No Typing Skills Required by Ziggy Kinsella

Jack. Blinks.

Shadows swirl around him.  Colours and ragged shapes in perpetual, sickening motion.  Noise.  A gnawing hive of irritating sound vomited up from Hell. Feet shuffling, skuttling.  Insect-like, burrowing into his skin and bone. The hiss of air interrupted by screeching voices, in pain, lost.  

Behind it all, the boom-boom-boom of the city. An atavistic, primordial call that rises one minute, fades away the next, but is always present. He tries to breathe. Tries to focus. Get it all to stop.

Now, shuffling feet, squeaking shoe leather, heels clicking, minions groaning in discordant rhythm. Bones grate in joints, teeth drip saliva. Plump dry eyes squeeze through too small sockets and try to see. It’s a cacophony of noise and images that gather and grow then dim and drill unsympathetically into his brain. It makes him feel nauseous.  

Jack. Blinks. Again.

Born full-grown. Devoid of hope or fear, attuned to the pain of his senses. This world of stumbling doom. His new-born self. Content and tied to it like a slave to cold, hard chains. He nearly giggles at the absurdity of his thoughts but, somewhere deep down, he knows it’s true.

This is his new life. They have brought him here. Dumped him in a swell of blood and bone that makes humanity despair.  

I am the way into the city of woe, I am the way into eternal pain, I am the way to go among the lost.

Hah! A glimpse. A glimpse!

Wasn’t that Dante? How did he know that? The Divine Comedy. The Inferno. Am I educated? How would I know Dante? Why the fuck would I care about Dante?

Because…

He doesn’t know and searching back through his memories is way too painful as if he is repeatedly running hard into a brick wall or trying to tear through a forest thick with brambles. He grabs his head. He is going to scream.

The constant thump-thump stops, the pain stops. Not gradually, not sitting in the background like a half-ignored disease like before. It stops and clears in another blink of the eyes. And there’s just sound.

Normal, human sound.

A clock came into focus.  High up.  He studied it until the minute hand ticked over and the world became a solid thing to which he belonged, for good or bad. Below the clock, a large billposter. 

Clubland. In big red letters. Twenty-four-seven.  In big, black letters.

Whatever you desire!

Next to that a picture of a girl he thought he recognised. A backless, sequinned evening dress, Colgate smile and sad eyes.  You shouldn’t be up there, he thought.  The old coot was right. We forgot.

Forgot what?

Ah, gotcha!

Around him, people in suits.  He was in a station.  A disembodied voice: “The train South has been delayed.”  The voice seemed to come from everywhere. It floated like a reminder there was no going back. He was in a station. “Please wait on Platform 6 for further details.”

Get a grip, Jack. Don’t let it all fall apart now.

He wore a suit too, could feel the tie knotted around his neck, the stiffness of the collar.  I don’t wear suits, he thought.  At least, I don’t think I do.  A briefcase in his right hand.  A letter in the other.  He looked down. The floor was polished, not a hint of dirt.  His black shoes reflected the light of the station, he could even see shapes moving across their mirrored surfaces. Other shoes shuffled by. All highly polished and new looking and reflecting the world around them.

Jack held the letter up to his face.  His left shoulder twinged.  The pain sent a memory rippling across his brain that faded almost as quickly as it arose. Something about a fight. A confrontation. Did it matter? That was gone now. Focus.  Snap out of it. 

“The train South has been delayed.” 

Thought 1:  I’m not supposed to be here.

Thought 2: You are here.

The letter. For a moment, he couldn’t focus. Then the words seemed to form, coalescing on the embossed paper.

“Following on from your recent interview, we are overjoyed to offer you the position of Assistant Information Processor at Great Gore Enterprises. Please come to reception at 9:30 am exactly and you will be taken for induction.”

A post-script: “Tardiness may affect your accruement of work credits. We value your service.”

The clock across the platform ticked to 9:17. To the right of it was a thick black exit sign.  He followed the arrow, adding his shuffle to the thousands in the station. Around him the announcer continued with: “The train South has been delayed.  Please wait on Platform 6 for further details.”

