Monolith
Based on the events of this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/us/Utah-monolith-red-rock-country.html
Content warning: brief suicidal ideation
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The monolith was twelve feet tall, three sided, and silver.
They found it deep in a canyon in the Utah desert, buried into the red, sun-baked clay. It was a couple of helicopter pilots that found it, a state wildlife crew flying low to survey bighorn sheep catching its glint poking through the crevices of rock. There had been no indication of how it had been installed there -- the rocky terrain into the canyon was impassable by car or truck, and the monolith was too large and too heavy for it to be lowered into the canyon, even with a crew of people. It carried no markings, and its reflective metal surface was unblemished, as if it had just been buffed and waxed, even as the warm desert breeze stirred the dust up around it.
Without a clear explanation, the monolith’s curious existence soon became the focus of much media speculation. Some thought it was an ambitious art installation, others a practical joke. A prominent conservative talk radio host insisted it was an experimental weapon planted by the aliens, or perhaps the CIA. A well-known television evangelist thought it was the first marker of the end times, and urged his followers to repent. But as the days wore on, and no further leads were discovered, the media attention soon faded away. The state wildlife agency, deeming it harmless, opted to leave the monolith up, and soon tourists arrived from across the country to make the journey into the canyon to take selfies in front of it. But before long even that interest waned, and the monolith was left in solitude once more, buried deep within the Utah desert, its silver surface reflecting red rocks and blue sky around it in perpetuity.
Then, one day, it vanished.
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Conor Lambest awoke and it was Tuesday.
This in itself wasn’t particularly noteworthy, apart from the fact that the previous day had been Tuesday as well. Conor was sure of it -- he was the sort of person who always kept track of the amount of days left until the sweet embrace of a Friday afternoon. Rolling over and seeing the date on his phone that morning -- Tuesday, April 22nd, 2020 -- therefore, was a bit of a shock to him. But he also wasn’t sure what he had done the previous day; perhaps, he surmised, he had expected the upcoming Tuesday would be so uninteresting he’d simply assumed it had already happened. After all, there was nothing interesting about Tuesdays.
That day, Conor, like most days, walked to work, Keurig coffee in a plastic thermos in one hand and phone in the other, weaving through the sidewalk traffic with a practiced precision as he idly swiped through the day’s news: the Dow up two points, the President in some scandal or other, the Knicks losing once again -- nothing that hadn’t already happened before. Even the weather itself was dreary: grey skies and a thin white fog that lay overhead, just obscuring the New York skyline far above Conor’s head. Though it was late April, there was a biting morning chill that gave no indication of the coming summer.
It wasn’t long before Conor arrived. You were never in danger of missing the building where he spent most of his waking hours -- it was an imposing facade of stainless steel and glass, with floor-to-ceiling windows stretching high above a view of Central Park below. Through the windows a pedestrian below could catch a glimpse of the office space, with long faux-wood tables stretched across, where young men and women in their late twenties or perhaps early thirties sat typing on laptops, a tasteful selection of fake plants dotting the corners of the rooms. Above the front door was the logo, a single word in a simple, unassuming, modern typeface: Prometheus.
Prometheus was, at least from the description on their website, a company that built “technological solutions to connect data, artificial intelligence, humans, and environments.” Whatever that meant from a practical standpoint was unknown, even to almost everyone that worked at the company. This fact, however, hadn’t stopped Prometheus from being valued at $50 billion dollars upon going public, and from being named in that year’s Money Magazine Top 10 Tech Startups to Watch (if they don’t fold in five years). There were rumors, of course. There always were with that sort of thing. Conor’s coworkers often liked to speculate on what the programs they built were used for, on who would quit if it turned out the company was selling its technology for uses like in drone bombers in the Middle East. Conor never partook in these discussions. From his point of view, there wasn’t any reason to. The job security was good, and so was the pay (especially in this economy, as he liked to tell people). Prometheus even provided his apartment, situated just a short walk away from the office. This, of course, was an arrangement that worked out well for both parties: the workers were able to live for free in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and the company was able to motivate them more effectively, lest they be fired and be evicted from their homes.
Conor hurried through the door, eager to escape both the bitter cold and the banal small talk that tended to plague the stragglers around the reception area. But it was only seconds after he’d sat down at his spot on the long, faux-wood table that served as his desk (because expensive office cubicles, an in-house analysis had found, were antithetical to a collaborative and inclusive work environment) and opened his company-issued laptop that he came under fire from a party which he couldn’t run from.
“Yo, Connor!” came a booming voice just to his right. “What’s up, buddy?”
This was Todd, a well-built intern with sandy blonde hair who sat in the space beside Conor, and as a result was probably his closest friend at the company. Conor often fantasized about drowning him in one of the office toilets.
“Hey, Todd,” he replied, with a facial expression that he hoped conveyed both his agreeableness and his unwillingness to partake in further social interaction.
“Weird weather we’re having, isn’t it?” asked Todd, not getting the hint.
“Yeah,” Conor replied.
“They say it’s gonna be like this for a while,” said Todd. “Might even snow!”
“Wow,” said Conor, who, to Todd’s eye, had suddenly become intensely focused on clearing his email’s spam folder.
