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Alarmingly Strange Stories This Guy I know by Dan Ericsson |
| There’s this guy I know. He has a job at a computer company called Conspicticon. He name is unimportant. Names mean nothing while he’s at work. For curiosity’s sake, his name is Hal. Sometimes while he’s at work, he just watches his screensaver. He watches the stars or Microsoft logos whooshing closer to him, closer to him, then flying off the edge off the monitor. Hal knew they kept going, richocheting around his head, closer to him. Hal wished, only when he was watching his screensaver, that he was a subatomic particle, like a boson or a muon or a lepton or a gluon or even a quark. He would like to whiz bang into other particles, or mount a charge on Uranium, or form a proton. All of this Hal, a guy I know, thought while he was staring at his monitor. He heard his phone ring in the cupboard of his conciousness. This is how he remembered answering his phone before: He sits at his desk, tapping away at his keyboard, a random conglomeration of meaningless letters burning into the screen, and his reciever pressed against his ear. Nightmares shoot through his brain, from neuron to axion, synapses and pistons firing away, until he spills a sensible answer into the phone. Hal heard the phone this time, and ripped himself away from the flying logos. His eyes pulled out of their respective, respectable sockets in a determined effort to continue receiving stimuli. He felt his hands moving toward the thin wire cage that encased his phone. He, Hal, a guy I know, had been creening his calls. He lifted the screen away from the phone and hurled it to the floor. He held the receiver up at arms length. “Hey, I’m going to have to go ahead and ask you…” Hal hung up the phone. He felt the nightmares subside, ebbing out of his mind, gravity pulling them to his feet. His, Hal’s, feet kicked, and he fell out of his chair. He could feel his feet, his nightmares, his convulsions dragging him across the floor toward the elevator. There were demons flying around his head. They attacked him, bang, in exponentially increasing intervals, breaking down his defenses. The nightmares could not take full control of his physical manifestation, and this guy I know was able to drive them away. Hal barely lurched as he mindlessly fought his way back to his desk. He carefully picked the phone up from the floor, cradled it next to his head, and coughed. “Hey guy. What happened back there?…” Hal, a guy I know, answered with palpable silence that told more than the nightmares ever had and the voice continued it’s passionless irrelevancy. “Ok, that’s swell. You’re going to have to finish up this report tonight. I’d advise ordering a sandwich and cracking the spreadsheets”. A hollow laugh resounded narrowly, as Hal’s eyes swept across his cubicle. The clock that those same wandering eyes missed displayed four fifty-three, a time that was usually reserved for quitting. A guy I know, Hal, however, felt his vision lock onto his screensaver. At some point he had knocked the mouse off kilter, and he was prompted to enter his password. He, Hal, a guy I know, slowly clicked cancel, and settled back into his chair. When the supervisor stopped at Hal’s cubicle during his cursory rounds, he found a man slumped in his chair, reddening eyes staring a blank screen. The supervisor, William, a guy I don’t know, realized that he had never seen this man before, and that he certainly did not work for Conspicticon. He checked that the computer was shut down and called security. |
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