But today, to spare everybody the sad dinner-for-one-esque photos of my attempt at Victorian tea sandwiches (they taste much better than they look, honest), I have a proposition for you. I've been rooting around in my virtual attic aka my safely retrieved story files which have now been backed up onto two separate drives with uncharacteristic anality. What I discovered were a few surprisingly entertaining bits of short and/or incomplete fiction. A bit pulpy at times, yes, and under the influence of a few too many of my sci-fi/fantasy/literary heroes, definitely. Well, what do you expect from a folder that contains bits of literary sci-fi, semi-autobiography, sort-of-detective story, grown up Harry Potter, and very possibly a Doctor Who Christmas episode? But I figured some of this might actually be enjoyed by an audience of more than one. "Kat's Internet Cafe," more a fragment than a complete short story, seems (on the surface, at least) to fit into that category. So in my knit-shit's stead, have a gander at Kat.
Kat's Internet Cafe
(working title)
Reality is overrated. Kat
Say, of Kat Says Cafe and Hub, makes herself a latte, retreats to her
“office” in an overlooked corner of counter, and kicks her feet
up, banishing the uncharacteristic moment of philosophy with slightly
more oomph than she intended. Some coffee laps over the side and
onto the leg of her jeans. She cuts short an almost silent oath and
shrugs. She doesn't mind the one or two seconds of scald, but the
stains get annoying. Anything shortening the procrastination period
between laundry days could be considered a nuisance at best.
Not that anyone around her
has noticed, especially her customers. Still plugged into their
bluetooths (blueteeth?) and clattering away. Well, clattering is the
sound she mentally inserts for them. While they voluntarily imprison
themselves in their packets of hyperstimulation, in the real world
she could use the background noise. It's only 10AM. Far too early
to plug in yet. She sighs into her foam and scans the room for
interesting characters.
What is it that she expects
to find? She's long since stopped asking because her brain, she
hopes she's learned by now, is something of an asshole. A bored one
and, she suspects, quickly becoming a dormant one. No funny twinges
as she settles tired eyeballs on a couple of suits by the window, a
university student or two in their logo hoodies and gym shorts, the
guy who's clearly trying to hide his unemployment behind a brisk
manner and a screen full of porn. Yes, she allows porn. Within
reason, of course. From his wire and silicon cubicle out back, Jimmy
is scanning the channels for the hardcore stuff: kiddie porn, sex
trafficking, the big no-nos that'll get you a cushy stay in a
maximum-security prison and your name on a blacklist available to
anybody and everybody via the wonders of the Internet. You go into
Kat Says knowing this, and you accept it. Otherwise, the authorities
owe her a couple favors and will haul your ass and any and all
computerized equipment you own out of there faster than you can say
“public humiliation.”
Her gaze stops for a moment
at a table in the far corner, but it takes fractions of a second
longer than it should for her to realize why. Damn, she is getting
slow. Effects of old age and success. Hell, she's thirty and owns a
coffee shop, is that all it takes? The man at the table is reading.
Oh, she'll give herself
credit: from that distance it's hard to care enough to look that
closely. Short haircut but not quite buzzed, requisite bluetooth
plugged in an ear, plain collared shirt, and open laptop with an
unremarkable amount of text and pixels streaming along the screen.
But there, in his lap, if you look at just the right angle, is the
book. Paperback with a disintegrating cover. He has it open and is
turning pages. Amid the electronic hum, the sound carries like a
gunshot.
By now she's gotten out of
the habit of approaching her customers in person. They seem to like
it that way. All of their transactions are carried out online. The
barista makes the drinks and carves out pieces of Kat's homebaked
pastries, and a signal goes out to the waiting customer when the
order's up. If said customer happens to be too lazy or absorbed to
bother getting up and retrieving his or her goods, she sends them a
personal greeting. There are several flavors of personal greeting
from Kat Say, ranging from sweet and chirpy to “my mother.”
