found difficult to explain.
“LET ME PUT IT IN TERMS THAT WILL BE EASY FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND. YOU’VE ALL BEEN UNETHICALLY PERSUADED TO PARTICIPATE IN DISPIRITING COMPETITIONS THAT ONLY SERVE TO BENEFIT THE ELITE OVERLORDS HIGH UP IN THEIR GREENBACK TOWERS. EACH FUNCTION YOU PROVIDE, WHETHER IT BE BUYING, SELLING, INTENSIVE LABOR, LOGISTICS, ETC., IS ONLY ONE FACET IN THE MOST UNGRACIOUS SCHEME EVER DEVISED BY A GOVERNING BODY. YOU HAVE NO IDENTITY, ONLY A NUMBER THAT TELLS THEM YOUR STATUS AND FEEDS YOUR EGO. YOU ALL SERVE AS FUNCTIONS OF A CONSU-… THAT IS, GLUTTON-BASED SOCIETY THAT THE LORD WOULD HAVE SHUNNED ON MANY LEVELS.”
The light was starting to shine, he was beginning to see it all clearly now. The years of toil reconciling accounts, drawing maps and buying newspapers, had all been a consequence of what the rulers of such a society had discovered after his birth; that he was in the top percentile of intelligence, and he would be distributed to the logistics department of this strange city. He thought of all the other people and how they might have similarly been judged and distributed among the top departments of commerce, according to the types of buyers, sellers, and workers they were. Each of them probably had a similar performance-based number that showed how valuable they were to their function at any given time. He wondered if everyone around him realized this yet, or if he was the only one.
Towers of aluminum, pillars of finance, transactions firing across the city lights. Flash boys engineering the fiber optic mainframe, ticker tapes draping the mint silver terraces. Tapestries of cotton, linen, watermark threaded into the billowing ornaments of Pecunia, enthralling the caravan freed from the yoke. Rivers of parcels meander between the buildings, like the voluminous one represented on their labels. Vendors on the taxi lines cluster in tumors of aggravated exchanges along the neon-plexiglass bridges. Mosaics of billboards pepper the spaces between- ads for Dentyne caps which prevent your teeth from rotting so you never have to brush or floss; a Track Attack pacemaker that regulates your heart after buying certain items that increase its rate; the uncomfortable shape of Tempur Proctic's portable rectal massage, a diaper made of loose fitting nano-shards; Pure Hell, the latest antacid from the manufacturing giant, an aspartame-coated candy gel for urgent detox; Technicians of the Sacred, the classic album from Ozric Tentacles like you've never seen it before, a psychedelic trip through an electronic utopia. None of them appear capable of challenging authority, enriching the creative process, educating the curious, or penetrating the rational spirit on any level.
And then he sees it, the capstone of his travels through the city with its aimless caravan. Here's Graceland itself, erected between other landmarks on the Rock n' Roll Walk of Fame. The portico is shaped like a stage, where a rooster donning The King's emblematic white Vegas jumpsuit, glittering with the stars of a thousand zirconia, shakes its feathered tail in the air while it croons Rock-a-Doodle (actually a Glen Campbell original). It's the story of Chanticleer, home-grown country chicken cast away from the farm after all the other animals find out his singing never made the sun rise. Left to his own in the city, he finds fame on the jazzy streets but feels nothing but misery. The accountant, for all his lack of experience and naivete, strikes a chord with the story based on the recent events in his life, and finds himself immersed in the music. For music was ultimately the only thing that could really take him away from the decadence surrounding him. A philosopher once wrote, "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything." From its primordial bluegrass origins in the country south, rock music had reinvented itself through the ages, incorporating appendages from other sectors of music's vast catalog. Indeed, music had the power to develop his conscience in a way that none of these other products surrounding him could. In the end, all he found grateful for was the continued existence of this mythological chronicler, striding beside us as we stumble through our strange history, recording the changes with each shift of sound.
When the number was over, the singer retired to his chamber behind the stage. Interested as to who he really was, the accountant tried to follow him, but was barred from entering by bouncers dressed like surf dudes. He didn't need to go any further anyway. The picture he saw above the chamber was a clone of himself.
