J. E. Landau

Derschmidt’s boss had come in, huffing and puffing and with his face all red, and he glared at Derschmidt like he might glare at a dead insect on a freshly cleaned windshield.

Derschmidt, for his part, had no idea what his boss was talking about, when he started yelling about a pallet of water bottles.

“You think this is funny?” his boss asked. He had narrow glasses, like he belonged in a tech company twenty years back, and together with his pencil moustache they divided his face into thirds.

“No, sir,” Derschmidt said, staring at the shipping label. His name was on it, but he hadn’t ordered anything. In fact, he didn’t think that he could order anything. He’d never been authorized or trained, and he assumed that there were no accounts with any companies, even in the Akashic age.

“It was company money, too.” His boss said, ignoring any excuses or complaints. “You’ve been playing with your discretionary account.”

“No, sir,” said Derschmidt. Which was the wrong answer.

His boss’s face got even redder, and he breathed in and out heavily with a little asthmatic wheeze to top it off. He expanded like a volcano about to burst, drawing in air for a new rant, ready to make Derschmidt face the whole of his managerial wrath. And then he glared and spoke quietly: “Don’t let it happen again, or there will be consequences.”

Then he turned and left, the threat reverberating in the room. Even if Derschmidt had worked in a normal company, with computers that could connect to what was left of the internet and windows in the office, it would have been a serious threat.

Derschmidt spent a little time at work. There was always more to do, paperwork to fill out, spreadsheets to tweak. But he could hardly focus on anything. He went down to the lobby of the building, not past the security booth, but he hovered behind it, and saw, like his boss had said, that there was a big plastic-wrapped pallet of water bottles in the lobby, between the uncomfortably-deep padded chairs and the plastic plants. His boss was there, shouting at someone about the pallet. Derschmidt retreated back up stairs.

If he couldn’t focus on work, he might as well try to figure out why the pallet had been sent. He logged into his computer, which happily created his desktop. It was the same as always, and, of course, he had no network connection.

Morris walked back in, with a mug of ersatz coffee in his hand. “So what was that about?” he asked, as he sat down at his desk opposite Derschmidt. He had clearly timed his disappearance and reappearance to miss the boss, and Derschmidt could hardly blame the man.

“Some joker sent a pallet of water here.” He messed with the different icons on his desktop, quickly skimming through databases to look at the latest intel reports. “And I’m getting blamed.”

“Ah, tough luck,” Morris said, clicking his mouse and clacking his keyboard a little too readily. Maybe he was faking being busy.

“I just don’t get how it could be my fault,” Derschmidt said. “Our computers don’t connect to the internet, and I don’t see anything about it in the databases.”

“Well, they have to get the databases out somehow,” Morris replied, typing away at a speed that implied that he was either very focused or—Derschmidt was sure, Morris was definitely faking his typing. He was pretending to be busy, smashing random keys.

“I guess so,” Derschmidt said, even though he was pretty certain that they didn’t have to. “But doesn’t IT handle that? Or someone with a better clearance than us.”

“Dunno.”

The conversation ground to a halt there, and Desrschmidt got back to work. There were always more synthetic intelligence reports, cooked up in predictive computers in a basement somewhere in the desert, full of the latest hardware and requiring only occasional synchronization to predict the actions of every American, every moment of every day. The machines guessed who was involved in anti-American activity, and they were very good at guessing, courtesy of the constants that were mined out of the fabric of spacetime, the Akashic sequences. But there still had to be someone in the loop, to approve different consequences for expected actions. That was Derschmidt, a rubber stamp on an oracle.

That day he didn’t find any clues as to how he could have possibly ordered a pallet of water, and so he took the employee bus home. It was a new thing, so it was cheaply made, with plastic fabric on the seats and a natural gas engine that murmured to itself as they rolled through the streets, past barbed-wire cordons and riot cops on street corners. Morris sat across the aisle, and he nodded politely to Derschmidt as he stepped off of the bus. Derschmidt got dropped at his apartment and scurried inside.

The power was out, except for emergency lights, so he took the stairs. They were full of a murky green half-light. Other people were walking down as he went up, their heads down, and nobody spoke at all. The whole stairwell still smelled like cheap weed.

