SM 0258 sat in the back of an empty cafe. Behind the rancid smoke of the cheap cigarette his bad skin was twitching, wrinkling the thin fabric that was tightly stretched over his sharp bones. His eyes were pink around the edges, painful blisters growing at the base of the eyelashes which flashed over vacant eyes held widely open, a reflection of the complicated mixture of a total lack of thought or feeling with a sort of sickly shock. This concoction, though, appeared to be at nothing in particular.
His coffee had become cold between his nervous grippings and letting go’s and mid-motion changes of heart or stomach. He was thinking they were all against him. Job listings were sprawled across the table, stained with coffee and annotated with symbols which had ceased to find meaning any more to their maker who was still occupied staring morosely through the world with a cigarette wrapped between chapped and nervous lips.
They were all against him. He didn’t even need to explain why to himself any more. He didn’t even feel crazy about it any more. They were obviously against everybody like him. He wished desperately for so many years that he would be proven crazy, that nobody would ever make it so clear that they were truly against him, but they did.
They sent him to the war and they made him do awful things and when he said he felt awful they sent him to a room with a bag of drugs and told him not to come out until he could tell them that he was happy. He hadn’t come out for a very long time and when he told them that he was happy he was sure they knew that he was not, but he had been so bad to them that they wanted to believe him as much as he wanted them to believe him. They all knew, though, that it wasn’t true. SM 0258 would never be happy again.
The glow of the cigarette reached the end of his bony, scarred finger and burned the tip that he had blistered the week before trying to clean up the mess he’d made at his last job. Jobs. He put the cigarette out sharply and waved his finger about. The thought of jobs and the new burn caused him to reach for his pill dispenser. It was a neat gadget and he felt good when he held it to his mouth. He hated the feeling of the pills in his mouth. This particular dose did not sit well and soon he found himself in the grimy bathroom vomiting. The sight of all the pills in the vomit made him vomit more. After some time there was nothing left in him so he cleaned his bad face and resumed his gloomy post at the table.
He cleared the job listings away because they made him feel pathetic. He knew the reality of his situation. If he could get an interview he’d probably blow it when they ask where he’d been for the last ten years. No explaining that, especially with the War Crimes Act. If he found a sympathetic employer to put him in some out of the way position the boss would quickly come to realize that between the mental illness which led to all sorts of near violent outbursts and the pills which melted SM 0258 into a sleepwalking, glassy eyed waste of company time and money there was little room to actually get any work done. It was a tale as old as time.
All the people he’d known from The War were having the same problems. He couldn’t even feel special about his condition. That is how against him they were.
The door opened and his eyes became alert. They flashed to the doorway where there was standing a man who could have been anybody, but really looked like he was somebody. His suit was sharp and dark, somehow blacker than black. His bones were sharp and angular. He at once seemed arrogant and relaxed. SM 0258 hated him terribly.
The black suited man seated himself at the table nearest to SM 0258’s and further he sat facing the nervous young man. There was something about the man in the black suit, and it was almost certainly in the way that he moved, that SM 0258 found deeply disturbing. He moved like the mechanized loaders which had loaded into his bomber the horrendous explosive devices which occupied so many of his daydreams. But it wasn’t entirely like the movement of those either. It was as if one of those had donned a suit and begun a dance made to mock the creatures which had given it such a disgusting task to accomplish. SM 0258 hated the loaders because, to his simple mind, it seemed like one of them could also be doing his more disgusting task to drop the payload into the atmosphere over rebellious colonies. Surely they would not wake up at night howling in a way that had proven that no sexual partner could stand. Robots don’t even have sexual partners.
The black suited man that moved like a machine had ordered and his coffee had come but he had not touched it. For that matter he hadn’t done anything, not even taken his eyes off the psychologically fragile veteran sitting across from him who had recently vomited up his afternoon’s dosage of antipsychotics (1,000 mg), antianxiety (800 mg), anti-depressants (1,200 mg) and miscellaneous medicines (2,500 mg). SM 0258 became quickly irate.
“What the fuck do you want you fucking robot? You wanna give me bombs? You drop your OWN fucking bombs!” demanded 0258.
Despite the clearly irrational basis of the remark the black suited man remained motionless. It was only his mouth which moved and made it clear that his mouth was not connected to his face in the conventional muscular way, but in some other, nearly muscular way, which meant without a doubt that this man was indeed a robot when he said “we want you to help us end The Industry.”
The lights went out. The bad face of SM 0258 was visible for a brief period as the cherry on his cigarette brightened, then dulled again, and then disappeared altogether into, presumably, the ash tray, though it very well might have been the extended arm of the robot man in the black suit. It was hard to tell.
The Paper Trail 