Chp 3: Ones and Zeros

Into the (digital) mines...

Howdy! Pirates of Appalachia is an epic absurdist satire releasing as a weekly serial. Think 2 parts Huck Finn, 1 part Slaughterhouse-Five, served with a punch to the face by A Boy Named Sue. This is a completed novel—not a work in progress. Learn more or start from the beginning via the buttons below. Happy pirating!

Previously on Pirates of Appalachia… The mayhem in the Gubernatorial debate is matched by mayhem in the Appalachian hills. Guber candidate Adam Patterson is concussed by a sex paddle shot to the skull, and good-ole-boy Kohl McGuire loses a finger to a sharkitten.

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Gold Line, Commuter Shaft Unit #1983

Independent City of Pittsburgh, Mt. Washington

Thursday, October 24, 0026 P.C., 6:07 A.M.

~ Brick Breaker’s ten-year anniversary at A.S.S.

The Muskutter shaft jolted to a stop—again. The solitary overhead light dimmed as if exhaling its last breath, and Brick Breaker sighed, his breath fogging up the shaft’s lone six-by-six-inch window. Below the window, a faded advertisement proclaimed: “Guber Oblamo welcomes you to the steel city, the city of bridges, the land of exits, and the home of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Thanks to a thirteen trillion MIM taxpayer donation, this elegant viewing window is your ticket to the breathtaking views that make this the grandest city-state of all.” It was dated 0010 P.C., which made sense since, as far as Brick could tell, that was the last time the city had done anything. Rather than grand, in the pre-dawn twilight, the Pittsburgh skyline looked like a motley crew of cocks lined up for their turn in the great gangbang of modern commerce. Pointy cocks; round cocks; long, narrow cocks; short, stumpy cocks; cocks of every shape and color impregnated the horizon, most with gaudy lettered jewelry adorning their tips like Prince Albert piercings. “Debt Providers, Pitt” read one. “Security Complex” another. Atop the tallest, girthiest member—and the final destination of Brick’s Muskutter shaft, if he ever made it there—“A.S.S.” gleamed in neon red, oblivious to the irony, with an old New England-style lighthouse standing sentinel beside it, beaming out into the ocean of hills in the distance. It was these buildings that had christened the city with the moniker it was most commonly known by—the City of Cocks—and this being the steel city, the cocks were always hard.

On the shafts of the cocks shimmered the faces of cyber sirens, esports heroes, porn stars, and other luminaries of screens both two-dimensional and three, each flashing ducky faces, fish gapes, and squinch poses as if the city itself was social media made manifest. But due to what Brick could only imagine were lax building codes and a combination of indifference, incompetence, and corruption, architectural herpes blemished each face. Jungle gyms, two-car garages, staircases, storefronts, even ornate pulpits boiled down the shafts before disappearing in the matted pubic hair of Muskutter shafts. From what had to be the sixtieth or seventieth floor of A.S.S. Tower, a barn jolted out into the expanse as if the building had inhaled a family farm. Years ago, so long ago Brick couldn’t bear to recount the time, he’d offered numerous options for remodeling or repurposing the growths. A web of kinetic cables connecting the various garages for busy executives to zip line to meetings and mergers. The pulpits could be converted into falcon aeries, and the jungle gyms and staircases rented out to adventurous urban ninjas for parkour. Most of his ideas were ignored, and the ones that weren’t ignored became semi-famous memes. And now Brick was forced to stare at the chasm of useless imperfections as he drifted along on his daily three-hour commute to work.

What do you do when the world no longer values you?

You go to work, of course.

And with the roads dilapidated and occupied by tent cities, the only way there was the Muskutter shafts, the brainchild of a billionaire who’d run out of brains long before this baby was born. Brick attempted to adjust his position, a nearly impossible task considering he outweighed the shaft by forty pounds, and sighed again as the shaft lunged forward, the overhead light flickering like a faint pulse. He longed to call out sick, but he’d never been sick a day in his life thanks to his and his entire generation’s genes being edited in vitro so that a pandemic could never again ravage the economy and everyone would be spared the indignity of vaccinations. Problem was, his genes had been edited too well. Not even the smell of death could make him retch, which couldn’t be healthy but came in handy since it was the fragrance de jour of every commuter shaft. It often took weeks for commuters who had met their demise to be removed from a shaft: the dead were left traveling in and out of the CoC, incurring more and more charges, until their toll pass was revoked and a debt reaper was sent to investigate. This often didn’t lead to the timely removal of the deceased. Reapers were notorious for leaving bodies in the shafts to incur additional fines and interest. But eventually even a debt reaper has to stop hounding the dead for money, and the bodies would be cleaned out and shipped to the human waste dumps in Appalachia.

