Lucid Waking

The arts of BNielsen

The Wanderers (6)

        Mr. Leblanc stood up when they walked in and smiled at Exec.
        “’Morning, Exec. What can I do for you?”
        “Good morning, Mr. Leblanc. I had already asked you about a favor and you had responded with positive enthusiasm. I would like to ask you to get a job for this man.”
        Mr. Leblanc’s smile slightly faded “Is he a friend of yours?”
        Exec paused ever so slightly. “Yes.”
        Mr. Leblanc sighed. “I don’t know, Exec. I really shouldn’t pull strings like this. I thought you were going to ask me to proofread one of your press releases, again.”
        “I understand, but I have calculated that you have a 3.5% possibility of getting caught and a 1.3% possibility of ruining the system. I believe these percentages are considerably low enough that no harm can come from this.”
Mr. Leblanc smiled slightly at this speech and sat down, shaking his head. Then, for the first time, he turned to Dorian. “What’s your name?”
        “Dorian (er—) Archer.”
        “Well, Mr. Archer, this is your lucky day.” He breathed a heavy sigh and turned towards his computer module. “Exec, you’re going to get me fired one day.” He quickly typed his password into some program and then Dorian’s name. He frowned. “Hmm. You’re not coming up in the database; that’s strange. Are you sure you exist?” Mr. Leblanc laughed. “I can’t imagine a glitch like this. Oh well, I can just make you a card and we’ll sort out the details later.” This statement was followed by more typing and several mouse clicks. “Well, since you’re not in the computer, I can only assume you have no job experience. Fortunately, there is still a job opening at this warehouse on the edge of town. It’s an assembly line for space craft, you might enjoy it. Not that you really have a choice, but it’s a good job, anyway.”
        A printer started up behind Exec and Dorian. “That should be your resume.”

Author’s comments on post 365: Sorry about the absense; it’s been a hell of a week. I’d also like to apologize about this ending of this post this week, but I had to stop at ten minutes. There really isn’t much more to the scene and I’m sure you get the gist of how it ends, anyway. I’m finding that when I take a story in small chunks, it’s easier to keep with continuity because I reread that last bit before I write this one to refresh my memory and thus, the big glaring continuity error in this one got fixed. I think this is much better than the first draft.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 1:22 pm and is filed under End of Childhood, Fiction Prose, Science Fiction, Short Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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