Ledman Pickup (All Geeked Up) Read online

"Oh?" She couldn't conceive of any more syllables.

  "Yeah,” he said, "it's actually quite an intriguing experiment. We're hoping to learn a great deal. Has it said anything yet?"

  "Said?" she muttered. "No, no. I haven't heard a peep."

  "It ought to be telling you something at some point,” her employer informed her. "I can't tell you what or even how that will happen, but you can definitely expect some feedback,” he said. "Until then, I suppose, it isn't very interesting, is it?"

  "Oh, no, not at all,” Zoey said, "I mean, not in that way, or in a usual way, or, oh, I don't know what I'm saying. It doesn't do anything that you can see that it's doing."

  "Oh, it's doing something,” Chris told her. "All of the time, I can tell you that much. It's a busy little bee, but it's all self-contained, as you know. It will tell you, when it's time, so don't worry. I just thought that it might have, you know, already done so by now."

  "No, no,” Zoey said, "nothing yet. I'll tell you, of course, as soon as it does, as soon as I have anything to tell you, that is."

  "Of course,” Chris replied. "Nothing but the best for this box. That's why we sent it to you of all people. There isn't another, I can tell you that much. It's the only one of its kind."

  "That's just great,” Zoey sighed. "I guess I kind of guessed that already."

  "Well,” said Chris after a pause. "I'll wish you good night, then."

  "Good night,” she said quickly, and hung up the phone.

  "I am calm,” she reminded herself. "Very calm. I know what I'm doing, exactly. I am packing my clothes and then I am getting into my car. And then I am driving all night. And then I am finding that package. And when I find it, I am going to take it, in person, all the way to San Francisco. Yes I am. And I am doing it calmly every step of the way."

  Then, as calm as a winter tornado, she threw all her clothes in a bag and ran out the door.

  Two

  The first thing it knew was a bump on its side. A corner that had previously been fine, sharp and square was now dented and blunt. The landing was soft. There had been no pain. A bump and a view from all sides except down. Around it was carpet, thin and pale green. Off in the distance were some black plastic brackets containing some forms and some packages, flattened. They seemed to be all the same. Up above, way high up, was the light, white and solid across. A darkish tan thing coming down, and the next thing it knew it was flying. That's when it first felt the vibrations. A feeling of motion and air flowing past. It was moving against its volition and that was an action that didn't seem right. Placed back on a surface of what was once yellow. Vibrations again in the lower range buzzing. Words that came through.

  "It says Air on the label."

  Other words came from another form elsewhere, a bit higher frequency and tighter, more pointy.

  "It's in the computer as Ground."

  "Maybe we ought to check?"

  "Computer says Ground."

  Slid across now by the form with the graspers, it felt itself tearing and torn, pulled apart, but that was all on the surface, it seemed. Soon a smoothing and restoration of sorts.

  "Ground it shall be,” said the original vibration, and then a more radical flight as it soared through the air and landed on top of a heap of some others. Here in the bin it could still see the ceiling of light, but nothing around it but boxes and white. It settled in for a long quiet time, adjusting to all the sensations. Frequencies ranging from very high up down to rumblings that felt underground, deep below. All of these had to be messages. Some it could process in some shape or form. There was meaning at times. There were things going out and things coming in. More noises became more familiar. The sound of the first and the sound of the second that were voices. Occasionally others quite similar. Humming come down from the ceiling of light. Shiftings and sortings as things piled on top. None of this was quite what it wanted. It had yearnings but could not express them.

  Later darkness after more motion. New surroundings, new senses, new visions. Rolling. Being rolled. Handled by different graspers. Flying, then resting, more piling. Time was a blur of starting and stopping, moving and yet not in motion. Energy streaming and always a host of vibrations. Occasional beepings from deep down inside. Pulses of wavelengths of light.

  It seemed like a rhythm that would go on forever, alternate resting and motion, darkness and light. It felt like it was getting to know all these facts. More and more it seemed like the others around it were things like itself, in a process of destiny, or at least of awakening. It could feel stirrings around it and occasionally another item would bump up against it and make contact. There was jostling for position at times as well, and it had a sense that it would find its own spot if it could. At the same time it seemed that anywhere was good enough, one shelf as welcoming as another.

  Voices were intermittent, sometimes muffled and distant, sometimes close and distinct. Words that had come to be familiar. It was part of an infinite relay, handed off from one runner to the next. In this way the time passed and the flow was underway, until abruptly it came to an end.

  Three

  Leonora Wells had a motto she lived by each day: get high early and get high often. This morning was no different, beginning with a wake-up scramble for a joint, which she pulled into her lungs on the fire escape that doubled as her front porch. Three floors above the alley she enjoyed the crack of light that sometimes appeared in the daytime above the apartment buildings that ranged about on every side. Behind her in the single room she inhabited was a pile of sheets, blankets, and a variety of tin foil wrappings left over from last week's burritos. The hot plate remained unplugged on the floor as she had not felt much like cooking in recent days. She was already wearing her outfit for the day - overalls, t-shirt and boots - so all it would take to get going was something to eat and a smoke. She stumbled back into the room and a quick glance told her she had nothing of those.

