A Techno Carol (with Apologies to Charles Dickens) - A Story in Five Parts

Part III:

Jimmy woke up with shakes and sweat.

He looked over at the window pooling the moonlight (not as strong as before). And then he looked over at his desk. All the things that should be there were back. There were no boomboxes, Walkmans or old computer systems. Everything was perfect.

Jimmy smiled and fell back on the pillow…

And then fell through the bed.

It was not a long fall, but he kept his eyes closed as he felt the space before him drop out and gravity took over. And then he landed on something hard (no pain, though; a small favour).

“Welcome, Mr. Curtis!”

They were getting more polite now (a good sign?).

He opened his eyes.

Was it a…warehouse? Jimmy was almost blinded by the lights above him and the open-plan design of the space that seemed to go on and on into the distance. And there were endless rows of what looked like toys, monitors, video game systems and other things that he was still trying to make out.

“Yes, hello! I’m the ghost of…!”

“Technology present?”

Jimmy looked at where the voice was coming from and could see that the man was disappointed. He was young, smiling and looked like he had just been hired for the job. He dressed like what a cartoon version of a used-car salesman and sounded like a game-show host. And it was clear that he wanted to share his title without being interrupted.

“Oh. So, you know?”

Jimmy stood up and frowned. “Of course. This is the second part, right? The one where I see what’s going on in the present?”

“Oh. Great. You got all of that… Well, welcome to the Warehouse!”

Jimmy could not think of a thing to say.

“Impressive, right?”

“Um, yeah. But I’ve seen one before. Not that crazy.”

The man was really starting to look depressed.

“Okay, kid. Let’s get on with it. I’m supposed to show you what technology is doing for us today…” He held out his hand…and then began to change.

Jimmy recognized the new face right away.

“Hey! I know you! You’re on YouTube! You play games all the time…”

“Right, right. I had to pick a form that you would recognize. This is all in your head and we are going to have to make a few stops.”

“Sounds about right.” Jimmy shook hands.

“Mark.”

“Jimmy.”

They both disappeared with a flash.

*

Well, this was not a surprise.

The building they were in was low-ceilinged, dirty and crowded. And Jimmy had been there before.

A foodbank…and a shelter. And a place for people to drop off donations.

“St. Anthony of Padua. Near your school, I believe.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know it. Mom and dad had me volunteering here a few times.”

He saw that the line they were standing next to went out the door into the harsh cold.

“All these people…”

“What about them?” Mark seemed curious about what he had to say.

“Every year, we make donations. We bring food, clothes, toys and anything else we think that people need, and it does not change a thing. The numbers never seem to drop. Doesn’t seem to help.”

Mark began to smile.

“Oh, really? You think that there is nothing good coming out of this? We should really take a look at the section for the toy drive…”

They seemed to float over to the far side of the room where there were more parents standing in anticipation with their children.

“Take a look…”

Jimmy looked over at a child holding a box.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

He was getting angry as he stared at the people in line.

“Benevolt 2.0! One of the most popular gaming systems in the world!”

Mark deserved a punch in the face, but Jimmy wanted to get back to his own world in one piece.

“How’d they…?”

“Your parents. They are the ones who decided to bring over a few of them?”

Jimmy turned on him.

“A few?”

“Oh, um…more than a few. About ten. Few just seemed like a relatively safe…”

“Shut it!” Jimmy could not bear to think of how much it cost them to buy all of those systems. “All that money. All that time I told them that I wanted to have one this year and they just…give it away.”

Mark pointed at the boy with the box. “But that boy and his family have nothing. Absolutely nothing. You can see that from the clothes on their backs and the fact that they have to be here. For them, this is just something they can do for their child that won’t cost them even more money. At least for one day, they have no worries. Your parents knew that and really came through.”

Jimmy looked over at the family. The boy really was overjoyed as his parents smiled and stepped out into the cold night.

“Yeah, yeah…”

“Okay, just a few more stops…”

“Of cour…”

*

“…se.” Jimmy was again on the floor of a warehouse, but this one was different. And he noticed something a little different than the first one.

The smell was interesting.

That high, plastic, raw, synthetic smell…

It was inescapable.

“Welcome to the Factory!”

Mark seemed overjoyed about this. Jimmy wanted to have a surgical mask.

“Not a warehouse…”

“No, not this time. Take a look around and see what we do!”