“Snow, in April!” Todd said, excitedly. “Can you imagine it?”
“I can,” said Conor, because it was not actually a hard thing to imagine at all.
At this point, even Todd had come to the realization that the conversation had run its course.
“Anyway,” he said, slapping Conor’s shoulder with a bit too much gusto, and lumbering over to his spot. “Keep rockin’ it, man!”
Though at the present moment Conor was imagining what a man’s screams would sound like with his head held underwater, he did manage a half smile and nod, before turning back to his laptop, and the day’s work.
Conor’s job was boring and terrible. It was, as far as he could tell, to run and record the performance of a program made by the others at the company. Because of the secretive and compartmentalized nature of Prometheus, Conor didn’t know what the program did or what it was for, just that each morning it would receive an update and each day he would need to put it through a sequence of tests. The program, however, was flawless; in his three years working at Prometheus and through update upon update it hadn’t faltered even once. Yet every day Conor would put it through an identical sequence of tests, and compile an identical, perfect, report to send to his superiors, just in case the impossible were to occur. But Conor didn’t mind the inane banality of his work. On the contrary, he had over time learned to find a perverse enjoyment of it, to savor the utter meaninglessness of its constant perfection, the beautiful sensation of nonexistence that came with watching the same result flicker onto his screen in uniform, inevitable perpetuity. Sometimes, on days that had a particular dullness, he would dissociate from his labor completely, feeling himself leave his body and float upwards, above the office and out the wide, polished windows, over the lush greenness of Central Park, and upward further still, past the skyline of the city and then the cloud cover and then the entire continent of North America, and up through the atmosphere and above the planet, and onward and onward until the solar system, and then the Milky Way were reduced to mere dots on the horizon, and on and on and on and on and again and again and again until there was nothing left to see except a few scattered sparks upon an infinite darkness, and finally peace.
But today, a notification chime knocked Conor out of his reverie, and back to earth. It was from Amanda, his “team leader” (the company had decided that “boss” carried with it too much of a negative perception among the employees, even though the role of the team leaders was functionally identical)
Hey all,
I hope you’re all having a wonderful week so far, even with the chilly weather we’ve been having! (brrr!) I just wanted to let you know that, for this week only, the company cafeteria will be selling hot chocolate! At just $6, it’s one of the best deals you’ll find in the entire city, so get it while it’s (excuse the pun!) hot!
However, it has come to my attention that our team hasn’t been hitting our work quotas recently. I just wanted to give you all a friendly reminder that here at Prometheus, we pride ourselves on doing the industry-leading standard of work.
Normally, this would mean we’d ask for you to stay in past your typical working hours (which is industry standard), but research has shown that that doesn’t actually improve productivity. Because here at Prometheus we pride ourselves on being employee-first, we’d like to extend to you the offer of working this weekend instead!
Looking forward to touching base soon! Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions, and I’ll circle back with my response. Take care, and enjoy the hot chocolate!
Amanda
Conor briefly considered putting a bullet in his brain.
But that would be silly, he realized. It was near impossible to buy a gun in New York these days. By the time all the background checks and forms and approvals would go through the impulse would have passed, and all he’d be left with was a weapon that he would probably end up murdering Todd with, since the impulse to do that particular crime emerged every time he opened his mouth. No, the more efficient and effective path to suicide would be to throw himself off the bridge over the Hudson into the river below. He might have done it already, he supposed, had he not been so afraid of heights, and also the cold. Perhaps the more realistic option was to throw himself in front of the subway, but then again, he thought, the task of cleaning his desecrated corpse off the tracks would fall to the minimum wage sanitation workers, and they didn’t deserve the extra trouble. But the amusing mental exercise of imagining the logistics of his suicide had sufficiently cleared Conor’s mind of the injustice of being forced to work the upcoming weekend, and so the rest of the workday passed in this pleasant fashion.
Back home, Conor, like most days, decided to order in from a meal-delivery service, taking care to tip the minimum amount. It wasn’t that he was stingy, he reasoned, only that it was getting late in the month, and as a result he was running low on money at the moment (although, to be fair, he reasoned, he wouldn’t have been in this situation had he not spent so much money on meal delivery services in the first place). While he waited, he flicked on the TV, since it was around 6 o’clock and time for the evening news with the pretty news anchor he liked. Tonight, she was wearing an olive green shirt with a pattern of lillies around the collar, which struck him as odd. Hadn’t he remembered her wearing that shirt already this week?
Then the feature story began, and Conor realized, with hideous clarity, that he had indeed lived this day before. They were talking about the monolith. It had disappeared, gone from its spot deep in the Utah desert without leaving so much as an indentation in the clay where it had stood, unmoving, for months. For hours the wildlife crews had scoured the canyons, but found nothing. Then, a call had come in from the other side of the world. They’d found a monolith on the streets of Singapore, deep in a dimly-lit back alley, buried into the ground as if it had been there forever. Not a scratch on it. Twelve feet all, three sided, and silver.
Conor’s phone buzzed on top of the coffee table, making him jump. Gingerly, he picked it up and glanced at the screen. It was an emergency notification text: just seven words, blinking black against a backdrop of white.
We are fucked. Have a nice day.
