Risk, the Job

"Panic…" Nachary Zewell says in his sleep, head resting in the crook of his elbow upon arms folded atop the bar of La Ville de la Vague Vapeur, his index finger tapping rapidly upon the countertop. Tuwile de Ville stands and watches, mop in hand, as her sleeping employee’s momentary of unconscious panic subsides, with her now-peaceful indentured barista drooling in his open-mouthed sleep across the bar. Still, she spends a few minutes watching him twitch through his continuing dream until, suddenly, she hears him stop breathing; but just before she grows concerned, Nachary smiles and says, "…Ignore," meanwhile tapping his index finger in the pool of his saliva, and Tuwile finally smashes Nachary in the head with the her mop's dirty brush.

"Excuse me?" Nachary both mumbles and shouts as he slides off his stool, flailing his arms to deflect any further blows before he gained his bearings.

"We've got a customer waiting on a hypespresso," Tuwile says shortly, and watches Nachary shake his head (in his peculiar habit, a sign she only knows from experience to mean that he understands) before struggling to enter the cleaning code for La Ville's vapolog hypespresso dispenser.

"I just had this dream," he said, yawning. "I worked at a computer for some company—I don’t even know what I did, but it was definitely pointless. I clicked some buttons, I talked to people on video streams, it seemed to make sense to them. Otherwise I worked alone." Failing again to enter the correct codes for the hypespresso dispenser, Nachary rubs his eyes and, in the same motion, brushed back his mop of hair before trying once more. "Nothing I did mattered at all. I even dreamed it in second-person, with some voice telling me what pointless act I’m doing next." He shakes his head, and fails a third time at entering the codes. "I can’t tell if it’s the most neutral dream I’ve ever had, or if it’s just the nightmare of nightmares, where nothing even happens except permanent stagnation. Either purgatory or hell, with no way to tell."

Tuwile nods, and watches Nachary begin his fourth attempt. "Doesn’t sound too different from what you’ve told me about working as a Three-Space Sigilwright. Too bad you can't go back to that,because a second-world alien from a third-tier planet could clean those machines faster than you," Tuwile off-handedly remarked.

Uninsulted (either from the galactic caffeine or from his inability to dislike Tuwile), the goonish Nachary pauses a moment in his struggles at entering codes. Finally he decides he might as well give in to the blatant saltiness she radiated, and in which Nachary himself neurotically indulged: "Well now you’re just being rude," he says, now punching the correct keys. "And absurd," he adds as the hypespresso dispenser begins its self-cleaning operations. Nachary uses an open hand, as if presenting the keypad standing within his palm, to gesture for Tuwile to input the customer's order.

"I believe it goes, 'The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world,'" Tuwile replies, punching the key-series for the customer's order with absent-minded expertise. "So, kindly respect that rule and engage in silence," came her quick and sharp reply. Due both to the absurdity of her statement, and to its cutting nature, they both know soon customers will hear a scene.

"No," Nachary answers, collecting the customer's cup of hypespresso, "I believe it goes, 'The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.' So we’re both absurd in an absolute sense of knowledge, whether we know the knowledge or not," he says, handing the cup to a three-armed amphibian dressed in a raincoat, oddly enough, and also equipped with an umbrella.

"I feel targeted," Tuwile says to Nachary before moving to take the next customer's order.

Nachary turns back to the hypespresso dispenser and smiles at his own unpolished reflection. "Good!" he says, admiring the many plaques collecting between his teeth.

Their next customer (one without a face at all, and a body composed of nothing more than polygons at low resolution) at least offers them a compromise: "'So it goes'?" he suggests, believing it something mundane enough that both can agree on it. Neither Tuwile nor Nachary hear him, however: either because of the noise of the hypespresso dispenser, the density Mal-Pal smoke-cloud enshrouding La Ville de la Vague Vapeur, or because neither Tuwile nor Nachary have ever desired anything that even resembles a compromise.

Nachary turns and hands the cup to the customer. "Anything else?" he asks.

"Honestly?" the polygon-person replies. "I wouldn’t mind a grapefruit."

(Source by Andrew Hutchinson)