1134
“Agent Number 1134. Please, take a seat.” The Human resources manager of Transluminal Vacations, Inc. shuts the door to her office behind Agent 1134. She sits down at her desk. She picks up a pen and clicks it once.
“Why’re you using my employee I.D. Number?”
“Anonymity assures impartiality,” She clicks the pen two times. “The nature of our services requires us to take every precaution against favoritism.”
“Specnacular.” 1134 looks around. “I’ve never been called into H.R.”
She opens a folder. Looks down. Click click click. “Twenty years on the job, 1134. Not a single incident. Not only that, you’ve written a number of our protocols.”
“I didn’t know about the impartiality thing.”
“It’s a need-to-know level of protocol, 1134.”
“Why do I need to know now?”
She leans back into her expensive office chair. Clickety clickety clickety clickety click. “You’re about to make your 100th sale.”
“Am I? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Despite how you’ve decorated the last square on the Closing board?” She almost grins. Click. 1134 sees that whiteboard in his mind. It’s divided into rows of salesmen’s names and 100 columns for their sales. He can see the final box in his row—his last sale. It’s filled in with a cartoon palm tree in dry-erase green.
“I may have thought about it once.”
Clickety clickety clickety click. “Not all salesmen have a Fuck You Money Timeline, 1134.”
“Language,” 1134 deadpans.
“How, in 20 years, have you managed to avoid it?”
“Deep in my heart, I’m a rules guy.”
“The pain of withholding explosive sardonic laughter is excruciating.” Click.
1134 folds his arms and looks at a poster on the wall.
“I may have peeked. Once,” 1134 inspects the bookshelves, the furniture. “Twice.”
“Fourteen instances of unauthorized access to alternate timelines.”
“Or fourteen. Am I in trouble?”
She slaps the folder closed.
“No. We’re in weird territory, ethically. I mean we as a company. We sell vacations into alternate timelines to greedy billionaires. What we do isn’t what a lawyer would describe as legal. However, no lawyer can describe it as illegal. It is, in the finest definition of the term, unlegal. Which puts people in my position in a tight spot, ethically speaking. The thing is, twelve of the unauthorized access incidents occurred in the last three years.” Clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety click.
“That’s weird.”
“And in none of them did you access your financial derivative stream, your FMYT. You visited the same baseline adjacent downstream thread every time. Statistically, it is indistinguishable from your base timeline.”
1134 looks at her thumb on the top of the pen. Click. He looks into her eyes.
“Look, I never accessed my FYMT and I never took anything and I never changed anything. It was . . . It was personal training. That’s why it’s the same one.”
Click. Click. Click.
“You gotta stay honed in this game,” 1134 says nervously.
Click. Click.
“I mean, there’s a whole generation of grinders coming up on my tail. I’m 48 years old. I have to stay sharp.”
Click.
“They make a great chardog.”
“There’s no protocol against visiting adjacent timelines. It would be hard for you to sell alternate timeline vacation packages if there were. And your track record–ninety-nine platinum-level packages,” she lays the pen down. “Well, it carries a lot of weight.” She slips out a paperclipped document with yellow signature tabs poking out from the edges. She plops it down in front of 1134 and spins it right side up. 1134 is carefully avoiding looking down at the document, keeping his eyes blank and steady on hers. “You’ve earned this.”
Now he looks down. Now he sees what he knows is already there, the reward after 20 years of hard work, 20 years of jumping timelines to run down leads and play them out like it’s a long con in some crime movie. His gold watch. His retirement package. He’s dreamed about this moment for 20 years, waited and grinded endlessly just to look down and see, on company letterhead, a Platinum-Level Vacation Package with his name at the top.
“Goddam,” he whispers.
“Just sign where it says to and be aware this is contingent on you closing your 100th sale. But that’s kind of a foregone conclusion,” Clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety clickety click. “You are, undoubtably, the best salesman in the biz. This is almost a formality.”
He signs. Turns a page and signs again. Turns to the last page but before he signs his final signature, 1134 asks.
“What happens if I don’t close?”
“You’re in the sales funnel already, aren’t you?”
“Actually, I don’t have a lead.”
“1134, you’re retiring in two days. We had you down as being in the close phase of a pitch.”
“Guy backed out.” He signs his name.
“Oh,” she carefully slides the clip back onto the papers, places them in the folder, then drops the folder into a vertical file. “Well, your package is only viable while you are employed. If you don’t close by the time your retirement kicks in, you lose access.”
1134 looks back at the poster. It says, “Hang in there, Baby”.
It is not encouraging.