  Damn it, she thought, but she'd already known. Every day was like this. Still, it wasn't so bad. She had a half a bag stashed in the jar, nothing to do but the job, and the job was so easy it suited her fine. Half a block down the street was the warehouse: Ledman Storage and Pickup. Leonora Wells had been working there for a month and could hardly believe in her luck. All she had to do was wave some drivers around and sign in when they came and when they left. The rest was pretty much up to them and the guys. The guys were Junior and Rolando, fun-loving fellows who never had a bad word to say or a mean look on their faces. All they did was move things around. She was supposed to be telling them where, but they knew better than she did. After all, she was the new kid in town. Rolando and Junior had been there for what seemed forever. The previous "supervisor,” an asshole named Rick, was not missed at all. He'd been a micro-manager supreme, always on their case, scolding them about the proper placement of packages for maximum efficiency. What did they care about that?

  Ledman Storage was just a way station. Boxes come in, and boxes go out. Who cares where they are in the meantime? As long as they made their way out into the world, that's all that really mattered in the end. Imagine that Rick guy having a fit every time that Rolando put package A on shelf C! But that's how it went. It hardly helped matters that package A turned out to be some critical shipment on its way to a nuclear research facility, and shelf C was reserved for East Coast medical equipment. Cost poor old Rick his position though it was scarcely his fault. Now Rick was supervising garden hose salesmen at K-Po's. Rolando and Junior didn't care. Nobody ever blamed them at all.

  Leonora thought that she had it made. The pay was damn good, the job was a cinch, she could do it with both eyes tied behind her back, a thought which made her burst out in a flurry of giggles. She stumbled her way into work and was happy to see that the guys were also in form. A delivery had come in from Texas, a light one, half a dozen small boxes mostly intended for pickup a half hour later. Anyone could see they should stay on the table right by the front landing, but something about their sizes and shapes made
them an irresistible target for Junior.

  "Go long,” he shouted, and heaved the first package along down the aisle, expecting Rolando to go for it. Rolando, however, stood still and the thing hit and went sliding beneath a rack of gray shelving along the west wall.

  "Aw, man,” Junior complained but Rolando just shrugged. Junior picked up the next one and this time they put together a decent string of tosses and catches, all the way to nine in a row before Junior went and dropped the darn thing and it busted. All sorts of stuffing and peanuts spilled out of the side of the box and the guys figured they'd better patch it up right away, and that was the end of that game. Leonora didn't even have to scold them. They knew their business and she didn't care. As long as there's no trouble she was fine, and so far whenever the boss had called to complain she'd just listened and hadn't really bothered to hear. It was pretty much all the same to her if they were going to fire her any day now or not. She had found a few beers sitting behind a blue dumpster and distributed them freely for breakfast.

  Four

  Kandhi Clarke had been paying close attention. As Chief Officer for the WWA Testing Division, Zoey Bridges was of special interest to her. Kandhi had been the first to discover Zoey and her talents. It had happened quite by accident. Kandhi and her mother were having coffee at one of their favorite spots and happened to overhear a conversation at the next table, a discussion between Zoey and another unidentified female on the subject of black box testing. Zoey had put together quite a theory and was making a case for intuition over planning although, it must be said to her credit, she did not deny the importance of the latter, only that the former tended to uncover the most pernicious defects. Planning undoubtedly led to bases being covered, i's being dotted and t's being crossed, but intuition delved below the surface and hit the rare gold more often than not.

  Her companion argued a cost-benefit analysis, that the rare breed of intuitive tester could not be relied upon in the aggregate, and that therefore it was wiser to develop a comprehensive course of action. Zoey did not disagree, but asserted that in her case, you could have both. Kandhi ventured to interrupt and joined them at their table. She discovered nothing interesting in the other woman, who struck her as a bland, vanilla type engineer, but Zoey, there was promise there. Kandhi had been one of the original members of WWA, the third employee to be precise, after the two founders, one of whom was the legendary Chris.

  She was not the greenhorn she had once been when the company had first got off the ground. She was older, of course, and more mature, though she still sported her spiky pink hair and a random assortment of piercings. The new Kandhi was a serious person who handled her responsibilities responsibly. She had been the original tester of some of their first devices and had developed some ideas of her own when it came to quality assurance. She was certain that Zoey was on to something, but from her own experience knew that such talents were untrainable. One had to be born with it, gifted. Kandhi had come across only one or two others in that line of work until then. She gathered Zoey's contact information and promised to get in touch.

  First, however, she did a little research of her own. In a matter of days she had a complete dossier and personality profile compiled on the subject of Zoey Bridges, only child, mathematics major in college. Zoey had stumbled into software testing after a temp job at Micro Microware turned into something more. At M and M (as they styled themselves), Zoey had been charged with validating the initial findings of the development team, that the intelliprobe they had released into its chamber had indeed acquired the volcanic-bacteria-sensing tissue they'd intended it to. In order to accomplish this task, Zoey had to depend upon a sophisticated measuring device, and the more she used that machine, the more suspicious she became about its reliability. She conducted offline experiments which were not authorized by the division, and the company was not amused. She reported numerous deficiencies in the tool and concluded that M and M had wasted their money and that the entire project could not be validated by any means whatsoever.

