Monday, June 12, 2034

 

Welcome to The Spot Writers. The prompt for this month is an unexpected visitor. This week’s story comes from the pen of Phil Yeats. It’s a scene from Cyberocracy, his current work in progress.

In April 2024, Phil published The Body on Karli’s Beach, the third book in his Barrettsport Mysteries, a series of soft-boiled mysteries set in a fictional South Shore, Nova Scotia town. For information about these books, The Road to Environmental Armageddon, his trilogy about the hazards of ignoring human-induced climate change, and his latest, a novella titled Starting Over Again: A Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy visit his website: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/.

Monday, June 12, 2034

by Phil Yeats

At 11 a.m., Ellie O’Brien loitered outside the local office of the Ministry of Personal Welfare, waiting for them to release Len Smith from their clutches. The annoying annual assessments were part of efforts to develop a complacent public dedicated to national goals. They occurred on the day before everyone’s birthday. Tuesday would be his twenty-sixth birthday, so his appointment would be today. A simple call told her he had a morning appointment.

Len was a nice, self-effacing guy. Lean, average height, blond hair, and blue eyes with nothing extreme or weird about his appearance, except for the glasses that were at least five fashion cycles out of date. He wasn’t very sociable, but quick to help strangers. And when called upon by his colleagues, he was ready and willing to lend a helping hand. Afterwards, though, he shunned the celebratory parties.

Several minutes after eleven, he hesitated outside the building, sneezing as he always did when he first encountered bright sunlight. She stepped in front of someone rushing inside and stumbled after the stranger brushed past. The minor collision she’d orchestrated propelled her into Len’s path.

“Ellie,” he said as she steadied herself by grabbing his outstretched arm. “I didn’t know you were in town.”

She stuttered, pretending to be flustered. “B-b-ack for fifteen months, working as a journalist. I’m here getting background for a story. But tomorrow’s the Ides of June, your birthday, isn’t it? That means you were here for your annual grilling…” She let her thought trail off, hoping her machinations hadn’t been too obvious. “Was it too awful?”

He shrugged his shoulders and sighed, his standard reaction to interaction with others. He didn’t avoid others, but he never showed enthusiasm. “Puzzling more than anything. I don’t understand what they’re after.”

“Yeah, can be difficult, but mostly it’s a continuation of the mantra we lived with as undergrads. You know, the benefits of collaboration with your colleagues and the synergies from working together.” She paused. When he said nothing, she turned up the heat. “This is like serendipity. I’ve often thought about you, and here we are, almost crashing into each other. Can we, like, go somewhere for coffee and, you know, catch up on old times?”

He looked at his outdated wristwatch, not a multi-function communicator like others carried. “Yeah, I guess. My shift starts at 12:45. I can manage half an hour for a chat. I’ll get a muffin or something and call it lunch.”

She pointed down the street at a Tim Hortons sign. Minutes later, they queued in the nearby donut shop. She turned to him. “Got your card?”

“Card?” he asked.

“You know, your Togetherness card.”

“What? They only work at the Twenty-Something Clubs.”

“Jesus, Leonard, you really are out of touch with reality. They gave you that card and replenish it every month to encourage you to get together with other young adults. It’s good in many places where people meet. If you present your card, and I show them mine, they deduct the cost of whatever we buy from your credit. I mean, we could use mine, but it’s kind of depleted.”

“I’m aware of all that. It’s part of the government-sponsored mating game, but it doesn’t connect with my life.”

She hesitated, wondering how to shift away from that topic. “Part of their effort to generate collaboration with colleagues.”

He snorted. “You mean part of their fight to reverse the county’s decreasing fertility rate? That’s what this is about, isn’t it? It’s so damned annoying I was about ready to lash out at the sanctimonious assessment officer. I have a job, an important one, in the university hospital’s neonatal unit. We’re making our systems more reliable and improving the survival of premature infants. Outstanding success with preemies as young as twenty-two weeks, and our research suggests we may soon push it lower. We’re world leaders in this work.” He paused, inhaling and exhaling his breath in an obvious effort to control his emotions. “Sorry for venting because I know it’s not your fault, but that’s my contribution to the fertility problem obsessing the government. They shouldn’t hound me with all this juvenile crap about working together. No way, we’re a bunch of happy bees working together for the good of the hive. Everything’s too messed up for their cheerful talk.”

“I didn’t know you were working in the medical field,” she said in another attempt to shift the conversation away from fertility. It was on her mind, but she remembered his aversion to intimate relationships during his university years. She didn’t want to push too hard, at least not yet.

“Quality control officer for the neonatal unit’s equipment, so an engineering job, not a medical one. I investigate malfunctioning equipment and improve its reliability.”

“But that didn’t fit into the Ministry’s image of the ideal young adult, did it?”

“I don’t know what they’re thinking. My first visit a year ago was noncommittal. They outlined some programs and their benefits. And since then, the local office’s propaganda has included my experience working in the hospital. But today they were down on me, accusing me of shirking my social responsibilities and threatening me with various repercussions.” He glanced at his watch and swallowed the rest of his coffee in one gulp before she could respond. “I should go. I promised to get into work early if possible, and the stupid meeting with the psychobabble gestapo took longer than I expected.”

She reached out and grabbed his hand. “Could we, you know, have dinner together some evening and gobble up more of your wasted credits?”

“I’m working every evening this week, but I could do Saturday. You can tell me what you’ve been doing for the past three years.”

They exchanged contact information, and he strode away with more spring in his step than he’d shown going to Tim’s. Ellie sat back with a second coffee and his untouched muffin, happy with her progress.

 

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The Spot Writers:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/