The tablet containing the Company’s ticketing system said that this was Site Number Seven. From what Brim could tell the Company cordoned off every area into sites based on their own twisted whim an fancy. Site Seven was a small subsection of a much larger geographic area that Brim had been assigned to clean for the past few weeks. Based on the other sites, he’d reach the conclusion that he was in some old section of a city that was slated for urban renewal. Yesterday it had been a housing project. Last week he was removing a section of interstate that had long been abandoned—clearing rusting cars and the bones of semi-tailer trucks.
Site Seven had been a football stadium. At least that was what it looked like to Brim, who had unfolded the Roamers primary shovel and began scooping large hefts of debris out from the main concourse. Seating for thousands surrounded him. All the seats were empty, or littered with rebar and wood—detritus from the past. Everything looked old here, yet modern-old—as Brim often called it. He defined modern-old as cleaning up after a place he himself would have felt comfortable littering. Littering not in a malicious way, but in the way one took for granted the staff who did all the cleaning. Take the stadium for example. You buy your nachos with the canned yellow cheese, the Big Gulp, and hot dog. Where does the containers for these tremendously healthy foods ends up, but under the seats. A stadium with hundreds of orange oil-drum trash cans and we’re too lazy to get off our asses to walk over to one.
As was often the case, the headache behind his eyes started as he entered the portal to Site Seven and he thumbed-on the auto navigation system and began counting his breaths. The auto-nav was linked to the ticketing system and would bring the roamer to the location of his first assignment. He’d read the details when he got there. For the moment he’d rest.
He thought of his daughter, who would have turned six two days ago. He wondered when he’d have a chance to see her. He wondered when he’d have enough saved up for the plane ticket. She was in Connecticut now, while he was on the West Coast. Plane tickets weren’t cheap and neither were visitation agreements. Lawyer complicated them but his ex-wife insisted on her lawyer being present, for everything.
After the headache had subsided into a dull thrum behind his eyes, he found the strength to pull up the ticketing system on his console. The console was a touchscreen that he manipulated with his left hand. From it he could turn on the cabin’s interior lights, control the climate and pull up a small computer that contained his manifest for the shift. He started every shift with over a dozen requests that came in from various departments, and as he worked, several more were filed. He was responsible for organizing them based on priority. Priority was often determined by who was making the requests. Accounting usually got top priority, while IT received the lowest. Occasionally a request would come in from Management. These were not to be ignored and trumped all others. A site could be on fire and he would have to leave it to burn when a request from Management came in.
He pulled up the details on the stadium ticket, Site Seven:
Please clear the main concourse and the field, while staying clear of the center structure. DO NOT GO NEAR THE CENTER STRUCTURE! Use the Incinerator on all objects in the grandstands, but try to keep the seats intact. Keep on Smiling.
This was an Accounting ticket. Brim wasn’t sure why Accounting was putting in so many cleanup requests. And their requests were usually on a much larger scale than his typical cleanup jobs. The stadium, for example was something he expected from Accounting. But for the life of him he couldn’t understand why. It was like Accounting was a label for something else, like Outlandishly Large Scale Department of Everything. Looking back, he had cleaned up an abandoned stadium, a shopping mall that rivaled the Mall of America, an entire Amusement Park—that had been a depressing job, and not one but two twin skyscrapers. The skyscrapers inevitably became part of a controlled demolition and it was Brim who had been responsible from placing the charges throughout both buildings.
Accounting sure had a lot of odd jobs for him. What did Accounting do anyway? Crunch numbers? Count? They seemed to have a lot of influence over the removal and remodeling of the Company’s assets. Brim supposed it all made sense. At the end of the day it all came down to money.
The roamer pushed the debris it had collected from the concourse and stepped out onto the field. Brim could see the ‘center structure’ more clearly now. At first glance, it reminded him of a bonfire, hours before the sun went down and the fire was lit. But as he focused, he realized that it was a series of scaffolds erected into a makeshift tower. Rags or sail cloth hung from each level, obscuring the interior. He turned the roamer around three hundred and sixty degrees, as if he were an athlete entering the field for the final game, the championship. He looked across the stands, and for a moment thought he could see it filled with reveling fans, all cheering his name.
That had been his high school years. Back before everything had fallen apart.
The moment passed. There were only empty stands, and an empty, misbegotten stadium, in a where and when he knew not. He set the primary shovel down and set to work.
He controlled the shovel with a pilots stick that was positioned between his legs. With it he was able to manipulate the angle of the shovel, raise and lower, and extend it much further than the roamers body would reach. He used it now to pick up a large chunk of concrete that had fallen from the gallery above. Had there been anyone in the stands when it had fallen this would have been Evening News material.
Tragedy at the stadium, when a half-dozen cheering fans were senselessly killed…
The debris was lodged in there pretty good. While holding it, he moved the roamer around in a half-circle and tried to get a better view. Was it caught on the damn seats? He pulled and the debris moved slightly. He could probably get it if he moved over a bit more.