  She was fired from that job, but the makers of the device, Ensuwalla Mektron, hired her as a special consultant while they went back to the drawing board. She enjoyed the whole special consultant thing and soon branched out, offering her services to makers of other scientific devices. One success followed another, and soon her career had led into the world of personal electronic communications and other consumer enterprises. She had established a reputation, not only as a skilled and talented consultant, but also as an almost unbelievably bland and boring person. Kandhi had never before encountered anyone as dull.

  Zoey was indeed on the socialnet (this was almost required for people of her generation), but her personal revelations were embarrassingly tedious, unrelieved by even a cute kitten video or quilting pattern. Her most original contributions to the worldly online super-culture was a periodic listing of cracks in neighboring sidewalks, a paean to the virtues of wax beans (they were yellow, and beanie), and a brief discussion on the brevity of precise midnight. Kandhi eventually contracted with Zoey to test a well-known and thoroughly tested WWA device, only to discover that Zoey was indeed everything she bragged of being. She uncovered seven priority-one defects in the device in the first two days she possessed it.

  Since then, Kandhi had not hesitated to hire Zoey for even alpha level testing. It was expensive to go that route, but had proven worth it. She had brought Chris into the picture, hoping to provoke a better sense of Zoey's character, which up until then presented itself as what-you-see-is-what-you-get: thoroughly bland yet continually astounding. Kandhi could not fathom how such an uninteresting person could yield such important results. After several contracts, Kandhi was more than satisfied with Zoey's work, but she still didn't completely trust her. She'd hoped that Chris would help to crack the icy exterior, but so far he hadn't produced the desired effect. Zoey was still an enigma. She had fallen under Chris' spell, of course, but all that brought about was a great deal of stammering and awkward telephone recordings. Kandhi wanted more. She wanted to crack her wide open, find out what was really going on inside, but now it seemed she was even lying to Chris. There had to be an explanation.

  She had picked Zoey especially for this assignment. Now or never, Zoey girl, she thought to herself as she shipped the curious device, and from that day on had been monitoring her every move. Zoey didn't know just how closely she was being observed. Kandhi noted with satisfaction how Zoey had gone through her paces, had attempted to pick and pry at the thing, had followed instructions and yet worked around them. Zoey had done everything possible, everything that ought to be done, and when the device had completed its work, it reported to her that Zoey had fulfilled her commitment. She had packed the thing up and taken it down to Gone Postal, and that was the end of the line.

  Kandhi was eager to see its report, but the device didn’t arrive as expected. Something had gone wrong along the way. She checked with the shipper and discovered, with more than dismay, that the package was lost. It had "experienced an exception.” Quickly she scanned the tracking tables and saw the same listings that Zoey had previously noted: San Antonio, Sonora, Balmorhea and Las Cruces, and finally, Ledman Storage and Pickup, in Wetford, Arizona. Kandhi rapidly checked with the airlines. There was a flight to L.A., then to Phoenix, from where it was only a two hour drive to that warehouse destination. She could get there by mid-morning, if she moved fast enough. There was no time to lose, because this was no ordinary package.

  Five

  Zoey drove a super mini compact car of the grayest gray and the drabbest interior. She could think of no good reason to waste money on vehicle decor. The car was a means to an end, and that was that. Even now in the dark she lamented the need to use it. Zoey had a fear of transportation that could be plotted on a graph, beginning with the necessity of walking, which was at least tolerable, if tiring. Slightly above that was walking fast, something she felt should never be required. If you were walking fast, then you had miscalculated somewhere along th
e line, otherwise, you would be on time, and walking at a normal pace.

  Manual wheeled transit, a category that included bicycles and skating, was absurd but justifiable. Motorized wheel transit was already on the borderline, but if it had to be done, buses were preferable to cars except that they never seemed to go where you needed to go, when you needed to go there. Cars would have to do in a pinch. Trains were pushing it. They were, how would she put it? Alarming. Everything else beyond the rails was simply out of the question. She would never, ever fly. The very idea was appalling. She didn't even appreciate it for birds, which were nothing but airborne nuisances. Ever since that sneak attack when she was a little child.

  She had thought of everything: clothes, snacks, laptop, phone. The car was waiting below in the garage. Lights were on in there and no one else was, thankfully. Her apartment complex was small but fully inhabited. Fortunately, it was civilized to the extent that people still respected the assignment of spaces. Only once in the seven years she'd occupied the place had her spot been stolen by some unlawful neighbor. She had left a caustic note. The incident was not repeated.

  Her beeper beeped the door open, and beeped again later to lift up the gate. It was already nine o'clock at night. She proceeded cautiously over the perilously cracked sidewalk in front of the garage. How many times she would have to complain to the management was still an open question, its answer currently resting at seventeen. Further along, Zoey had to wait at several traffic lights before finally getting out of town. She could never understand that. Whoever timed the lights had to know there was nobody out there now, so why should she have to sit and wait exactly twenty-seven seconds for nothing! If she had another life to live she would consider becoming a traffic engineer instead. She was certain she would excel at such a career.