Brick wasn’t dead, at least not officially, but the shaft’s previous occupant had been, and Brick could attest that the phrase “cleaned out” was far too kind. On the floorboard, a severed pinky finger bumbled about as the shaft jolted along, a family of maggots cleaving to it like shipwrecked sailors to flotsam. Usually Brick would sleep through his commute, but no amount of gene-editing could suppress the heebie-jeebies from the thought of becoming maggot food. So instead of drifting away to dreamland, he ogled defective buildings and monitored squiggly larva, until at last, a tad under four hours later, his Muskutter shaft pulled into A.S.S., the overhead light faded to black, and the bottom flipped open, dropping Brick like a deuce onto the inflatable exit jumper below.

Efficiency at its finest: Brick was right on time.

“Underlings, assemble,” Brick’s boss ordered with a theatrical sweep of a brace-clad hand. She was standing on the center entrance ramp wearing a knee-length grey skirt and a knitted sweater that was so loose it could fit three of her… or maybe half of the ever-growing list of credentials she insisted be included whenever she was referenced. The neck of Ms. Barbie Woods, RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO’s sweater had slipped down her chest, revealing islands of rolling cleavage, and as Brick rattled off her acronymic accolades in his mind, he suddenly felt an unwanted advance in his tighty-whities and something hard poking him in the rear.

He pried his eyes off his boss and dug beneath him to find what was poking him—an especially vexing task due to the thirty-foot by thirty-foot section of jumper swelling and sinking as fresh meat pellets dropped and bounced around him—and discovered that the severed pinky had come along for a romp. He smiled ruefully into his selfie drone as it glided down towards him, then flicked the pinky away, sending it hippity-hopping across the green and blue waves of nylon.

He returned his sights to those delicate isles of fatty tissue and began the perilous crawl across the jumper, trying in vain to dodge shafted commuters as they fell. By the time he made it to the entrance ramp, he’d been pummeled three times and a scrum had gathered around Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO. He waded into the fray, rolling his head to stretch out the knots in his neck. One of his coworkers, a stubby fellow with glasses as thick as a politician’s skull, was raving about a 5D superscreen television he’d seen at the DroneStrike arcade. “You can actually smell a rose,” he said, pantomiming doing just that. “That’s the type of stuff the Beard was talking about when he said ‘A rose on any other screen is just obscene.’ Pansy Pat may be an infidel, but he’s my choice for guber.”

“Wait, do you smell that?” his companion said, sniffing the air dramatically. Brick remembered his name—Oliver Pantzov. The fashion for a time had been naming your kids after your favorite crank call, though none of those children would ever make or even know what a crank call was. As a result, there were four Oliver Pantzovs in Brick’s department. Oliver took another sniff and made a sour face. “It smells like fleas and failure.”

“LMAO,” Bifocals said dourly. “Where’s your dog, Brick? Rotting in the shaft with your dreams?”

Even though it had occurred eight years prior, Brick was still notorious for having had the audacity to bring his dog to work when he first started at A.S.S. Although she was registered as a service dog and smarter than any of his coworkers, Chelsea had a habit of howling when she felt distressed, which she did every minute they were in the building. Brick tried everything he could, even invented a noise-canceling headset designed specifically for golden retrievers and swapped out the water in her bowl for chamomile tea, but nothing worked. Finally, regretfully, agonizingly, unavoidably—he was forced to give her up. The memory of handing her leash over to a Crispy political wrangler still trenched his heart whenever he thought about it, and somehow Pantzov and Bi-fuck-all found a way to remind him daily.

“Underlings, last night I heard from the medical apparatus,” Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO said, holding the back of her hand against her forehead as if she were faint. She tightened the velcro straps of her wrist brace and directed her gaze directly into her selfie drone. “And I regret to inform you that I’ve been stricken with that most dreadful of afflictions, the Malady of Milady, the silent pandemic—Candy Crush Thumb!”

Well, that explained the wrist brace. Brick had never taken Barbie for a Candy Crush addict, but as she fiddled with the brace her sweater slipped a tad further down her chest, and suddenly all he could imagine was playing Candy Crush All. Night. Long.

“Due to my condition, I won’t be available to tiger-manage you in the way in which you have become accustomed. I will, however, be able to remotely monitor every click, swoosh and tap you perform, so be mindful to keep our guiding principle—segregation—at the core of every movement as you continuously improve and maintain the status quo, if you will. Now, underlings, proceed forth and make the magic!”

“Making the magic,” as Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO put it, consisted of sorting digital ones and zeros. After the War of the Four Domains tore the tech industry and the United States asunder, the digital realm was reduced to ruin and the safeguards preventing ones and zeros from comingling all willy-nilly-like were destroyed. The cyber warfare wreaked havoc on algos everywhere, causing power outages, food shortages, and bank runs. Worse, it buried the posts of some of the city’s premiere influencers. At the conclusion of the war, the crack team at Autonomous Segregation Solutions (A.S.S.) was assembled to put cyberspace back in order by segregating the ones from the zeros and selling them back to displaced mathematicians and coders across the globe.