The roamer slid sideways—something it was not supposed to do. He remembered reading in the manual that it came equipped with fall sensors—just like his laptop, that would detect any sudden shifts and drops in the terrain. This was especially useful when traveling over unstable walkways or muddy patches. According to the manual, the roamer would perform evasive maneuvers in order to keep itself upright. The roamer could not fall, he had read. It was impossible.
Something beneath him had given way. A loose patch of turf, a sink hole that had been waiting for centuries for this moment, nested up against the concrete skirt of the stadium. When the roamer stepped onto it, it had finally given way, so suddenly that Brim hadn’t even realized he was falling until it was too late.
The entire leg of the machine traveled earthbound. The evasion systems finally kicked in, but not before Brim heard the loud thud of metal hitting concrete. Red lights filled the cockpit and an alarm sounded that matched the ringing in his ears.
He thought about letting go of the stick controlling the shovel, to switch over to the arms, but something told him to hold on. His display had become grainy, pixelated, but he saw enough to know that the shovel and the debris it still held was all that was keeping him from falling into the hole. Were he to shift in any way, he’d lose his grip on the shovel and possibly fall deeper in, or worse—get stuck. Who would he call if he were to get stuck? That chapter hadn’t been covered in the damn manual.
Keeping his left hand steady on the stick, he slowly moved his right over to the controls at his side. By feel he found the release valve. He unlocked the pistons on the right leg, allowed it to move freely instead of their typical, locked state. He heard the release of air and knew the leg was hanging limp inside the space of the sinkhole. With his actual right leg, Brim kicked forward. He felt nothing in the sensors connected to the boot his foot rested in. He heard nothing come in contact with the roamers giant leg. He kicked backward and the roamer lurched forward.
Now we were getting somewhere. The kick was solid. Was it the earth beneath the stadium? A chunk of foundation perhaps? Would if give way once he put the roamer’s weight on it?
He kicked back again, this time arching his leg out a bit, like a Kung-Fu master—and the thought that he compared himself to a master of anything made him laugh.
The leg made contact again and the boot held fast. He pushed and watched the pixelated view from his display rise. He shifted in his seat without daring to move his left hand from the stick that controlled the shovel. He pushed himself up, out of the hole and was once again on solid ground.
He stepped back, then cursed for doing so. The whole damn field could be nothing but sink holes. His ticketing systems had said nothing about that. This ticket was ridiculous—an entire stadium to clean and the vaguest of descriptions. Nothing about sink holes, nothing about falling to ones doom. Nothing about the repair job to his heads-up display.
Brim pawed for his flask while he assessed the damage. He took a drink. It was funny. Until the damage had been done, he though he’d been looking through a windshield. Now it was clear he’d been cleaning through the worlds clearest and curviest computer screen. He couldn’t see it any other way now. No wonder he was getting headaches. It wasn’t just the slow trickle of alcohol poisoning. He’d had more screen time than a professional keyboard warrior.
The image was distorted, cracked like glass, with dark jagged shapes in chaotic spiderweb patterns from the point of impact. He’d fallen flat on his face—at least the roamer had, and it made working the rest of his shift all but impossible. He turned and the image moved a millisecond out of sync. It was enough to make him notice, enough for him to know that something was wrong.
The dead eyes staring back at him didn’t help matters either.
Wait a second…
Brim froze in the cockpit of the roamer and the roamer slowed to a stop. His gaze was fixed on a point in the screen between two intersecting cracks surrounded by dead pixels. In that space was a person, a person who was sitting in the front row of the stands. He—it was impossible to tell the person’s gender as it lacked hair, or skin or any sort of shape other than a skull set atop a pile of, what? Bones? Bodies?
The eyes were what caught Brim, what had drawn him to this space in the stands as he turned to leave. The eye were present. Everything else about the man had rotted away a very long time ago. But the eyes, those eyes, resting within the black recessed sockets of a grinning skull, were fresh, seeing eyes that had actually turned—they actually fucking turned and followed the roamer’s course.
“What the fu—” Brim started to say before the flask fell from his clammy hand. He jumped as it clanged on the floor by his feet. “Oh son of a—” he looked down to see the brown liquid pooling on the floor, stopped himself and looked back to the place in the stands where the skull was supposed to be—where it had been up until a dropped flask ago.
But it was gone, or had never been there to begin with. He found the place where it should have been, found the debris that had been the skull, the bones or whatever. But it was no longer there—no longer a skull with watching eyes. What Brim saw instead were rags—nothing more—and old wood and detritus from this ancient site that had once been a football stadium.
He shook his head, reached down for his flask, shook it. He still had a bit left. He was going to need it for the trek back up to the gate, back into the dock. He made his way to the concourse, back to where the players had once entered the field. He stopped, slowly turned back around so he could face the field, and the scaffolds that had been erected in the center. Stay away from the center, the ticket on his console had said. He wondered why. If Accounting wanted this site cleaned the eyesore in the center of the field would need to be dealt with.
The eyesore in the center, the folks in the stands, the giant maws that seemed to open right under the god damn roamer.
Brim shivered and turned to leave. He emptied his flask and thought about the section of the manual that had simply been titled, Fight or Flight. While he waited for the repairs he thought about brushing up on that particular chapter.