Robotics for beginners. Guys with short hair, dark suits, briefcases in right hands, letters in left.  Women, dark suits, briefcases in right hands, letters in left.  No smell.  No sweat.  No perfume.  Everyone walking at the same speed as if they all had the same chip in their heads. 

Bodies in motion.  He swapped the letter and the briefcase and immediately felt awkward. As if he was suddenly and dreadfully revealed to the world, a light shone on his every misdemeanour. He only took a few steps and then swapped them back with a sense of panic.

At the exit, out on the street, the robotic crowd spread out, heading along different channels.  Right.  Left.  Straight ahead. They all knew where they were going. They all had a purpose.

Car horn.  Blink.  As the crowd of commuters dispersed, he realised they weren’t all same.  They didn’t all move the same.  They weren’t robots. A scream. Half pain. Half laughter. A girl in a sequin dress, stumbling across the road, bottle of cider in her hand. Hair all mussed.  Eyes drooping. Lipstick smeared.

In the distance the beat of a city that would not allow you to stop began to rise. It seared through his brain and promised all sorts of things.

Jack turned left.  Following the map on the letter.  Left.  Right.  Left.  Coffee shop.  A porno shop with a seedy man lounging outside and then a new looking building.  Great Gore Enterprises. 

Purveyors of Information. The sign sparkled and when he caught sight of it, the noise and beat of the city around him seemed to diminish.  There was no rubbish on the street.  It was spotless. Was there a city in the world that didn’t have rubbish on the street?  He looked up.  Reflective, metallic windows.  Brown walls.  Square blocks of concrete.  He figured it was about 20 stories high, almost the same wide.  A big brown box.  He glanced at the letter. Checked the address. This was it.

Jack took a deep breath.

He pushed through the revolving doors.  A grey, polished floor.  A big GGE logo in the centre. Hallway and lifts to the right. A woman stood there, waiting.  Straight ahead, a reception desk behind which a cadaverously wan but neatly turned-out security man sat hunched over a clipboard.  Above his head, another clock. 

So quiet inside, Jack could hear it tick-tock.

9:28. Just in time. Great Gore Enterprises loves you to be on time!

Jack walked to the desk.  The security guard was impassive.  No lines around his eyes or face.  He looked almost plastic.  As if he had never smiled or cried or screamed. A name badge said he was Todd.

Jack smiled and showed him the letter: “It says here I’m to report to Ms Sanderson.  I’m starting work today.”  His own voice sounded too loud.  It bounced off the walls.

The guard did not return Jacks smile but examined the letter, stooping forward a little. He used his pen to point towards a corridor.

“Take the second lift to the fifth floor.”

Jack nodded, smiled again and turned towards the lifts. The woman.  Black suit.  Briefcase.  Letter.  He kept his smile as he approached.  “Are you starting work today?”

She studied him for a moment and then said: “Yes.”  She was pretty but her eyes were dull as if everything beneath the flesh had been sucked away and devoured.  She turned her attention to the lifts and watched the dial count down the floors. They waited in silence.

Ping. The lift doors opened.  The woman climbed in. Jack followed. She pressed 5.  Music.  The sort you normally got in a lift.  It jangled in his head. “We’re going the same way,” he said.

“Do you smoke?” Asked the woman.

“No.” 

“They don’t like people to smoke.”

Do I smoke?  He didn’t know if he did or not.  He didn’t know a hell of a lot.  All he could do was follow this through. He must have been somewhere this morning. Must have got up, dressed, had breakfast. He concentrated as the lift rose. Who am I? What went before?

Jack, that’s all you need to know. Ping. The doors opened.

Another reception.  Another plastic guard.  This one was called Ebben.  He looked a lot like Todd’s brother, maybe not as plastic but that could have been down to the light. He took the woman’s letter and stamped it with a red date.  Took Jacks.  Stamped that too.  Added it to a pile of letters.  All stamped.

Jack had time to notice that the woman’s name was Anthea, and she had the same job title as him. They were all assistant data processors.

“First door on the right,” said the plastic guard.