Brick and his fellow underlings followed Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO up the walkway like baby ducks, most of them dragging Pet Coal behind them on leashes as they entered the perpetual twilight of the office space. The sight of the diabolically grey Bartleby cubicles filled Brick with a sense of foreboding, like he’d stepped into purgatory, but it seemed to excite Bi-fuck-all.

“Did you see that homerun last night?” he asked, pumping his fist.

“Hell yeah I did! I like Puig because he defected from the Empire of the Bahamas. He’s a defector. I’ve always just been a defect. At least that’s what Ma says.”

“Oliver, don’t do that to yourself. You’ll swipe the right girl. And until you do, there’s always Brick’s mama to plow.”

The alarm sounded to start segregating, and Brick slipped inside his cube, eager to escape the sophomoric jabs about his mom and dog, not to mention the piercing jabs from the door closing on him. Bartleby cubicles were made of cheap plastic and fabric, but the ingenuous corporate overlords at A.S.S. had installed thumbtacks so that any soul unlucky enough to be caught by the door would receive immediate “feedback” regarding their tardiness. Brick sat down in a swivel chair that made the Muskutter shafts feel luxurious, allowed himself a moment to cherish the photograph of Chelsea’s slobbering face on his computer’s desktop, then pressed control-alt-escape on his keyboard.

Chelsea’s face was replaced by an eight-bit display resembling what would’ve been a state-of-the-art game if it’d been made for an Atari 2600. Atop the screen were ones and zeros so jumbled together they resembled hieroglyphic alien creatures, and at the bottom were containers marked “Ones,” “Zeros,” and “Unknowns.” The alien tangle of ones and zeros began to creep down the screen, and then as if magic the ones and zeros went about sorting themselves, one numeral at a time in precisely two-minute intervals. It was a program Brick had designed less than an hour into his first day on the job, but middle management remained steadfastly disinterested in it. The “autonomous” in A.S.S. reflected that the business was not affiliated with any states or warring domains, not that any of the work was “automated.”

With the ones and zeros segregating themselves, Brick took a lap around his Bartleby cube (he spun in his chair) and opened a smaller window on his computer. His internet homepage was his late mother’s all-socials timeline. It was so jam-packed with videos, pictures, memes, rants, and advertisements that even though he’d spent the better part of eight years excavating it, he didn’t feel like he knew his mom any better than when he’d started. He knew the parameters of her life—though her timeline was infuriatingly not chronological, her page was created when she was born, and 44,319 posts later, the timeline ended with her death when Brick was still a young child. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to delve into those posts yet, but he had learned such fabulous and minute details about her life! January 30, 2000 C.E.—Zelda Marie Domínguez, born during Super Bowl XXXIV to an immigrant yoga instructor and an aerospace engineer. December 12, 2015—drove a car for the first time, ran over a curb. March 21, 2010—Cheetos fingers. October 2, 2035—Wally is a sus ass prick! November 7, 2029— humpin a pumpkin LMAO. And, sure enough, there she was, dry-humping a pumpkin with a cloth mask covering her face at the end of the Croakin’ Twenties, her favorite frenemy, the “sus ass” Wally, snapping the selfie with his face covered by its customary Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson filter.

Brick scoured them, searching for the through line, the connective tissue, the beating heart uniting the bluster, but despite the intense amount of details and dizzying array of images, she remained ineffable, a character from a story drawn so vividly she lingered in the imagination but left a sense of loss over the fact she’d never truly existed. He’d never known his father—hell, for all he knew “The Rock” filter was his daddy—so his mother’s timeline was all he had in the way of family roots.

Three hours later, the Bartleby doors swung open and Brick’s stomach grumbled, announcing “recharge-refesh” break. Or, as Brick thought of it: Cheetos Time!

“Oh Beaver,” Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO called, her voice sharper than any corporate-sponsored thumbtack; Beaver was her pet nickname for Brick. “I should have a word with you, if I will… and I will.”

Brick walked around the corner to her cube, which was directly opposite his. Inside, Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO was tied in a knot. Literally. Her right leg was stuck behind her head, and her left arm was jammed between her leg and shoulder. “I learned this move from gold medalist influencer Livvy Dunne,” she said, puckering her lips at the selfie drone circling her ordeal like a news helicopter. Brick knew from overhearing her watching TikToks that she’d never been a gymnast and had “learned” the move from watching Livvy’s viral stretching videos. “I shouldn’t have tried it in this sweater, though. It restricts my lubricity.”

Brick helped unknot her without saying a word, struggling to avoid staring at the wealth of thigh revealed clear down to the pink shorts she wore beneath her skirt. She smelled of Vaseline and nutmeg, and something about the odd combination of the medicinal and the baked made his heart race and his groin tingle. Once the detangling was complete, he crossed his legs and started awkwardly for the vending machine down the hall.

