by Erik Nelson
Draft, March 5, 2023
Another day at the office. We are making another presentation to show to a client.
Mr. Lightfoot, our boss, is addressing Ben and me on video as we sit in the huddle room with our laptops on Microsoft Teams.
He says, “Now, I was just in a discussion with our sales specialists, and what they want is concept. Make it look modern. Not like yesterday’s future. Like tomorrow’s future. It’s another retail space, but don’t make it look like just another retail space. Now go out there to your design stations and make something creative.”
So Ben and I go back to our cubicles, turn on our software packages, and start concepting.
I am trying to use the new renderer to make an animated image of a proposed retail space that we are designing for a developer.
Mr. Lightfoot is looking over my shoulder as I sit in my cubicle trying to focus on my computer screen.
“Don’t fall asleep on me!” he barks at me.
Fair enough. I was spacing out a little.
But somehow when he yells at me I am startled into a strange state, like pulling a muscle in my brain.
I can’t sleep but I can’t wake up either.
I am turning unresponsive and zombified and invisible. I am having an out-of-body experience, looking down on me slumped over the chair and everyone else in the office looking small from a height.
I start sleepwalking. Am I sleepwalking through the real world or through imaginary space inside my computer? I am not sure.
I can not breathe, I can not taste. I can just steer through hallways.
I am in a mall where there is no natural lighting in the halls, only fluorescent and neon.
In the mall, there are no people. Robots are shopping, or maybe they are zombies. They look exactly like the mannequins in the stores where they are trying clothes on, except maybe a little more human-like, with a flexible skin.
They line up at the food court. Even though they are not able to eat because they have no mouths, they seem to be treating the act of buying food as if it were something sacred, a fetish maybe. Perhaps they are compelled to buy drinks because they desire them, they are thirsty, but can not drink. So they get an illusion of satisfaction by buying.
A blue light flashes and an electronic ringtone sounds.
In perfect lockstep they all walk back into a storage room, pack themselves like sardines, and turn themselves off.
A robot with a vacuum cleaner starts vacuuming.
I run as the vacuum cleaner is pushed against my ankles.
As I open the exit door a flock of seagulls flies in and starts eating the food the zombies left behind at the tables. I walk further.
I walk past an abandoned warehouse. Lights get turned off as I walk by, perhaps by squatters who don’t want to be seen.
There is a school being demolished. Lockers dangling on a wall several stories up, with occasional mittens and with typed announcements pinned to the walls.
I see a person on the sidewalk.
I want to ask where I am, ask what time it is, ask where I can get a drink.
I walk up to her and all that comes out of my mouth is a vague whispering sound and she runs. I see I have no shadow. I see my hands look like wisps of dust bunny. I see my reflection and I seem to have no mouth. And even though I have no mouth I am very thirsty.
I am lying on the floor next to my cubicle and Ben pats me on the back.
“You seem to have fainted,” he says. Let me get you a drink. I’ll be right back.
I sit in my swivel chair while the room spins around me, and he comes back with a Gatorade and an energy bar.
“You have to be careful with the renderer,” he says. “If it strobes at the wrong rate it synchronizes with your brain waves.”
“Why don’t they ban it?” I ask.
“They’re looking for a way to use it in advertising,” he replies, “but they haven’t worked out all the parameters.”
For a while I can not look at things.
The color swatches and samples in the space the Space Planning department uses start to swirl and if I look too deep I will see things in them like tunnels in the printed pattern and get drawn in, and never be able to get out.
But if I don’t look at anything, the same images form in the darkness behind my eyelids.
So I have to look at something and nothing at the same time.
I reboot.
I log in.
I read my e-mail and check my messages on Microsoft Teams.
I take another sip of Gatorade.
I can taste it and it is wet, so I can tell that I am not one of those robots at the mall that can not taste food.
Yet.
At quitting time I remember there are a few things I need to buy at the mall. But I decide I would rather go straight home.
Retail Space Walkthrough
DRAFT 3/5/2023