He followed Anthea into a large room.  Pale blue walls.  Strangely luminescent.  Forty rows of forty identical chairs and desks with PCs, all arranged with absolute precision.  All filled with suited drones.  Two spaces left at the back.  Anthea sat down.  He took his place next to her. They were ready to begin.

His desk:  Standard HP tower with a black flat-top screen, keyboard and mouse.  The PC was on and an excel spreadsheet was displayed topped by the GGE logo. 

Titles at the top: Name.  Address first line.  Address second line.  City.  Province.  Postal Code.  Age.  Employment.  Marital Status.  Children. 

To the right of the screen: A pile of paper with details on.  Typed in the same order as the digital sheet.

The door opened behind and a man headed stiffly to the front of the room.  Tall.  Thin.  Plastic. He positioned himself behind a desk and then reached down and pressed a button.

A screen lowered down the wall at the front of the room.  Fade in: A woman.  White shirt.  Black tie.  Hair pulled back tight.  Garish red lips.  Bloodless face. She stared straight at Jack with dark, fathomless eyes and he felt his throat tighten with panic.

“Welcome to Great Gore Enterprises.”  He shifted nervously.  The floor was uneven.  He looked down.  There were two feet sized indents in the floor.  He pressed his soles into them and felt a little more reassured.  “Your job is to input the data on your table.  You must type continuously until all data on your desk has been inputted.  You will not take a break until all data has been inputted.  Data must be input using title case for all words.  Errors in inputting are not acceptable.  All data must be input correctly.  Once a sheet has been input, move it face down to the left of your keyboard.  Once all data has been input from a batch, your completed sheets will be collected, and a new set of data placed on your desk.  You may now commence inputting.  Please remember we value you as an employee.” 

The woman faded out and the screen rose back into the ceiling.  A loud buzz. People began to type.  The floor tightened around Jacks polished shoes.  He looked down. Tried to move his feet and pull them away. They were stuck fast, and he was trapped. Nobody complained.  They just typed. As if this was perfectly natural.

Free will didn’t live at Great Gore Enterprises. They all typed like good little robots.  The plastic man stood at the front and didn’t fidget, talk or waver. He just stood there with a blank expression as if someone had powered him down. Jack began to input his data. He looked up a couple of time to see if the plastic man was breathing. 

The ache in his shoulder returned. Had he hurt himself? Somewhere in the fog of the past. Anthea worked away as if her life depended on it.  Her fingers were a blur.  Jack was slow.  His own fingers felt too thick and lacked the dexterity of the others in the room. Every few seconds his computer would tell him: “There is an error on entry 5…there is an error on entry 7”. He worked as fast as he could, not wanting to appear slow. The ache stretched up his neck and across through his shoulder blades. Fifteen minutes passed. He stopped.  His fingers hurt.  He massaged his knuckles.   

A voice from his screen.  “You have stopped typing, please continue.  You have stopped typing, please continue.” 

He massaged his fingers some more.  I’ll type when I want, you bastard. A shock went through his feet then, jolting him in his chair.  He tried to pull out his feet. Tried to get up, letting out a scared yelp. Another jolt.  “You have stopped typing, please continue.” He drew in a shaky breath, anticipating another jolt but managed to get his fingers working again. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

Typing.  Typing. Keep typing.

He could smell it now.  Throughout the room. As palpable as anything.

Fear.

Typing. Typing. You have to keep typing. Every now and again, someone would yelp and the voice would say: “You have stopped typing, please continue.” The frequency increased as the minutes and hours wore on. The yelps turned to resigned whimpers of pain and there seemed no end.

For hours and hours they all typed with no break.  He lost count of the number of times he was jolted or how many entries he had input into the system. The pain in his fingers.  In his shoulders.  After he’d been shocked four or five times and the voice started telling him he wasn’t typing fast enough.  Next to him he could hear Anthea whimpering almost constantly. Then he realised he was doing the same.

Buzz.

“You may stop typing.”

The clock said 1:30am. His head throbbed.

“You may now take your rest and recreation.  You will find your rest and recreation card in your welcome pack in the draw to your right.  It has now been credited.  You must be back at your desk for 9:30 am precisely.  We value as an employee.”

