Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 45 of the my online book "Excited Delirium". Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index
When you enter an office building on a Saturday afternoon, the first thing you think is that you must have missed the alarm bell. Acres of cubicles are deserted, stripped of their organic inhabitants, now a quiet and still refuge for sleeping computers (few of which are turned off on Friday afternoon), pictures of families and friend and smelly work shoes, tucked under the retractable keyboard.
It was the pictures that always struck Kite. These were icons of hope, images of desire and sometimes visual tombstones and reminders for all office employees that for a few brief moments each week, these people weren’t stuck in a cubicle breathing in the dust of hundreds of other clock-punchers and drones. Or that they weren’t breathing in the chemically unstable and highly toxic fumes of the poorly made chairs, desks and rugs, all mass produced with cost-efficiencies in mind, and not the health of the end users. Continue reading