“Oh Beaver!” Barbie called after him.

He stopped and turned his head to acknowledge her, careful to stay pelvis-forward. “Yes?”

Crossing the cubicle with unnatural speed, she swatted him on the nose with an umbrella she kept for precisely these occasions.

“Oh, sorry…” He rubbed his nose, then added with a curtsey: “Yes, Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO.”

Barbie opened the umbrella as if Mary Poppins preparing to float away, then leaned against her desk. “I’ve been reviewing efficiency stamps as part of my standard work, if you will.” She flashed a coy smile to her selfie drone. “And a certain underling’s stamps caught my ire.”

She leaned forward and shimmied her shoulders in an almost giddy manner, her sweater offering a thrilling peek of the cleavage beneath. When Barbie wasn’t gawking into her selfie drone, there was something almost sweet about her; her lips and eyes danced between expressions, sun-kissed and breezy, and her body seemed welcoming, even yearning, of possibility. Her perfume wafted over him, and although he loathed himself for it, he couldn’t stop imagining the two of them together, slathered in Vaseline and baking apple pies. And while the pies baked, he could really play the part of her underling.

“Like a working clock, you sort a numeral every two minutes. A bit sus, no?”

“Suspicious?” He rubbed his face in an effort to regain his composure. “That’s the minimum, right?”

“Yes, but no one has ever met the minimum before. It flies in the face of our core value—stay true to the Process.”

“I’ve been working hard, I guess.” The smell of Vaseline was so thick in the air he could feel it on his lips, emboldening him to speak. Although the logic center of his brain was slamming windows and scrambling to muzzle him, he couldn’t stop himself—“And, well… I devised a method that could make the company more efficient. Would you like me to show you?”

She glowered at him, sweetness replaced by saltiness. “You devised a method?”

“Yeah. I can show you. And we can roll it out to everyone!”

“Beaver couldn’t have possibly figured out a way to be more efficient.”

“I did! You see—”

She hoisted the umbrella as if she were about to ascend again. “Yes, Beaver, that’s the point—I see. You don’t.” With a flick of her wrist, she tossed the umbrella onto the Bartleby cube wall, then adjusted her sweater so not even a speck of skin showed. “I’m a black belt in Lean Sigma, trained by the same efficiency experts who designed and built this building. I’ve been leading projects since the war ended to make your job as efficient as possible. You, Beaver, are just a worker. There’s not a single credential after your name. You’re simply not qualified to offer anything except your fingers to the job.”

“Why do credentials matter?” Brick asked, almost pleading. He knew he should let it go, but his previous arousal had aroused a renewed thirst to better the world around him, to not accept defects and delay as gospel. “I don’t judge anyone differently by the letters after their name than I do the letters in their name.”

“Of course you don’t. Let me explain it in a way someone of your learning-capable educationally-challenged background can understand. There are ones,” she said, smirking into the bulging eye of her selfie drone. Then she turned to him, her eyes and lips fixed in a mirthless frown—“And there are zeros.”

“Imagination requires no qualification.”

“Don’t get smart with me, Beav!” she snapped. “I can’t handle it!”

Brick flinched and lowered his eyes, all forms of arousal doused. “I’m sorry, Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO.”

“And…?”

“EIEIO,” he added with a curtsey.

“Whatever you’re doing, stop it, and go back to the way I taught you.”

“Of course,” said Brick, his eyes tracing the lines of the grey carpet.

Ms. Barbie Woods RN, BSN, PMP, ING, MMA, COPD, AA, AAA, MCO, EIEIO stepped to him, so close she should’ve bathed him in her scent, but oddly he didn’t smell a thing. “You understand, we can’t all do whatever we want.” She laid her brace-clad hand on his shoulder, but rather than warmth or titillation, he felt only weight. “There are large portions of the day where I want to punch you in the face, but I don’t… because I’m more of a kicker.”

And with that, she kicked him in the shin with shocking accuracy and power, sending him crumbling to the floor. The segregation alarm sounded, and Brick army crawled to his cube, which proved inefficient as the thumbtacks in his door reminded.

As he climbed into his chair, he could hear Barbie sobbing on the other side of the wall as she lamented how no one appreciated her. It was her afternoon testimonial, and as she launched into hysterics he could hear the rest of the department fly into their testimonials, the buzzing of selfie drones growing as intense as swarming bees. Brick looked up at his drone, but couldn’t muster the energy to say anything. He sighed, put his head down, and fell asleep.

He awoke to the sound of Barbie’s voice stabbing through the Bartleby wall: “Oh Beaver—it’s happened again! Please come to my chamber when the cubes open, if I will.”

Brick couldn’t help but curtsey.