His feet were released.  An audible sigh pressed across the desks. He tried to wriggle his toes but couldn’t feel them.  Pins and needles shot up his legs as he tried to stand. His neck cracked like a gunshot as he moved it.  Jack opened the drawer and pulled out a black folder.  Inside was a sheet of paper with a card attached. He twisted it loose and held it up.  “Great Gore Enterprises. Service is our reason.”  Under that: “Work Credits.” Then: “Valid in most major outlets.”

Anthea got up.  Stumbled.  Jack stood, his knee joints popping.  He put the card in his pocket.  His fingernails felt like they had been driven back into the flesh.  There were blisters on his fingertips. Anthea smiled at him and for a moment he thought she was going to collapse into his arms.

Last in.  First out.  Cold air on his face.  He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  Anthea grabbed his arm.  “Come on, we can hold each other up.” His legs seemed to want to go in separate directions.

Noise.  So different from the click-clack-click of sixteen hundred keyboards.  They staggered into the first pub they came to. It was called Janty’s. They got to the bar and ordered drinks and took them to a table.  Sitting with Anthea. Awkward.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” she said finally.

He looked at her.  She was sincere.  He couldn’t believe it. “Wasn’t so bad?”

Anthea shrugged.  “I’ve been in worse places.  At least they value us as employees.”  She smiled.  The teeth were a little crooked but the smile was welcome.  He dipped his fingers in his ice-cold beer and put them to his forehead.

“What do we do now?” He felt drained of life.

“We party,” she said. “We forget.”

For the next six hours: drink, drugs, one huge binge that threatened to send him into oblivion.  The pound of music.  Anthea loosened up some more.  They began to laugh as if this was all perfectly, perfectly natural.  They even danced.  Clung to each other like drunks. 

Clubland swam around him.  Bodies entwined.  Smoke curling.  Shrieks of ecstasy.  Cries of pain.  The streets crowded well into the early morning.  And somewhere beneath it all was the sense of unreality you only got in dreams. More drink.  The pain in his fingers hid beneath the alcohol.  At one point Anthea turned and kissed him suddenly, forcing her tongue between his lips, pressing her body against his.  Even drunk, he could feel the passion rising, couldn’t resist, needed to be inside her.  Groping, pawing, fucking. They did it in the gents, while the air and music thundered around them. After that, they slept for a few short hours. But the beat of Clubland was always there, and it was merciless.

9:30am. Anthea and Jack. Assistant data processors extraordinaire.

Back at the office. Typing.  Typing.  Typing.  It was okay for the first couple of hours as if his body and his mind had become immune.  He was glazed and still drunk.  His bladder was full though and he needed to piss urgently.  Jack held up his hand.  The plastic man stared straight ahead.  Ignored him.  “You have stopped typing, please continue.  You have stopped typing, please continue.” He kept going.  This is ridiculous, he thought. Tears in his eyes.  Typing.  Typing.  Typing. 

Michelle Danvers from Glossop.

Carol Heyes from Dorchester.

Yasti Devos from Leeds.

He cried out.  Tears in his eyes.  Put his hand up again.  “You have stopped typing, please continue.”  Ignored.  He couldn’t type.  Couldn’t think.  Pain everywhere.  A shock went through his feet.  Jack yelped.  Pissed his pants.  Hot and wet, it flooded over his crotch and thighs, down his shins, pooling around his feet.  It smelled of rank despair and was almost glorious. Relief.  It was pure and beautiful.  The stink of urine filled his nostrils.  Across the room someone else yelped.  “You have stopped typing, please continue.”

Typing. Typing. Typing.

Merion Jones from Llandudno.

Geoffrey Singleton from Edinburgh.

Clarie Hanglow from Eastbourne.

Typing.  Typing.  Typing.  Eyes glazed.  Fingers burned.  Blood on the keyboard now but he kept going.  Pain filling every cell of his body.  He was jolted three more times in the space of a few minutes.  Pissed himself once more. He didn’t care. Laughed hysterically.