The hallway, at least, had a window that let in the evening sun, illuminating the stained carpets. His apartment door opened when he approached, the door popping open with a happy beep. It was a new-style apartment, where he didn’t even have to scan his phone. Instead, it just predicted where he’d be. The Akashic series were infinite, but the sub-entries, like the predictions of where Derschmidt would be, every moment of every day of the rest of his predestined life, were quite finite, and could even fit in the door’s low-power computer.

His apartment was cramped, and it was bursting with godawful faux-granite countertops and cheap gray furniture, but it was home, and he cracked open a beer from a six-pack on the floor and slumped onto the square couch, across from the TV. There were no lights on, and the TV wouldn’t start, but that was okay. His laptop, sitting on the coffee table in a pile of coupons that didn’t need to be entered, still had a charge, and he opened it up.

The computer helpfully informed him that although it couldn’t access the internet, it could predict it. He got onto a local pizza place’s website, the headers filled with incomprehensible text advertising pizzas that trailed off into nonsense. The computers could predict perfectly, but why should they? They knew what he wanted.

He filled out an order for an anchovy-and-pineapple pizza and sent it off. No signal was being sent from his computer, but the pizza franchise would know that he wanted to order. After all, they’d already predicted every order they would ever get.

The power came back on not long after, and Derschmidt put his laptop away. The TV turned on, since it already knew when he’d want to watch it—or at least, when he had a vague inclination towards watching it—and it started generating some entirely synthetic content about a cooking game show that didn’t really exist. And there was a knock on his door a few minutes after. The pizza had arrived.

He opened the front door, and there was a woman wearing the company’s uniform, her eyes totally covered with AR goggles. Her neck was covered in tattoos and she had piercings in her mouth. She pulled the pizza out of its insulated bag, and held it out. “Your order, sir,” she said. “Thank you for your tip.” And he took the pizza from her.

“Thank you,” he said, but she wasn’t listening. She probably couldn’t even hear him, and she turned and walked off like a machine. There was no need to worry about a tip, just like how there was no need to worry about rent payments. Everyone knew that he’d be able to pay, and that he would pay, and how much he would pay, and when.

He sat down with his pizza, and opened the box. They’d sent him pepperoni.

When Derschmidt stepped off the bus to walk into work, he saw that there were two pallets of plastic-wrapped water in the lobby. He hurried over to them, and looked at the shipping labels. His name was on them, alright. For a moment, he thought about trying to move the pallets of water, but he had no idea how he’d do that. He didn’t even know how they’d gotten moved into the lobby to begin with, maybe a forklift. He hovered for a moment, looking down at the pallets, and then he tore off the shipping labels and stuffed them into his pockets. He didn’t know if it would help.

Derschmidt kept his head down as he went into his office, trying to avoid his boss, and sat down at his desk. He spent a little while searching for information about the pallets, but he couldn’t find anything. He didn’t even know where to begin to look. He didn’t have a purchase account, he didn’t have any order forms to fill out. The water could have been ordered without an internet connection, for sure, but he didn’t know how he’d order it.

So he settled into the rhythm of approving actions. Future dissidents to be arrested, future terrorists to be killed. They were names and actions and causes, and of course they all made sense. He didn’t need evidence. It was all known already, just like how it was known that he would approve every action, and that he’d keep collecting a salary. The world was predictable. Pre-ordained.

“Derschmidt,” his boss shouted, from the other side of the office, and Derschmidt jumped. The man stormed over, his face already red. “If I hear that you’ve done one more prank, you’re on the street.” He loomed over Derschmidt’s cubicle, his eyebrows furrowed.

“I didn’t do anything,” Derschmidt said. “I didn’t order anything at all. I don’t even know how.”

“Pull up the 10-81 database,” his boss ordered, and Derschmidt complied. The computer generated an expense account just like that. And there were two orders in it—just two orders, for water. “It’s on your computer.”

“I’ve never seen that before,” Derschmidt protested, but his boss was already stomping away.

“Don’t let it happen again.”

He got back to work. The lists of people to be dealt with never ended, because the Akashic series never ended either. There were no dates on any of the entries, so Derschmidt liked to imagine that some of the entries were for people that had not yet been born, or for actions hundreds of years in the future. Of course, he had no way of knowing. The people on the list were just names, and the actions he approved were just words.

“Derschmidt!” came the cry, and he leapt up from his chair. “Get your ass over here.”