It was grey, dark, and the sound of cables and gears in motion was very loud as they moved deeper into the building. Some of the same sort of overhead lights were above them that he had seen in the Warehouse, but many of them were broken, flickering, or just incredibly dim.

“And here we are!”

Mark moved through one shuttered sliding door without opening it and Jimmy followed. His brief thought about how cool it was to be a ghost soon disappeared.

There were workers in rows, all wearing white shower caps, t-shirts and jackets with rubber gloves and plastic-soled shoes. They were set up on assembly lines handling parts for what looked very familiar to Jimmy.

The boxes gave the game away.

“Benevolt 2.0…”

“The main factory! Where all the magic happens!”

That punch was not a bad idea.

“What the hell are you…?”

“This is the main factory for the gaming system you love so much. This is where the magic…”

“Shut up!” Jimmy looked at the line of people here. They were young, old, male and female; they were tired and sad; they were all Asian, too, a fact that Jimmy did not want to notice. “How do you call this magic?”

“But this is where your favourite system gets made. This is but one of many factories in this country that makes your favourite toys. Are you really surprised by this?”

A boy about Jimmy’s age walked past him, pushing a trolley with about a dozen boxes on it. He was struggling with the weight and Jimmy tried to help him, but his hands simply passed through him. He watched the boy move between the rows of workers. No one noticed the kid. No one got up to help him.

“Okay, let’s go.”

“But I thought that you…”

“I’ve seen enough! I…have read about this before. Child labour and how companies make their money. This is terrible. I know that. But I can’t do something about it. What can I do?”

“You are absolutely right. You are correct about that. What can you do? You are just a boy. But I think that you are not aware of what your role is in all this yet.”

“My role? But what is…?”

“You’ll see. One more stop.”

Jimmy was confused as the flash took them away.

*

And then they landed.

Now, Jimmy had to laugh.

“Seriously? You brought me to my school?”

Mark was not smiling.

“What?”

“Like I said, I think that you are not aware of your role yet. Please…”

Mark pointed down the hallway to one of the main labs.

Jimmy knew this room very well. They did some computer work at the end of the day before he went home. There was still some of it saved on his computer.

And in the security lights, it was easy to find the particular black monitor among the dull blue walls and scuffed white tiles.

“You want to see my homework?”

“Well, I think you do…now.”

They drifted through the desks and stood in front of his monitor.

“I really don’t understand…”

“Look.”

The system turned on and a simple dot of light appeared on the screen. Jimmy had a brief thought about several films he had seen about computers and alternate worlds, but he focused.

And then it appeared.

It was a program he had been working on as a joke. His dad was always pushing him to focus more on physics than computer science and math, but he knew that programming was going to be his major. Or his life. Or just something that he would enjoy when he moved out. Why was his dad…?

“Okay, so this is the program that I worked on. We were done our assignments and the teacher said that since it was the last day, we could finish up whatever else we needed to do.”

“But you were already done, weren’t you?” Mark looked so serious. His manner was more like a vice-principal now. “You had something special to do.”

“What special? It was a joke.”

The lines of code on the screen began to run. Jimmy smiled as he saw how the game he had worked on buzzed and filled the screen with a battleship that was at war with intergalactic aliens. Some pride in this made him smile.

“It really does work well.”

Jimmy turned to look at Mark. There was a compliment there, but it did not feel like one. Mark began to look more and more like a vice-principal (Mr. O’Halloran? Ms. Scarborough?). “If you say so… But why are we…?”

“You don’t know it yet, but the program you wrote on the last day of school is going to change everything for you. It is something that the company we just visited is going to use and make a fortune from.”

Jimmy grinned hard at the screen. “Really? But that’s great! That’s incredible! Why are you so serious?”

“Because it will change everything, Mr. Curtis. Christmas is going to be very different for many people, but so will the whole wide world. You just can’t see it yet… But you will.”

Mark’s eyes suddenly flashed, turning into dark pearls of heat that Jimmy flinched at.

“You will!”

“Hey, knock it off!”

“YOU WILL!”

Mark’s voice grew, and his body as well, slowly filling up the space in the room as Jimmy ran to the door. This time he had to open it as he ran out and made it down the darkened hall.

“YOU WILL! YOU WILL, YOU WILL, YOU WILL!!!”

Jimmy ran down the hall, the voice louder and louder as he found the main door to the schoolyard. With a large shove, it gave way…

…And he landed back in bed.

Jimmy wondered if his parents would mind if he crawled into bed with them.

He tried to sleep in the moonlight.

*

Thank you for reading!

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