May 21, 2008

20 minute story... No Revisions...

The kayak flipped over and I hit my head on the bottom of the river. After a few lengthy seconds of flopping around as if I were a wet bird, I resurfaced only to discover my helmet was covered in a thick layer of mud. Not your average I-stepped-in-a-puddle-mud. I’m talking about the kind of mud you find beneath the garbage cans around the side of the garage that have been laying on their face in the ditch full of mucky waste.

So what do I do besides try to flip the kayak again and get my head wet to rinse off the river grime? I rocked to the left. Rocked to the right. Then finally after a few sways in both directions, the kayak flipped over. This time I fell face first splashing my helmet into the fresh water. I felt the mud rinse free of my hairline. I felt it spread out and disperse away from the tough yellow shell of the helmet. It was beautiful.

But as I climbed back to the surface, I felt something slap my nose. Then again it slapped my forehead. All of a sudden I found myself paddling upstream, white caps over the flowing water. Salmon were giving me a beating.

Just then a bear splashed through the river’s edge grabbing one unlucky scaly son of a bitch, ripping into its flesh. I tried turning around but the water’s power was too strong. So strong the kayak ended up flipping over and I fell into the shallow water, cracking the helmet straight through to my head on the rocks below.

I woke up in the ambulance with dry clothes and red gauze wrapped around my skull.

May 9, 2008

The Building

OmniCloud headquarters - Chicago, IL.

There's a building that stands tall and curved, huddling over us like it knows what we're going to do before we do it. It's said to have the kind of power and prowess of a lethal virus, slowly infecting its host entity. 

I know this because everyone knows this, though it's never publicly announced. It's underground... but not really. Sort of like Google's slogan to disavow evil. 

OmniCloud has an order to the way they run press coverage. And none of it includes Q&A.

Michele got a job right out of college; from Michigan Tech to the workforce. They hired her and her skillset with a base starting salary of $80k at a time where those resources were typically reserved for MIT graduates. She managed code for an undisclosed project in the world of VR. (Sources point towards their GPS project, Gateway, rivaling Google's Street View.) It was canned after they lost their top executive to a heart attack.

But before that happened, Tyler, her boyfriend at the time, made Michele tell him about it over drinks one night. She was just buzzed enough to oblige. She was fired within the week. On a Thursday. 

Never found out how they learned of it, either. She was escorted out into the concourse above and vowed off men altogether. 

See, Michele knew about the cancer before the planet did. And when she looked up to see the parabola of reflected sky, she understood the universe was doing her a favor. She'd reciprocate eventually -- when the curve came back to her.