Morris re-entered the room as Derschmidt walked out, with a sympathetic smirk on his face. “Good luck,” he said.

Derschmidt’s boss had an office, but he always kept the door open. Maybe there was no point in chewing someone out if nobody else could hear it. Derschmidt made his way through the cubicle farm, past lots of workers with their heads bent down, leaving little gaps between their necks and their collared shirts. The office was windowless, like everything else, and his boss was sitting across a heavy wooden desk, with one of his monitors already spun around.

“Care to explain this?” his boss asked.

Derschmidt leaned down to look at the spreadsheet that was pulled up. It was a list of purchases. Office supplies, a new watercooler, coffee. His name was next to every entry.

“I—I can’t,” Derschmidt said.

“Have you been tampering with the computer systems?” his boss asked, glaring over the top of his square glasses. Derschmidt didn’t know what to say, so his boss just kept talking. “IT can’t find anything wrong, so you must have tampered with the records.”

“With the generation?”

“Oh, yes,” his boss said, glaring. “Go back to your desk and clear it out. Get out of here in an hour, and don’t leave town. The investigation has already started.”

So Derschmidt did. He opened his computer, and, before anything else, he opened form 10-81. It matched his boss’s form exactly. Every purchase in the office had been routed through his desk for months. He clicked back through. It went all the way back, before he had started working in that windowless office building. It went back for years. He closed the window.

The list of names was still open on his desktop, his cursor blinking in one of the cells, waiting for him to type out an approval. The names were all his. He shut down the computer and cleared out his desk, piling everything into a cardboard box. There wasn’t much—a few mementos and awards. He didn’t know what to think.

On his way out of the office, he saw a few workers with a pallet jack unloading more water. Derschmidt hurried past, but then realized he didn’t have any way to get home. The employee bus wouldn’t be running for hours. He pulled out his phone, to order a ride. His name was written over and over again on the screen, and he it wouldn’t respond to his touch. He put it away. He didn’t want to think about it.

As he started walking along the road, cars kept whipping by. There was no sidewalk, so he walked on the curb, past checkpoints and glaring cops with plexiglass shields over their faces, scrolling red text projected in front of their eyes. The ground was cracked and there were barricades scattered around from the last round of protests, which nobody had bothered to clean up.

“Hey,” one said, as he walked past, “are you Paul Derschmidt?”

He started running, and he didn’t know if the cops were chasing him. He didn’t know where he was running, but his feet knew, and he ended up back at his apartment, totally alone. The front door to the building didn’t open for him, but someone else was going out, and Paul was able to slip inside, past the second pair of doors that tried to keep out the warm, humid heat. The person at the front desk stared at him as he walked by, and Paul tried not to pant, and walked to the elevators.

The little electronic control panel that called them just said his name: Paul Derschmidt, Paul Derschmidt, Paul Derschmidt.

So he took the stairs. He was already sweaty and tired, and the stairs made it worse. The lights flickered as he walked, on and off, and he had the feeling that if he could just understand them, they would be saying his name. The stairwell didn’t smell like pot anymore, instead it just smelled like fresh paint and concrete.

He came to his floor, and walked to his apartment. There was a pile of pizza boxes on the floor in front of it, and he could smell that they had long ago gone cold. His door didn’t open, and he rattled the handle without any luck. He tried pressing his phone against the door, without any luck.

Then, all at once, the doors in the hallway popped open, and then slammed shut. And they popped open, and slammed shut, over and over again. And the lights began to flicker, too, in the same pattern, and Derschmidt dropped his phone on the floor and cried out: “What do you want from me? Why is this happening?”

The blinds on the windows at the end of the hallway dropped and jerked upwards and the fire alarms began to scream in the same pattern, the lights flashing and the sounds blaring, and Paul Derschmidt crumpled to the floor and held his head in his hands. He curled up. He cradled himself, and rocked back and forth to the same rhythm as the lights and the doors and the alarms.

Paul Derschmidt Paul Derschmidt Paul Derschmidt

More than anything he wanted to know the reason for it all. As he rocked back and forth, he desperately wanted to know the reason for it all.

He laid there until it made sense. Finally, it did. He stood up. The alarms had gone quiet. The pizza boxes had gone, and he was alone. There was a faint smell of fresh paint. The door to his apartment was open, waiting for him.

He stepped through, and fell back into the endless series.