She's pretty good at guessing which one gets the job done. But
without provocation...
In the end she decides to
forgo the spine. She sighs, retrieves the laptop from her bag where
she's secreted it under the counter, and logs in. Table 14. Signed
in under guest credentials, medium slow-roast, black, with a cake
donut. Homepage open to the news, nothing overly sentimental, just
some economic agreements among allied countries over natural
resources. Stereotypical cop fare, she thinks. Cute. She doesn't
need their help. People just don't make trouble here, if for no
other reason than it isn't worth it.
And then it happens. Her
screen blinks, flickers, and cuts out, replaced by something she
hasn't seen in a very long time. Blue screen, white letters.
Vestigial Pavlovian response rubbed into her unconscious by the one
and only computer programming class she ever presumed to sign up for.
Blue screen of death. She splutters coffee back into the cup and
after a couple of deep breaths remembers to push the speaker button
to Jimmy's “office.”
“Problem, Kat?” he
asks, surprised and oddly amused.
“I...yeah. Hang on,
what?” This last is directed at the computer screen, which has
miraculously and without any intervention returned to normal. Same
browser window with Table 14's transaction details and everything.
“You know what? Never mind.”
“Okay,” he says slowly.
“Lemme know if you need anything.”
“Sure thing,” she says,
hanging up.
“Didn't your parents
teach you it was rude to spy on people?”
Kat's been working around
hot liquids long enough to catch her arm before it careens into the
coffee cup. Also she had the foresight to spill-proof her keyboard
after the first few times. She looks up with possibly more composure
than she actually feels. “Who's asking?”
Funny, he doesn't look like
a cop. Or a reader. Tall, more wiry than muscular, a little
stoop-shouldered and behind in the suntan department, highish
forehead, light eyes that appear gray for the moment but might edge
toward blue or green in the outside world. His appearance and the
little joke he just played on her scream tech mage. But there it is,
held out to her in a long-fingered hand. She doesn't know what she
expected: Orwell, maybe, or Huxley, or some hotly debated member of
the sci-fi and fantasy canon. Possibly the Communist Manifesto, or
Machiavelli. Or Shakespeare, damn the old fart. “Tennyson?” she
snorts, a little incredulous.
“You could've just
asked,” he says, unruffled.
“And walk through that?”
she asks, motioning at the room full of wire-heads, as she secretly
calls them. “What if I disrupt a connection?”
“You won't. I checked.”
“Before or after you
pulled that stunt on my computer?”
He shrugs. “I don't like
hackers.”
“I'm not a hacker,” she
bristles. How dare he? What she's doing is legitimate, sanctioned
by the law in the great state of which she is a resident. “I don't
like cops. Especially cybercops.”
Instead of protesting or
getting offended or slapping on the handcuffs, he laughs. Actually
laughs. It's a strangely disruptive sound in this place of
mechanical by-noise. He laughs like someone used to restraint
letting the dam burst open. “Who told you I was a cybercop?” he
asks, still smiling almost involuntarily.
“Well, no one. I just
thought—”
“Kat Says,” he mutters,
and she can almost hear him rolling the syllables around in his head,
enjoying the linguistic jokes that went into her naming the cafe, the
deliberate omission of the apostrophe which few people in cyberspace
actually miss. Or notice. Her next venture, she thinks, will
involve an Oxford comma.
He leaves it at that.
“Hey, you forgot your
book!” she calls, waving it at his retreating back. A few patrons
look up, annoyed in that abstracted, head-still-in-the-webs way they
have. She ducks back into her corner to avoid the flurry of angry
online chatter. “Besides, I've read it already,” she mutters.
“Why don't you know that? If you don't know it?”
The book is marked at
“Ulysses” by a rectangle of card stock. For a few seconds she
glances at the familiar words and relishes the spirit of the thing.
As if. Then she picks up the business card and looks it over. It
contains a single line of unassuming serif type: “David McArthur,
Librarian.”
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