The dense arrays of taillights and headlights were tranquilizing.
But as he approached the PanNet Corporation headquarters again, he began to fidget as the unsettling feeling of having been disconnected resumed.
Two guards stood in the main gatehouse gazing out at the luminous stream of traffic.
The local news trucks that covered the resource action had left an hour before.
He wished he had crashed his car through the gate earlier. That would have been an interesting item for the evening news.
Resource action. Sounds like a phrase that a cartoon snake would hiss.
He drove past PanNet with jaw clamped.
Eight big buildings, set among a sprawling immaculate landscape in what had once been tobacco fields and loblolly pine woods.
He’d driven past them back-and-forth several times but wasn’t ready to give in to the layoff and go home. Not until he reconnected somehow.
He took out his cell phone, enabled caller-ID, and keyed Madison’s number, expecting her to not pick up. She had hung up on their previous conversation, but he was anxious to talk to someone.
Despite his agitation, he leaned to his right to glimpse himself in the rearview mirror and held the phone so that other drivers could see his silhouette using the latest in cell-phone technology.
“Hey,” Madison answered sympathetically. No, pityingly. “I thought I’d heard wrong, but when I looked you up in Collabo, you weren’t there.”
With the flick of a few keys, a roll of a mouse, he had been wiped out of Collabo, PanNet’s email, scheduling, and virtual-conferencing system.
“Are you okay?” Madison queried.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
She sighed. “You’re going through a traumatic milestone in your career.”
“I’m not the only one,” he said, as if accused of something.
“Well, now, I realize that, and it’s definitely a, uh, paradigm shift for you and the others who were selected for the RA.”
He breathed deeply before replying through his teeth. “You sound like the severance package.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“Of course not,” he said. “After all, you didn’t receive one.”
“Not yet,” she said.
“Oh, come on, Madison, you don’t have anything to worry about. There’s always a position in PanNet for an MBA.”
They had been hired at the same time, but her career movement had been at a 45-degree angle, while his had been horizontal, even with a couple extraprofessional achievements.
“Especially an MBA with your connections,” he added.
“But you can be sure that my resume is updated and ready for distribution,” she countered.
He laughed at her conversational slumming. She was one of the FLOPs, a “future leader of PanNet,” and was being groomed by management and was on her way up just as surely as she had been on her way out of his life after a short year together.
“It’s a positive indicator that you can laugh about this reduction in force,” Madison said encouragingly.
“Wasn’t laughing about that.”
“No, I suppose it’s not a laughing matter,” she humored him. “But PanNet is the loser.”
“Just like you were the loser when you let me go?”
Her breakup speech had been as stilted as the words in the layoff package. He intuited that it had more to do with his declining corporate visibility, and less with romantic reasons.
Or both.
“Our goals were just no longer aligned,” Madison said.
“On the corporate level,” he sneered, “or the personal level?”
“Look, I answered your call because I thought I could help to mediate your career and life adjustment, but I don’t feel that I’m accomplishing that.”
He laughed again. Now she sounded like a PanNet Career Coach. And he realized that that was how he had frequently thought and talked. But no more.
“We’re getting off topic,” Madison said. “I suggest we try a more productive discussion later in the week.”
“Well, let’s synch-up our calendars,” he scoffed. “Oh, wait, I forgot . . . Collabo doesn’t know me any longer.”
“And the way you’re acting,” Madison said, “you’re no one that I know.”
He didn’t respond but kept pointing the cell phone at his ear. Though traveling at 60 miles per hour, he had no sensation of movement.
“Are you there?” Madison asked.
He didn’t know how to answer that, so he closed the phone and continued traversing the Beltway.
The Beltway was unfinished and shaped like the headphone icon on his confiscated laptop. When he got to one barricade to the unfinished part of the Beltway, he’d turn around and drive 29 miles to the other barricade, passing PanNet enroute.
Though he knew the Beltway, he kept the UR@ map glowing conspicuously on the dash where a Virgin Mary might have stood.
Olde Towne Centre
Next 3 Exits
The green light from the overhead mall sign flashed on his severance package in the passenger bucket seat.
For five years, he had thought of himself as a PanNeteer. There had been times – for example, walking down long empty carpeted corridors late at night, the ubiquitous white noise barely audible -when he felt one with the corporation.
For five years!
Now he recognized PanNet as a betrayer, and carting around the severance package was insult to injury.
He briefly wondered how much personal information was in the package that could be used to steal his identity, and then didn’t care. He pushed the automatic sunroof button and chucked the thick envelope into the rushing draft.
Cars behind and passing him blared their horns.
One driver kept abreast of him and was probably cursing at him.
He taunted the driver by ignoring him, keeping his eyes on the license plate ahead:
I S P L T @ M Z
The driver precariously squeezed in front of him and angrily shook a middle finger at him.
He felt a sudden affinity with his antagonist, but then realized that the antagonist was misplacing his anger. For he was behind them, scattered by traffic over the lanes of the Beltway, among the spirits of deer run over on nights during the fall migration.
“I’m back there,” he muttered. “Somewhere, I am.”
I am.
He forced a sardonic laugh. Collabo had a menu function titled I am that displayed an employee’s profile. Any user of Collabo could view another’s profile with a similar menu function titled Meet your team.