Buzz.

“You may now have rest and recreation.  You will find your rest and recreation card in your welcome pack.  It has now been credited.  You must be back at your desk for 9:30.  We value as an employee.”

Anthea gulped her first drink.  Nails broken.  Fingers raw.  Clubland beating around them.  Her eyes were hollow.  He went to the toilets.  Vomited.  A man stood over him.  “Here, try some of this.”  The man took his credit card to pay for the line of coke.  Jack snorted it gratefully.  Buzzed for a while.  Cool.  He went back to the bar.  Took Anthea to a hotel.  Fucked her.  She screamed, wept.  “I can’t go on, I can’t go on.”  It didn’t matter. He started laughing. Became hysterical.

9:30am

Back to work. Another eighteen hours. An endless cycle. He forgot how many days and nights it went on for. The pain became the norm. The smell of sixteen hundred people locked in hell became the norm. He took more drugs to get him through the day.

9.30 buzz 9.30 buzz 9.30 buzz.

A couple of people slumped over their desks.  Their bodies jolted but they didn’t resume typing.  Two men came in with a trolley, lifted them up, carried them out.  Typing.  Typing.  Names.  Address.  Meaningless information.  Pain screamed up his fingers and wrists.  Another shock.  A tooth popped out of his mouth, bounced across the table and disappeared over the edge.  He laughed as he typed.  Laughed and laughed and laughed.

Buzz.

“You may now have rest and recreation.  You will find your rest and recreation card in your welcome pack.  It has now been credited.  You must be back at your desk for 9:30 am.  We value you as an employee.”

More drink.  More drugs.  When he fucked Anthea, she was like a rag doll.  The music beat in his head.  Someone was selling E’s and he was out on the dancefloor, Anthea slumped at a table, staring glazed at her drink. He bought a couple of tabs and let the drug spark him back into life. He found another girl with more energy and fucked her too, out on the street with people watching. Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing on this place.

Back to work.  By day three, he didn’t mind the shocks.  Loved it when he wet his pants.  At one point Anthea was shocked ten times in one hour.  He snatched a look at her.  Face thin.  Eyes empty.  Buzz.  Fun time.  Clubland called.  Drink.  Drugs.  Unending. Agony.  Ecstasy.  Pain.  Pain. Beautiful, unending pain. Back to work. Typing again.  This time Anthea not typing.  He looked at her. Her flesh was twitching with each shock but she was no longer reacting.  A while later, the trolley came and took her away.  He felt a pang of jealousy. He laughed and screamed as they wheeled her to the door.   

Buzz

He drank alone.  He took a line of coke in the toilets.  A man stood near him.  “Bud? You okay, bud?”

He looked up into old, creased eyes.  Looked down at his own, bloody fingers.  He dribbled like a child.  Stumbled.  The man grabbed him before he fell. “I can’t go on,” Jack tried to say. Around him Clubland continued its constant beat. It cut into his flesh, broke open his blood vessels and made him bleed.

He tried to ask: “Do you know me?” But again nothing intelligible came out.

“You have to hide. Have to hide.”

“They value my service. They do.”

He looked up and saw fear in the man’s eyes. “Come on. We have to hide.”

The fear came then. He didn’t know why nor did he understand. The man gave up and turned, pushed through the door and was gone. Jack stumbled to his feet. The hideous beat of Clubland had changed and now it was a kind of screech that seemed to grow and grow with every passing second.

Jack made it to the bar. It was empty. Glass and broken bottles were strewn across the floor. He pushed his way out onto the street. Why were people running? Why were they running? He turned to look up the street.

They came them. The dark, twisted things that had imprisoned him here. Made him forget. They came flooding down the cobbled path, across the walls, their sharp teeth and burning red eyes intent on devouring. As the first one hit him and drove him across the ground, Jack wondered what would happen if he was late for work. The creature bit into his soft, ready flesh and the pain was exquisite. Then there were more, feeding with such frenzy that his body was dragged along the road for some distance. He felt those teeth tear at his throat and the warm blood bubbled up into his mouth as the final darkness swept over him.