He had a superlative profile, just what the company said it was looking for.
Summa cum laude BS in computer science and math, with a concentration in human-computer interaction.
And as early as his first year at PanNet, he had earned a patent related to the work that he was doing to help redesign one of PanNet’s many graphical user interfaces: Algorithm for Subject Retrieval Using Metadata.
So how stupid had he been not to have induced the shutdown of his under-performing product line, and secured another job before then?
How complacent had he been at the transfer of jobs overseas?
Floodlights revealed two isolated buildings in the darkening terrain. Lighted from below, the black glass edifices looked spooky, like a flashlight held under one’s chin.
He’s Not Here
He wondered how many times he had seen that nightclub bumper sticker during the past several years on the Beltway as he drove to and from work. How appropriate.
As he again approached PanNet, and the disturbing feeling of having been disconnected, he flinched as his cell phone played that week’s ring tone, Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve.”
Madison? Calling back in concern?
It wasn’t Madison.
“Yew sure this ain’t Pan Perfect Porque?” the caller pestered him.
He snapped the phone shut and threw it onto the passenger seat. He cringed wondering whether his next job would be taking food orders over the phone, and wrung his hands around the cushioned steering wheel to stretch his arms. He was startled to realize that he had been looping the Beltway for several hours.
He became even more anxious as he noted that the twilight traffic was thinning. He was being left alone.
He had always secretly liked the traffic as much as the noisy open-floor workplace at PanNet, though he would complain about it with his peers. Both the cramped cubicle farm and the congested traffic made him feel . . . what was it? Like he belonged.
But on this evening in early March, with the black tree limbs like discrete networks in a blue-screen-of-death sky, he felt as detached as the separate bits of white dividing line would feel.
He glanced at other drivers and wanted to reach out to them, even if only to exchange curses or horn blaring.
Most of the cars were single-occupant, the drivers’ immobile, mask-like faces lighted by the cool greens or blues of their dashboard lights. The drivers and passengers of the few cars that had multiple occupants likewise stared forward as motionless and silent as turned-off monitors.
What was needed was some kind of tool to bring him together with them, like the disk defragmenter on personal computers.
But it wasn’t that easy, and he snickered at his silly thought.
All he had was his cell phone. If he could only use it to connect. Just once, briefly.
He opened the cell phone and tried to join a chat room that he frequented that was probably abuzz with the layoff, but was dismayed to see he was out of range for a wireless connection.
He fondled it as he considered his options. He could try a random phone number. Or Dial-A-Prayer. LifeLine. CrisisLine. 911. He would have been better off calling any of those instead of that Madison. If he waited, maybe he’d receive another order for barbecue. Family. Friends.
No, he wanted an anonymous call, for that’s what he was now. Rather, he was nonexistent. He couldn’t even link to a chat room. PanNet and Madison had set up the proof for his nonexistence. He’d make it a theorem.
He couldn’t get anymore anonymous than 1-800-HOTTEEZ. And it was something he would never have done in the past.
“Trixie” sultrily answered his call. Her name and fake Southern accent struck him as comical. And her patter -- “Ah’ll be your intimate-needs counselor this evening” -- might have been written by PanNet’s public relations. But he didn’t chuckle. He was nervous, and embarrassed to be calling this place, that he had come to this.
Trixie understood all that and said it was normal for first-time users of the service. And no one would know it was “little ole you talking to little ole me,” if that was bothering him.
“You can call back when you’re ready to commit,” Trixie suggested.
“I’m ready now,” he said.
“Me too,” Trixie said. “But don’t you think it would be a lot more intimate if you’d tell me your name?”
Anonymity be damned, he suddenly wanted her to know it was he, and where he was.
“I like it in a car, Kylar,” Trixie said. “There are so many positions you can assume.”
To his surprise, he became aroused, feeling the numbness leave his mind and spirit as his cheeks flushed with the conversation.
“Speaking of assuming,” Trixie breathed, “do you like role-playing?”
He was about to respond, “Sure,” but several seconds of reflection triggered the opposite response. “No!” he said vehemently. “Not now.”
“Okay, shug, okay,” Trixie placated him. “It’ll just be you and I then.”
As they talked and became more personal, Kylar accelerated. He whipped past the exit sign to Vistful Vue, the last standalone housing tract before the end of the Beltway, barreling past every car.
“I wish,” he gasped, “you were here.”
“I am.”
“I mean really here.”
“But I really am there. How ca-an I prove it?”
He told her.
“Oh, I do like that,” Trixie said. “Drive safely, hear?”
“Complete control.”
“Oooh, master,” she cooed.
“No, say my name,” he pleaded.
“Kyyylar,” Trixie drawled.
He stomped the accelerator, ignoring the frantic honking and flashing headlights behind him.
As he shot his car between a blur of orange-and-white striped DO NOT ENTER signs, the concrete barricade loomed for a millisecond before crushing him with an orgasmic shriek.
About the author
Besides technical documentation, Rick’s fiction publications include short stories and one YA novel (CASCADES). Journal experience: eight years as an associate editor at Bartleby Snopes; December 2023 - March 2025, associate editor at Fiction on the Web. Most recently, “Shock Corridor,” went live at Maudlin House on July 30th.
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